Greg Stamos is offering–sort of insisting, basically–to let me on his insidious plot. Which, okay, great. I do appreciate the delicate spokes within cyclopean gears within twilit dimensions that have swung inexorably towards his sinister purpose. I’m sure it’ll be really great. I’m looking for the exit. Are you getting this, Greg? Are you writing this down? The story of this dungeon crawl is I’m trying to finish it.
Perhaps you’ve considered making me your unwitting pawn. Trusting my human naivety, you’d let me serve your purpose without ever understanding the gravity of my role. I think that could really work out. I haven’t understood anything I’ve done so far and I’m pretty sure all of it was my idea.
You know, you might be thinking at this point, “I wonder how much of Ruts not understanding this storyline comes down to him not reading stuff.” And I would say, yeah. You might actually have a point there. I’ll actually realize every now and then that one of the unlabeled identical scrolls forming snakes through my sprawling inventory is something I haven’t read yet, and then I’ll bring it up and a couple pages of proper nouns sharing three vowels between them will surge up and I’ll throw a guilty look at my notepad and close the scroll again. You, a thoughtful and erudite player, would have paid close mind to the scrolls, the lines, and the lines between the lines and you’d have been transported to a fascinating power struggle between chillingly believable naked ladies. I’ll accept that. But I feel like I ought to say, for the record–I only gave up, like, halfway through. I put in hours of good-faith effort before I decided it wasn’t worth it–and if that’s because I was too dumb to figure things out, so be it. But I might suggest that there’s a few gaps, perhaps left by last-minute story decisions or lack of playtester feedback, that bring things down a bit. It happens.
Anyway, the gist of what’s happening now is that Greg’s gonna give me the true names of some other powerful daedra, I’m going to mess ’em up, and then he’ll kick me on to the next area. This I understand. See, stuff like this is basically what humans are for in the Elder Scrolls; when you get past the bosoms and goatees, Daedra are just universe-class melodramatic overthinkers whose master plans get buried in machination creep. When they fight, it’s like a game of chess where each capturing of a piece is a game of Risk where each roll of the dice is a game of Stratego–and if anyone forgets whose turn it is, the whole game starts over just to be safe. Humans are there to be like, “Hey, assholes, I don’t care how this ends, I’m gonna die, do you get it, I’m gonna die, don’t tell me to calm down” and throw somebody’s pieces out the window. It’s our gift.
My first house call is to the Grand Daedric Battle Momma Faygo Shawty. The bulk of her fortress lies through the until recently blocked off west gate.I don’t know how my compass decides what’s west. Just go with it. After hacking my way through the greeters I come across three mirrors, which is dungeon shorthand for, “this shit’s gonna be trippy.”
So…middle mirror, right? Got to be the middle mirror.
I hit “use” and it instantly whisks me to another place. I think this is the dimension the scholars call, “desktop.” It’s exactly like the game with all the bad parts removed.
As I’m loading my save, it occurs to me that if the game crashes the next time I try that I’ve probably hit an undocumented glitch that will prevent me from ever finishing Battlespire. I break into a cold sweat as I face the glass and hit “use.” To my horror, it works just fine this time. Which means that in the balance of time, and after a few other glass trips, I get to settle accounts with this tastefully costumed daedric authority figure.
When I share my reason for breaking into her fortress and traveling through her mirror dimensions, she gets a little bit tetchy. I admit that some name-calling does occur. She throws some anti-mortal slurs at me, then I call her the assembly of elemental syllables that circumscribe her divinity. That ends the argument right there.
Afterwards, I cross the courtyard and brave this fellow’s bodyguards…
…and discover that he’s willing to knuckle under. Okay, we’re making a brisk pace here. Next stop, last level. So what are we looking at? Bunch of narrow glitching stone platforms full of enemies on top of a sea of lava?
You know, I’ll say this much: the game’s stopped surprising me.
NEXT WEEK: I WAS MISTAKEN
Footnotes:
[1] I don’t know how my compass decides what’s west. Just go with it.
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This is like watching someone slowly descend into hell without realizing it, or maybe they do but they are in denial.
More like watching someone descend into hell, fully aware, but each time they think they’ve reached it they realize there are still more twisted depths.
I may have just missed it, but at some point did you stop exploring the Battlespire and somehow end up in Oblivion? (The place in Elder Scrolls world, not the game). Not that we have much plot in any case, but at some point either I lost the thread or the game did.
Doesn’t that assume the game was following a single thread in the first place instead of throwing a craft store’s worth of yarn into the air and calling that the plot?
