<chuckles> idk if you just missed a zero off (butter fingers ) or thought I accidentally added a zero!

No seriously… My Skyrim play is a good 23 Thousand hours.

I don’t have a steam log (XB1S), but I know how many play hours I expended and by my calculation it went over twenty thousand at the end of 2018. Since then I have reined myself in a lot.
Also…no, I don’t expect gold stars or a long play medal….Just saying.

Despite purchasing six Skyrim disc covering changes of platform, kids copies and extra SE versions….It still has to be the best bang for buck of any title I’ve played.

If TES6 measures up I’ll buy a PC for it and play it until they shovel earth on my box! (Dramatic flourish!)

A.

That sounds like me. I've purchased eight copies of Morrowind over the years. I'd guess that I have about 15,000 to 20,000 hours invested in the game by now.

I consider the money I've spent on all Elder Scrolls games to be the best entertainment value I have ever received for my money. In fact, there are times I feel almost guilty about all the use I've gotten out of Skyrim and Morrowind for such a small price.

Buffy played Oblivion for just over 4000 hours. Then she moved on to Skyrim for another 4000 hours. For the last 10k+ hours, she's been calling ESO home. Sounds like Adella has us all beat in Skryim though!

I suspect my eyes saw 23k but my mind rejected it.

I tend to play games I really like to death, but can't envision a play-through so long as yours. Then again, I suspect I put numerous thousands of hours into Everquest and, to a lesser extent, Everquest 2 during my MMO addiction, which extended from about a year following Daggerfall's release until 2009, when I bought Oblivion. (My MMO addiction includes some year with Meridian59 in addition to EQ1 & 2.)

It soon adds up!

I was a Skyrim addict. At my worst I would play 8 hours per day every day. Starting like 7pm and going through to 2 or 3am. Even now, once I get into a good questline, despite knowing it inside out, I just can’t put the controller down until the small hours, but at least I have days off it

When Skyrim released, I had a regular day job and spent as long gaming in the evenings as I did working in the day. Then mother developed Alzheimers and become bed bound. I moved her in with us and gave up regular work to be her primary carer. Most of the day she just slept and so I filled much of my spare time….with more Skyrim.

Everything has changed again now, but I still Skyrim at least three days per week…say 15 hours or so, but the ferver has gone out of it and sometimes I get quest burnout where quests become just a hard slog.

Why keep going if like food chewed too long, it has lost it’s flavour? Well, I can’t see a game out there that fills the slot adequately for me. I did have three months with CP2077, but it was a great disappointment… The endings were unpalatable to me…Go check YT if curious hmmm.

However, I have ways of putting some zing back into the old boot! I have developed a set of tiered rule based challenges which toughen the game (a lot) by disallowing most advantageous vanilla game mechanics. Like….no healing, on Legendary, no reloads upon death, no followers, no magic (unless specifically being a sorceress), no aiming sight for ranged weapons (always third person for me see) no paralyse or absorb enchants etc. Each challenge gets progressively tougher to survive while completing the quest lines. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but can make a diverting change from wandering around or trying to think up new playstyles.
If there is any interest I could publish the rule sets here…they were on Beth Forums for years, but now moved elsewhere.

Anyway….I seem to be rambling again
Time to get going
Adella

Adella- for me, THAT was what made Morrowind (and the other ES games) playable (and replayable). Forcing the character to make choices- phobias, inability to use certain weapons/armor/skills, would NEVER join this or that organization for "reasons", and so forth.

My fan-fic stories grew out of that process of character development, because I had to come up with a "back-story" to explain the characters' choices.

One of the MOST challenging feats I ever attempted was... get through the Morrowind main quest while killing the fewest people possible.... Which meant running away from a LOT of random encounters and not joining most guilds.

I think the fact that we are seriously debating how draugr get back into their alcoves after you've killed them (again), shows that we are not just casual players. Me, I don't particularly like Skyrim. Don't like the quests that much, never completed either of the main quest lines (dragons or civil war), etc., etc., fill in your pet complaint here. And yet... over 10k hours of play... how did this happen? So don't ask me how many hours I've got in Oblivion - don't know and don't want to know! But at least twice as much as Skyrim...

