Slowtrain

Yup, this alone makes the game worth trying. It can't possibly do anything but improve gameplay by a huge amount.

I remember the devs responding to that complaint all the way back in Morrowind days. Their answer was pretty simple: not worth the cpu cycles. My guess is that trying to get this game to run well on current consoles means cutting back on a lot of stuff.

Bethesda has always been a proponent of quantity over quality in their rpgs. That's not a knock on them, though it may sound that way. Bethie simply appears to believe that a huge number of small choices are better than one or two big ones.

Crates are one thing Bethie does as well as anyone!

I think some of you are expecting too much from a Bethesda game. Open world, exploration, atmosphere: as long as it has though there's not much to complain about it. Bethesda has a long list of things they don't do well in their rpgs; those are unlikely to change in Skyrim.

Is that a spider on his/her back?

Given that only Oblivion really failed at this, there's every reason to believe it wil be fine in Skyrim. Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Fallout 3 all had their assortment of problems, but mostly all created worlds that were fun to explore. I think Morrowind still remains the best from an exploration-only aspect, but there's no reason Skyrim couldn't surpass it. Say what you want about Bethesda, they seem to do a pretty good job learning from their failures. Their biggest problem seems to be that they always seem to find new ways to fail with each game so each game ends up with some serious flaws. But not the same flaws as the previous game.

I wish. I guess this just isn't Bethesda's thing. FO3 didn't have any either. You would think after watching Obsidian pull it off they would be interested in trying to give some personality to people that follow you around. Acutally, I give them credit for recognizing their limitations. Better to spend their time and resources on stuff they're good at rather than spending it on stuff they're bad at. No game can have everything so developers have to pick and choose what to include and what to develop.

The black sun is cool.

The implementaion of level scaling in Oblivion was the worst I've ever seen in any game. There may be other games that are worse, but not that I've played. Fallout 3 had less obvious and extreme level-scaling and had much greater strengths to begin with, all of which made the level-scaling in FO3 much more tolerable. If Skyrim really does have the same basic level-scaling implementation as FO3 that will be good enough. Not ideal, but good enough.

Didn't you like Daggerfall? I recently replayed it and that one has exactly the same level scaling as Oblivion. Above level 20 all you'll ever meet are Vampires, Liches and Ancient Vampires. It even has random bandits dropping daedric equipment. The only difference is that the main quest dungeons have fixed levels of monsters. I do indeed like Daggerfall, and yes, you are correct it has exactly the same level scaling as Oblivion. (not quite, actually, but close) Daggerfall, however much I like it, would have been a better game without it. I don't claim that level-scaling instantly makes any game bad, rather that it makes it less than it could have been.

There's nothing good to be said about level-scaling. In the end it's just a way to make things easier for the developer. For a gamer, level-scaling always cheapens the experience.

Indeeed, I think when somone has a billion-dollar IP attached to their name that IP gets consideration on pretty much a daily basis, but as you say that consideration is much more likely to be attached to financial aspects of the IP rather than some imagined narrative/universe integrity that really serves no purpose since it's all just made-up anyway and can/should be changed at any time depending on the needs of the IP.

Grommy makes the internet a better place. I don't know. I would guess Lucas thinks about this stuff a lot. He just changes his mind often. Nothing wrong with that though. It's all just made-up FEPO stuff anyway.

I have to say that as a longtime super-nutty hardcore Jagged Alliance 2 fanboy, the current version of Jagged alliance 3 (how many versions have there been now?), looks...actually OK from a tactical point of view. How it plays from a strategy standpoint is yet to be determined.

I would have liked to see Samuel B Jackson as the Emperor.

I love Patrick Stewart. But would having Wes Johson voice his role in Oblivion have detracted in any way from the quality of Oblivion? Now if Patrick Stewart cost the same as Wes Johnson for the part, then fine, 6 one way, half a dozen the other, but my guess is Patrick Stewart was considerably more of an expense. However, I do not know that for a certainty, of course.

Totally agree. My point is that given limited resources, it seems wasteful to spend money in areas that don't really help the game, especially when less expensive options were availiable that woudl be just as good. If someone is making a licensed ST:TNG game then, yes, spending the neccessary money for Patrick Stewart is an important part of making the game, but casting a voice for an emperor in Oblivion, not so much. If budgets were not an issue, than none of it would matter, of course. But they are.

I'm not disagreeing with having a variety of voices in the game, just pondering the point of spending money on famous actors for the voices, especially when the spoken dialogue is horribly written. Wes Johnson would have been just as effective in Patrick Stewart's role in Oblivion. WHich isn't to say that Wes Johnson == Patrick Stewart but with Bethesda's limited skill set, Patrick Stewart is grotesque overkill and isn't going to be effectively utilized. And that doesn't mean all the programmers have to bring in their brothers and sisters to read the parts either. Lots of good actors, theatrical and otherwise, out there who could benefit from some work and do a great job. I recognize that hiring people like Patrick Stewart is 99% PR and allows Bethesda another avenue to pimp their game, but I still think that the practice can be criticized. edit: spelling

I'm reminded of Clint Eastwood's line from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly: "Never have I seen so many men wasted so badly." Why does Bethesda even bothering hiring "Big Name" voices just to have them recite inspid writing? I mean, I like Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Sean Bean, yet they were all pretty sucktastic in Bethesda's game. Just stick with Wes Johnson and the other regulars; they are more than good enough for this.

They're just there as NPC conversation fodder.

Isn't that the dude on the bridge on the way to the Dwemer ruin just outside Balmora? Getting your character killed by him is like getting your character killed by a hangnail. Embarrassing.

Ah, ok. I just assumed that since we all know there is going to be a Fallout 4, some hints might have sneaked out of the Bethie offices. Chicago would make sense as a kind of split-the-difference between east and west. I would personally like to see a much lower-tech world with no power armor, energy weapons etc aexcept maybe as extremely isolated events. But yeah, probably not going to happen.

Is it known yet where Fallout 4 will take place? In Fallout 3 that guy Zimmer from the Commonwealth is hanging around DC loooking for his android. I always took that as maybe a hint that Fallout 4 would take place there and maybe have something to do with android slavery or something. But maybe that's looking too hard for something that isn't there.

Actually Daggerfall was more dynamic than random. Yes, all the dungeons other than then main quest ones were randomly assembled from various forms and pieces, and a lot of weapons were randomly generated, but pretty much everything else was hand-designed and inserted into the game. Then depending on your actions and choices and where you went and the things you saw, the game would dynamically "hand-out" the built in content. Daggerfall had far more content than any game I've ever seen outside of a giant mmorpg. I played many, many games of Daggerfall and there was so much stuff that I only encountered in one game and never before or after. There was also lots of stuff that I encountered multiple times as well, of course. I totally understand why gamers who like a very linear and considered narrative would not enjoy it, but Daggerfall really is the top single-player open-world game ever made. edit: It was actually somewhat more complicated than that really, since the gameworld basically ran by itself and various states would change based on various factors and the actions of the different factions, much of which ran completely independent of , or only slightly affected by, your character's actions.