Topic: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

[Xessive]

I'm just grateful I have the PC version so I can mod anything that bugs me i.e. interface, menus, etc.

Overall, the Elder Scrolls games have been accumulative, with each game improvements built on the previous game, at least since Morrowind. Some people will still argue that they've been gradually deteriorating in terms of gameplay mechanics.

[Cobra951]

The dead dragon thing just sounds like a physics/clipping issue. Dragon skeleton clips into the ground and acts weird. The other one doesn't sound like a bug... there are random dragons that aren't related to quests or anything else, and they often attack towns and such. They aren't generally that powerful. Guards will take them out given some time, and if you're nearby when they do, you'll still get the soul.

I assume you're playing 360? My experience on PS3 I think was 2 minor bugs and 2 crashes in 120+ hours, though think I've said that here already. I was impressed.

I hated Oblivion's menu system, but don't remember how it was on console. I like Skyrim's, though. And it's funny, you say that chests aren't organized by types... and I honestly can't remember. My instinct was to say, "Wait, it isn't like that," but the more I thought about it the more I thought you were right. I guess it just didn't bug me. And I'm pretty sure stuff alphabetizes right, I don't remember ever struggling to find anything.

How did the spellcasting work in Oblivion? I can't seem to recall. You could cast without having an open hand? Regardless, I don't see the problem. It seems balanced just fine to me. You want to be a warrior, be a warrior. You want to do both, don't go with giant-ass two-handed weapons. If you're able to do everything at once, you never have to choose and it sort of removes some of the uniqueness of whatever character you're playing. I'm a bit sad that you can basically do every quest in the game without having to specialize, even. It would be nice if you had to choose a little bit more. To be drafted into the fancy mage academy they ask you to prove you can cast something, but you don't have to know hardly a fucking thing. One weak spell, whoopee. It sort of cheapens things a tad. One of my only complaints, honestly, and not because it's outright bad... it just cheapens what might feel a bit more special in other circumstances. I didn't feel like a great mage because even though I was focusing on magic, the magic I needed to know was practically nothing. I subsequently started focusing on stealth stuff I think because of that.

I really don't get the Oblivion 1.5 feeling at all, though. They fixed so much and streamlined so much, improved so much of the character interaction... feels like a legit sequel to me. I guess part of that is I don't really think they SHOULD change the formula too much. They can tweak, but the open world, general progression, and great combat are more or less what people want now, I think. Wouldn't mind seeing them deepen some elements, but on the whole I was thrilled with what we got.

It's more than just a clipping issue.  This was supposed to be a dead dragon skeleton, not a live dragon neck and head moving around.  Yes, every modern game I play is on the 360.  That's all I have available at the moment.  It's not responsible for the game crashes either.  I've been playing a lot of other demanding games without any technical issues on this particular box for a long while.  Jasper chipset FTW.  The tech problems are on Beth's shoulders, and with my previous experience with their buggy releases, they were not unexpected.

By "Oblivion 1.5" I didn't mean that it felt like an expansion.  This is definitely a whole new game.  I meant that there was more of a gentle technical progression, as opposed to the leap I perceived from older ES games to Oblivion.  There's a new layer of visual polish on the old framework, or so it feels.  I know they claim to use a whole new engine.  That usually means a whole new look to things that I just don't see here.  Maybe I remember Oblivion too fondly.  Perhaps I should fire it up for better comparison.

In Oblivion, you could cast spells regardless of what was in your hands.  IIRC, what you were wearing would impact the effectiveness of your spells.  I'm thinking it was 85% effectiveness max if you wore armor as opposed to robes.  But casting itself was an easy affair that you could do in the midst of heated battles.  Now it's a pain at least for melee warriors, as I described in detail in my last post.  Not a welcome change.

