A game on the scale of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has ample opportunity to mess players around with disgusting achievements… here are just a few of the ways it could have been a horrible completion rather than just a long one.
Skyrim is famously a pretty involved completion, but most of that just comes down to how big the game is and how long it takes to just get through it naturally — there’s not a single skill check on the entire Skyrim achievement list, so it just becomes a case of playing until you get there. According to site estimates, that’ll likely take around 100 hours (even more if you factor in the DLC areas), but in the spirit of this feature series, let’s looks at some ways that grind could have been way worse if Bethesda gave us The Elder Trolls V…
BS GS is an original editorial series from TA where we ruminate on how rough things might have been if developers had taken their achievement lists to the next level. We’ll try to focus on specific details and possibilities rather than simple grinds — one billion kills, play every day for a year, etc. — to keep things interesting, where possible using other instances of ridiculous achievements as a precedent for what we dream up.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — Unlock all perks
For our main talking point this time around, we’re going to be looking at something that wasn’t possible in the original release of Skyrim, but became achievable in a later update and the Special Edition rerelease — claiming every single perk in the game. Yes, it’s pretty pointless since a melee build isn’t going to be worrying about getting those magic-boosting bonuses, for example, but it is exactly the kind of achievement you do see on quite a lot of RPG achievement lists so I thought it would be interesting to dive into what exactly it would entail in a game as massive as Skyrim. Fi