At the time of writing, the latest game from Bethesda, on [[Xbox]] and PC. Caught my imagination in a way few other games have, but not for anywhere near as long as [[No Man's Sky]] did. It contains quite a lot of combat, mainly First Person Shooter (FPS) style, which is very much not my kind of game, but I found myself enjoying that side of it way more than I'd have expected. ## The Guns Considering I've never had much of a fascination with guns either in games or IRL, it was a surprise to me how deeply into the various weapons I got. They have that thing that often tends to get me - the outward appearance of being simple, but with lots of hidden complexity. Every gun in the game has a whole bunch of stats - how much damage each shot does, the rate of fire, the magazine size, the range. Then there are factors the numbers don't tell you - how much does the recoil get in the way, how fast does it reload, and even a very subjective 'fun' factor. There are modifications you can apply to a weapon to better suit you. But there are also random effects on weapons that are Rare, Epic or Legendary. And how good those are depends very much on the type of gun. A randomly-applied effect that causes something like bleeding or burning can be really good on a fast-fire fully automatic gun, but almost useless on a single-shot rifle. And these effects can be applied much more often by any shotgun-like weapon, as each individual piece of shot can cause it. In some cases, a mediocre gun can be made way better with a simple modification. And sometimes, a gun you've never really found any good just happens to turn up with a combination of legendary effects that transforms it. Early game, I found a Solstice, which is usually an underpowered laser pistol, with the One Inch Punch effect. That turned it into a tiny shotgun that got me through quite a bit of the game.