Skyrim - Heart of the Mountain
The next episode of the Dungeon Dive, publishing this coming Wednesday, is a digital dive, and so the video is too big to upload here to Patreon. However, I wanted to provide you all with a little something extra to read.
About once a year I return to the world of Skyrim. Even though I've been playing the game since it came out in 2011 or so, I've never beaten the main quest or the civil war quest. I love the game, I just don't really care about the two main stories.
For me, Skyrim is like a huge fantasy amusement park, with each of the dungeons and points of interesting acting like a ride or an attraction. And so most of my time playing Skyrim over the years has been focused on side quests, bounties, and simply exploring the various locales creating my own fun as I go.
What adventures will new stealth archer uncover? Spoiler alert - in this current game I'm actually not playing a stealth archer!
I do really like the DLC quests, especially Dawnguard, and I also like the faction quests. After reinstalling the game about a week ago, I was browsing the Creation Club and ran across this DLC-sized expansion called Heart of the Mountain. It sounded interesting, and the main thing that drew me to it are the new and different biomes.
In Heart of the Mountain you get to explore a large and expansive desert and swamp area. It's so weird to be playing Skyrim in a desert!
This community mod seems to be of the highest quality. It's fully voice-acted, has new music, 70+ new quests, an engaging main quest that reminds me of something out of Bloodborne, and it has a very interesting new follower, a living doll named Audrey. The main story is also super weird - it's all about this curse of the old blood and focuses on a meat mine, some eccentric character called the Hollow Princess, and a bunch of corrupted Khajiit cultists.
The expansion is $10 via the creation club, and I think it's more than worth it. I know that a large portion of the community was down on Bethesda opening the paid-for Creation Club, but I don't mind it at all. I actually like the ability to pay the creators for their creations. It takes a ton of work to make something like this, and I think the writers, musicians, artists, and voice actors should get paid for their time and hard work. Also, $10 for more of a game I love is not something I'd ever complain about, especially when it's as good as this seems.
The episode posting on Wednesday is the first part of a let's play series. I'm not sure if the series will continue, as that will be up to the viewers and their interest. I'm hoping there is interest, because this seems like a perfect fit for the channel. But even if there isn't, I will continue to play on my own because I'm really interested in seeing where this one goes.