Hi all, really enjoying this new TES game, been a fan since Daggerfall but haven’t finished a single one despite hundreds of hours of play time. Anyways I have a few questions.... playing as a mage and wondering if making my way first thing after leaving the tutorial to Winterhold to join the college there is a viable start option? Should I go on foot is it really tough going or should I use the horse cart fast travel option? Is it one of the high level locked areas I keep hearing about?

Also (early main quest spoiler):



Thx in advance

Just jog over to Whiterun and take a carriage to Whitehold for 50(?) gold. Chopping some wood over in Riverwood will pay the tab.

If you keep the roads sure, sabre tooths are real killers if you encounter them.. special;;y for a squishy robe wearing mage with limited spells.

Ok I'll do a save by the horse cart and give it a try on foot sticking to the roads and just re-load if it gets too hard. How about adventuring from Winterhold as a kind of "home base" is there enough to do or is there only like 5 mage guild quests and then you're done? Are there any local (side) quests for that area?

Reason why I'm doing all this is b/c I'm playing out my character as a descendant of my Altmer mage from Oblivion who ended up living in Frostcrag spire (Frostcrag Revisited mod ftw). My character visited Frostcrag spire and for reasons not yet clear to him was told to make his way to Winterhold College of course getting wrongly taken prisoner crossing the border playing into the intro tutorial. I had to devise this backstory because any non-Nord feels so out of place to me in this game.

Bump do rah

Any help with the above question then I'll leave y'all alone

If you play on a PC, do the console command: "set timescale to 6".
This will make 1 in-game day last 4 real-time hours, in stead of the default 1 hour (and 12 minutes).
That way you will have 2 real-time hours of traveling in daylight. That might make it a lot easier.
You can see where you are going. You can see enemies approaching. And I think there are less dangerous NPCs traveling the lands during daytime.

If you don't like it, you can always return to the default with the command: "set timescale to 20".
Check the current setting with: "show timescale".
Hope this helps.

I'm only lvl11 now. After doing some quests in Whiterun, I traveled to Winterhold. There wasn't that much to do, but tbh, I didn't look around much. I am not going to play as a mage, so I have no real business there. The quests and NPCs outside of Winterhold did seem to be a bit harder than in Whiterun. I decided to go a little south, to Windhelm. Lovely city. There was more to do there. Once I'm done with Windhelm (and some related quests that brought me south of Windhelm), I will return to Winterhold.

i went there asap lvl 5 or so by foot didnt know about carages hadnt any problem etc , its a good start .

I might do the same thing as u, I'm thinking of starting a Mage character as well and I feel like killing a dragon at like lvl 3 is kinda stupid, so i think starting at the college would be a very good option! Thanks for the idea!

Dragons are UP early game or not, but either way, the fact that TES Dragpons don't have two front legs but instead of wings with claws on them like bats is a concept nerf!

I went through a bit of the main quest

Not really much further than you, and somewhat in the right direction. I then cleared out a couple small caves to save up for a house to take care of my packrat problems.
After which I set out for winterhold, I was around level 5 at the time. There were a few nastys on the way, pairs of ice wolves were tricky to deal with, but killable. There was a saber cat, which was hard too, but with lydia's help and my shout, I was able to keep him from killing me (was doing around 75% of my health in one hit, so be careful if you see one). I saw some ice wraiths at one point, and I strongly recommend against dealing with them, they tore me apart, and I had to reload.

Overall, its a trip to be careful with, but one I dont regret making, and you can always spend the 50 coins to take the easy route if you are concerned. I'm still doing the mage quests so I dont know what sort of other quests are in the area yet.