Skyrim - Editorial @ Eurogamer

Eurogamer's Tony Coles has written a new article for Skyrim where he writes about how Bethesda's open world game remains as fresh as ever. Here is a sample.

How often have you gone back to a game you thought you'd exhausted, only to find it full of prospects and potential? In a fallow period for vast open-world RPGs, a lazy visit to see my Skyrim house opened more than furniture filled with hard-earned goodies. Nostalgia took hold and prompted a look at my open quests list, and from there I was picking up the threads of a game that had laid dormant for a good 18 months.

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More information.

a lazy visit to see my Skyrim house opened more than furniture filled with hard-earned goodies.

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Poor man's The Sims.

There are a few good mods (*) out there that enhance Skyrim to my taste.
Combine this with higher difficulty levels and you have a game you can spend a lot of fun time in. In my case more than 560 hours.

(*)
Falskaar
Vilja in Skyrim
Maids II - Deception
+
the official addons
Dawnguard
Dragonborn
Hearthfire

Eh eh…

I'll suggest something else. And I dunno how many hours I spent on it, but definetly not so many. So get this:

Mods:
- Only norespawn mod (IIRC it's called slow respawn on nexus)
- Bookmark skyrim wiki for codes to unbreak gamestopper bugs
DLC:
- Dawnguard
- Dragonborn

Skip the Dawnguard main quest unless you want to be a vampire. It's utterly annoying in any case. However, do not skip the Etherium wars substory that comes in this DLC, it's brilliant.
Dragonborn is so good that if it was a standalone DLC, I would never ever suggest buying Skyrim.

Avoid Heartfire at all costs. Instead go buy on sale or somewhere (key resellers) for cheap money:
The Sims 3
The Sims 3: World Adventures DLC
The Sims 3: Ambitions DLC

Nothing else, just those three! Forget other DLC. And don't worry about mods, there are plenty of those on the official sims site, maybe even more than Skyrim mods.
Number of hours you'll spend on Sims 3+WA+Amb will probably be 560+.

You can avoid being a vampire in Dawnguard and you can even heal Serena from vampirism … just for info

I really need to see Dragonborn… I was bored with my recent return to Skyrim after just one week - 95% of the content is all the same (go there, kill this, return this). To be honest, I haven't even seen much of the game yet - I get bored too quickly.

I'll try again once the 'Breezehome Fullyupgradable' mod gets updated for Open Cities.

HiddenX said:

You can avoid being a vampire in Dawnguard and you can even heal Serena from vampirism … just for info

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It's not about choices… The whole thing is annoying no matter what you do.

Drithius, Dragonborn is so good you get a feeling it's not DLC but a separate high quality game. Not just the story, substories and quests… There are just a few bugs in it and none of those is a gamestopper, an unfinishable quest or a bad script issue. A few new very interesting mob types are added where you'll have to think how efficiently to deal with them, I didn't try them on the hardest difficulty nor would. A certain quest (find one's brother) has no handholding mark on the map so you will have to search for him and do your part on some serious exploration. There is also a secret boss harder to kill than anything you've seen in whole Skyrim. Although it's DLC, honestly I cannot praise it more.

I really got a lot out of Skyrim - vanilla + the 2 big DLCs..about 320 hours over about 4 characters...which is a lot for me. But now I can;t stand the sight of it! I am waiting for the Nehirim sequel before I touch it again.