Tigranes

I've only found wolves (one of which gave me rock-herpes or whatnot), deer, bandits, a bear, and totally cool looking spiders. BTW, as you can see in the third screenshot, the compass & markers are even more annoying now, with huge Apple icons for places to go spinning. .ini lets you disable it all, as you can see, which totally changes the experience for the better. I have some work to do but I'll probably end up playing it a fair bit tonight, I'll stay on here so ask me if you want to know anything or want any screens. Keep in mind I'm still in the starting areas.

Unlocked my Steam copy. Quick Impressions: I've played about two hours, which was enough to do the as-ever-boring introductory sequence (thankfully nowhere near as long and overdramatic as Oblivion), stumble on Riverwood, and do a couple of other things. The trademark TES experience is there, and so far it really does feel like an odd blend of Morrowind and Oblivion. Dialogue is still a mixture of OK and random nonsense, but more towards the former now. The game is far, far too easy - I started on 'Master' difficulty (highest) and all I have to do is swing my sword or run backwards and cast spells. Really need the Skyrim editor if only to hike up enemy HP/attack by x per cent, and even better if running back speed can be lowered. Still, the world looks large and generally makes you want to explore; the Nordic vibe is there; you can use workbenches, grindstones, tan hides, and such and such; and stories/quests/rumours are so far given fairly sensibly. We'll see. UI is retarded. Worse than Alpha Protocol, Oblivion, or whatever. Far worse. UI Art style is horrendous too - icons on the world map, for instance, stand out like some sort of iPhone shortcut. You can mark weapons and spells as 'favourite' but then you press Q while in the world, time stops, then you choose the favourites you want to equip from a list and click. i.e. Skyrim's favourites menu is as much a hassle as other games' full inventory menu. The worst thing is the skills menu. You know how they designed it like a series of star signs? Well, (1) there's no way to see all your skills in one screen. (2) you can't use your left/right keys to scroll the various skills, you have to lean with your mouse. (3) there's no way to see even all the perks avaialble for a given skill in one screen. The minute you click on one skill you zoom in to this hyper-zoomed-in-ground-angle view of the skill map, where you have to keep flying around - and it's really easy to spill into a different star tree, too. It's just **** in every conceivable way. PC Controls are generally fine. Everyone should get on the .ini as soon as they get the game and turn off VSync and mouse acceleration for best results. Engine is clearly not much different from Oblivion as far as user experience goes. What TES was always good at - fast loading - is still there; people do look significantly better, lighting has been improved, although some stupid looking faces still exist. But it's still very dated, and the environment textures are horrible. I think either there's a big bug, or they really had to chop and burn things to fit old consoles / 1 DVD. In a single small tower you will see inner walls that have decent textures and ground textures; but the intermediate wooden floors and the outer walls might have textures that really, seriously, look like they're from ten years ago. The game still looks better than Oblivion, especially because of the much improved art design - although so far ti doesn't have the immediately strange yet cohesive attraction Morrowind had. But the weird clash of terrible and decent textures is really weird. Observe: The typical kind of picture you might get in the hype. Looks pretty good. The default Dunmer look. Faces and people are significantly improved. Though not always perfect, but then, lighting does that to people. Legion feel. Vistas look impressive unless you look too far / in the wrong place. Same as Oblivion. Snowy rocks close-up look horrible. The outer walls of a tower. Except I'm not contriving to get this shot, I've just reached the open roof of a tower and everywhere around me the game is screaming party like it's 1999. (And of course, Ultra graphics, and with further ini tweaks to get more shadows. Max LOD distance. Unfortunately no option for textures, yet.)

So is it a midnight unlock depending on your local time? Figures, just when I move from the earliest country in the world...

I'm not unhappy with their experiments with AP & DS3, and think AP in particular was awesome... but yes, I believe it's time now to put out a couple of games that they really know how to do well, cut down on the difficulties associated with wading into new genres/etc, and put out something really quality. After all, we still don't have one Obsidian RPG that is both orthodox Obsid-style and an original game, and say "this is Obsidian".

