Fewer People Get Married in Skyrim Than Finish It

What have you accomplished in Skyrim? You’ve probably not finished it and it’s even less likely you’ve reached Level 50 or gotten married.

Millions of people have played this year’s biggest role-playing game. Millions have gotten pleasantly lost in its numerous quests and expansive landscape. Along the way, those people have achieved many things, much of it tallied by the game’s Achievement system. Let’s see what people have done the most and what Skyrim goals they’ve avoided or failed to accomplish.

We’re going to ignore Skyrim‘s console gamers in this piece (insert apology for implied insult here). Let’s drill into the stats for PC gamers, specifically those who got the game through the Steam service. Steam tracks Achievements. It doesn’t tell us how many Skyrim players it is collecting data from—I asked Skyrim‘s publisher for them and will add them if I get them—but it breaks down the percentages of what they have done.

The Steam Achievements are ranked in order of accomplishment. The top ones have been achieved by the most players, the bottom ones by the fewest.

The most commonly achieved Skyrim Achievement is Unbound, which is nearly impossible to avoid. You earn it when you leave the game’s first cave, a cave that births you from the game’s linear introductory chapter into the open world of Skyrim. Any Skyrim players who missed this Achievement probably didn’t even start the game, or shut it off a half hour or so into it. Note that 7 out of 100 Skyrim players on Steam fit this category:

The next batch of Achievements shows how sharply people’s progress falls off. Skyrim is an enormous game and not everyone will proceed through the same quests or even bother to keep up with the main quest. Nearly 8 of 10 Skyrim players hit level 10, which happens fairly quickly, maybe even in a single, long afternoon with the game. But attaining level 25, which took one of our staffers 25 hours, has only been achieved by fewer than 5 out of 10 Skyrim players.

Just over half of Steam’s Skyrim‘s players bothered to buy a house.

Only 3 of 10 players wandered far enough to find 100 locations. Only a quarter of the people playing joined the Dark Brotherhood.

We’re dropping into some of the rarest Skyrim feats. Since you mostly get dragon souls from killing dragons, it doesn’t look like many people have managed to slay 20 dragons.

Next, take a look at the Dragonslayer Achievement. That’s what you get for finishing the game. It’s rare. Fewer than 2 out of 10 players have attained it. But that’s more than the amount who have gotten married in the game. That’s barely 1 out of 10 players.

Finally, we get to the things almost no one has done. Reaching Level 50? Almost unheard of. Becoming a Master Criminal? No one does that.

You can take a look at these Steam Achievements yourself, as they change with each passing day. Just load up Steam, go to the Skyrim section and click the option to see Global Achievements.

You can contact Stephen Totilo, the author of this post, at [email protected]. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.