Skyrim, You Have Stolen My Life...

Ever since Skyrim came out. I have been engrossed in it. I got it nearly a week early because of a retailer being stupid and breaking street date without realizing it. Gotta love people who don't normally work in the electronics departments getting thrust into it and not reading the large red/yellow tape that says do not display until (insert printed date here).

I gotta say I only kinda liked Oblivion, and it took me a long time to come around to it. When I started it I couldn't get into it. This was NOT the case with Skyrim. I loved it from the moment I first loaded it up.

I have 720/1000G done on this time sucking game of awesome. It is mostly just main storyline stuff left too. I have fallen prey to the Markarth Forsworn glitch(I have yet to fix it by sneaking to the temple of talos) I have had Hagravens fall out of the sky on me at random locations, I have seen dragons fly backwards, and watched their bones randomly animate and walk around the map. I have even watched my game freeze frustratingly at inconvenient places. And yet I still love this game.

I got my smithing to 100 pretty early on, I just made loads and loads of iron daggers, and leather bracers. I would bow hunt and soul trap deer, elk etc and take their pelts to make into leather and leather strips, and I mined my own iron ore and smelted it down for ingots. Not only did my smithing rise but so did my archery, and enchanting skills(the constant recharging of the bow and having all those soul gems filled really helped out and still helps me out now).

I also discovered that I could just get a non-killable npc to just keep hitting me to up my heavy armor and block. You can constantly follow the guards around at night and sneak behind them on their set paths to raise sneak(equip the muffle illusion spell and cast it as soon as magicka permits every time to raise that skill at the same time).

I used the mannequin glitch by accident when I discovered it. I accidentally put my legendary dragon armor on the mannequin and took it off before closing the screen out and noticed next time I came back to my house I had multiplied it. This is awesome for getting the achievement for having 100,000 gold on you at one time.

I noticed you could re-clear dungeons after a certain period of time, as well as redo some of the dragon wall locations(along with the chests that went with them) to get the Delver achievement.

That is just a taste of what I have learned and discovered while roaming Skyrim. I stand at well over 200 locations discovered and I have yet to even partially fill in the map...this game is massive and epic all at the same time.

I won't lie I will be a little sad when I finally 1000 this, but then again there is also DLC to look forward to, I mean have you seen how much further the line of sight is into Morrowind and Cyrodiil....it has to be there for a reason right????

Time will tell. Thank you Bethesda for creating my personal GOTY for 2011(and nearly everyone else's) and for creating an adventure that truly has kept me engrossed long after most RPGs have already started collecting dust on my shelf.