One player of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim has used real life step tracking technology and an inclined treadmill to simulate walking The 7,000 Steps up the Throat of the World to the Greybeards of High Hrothgar.
YouTuber ShakeMistake uploads videos which combine fitness and gaming and through the Stepl app and, after already walking three hours from Riften to Solitude, decided to tackle Skyrim’s famous 7,000 steps.
Video game technology of 2011 limited the number of steps actually on the mountain path, however, and in reality there’s only 700 to 800 steps to be climbed. ShakeMistake therefore had to make some changes before he could authentically simulate the route.
Unable to make the game world larger to add more steps, ShakeMistake instead reduced their character down to a third of the size. They also set up a treadmill on an incline to emulate the feeling of actually climbing a mountain, and with that set off on the journey.
Unfortunately, the number still didn’t come to 7,000 exactly. ShakeMistake walked through the doors of High Hrothgar around the 5,630 mark but kept going, as the mountain actually goes much further. They eventually reached the very top at around 8,200 steps, and to satisfy the canon of it all deduced that, minus a good few hundred steps for all the flat surfaces along the way, the journey would be around 7,000 steps after all.
With The Elder Scrolls 6 is still several years away, Skyrim players are having to keep themselves entertained in wild and wacky ways like this. New technology is certainly a popular way of doing so, with one player creating a mod which lets their Twitch chat voice NPCs and another adding haptic feedback suits to an already $15,000 set up, letting them feel real pain when hurt in game.
Speedruns are another popular method of keeping Skyrim interesting, and one player recently set a new world record by reaching Level 80 and defeating the infamous Ebony Warrior in under 10 minutes.
The most sentimental of fans, meanwhile, booted up their old Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s to “retire” their original characters, showing how much Skyrim has remained in player consciousness in its more than a decade on the market.
In our 9/10 review of the beloved RPG, IGN said: “Skyrim is a rare kind of intensely personal, deeply rewarding experience, and one of the best role-playing games yet produced.”
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
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