Desperate Housewives of Skyrim

[Alssadar]

That was perhaps one of the greatest articles I've read recently, both entertaining whilst detailing the lack of emotional depth in Skyrim.
That being said, I've yet to play Skrim. I'm more of the Strategy guy, and my recent interest in Crusader Kings has been about marriage for alliance and statistical boost. Although, there is little designated action between spouses (As far as I know) there are plenty of holes to fill in with the imagination (Such as the two kids we had in three years).

 

[shrimpcel]

This would all be very interesting if my wife had not disappeared after the marriage. When I find her, there will be hell to pay.

 

[YodaUnleashed]

Consider this though, if the marriage system in Skyrim wasn't so dire, this highly entertaining article would not have been written! This makes it all worthwhile. Some advice though, you really should have married a more action-orientated woman and taken her along with you on your adventures, and lamented her unfortunate death at the hands of a ferocious mudcrab when she'd overstaid her welcome. MUHAHAHAHA.....I'm going to make a good husband one day.

 

[Vozati]

The thing is that shallow two dimensional planks for characters is not unique to spouses. Every NPC stares at you blankly, spits out a stock phrase regardless of context, and don't respond to anything you do unless its murder.

 

[The Lugz]

My solution was to get hooked with someone more adventurous and with a follower-tag. Although it'd still be a very shallow mimic of a real relationship and everything, at least we could do some cozy grave desecrating together. It worked out rather well, until Uthgerd got pummeled by mean dwarven robots. And I turned out to be the world's worst widower, since there's no way to carry off and properly bury dead friends in Skyrim, so I had to leave her to the spiders.

I've seriously been laughing at this story all day. So I Left Her To The Spiders needs to be the final line in every story about a past relationship. e.g.: "She wasn't willing to move states when I got my new job, so I left her to the spiders."

To be honest, I never played Skyrim with any sort of strategy guide (it's more fun to figure out on my own, since it's the mistakes that make it interesting) so I had no idea at first that I could marry a follower and have my wife come along on adventures. In fact I never got into using followers much--I acquired one by accident once, but she got lost in the wilderness while following me and I never saw her again. I finally found her mangled remains after backtracking for 20 minutes, and after that I decided followers were more trouble than they were worth and that my Nord was more of a loner anyway.

On balance, losing your wife in a dungeon raid then just leaving her to rot on the floor is almost more disturbing than the domestic containment scenario I encountered.

However, at the end of the day, my closest Skyrim-friend is always going to be my horse. And despite having gone through about thirty of them, it never ever gets any easier... It's interesting how I felt so attached, considering they never actually talk to you.

"Gunvald! Noooo! Please, get back up, Mr. G! Why? *Sob* Why...."

See, that's why I never bought a horse. I was perpetually cash poor for whatever reason (read: constantly buying metal to level smithing skills) and didn't want to invest in something that was just going to get murdered in front of me.

Besides, I found a lot of cool places traveling on foot...
In heavy armor...
Under constant threat of attack...
Unable to outrun trouble...

Yeah, I probably should've bought a horse.

meh, horses.
i agree with your original conclusion horses are an expensive pain in the nuts,
personally i only use the city carriage or walk
the only use for a horse in the entire game in my opinion is to outrun some bandits when you steal all their stuff outside whiterun so you get some free gear to start with ( assuming you cant just kill them )

as for the carriage, yes theoretically it's more expensive in the long run but it's in tiny amounts that you loot off a corpse between rides so it's never an issue even at the start of the game and once you discover all the citys you can just fast travel to every corner of the map and walk about 2 minutes to anywhere
so, back to my first point 'meh horses'

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

And this is why I romanced a Party Member rather than a random NPC - because she could go adventuring with me rather than staying at home.

Also, I never had her make me the home cooked meal. It was just too creepy.

I did make us matching stealth armor, though, so she wouldn't keep failing all her sneaking checks and giving us both away.

 

[disgruntledgamer]

And this is why I romanced a Party Member rather than a random NPC - because she could go adventuring with me rather than staying at home.

Also, I never had her make me the home cooked meal. It was just too creepy.

I did make us matching stealth armor, though, so she wouldn't keep failing all her sneaking checks and giving us both away.

They still have the personality of a wet noodle, regardless if you take them with you or not. Bethesda never did know how to do NPC interactions. Out of all the followers not one is half interesting.

Quality > Quantity

 

[Amakusa]

hmmm for my Skyrim game, i ended up marrying Jordis the Sword Maiden, and took her everywhere until she started to bug out and i couldn't give her much stuff to carry as compared to before, since her carrying weight went all weird. (This was the ps3 version) That being said, she was really nasty in combat provided you gave her nice gear. Very good tank. Also i didn't mind her voice either so that helped. But yeah no way i would of married a char that couldn't fight.

