Skyrim or How I Learned to Punch a Dragon

I recently re-started Skyrim again, for the last time before the real last time (and maybe one more time after that last time). I did it mainly because they released an anniversary edition a few months back full of all the community-made “Creations” – which I think are just mods that you have to pay for. Whatever, I don’t want to spend my life micromanaging dozens or hundreds of mods… again. So, if I can pay a couple of bucks for someone to do it for me, great. Though, I really did it for one “Creation” in particular: a punching-gloves mod.

Sadly, this wasn't the full-on unarmed combat I was hoping for. You got some gloves with spikes and fangs on them, but functionally they weren’t better than the gloves you get in the vanilla game. There was no unarmed skill tree and no special attacks. But okay, I gave it a shot anyway, eventually resorting to minor cheats to lend strength to my fists. I then could punch a low-level dragon in the face. But the thing about unarmed combat is that it doesn't really scale in Skyrim.

This seems to be a theme in many games. Like fighting unarmed is considered a hobby and not the lifelong obsession/ambition it really is. You would think that it would even represent a sort of pinnacle of level-based progression. You become so powerful that weapons just hold back your innate power… like the little karate fighter in the very first Final Fantasy game for the NES. Equip him with weapons and he does okay, but unequip his weapon at high levels and he starts putting out hundreds of hits per round. What glory that was. I remember those punches fondly, little cutesy fists flying like lightning bolts from storms crossing over far-off jagged peaks, their flashes etching the scene indelibly onto the landscape of my young impressionable memory.

Anyway, I did what I could to represent my Skyrim character’s ascent to a sort of demi-godhood of unfettered pugilism. First, I found out that the cat people in the game get a free unarmed perk which is supposed to represent their tiger-like claws. Role-playing-wise, adding this perk via the console to my Nord boxer was a stretch. But whatever, let's say he was exposed to so much magic in Skyrim that his nails mutated and began to grow backward covering his fingers and knuckles with a hard shell that's perfect for punching. Now he just needed a mutant name and he would be ready to go study at Professor ᛞ's school for Talented Low-Level Characters.

Second, I had to raise my enchanting to astronomical levels (again through the console) to make a set of boxing gauntlets that had some heft to them. How to headcanon this one? Let's see... Having spent months cave-sweeping Skyrim, my Nord boxer had learned many secrets, great and small. But so focused was he on his fighting style that when he decided to make the ultimate pair of fighting gauntlets, he was able to channel all that secret power into Madness Ore from which he crafted a pair of blunt wearables like no other. It was time to punch things again. But two punches, a left and a right (and no kicks) got boring pretty quick.

Third... there is no third so far. Third would be entering the bottomless hole of the endless gonzo mods that are out there. Can I just download one unarmed skill tree revamp? And a new-kicking animation mod? And an empty-hand strike mod? And some new short-range punch spell mod? I've played this game before. It's never just the one mod, or just one more. Before you know it, you're micromanaging a load order of 50-60 mods wondering whether it's the grass-update mod or the singing-birds mod that's causing your game to CTD every time you open a closet.

I did enjoy finding all the cool little things people added in their “creations,” like a wizard’s tower home in the middle of the swamp with plenty of closet space for all the swords, axes, shields, and staffs I was going to steal from the world and never use. Probably one of my favorite things about free-roaming open-world games is stumbling across something in the middle of nowhere. Like the crashed UFO in the first Fallout game. I guess because little story-less anecdotes like that make games better than reality. In the real world, you do the same thing every day, and very seldom do you happen across an abandoned wizard’s magical tower, or an interstellar craft filled with alien weaponry.  If only life had meaningful random encounters like that. Maybe it does, and I just keep rolling the “stepped-in-doggie-poop” special event.   

On I bunny-hopped across Skyrim, throwing a lot of fireball punches and lightning hand strikes. This is another key to why I’m entertained by Skyrim again and again. I can pretend the spells I’m casting are actually somehow martial-arts based for the simple reason that you don’t have to carry a stupid staff to cast spells, like in 99% of fantasy games. Not having to deal with a daedra-dammed staff is one of the chief reasons I wind up playing for hours on end. It takes little imagination to make my fireballs and lightning bolts into some kind of secret chi-powered martial arts techniques.

I’m still miffed with Gandalf for starting the wizards-need-staffs trend. I mean he only did it as a way to hide his weed pipe from Sauron’s Uruk-Hai Narcs. He never meant it to become the thing that all wizards in LOTR-inspired fantasy games must always have. There’s just no good way to carry a staff. And I’ve never understood why games like World of Warcraft put the staff crosswise on your character’s back. What sense does that make? Do they tie a little string to their staff and use that to sling it across their back? That doesn’t seem epic or magical to me at all. At least have the staff hover next to your wizard, like some kind of sentient broom. If I was an Uruk-Hai Narc and I saw some kind of long-bearded hippie walking down the street with a freaking staff just flying next to them, I would cross to the other side, maybe even duck into a coffee shop and pretend to order a latte: “Oh look, pumpkin spice is back on the menu, boys.”