What you said about the random dragon getting killed and then me getting the soul makes sense.  Dragons so far have been pushovers.  The only intractable enemy I've had to deal with so far is an ice troll.  It became clear quickly that I had no chance in hell of doing any damage that wouldn't heal back up almost immediately.  So I ran away, to come back and fight him another day, when I have some decent fire weapons or spells.  Yikes.

[Quemaqua]

Well, clipping issues with dead physics objects tend to make them move over and over again in weird ways, that's all I was suggesting about the dead dragon. I've had similar things happen, albeit less fantastic than you describe.

I imagine also that Bethesda having a new engine is sort of a misnomer. They build all their engines from a variety of pieces of middleware as I understand it, so even if it's new and repurposed I'd bet it's a lot of the same. It definitely didn't feel like a huge technical leap, but they've said their focus was to release more than one game per console cycle going forward. Though it's funny, I didn't realize it, but Skyrim actually took a year longer from Oblivion than Oblivion took from Morrowind. But Morrowind didn't really even look very good in a lot of ways when it was new, and we seem to have hit something of a tech plateau in gaming over the last few years. Used to be my PCs would get outdated fairly quickly without significant upgrades. Lately every game seems to hit it just about the same and it's been that way for a while despite my PC being really old now. For instance, even though Skyrim is a fair bit prettier than Alan Wake, both seem to tax the PC about equally.

I still think melee fighters should have a harder time with magic, though. If you can cast everything at 85% capacity and still use the most powerful weapons, that seems even more unbalanced than the strongest perks already make the game. As it is I think stuff should be a lot harder naturally. And those dragons, as you mentioned, are pushovers... they should have made those a lot more beefy, or at least scaled them better. Why is everyone so afraid of them when you find a bunch of trolls that are harder to take down? I have had some epic fights, though, dragons included. When things line up properly and the balance is right, there's some excitement to be had. Just wish it was a bit more consistent.

[Cobra951]

Well, OK, an axe-swinging barbarian should have a harder time spellcasting than an erudite mage.  But that difficulty shouldn't be caused by a crappy interface.  It wouldn't be much fun by any means I can think of.  Damage to metal blades and armor getting clanked against each other is also realistic, but they did away with that, I imagine by popular demand.  (Who knows, though.)  It's a fantasy world, and magic is fantasy through and through.  They can set up the rules for that to be as enjoyable and as suited to the available control devices as possible.

The gaming plateau has at least 2 causes that I can think of.  Or maybe they're one and the same, because one is at least partly responsible for the other?  I'd say diminishing returns are the biggest issue.  Technology itself is no longer an obvious barrier to audiovisual greatness.  They can improve resolution, frame rates, rendering fidelity and memory for bigger environments and more things at once, but there are no fundamental barriers left to knock down, as long as the display device is a flat screen and the audio device is an array of speakers.  Any premise can be realized beautifully given the right talent and budget, with current technology.  No more bleeps and bloops replaced by orchestral music, no more 2D-to-3D eye openers, or flat shading to detailed texturing.  I.e., no more intense wow factors to get people excited about newer devices for their own sake.  The software drives the hardware, and software is still selling the current hardware very well.

The other issue is the long current console cycle coupled with the decline of PC gaming, at least when it comes to traditional big games.  Without new hardware, the look of games isn't going to change very much once the system capabilities are exploited fully.  And if games are being tailored for where the money is first, consoles, the ports to the newest PCs aren't going to look much better.  Why such a long cycle this time?  See above.
/ot

[MysterD]

Well, clipping issues with dead physics objects tend to make them move over and over again in weird ways, that's all I was suggesting about the dead dragon. I've had similar things happen, albeit less fantastic than you describe.

