Skyrim 100% Maximized Legendary Playthrough - 254. Good Intentions and Restoration Ritual Spell
2We start where we finished last time - at the entrance to the Midden Dark. We're here to talk to the Augur of Dunlain, who apparently is a former student of the College who somehow accidentally magicked himself into godlike powers like Dr. Manhattan or something. Again, he knows that Ancano is going to misuse the Eye, but instead of telling us to go melt his face off with fireballs, the solution instead is to track down another MacGuffin - the Staff of Magnus. Herein is the problem with the entire College storyline - none of the elements have any inherent significance to make us care what's going on.
We started by finding a MacGuffin, the Eye of Magnus, and by the end of the questline we literally know nothing about it other than it's a magical artifact of immense power. So we go chase another MacGuffin - Urag's books - to hopefully find useful information about it. But the content of the books ends up being completely irrelevant to what happens next in the plot, which instead is driven by the Psijic Order telling us to find another MacGuffin - the Augur of Dunlain. Despite both the Order and the Augur having both incredible foresight and immense magical powers, they are for some reason powerless to do anything about the situation, so now we're sent to track down yet *another* MacGuffin. At least the Staff of Magnus ends up being something we actually can use after the questline is over.
I'm not sure when this playthrough transitioned into a critique of Skyrim's writing. Again, let me emphasize that Skyrim is one of my favorite games of all time - I really do love it. I guess just the process of having to describe the plots of the various questlines has emphasized to me how weak the writing really is.
Anyways, after talking to the Augur we finish exploring the rest of the Midden Dark. Part of that involves finding the Daedric gauntlet that is the focus of the non-journal quest Forgotten Names. After we're done exploring we head back up to advance the main quest, then sneak into the Arcaneum in order to steal the rings we need from Urag's chest. Heading back down we use them on the gauntlet to summon Velehk Sain. Of course we cut a deal with him, and we take this opportunity to go ahead and find his hidden treasure and claim it.
After that there's one more thing we can now take care of. We got Restoration to 100 ages ago, but the Restoration Ritual Spell quest is unique in that it's gated to the main quest. You have to be able to talk to the Augur in order to start the quest. So we talk to Collette, who sends us to the Augur, who gives us the extremely underwhelming task of simply surviving attacks from unkillable ghosts for a few seconds. If you didn't know, the quest is made more pathetic by the fact that if the ghosts don't see you - like in our case where they happen to spawn looking away from us - you can literally just stand there doing nothing until the quest is over. Instead we deliberately aggro them so we can at least feel some slight sense of accomplishment, then head back upstairs to purchase the other master Restoration spell from Collette.
Next time we'll get to more meaty content, diving into the ruins of Mzulft to retrieve the Staff of Magnus.
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