It's an escape. It's a world we want to live in. It's a world we do live in. The rest is just an illusion.

Agree with you on everything you said here. I didn't love Skyrim; never even started the dragons or the civil war; the questlines were too short; and they lacked the autonomy I had come to expect from Bethesda. But that said; I managed to work up some whopping hours in the game just exploring the world.

Now Oblivion = it has to be over ten times the number of hours I put into Skyrim. I loved it on the X-Box 360 through 25 games and 8 RROD's; and fell in love with it all over again on the PC for at least that many more games. (not to mention just playing in the world; especially after I started modding it, lol).

I don't want to get into a divisive game-versus-game argument (I got through more than enough of that back in 2011-2012), so I will merely say that I disagree with the sentiments above. The one opinion I actually do agree with, though, is that faction quest lines are too short.

SDIT: In fairness, I will say that with the addition of some gameplay-changing mods like Maskar's Oblivion Overhaul, Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, Martigen's Monster Mod (mainly for the improved AI), Av Latta Magicka (or Less Annoying Magic Experience or Supreme Magicka), Realistic Leveling (or nGCD), Realistic Fatigue, DarN's UI and a few others, Oblivion is tolerably enjoyable for me. I'm actually beginning a new Oblivion character soon, with these mods.

This post has been edited by Pseron Wyrd: Jun 13 2021, 04:42 PM

Toss in Unique Landscapes, Snu's Dungeons, Better Cities, and All Natural and you're close to the game I'm playing. It's beautiful and presents a lively challenge but that's just my opinion.

Toss in the vanilla versions for me.

Kidding. I am still able to go back to vanilla though.

If you and others who grew up gaming on PC instead spent most of the 2000s playing linear games on Playstation and Playstation 2, with only GTA for open-world gaming, suddenly getting presented with Oblivion and its huge open world, and non-forced gameplay... I still remember that transition, even though it happened (for me) over 12 years ago. Mods are just icing on the for me.

I started gaming in late 2000 with American McGee's Alice and played linear shooters (No One Lives Forever, Half-Life, Unreal, ect) for the next two years until Morrowind came out (except for the countless hours Shelly Mars dragged me into one bar after another to play Pong in the 70's). So it kind of sounds like my experience is similar to yours. In my case, I was so new to video games I didn't know the difference between a shooter and a roleplaying game. I only bought Morrowind because the graphics looked pretty on Amazon's website, lol.

I didn't realize what an "open world" was until I played Neverwinter Nights, which came out a month later. That game is linear (as Bioware games tend to be) and chopped up into disconnected maps. It was only after going back to Morrowind that I realized how open and free Vvardenfell was. I think that's when I truly fell in love with Morrowind...and Bethesda's design philosophy in general.

This post has been edited by Pseron Wyrd: Jun 14 2021, 04:23 PM

Totally on Renee’s page here.

My less good, human half started console gaming with the Sega Master System, then graduated to PS1. GTA III was the first experience of a free roam world with at least some verisimilitude to real life. Prior there was the original Tomb Raider which was the first proper 3D game featuring a little latitude to go off track…complete with a farting butler .

So, upon braving a recommendation to try Oblivion…Other half was blown away. No mods of course, and we finished with Sony after PS3, specifically because it couldn't handle Beths big games too well. I was developed and character played in Skyrim on X360 until mods were made available and that kicked us over to XB1S with a good likeness.

Had our chosen platform been PC all along, the sudden shock of being dropped into TES4 would have had much less impact. We’d have probably been making mods by now.

I want to make a big stand alone island quest mod…Think I’ll call it Falsteeth.

Adella

By the way, Adella, you are no longer banned at Beth.net.

SimCity 3000


Started another business area in the original part of the city, to the right of the big river dividing the map. This business area is surrounding a big park constellation and is easily accessable via bus, train and subway. I'm very much closing in on the sea now. Next session I will probably add a big residential area to complement this new business district.