I imagine also that Bethesda having a new engine is sort of a misnomer. They build all their engines from a variety of pieces of middleware as I understand it, so even if it's new and repurposed I'd bet it's a lot of the same. It definitely didn't feel like a huge technical leap, but they've said their focus was to release more than one game per console cycle going forward. Though it's funny, I didn't realize it, but Skyrim actually took a year longer from Oblivion than Oblivion took from Morrowind. But Morrowind didn't really even look very good in a lot of ways when it was new, and we seem to have hit something of a tech plateau in gaming over the last few years. Used to be my PCs would get outdated fairly quickly without significant upgrades. Lately every game seems to hit it just about the same and it's been that way for a while despite my PC being really old now. For instance, even though Skyrim is a fair bit prettier than Alan Wake, both seem to tax the PC about equally.

I think a lot of this has to do w/ Multi-platforming - and trying to get the games running across both console and PC platforms so all versions turn out quite well.
Most games are still DX 9.0 C based [Win XP!], even though Win Vista and Win 7 do support DX10/11.
If more games were strictly PC or PC version-first, there'd probably be more taking advantage of DX10/11 and all of its benefits.

Look at how gorgeous on high-end rigs Crysis 2 [with highest textures & high-res extras from MyCrysis.com installed] and The Witcher 2 looks at their maxed-out settings.
Those games are just mind-blowingly gorgeous, maxed-out - as long as your PC can handle it, of course.
I ain't seen BF3 PC on my rig yet, but that'd probably be another one I'd think would be up there, too.

EDIT:
Even Metro 2032 PC from a few years back is still drop-dead gorgeous maxed-out, compared to most PC games.
Just Cause 2 PC is another game I can think that looks outstanding maxed-out.

[MysterD]

Remember that ranged and magic kill-cam features that were in BethSoft Game Jam?
We might be seeing that in the next patch - Patch 1.5.

[Cobra951]

They have absolutely no business expanding this game until they fix the massive bugs.  I now have a hopelessly broken quest, with a 1-lb book forever stuck in my inventory, plus a 7-lb bow also stuck there with no idea what quest it belongs to.  My guess is that when I finally stumble into the mission that needs it, the owner will behave just like the Arcanum's guy, and completely ignore the fact that I already have what he wants, with no way at all to change that.

After playing 2 full days crash free, late last night was a major frustration.  Luckily, I've stuck to my 10-slot save rotation, where I make sure always to keep several saves from varied locations, and before I enter anywhere like a dungeon.  I was in this one dungeon trying to solve a puzzle with those rotating pillars, except they weren't rotating.  I scoured the caverns for the better part of an hour trying to find the solution.  Eventually, I gave in to my suspicion that it was bugged, and found out I was right.  The game had crashed on me there once with what felt like memory-leak issues, and that may be part of the bug-triggering mechanism--I don't really know.  But it's a documented bug, and the only way to work around it is to try again, from a save from before you entered the dungeon.  This is not a simple little side show either.  There is a word of power at the end of the excursion, so if I had trusted too much and overwritten all my earlier saves, I'd be fucked.  Re-entering the dungeon and doing it all again solved it.

I don't want to hear jack-shit about kill animations, Bethesda.  Fix the game first.

[Xessive]

They have absolutely no business expanding this game until they fix the massive bugs.  I now have a hopelessly broken quest, with a 1-lb book forever stuck in my inventory, plus a 7-lb bow also stuck there with no idea what quest it belongs to.  My guess is that when I finally stumble into the mission that needs it, the owner will behave just like the Arcanum's guy, and completely ignore the fact that I already have what he wants, with no way at all to change that.

After playing 2 full days crash free, late last night was a major frustration.  Luckily, I've stuck to my 10-slot save rotation, where I make sure always to keep several saves from varied locations, and before I enter anywhere like a dungeon.  I was in this one dungeon trying to solve a puzzle with those rotating pillars, except they weren't rotating.  I scoured the caverns for the better part of an hour trying to find the solution.  Eventually, I gave in to my suspicion that it was bugged, and found out I was right.  The game had crashed on me there once with what felt like memory-leak issues, and that may be part of the bug-triggering mechanism--I don't really know.  But it's a documented bug, and the only way to work around it is to try again, from a save from before you entered the dungeon.  This is not a simple little side show either.  There is a word of power at the end of the excursion, so if I had trusted too much and overwritten all my earlier saves, I'd be fucked.  Re-entering the dungeon and doing it all again solved it.

