Tigranes

Meh, I only just learnt muffle. Forgot about it somehow. I'm not a big fan of spamming spells artificially.

I've been playing sneak/archery + illusion/conjuration, but at level 20 my illusion is still at 20, so I trotted over to Winterhold to get some training. Leaving the heavy armour/smithing stuff for a second playthrough, i.e. packin' steel, but we'll see how I wear the game out.

The Making of Risen Part 1. Disappointed they're now using a terrain engine, but what little you see there looks absolutely brilliant.

Level 20 and feel like I've done nearly everything in Whiterun & Falkreath, and may be powerful enough to start tackling Riften proper. I was a little sad that Rorikstead turned out to be a little hamlet with nothing much to do, but am hoping the outlying cities that I've avoided so far will provide good city stuff. Have hardly bothered with the main quest except going up the Throat to get the sprint shout. The dragon doesn't seem very fun to fight - it was the same in Witcher 2, it's hard to take the kind of combat system you have there and take it to a flying giant thing. I mean, seriously, the first MQ dragon - the lieutenant gives a stirring speech to rouse the troops... except there's four freaking soldiers standing in the middle of the road! Then everyone trots ofver like it's a picnic and bring it down! WTF? At the start of the game it burned an entire town to a crisp by itself! It would have been a lot better to have the dragon much more powerful, you require a lot more allies, and possibly rely on things like ensuring you protect some kind of heavy machinery (ballista-like, or whatnot) critical to success - maybe set directly outside Whiterun where there's more structure and guards. Same problem with Witcher 2, really - you have all these wonderful scenes with tons of soldiers, artillery and explosions all throughout the game, but when you have to fight a dragon it's basically a Super Mario 64 boss pied-a-pied.

I bought & beat it a couple weeks ago, very fun and I think it is/was on sale somewhere recently. But I think it's worth $15 if you don't expect something mindblowing and have some game time to spare. It's a simple game but the visual/narrative charm holds up all the way through (to the ending, IMO) and they throw you a lot of different weapons to play with, most of which are useful enough.

I fought my first giant at level 17, not really by choice, and in one swing I was up high as the mountains ragdollin' it up. ...had to play merry-go-round round some rocks.

It's radiant!

Skyrim is a lot better and closer to Morrowind. Don't bother with Oblivion. Or if you really want, do some research and stock up on a lot of mods.

I've installed the slower levelling mod - I think it's working, I'm still only level 16. Got a little worn down by all the go to dungeon kill X around centre of the map and decided to walk to Riften for the thieves' guild. Riften definitely feels a lot more like a proper RPG town where you can do stuff inside, and I actually like how they've integrated Steal X quests with more properly thought out ones, and how the dynamic between guild, officials and other interests is communicated well through everything that happens in the town. This town at least is definitely a step up from Oblivion's Town A, Town B. The level scaling is also holding up OK so far - i.e. it's hard to notice. I tried to go out of the beaten path in the Riften area and bears / sabre cats mauled my sneak/archer character, and one quest I tried (the ) was just way too difficult so I had to pull out. Mainly I'm using Flame Atronach summon and Fury to provide sufficient distraction while I shoot people down, but I'm also hoping to get Sneak up more so I can get the final backstab perk.

Do the normal gems like Garnet have any use? Or should I be selling them off? Level 14 and only visited Whiterun, Falkreath and Riverwood for towns, taking my time. There's a lot of crap so I might buy a home just to store. I'm still enjoying it and the feeling of Oblivion-Morrowind is keeping up, though: -> The weird AI glitches where sometimes they never ever find you although you're shooting at them front & center, or just get stuck in block mode, carried over from Oblivion. -> Killing attributes really was a stupid idea. Even as a 'broken' mechanic in Oblivion it was still a lot more fun than just taking it out - at least you had the satisfaction of character building. I also imagine the stupid, pointless, annoying UI they thought was "cool beans" for the skills will hinder efforts to introduce new skills, etc. -> Alchemy experimentation is fun but I've found very few recipes, and none of them have ingredients I have at hand. Hrm. In both Morrowind & Oblivion, the moment you can substantially enchant weapons with life-steal or paralysis is when the game breaks. I'm nowhere near that yet but we'll see.

Predictably, Barbas the dog went on without me and I've tracked down Haemar's Shame, but is the shrine actually inside the cave or nearby? If inside I'm going to have to come back later, the vampire is too strong.

In contrast, I'm level 12 and my illusion is still below 20. I think illusion is really hard to level up in the TES system, because you're likely to cast it only once for enemy. You should get a really big boost for a successful cast, maybe. Similarly, the whole point of going light armour rather than heavy is that you don't want to get hit in the first place, so... In contrast, it seems lockpick skill increases even when you fail, so I wasted 10 locks on an expert and got it to level up... hmm.

Fury is fantastic - I checked out Fort Greymouth or something or other to the west of Whiterun, and the warhammer-swinging bandit highwayman in particular was too much for me, but I ended up collecting bandits into groups then setting multiple Fury's on each other. I haven't seen a lot of quests to the end yet - I've been impressed by the way they are presented and the way we first gather information - e.g. learning about the Redguard on the run at Whiterun - but We'll see how they pan out.

They've done a pretty good job with the rumours system - as with Oblivion and Morrowind you hear useful information in all sorts of places, but now it also updates your Misc. Journal and sometimes adds map markers (but not always!). I'm having zero problems with no compass/etc, and exploration really is pretty good. Finding that the sabre cats are acting as a natural barrier to my going some places. Too fast for my archer.

