Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Alright... as an Elder Scrolls man at heart, I was expecting nothing from this game, after Oblivion, I played it just because I felt that I had an obligation to do so. What I got, while not as deep of an RPG as Morrowind and Daggerfall, was a truly entertaining game. True that the writing could be better, the game more stable, but the details put in really showed effort on the part of the developers.

I truly believed that they were going to butcher the lore like they did with Oblivion, but everything is where it should be. The cities are all unique in style, pretty much each dungeon has a theme or unmarked quest to go with it. I even got a chuckle out of some of the dialogue. Such as during Sheogorath's Daedric quest. The moral ambiguity is done very well in my opinion, as I too was sympathetic with the Stormcloaks, that is until I arrived in Windhelm and saw the way the Dark Elves were being treated. I think this is redemtion for Bethesda for making Oblivion.
 
Aye, so far I'm also greatly impressed by Skyrim. It's a fantastic game in every aspect. The only thing I miss are stats and a good interface.
 
I enjoy the stats being axed. Well, at least compared to what Oblivion was.
Oblivion was a micro-management nightmare. Did I level up more than 10 skill points for one attribute? Fuck me - I lost out on attribute efficiency. Same thing if you leveled too many different attribute categories of skills. Why should I have to sleep? It's convenient to level up whenever I want, like most RPGs. Then the whole deal with not choosing a good set of major skills - you'd be stuck leveling some attributes 1 point per level up. I do enjoy me some attributes, but the power-leveler in me hated the micro-management you had to deal with in Oblivion. Also, as far as I recall(I may be wrong), there were never attribute checks in Oblivion anyway. In Skyrim, they simply moved all the character bonuses directly over to the skills to simplify the process. And now we have perks, which you can't come close to maxing out all the trees.
The removal of speed, acrobatics and athletes was also a good choice, in my opinion. It's harder to become a movement-abusing demi-god now. While the game is getting easier as I progress(Enchantment and smithing up to 100 now), I still have some challenge to deal with. Those fuckin' arch mages and vampires - get plowed even with my high elemental resistances every so often.

EDIT:
Anyone remember the boots of blinding speed in Morrowind? Man, I can't believe I (ab)used that turd item. I remember my dad walking by me once asking, "What's the point of even playing if you can barely see anything?"
 
I kind of hated leveling up in Oblivion too with this whole sleeping crap, and decided to give up on being a vampire. I'm still on the cure quest.
 
Hey guys, is it just my game or is Esbern bugged? He doesn't speak, I mean the floating text appears for a second and the conversations progress but not a single sound comes out of his mouth and the text goes away too fast for anyone to be able to read it.
 
Ok im starting to hit my limit with the "fetch me this item from this dungeon" or "kill this bandit leader from that dungeon" type of quests. And they make up 80 % of this game quests. Exploration is still fun and sneaking with archery still gives me fair challenge. It did eat littlebit of my experience when i discovered the smithing enchat exploit on my own and basically broke the whole economy, so i just decided not to do it anymore ( larping yeah yeah).

Damn i just wish the game had better ai and side quests were more varied id be all over it. Still fun game though.
 
(Un)fun little venture today.

Companions tell me these Silver Hand douchebags keep plans in a fort in the ass-end of nowhere, and of course since the others are content to drink mead all day long it falls up to The Chosen One to murderize them and steal the plans. Fair enough.

On the long trek, I kill (among the usual bevy of suicidal animals and overconfident cutpurses) 2 Cave Bears, 2 Trolls at once, and a Blood Dragon (epic battle, these guys are much better than regular killer reptiles). All of these enemies theoretically outlevel me, but they technically do not outlevel my well-forged claymore so that's OK. In time, I get to said Fort, telling myself, ''eh, I beat these Silver Hand guys before, no biggy, hell these two archers over there don't even have suffixes in their name, pansies''.

That was right before said pansies two-shotted me. Literally, I was from full health to dead. In one volley. Wearing full Heavy Armor. I retried, best case scenario I go down in three arrows, and THEY take a bloody lifetime to die from my sword. I eventually kill both in Werewolf form, and manage to clear the dungeon easily since all of them are, for some reason, underleveld grunts who die in two hits. Then, the plans were guarded by a ''Bandit Chief'' type, who three-shotted me. With a dagger, meaning I literally could not approach him. He did more damage than the dragon or the trolls, much faster. I grew tired of this shit, activated God Mode and wailed at him, yet he still took almost a minute to down.

Bethesda, your level scaling absolutely sucks. Bandits should not pose any threat once you can reliably kill bears, trolls and dragons. That's like New vegas Powder Gangers killing a level 20 character that can orherwise beat Cazadores and Deathclaw. It doesn't make any kind of goddamn sense. I can't wait for the Construction Kit to come out so that modders can fix this ASAP. At least they already fixed underpowered Destruction magic.

