Having really enjoyed Skyrim, I looked forward to this game with great anticipation. I even recruited one of my friends to get the game too so we could go on quests together. Sounds fun, right? Well... sort of. It was great fun at first, but the fun seemed to wear off after about 4-5 months. There were a couple reasons. First, the clumsiness of the cooperative gaming mode. In order for both of us to get "credit" for completing a quest, we both had to be in the same exact place in the storyline. Okay, once we got through that, the game was really just a bunch of fetch quests. Get this object, kill this dude, save this town, etc. There was just too much grinding involved too. Unless you spend a crazy amount of time on this game, it just takes too long to level up your skills to get better perks. I was doing it all - getting stuff, researching stuff, deconstructing stuff, crafting stuff, and it just takes forever to level up. Soon I was resorting to a life of crime. I would regularly steal all the armor lying around, deconstruct it, and then, if I had a big bounty on my head, I would log off, that way the bounty would be gone by the time I came back the next day, and maybe I would even sell off the raw materials back to the very blacksmith I had just ripped off. It was like running a virtual chop shop. And even then it takes forever to level up abilities. I would look through every bookshelf possible trying to get the books that increase your skills. This was very tedious and most of the time you just have to sort through "lore" books which are so boring to read through, I don't know how the game developers came up with such a stupendously ginormous amount of mythical mumbo jumbo. Who has time to read all their nonsense? So after a while, the game got so repetitive and tedious that my friend stopped playing, and I just ended up playing solo for a few more months. This game does not favor the solo player. I had my character, a high elf with some badass magic skills, up to level 40+ and I reached a point in the game where I just got stuck. I played through a quest where I came up against this large snake dude that was just impossible to kill, unless I were to invest the time and effort to maybe grind up my levels way up. That killed it for me, and I stopped playing at that point. I've since traded in my game for a paltry 3 bucks.



My comments were mostly confined to the quest parts of the game. I honestly didn't have much interest in or care much for the PVP aspect. I tried it out and honestly, it was really boring. It takes too long to get to where the combat is, and then once you get there it's just chaotic fighting, but if I want to fight and kill other dudes online I think I would just prefer playing Call of Duty. My other observation is that there should have been gamer points awarded for criminal achievements. I mean, if I am going to go through the work to knock off 100 NPC's so I can proudly claim the "mass murderer" achievement, shouldn't I get gamer points for that?! Nope, didn't happen. I was sorely disappointed!



But you know where this game really came to life, was in the Dolmens. It was complete utter chaos and it was fantastic. There is nothing more fun than jumping into a huge random battle with a dozen other dudes everyone hacking, shooting arrows, and casting spells all over the place, killing hordes of bad guys, and then getting some nice loot at the end. If only the game could have had more of that kind of interaction, it would have been more fun.