{"id":3056,"date":"2011-12-16T10:40:10","date_gmt":"2011-12-16T14:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lungfishopolis.com\/?p=3056"},"modified":"2011-12-16T11:37:03","modified_gmt":"2011-12-16T15:37:03","slug":"moments-in-skyrim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/2011\/12\/moments-in-skyrim\/","title":{"rendered":"Moments in Skyrim"},"content":{"rendered":"

$\"\"$ <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I’ve been playing Skyrim a lot, and I’m loving the game. My character is level 39 at present, and my sneak skill is already\u00a0at 99\u00a0– I hope to max it out\u00a0the next time I play\u00a0and then work harder at maxxing out my archery, enchantment, and alchemy.<\/p>\n

But my favorite part of any Elder Scrolls game has always been the emergent gameplay moments – those moments that weren’t specifically scripted by the programmers that somehow end up being the best thing about the game. In this article, I’d like to share a few of my favorite moments.<\/p>\n

Taking out an entire keep of bandits Garret style<\/strong><\/p>\n

I really enjoy stealth games, so I was really excited to find that the stealth mechanics in Skyrim were way better than in Oblivion. I now sneak up on enemies regularly and slit their throats before they know I’m there. When I cleared one particular keep full of bandits recently, I did so without letting any of its inhabitants know I was ever there. They were dead before they knew they were in a fight. Skyrim’s cutscene-like final blow animations make it even more fun.<\/p>\n

Backstabbing a snowy sabrecat<\/strong><\/p>\n

That four-word description really doesn’t do my story justice. Here’s the long version: I was coming over a snowy mountain rise and looked down to see a keep. Far away, near the keep, were two snowy sabrecats fighting an ice wraith. I watched for a while, and the sabrecats killed the ice wraith. I thought it’d be nice to get the ice wraith’s teeth since at the time they were fairly valuable to me. I hid and started firing arrows at the sabrecats, but they were so far away that I missed 80% of my shots. After 5-10 minutes of firing arrows, I’d hit a few times and they were wandering closer. One eventually charged up the mountain, and by the time he’d reached me I had him down to about 50% health. Still, I barely survived the encounter. I’d gone through all my healing potions.<\/p>\n

I snuck down the mountain, thinking that if I could get up onto the keep’s walls, I could shoot down at the second sabrecat from safety. When it saw me, I started sprinting for a wall where it looked like I could jump up. My luck, I found that I couldn’t jump that high. So I ran. I ended up trapped in a V between one of the keep’s walls and a sheer cliff – if I fell, I knew I’d be dead. So I hid. And somehow, the sabrecat lost me. It came down towards the V and decided that I wasn’t there, then turned away and sat down. Its back was to me, and I’d just gotten the x15 backstab perk. So I snuck up very slowly and BAM.<\/em> One-hit kill. It was so nice.<\/p>\n

Arrows shouldn’t hurt skeletons – should they?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Archery is another skill I’m loving. The game’s bows take some getting used to – they have a lot less drop than you’d expect. But when you get a decent bow and your archery skill is good enough, a bow can be devastating. I entered one crypt and a number of skeletons began rising from their sacrophagi. As they rushed me, I took them out all one by one, one-shotting most of them. None of them were even able to enter melee. There were probably twelve or fifteen in all, and my bow pwned them, so to speak.<\/p>\n

Mountain goat, Meet Waterfall<\/strong><\/p>\n

A small thing, really, but I stood and watched while a goat forded across a river and was swept downstream. When he reached the end, near a waterfall, he began struggling mightily. He fought it quite a lot, but in the end the goat went over and fell to his death.<\/p>\n

You done with that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is the only thing on the list that actually is<\/em> scripted, but I was shocked that it happened. During multiple runs back and forth from a store to an enchantment table, I found at one point that I was overburdened, so I dropped a shield and some boots on the ground. A passing woman stopped me and asked if she could have the things I’d dropped. Wow.<\/p>\n

Picking Flowers during an Invasion <\/strong><\/p>\n

At the risk of spoilers, I was at one point involved in an armed conflict: the Invasion of Whiterun. While soldiers were locked in heated bloody battle, I kept sidetracking to pick flowers. I found the whole situation so utterly ludicrous that I felt obliged to mention it here.<\/p>\n

Since Steam makes screenshots so easy, I’ve started trying to screenshot as many of these moments as I can, but they can be fleeting – you don’t realize a moment until it’s passed. You can see the screenshots I’ve collected so far here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"