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Which was the first Elder Scrolls game you played?

Thursday 8 September 2011

Dragon Priests!

This is old news, but this is a database, not a news station! Or well, it's also sort of a news station... Snap.
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... That aside, lets talk Dragon Priests.
As you may have noticed, dragons are quite common in Skyrim all of a sudden, much to our delight. In fact, Nords worshipped Dragons many, many years ago, which is why there are still dragon temples, such as Bleak Falls Barrow, scattered around the land.

Every temple needs a priest, and thus they were bestowed with their very own version of a wicker, which as you may have guessed, eventually came to be quite dead. Sure, like with Michael Jackson, it is a sad loss and they are missed, which I guess they've sensed, 'cause they are coming back in a rather unfriendly manner, which I am sure you've already spotted. They return as Draugr, still going by their old title: Dragon Priest, and they function as sort of a boss fight, as seen the the Skyrim demo video, where one of these guys floats out of a coffin with the goal of butchering our little, innocent hero, through whatever dirty means he can!

Luckily, our hero prevails, robs him blind as his just reward, and takes off.

Sunday 4 September 2011

I'm Essential; You're essential; This whole courtroom is essential!

Who did I just quote? Can you guess?

Giving that we're getting closer and closer to the release date, It seems that the first for knowledge increases mildy, day by day. Therefore I will let this info on the "essential" rules be your morning orange juice.

In Oblivion we had something called "Essentail Characters," meaning that they were involved in a quest somehow, or "essential" to the story if you'd prefer, and could therefore not be killed. Not even by Johnny English. Of course, once the quests they were involved in were over, they lost their essential status and we could play (torture) them as much as we'd like, but some fans (me included) still found it somehow stressful that there were so many immortal characters, since it in some way killed part of the immersion.

Luckily Bethesda has come to our hour of need on that part, not that I sent them any threatening letters whatsoever and any accusations against me are fully and completely untrue. My magical real life adventures aside, Bethesda has manage to severely decrease the number of essential characters there will be in Skyrim, by using Radiant story.

Radiant story will essentially (haha!) just take a bunch of variables created from our exploits and take NPC's filling certain requirements and put them in the role of the quest-giver or bad guy and so on. Should you kill a quest giver like that, a family member of that NPC might take over the quest-giver role, not that I am entirely sure how that would work TBH.

But whilst there is gravy to this meal, there is also broccoli. There has to be some essential characters, that is hard to get out of. There are some side-quests that has them and those crucial the the main quest will definitely be essential as well. To that, there is no middle-ground.

But middle-ground has been found in some aspect. There is yet another kind of "essential" that aren't quite as "essential" as other "essential," meaning that they are probably not that "essential." These are called "protected characters" and protected they are - there are a lot of strings (variables) in Skyrim, which could mean that one NPC might get mad and end up killing another, evidently also whilst you're not around. The protected characters are the NPC's that can be killed by no one but you and I could imagine the radiant story quest-givers to be "protected" whilst the quest is active.

So that was rather essential, right?
Yes, I thought so too.
Unfortunately our time is up, so hasta luego - until next post