Demix said:
First time actually posting in these forums so hello everyone!
Anyway I love playing Skyrim as I'm sure many of you do but I recently restarted my game.
I only got to level 15 and didn't get all that far but there is one thing I was considering doing just to change things up. In Oblivion I almost always reloaded saves when situations didn't go in my favor, It was a fun challenge but now that I'm playing Skyrim I'm wondering if I should simply let events happen as they should.
I got into a brawl and accidentally punched a woman watching us, I reloaded but I have to wonder what if I went to jail? what if I broke out and lived my Skyrim life as an outlaw? Spend some time in jail and get out with a psychotic hatred for guards?
So what do you do? Do you reload saves for your preferred end to a quest, or do you let it play out and live with the twists the game throws your way?
First - Welcome!
Second - it's really a personal choice you're asking about, and what YOU feel is legitimate is what should be your course.
If, however, you want an outside opinion: I think reloads for things like "click mistakes" and glitches and "oops I dropped my controller and stole in public now the whole town hates me" type stuff is completely OK - because that isn't how you meant to play it, it was a mistake, and you had no intention of your character taking that particular action.
Reloading constantly for the perfect game because you intentionally did something and later decided you didn't like the outcome - essentially "spoiling" it for yourself and saying "Nope, don't want that" ... has a cloud. You're meta-gaming. You're using player knowledge of the outcome to manipulate character choice. That's a tabletop hold over for me I guess.
Either way, what I feel about it doesn't really matter - its your game and how you want to play it is how you should play it.
OH - and I should add the above applies to first plays and unspoiled plays without a set purpose - for "path" games (Dragon Age for example) this applies only to unspoiled play through - not the 100th time you're playing something just to do things a different way - by all means, engineer the hell out of that because that's kinda the point at that juncture. In open world games like Skyrim - again, once you're past the point of exploration and onto the "what can I engineer" then the cloud goes away.
