A Comfortable Cold Place

The 6th of February, 2026

You may be asking yourself: what is Ocean up to? What have they been doing? It’s been a while since the last blog post!

Much to the surprise of literally no one, I’ve been re-re-replaying Skyrim. Yes, I will never come out of the dungeons; I was born for dungeon crawling. The depths call to me!

Perhaps next you’d inquire: “Why, Ocean, would you want to restart a game you’ve already played for hundreds of hours from the very start?”

That’s a good question, theoretical reader!

I actually got Skyrim on the Xbox 360 on 11/11/11, the day it came out, and played it very extensively in that era. I’d seen basically everything the game had to offer in 2012, but I’ve kept returning to it as I have the other Elder Scrolls games. Since the distant days when Elder Scrolls existed, no other studio has dared make a game as extensive and enjoyable as those old games. Elder Scrolls was more or less a genre unto itself, and unfortunately it’s my favorite genre of game; so here I sit, playing the same old games over and over again.

Why?

One of the Elder Scrolls series’ greatest strengths is its unbeatable sense of character progression. You start the game as this weak whelp who gets destroyed by rats or small critters, but you end up as this all-powerful god that can change the weather with their voice or shoot a fireball that catches an entire room on fire, or deal so much damage that the game lags as it calculates it. If I had to detract from Skyrim in one way in this blog post, I would admit that Oblivion and Morrowind capture this feeling of godhood much better than Skyrim does. Skyrim’s stats system is streamlined and more palatable to a general audience, but some of this goofy stuff was lost along the way. Skyrim doesn’t really offer the full spectrum of this like the older games do, but it still offers it in spades. Some may think Oblivion even went too far? Starting that game and getting walloped by rats in the dungeon and ending it jumping from the top of the tallest mountain in a dead sprint and sticking the landing and running 100 km/h into the nearest town thanks to the power of your end game gear, magic, and potions maybe does detract from the believability of your game’s universe in a way Skyrim doesn’t necessarily do. (true story by the way.)

Oof, I’m rambling about Oblivion in my Skyrim article huh? Whoops! While Oblivion will always remain my favorite, there are a few things I actually do prefer about Skyrim.

Skyrim really expanded on the side content stuff: the crafting, the home ownership, and the followers system. These additions make Skyrim a fun place to kind of “live in” as you play the game. Perhaps this seems a trivial thing, but for me it gives a great deal of value to the greater game world. Most obviously, the world is something you can roleplay and live in a little more than in the older games. You can go out on the town and buy books to adorn your bookshelves in your house, or hang your favorite old gear on your walls. These features allow you to have a little bit more of yourself in the game, which is something I find endlessly captivating. Of course, the crazy quest about saving the world from an evil dragon is cool and all, but I’ve also literally built a home in this world. I’ve arranged a little library nook to read in, I have a wife/family. This is another core element of the game’s appeal, one that drives me to continue to come back to it. Skyrim harbors a kind of digital citizenship in this way.

I will always return to these games, to Tamriel. These games are like your favorite comfortable chair at grandma’s house. Skyrim, Cyrodiil, and Vvardenfell are like second homes to return to when the stress of life grows too great. Those fantastical worlds are always there, waiting, just the same as they were the first time you played them all those years ago in childhood. They nobly lie in wait on old game disks and hard drives, for your next visit where they’ll work their woe-melting magic once more.

And that’s it! The final time I write about Elder Scrolls*

^{*this is not guaranteed}