So, Skyrim's out 11/11/11

[RTM]

Hmmm... out today everywhere BUT rural North Dakota

You have to have Steam anyhow, you may as well just buy it from there.

Just finished up my 1st 5 hours with the game. It's pretty fun! Better than Oblivion so far, and I don't feel like I'm as weak as I was at the start of Morrowind. Not terribly impressed with the graphics (running everything on Ultra) - there are some truly ugly textures. The atmosphere is fantastic though. I ran through a few dungeons, stumbled across a few bandit camps and some random houses out in the middle of nowhere, did a few quests. I've only explored a tiny fraction of the map.

How do you do a power attack? I see in the perks that it exists, but I'm not sure how to actually pull it off. My melee combat so far has consisted of wildly flailing around until either the bad guy or myself falls over.

[Treesh]

How do you do a power attack? I see in the perks that it exists, but I'm not sure how to actually pull it off. My melee combat so far has consisted of wildly flailing around until either the bad guy or myself falls over.

Well, with a controller, you hold down the attack button instead of tapping it. You can also move items instead of taking them if you hold the activate button for a little longer and then tap once you've moved the object into place. I keep accidentally moving the dead bodies around instead of looting. =D

[kandrathe]

Edit: Woohoo! You don't have to have an idiot fence to sell stolen things! It's back to Daggerfall rules - I can sell it right to the guy I stole it from. =D

Edit2: Not quite Daggerfall rules though. He bought some stuff back, but not all of it. This calls for more experimental thievery. *nodnodnod* I wonder if the stuff laying around is flagged differently than the stuff I grab out of his containers. Maybe that's the difference.

I always wondered how the vendor two cities away could tell the difference between a stolen Scrib jelly and one I acquired from a Scrib.

[Treesh]

Edit: Woohoo! You don't have to have an idiot fence to sell stolen things! It's back to Daggerfall rules - I can sell it right to the guy I stole it from. =D

Edit2: Not quite Daggerfall rules though. He bought some stuff back, but not all of it. This calls for more experimental thievery. *nodnodnod* I wonder if the stuff laying around is flagged differently than the stuff I grab out of his containers. Maybe that's the difference.

I always wondered how the vendor two cities away could tell the difference between a stolen Scrib jelly and one I acquired from a Scrib.

Well, apparently what I sold back to him wasn't what I stole from him in the first place because he's not buying my stolen goods now. Bugger.

Edit: Even the stuff I pickpocketed from folks in the inn he won't take. Guess I'll just have to find the thieves guild. *shakes her fist at Bethesda*

Edit2: After finally sitting down and actually PLAYING instead of just messing around with five million new characters, crafting, thievery stuffs, and general learning, this game really does beat Oblivion hands down. Not actually choosing anything beyond race at the beginning was a little odd for me and some other minor control things made it feel like it wasn't a TES game, but the playstyle is still there. The flexibility is still there. And I don't have to play as a silly mage just to feel like I can be effective. I like the melee combat in this one better because, while you still can move to get different power strikes in, that's not the sole purpose of the movement. Plus, I LOVE that whole bash deal to knock 'em off balance enough to really land a good, hard power strike. You bash by holding the block key and tapping the attack key. It just feels like better melee. Although I still prefer to open with a bowshot from stealth. =D

Bethesda, much MUCH improvement on Oblivion, especially with not having the retarded mob leveling system. This means I definitely have a game that will tide me over until D3 and I don't have to keep paying for RIFT to get crafting done either. =) Oh! And on the plus side, you can actually get upgrades from the dungeon loot instead of being stuck with the same crap for level after level after level so I get a little "Oooh! What dropped?" bit too. Although I still haven't found an enchanter's altar/table thingy yet, but I also haven't looked too closely for one either. =)

All in all, definitely worth it. It will be even more worth it when they release the Creation Kit (previously known as the construction set) and I can fiddle around again. =D

*does a happy dance around the room before leaving to beat the ever living crap out of nasty undead things*

By the way, going through all the damned spider webs in the dungeons literally made me do one of those all over body shakes to get rid of the creepy crawly feeling. HATE spiders.

