And there ends an EPIC adventure of a lifetime! It all began on the 16th December last year, when I began playing Skyrim amdist a lot of enthusiastic discussions on our forums. After having read at least a dozen reviews on the game, I was quite sure what was in store for me. And it took me 34 whole days (the in-game counter indicates 102 hours, 5 minutes and 51 seconds) to complete the game - something I am going to cherish for a long time now. Never before has any game got me hooked so much, that I've dedicated so much time to complete the side quests completing keeping aside the main quest. Call it ridiculous but the amount of content the game presents before us (and packs all this into < 6 GB of installation data!) is simply out of this world!
Be it mining some ore, smelting it into ingots, crafting armor and weaponry at random forges, improving them at a workbench, enchanting them with powers or running behind butterflies and dragonflies or salvaging something out of a shipwreck or playing tag and hide-n-seek with the children or exploring barrows, caves and taverns or a couple of rounds of brawl with NPCs or farming wheat and cabbages or recovering some ancient artifact for a mage from a Dwarven ruin or shouting 'Fus Ro Dah' a gazillion times over or discovering one of those 13 Guardian Stones strewn around the vast lands of Skyrim or wearing the amulet of Mara , getting your character hitched, move into that shiny new house with the newfound love and get rid of the loneliness forever or kicking the Dragon Priest's butt with the elite legendary Daedric swords or swing by Riften's famous inn The Bee and Barb and have a couple of bottles of the expensive and rare alcohol - Black Briar Mead or irritate those giants herding mammoths and take them for a ride or ride the Shadowmere lending that awesome Nazgul looks (with the Deadric armor set of course) or slaying some Ancient Dragons and looting them off their bones and scales or join different courses at the Bards College at Solitude or the College of Winterhold and mastering Magicka or investigating the serial killer case and hunting the bastard down only to discover that 'he' isn't the actual killer much later!
There are a GAZILLION things to be done in the game and yet barely scrape the surface of the main storyline! This is exactly what addictive immersive RPGs do to oneself - they simply pull you into their worlds and before you knew the clock was ticking 3 AM, you'd want to complete that quest and the next quest and the next one. I was curious to know how Skyrim would fair when the NDA was lifted and the reviews are out. IGN perfectly summed it up in one line - Say goodbye to real life! And I think I could vouch for that, for I was talking about my adventures to my colleagues - some of them who knew zilch about things like these but were curious to know what happened next, to my boss who used to patiently listen through all the bullcrap I spewed (arrow to the knee - are you fcuking kidding me?!), to my roomie Krishnamoorthy who keenly follows Skyrim through Reddit, to my friends and so forth. Thank goodness my parents and ex were spared of this misery!
The game however, wasn't perfect (no game was and will never be!) for the numerous bugs and glitches at times were irritating but given a game that must have taken no less than mindless programming, this is a given. The impeccable mods at Skyrim Nexus for the PC was a blessing - tweaking and fine-tuning the performance and IQ - the game ultimately looked a stunner on my 40 inch display and ran butter smooth on my present system (i5 2500K + 8 gigs RAM + 6950 2GB). Absolutely no hiccups or slideshows (not even at Markarth - beat that lol!). But regardless, this was one heck of a ride, and I loved every bit of it. Those ingenious devs. at Bethesda deserve a standing ovation. The least I could do for them as a player is to buy a copy of Skyrim and donate it to someone (for a discount ofc!) and I am just going to do that.
Extremely sorry man! I don't how I posted all those.
Edited the post.