I don't want to hear jack-shit about kill animations, Bethesda.  Fix the game first.

Very similar issue happened to me with Red Eagle's sword.. Had it in my inventory and couldn't get rid of it. For some reason the game reset the quest and it assumed that I didn't complete it. Went to the cavern where I can complete the quest by placing the sword in its place, I ended up with 2 more duplicates instead, each one weighing 12 units. Eventually, after several save/loads the game allowed to drop them. Not sure exactly how I solved the problem.

[Cobra951]

Thanks for the heads up on that.  I already know about that quest, but I have yet to undertake it.  From now on, this is what I'm going to do when I run into an item with a proper name that I don't recognize:  Save the game before picking it up, pick it up, attempt to drop it.  If it won't drop, and won't tell me that a related quest just updated, load the save file I just made and walk away from the fucking thing.

[Cobra951]

Alrighty!  A nice, long day of Skyrim adventure without issues.  I'm thinking the things to do on this platform to avoid triggering technical headches are (1) disconnect the internet, and (2) stay off the damn horse.  It suddenly struck me after my last bout with the gremlins (creatures that aren't supposed to be in Tamriel) that nearly every stuttery episode, inevitably followed by a crash, happened when I was on the horse, or getting on or off the horse.  My guess is that too many things happened--new area streaming in, some dragon getting instanced and rendered, plus my 3rd-person character and horse having to be dealt with.  There are no problems with gobs of creatures and NPCs running all over the place, but there's just something about the horse plus the random nature of the great outdoors that seems to push the code into lala land.  Staying off of XBL prevents any random tasks from stressing the system (memory, multitasking, whatever), and I know for a fact this alone makes a huge difference in the stability of Oblivion.  Time will tell if I'm right with Skyrim.  I did have one random crash in a dungeon before (mentioned above somewhere) but that is it for terminal bugs indoors, after 90 hours of play.

I got to Markarth this evening while pursuing a nearby quest.  What an awesome place!  All that dwemer and mechanical goodness.  I really wasn't expecting such a huge and detailed town so far out of the way.  I could spend days there.  I probably will.

[Cobra951]

Here's a well-done amateur video.

The most impressive thing to me is that the music is not based on the game's recording.  It's done from scratch, and includes the BYU's men's chorus (180 strong, per the description, which is double the 3-layered official version, and 6 times the actual voices used in the game's take).  The behind-the-scenes video is worth a look as well.

I'm 150 hours into this now, and it's displaced pretty much everything else I've been doing for nerdy entertainment.  Version 1.5 is around the corner, hopefully fixing the rest of the crash and quest-breaking bugs.  (I can hope anyway.)

[Cobra951]

Over 30 years ago, I had a revelation.  It came represented by a moving square and stick figures which included some duck-looking dragons.  The crude form was not the eye opener.  The possibilities that came pouring into my head were.  It would take until now for the reality to catch up to the images inspired by that experience.

I don't know how to begin describing the whole Skyrim experience.  Most of you have played it already, and know what it's about.  So I won't try.  I'll just briefly say that it was a truly outstanding voyage, and in some ways a realization of the illusions brought by that little Atari cartridge in the late 70s.  It's about time.

From a technical standpoint, the funny thing is that the longer I played the game, the more stable it got.  Eventually, it quit crashing altogether.  I'm going to guess that the testers never thought to reset the entire world periodically, to start from scratch every so often to see how things came together the first time around.  Whatever the reason, I've been able to settle into playing the game and quit worrying about freezes.  Awesome.

And I'm not done with it by any stretch, though I finally allowed myself to complete the main quest line.

