152+ Hours of Sneak Thievin'

Over the past month, most of my free time has been lost to soaking up every ounce of lore I possibly could within the realm of Skyrim. If you know me at all, the fact that I have forsaken playing even one minute of Zelda or Assassin's Creed should speak volumes to how deep I've fallen into Bethesda's latest epic.

There may be some spoilers within. I don't think it's anything major, but..you have been warned.

Today, I finished the war quest line and obtained the last achievement I needed to reach 1000/1000. There's still so much to explore in that game, but I feel like I should move on for now, especially considering with game of the year talks heating up. Still, I thought it'd be interesting to post some of my statistics and see how they compare with other people's if they want to chime in.

My character, Aria (yeah, I played as a female), is a level 53 wood elf rogue that dual wields daggers that she uses to backstab fools for 30x damage, and often switches to archery when necessary. I never put a single level-up bonus in to Magicka. I ended up with 450 Health and 350 Stamina. My Light Armor, Sneak, Lockpicking, Speech, Smithing, and One-Handed made it to 100. Pickpocketing got up to 75, but nothing else made it over 50.

In these open world games, once they give you the first objective and/or place to go, I generally go the complete opposite direction. That's what I did for the first 50+ hours in Skyrim. Then I did enough of the main quest to get the dragons to start showing up. After that, it was back to roaming around. The main quest and the civil war were the last things I completed. I decided to side with the Stormcloaks in the war, which may seem weird as an elf, but I wasn't a high elf, and the Imperials did try to execute me in the beginning of the game. Obviously, if you've played the game, there was a lot of gray area in making that decision. I didn't enjoy having to forcefully remove the Jarl of Whiterun after he did so much to help me in the quest to kill Alduin, but I'm sure there would've been things that I didn't enjoy taking part in if I had gone the other way.

Anyway, here's a bunch of numbers...

General

When I look at the raw numbers, there's some surprising things. First off, 278 locations found? Damn. I don't know what the total is, but I feel like there are tons of blacked out locations on my radar still. That one horse I own isn't by choice. I wish I could somehow get rid of him. The idea of a rogue riding around on a horse just seems really dumb to me.

Quest

The thing that stands out as weird to me here is the Thieves' Guild stat. Three? How could that be right? Aside from that, 239 miscellaneous quests seems insane. If I would've guessed before looking at it, I would've thought maybe 100.

Combat

Apparently, Nathan Drake isn't the biggest mass murderer in games this year. I killed over a THOUSAND people. Mostly via backstabs. Only 22 of those were considered to be murderous crimes though. Also, I ain't no bunny killer.

Magic

The only reason Flames is my "Favorite Spell" is that late in the game I just started casting it to try to keep leveling up since most of my rogue-ish skills were maxed out. Otherwise, it would probably be Candlelight. As for Aura Whisper being my "Favorite Shout," that's likely due to how dependent I was on the Gray Fox's Cowl in Oblivion. Being able to see people through walls from a great distance clearly helps being a sneak thief.

Crafting

Yeah, I'll admit to making a metric ton of steel daggers to get my smithing up. Improving your weapons and armor is highly recommended. Despite being a rogue, I never really found a reason to use poison since I was usually sneaking up behind people and killing them instantly anyway. Similarly, I never found much use for trapping souls since I generally the stack of soul gems I found were enough to keep my bow charged up.

Crime

Being a rogue, you may expect my bounty stats to be sky high. But, if you're a successful rogue, it should be zero. Unfortunately, there were a few unavoidable cases where I was spotted and/or caught. But seriously...2262 items stolen? I may have a problem.