[Frag]

Hmmm... out today everywhere BUT rural North Dakota

You have to have Steam anyhow, you may as well just buy it from there.

The Steam requirement really bugs me. So far I've held off on buying it partially because of that, partially because it's only partially threaded (wtf is with building a CPU limited engine and then disabling using more than 2 cores? If they eventually update the engine I'll probably jump in then).

Not terribly impressed with the graphics (running everything on Ultra) - there are some truly ugly textures.

This might help, Tom's showed that enabling hardware Adaptive AA / TrSSAA apparently helps out quite a bit with the ugly outdoor textures w/o making everything blurry by just enabling FXAA, the is difference shown on the linked page and four pages forward you can see the hardware requirements for enabling hardware AA.

Regards,
~Frag

[Tris]

I checked out the price and went ack. It's tied to Steam... bleh. Really liked that TES's weren't really tied to any crap like that.

[Treesh]

Why are people so annoyed with it being on Steam? I like it. I like having digital copies of this stuff instead of always having to fight with discs.

[Kevin]

Why are people so annoyed with it being on Steam? I like it. I like having digital copies of this stuff instead of always having to fight with discs.

I resisted Steam at first too, didn't get it until the put Portal up for free on it. Now I love it. There were some games I thought about getting that I didn't buy because I couldn't get them on Steam.

I know I resisted it because I didn't want to be online for for a single player game. But offline mode works fine to deal with that. I also didn't like the idea of something else running on my machine but it's not a big deal to configure that. I've even turned some of the auto updating stuff back on.

That's what I can remember as to why I avoided it, but I don't really remember fully why anymore.

[LochnarITB]

Why are people so annoyed with it being on Steam? I like it. I like having digital copies of this stuff instead of always having to fight with discs.

My aversion comes from what came before. Another similar service is WildTangent. I don't know what it is like now but it has cost me large chunks of hair. It came as bloatware on systems I've had to deal with. It caused all kinds of trouble and then trying to excise it from the system was like rooting out a nasty virus. Blech.

[Thenryb]

[quote='Treesh' pid='191417' dateline='1321154800']
Why are people so annoyed with it being on Steam? I like it. I like having digital copies of this stuff instead of always having to fight with discs.

I agree with not having to bother with discs. I never sell my games as used games but if I wanted to sell my Fallout New Vegas disc, for example, it would be worthless since it is registered to me no one else could play it on Steam even offline. As to Skyrim itself, I find some things really confusing such as assigning perks. Every time I level up I get some message about the number of perks which are now unlocked but have no clue in how to choose one. I can scroll through the various perks, some of which my character does not have the levels required to select but even for those he does (eg "barbarian") there seems to be no way to select it. I push on the mouse key and it just scrolls to the next perk. I definitely do not like the inability to assign various weapons to hotkeys. To switch you have to hit "Q" and scroll down your list of "favorites" with your somewhat unresponsive mouse. I suppose the controls are an example of the game being "consolized" (yet another new word I have just come across).

I was thinking of starting a new character and feared that what Treesh said would be true-no way to bypass the introduction. That is so annoying. That same thing was true in Mass Effect 2. The writers are so proud of their work that they think we all need to watch it multiple times. I have been playing Fallout New Vegas. Each of the DLCs as well as the main game has a lengthy introduction and epilogue which cannot be bypassed and which is extremely tiresome.

[Treesh]

I suppose the controls are an example of the game being "consolized" (yet another new word I have just come across).

The controls are definitely set up with a controller in mind rather than a keyboard. It works great with a controller. Although if you're a spellcaster, using the favorites gets a little annoying, but if you're mostly a physical damage dealer, it works pretty well to quick swap between them. I do prefer how they did hotkeys for the consoles in Oblivion (get to save 8 on the directional pad), but it's doable how they have it for console anyway. I guess they just wanted the UI a bit sleeker or something.

I was thinking of starting a new character and feared that what Treesh said would be true-no way to bypass the introduction.