I have yet to do a single thing in Skyrim in the proper order. I'm constantly showing up to some dude's castle that I've never seen before, only to hand over a mystical item that I'd mentally scratched off as garbage hours ago, and then sit and listen to the story be retroactively explained to me:

King: Wanderer! Thank the gods you've come! The prophecy told us that a mighty warrior would arise, worthy of wielding Fjalnir, the God-axe, and slaying the evil Demon Prince Synraith. We believe you to be that warrior. What say you, traveler? Will you accept this task?

Me: Yea, verily I shall accept thine task and vanq- wait, Synraith? Fiery dude in a floating city? Cape made out of screeching souls? Ahhh, shit. I already killed that guy.

King: You ... already slew the Demon Prince, the Knife in the Dark, the Void at the Heart of All Men, whose identity you did not learn until just now?

Me: Yup. I saw that castle floating up in the sky, and I wanted to know if I could jump up the rocks to get in the back way. It took a lot of reloads, but I finally managed to hop on up in there.

King: You "hopped on up" into the Abyssal Palace?

Me: Yeeeep, yep yep yep. Just squat-jumped on in there and looted the place. Then I killed that Sydney guy-

King: Synraith, Demon Prince of the Abyss.

Me: -yeah him. I ganked that guy. Mostly just to see if I could. Plus he looked like kind of a dick.

King: Indeed, the Foulest of the Foul was "kind of a dick." But you vanquished him without the aid of sacred Fjalnir, the God-axe?

Me: Totally. It wasn't even a thing. I just hid on top of a bookshelf where he couldn't reach me and shot him with arrows. Then I waited until he forgot I was shooting him, and did it all again to get the sneak damage bonus. Took a while, but he died all the same.

King: Forsooth! Thine heroic deeds are ... well, that sounds kind of fucked up, actually. Never thought I'd feel bad for He Who Devours. So you have no need of our sacred totem weapon?

Me: What, the gold dealy, with the shiny bits? Nah, I already stole that out of the display case four hours ago, before I knew who you were. I gave it to Sven, but he Quantum Leaped out of the game with that shit.

King: Huh. So. I guess ... the bards will ... sing of your tale now?

Me: Oh yeah? Sweet, let's hear it.

Bard: The hero came with eyes aflame / his tasks already done / the land was rescued all the same / but 'tis kind of a shitty song.

Me: Word.

You can buy Robert's book, Everything is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead, or follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Or you could do none of those things, because you're currently playing Skyrim until your eyes bleed, stopping only to read more about Skyrim before returning to Skyrim.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-personality-flaws-skyrim-forces-you-to-deal-with/

[Xessive]

I thought this little mod was pretty impressive: Dwarven Mechanical Equipment

[PyroMenace]

lol

[Xessive]

Funny

[Xessive]

Awesome screenshots over at Dead End Thrills.

[Cobra951]

Some of those are spectacular.  Thanks for the link.

[Xessive]

Some of those are spectacular.  Thanks for the link.

They are incredible! I've got them set up as a wallpaper slideshow on my desktop. I'm am amazed and ecstatic that I'm finally beginning to see the age where real-time graphics are coming on par with pre-rendered CG footage. We're not quite there yet but we're getting close; close enough that these shots are already better than any of the digitally generated wallpapers (i.e. Digital Blasphemy, etc.) I used to have on in the last decade.

Take that all those who don't consider games art!

[Xessive]

[Xessive]

FreddieW's Skyrim Badass

[Quemaqua]

Man, I hadn't looked at those screens until now. Amazing.

[Xessive]

Man, I hadn't looked at those screens until now. Amazing.

Oh yeah, phenomenal stuff! He makes new ones fairly regularly too.

[MysterD]

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Dawnguard announced.

Coming this summer to Xbox 360.
More details at E3.

[Xessive]

Damn delayed PC release.

