How I Made Skyrim Fun!

Over the years I've played a lot of RPG's. I've player every numbered game in the Elder Scrolls series, except for Arena, but strangely when I first started to play Skyrim I found that I wasn't enjoying it.

The first game in the series I played was Morrowind. I decided that I wanted to play a character that was a master of various combat styles and so picked a Redguard and chose various weapons and heavy armour as my key attributes. After playing for a while I found that having a high level in multiple weapons wasn't worthwhile and was also constantly frustrated by my inability to open locks, cast spells, or sneak. So I rerolled, still using a Redguard as a base, but this time I spread my skills around. I was still primarily a fighter but had lockpick and destruction as key skills to give me some diversity.

I next played Daggerfall. Daggerfall has a very detailed character creation system, letting you choose advantages and disadvantages, so I min-maxed like crazy. My character couldn't use any weapons less than steel in quality but had much higher stats as a result. This made the first few hours quite difficult but in the long run made the game much easier.

In Oblivion I wanted to try out some of the less usual star signs and my first character was a high-elf mage, who regained MP by absorbing the spells cast at them. Unfortunately I kept having to fight people armed with swords and arrows, so my magic meter was never full. Feeling dissatisfied I rerolled as an Argonian who was good at everything. I had a high skill in sneak, lockpick, archer, swords, alchemy and speech. I was also reasonable with some of the magic schools. This made the game easy enough to play through, but the character felt like a generic Jack of all trades.

When I came to Skyrim I started with a Khajiit, and began leveing up the same skills I had used in Oblivion. Once again they prooved useful and I was making good progress, but I found myself getting bored. The character just seemed so generic and lacked flavour and depth. I then found that I just stopped playing the game altogether. This was a strange situation, I had a game from a series I enjoy and in a genre I enjoy, but I wasn't enjoying it. I decided to try the game again, but this time I was going to be a character, not just someone moving through the plot while being good at everything. So I made a Dunmer mage, I realise that in Skyrim you don't actually pick a class but rather equip class stones as you move through the game, but I resolved to only use magic in combat, unless I ran out of MP at which point I could draw a weapon. I also only equipped mage robes on my torso and light armour elsewhere.

I now have 21 hours play time clocked in and am greatly enjoying myself. Because I want to be this character, rather than just do everything in the game, I have refused to progress the Brave Companion's quest line as I don't want to become a werewolf. In some ways I think it is a shame that Skyrim took such a relaxed approach to character creation, although it's better than letting players 'cheat the rules' as they could in Daggerfall.