Rule for Bethesda products in particular, though- If you buy on Day 1, then you've already made up your mind that it'll at least be worth the money you put down - the reviews aren't going to help you make a better decision. If you need reviews and examinations from other people to make up your mind, you have to wait at least a month or two so people finish the game and start seeing just how quick the honeymoon wears off, etc. I've already preloaded on the assumption that despite many flaws it will give me a decent amount of good fun. No need to click on reviews unless I want to read a bunch of irrelevant spiel.

I think more than most other games you can see a difference in a select few principles that make Morrowind and Oblivion so different even when, in terms of gameplay mechanics or design features, they are so very similar. Mainly, Oblivion destroys world consistency with the argument that this frees up designers to create the most fun/exciting experience possible at any given moment. Then, the implication is that all those fun moments will congeal together naturally to form a great experience where you no longer mind the consistency. And that certainly can work for some people - if you internalize it to the extent that you don't care much about what you're missing, it's fantastic. If you don't, it's horrible because it's a series of nonsensical Awesome Cool Stuff that doesn't even match together. So you can never get a sense of world and culture in Oblivion with that (it also didn't help that art design jumped off a cliff), whereas with Morrowind - it's weird how most towns have very similar sets of buildings, functions, quests, etc. but you get a much better sense. The thing with Skyrim is that art design has gotten attention again and at least at a visual level they've tried to reintegrate this. The problem is that in terms of design principles they seem to have gone even more radically Oblivionian - "we don't mind if the NPCs lose consistency or coherence as long as you keep getting a lot of cool quests". The logic is that, again, if you are getting interesting quests all the time and not being frustrated looking for people, broken questlines, etc., you won't really mind that they cease to even pretend to be real people. It remains to be seen whether it's that jarring in practice, but I think there's going to be a mix here, they're trying to start from Oblivion then go in both directions, so...

My expectation is that some things will have Morrowindified Oblivion; other aspects, it will have Oblivionified even further (e.g. UI, level scaled dragons). I'm mainly hoping that the former will outweigh the latter - that will make me happy.

TW1 used a super-heavily modified version of the Aurora Engine, and that was mentioned prominently in the earliest coverage. It's still debatable how much TW1 benefited marketing-wise, but there's the connection.

The Etymotics came in today. They come with 4 different types of tips but I"m quite happy with the laser-gun style default; the noise cancelling also seems strong enough for an earphone.

I never know just how different it is. In some cases it's same name, completely different people in different cities, in other cases, not so much, no?

Bio's been working hard to expand their brand though - what with Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and now the MMO. It's not that weird, as long as the game is good. Unfortunately, that's the most problematic part. Bio's never done action well, so they'll need to make sure they have good talent there.

Since the original comment said one of the few companies with a long history in RPGs, that would very obviously include Bioware and Bethesda. Boring, Volo.

You've always been able to jump. I mean, you have an Acrobatics skill... Or did they remove that now?

Modding community couldn't do it for Oblivion AFAIK, so I'm not holding my breath in Skyrim. Yeah, it would be awesome to have someone attack you by levitating. E.g. in a defend-this-place-for-x-minutes kind of setting.

You know, I really miss levitate/jumping over half of Vvardenfell. It was brilliant. There really should be no good reason to leave that out now, with dragons flying around and throwing NPCs all over the place. Or are they afraid people will start running into dragons in the air?

