Playing A Game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Special Edition PC

I got 100% of the Steam achievements for Skyrim, and I barely cheated at all!

  • For Oblivion Walker, I tried to re-do the "Waking Nightmare" quest (because I had picked the "wrong" outcome last time), but nothing I was doing would reset the quest NPC correctly. So instead I gave myself a second copy of the Savior's Hide item, and that triggered the achievement.
  • And for Legend, after finally reaching level 50, I saw that this kind of dragon doesn't show up until level 78 -- so I just said "Fuck it" while cheating my level up 28 times. (I still fought and killed the dragon!)

Of course, I also had to use console cheats in some non-achievement scenarios, just to play the game. One incident I remember particularly well was in the quest Lost to the Ages, where the quest NPC (Katria) got stuck, and I needed to manually tinker with the quest status in order to un-stuck her.

And there was one quest bug so heinous that I never was able to fix it, even with all the console cheats I could muster. I am still a werewolf because the Purity quest just doesn't fucking work for me. Farkas says he'll meet me at the dungeon and then never shows up.

(In one attempt at cheating my way through, I got him to go to the dungeon and we killed the necessary monster, but then he became stuck as a follower who was unable to stop following me.)

Skyrim is a vast world full of interesting content to explore, and I love it. Getting all the achievements and spending 180 hours in that world has me ... pretty satisfied, but there is still more content in here that I just might come back to. That the game is so technologically flawed, and I still love it, is a credit to how well-crafted that world is.

Seriously, if I worked at Bethesda I would shut the whole thing down until their quest system had full coverage of build verification tests. This shit is gnarly.

Rating: Awesome