I finished Fallout 3, went all the way to the end with the Aliens mothership. I played at Normal level, so I’ll prolly go back sometime and play again at Very Hard. I enjoyed Fallout 3 but the landscape and just about everything was so bleak that I didn’t want to get into Fallout New Vegas again seeing as it was pretty much the same game engine.

I was considering returning to Fallout 76, but I’m not that excited by the two new DLCs. I’ll return to FO76 sometime this year because I have a Fallout 1 subscription. I want to work on my encampments and I like the larger utility room shelter; that’ll be fun to build out.

SO WHAT NEXT?

I searched many games and again and again I’ve ruled out: Grand Theft Auto (just don’t like the start of the game); The Elder Scrolls (don’t like multi-player games that much); Call of Duty (bad recollection of the linear nature of the game I played ages ago); and so forth and so on. Then I looked at Skyrim.

Okay, the cover didn’t really appeal to me but…

I’m not crazy about medieval games, partly because when I tried an early version of World of Warcraft it was a totally awful experience. In my early days of gaming I played a game called Might & Magic, and I had some friends who loved Skyrim back in the day, but I was still reluctant. So, I did some digging around into the game and discovered it had many of the story elements, landscapes, and flowed along the line of “Game of Thrones” and “The Lord of the Rings”.

So I bought a full special edition with all the DLCs and all the Creation Club items for Xbox Series X.

I started out playing at Very Easy just to get a sense of how the game works and because it’s a Bethesda game I found it very comfortable and familiar. I also discovered the game apparently uses a similar gaming engine to the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Lara Croft: Rise of the Tomb Raider games. I especially liked the Lara Croft games because of the great gamescape, but I disliked the relatively linear gameplay with one-way transitions and big impossible endings that you have to die a dozen times to find a solution to. HOWEVER, Skyrim had the great landscapes, villages, but is very open for exploration and has similarities to the gameplay of Bethesda’s Fallout games.

So, I took a ride into the game at the Very Easy level, and even though I’m still fumbling around with spells and potions, I’m enjoying the game a lot. Next step head back on Normal level and see how well I can figure this thing out. I think I’ll stick with being a Human but I like those big cat avatars, I might have to try one of those sometime also.

I intend to make a couple posts as I make my way through the game and I’ll try to figure out how to photograph my journey.