Hunter's Insight – A Guild Wars 2 Blog

The Skyrim Rigmarole

I come over the hill to Winterhold. How anybody could live in a constant snowstorm is beyond me. Oh wait, I live in Canada. Nevermind. Winterhold at first glance is less impressive than other cities. Immediately I notice several abandoned and ruined homesteads as I do some recon. And then I hear a familiar sound coming from the skies.

Just another day in Skyrim.

The dragon kills two guards before I can even get it to land on the ground. Once down I make short work of it. My ebony war axe is exquisite and does cold damage. Nothing like dealing death with something you’ve made yourself.

The first thing I do in any town or village is talk to every single person. I don’t care if it’s a child, a servant, or the Jarl, I’m looking for work and will take it where I can find it.

I’m in town on a number of jobs. I have to pick up an item for Riften’s court wizard, talk to a contact about translating an old journal, and I’m interested in joining the Mages College. Before I leave the village for the college I have collected yet more things to do.

I wander up to the college and repeat. Talking to every single man and mer, entering every room, and cautiously avoiding any area that looks like it may become interesting later on. The Midden suspiciously qualifies as one such area, so I look through my to-do list and pick out a random activity.

Because I’m incredibly anal and travel on foot (not horse since you sometimes miss interesting things from horseback) to locations that are generally on the way to my destination, I’ve already visited the spot in question and quickly make my way there.

I do a quick reconnaissance before entering a dungeon, every time, and then while inside, look over almost every burial urn, body, and chest. One reason they say I have the Golden Touch.

I switch between axe and bow, but I’m always sneaking. This is the first skill I completely master in Skyrim, but it won’t be the last.

The details of the dungeon don’t really matter. At some point I’ve avoided traps and tripped others. I’ve made child’s play of one enemy while another with the exact same skills nearly kills me. I’ve discovered one hidden door or chest and probably missed others. The final boss is either challenging or a walk in the park.

By the time I leave I am carrying at least 100 pounds of loot.

It’s fascinating to me that even though I keep to a personal rule of thumb (I only pick up things that are worth more than 10x what they weigh) I still get overloaded pretty quickly. Probably because I pick up too many weapons and armour, but if I don’t have anything to sell to the blacksmiths I won’t make much money and we come back to that whole anal thing.

This means that every two dungeons I have to return to town to visit various shopkeepers. At each shopkeeper I have to first purchase things, because by the time I’ve sold them all my stuff, they’re going to be broke. It ends up being a near zero sum game but it keeps me supplied and there is a reason my speechcraft is so high when I don’t work on it outside selling things.

It’s all incredibly pointless but fun to me.

There are of course the things I intend to keep as well. I stop off at home and drop those off in their respective chests. Each chest is organized in a way that probably only makes sense to me.

I have a chest for books and keys. The bookcases provided fill up quite quickly. I could sell the books of course but sometimes I want to read them later and sometimes they only make sense to hang on to since as a professional thief for instance I should hang on to tomes about sneaking.

In Oblivion I preferred the small squat shack outside the Imperial City because it was centrally located and easy to get to. In Skyrim Breezehome is very near the gates to Whiterun and easily purchased. I put my alchemy agents, potions, smithing ingredients, and soul stones in the first cabinet on the left.

I then proceed to the back where I shove armour and weapons. I usually hang on to anything with a rare enchantment that might be useful in a rare situation. Bracers of pickpocketing for instance, since pickpocketing for me isn’t a priority they might be useful if a situation calls for it.

After I’ve lightened my load of any and all extraneous weight, I start looking at my next quests. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Some people are slightly less organized with their loot in Breezehome.