For me, it’s not Halloween season until the trees start to turn orange and yellow. It’s not a Mission Impossible movie until that theme song plays. And it ain’t an Elder Scrolls game until I kill a Mudcrab.
Yes, I know that means that technically the older games, like Daggerfall, aren’t Elder Scrolls games if we are following this logic. And while that’s sad for those games, it’s just the way this works. Morrowind was the first TRUE Elder Scrolls game because it had Mudcrabs, Akatosh’s gift to the world of Nirn.
I started playing The Elder Scrolls Online a few weeks back because... well, honestly because I live in America and we are still battling covid-19 and that means I spend 95% of the time inside so I needed something to do. I was enjoying myself, but something felt off. And then I spotted a little brown crab near the edge of a river. It was a Mudcrab!
Suddenly, I was much more interested. “This is a true Elder Scrolls game,” I thought to myself as I brutally killed it and like ten other crabs nearby. Isn’t odd what we connect with a franchise. I stopped playing Elder Scrolls Blades only after a few days and thinking back to why, I don’t remember seeing a Mudcrab. I know that, according to this wiki page, Mudcrabs ARE in the game. But I never saw one. The “Time-To-Mudcrab” stat was far too high in that game. Meanwhile, in games like Skyrim, you can be killing a Mudcrab in less than 20 minutes if you know where to look. Probably sooner, honestly!
In fact, I’d love to see that become a new speedrunning category: Time To Mudcrab. Finally, these little, disgusting crabs can be useful for a change. Well, that one Mudcrab who bought and sold stuff was useful, now that I think about it...