Feel free to open a spoilers Skyrim thread - as with FNV and other games, we can accommodate a couple of threads but don't want 20 all over. Still wandering around aimlessly somewhat in the starting region, I had a small bounty from my earlier encounter with the and the soldiers accepted my payment and also took me to that Dragon-something stronghold sitting directly on top of Whiterun. I love the way it looks when you start from the top entrance and look down - the towns still retain something of that Oblivionish "we are a medieval town except clearly planned out by some sort of time-travelling architect" oddness, but have a lot more character and I like the Nordic design on various textures. I'm quite fond of the enchanting system where you have to destroy existing magic items to learn the specific properties - makes the loot system a lot more robust.

The game's perfectly playable with no compass, quest marker etc. of any kind - every once in a while you might forget who was who and where, but then you can just look on the map if you really need. Was wandering about and found some clearly high level , who's ultra-suspicious and attacks you very easily (I like how they've made the dialogue a bit more devious and a bit less kindergarten). Made use of a Scroll of Mayhem to have them all start attacking each other, including the and a random wolf that joined the proceedings. I ran away and contributed with arrows and now at level 9 have , which isn't that powerful but at least looks nice.

In that direction I had also inadvertently stumbled on a small house near that area with bandits - I nearly left after a cursory look before It does seem that they applied lessons of FO3 and making more 'crafted' dungeons with a story to tell.

I started a new character - Nord - and played some more, deliberately avoiding Riverwood. Hint: it's a lot more fun if you go LEFT after you leave the tutorial cave. I got distracted and started getting into random mishaps, and was level 5 before stumbling back into Riverwood. Levelling is definitely too fast and it feels like you're not even trying, so I really want to slow down skill gain by 15% or so as soon as possible. But yeah, having a blast. I enjoy magic and archery and sneaking, unfortunately melee seems pretty stupid - all they needed to do was copy Gothic/Risen a bit. you just swing swing swing, block seems to do little at least with low skill and there's really no variation. You definitely feel it when your enemies have a 2h weapon though. Monty: With Skyrim really the only decision you're making actively is whether to up Magicka/Health/Stamina and what perks to get. There are some obviously synergistic skills - sneak/archery, two handed/heavy armour, etc. As for magic I tend to go towards illusion (invisibility, make people berserk, etc) and conjuration (reanimate zombies, later some cool creatures if Skyrim continues the tradition) but destruction/restoration are obviously useful and mystical (?) is OK.

It's not as big as it was in Oblivion. Trying to make player.showracemenu work so I can refiddle the character's face. The old save trick doesn't seem to work.

Played a bit more and my opinion has somewhat improved. Textures still suck but in places the game does look quite nice, especially when the warm lighting can do its thing; in snow-laden areas it's weaker, which is a bit weird given the setting. Also found that (a) you can map the favourites to numbers so it's not quite as bad - sadly it doesn't do dual wielding very well; (b) the game did get harder and the draugr below gave me a lot of trouble on highest difficulty, though nothing compared to the Gothics or Morrowind's That Big Huge Mine. You level up pretty fast and it feels like my stats are going up without trying, but the logic of binding level ups, perks and stats together is very good. I only wish they'd kept attributes and made them matter somehow - without them it just feels like you don't get to define what your character is like physically/physiologically, the character just becomes a thing you invest money/points into. Got myself a Fury spell (incite target to go berserk) which I'll look to use creatively soon. Example of good lookin'. Had to fight these guys a few times as my sneak/illusion character couldn't stand up to them, but.. Realized stepping on that stone on the ground makes the door swing superfast - and you can see the spikes on the doors there. Just had to make sure I wasn't caught in it.

Ultra runs fine for me, but I'm starting to wonder whether it's my machine being weird that produces those superbad textures. Suped up GTX570.

Yes, they're the Empire folks who're looking to execute some Nords + You. I'm hoping to see some Imperial architecture somewhere.

When you open a door indoors, the door only opens a crack then you load a new level. But as usual for Bethesda, loading is extremely fast. Same old window-tricks. I haven't explored much yet but there are a lot of mountains, as befits Skyrim, and as befits Gamebryo your character jumps like a retarded monkey so some are uncrossable. Just how much remains to be seen. Time doesn't stop during convos and you can press tab to exit a convo at any given time - in which case they'll simply finish the line they were saying before. It makes it a bit more seamless. The lockpicking mini-game is a lot faster/simpler now, but I'm not sure if time stops - hard to say as the minigame UI takes up half the screen. I'll try and test this. Engine is most definitely not 'new' as far as the end user is concerned. The most noticeable improvement is the character models/faces, really.

I didn't get that problem while doing the smithing, Starwars - the child spoke, but appropriately intermittently. Maybe because she stood just outside, by chance. The physics are still crazy though, I walked into a little wagon and then it kept bouncing around in that small forge every time I tried to move - and each time it kept taking away half my health! It hurt me more than any enemy thus far Hard to say about Radiant AI. Everything's been very good so far but I haven't really tested it enough I feel.

I've enabled all the ini tweaks I could find online, and ones I know from fiddling with Oblivion/F3/FNV back in the day. I could increase LOD & Shadows even further to insane numbers, but I doubt that'll do much beyond program instability. Mind you, I like the game thus far, and I'm usually bad about making that come across. Most of the time it looks like the video LC posted - also see screens below. But the low-textures can't be ignored because they come out at you time to time, without even looking for them. Skyrim looks best when you're in town walking around, looking at the people. There it really beats Oblivion. Vistas are also good in areas - same logic as Oblivion, the short-distance and long-distance view is great, middle is not as it gets caught between two modes. You can also see the Quick Use menu there. I should also mention I have yet to check out a proper dungeon, which I'm quite excited about.