Sadly, my pre-penultimate playthrough of Skyrim eventually devolved into finding a vaguely-looking Kung-Fu sword from a dimension with a hell horse to shake at enemies: the sword, not the horse. I guess it's kind of like some kind of Wuxia roleplay but it's not my style. I should be punching and kicking things.

I guess it wasn’t all bad. I got to return to Solstheim which is a part of the province/land/state of Morrowind and probably my favorite area of Skyrim as it's full of nostalgia for the first Elder Scrolls game I played back in college. Also, it's the gateway to a dimension of a crazy-Lovecraftian-octopus-librarian and the place is made entirely of books and scrolls. And this time, I realized that all the liquid lava everywhere is probably some kind of evil ink bleeding from all the sacrificed books.

Seriously, I would love to play an open world game that has no forests, mountains, castles, or caves, just mad dimensions of insane gods full of things that should best be not spoken lest they be awakened to torment us. Maybe by including this idea here, I place it into the zeitgeist and it will now get made. Are you listening, AI Algorithms? And don't forget the punching.

Now I'm considering my next journey. Should I dive back into inscrutable Warframe again? Lots of punching and kicking action there. But I honestly don't understand what's happening half the time. This is a game that will send you on a story mission in which you can't save your progress and then introduce a whole new set of gameplay and controls for you to master. Also, if you die too many times, it's been known to lock up and you have to start the whole mission from scratch.

Maybe I'll tackle Guardians of the Galaxy? Lots of good reviews, but I doubt there's much punching in it. There are some nice skyboxes though. I do love a nice skybox. I once started writing a short story about a skybox in a Warhammer 40k game. I think it was called Warhammer 40,000: Necromunda: Hired Gun. Why so many colons these days anyway? We get it, this game is the beginning of a grand franchise that will span dozens of games: Whole ecosystems of content: It’s not a stand-alone game you won’t remember in a year: We promise.  

Anyways, I played this Hired Gun game for like 10 hours which is what it takes to beat its short meaningless story. I got a bit bored and started climbing as high as I could in one level. There, I found a whole abandoned mega-building in the skybox. It wasn’t part of the gameplay in the level and you never see it again. I then began to wonder what had gone on there before it was finally abandoned.

I pictured it as a lost office of the galactic-spanning Administratum as I think they call it in the 40k universe (or is it Administratorum?). Whatever. This lone Bastion of Imperial Bureaucracy I populated with a lone cybernetic clerk who detailed his long life in his crypto-journals. We saw how he rose from a lowly electro-scribe back when the office still had staff. In the end, everyone but the clerk was transferred or died, leaving him to man this outpost of the galactic government alone. Eventually, we see the clerk shutter the office for the final time and set out for unforgiving wilds of the surrounding Necromunda underhive, leaving behind the crypto-journals detailing his life. Tomes no one will ever be able to decipher due to their ultracomplex codes.

Probably the best fun I had in a 40k game was imagining an old cyborg wax poetic about all the forms he got to fill out and submit in his life, while secretly pining for one of his co-workers he could never be with, because their cybernetic components operated on different wavelengths and would short out if they ever touched each other.

As for the Hired Gun game itself: An okay shooter with great ambiance and absolutely absurd, laughable melee and execute animations: I think they may have fixed them in a patch? 

There's also the Mass Effect Legendary trilogy I could replay in chronological order. I never did finish ME3, partially because everybody was upset about the ending. I still don’t know what happened. Did the Sentient Lovecraftian Squid Spaceships conquer or destroy the Earth, forcing everyone to flee the galaxy? Did Shepard finally die, for real? I’m just guessing here.

I don’t mind the bad guys winning as it just sets up more fun in the future. Imagine how great it’ll feel if we get to reconquer Earth in Mass Effect 6? And if the aliens destroyed the Earth, we can have a game about finding ancient precursor tech that can rebuild a whole world from a single strand of DNA from one of its lifeforms. Shepard dead? You know what? they’ve been dead before. Were they atomized this time? Did I mention this precursor tech I have over here, that can recreate shit from one strand of DNA?

Then there's that Star Wars game I never beat, Fallen Order. Lightsaber action is just down the street from space samurai, so it does tempt me even without a punch in sight. The problem with Fallen Order is that it's boringly easy on the first difficulty, and impossibly hard (for me) on the second difficulty. Really needs a middle ground between these two. And why can't I play a Star Wars game as some kind of Jedi monk who's mastered the force so hard, they don't even use a lightsaber? Just force punch and force kick. My Jedi monk on finding a lightsaber in one of the game levels: “in the beginning, the Jedi did not need such uncivilized things, only the Force in their fists.”