Streamer ShakeMistake used an incline treadmill and a phone app to manually walk up Skyrim‘s High Hrothgar using his actual legs.
The pilgrimage to High Hrothgar is an important part of Skyrim‘s story. The Dragonborn must answer the call of the Greybeards and make the treacherous climb up the 7,000 steps, fighting off the cold and a frost troll on their way up.
To climb the steps in real life, ShakeMistake hooked up a phone app called Steplapp and used his incline treadmill. He found that when walking normally, it only took 2,500 real-life steps to climb the mountain.
He then shrank his character down “as much as possible without messing up my walking animation”.
With this method, it took around 8,000 steps. He reckons that if you account for parts of the journey on flat ground with no incline, this probably means there are around 7,000 in-game steps to take.
One Redditor actually counted all the steps on the way to High Hrothgar and claims there are only 748. This doesn’t mean it takes that many in-game steps to reach the peak, but that’s how many stairs or stair-like objects are actually visible on the way up the mountain. This means the mountain should have been 10 times bigger than it is currently, but that would have made it tower above the rest of the Skyrim region.
ShakeMistake’s next challenge is to swim around the island of Solstheim using his arms in a breast-stroke motion. It took him around one hour and 20 minutes to do this, again using a scaled-down character to make the distance travelled more realistic.
In other news, video game composer Gareth Coker has just released a new version of the Ori And The Will Of The Wisps soundtrack to streaming services. It’s a stripped-back piano rendition of the songs from the original game.