Please Cash god, KILL Kevin Bacon! :3

HE DID IT, LADS.

I'm not sure.

Sometimes I understand it. Sometimes it's also good for Bungie to revisit old content and scale it a little bit so it's not too easy.

Best example I can think of is Xol who was actually a pretty tough strike boss back when it launched. Weapons were different, abilities were different, there weren't really many options to nuke Xol without even using the Valkyrie. It wasn't an easy fight. But it did get progressively easier as time went by to the point of it being a joke at the end before vaulting. It sure would've benefitted from some tweaks, but then again probably not worth it considering the vaulting plans.

Other than that, I really don't think every mildly important lore character should be part of a raid. Aside from being impossible to make so many raids, it's also pretty inaccessible to players who can't run raids.

I think Quria specifically was handled well for its lore. Quria's defeat wasn't just us beating it in Delphi. It was 8 weeks of parsing through the Vex Network, collapsing its domains one by one until we managed to locate it and destroy it. We shouldn't forget that. It's fitting because as I said in my previous reply to a post about this, Quria was a research mind, not a warrior. Quria's strength was creating and manipulating the Endless Night through the Vex Network which required a join effort of the Vanguard, the Guardians and the Eliksni splicers working for 2 months to fully untangle.

The Corridors of Time held no other eventual future for them but a teary vigil from Saint-14 and a cold crypt, a carving of Ghost and blade laid atop it.

Now Quria, Dreaming Mind, the ONLY Vex monstrosity capable of simulating and predicting the paracausal, consistently, accurately, and with half a billion years of experience, tells us she sees us broken, taken, dead.

Drifter quips “You say you live for this stuff, Hero? Yeah. You do”. And then goes on to ask us what exactly we think is going to happen, when there’s no more dragon for our knight in shining armor to slay.

I don’t think the Young Wolf is going to get out of the confrontation between Gardener and Winnower alive, and for all my dismal little jokes, I’m gonna cry when they die, inevitably probably saving or protecting someone else, inevitably BECAUSE they felt they had to save/protect someone they love.

I’m afraid they’re going to die before they ever get a chance to live FOR themself, be a person, feel SAFE. I’m afraid they’re going to die doing the exact thing they were reborn doing, a decade or so earlier— Fighting evil no one else could, because they think it’s the right think to do, the only thing they CAN do.

So I travelled around a bit, chatting up likely looking npcs until I found one I both liked and didn’t feel guilty about marrying (I feel bad if I marry one of the warrior adventurer types, making them be a stay at home mum) and settled on an obnoxiously cheerful argonian called Shavee because her life was frankly shit, and I thought she’d probably be good with kids.

So off I go to Riften to the Temple of Mara to arrange the wedding. I book it in for the next day, realise I didn’t bring anything nice to wear, and spend the night before the wedding robbing every house in the city in the search for something to wear. Eventually decide everyone in Riften has terrible fashion sense and break down everything I stole into raw materials and use them to craft myself an outfit and some jewellery that i’m pretty happy with. I even carefully pick out my fanciest looking sword to wear.

(don’t know why I bothered, frankly, shavee turned up wearing a shirt covered in suspicious stains and weilding a pickaxe, it’s like she doesn’t even care about this marriage)

(also for comedy purposes, bear in mind I play with survival mods that mean my character needs to eat and sleep to live, and I literally spent the entire ingame night on this and forgot to eat and drink anything either and then just downed four bowls of wolf stew right before entering the temple so I didn’t starve during the ceremony. also I discovered during the wedding that I am dying of rockjoint, which I contracted from sleeping in a pile of hay on the floor of a skeever infested cave, so even being six foot tall and jacked can’t make up for the fact that I am exhausted, running a fever, and probably covered in wolf which I spilled because my joints are slowly atrophying, and even the fanciest clothes in the world aren’t going to cover that up)

so I enter the temple, and my finance is there, and Lydia my housecarl, and some random NPCs the game thinks are my friends because I did fetch quests for them

One of the random NPCs is Lisbet. Atfter I did her fetch quest, I then did another quest in which I discovered Lisbet is secretly a cannibal and part of a demonic cult that worships the daedric prince of decay by kidnapping priests, sacrificing them, and then eating their corpses. Raw. I think the raw meat is the sticking point for me here honestly.

I ultimately decided not to sacrifice the random priest to a daedric prince in exchange for one magic ring and all the raw human I could eat, because frankly, that doesn’t sound like much of a deal to me. I was expecting there to be some kind of dialogue choice where I could nope out at the last minute, but it turns out there isn’t one, so after they drugged the priest and tied him to the altar, I just got out my sword and started swinging.

I killed most of the cult (including the town butcher, because I had brought meat from him before and was extremely pissed off that he might have been secretly feeding me humans) but a couple of them got away, which I figured was fine because they weren’t trying to kill me.

Except it turns out, if any of them escape, then every time you see them in the future there’s a random chance that they’ll fly into a violent rage and try and murder you.