Oh, and the Theives's Guild questline is really nice. Same as the Dark Brotherhood's. Much better than the ''clear dungeon X, bring me item Y while I sit here'' quests the other two major factions have, not to mention the utterly meaningless and uninteresting Radiant quests that take up space more than anything.
 
Just to throw in a comment on that: I am a guy with a bow, enchantment and blacksmithing build (and also conjuration, and sneaking) currently on...I don't remember, think it was level 26 or something. Also, I've been playing on the highest difficulty setting from the start.

As of yet, I'm not badass enough to kill anything stronger with two shots. But it's all very iffy. Generally, when I can get the drop on enemies and use a sneak attack with my bow (lvl 70 archery, with the x 3 sneak attack perk from sneaking, glass bow, steel arrows) I instakill most trashmobs. But then there are the guys who, for some inexplicable reason, just can't go down. Dragons I can do, with a flame atronach as 'tank' (ie., re-conjure the bloody thing every other fly-by) and about 30-50 arrows. But sometimes there's one or two guys in a dungeon that are next to impossible and I have to pull out everything I got, using my best poisons, shouts, potions, scrolls etc. And iffy pathfinding might help as well.

Sometimes I meet a fellow archer on the battlefield with, say, an imperial bow and orcish arrows. Two shots and I'm dead. Same with some melee characters who one-two shot me. It's not a walk in the park even for an archer with the right perks, because even while I do great damage, NPC's can and do outdamage me regularly. Dragons I generally need to reload a few times, same with giants and mammoths. I have absolutely no points in stamina, only health and magicka so as to enable me to survive, conjure and soul stone stuff.

The game is highly imbalanced, especially on higher difficulties, towards builds that focus on high damage, range and on not getting hit at all. Bows, not spells, are best for that, especially with the 50% stagger perk. Mana is no limitation, although good arrows aren't that plentiful either, especially because one strong enemy can require about 10-20 shots. Furthermore, spells don't get %-damage upgrades from enchantments, bows do. I'm only just dabbling in enchanting and I'm already up by about 20-30% in damage. Basically, I'm the glass cannon mages should've been and as a mage I'd feel royally screwed most of the time I think.

Armor, for my character, is mostly useless, cosmetic, or there to take my enchantments. I'm in full light elvish armor but at times it does absolutely nothing. Weak enemies I sometimes try to kill with a sword and shield, which usually works only just barely, with using potions. Unless damage output and damage resistance is greatly increased for a real warrior, I can't imagine him being viable in any difficult fight on the highest difficulty. As an archer, I'm enjoying the experience though. It's just the right level of difficulty to keep me dying if I do something stupid, and to confront me with the occasional challenge, although sometimes a bit too much so. It'd just be nice if the game would have some consistency, so that I'd know what to generally expect from an area, and not that stuff where I get the impression from the first enemy that a fort is a pushover, only to be met by some expert marksman who could rival the gods, or a fighter who equals Hercules.
 
its if you ask me the issue is caused by the "you get better the more you use it" system which Elder-Scroll games have.

I mean as archer or mage wearing armor you will improve from hits. Now a clear sword or axe fighter will improve his armor skills much faster then a player which is using his bow most of the time. This is forcing you one way or another to "grind" with finding weak enemies to "hit" you or you end up in playing a weapon that you actually don't want for your character.

Bethesda games have never been that great with characters doing a specialization. Particularly with ranged characters. It simply works much easier if you go with melee weapons first and anything ranged later. It seems to me at least like the game is "balanced" for those fights first and the rest later. Which sucks to say that. - Well with D&D it is pretty much the other way where you cant get without mages/druids but that game has a whole different target anyway.
 
Just take your anger out on the kids.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNuFNZijnCo[/youtube]

:P
Construction Kit isn't out yet and still they make a child killing mod.
 
Crni Vuk said:
its if you ask me the issue is caused by the "you get better the more you use it" system which Elder-Scroll games have.

I mean as archer or mage wearing armor you will improve from hits. Now a clear sword or axe fighter will improve his armor skills much faster then a player which is using his bow most of the time. This is forcing you one way or another to "grind" with finding weak enemies to "hit" you or you end up in playing a weapon that you actually don't want for your character.

Bethesda games have never been that great with characters doing a specialization. Particularly with ranged characters. It simply works much easier if you go with melee weapons first and anything ranged later. It seems to me at least like the game is "balanced" for those fights first and the rest later. Which sucks to say that. - Well with D&D it is pretty much the other way where you cant get without mages/druids but that game has a whole different target anyway.
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I can understand the frustration over this, but at the same time that's why there are trainers in the game. and training your skills costs just about enough to be a pretty good money sink. keeping a skill trained will cost you a lot of money, but not too much to ruin you and still enough to burn a hole in your pocket.

