After Nine Years, I Finally Beat The Main Quest Of SKYRIM!

It took me nine years, but I finally beat the main quest of THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM.

Back in 2011, I got SKYRIM when it first came out, because I had spent a lot of time the previous game playing THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION, and it was one of my favorite games. I think I played through nearly all the content – I finished the Mages Guild, Fighters Guild, Thieves Guild, and Dark Brotherhood storylines before I started the Kvatch mission in the Main Quest. (I even finished the quest where you have to find all ten statues for that crazy Umbacano guy, and after he went nuts, I broke into his mansion and stole them all back.) So I put a lot of hours into the game, though I was able to do that because I didn’t have all that much else to do at the time.

By contrast, when SKYRIM came along, I was working a full-time job, a part-time job, and I had just gotten started with indie publishing. I think I was about halfway through writing SOUL OF DRAGONS when I bought the game. So over the last nine years, I didn’t have all that much spare time, because I was busy writing like 100 novels or so. When I did play SKYRIM, I tended to get sidetracked into side quests. Like, I finished the College of Winterhold and the Companions quests, but every time I started the main quest, I would get distracted by something else in Real Life and forget the game.

But last year, to celebrate my 100th novel (DRAGONTIARNA: KNIGHTS) I got a Nintendo Switch. SKYRIM had been released for Switch a little bit before that, so this summer I decided that, once and for all, I would beat the main quest of SKYRIM. And since the Switch is handheld, I could do so while reclining in comfort on my couch!

I started on July 8th, 2020, and finished on September 9th.

I was surprised at how short the Main Quest was (but it still took me two months to get through it – I don’t spend that much time playing games nowadays). OBLIVION’S was longer, and MORROWIND’s was WAY longer, but I suppose MORROWIND had the advantage that it wasn’t fully voice acted, so it could use the “Wall of Text” technique to explain complicated things like just who Dagoth Ur was and his relationship to Vivec and Almalexia. For that matter, to finish OBLIVION’S main quest you have to visit every town in the game at some point, but there are towns in Skyrim that you never have to visit to finish the main quest. But I think something like only 10% of SKYRIM’s content is in the main quest. The game is an enormous sandbox, and you can wander around doing random stuff practically forever.

So after nine years, it’s nice to have finished the Main Quest. A sense of closure and all that.

But I suspect I’ll be back. I still play OBLIVION from time to time, after all. 🙂

-JM