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 perksFor 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. First, up, why wasn’t this possible in the base game? Well, each individual skill maxes out at 100 and since skill progression links directly to character level in Skyrim, this translates to a hard character level cap of 81, allowing you to unlock a total of 80 perks out of a total of 251 — less than a third of everything on offer. Realistically, that’s likely enough to grab more or less everything that is relevant to how you have built your character, but completionists would get their time to shine when the v1.9 update dropped in 2013.Now, while skills still cap out at 100, reaching that point allows you to make a skill Legendary, resetting it back to just 15 (plus any racial bonuses) and refunding perk points spent in the respective tree so you can reallocate them again once you grind back up to the appropriate level. This in turn leads to a practically unlimited character level cap, as you can repeat this process across all 18 skills multiple times, although you ‘only’ need to reach character level 252 with 100 in every stat to be able to equip every perk in the game. Even with some skills being quicker than others to level, that’s not going to be quick. Oh, and because I love weird maths trivia in games, here are a couple of other odd facts. First, if you took this daft grind even further and reached around character level 500, you would actually lose a lot of your perks — with only 251 total perks available, the devs decided that a hard limit of 256 for unspent perk points would be fine, but this means that the points overflow past that point and reset to 0 if you level too much, forcing you to grind even more to get your points back for any tree that still needs them. Second, while patch 1.9 realistically removed the level cap from the game, it didn’t really. Character level is stored as a four-character hexadecimal value, resulting in an actual level cap of 65,535 (FFFF in hex). Levelling beyond this point will apparently just crash the game, according to players who have pushed the game to its limits using console commands.Arguably the best thing about this pretend awful achievement is that it is utterly pointless. As mentioned, even though your character gradually evolves into something of a jack of all trades in Skyrim, everyone will still have their own preferred play styles, which means a bunch of perks won’t have any impact on their character. Why would a tanky melee fighter built around using heavy armour care about light armour perks at all? Does a stealthy ranged build actually gain anything from two-handed weapon perks? It’s completionism for completionism’s sake, hence why I’m calling it out here — yes, options are nice, and something like Hades’ kinda similar unlock all weapon aspects achievement is fine because nothing is redundant. Everything you need to unlock for that achievement has a place in a certain build, which is important with runs that come in under an hour. In Skyrim, probably no more than half (at very most) of the total perks will be online at any given time, and players are unlikely to leave the comfort zone of the character build they’ve spent hundreds of hours working on unless they absolutely have to.Grindy achievements are absolutely everywhere, but the worst offenders are those where you don’t even gain much — or even anything — from doing the thing umpteen times in the first place. Personal options will always differ, and that’s what the comments section is for, but there are some things that should be saved for individual self-imposed challenges, like I said when I discussed Cuphead in a previous article in this series. I’ve seen a few Reddit posts claiming to have pulled this off, but making it a new achievement when the hard level cap was removed would have been a bit gross. Practically, it achieves so little over what the base game’s 80 perks could add to a build, and while a few extra might be nice (depending on your build), you will literally never need all of them. That’s why this one gets the headline spot, but we’ve still got more nonsense to come…Complete the game without walkingThis one is inspired by an incredible ymfah video in which the dedicated lunatic actually manages to pull this off, using an ingenious string of gimmicks, abilities, and creative solutions to finish Skyrim without ever touching the left stick. Even with footage sped up and heavily edited, it’s clear just how much of a slog getting around would be when you’re relying on using your unarmed power attack to slowly stumble around or using a bucket to nudge yourself through non-combat zones thanks to Skyrim’s famously flawless physics. Even though a lot of ymfah’s similar challenge run videos are framed as ‘guides,’ the idea that anyone would actually want to replicate and suffer through the same kind of extremely specific self-torture is laughable, so obviously tying an achievement to something which likely wasn’t even considered as being a possibility by the developers is never going to happen. Still, it’s not unheard of for devs to update their games with achievements based on the actions and comments of content creators — Gems of War and Minecraft Dungeons have both done it relatively recently.Do not steal a single itemAchievements like this are awful in big open world games, since the game itself is offering you this glorious sandbox in which to do whatever you like, while specific achievement will lock you out of certain play styles or approaches. In a shorter game where you could realistically expect players to want to see how different two approaches can be across repeat plays (hey Dishonored, what’s up?), sure, go for it. But here, forcing players to not engage with entire quest lines or play how they want for the entirety of a massive adventure would just be cruel and automatically force multiple playthroughs… if only partial ones if you were smart with saves. This kind of achievement isn’t hard per se — it’s just disrespectful of players’ time and goes against the spirit of freedom that exists at the heart of most great open world games. This also wouldn’t gel well with Skyrim’s inconsitency in what is fair game and what counts as stealing, and you could quite easily blink and miss accidentally pinching the one ‘owned’ item of a bunch of free ones and end up missing out on this achievement without knowingly committing crimes against Skyrim and her people. Which, obviously, would suck.Take an arrow to the kneeAchievements often love to embrace memes, and while that can be amusing, it isn’t always practical. This is a prime example, and while falling foul of the same fate that befell many an adventurer like you might seem funny at surface level, the reality would be somewhat less entertaining. Aside from getting supremely lucky, this would simply boil down to being a case of waiting for a ranged enemy to tag you with a shot to the leg, or leaping around like an idiot attempting to manipulate the likelihood of that happening. Heck, you can’t even shoot yourself in Skyrim, so there’s goes that option, meaning that waiting on enemies to (hopefully) eventually make the shot is all you would be able to do. That said, what if we took this one step further and decided that taking an arrow to the knee was indeed the end of an adventurer’s life in this universe, tying unlocking this achievement to an alternate ending to the main campaign where you instead just spend your days as a town guard who has to tell as many people as possible how they got shot in the knee? Yeah, no thanks.And that’s it for this week! Got any ideas of your own for disgusting Skyrim achievement, or ones you’re hoping not to see when The Elder Scrolls VI eventually emerges? Or something you’d like to see us tackle in a future BS GS article (yes, I will do Dark Souls at some point)? Let’s hear it!
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