[Cobra951]

It's clear that MS is calling the shots here.  A Kinect patch came out yesterday, long after Todd Howard had said the game would never use the thing.  It's useless to me, of course, but it's a mandatory 35MB bloat (if you want to be online and get future updates), and it offers the only way to sort containers (3 ways).  Controller-only users get the shaft on this.  It has to be a Microsoft agenda at work.

[sirean_syan]

Not that I'm justifying this, but wasn't this the case with Fallout as well? It's really not all that surprising, although it does suck.

[Quemaqua]

That's some shit.

[MysterD]

Not that I'm justifying this, but wasn't this the case with Fallout as well? It's really not all that surprising, although it does suck.

Yep.
FO3 DLC [BethSoft] + FO:NV DLC [Obsidian] were delayed at least 30 days for release for exclusive X360 early release.
As long as they eventually release ALL Content to the PC, this is not really a big deal to me.
I normally don't buy DLC upon release and wait a bit, for price-drops or DLC packs or something.

[MysterD]

Skyrim hits GameBoy:

[PyroMenace]

I've been getting back into this pretty hard now that spring classes are done, gonna try and finish off the main quest line before Diablo 3 comes out. I recently finished off the thieves guild stuff, finally got around to venturing into Markarth which is the last city I had yet to check out. Also got my black smithing up some more and made daedra armor which Beo had posted a pic off, it is getting ridiculous to how untouchable I am becoming, pondering if I should up the difficulty. Thing is I really don't mind that I'm just parading over anybody that comes against me, I just find the questing and world so enriching that I don't care how easy it is, plus there's so much of it that it would be more self defeating if I slowed myself down by upping the difficulty.

[Cobra951]

Both of my characters ended up becoming tanks.  I cranked the difficulty up to Expert, and still no one can touch me.  At least I'm not one-shotting everything anymore.  I guess I'll try Master next.

You can get maximum armor protection (567 rating = 80% damage-soak cap) with any armor in the game, if you get your smithing high enough and use some fortify-smithing items and potions.

The MQ is very cool.  Don't leave it unfinished.  Dark Brotherhood is also entertaining, in a creepy way.

[MysterD]

GamesRadar -> Skyrim PC - Beta Patch 1.6 released adding Combat to Mounts.

[Cools!]

Excellent.

[Cobra951]

Fixed issue with nirnroot lighting not properly cleaning up

Woohoo!  All of the new tech fixes are very welcome.

[MysterD]

Dawnguard - E3 2012 TRAILER.

This trailer seems to confirm some of the previous tidbits of news and teasers that have come out since news first broke about the first highly-anticipated add-on for Skyrim such as "Kinect shouts," seasonal foliage, mounted combat and the addition of vampires to the gameplay. Of course, we'll only know for sure when Dawnguard gets its public premiere at next week's E3 and Bethesda decides to set a release date for it.

[MysterD]

RPGWatch -> Dawnguard X360 Beta sign-up info.
If you do get selected for The Beta, you won't have to buy the add-on.
The FULL version of Dawnguard X360 will be yours.

    Visit DawnguardBeta.ElderScrolls.com to apply. The process should only take a couple minutes, but make sure to fill out all the information accurately. Applicants need a registered account on our official forums and you’ll want to make sure your forum email address is updated.

    We will be selecting applicants in about a week. Players accepted into the beta will receive an Xbox LIVE code to redeem Dawnguard. The beta is the full version (complete with Xbox LIVE achievements) and those participating will not have to purchase the content.

[MysterD]

Dawnguard DLC -- Console Version REVIEWS

Scored out of a max of 10
IGN -> 8.0.
Videogamer -> 7.
Eurogamer -> 7.
Metro UK -> 6.

Scored out of 100
GamesBeat -> 85.

No score
Kotaku -> "Nothing short of underwhelming."

[Cools!]

[MysterD]

GamesRadar -> Dawnguard PC/PS3 still unannounced after 30 day XB exclusivity had ended...

[Xessive]

In due time. Patience.