Oddity of the day; my sports arena that I built ages ago has vanished! I don't know why it's gone! And I now yet again get constant messages that my Sims want it but I can't find it in the awards option where it should be.

Here I sit reading of everyone's revelations in the 2000's and I'm thinking of my game world awakening in the '90s when I first played Daggerfall. Up to that point in time I had never experienced a game world so big, so open, and so free flowing. Only thing lacking was to see ones self walk around in the visual garden. That eye opening experience came at a cost of bigness with Morrowind. Dang, I feel old.

Nice. I'll have to see if there are any Alice videos, because I don't think I've ever seen that one. I also remember my first time playing Pong. I was an adult party (my parents dragged us kids to) and was maybe 9 or 10. Being able to play a game on television blew us all away, can you imagine?

But I also forgot to mention another dimension to my tale here. I was at a party some time in 2002, and the party itself was sort of 'eh'. However, somebody who lived there fired up his Xbox (which was new at the time) and began playing this game. The game he played had a whole bunch of fog in it, and it seemed like it went on damn-near forever. I was used to playing games which had a lot of 'Levels", such as Tomb Raider. You beat one level, you move on to the next, and so on.

Only thing is, this game with all the fog did not seem to have any levels. No cut scenes, no "worlds" separated by character progression. The character on the TV screen kept running and running, it seemed like the world had no end. Whatever this game was, I had to have it, of course.

Knowing how I am, I would definitely have asked "what's the game you're playing?" And his answer (The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind) would have been too complicated for me to remember. Maybe I wrote it down. More likely, I just assumed this game with all the fog would be on Playstation. I could just buy it for Playstation...

I could just buy it for Playstation..... and it was never on Playstation. Now do you get it?? I actually yearned for that game. I basically spent the rest of the 2000s looking for that awesome game with all the fog, not knowing it was on Xbox only! (or PC)! :facepalm:

Adella, mirocu, macole, all of your tales area also fun to read..

This post has been edited by Renee: Jun 14 2021, 09:09 PM

I've played McGee's Alice - it was really hard! I got constantly sliced up by those card guards... Anyway, I much prefer Alice: Madness Returns. It's the Realm of Sheogorath all over again.

I started gaming when I bought my first computer in the early 90s. Doom Shareware was the first computer game I owned. Though I had played other games like Wolfenstein, Sim City, Pirates, and Wing Commander 1 on other people's computers before that.

I played a lot of linear shooters back then. The various Dooms and their sequel games like Hexen, Heretic, Quake, etc... I loved No One Lives Forever for its tongue in cheek style. Flight Sims were huge back then. But aside from X-Wing and Tie Fighter, those never interested me much. The first Diablo was a big deal for me, as it was one of my first fantasy games. Finally I loved the original Tomb Raider.

In the 2000s I was playing a lot of the first Rome Total War game. It is the game that introduced me to modding, since it was so darn easy in that game. All the various configuration files were simple text files, so anyone could edit them. I created a massive partial conversion mod called Amazon Total War, in which I created 4 separate Amazon factions in different parts of the world, which with their own unique units and play styles. I still go back and play ATW today.

From there I went to Oblivion. That was my first truly open world game. And I loved the freedom of just ignoring the main quest, going anywhere I wanted to, and doing whatever I felt like. Modding it was not as easy as RTW. But I eventually figured it out. Eventually those became the key components of the games I love most. An open world and modding.

I adored American McGee's Alice, but I couldn't make myself finish Alice: Madness Returns. Two things put me off: checkpoints and jumping puzzles. I simply cannot stand games that do not allow me to make my own saves. I don't know why developers continue to do that. I refuse to even buy a game with checkpoints anymore.

I'm not a fan of jumping puzzles either. The original game had them, but it displayed feet icons that told us when a jump would be successful. That made jumping puzzles a bit less less aggravating to me.

And when jumping puzzles are combined with checkpoints, I end up repeating chunks of the game over and over and over and over until I memorize exactly what the developers expect me to do. I feel like I'm in the movie "Groundhog's Day"...and that just isn't fun to me.

I did like the atmosphere of the early levels, though.