There is a little bit of a shortcut though. It does a save right before you tell Hadvar your name so you don't have to watch the motion-sickness inducing wagon ride at least. Or maybe I did it myself? I think it automatically did it though even though it didn't call it an autosave. I don't think I would have thought ahead enough to come up with that.

[Quark]

Why are people so annoyed with it being on Steam? I like it. I like having digital copies of this stuff instead of always having to fight with discs.

My aversion comes from what came before. Another similar service is WildTangent. I don't know what it is like now but it has cost me large chunks of hair. It came as bloatware on systems I've had to deal with. It caused all kinds of trouble and then trying to excise it from the system was like rooting out a nasty virus. Blech.

Did you really just compare Steam to WildTangent? Really? I just ... there are no words.

Steam used to suck, flat out, but never did anything suspicious. It doesn't suck anymore (it's been good quality for at least the last 5 years), and chances are if you're buying games not released in the past month, your best bet is Steam and its sales.

[LochnarITB]

Why are people so annoyed with it being on Steam? I like it. I like having digital copies of this stuff instead of always having to fight with discs.

My aversion comes from what came before. Another similar service is WildTangent. I don't know what it is like now but it has cost me large chunks of hair. It came as bloatware on systems I've had to deal with. It caused all kinds of trouble and then trying to excise it from the system was like rooting out a nasty virus. Blech.

Did you really just compare Steam to WildTangent? Really? I just ... there are no words.

Steam used to suck, flat out, but never did anything suspicious. It doesn't suck anymore (it's been good quality for at least the last 5 years), and chances are if you're buying games not released in the past month, your best bet is Steam and its sales.

Yeppers, I did indeed. That was the first thought that came to mind when I started hearing of Steam. A taste as bad as WildTangent is often very difficult to get out of your mouth. Also note that I do have Steam on my personal machine, although used only a few times for demos, so I am working on my aversion with exposure therapy.

[Rhydderch Hael]

I was thinking of starting a new character and feared that what Treesh said would be true-no way to bypass the introduction.

There is a little bit of a shortcut though. It does a save right before you tell Hadvar your name so you don't have to watch the motion-sickness inducing wagon ride at least. Or maybe I did it myself? I think it automatically did it though even though it didn't call it an autosave. I don't think I would have thought ahead enough to come up with that.

It's not an Autosave, but the game does generate "Save 001" automatically for you at that point.

What I have problem with is the fact that you cannot see your character in third-person until you've gone through the motions of the opening attack. Only after you're freed of your bonds can you use the external camera and see if your character's face turned out any at all decent.

Next time, I'm going to open the debugging console immediately after char creation and toggle the free camera. Though I suspect, since I'll be engaging the free camera while in first-person view, I still will not be able to see my character's model.

[[wcip]Angel]

lvl 12 female wood-elf, bow in hand, done a few random quests and explored parts of the landscape.

Just killed my first dragon. Impressions so far? A bit "meh".

Pros:
* Incredible world. There are no games other than TES that manage to create a space where you just want to stop and look around you all the time. Nature kicks ass!
* Variety: character customisation, quest types, landscapes, monsters, stuff to do. You shouldn't tire of this game easily.
* Decent graphics and music

The cons (IMHO):
* It's dull. The characters, the dialogue and the quests don't manage to inspire any sort of emotion in me. I'm constantly thinking of The Witcher2 while playing Skyrim. TW2 felt more like an actual story instead of a long list of fetch/kill-quests set in a fantasy world.

That's it really. I could point out a few shortcomings when it comes to simplistic melee-combat, bugs or other normal detractors; but I don't really feel the need to. 1 bulleted point for "cons" is enough when that point is *so* crucial (to me).

I don't care about variety in character custommisation, the length of the game or the size of the world, the number of NPCs, how they've improved level scaling from Oblivion, the lovely sunsets and the sprawling forests. I don't care about anything but story and dialogue and character. I wish I could ignore this, because I do see that Skyrim is a fantastic game in so many ways.