It's weird how both AP & DS3 had sales expectation of 1 million though AP must have cost so much more, yes. Now we know AP's 700k shipped was pretty terrible. Does that mean DS3 had a fairly high expectation and 820k shipped is 'OK'? Sales-wise Obsidian's been doing very well throughout its history and AP is the only true bomb in that respect, but we know that in this industry even one or two underperformers can really hurt. I don't think DS3 selling lower than expected had to do with story, by the way. There are plenty of games out there that mix story with action. I think that attitude is actually down to our own position as CRPG gamers - from our point of view we know what a 'proper' CRPG story is, quest is, setting is, gameplay is, etc - so (1) we judge DS3's story from that perspective, (2) we judge DS3's action gameplay from that perspective, (3) we have a particular way of thinking about ARPGs as a genre. For a different type of gamer, it's actually a very natural and positive thing to pick a game up, start swinging swords and find that there's a story on, too. I think the difficult reception AP/DS3 had is actually down to quite similar reasons, broadly speaking. Obsidian's games, historically, all suffer from similar Achilles' heels. E.g. They have a weak beginning which is either boring or confusing, both in terms of story / level progression and introducing gameplay in a fun and understandable way. When you make something like NWN2 this won't hurt you as much, because you are targeting the game at an established fanbase - who know what they are meant to get out of that game 5 hours down the line so are more willing to sit this out. When you pick up a game and you don't really know what it's going to be or you expect something different to begin with (i.e. AP and the half million people who expected Splinter Cell or something), then that becomes a much bigger problem. Ironically, we know that AP suffered from a horribly long dev period with lots of two step forward one step back, while with DS3 they tried to be efficient, think small, think tight. Certainly DS3 is a lot more polished and bug free. But I think they still share project management level problems as well that translated into the mixed reception. I don't agree that AP didn't know what it was about - it knew exactly what it was about and had a philosophy running right through it, as did DS3. The problem is that if you examine that identity, the way they arrived at that identity is rather.. odd. E.g. if you accept that AP is a stat-based multi-solution spy game where a big chunk of gameplay occurs through conversations & decisions, it's a fantastic game. But that's a complicated concept that lies in the mdidle of various valleys and in the end AP, whether in the game itself or through the hype/whatever, was unable to convince many people that such a concept is a good one, or even that that is the concept. Thus you see people that think AP doesn't know what it is, etc. I think it was the same with DS3. What's the consequences? I thought AP was a brilliant game and DS3 a decent, fun one. I want Obsidian to make sure they keep on making proper CRPGs but I'm also excited about these unique mixes they keep coming up with. The challenge is how do you make such mixes speak to your audience, so that they will judge your game by your standards. Because that (a) gets better reviews & sales, but also (b) helps people have more fun with your game. I don't know how much of that is down to the game itself, and whether games like DXHR did something that AP/DS3 could not.

We still care about 'em reviews?

The search engine is on the top right of the screen. Unfortunately, I doubt we'll see major changes like that in a patch, cmd_laurens - it sometimes happens, but it's really not very common.

Properly made earphones don't fall out and don't feel like they're there. The difference is quite strong - anything less than a great earphone and I agree, it feels like ear-probing. But then, as I say, most headphones make me even more uncomfortable. I also need music wherever I go and I don't want big headphones when I'm running or something.

You can only have one sidekick at a time, though, so you can never use all 4 together in battle. If you mean co-op, you can start with 4 from the beginning, anyway.

I generally don't preorder more than a week early - I don't even look at the bonuses, special editions, or anything, it's just convenient for me to do it now then pre-load the game next week. Although, looking at that, maybe I should go for cdkeydiscount this time. Looks like they just send you the key instead of activating for you in that one?

I'm not a fan of headphones - admittedly I haven't had the chance to try the more quality ones, but they always make my ears (as in, ears, not eardrums) hurt, they feel stuffy, they're big and they matt down the hair. Recently lost my excellent Sennheiser CX range earphones somewhere, but they had good sound and great noise reduction. So I ordered a replacement and tried a Bose IE2, but found their weird tips awful - they wouldn't stay in at all, and it turned out they have absolutely zero noise reduction. About as good as a ten dollar earphone on that front. I've switched gear and am going to try a new brand, Etymotic, which looks like the Sennheisers but apparently with nice earbuds and good sound quality. If it doesn't work out I'll just swear loyalty to Sennheiser brand.

Preordered. I'm a sucker.

Whether it will ever happen depends on what exactly you want improved, doesn't it? People seem to have different ideas. I thought loot was rather underwhelming but generally sound. DLC introduces crafting, which seems to have improved things.

I've lost my Sennheiser earphones, my tumbler, and my replacement tumbler in the last month. Hrm.