I'm playing a melee assassin type. very high sneak skill, dual-wielding sword and some illusion and alteration magic to tip the balance of challening battles. I had a pretty big problem with my Light Armor skill, since I usually kill enemies before they can get more than one or two attacks off, until I found a trainer for it. now it's my main money sink (actually, the only one) and the game feels very balanced because of it.

I can't really say for sure before I've tried more different skill combinations, but so far I feel that the imbalance of the skill/level system is actually what makes it balanced. it forces you to raise skills that are essential for your character and punishes you for trying to powergame. take the common complain about enchanting + smithing for example. yes, maxing these skills will make you very powerful and give you the best gear available in the game. but you will need to spend many perks and levels to get there and if you do it too early in the game it will seriously hamper your fighting abilities. this can of course be made up for this the powerful gear you can create, but then you will have to get out there and be able to find the ore and enchantments you need as well. the real problem here in my opinion isn't that raising these skills grants you higher levels and will make enemies too tough, but that these skills might simply be too easy to raise. it's pretty retarded that you can get your smithing to 100 by creating the same iron dagger from start to finish. if the game had actually forced you to get your hands on more rare and expensive material it would have been much more balanced.

I myself started doing some smithing early on. mainly to improve equipment. pretty soon I realized I was only making it harder for myself as I would gain levels and not being able to spend perks where I wanted them, due to my main skills being too low.

from my impression the game is balanced around the player picking one fighting style, one armor type and one crafting skill. or going deep into the magic skills. and this is how the majority of players will play the game. the bad part about it is that it doesn't allow you to create any type of character you want, but that brings us back to what type of game this is: an open world adventure game with heavy dungeon crawling and hack'n'slash combat. it's not an rpg that is supposed to let you play a pacifist or diplomat.

there are some major imbalances in the game, but I don't see the skill system as the biggest one. rather, I see it as pretty balanced. especially in comparison to the earlier TES games. I remember one of the first characters I played in Morrowind. I went to Balmora, maxed my level and attributes and created a life-stealing sword before I had done one single quest. the game was broken from that point. in Skyrim, you have to actually play the game.
 
You think that's fun? Try playing as a mage, level 30, going up against bandits (or "Bandit Plunderers/Marauders/Pillagers/whatevers"). Enjoy being killed over and over by a single arrow while your spells, which you can cast two times before recharging your mana, do about 10% damage to every single one of them. Did I mention this is with every available damage-increasing perk, using the most powerful spells in the game, with every point put into increasing mana, and with reserves of potions which, at their best, still only restore about 1/6th of your maximum? Let's also not forget that high-level Daedra like Storm Atronachs die in about three hits and don't do enough damage to kill a single enemy.
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There are already a few mods on the Nexus that focus on increasing magic damage. Some seem to go a bit overboard, others look reasonable. It's pretty clear Destruction magic is very underwhelming when your most powerful spell deals 150 damage at most, takes several seconds to cast, is AoE and so torches you too and eats all your mana bar if you don't exploit mana cost reducing enchants (you can get free entirely free spells that way, but what's the point of a mana bar then?). Meanwhile, high level warriors can reliably deal 200+ damage per hit, not counting Power attacks, bows or sneak attacks (you can get up to 30x backstab damage!). Internal balance is a gigantic mess, fortunately it's a problem mods can solve. In fact, apart from Radiant story being kinda shit, I find that most of Skyrim's problems could be solved by modders, makes me a bit optimistic.

there are some major imbalances in the game, but I don't see the skill system as the biggest one. rather, I see it as pretty balanced. especially in comparison to the earlier TES games. I remember one of the first characters I played in Morrowind. I went to Balmora, maxed my level and attributes and created a life-stealing sword before I had done one single quest. the game was broken from that point. in Skyrim, you have to actually play the game.
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Imbalances between builds don't worry me much (except Destro being useless at high levels, but that's already fixed), it's the fact low-life bandits can be much harder than the supposedly world-ending dragons that grates me. Still, it's better than Oblivion, and it's true that after level 15 my Morrowind character just ran killing stuff without much amount of foretought. Skyrim basically forced me to play strategically at times (which is why I use a bow as well as a two-hander).
 
