Another depression/anxiety sufferer here and I sympathise with how you feel. There has been some good advice in these comments (alongside a couple of shockingly insensitive ones - authors should be ashamed...). All I can say is that the Churchill quote from earlier is a good one. The media and world around us in general portrays this idea of a normal life being one exempt from unhappiness or loneliness and if you feel either of these you're 'doing it wrong'. The reality of life is very different. It's normal to be unhappy sometimes or lonely sometimes and it will pass. Feeling a bit crap isn't a problem but thinking that it's wrong to feel crap can be very damaging. Take care mate.

I suppose it's down to how the world changes when a death occurs. In the real world a death isn't just the removal of a person, it has an impact on friends and family and can sometimes have wider and profound effects (start wars, change laws, etc). In skyrim for the most part an npc death is simply the removal of one of the limited pool of actors. It just subtracts from the game as a whole. I'm not saying it should be like that or that's how I want it. When I talk about having more depth in the game that's what I mean, have more impacts programmed in for player actions. Have various ways that story lines can play out with different npcs assuming roles if others are dead (much like the shopkeeper thing mentioned below but on a wider scale). As it is the developers could only get as much depth in as they did and so in order for the quest lines to work they needed to ensure that various actors were going to be available when needed.

It seems a necessary evil to me. At the end of the day a computer game with programmed interactions between the player and npcs can only account for a limited range of events. The world the developers create only makes sense if the players aren't given enough agency to alter the world outside of the conditions the developers have accounted for. Ultimately we can't kill some npcs because the world just cannot react in a sensible way to that death. It's the price we pay for having story, in a sandbox with no story (minecraft) the player can be allowed to do whatever they like but skyrim is a story based game which tries (very cleverly) to weave the illusion of being a sandbox and in order to do so it has to protect the elements of the story. In many ways the game is like a picture that only makes sense when viewed from a single angle. Move to either side and it all distorts and falls apart. My hope for the next game isn't so much that they make it any bigger than skyrim but that they make it deeper. More routes through quests and interactions, good and evil paths etc. On a slightly different tack I've realised that even on my most evil of characters I become completely obsessed with keeping all civilians alive. The random vampire attacks added by dawnguard are the worst thing that has happened to skyrim for me and I go to great lengths to mitigate those attacks, even playing a trevor deathhand type. I feel that the npcs are the lifeblood of skyrim and a finite resource. Every one that gets killed diminishes the game slightly (adrianne I'm looking at you here, stop being a bloody hero and run away for once). Besides, where's the fun in being an evil overlord if everyone is dead? What we need is a way to subjugate the population :)

After binning many characters when they started to use cloak spells I finally realised the other day that they make me a little motion sick! The shock one is ok but I can't use any of the others. Shame really as I love the principal of them and like similar powers in other games. Something about the way they swirl in first person I guess.

Love the thieves guild. Just seems to have a bit more substance than most of the other guilds. Love the 'one man crime wave' feeling of the side missions and the way it takes a bit of effort to earn your way to the top. Several other factions seem way too short in comparison - 'oh hey there newcomer ... would you like to be our new leader?'. Also Nocturnal is the only daedric prince that gives you a feeling of some danger in dealing with her - you feel you are making a pact that your immortal soul could come to regret. Most of the others just throw an artifact at you and let you get on with it.