But yeah your wife didn't have much dialogue or extra quests which was a pity.

 

[bigfatcarp93]

Bethesda: Extra dialogue and story roles DLC for Skyrim. NAU.

Seriously, I could plan that out. Honestly, it's easy:

Go through and add about nineteen or so extra lines for each marriable character (It's not that much).

For fighting spouses, have them come forward with a mission connected to their backstory or character arc that the player can help them with at some point in the game.

For non-fighting spouses, have them, I don't know, get kidnapped and need rescuing or something. Yeah, that could work. In fact, it would really add to the whole classic fantasy-epic feel of TES games: what's more "Authentic fantasy" then killing a dragon? Rescuing a damsel in distress.

BOOM. That's about five months of work by my best guess, and PEOPLE WOULD BUY IT.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

After reading some of the woeful tales here, I would do the opposite. Don't have a thousand choices, have only one. You can have a thousand where it's a three stage effort to get them in to bed and spend the rest of your days hearing the same three lines over and over, OR, you have one richly detailed and engaging relationship.

 

[Sehnsucht Engel]

This was a pretty funny read. I never had the same problem though. My female khajiit married Mjoll like ten hours into my playthrough, and Mjoll can't die, so the rest of the fourty hours I played they were always together. I liked Mjoll, she was a good companion and wife, since she could fight and not just stay at home.

 

[freaper]

My life with Lydia in a nutshell.

Degrading her from valiant Shield Maiden to braindead housewife, stirring a dubious substance in the cauldron over and over again, made me feel really guilty after the first week of our marriage. To think that I had looked up how to marry her, because at the time her dialogue was bugged, made things even worse. I wanted to be with her, even though the only reason she was into my Redguard was because he was particularly good at destroying life and because she was bound to him by oath, not because of his sense of humour or his caring mannerism.

On the other hand I was too afraid she'd get herself killed on a Dwemer trap during one of my dungeon delving episodes, so I'd have to send her on her way back to Whiterun from some desolate plain on the other side of Skyrim. One time I asked her to leave, after I had finished the dungeon I'd fast travel back home, only to find the fireplace empty and Lydia nowhere to be found. It took her two more weeks to arrive home, and when she did she was not even slightly disgruntled that she had to walk day and night for over twenty days.

That's the main reason I re-rolled as a bloodthirsty Orcish commander; if you can't love 'em, beat 'em to death with a hammer.

 

[Magnejamed90]

I ended up marrying Ysolda, but the marriage went sharply downhill after I discovered she had been running an illegal secret narcotics trade in Sleeping Tree Sap with some shifty looking Orc. I played along for a while but now I've found her sleeping in the same bed as Lydia and she's been a bit too friendly with Llewellyn the Bard as well...

 

[Danceofmasks]

I reckon people should try out a mod by the name of Vilja.
That mod is still being worked on, but at the moment has about 4000 lines of voice acting.

There are a whole bunch of features, but mainly the complexity of the mod just goes to illustrate what's possible in the engine.

 

[Wuvlycuddles]

I married Mjoll the Lioness, seemed like a perfect partner to go adventuring with..... except that Aerin kept following us around. I tried getting him killed "by accident" a few times, it failed and I had to stab him. Mjoll wasn't happy about this.

 

[blackrave]

That is why my character is usually single
Also his love was murdered prior the game, so he is on the path vengeance
One day, on one happy day he'll find that argonian bastard who axed her and then he will use all of his crafting skills to make boots out of him

 

[Kahani]

I was perpetually poor

Poor? In a TES game? Is that even physically possible? If you're not richer than every single person in the world combined by halfway through the game you've either been doing some hardcore roleplaying or are simply doing something very wrong. Balancing the game economy is something Bethesda have never come close to managing.

It was pretty clear they threw in marriage as an afterthought, just a little thing they didn't bother to do much with.

This is partly why the Hearthfire DLC bugged me. It's not just that it didn't really add much to the game, but that what it did add was just little bits tacked on to the side of a feature that was already just a little bit tacked on to the side of the rest of the game. Homes and spouses don't really do anything, so now you can have another house and a child that also don't really do anything. If your home was any more than a place to keep your storage chest and your spouse was anything more than a vending machine, adding related features could have made sense. But instead we just get the option to add a non-interactive child so they can fail to interact with our non-interactive spouse. If I didn't want to interact with things, I wouldn't bother turning my PC on in the first place.

 

[AbnormalFetus]

This was hilarious, insightful, a bit sad and one of the best articles i have read on the escapist. You experiences with marriage in skyring pretty much exactly mirror my own. Right down to the part when you start to actively avoid her because you dont feel you deserve her devotion. Thanks for a great read.