Game Blog

Why do I keep playing Skyrim?

I was late to the party. I tried Oblivion but never got into it and I certainly didn’t preorder Skyrim. I got it for Christmas 2011 on Xbox 360 and put in about 12 hours. That’s enough to finish many games, but not a game like Skyrim.

Then I got a laptop powerful enough to play PC games and ironically — because I played console games less frequently — I stopped playing Skyrim. DLC was released and I read about it briefly, but that was it.

With the new PC I spent more and more time on Steam.  Anyone who’s  spent much time on Steam in the last two years has probably noticed Skyrim’s prominent placement.  In fact, today — August 6, 2013 — Skyrim’s Legendary Edition is featured in Steam’s store front page carousel.  I resisted for a long time.  I already owned it on Xbox, after all; I’d always go back to it, eventually.

A combination of a few factors got me.  First, that promotional art for the final expansion: Dragonborn. I can still stare at a it for a few seconds now. Second, my wife got me $100 in Steam Wallet cards. Third, in January 2013 Skyrim went on sale for $29.99, which was half off.  I researched the discount on a Steam price tracker.  The price had never been lower, and never outside of a major Steam Sale.  I might have skipped it during the Steam Holiday Sale, but now it was the center of my attention, it was cheap, and that new expansion looked really interesting.

I went for it.

I put 50 hours into it.  I had done very little of the main story and hadn’t moved much outside of the southwest quarter of the map. Then I formatted my computer and somehow — somehow! — failed to back up my savegame.

Fifty hours down the crapper.

After something like that I would have stopped playing most games. But I started over immediately. And this time I had the ability to plan a few things.  I would focus on archery and stealth. I would seek out dragons and word walls.  I would buy a house.

I played another 50 hours and Bioshock Infinite came out. It monopolized my gaming time and Skyrim fell by the wayside.  I had purchased Skyrim on January 26.  Bioshock released on March 26.  I had played exactly 100 hours in exactly two months.

In the backdrop of all this, my wife was pregnant with our first baby.  He arrived in June. Shortly before that, The Last of Us came out. I downloaded it and played a bit. After the baby came, the Steam Summer Sale started.  I picked up a bunch of indie games — I bet a lot of people did that — and Dishonored.  I spent a few weeks playing The Cave, Gunpoint, Castle Crashers, Retro City Rampage, The Swapper, and Fez in my spare time of my paternity leave.

Then I went back to work. I all but stopped gaming for two weeks.  Then, for some reason, I fired up Skyrim again. A couple days later, I had another 15 hours in, and I had read an Elder Scroll at the Time Wound. (Spoilers!) After that, I had a bit of a “Now I have to do WHAT?” moment, so I’m writing this instead of playing more.

I’m looking forward to completing the main story and then taking on the DLC. I’ve explored almost every region of the map (with the notable exception of the southeast corner — I’ve been avoiding it because I believe Dawnguard is kicked off there) but I know there are caves and other places I’ve missed. I’m hoping it doesn’t take me another 100 hours to see everything.