i literally dont care what your excuse for using AI is. if you didnt put your own effort into making it im not putting my own effort into interacting with it.
“buhbub uhbubuh its just a tool!!” yeah youd know about being a tool wouldnt you
I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old “the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power” route, but it’s almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.
Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren’t keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn’t one of those “well, it’s okay when we do it” deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.
It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.
Can someone please explain to me WHY no one can accept that I knit for pleasure?? Every time someone compliments me on my knitting they ask me if I’ve thought about selling it. NO GOD DAMMIIT NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO BE A SIDE HUSTLE
It would take all the pleasure out of it.
Bring back people doing things for fun. Jesus.
When people ask me that, I usually just say “yes” and wait. Either they’re taken aback by the one word answer and don’t push it, more usually they fall into my cunning trap and ask where I sell stuff. To which I then reply, “I don’t. No one wants to pay $500 for a pair of socks.”
If they are foolish enough to continue their questioning, they are subjected to my rant about the historical devaluation of textile labour, analysis of the time put into each garment I make and its retail cost at a fair wage, and the methods by which fast fashion has trained consumers to devalue handmade goods even more than was the case historically when labour was cheap but materials were expensive. Sometimes I even manage to squeeze in a few words about the problems with the puritanical notion of productivity, how it’s been further bastardised by capitalism, and how attempts to monetise every facet of one’s life results in burnout and despair. Though by the time I’ve warmed up to that they’ve usually fled in terror from the short bearded king who’s gone on such a terrifying rant while aggressively knitting a sock at them.
So Bethesda’s reasoning behind forcing a Miraak kill was that they had failed at creating a compelling dilemma. Originally you were going to trade some sort of tome to Mora, and they realized that no one was going to turn down saving a cool ass renegade cyborg sounding Dragon Priest for their little skill tree bit.
The thing is that this would have been ridiculously easy to fix with an addition of literally ANY interesting mechanic. So being a Miraak stannie, here are a few things the questline itself could lock behind Miraak’s death to make me consider killing him:
Trade Dragon Souls for a Reduction in Shout Cool Down Time - A 1-2% increase for every shout spent. Actually gives the player motivation to seek out dragons and play a Thu'um build.
Trade Dragon Souls for an Increase in Shout Power - Fire Breath is one of the coolest in game shouts, and you get the fire Wyrm if you kill an enemy – yet at higher levels it becomes almost useless. This goes for quite a few shouts.
Stacked Vahlok the Jailor Spectral Follower - A summon isn’t enough to make me want to kill Miraak, but a spectral follower? That’s cool as fuck. It makes sense, since you absorbed Miraak’s soul, that Vahlok would want to follow you. Literally no one in their god damn mind would want to fuck with you and your floating dragon priest ghost going suplex city
Vahlok’s Mask - Locking the final dragon priest mask behind a decision would actually make collectors twitch.
Marry Frea - Stupid as fuck that you can’t marry Frea. Conversely, if you spare Miraak, you should be locked out of any remaining Skaal quests and merchants.
Ability to Craft Dragon Priest Armor - Yeah this would just be unbelievably fucking goated and I think you should get this regardless of decision if you collect all the masks, but whatever.
Bend Will That Actually Works - The ability to create up to two living thralls instead of two dead ones, effectively allowing you to increase your follower count, ie, you could have Teldryn, Serana, and Ralis at once.
Maybe someone who mods better than I do can tell me if these would be difficult to add, but honestly, I don’t think a lot of them are as I’ve seen plenty of mods along these lines.
The pure laziness that went into the Dragonborn DLC – which is fun, but criminally short and contained – in comparison to the Dawnguard DLC is irritating, and it’s even more irritating to know they had the voice lines ready to go and everything and decided to cut an actually good plot point last minute.
