Skyrim: 48 Hours Of Funny Glitches – Part 2

Continued from yesterday’s ‘Skyrim: 48 Hours Of Funny Glitches – Part 1‘

30 hours - A load off

Around this point in my playthrough I’m starting to notice the loading times. Fast-travelling to big areas is definitely taking longer, pulling up menus takes a fraction of a second longer than it did at the start and there’s sometimes a delay even when pressing buttons to activate things. This is shortly before the launch of Skyrim on 11 November and at this point there has been a update which I assume must be the 1.1 patch.

36 hours – Still dragging on

My favourite bug yet! I’ve accidentally fast-travelled to Winterhold village rather than the College (they’re very close on the map) and I arrive in the centre, only for both my spooky dragon skeleton friend and its equally weird new companion to drop out of the sky and into the main street. They twitch around for a bit while the villagers blithely walk through their dead bones as if it was just another shower of snow that had fallen from the heavens.

42 hours – The flying tea set

Skyrim seems quite fond of defying the laws of gravity, though up until now I only had colleagues’ word of its surreal, Alice In Wonderland happenings. Then, on a wide valley path, I find a teapot, two mugs and some bottles suspended in the air several feet above my head on an invisible (and insubstantial) shelf. Anyone for an al fresco cuppa?

46 hours – The Ultimate Jabberwang Of Cool-Killing Sexiness

In the bowels of Riften, we return to the Ragged Cat – a focal point for the Thieves Guild headquarters – to return four books that we just grafted out of a freezing, undead-infested Necromancer’s (who’s a necrophiliac, to boot) ice cave leagues north of the town. Quest completes, barman is satisfied and thus gives me… nothing. Although to be fair, he doesn’t take the four books off me either, but they’re pratically worthless to me, while the Ultimate Jabberwang Of Cool-Killing Sexiness (or whatever it was he was going to give me in exchange) could have been handy.

48 hours – Conclusion

So, that’s it really. Unlike many other Skyrim players (particularly those playing on PS3, apparently) I’ve encountered nothing that has significantly upset my adventure in Skyrim on the Xbox 360 so far. That reward-killing bug doesn’t bode well, I wouldn’t want anything like that to happen at a critical point in the main quest, for example. And those load times/delays are bearable – for now.

However, that’s just 48 hours of playing Skyrim, which is about a tenth of the total time I anticipate spending in this world. Taking into account the inbound patch Bethesda’s VP of Marketing, Pete Hines has spoken about recently, plus the barrage of inevitable updates over the next few months, it feels like a bit of a lottery: consuming Skyrim at this fairly voracious rate, it does seem like a matter of time before I hit another bump and that may be the one to completely derail my game, forcing me to start again.

I believe that in my case and any like it, Bethesda should be given some slack anyway. Skyrim is an enormously ambitious project with many times the value of its closest competitors, but more importantly, these niggles wither into insignificance compared the incredible time I’m having playing it. This is my very individual experience of it, of course and some people may have it a lot worse. But I feel if I was to complain about things falling out of the sky and minor quest-killing bugs, it would only be because I’m a little bit nuts about Skyrim and I’d want such stunning achievement to be as polished as possible.