You Never Forget Your First

It is 2011.

Or 2012.

One of the two.

I never played any Bethesda games other than Fallout 3, a game I got by trading a Guitar Hero game to a friend in 5th grade. I got the better end of the deal.

I never played any of the Elder Scrolls games. I wasn’t even that familiar with them. Only hearing rumblings of their past. But it had been half a decade since Oblivion while Morrowind was touching the other half of that milestone.

I walked out of GameStop with a copy of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

I had played several open-world games before. Mainly entries in the Grand Theft Auto series, primarily Grand Theft Auto IV. The Saints Row trilogy. The criminally underrated Wii port of The Godfather. And of course, Fallout 3. But none of them compared to the world of Skyrim. The world of ice and stone. Fire rarely meets its counterpart here. Until I encountered what I now consider a flying reminder of the fact that in 2011, the year Skyrim was released, was also the year A Dance With Dragons was released and remains to be the latest entry in the A Song Of Ice & Fire series. I can only imagine how happy dragon fans were that year. Anda dance it was when Alduin interrupted my execution and freed me, the Dragonborn, an identity unbeknownst to me and everyone else.

This tutorial was exhilarating as I wasn't really into fantasy RPGs back then. As I ran alongside guards and prisoners through a burning hellscape, all I could hear was the fantasy equivalent of an AC-130 overhead. I’m pretty sure I had just played Modern Warfare 2 or 3 recently. Middle school was definitely known for an insane amount of playtime in that franchise. Stories for another day, perhaps?

Finally, I make it out of Hellscape Helgen. I picked the Stormcloak. The guy seemed cool and picking the bootleg Roman Imperial felt like siding with a Stormtrooper at the beginning of the game. I found it funny that the Imperial iconography would come back when I eventually found the dusty and rusty masterpiece in the form of Fallout: New Vegas.

The world was winter personified. My absolute favorite season. The sky was a beautiful baby blue, unknowingly foreshadowing my discovering Breaking Bad during Summer break in 2013, I’m certain of it. The feeling was perfect. The music was stunning. The sounds that played in my Turtle Beach headset and the impressive Xbox 360 graphics pulled me in and I found myself at Whiterun, one of my favorite locations in all of gaming.

Soon I would find myself confronting the most grotesque, the most horrific, the most insert adjective here kind of enemy in the game. The first spider in Bleak Falls Barrow.

It took me over a year to beat the game. The beginning of Summer break in 2013 to be precise. A summer that had moments that have reverberated in time and has its effects still felt today. But a year later I bought the game on PC and was introduced to mods. Discovering what happens when you mush Skyrim and mods together can be best described by the cutaway gag in Family Guy about the two guys who get into a car accident and inadvertently combined chocolate and peanut butter. The combination is deadly for them and in the case of modded Skyrim, deadly for the player due to the green crystal plumbob above their head slowly turning crimson red.

While this was between my Xbox 360 playthrough and the PC playthrough, the next game to have a world that came close to captivating me like this was Fallout: New Vegas.

It is 2016.

I finally played Dark Souls, specifically the PC port of Prepare To Die. I played it with a keyboard and mouse. I was especially dedicated to self-harm in the summer of 2016.

The world of Lordran was a step in the right direction. The game was even released just weeks before Skyrim.

A few weeks later I got Dark Souls II. I made sure to use an Xbox controller. It made a massive difference.

Even to this day, I never finished either one of those games.

But then I got Dark Souls III shortly after the sequel.

While the world of Lothric was not as open as Lordran and certainly neither is as vast as Skyrim, it was a stunning medieval gothic world. This one I did finish twice. The second time was a year later.

Still searching for a world to surpass Skyrim, I actually found myself playing The Elder Scrolls Online again. I originally played the Beta back in 2014 but the present issues turned me away and the way the game was managed during its release kept me from giving it a chance. But by November 2016, those issues were fixed and the game was in an impressive state. Instead of just having access to Skyrim, I had access to many other landscapes in the land of Tamriel. I thoroughly enjoyed my time binging that game for a short period of time but bigger was not better.

My search continued.

It is E3 2019.

A trailer reveals the next FromSoftware game. The brief glimpses of the design echoed back to my journey into the Dark Souls trilogy. Then something interesting was revealed. The story credits George R.R. Martin. While I didn’t watch Game Of Thrones until after getting the first Dark Souls and before the sequel nor did I begin the first book until the conclusion of Summer break that year, I remember my connection between Dark Souls and Martin. This connection had nothing to do with searching for a world to replace Skyrim, a search that I had forgotten years before.

And just like The Winds Of Winter at that point (and still now sadly), a release date for this next game was unknown.

But that game had a really cool name: Elden Ring.

It is finally 2022.

Fast forward 10 or 11 years later. 

This is where this has been leading up to.

I sat there the moment that evening on February 24th when Elden Ring finally went live. I created my character. I selected the one and only class one should pick: The Wretch. I miserably failed to kill the boss presented, only to realize I was meant to die and awake deep in a cave. Soon I found myself exiting this dungeon. A decent-sized place to host a tutorial. A man stood just outside, waiting to call me "maidenless".

I ignored him and resisted the idea of killing him due to NPCs in FromSoftware games typically revealing new uses later in the game.

But there were no quest markers. No definitive direction. Just a suggestion by the Light of Grace as to where to consider heading. That direction just so happened to be forward. But looking around, the world seemed endless. Here in the Lands Between region of Limgrave, I moved forward. Many hours passed that night and eventually, I kept going forward, a direction that translated to moving north. While playing, I was chatting with my friends as they were playing alongside me. One found a portal that transported him to a sanctum that was full of powerful enemies that gave an impressive amount of XP. But no matter how many times and in different ways he gave me directions to find this portal, I couldn’t find it. Even a picture of the map sent to me couldn’t help. Instead, I found a great elevator that I couldn’t use and no more road northwards. Soon I would learn that while I decided to move north, my friend moved east. All of those hours spent exploring the completely wrong direction built upon hours of complete awe made me realize…

I found it.