The plot, such as it is and what there is of it, is that through Daedric manipulation Oblivion is spilling out into the Spire.
Then again, it’s a magical proving grounds to start with, so who knows how much of this is Daedric reality-destroying bullshit and how much is just wizardly reality-destroying bullshit.
Whenever you see something like that, A Wizard did it.
Unless a Daedra did it.
Aren’t they wizard?
Often, but not always, if the ones who charge in screaming with a huge mace are any indication.
Seriously, this started out with some kind of accident and turned into Rutskarn’s Inferno. Did the wizard’s tower summon hell?
I could be wrong, but I THINK some of those portals at the end of some level of other brought you out of the spire proper. And since we’re not in Tamriel, and there’s Daedra everywhere, it’s likely Oblivion.
Apparently, the current quest is to rescue Trenelle, I guess? For reasons?
According to the UESP wiki:
“The realm of Battlespire, the magical academy of the battlemages, is located in a thin slipstream between Oblivion and Mundus. ”
So Battlespire isn’t in “the real world” in the first place, and it’s all made by mages and stuff, so yeah it’s a crazy place.
The plot of Battlespire is about this time that a bunch of daedra invaded it from the Oblivion side.
FTFY.
I like that “tastefully costumed” means having only one nipple showing.
Sweet, it’s Rubicante!
I wonder if the complete lack of any sexual stuff in Skyrim is some sort of penance on their part for all the demons in this game all having their knockers out. I know I did a few daedra quests in Skyrim, and I’m pretty sure the most physical any of them appeared was as a… deer, or something?
The started dialing it back with Morrowind, which was probably a function of Microsoft not wanting Bethesda to put nude women and dongs on the XBox.
I’m amused that she has this huge robe that gathers around her feet, but still manages to be mostly naked.
Wait. Is that Faydra the Daedra? I’ve been kind of skipping over all the character names, have they all been this fantastically stupid?
Sadly, yes. She’s supposed to be a Daedra Queen, though, second only to Dagon himself. Yes, that Dagon.
“You go skipping and prancing through life, skipping through a field of dandelions. But what you don't see is that on each dandelion is a bee, and on each bee is an ant, and the ant is biting the bee and the bee is biting the flower, and if that shocks you then I'm sorry.”–Jack Handy
Dammit. Reply wound up on the wrong thread somehow.
Don’t feel bad. This was no more confusing than the rest of Battlespire, and somehow fitting.
“When they fight, it's like a game of chess where each capturing of a piece is a game of Risk where each roll of the dice is a game of Stratego” – my head hurts
“a couple pages of proper nouns sharing three vowels between them ” – come on, Ruts, you can’t just say that and NOT share a screenshot afterwards :d
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LZo9ugJTWQ&t=2m38s
Look, man, I’d had a rough night, and my good tutu was in the wash. Don’t act like you haven’t been there.
People say how the prevalence of voice acting leads to there being fewer words in video games these days.But reading that 4th picture,I have to ask:Is that such a bad thing?I mean jesus,look how many words this one wastes to say “Already have a quest,to kill you,with your real name.So sweeten the deal or gtfo”.
I’m convinced that some of these dialogue options are direct quotes from PnP RPG sessions they had at Bethesda HQ.
I suppose they might have thought “That story was gold! We should make a game with that. Or maybe retell it on a blog. Nah, that’s just silly.”
It’s because that option is supposed to be the wise, learned one. Of course it’s going to be wordy.
Shame that it conveys neither wisdom nor knowledge,but rather how homer simpson would talk if he discovered thesaurus for the first time.
I’m really curious as to that first dialogue option. Is that a nonstandard game over?
what’s that about points in the last screenshot? Do you need points to save your game?
No, that was still there from the leveling up screen a second ago.
So, you’re going into the last level of the game and you’re only Level 8?
Do levels work strangely in this godforsaken place? Are these, like, D&D levels, as opposed to “standard” Bethesda levels that are given out like candy? Is the level system (gasp) bugged?
Or am I misreading the screen?
Could this be a game where you go up a level and down a level at the same time?
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0012.html
Yes, actually. Whenever you go down a level, you go up a level.
But what if you go back up a level?Do you then go down a level as well?
Probably. But how he got to level 8 in the first place, we’ll never know.
When I first saw that second Daedra boss it looked like he was equipped with a pretty heavy-duty polearm, but on closer examination I think it’s just a belt with a giant sash on it.
Here’s to hoping you make it through the glitches and nightmares of the game in one piece.