“Dragonborn” is an appropriate, yet odd choice for an add-on title for Skyrim, as I’ve been playing as the proverbial Dragonborn for over 64 levels of mayhem. It’s not like I’m just finding out the secret of the Dragonborn is. The game explicitly explains what the Dragonborn is and what the Dragonborn’s destiny should be, and lets you live that out. Now, it’s telling you there’s another Dragonborn, with a knife to the face.
Your quest begins as two cultists confront you, the Dragonborn, and insist that you are an impostor. You correct them of their assumptions by Shouting them to dust. I was accompanied by Serenna for this first step of the journey, and she promptly zombified one of the cultists, and I had to wait for her spell to wear off so I could investigate the dead body. In the meantime, I tried to figure out where the hell my adoptive daughter has gone to. Lydia should have been watching over her in Breezehome, but I found Lydia sitting in my bedroom staring at my empty bed, perhaps with longing, perhaps with regret. My daughter’s room was empty, but her bed was owned. Where could she be? Moon River.
I forgot about that and set sail for a the ash-strewn island of Soltheim, where every occupant knows the name of the man I seek, but none can recall why. Everyone give me the same clue, to look for the temple. I find it, but not before a mishap. I encounter a madman who talks about fingers not being long enough, a tower, and a black book. Then he attacks me. I follow his description of a tower and approach the nearest tower. There’s no obvious way in, so I try leaping over some rocks. I immediately become trapped, stuck between two rocks. This is roughly the fourteenth time I’ve become stuck on the map, unable to move out of a small recession in the terrain. My avatar does not have the ability to climb out of a foot-deep pit. I had to reset.
The first quest I found on Soltheim was ironically identical to the fist quest I ever finished in Whiterun. I offered to clear out the tombs beneath the temple of the restless dead. You’d think that cremating the dead would prevent them from coming back as zombies, but I had no such luck.
I find it peculiar that in both cases, a priest was content to sleep inches away from a zombie filled tomb, with only a locked door separating him from certain, gruesome death, and that he had not enlisted the air of the numerous guards around the city as soon as he discovered what was going on. If I hadn’t come along, he’d still be there, hoping that the situation would resolve itself. The people of Skyrim and the surrounding provinces have the common sense and problem solving skills of lemmings in a Disney nature movie.
Seriously, though, the zombie to living ration in Skyrim is higher than The Walking Dead. Plus, The Walking Dead survivors don’t have to worry about their bone-dry ancient ancestors rising from their graves, armed to the teeth with swords, shields and bows. When you think about how necromancy is universally reviled in their culture, and how useful a skill it is to turn an enemy zombie into your ally, you’d wonder at their logic too. It’d be like outlawing dentistry because of all your rotten teeth.
I found the dungeons beneath Soltheim identical to the dungeons of Skyrim, which is disappointing as I expect to spend the next thirty hours exploring the same shade of walled room as I’ve been exploring for the last hundred or so hours.
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