Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

[Bos_hybrid]

Are you female?

 

?

 

Odd question....

[Tale]

Correct me if the numbers are wrong.

Operation Anchorage took 3 months.

Dead Money took 4 months

 

We're on month 5 and not even an announcement. Wonder what's holding them up.

[WorstUsernameEver]

Correct me if the numbers are wrong.

Operation Anchorage took 3 months.

Dead Money took 4 months

 

We're on month 5 and not even an announcement. Wonder what's holding them up.

 

They're making a more substantial one?

[Humanoid]

It already has enough dungeons to last me the decade. Hoping for a complete change in tone with a lot of overworld content instead, but not optimistic.

[GhostofAnakin]

Got those last two achievements I was aiming for. Pickpocket 50 was easy, and the reach level 50 was just a bunch of smithing and enchanting grinding.

 

Speaking of which, I'm not a fan of that system of leveling up. I got way more XP for doing that kind of stuff than solving actual quests. I killed an elder dragon and my XP bar barely moved, but then I go home to my workshop and do some enchanting and I'm leveled up in no time.

 

Looks like Skyrim's going on my shelf until the expansion/DLC gets released.

[HoonDing]

Correct me if the numbers are wrong.

Operation Anchorage took 3 months.

Dead Money took 4 months

 

We're on month 5 and not even an announcement. Wonder what's holding them up.

Shivering Isles took a year.

[Enoch]

Correct me if the numbers are wrong.

Operation Anchorage took 3 months.

Dead Money took 4 months

 

We're on month 5 and not even an announcement. Wonder what's holding them up.

Shivering Isles took a year.

Yeah, but Horse Armor was out in, like, 2 weeks.

[BobSmith101]

Anyone know when the GOTY comes out?

[WorstUsernameEver]

Anyone know when the GOTY comes out?

 

How can we possibly know if the DLC hasn't even been announced yet?

[HoonDing]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSLPH9d-jsI

 

Some people take Skyrim too seriously.

[Lexx]

That's p.cool and the chick is hawt.

[entrerix]

i just watched season one of game of thrones and now i want to play skyrim!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

but im gonna go read those books instead.

[GhostofAnakin]

I've got Skyrim's theme music stuck in my head now after watching that video. Thanks a lot.

[HoonDing]

Apparently this was filmed in Utah (where the girl is apparently from). Pretty fitting landscape.

[WDeranged]

As much as I love Skyrim's landscape I do hope for something a bit more otherworldly in the DLC's, it's always been Bethesda's strong point.

[Rosbjerg]

Have you seen the Elsweyr mod? Moonpath something.

 

[WDeranged]

Pretty damn cool, really shows you what's going to be possible with the engine

[Lexx]

Yea, would have tried it already, but I am pretty sure it won't run very smooth on my machine.

 

Also I find these airships a bit strange... does that really fit to TES?

[WDeranged]

Yeah, the Dwemer had at least one, you can find the wreckage in the Bloodmoon expansion for Morrowind.

[HoonDing]

A comment in another thread about Joe Abercrombie being a gamer led me to his thoughts on Skyrim:

 

http://www.joeabercrombie.com/2011/12/06/skyrim-2/

 

He seems quite the gamer, actually, now I wonder about Brandon Sanderson.

[Morgoth]

Question: Does the HighRes Texture pack on Steam make any difference? I look at those screenshots and hardly see any improvements. How's performance and loading times with the HD pack?

[Starwars]

There are people who say the modded highres texture packs are better so that may be worth looking into.

 

But you do see a difference when you're playing, definitely. But yes, there is an impact on performance (though I feel it's off-set by the performance improvements in the patches). Loading times are a bit longer but nothing really extreme.

[Drowsy Emperor]

Well a bit of time has passed, so what's the verdict on this game?

[Tale]

It very quickly ended up as my number 3 most played game on Steam. Below Team Fortress 2 and Dragon Age Origins, but right above Fallout New Vegas.

 

I'm surprised at how much time I spent with it, really.

[Starwars]

Personally, I'd say it's like... I dunno, it's like a much, much better Oblivion but it still suffers from many of the same problems.

 

The biggest improvement from Oblivion is the world-building. The world of Skyrim is really excellent to explore on your first time through. The world is intensely beautiful (both in the technical sense and the art direction) and also a lot more varied than Oblivion. Even though it's an obvious northern climate, you have glacier-like areas, you have a tundra, hot springs, big mountains, a forest area, a forest-ish area that feels like it's more in the autumn, a steppe-like area, a murky and gloomy swamp... They did an excellent job at varying the feel of the environment within the northern feel framework.

 

Dungeons are generally better in terms of their story-telling and looks. You often have plenty of notes and journal-entries giving good context for the areas. On the other hand, most of them are *completely* linear. Literally like corridors with extremely dumb... puzzles. Actually not even puzzles, they're just things that you do to go further in the mine. It has the appearance of a puzzle often, but they require not brain power whatsoever.

 

Lore overall is much better. Skyrim has a much better sense of culture and "place" than Oblivion did. The writing for the world itself is really quite good.

 

Where the game really fails for me personally is that, like in Oblivion, there is little reaction to what you do in the world. You can still be head of all the guilds and nothing really changes. The game never really cuts you off from anything or "bites back". Some people think this is the epitome of sandbox gameplay but I think it feels very tepid. And because of this, I don't think I'll ever do a serious replay of the game, it'll just be sorta screwing around and testing out mods.

And it's sort of a crime because the world deserves better. You have strife in Skyrim, you have factions opposed to one another, you have all this stuff in the lore and yet it feels like can only scratch the surface barely. You can't *really* sink your teeth and get creative roleplaying wise because either the game just doesn't react to what you're doing, or it flat out won't let you do some things (like the unkillable NPCs). You can go on a large number of usually very linear quests and watch as rather boring storylines unfold.

 

I bought it at release and I still consider it to have been worth it though because I squeezed quite a lot of "juice" from that first playthrough where all the exploration was new to me. And that to me was really the fun part of Skyrim, the initial exploration of the world. Once that was mostly done, my interest plummeted.

 

I don't think TES and Fallout are in the same subgenre of games but a game like Skyrim could've desperately needed a good injection of New Vegas into it. And I don't even mean that you could potentially solve all quests in a myriad of ways, but I'm talking about the sandbox style gameplay. Reputation checks, opposing factions where it actually means something where you join, removing plot-armor from the NPCs, a Hardcore mode (makes sense given the environment) etc etc.