Lisbet is at my wedding. Lisbet decides that clearly me marrying this random argonian woman with two lines of dialogue is the happiest day of my life, and she cannot allow me that happiness, when I’ve taken so much from her.

So she tries to kill me. Only she can’t, because I’m stuck in a pre-rendered wedding animation, and also she’s sitting next to Lydia, my faithful retainer and owner of a really big axe.

It also turns out that Lisbet is essential, meaning she can be knocked unconcious but not actually killed because she’s needed for some quest or other. And the minute she wakes up from unconciousness, she tries to kill me again, so Lydia knocks her unconcious again, and I’m stuck, I can’t move, because I’m supposed to be in the wedding animation.

Except Shavee has, not unreasonably, see all this and decided that she doesn’t like me enough to risk getting murdered, and has done a runner, leaving me at the altar, but more importantly, leaving me trapped in a broken pre-rendered animation, so all I can do is stand there at the altar, staring at the space where my fiance was supposed to be, listening to the sounds of Lydia trying and failing to beat a cannibal to death behind me.

Okay, I think, clearly this wedding isn’t going to happen, I’m going to go for the registry office option and complete the wedding using the dev commands. I do this. The priest gives me a wedding ring, and I can finally move again. I chase after Shavee, who has an impressive turn of speed on her, and eventually catch up right by the city gates. I try to talk to her.

Apparently using the console has completed the wedding for me, but not for her, because she still only has the same 2 lines of dialogue she usually has.

Clearly this is working, I can’t leave my kids with someone who can only say 2 things and doesn’t even know she’s their mum, that’s irresponsible.

I try loading from inside the temple. I get the same problem.

Eventually I figure out that I need to use the dev controls to disable Lisbet’s entire existence in the universe.

Shavee and me get married. As the priest reads the vows, I stare at Shavee and wonder why she couldn’t even be bothered to put on a clean shirt. I wonder what kind of mother she’ll be.

Once the ceremony is over, and I’m happily married to the dirty green lizard of my dreams, and we’ve agreed that until I can make her recognise my extremely nice modded house exists I will share her single bed in the unheated flophouse in Windhelm she calls home, I re-enable Lisbet, because I’m worried I’ll forget if I leave it too long.

Fun fact about skyrim, it loads in quite a lot of npcs and objects by dropping them from the sky. I have no idea why this is the case, but it’s objectively the funniest way to load in objects.

I re-enable Lisbet. She falls from the sky, clips through the roof of the temple, and lands in the pew beside Lydia, stands up, draws a knife, and is immedately beaten unconcious.

I no longer care, because Shavee now has all the exciting new spouse-only romantic dialogue options like “Could you cook something for me” and “have you made any money lately”, and I know she’ll be a great mother.

I limp to the door of the temple, while around me the guests not involved in the Lydia-Lisbet murder cycle scream and duck for cover.

I open the door to the temple, immediately collapse and ragdoll down the steps, which is how I discover I am dying of rockjoint.

I limp to the orphanage down the street, adopt two kids, and then finally remember that I’m carrying garlic bread, which as we all know, cures all known illnesses.

When I emerge back into the street, full of the joys of motherhood and garlic bread, I find the town in disaray. Lydia is chasing Lisbet through the streets with an axe and a dragon is circling overhead, burning npcs to death. People are running for shelter, screaming, while the guards try to take down an entire dragon using only the worst bows and arrows in the game.

I decide that as a parent, I have to think of my own safety first and leave them to it.

I head out of the city, intent on returning home and figuring out why Shavee refuses to move in with me. A man hanging around the stables challenges me to a boxing match. For want of anything better to do, I agree.

Halfway through the fight he dodges at the wrong moment and I punch one of his horses in the head.

Two guards attack me while I desperately try to surrender. My kids will miss me, but I’m prepared to go to jail for my horse crimes, I’m an honest citizen. Also my horse crimes seem somewhat less important than the dragon.

Haven't seen anyone posting this yet, but basically there was a physical cassette tape as a part of a Splicer kit box and it features a message from Crow. I highly recommend listening to it because it's very soft and good but here's a transcript also:

Hey, Guardian. There was one night early in my stay with Spider; I don’t… remember why he was angry. Either I did something stupid or… said something smart. But he kicked me out. I’m sitting in this alley on the Tangled Shore next to piles of scrap and garbage feeling like I belong there, and… These three Eliksni approach me. Now I'm not in the best place emotionally so… I pull myself together and stand up, ready to spend the rest of the night dead. But… They just say… “Velask.” That means… “hello” and… They bring me inside a little market, push a warm cup of something in my hands and… start talking to me. I say “talking” but they only spoke Eliksni… They’d point to something and say what it was and I’d repeat it and [chuckles] they’d laugh. That sort of thing. And then… we hear music from somewhere a few doors down. [Hope for the Future playing in the background] So they got up and started… well I wouldn’t call it dancing, exactly, but they were definitely moving. I was just sitting there, watching them while this ethereal music is bleeding out of some club… And you know… it was honestly one of the best nights I’ve ever had.