As usual, I had many great ideas for tonight’s blog entry mere hours ago and now I can’t think of any of them. So if the title of this entry is “So now what?”, it means I either didn’t think of one or forgot to change it.

C’est la vie.

The anti-Skyrim pressure within me continues to grow. For a long time now, there has been a rebellion against my Skyrim lifestyle brewing and gaining support in my mind, and I have done nothing to suppress it.

After all,. it’s the voice that cries out, with a voice that rrows louder and more comfident every day, that there has to be more of life than this and we are in pain because of the limitations this Skyrim shift puts on our lives.

I, of course, agree. But I also know that I have to let this thing run its course. More sooner than later, the dam will break and the new mind will dawn across my ice-ravaged landscape, and I will be washed clean by the water thus released.

Or at the very least, I will get to the point where I played a variety of video games, and did othing things too, like making videos and music and stuff.

Right now, I fele like Skyrim is a kind of purgatory for me. Or maybe it’s my bardo bridging the gap between two states of being for me.

I toil and toil, and most of me is happy.

But the percentage that is unhappy grows every day, and one of these days,. I will finally be will and truly sick of the damned game, and I will uninstall it and never want to see it again for the rest of my life.

I feel like that day is coming soon. I have already had nostalgia for another, similar game called Witcher 3, which I purchased and played to death years ago.

It’s sitting there on my Steam account, ready for me to install and play once more, and it has a lot of advantages over Skyrim. The battle mechanics are more fun, the plot is rich and varied, the graphics are way better, the world is amazingly dense with genuine content, and most importantly. there is no custom character building.

You are Geralt. That’s it. End of story. One of the main things that has kept me in Skyrim’s clutches for so long is that there are so many potential character builds, and each one makes the game fresh again because it strongly affects everything about how you play that character and thus how you interact with the game.

Take my current character. He’s a mage. He fights with spells. That makes him very powerful but it also means that, along the route I am taking, wearing armor  (and thus increasing your skill in that armor type every time you get hit) is not an option, and so my guy is very powerful, but also very vulnerable.

PRetty much any idiot with a sword can kill me if he is lucky enough to get to me before I can take him down with my fireballs.

And there is no perfect solution for that. My guy can summon demon-ish creatures called Dremora to act as his bodyguard, but there are limits to how much protection you can  get from one or two creatures.

Especially when there is no way to tell them “No, don’t chase that fleeing enemy or go darting off after the first enemty you see, STAY WITH ME, damn it. ”

There’s armor spells, too, but they are nowhere near as effective as actual armor. They, at best, make it so that the aforementioned idiot with a sword has to hit me two or three times to kill me, and that gives me time to turn him into a charcoal briquette.

God, I love fire magic. I am such a latent pyro. The other two options for offensive magic are ice and electricity, and ice sucks dog taint because so many creatures are resistant or immune to it and electricity is awesome – theres’s no qay for shooting lightning from your fingers like you’re Darth Motherfucking Sidious  NOT to be awesome – but it doesn’t please me like fire magic does.

Anyhow. Back to the pklot.

My point (Surprise! There’s a point!) is that when I play a character lik emy mage, I have to be cagey and alert and ready to zotz someone with the speed and accuracy of a quick draw artist at all times.

Then take the polar opposite : the Big Thumping Monster Build.

That’s when you play a character who specializes in huge weapons, thick armor,. and very little else.

You hit things very hard until they die.

That’s it. You need to have some caution early in the game, but once you have some good armor and the skill to use it well, you are pretty much a tank and can more or less walk through even tough dungeons barely having to break your stride.

It’s a totally different experience. And that means that when I get bored of playing one kind of character, I can make a different kind of character and play it,and boom everything is fresh and exciting again.

Then add in the effect of nearly 30K mods that change the game in ways both subtle (like the one that makes enemies glow so I am less likely to fireball an ally) or profound (ones that are practically entire new games), you can see how this game has had me in its spell for so long.

It’s one game that can be played thousands of unique, distinct ways.

It’s a wonder I ever come up for air.

But I do. And some day soon, I will surface for good, and unintall the goddamned thing, and that will be it. I will have overcome it for good.

Or at least for long enough to get another steady gig.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.