I'm not even at alchemy 70 yet and am making potions I can sell for 400-600 a pop. The economy is easy-peasy in this game - essentially broken when you get speech up to 50 and can sell any item to any merchant. Nothing new for a Bethesda game and a simple rebalancing mod can fix it.
The balancing is wonky, I'll agree, but better than previous titles. I don't understand why they didn't scale the beasts, too. At least some challenge still exists, but it is pretty lame how dragons don't even dent my health now yet an arch mage can wipe me out in two spell blasts.
Playing in third-person is pretty entertaining. The animations are definitely much better than the ones in the gamebryo engine. The graphics, of course, are better, but I'm happy to see they dumped a lot of work into the animations. That said- even with the OCed CPU and the crossfire usage showing 90%+ during some parts, the game runs better on one card. How the fuck is it possible for both cards to use more than 90%, yet running one card consistently gets better FPS. Terrible optimization. I've tried many fixes, to no avail.
Which brings me to my next point. If you're a steam friend, you've probably seen me enter and exit the game a bajillion times. Most of this is due to me testing out things to see if I can get the game to run better in crossfire, but I have had somewhere around 20 CTDs by now. That's crazy. It might be due me trying out bizarre things like setting Oblivion AA settings to see if I can squeeze out a few more FPS, but usually if I don't notice an immediate improvement, I disable the "fix" I tried. I have trained myself to quicksave every 5-10 minutes, just in case.

Despite all these flaws, still enjoying the game and have hours more to dump into it. Hopefully an editor and some patches come soon for those with my same problems. I think my next playthrough might be after they release all the DLCs anyway.
 
Makagulfazel said:
Terrible optimization. I've tried many fixes, to no avail.
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It's not just crossfire stuff that's badly optimised. Despite the recomended specs saying it needs a quad core it only actually uses two cores.
 
Crazy tap moves. Speedfan shows CPU usage across all cores, but that obviously doesn't mean much(similar to my crossfire issue). This is pretty much worse than Rage's optimization, since at least that game had a simple fix of installing special AMD drivers. Skyrim's not unplayable without tweaking, and I don't really have to keep my settings on ultra, but it sucks when you know it should be running better and there's no clear fix to the issue after hours of research.
 
When I first saw Blackreach...oh my god, I was actually stunned looking at my screen for a minute or two. It's funny, in hindsight, it would be perfect for this music, exploring the great Dwemer halls of Alftand, then the reveal to the Dwemer kingdom of Blackreach.
 
actually when thinking about it one should be glad that Todd watched Lord of the Rings before making Oblivion so it became a "standard fantasy lore" kind of game ...

It seems at least like skyrim is more in tradition with the "Nords" (it feels at least rather germanic then standard fantasy but I might be wrong). The setting feels not THAT generic like Oblivion.

But I have to say from what I have seen the writing/quests really go from mediocre to bad ... I mean its so ridiculous sometimes. To get with some example.

[spoiler:f1d4cbc300]There is a cave with some necromants trying to conjure a powerful dead soul. The soul speaks to the necros, they are to weak and will never be able to control her. Then you the player get in. Kill the necros. And that was it. Over. Nothing. What the hell is that for an ending ? Well done Beth for giving away some awesome story potential either getting the option to A ) fight with the soul B ) absorb it C ) offer her your support.

Or destroying a pirate hideout. You get in to kill the mage blocking the entrance (perfect opportunity to make a sneak mission out of it ... but they failed again). Once he is dead you get out, and instead of having a "epic" battle to speak so the commander is sitting next to an empty ship fighting 2-3 pirates. Thank you! You did a great service to the empire yada yada yada lets get back to have a party !!! ... Eh.[/spoiler:f1d4cbc300]

And there are many of such quests which you start and they have a really SHIT ending. Which does not only feel boring but "unfinished". The part with the Cube ... where you have to return it in some ruin. You do it. And the quest is solved. Eh ? No one to talk to. Nothing which explains ANYTHING behind it. (the part before it was awesome though!) ...

It really reminds me to "deadra invasion!" from Oblivion all over again stoping it with 10 people and calling it a "war". Talking about verisimilitude here.

Bethesda really has to learn one thing. If they simply CAN NOT do epic situation/battles they should not try it. What ever if the engine cant support 40 people on the screen at the same time (Can you say Oblivion again ...) or if they are lazy or what ever then they should simply work around it. But it is not only Bethesda here. Vegas did the same with the "battle over the dam" albeit not that bad but still. You get always this feeling in the game "Now it has to rumble! 10 000 men here 10 000 men there!" everything works toward this climax. I mean it simply has to fail and disappoint. The Witcher for example did a much better job here by simply not showing everything all the time. Hell even Dragon Age did that "epic battle part" better. I remember just that one time underground fighting over a bridge while a whole army was marching under you.

Is it really that Beth people lack competent writters or are their leaders lacking so much imagination ? I am really not seeing my self as the "best" artist around (but if the whole class tells you "youre pretty good!" then it has to mean something I guess). And for the love of god even I could come up with better quests endings then they do.
 
Uh, about that quest with the necromancers conjuring that soul: wait a few days, the quest isn't over.
 
well that would be a nice surprise. But anyway. You get the idea! Some quests (or well lets say a good number of them) are simply very very badly presented. Much better then Oblivion. But that is simply because Beth had no other way to go then up after Oblivion.
 
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