I get the sense that my disappointment with Skyrim is a continuation of my weening interest in sandbox-games. I loved Morrowind and Oblivion, but I never finished GTA4 or Red Dead Redemption, which were fantastic (yet dull) games. I've been in the business of loving video games for so long now that I realise now that I need an auteur, an artist or a director, showing me a piece of work; I need a directed experience; not sandboxy freedom of "gamer empowerment". I'd rather have a focussed experience - a 10 hour game making me laugh and cry over an engrossing storyline and interesting characters, rather than play a 100 hour game of patted out fetch/kill-quests in beautiful setting.

I'll keep playing the main story line and hope I'll connect with the characters a bit more, but so far, I'm actually considering playing through The Witcher2 a 5th time rather than completing Skyrim.

[RTM]

As to Skyrim itself, I find some things really confusing such as assigning perks. Every time I level up I get some message about the number of perks which are now unlocked but have no clue in how to choose one. I can scroll through the various perks, some of which my character does not have the levels required to select but even for those he does (eg "barbarian") there seems to be no way to select it. I push on the mouse key and it just scrolls to the next perk. I definitely do not like the inability to assign various weapons to hotkeys. To switch you have to hit "Q" and scroll down your list of "favorites" with your somewhat unresponsive mouse. I suppose the controls are an example of the game being "consolized" (yet another new word I have just come across).

On the PC, you can assign keys 1-9 to items in your favorites menu. Just open your favorites, hover over the item you want to hotkey, and hit the hotkey. It gets a little wonky when you have 2 of an item (i.e. 2 of the same bow) and will erase your hotkey binding from time to time, but in general it works.

I agree with the consolized complaint. The whole interface is WAY clunkier than it has to be on PC, and the only reason is because they had to make it work on a controller.

[Kevin]

I agree with the consolized complaint. The whole interface is WAY clunkier than it has to be on PC, and the only reason is because they had to make it work on a controller.

Which is why I'm playing it with the X-Box 360 controller on my PC. That's what it is was designed for it and plays quite well with that. I found the same thing with Dungeon Siege 3 when I was trying it. It played fine on the PC with the 360 controller plugged in since that is what it was designed for and like I mentioned in a thread about that game a game isn't automatically worse just because of the interface device. TES games have never really required rapid turning like other FPS games so moving with the controller actually feels smoother than keys and mouse in this one. I also don't have a wireless keyboard or mouse anymore so the 360 Controller lets me sit on the couch and play if I want. My desk chair is nice but it's not the couch or recliner.

I'm enjoying it a lot more than Oblivion. I'm only an L8 Breton Mage / Thief (OK I don't really steal, but I sneak all the time and blowing people up with dual cast lightning bolts out of nowhere is satisfying) who will pull out the dwarven mace and hide shield if need be. I've put down the bow now that I've got long range spells.

I'm actually enjoying the main quest line more than in Oblivion or Morrowind. I've also enjoyed the side quests a bit more. I'm a bit opposite of [wcip]Angel in that I actually feel this world is more alive than previous TES games and the side quests have a bit more meaning. So his con is actually a pro for me when compared to the other TES games. I just think it's a richer world and while bucket head thievery is a major AI flaw, the AI is much more robust than it was in the previous games. Sure it's not the story like the Mass Effect games had but I'm enjoying it and I still like being able to go off the rails.

The improvements to the leveling system don't make me feeling like I have to use skills I don't care about to maximize level games. I play how I like and the more I do that, the faster those skills move up. That is a HUGE plus over the old TES games.

Of course the first thing I had to do was hit ~ and type FOV 85 so that the motion didn't bug me (default field of view was 60 I think) I tested with 70, 75, 80, 85, and 90; 85 works best for me.

Yes I got way sidetracked during my reply.

[Thenryb]

[Quote]Which is why I'm playing it with the X-Box 360 controller on my PC.[EndQuote]

It did not occur to me you could do that. I suppose you just get a controller separately and download the software? I am not sure Skyrim is worth the trouble, but that would enable you to play the game as it was apparently designed and still get mods which I find are always necessary for Bethesda games both because they are so buggy and because the characters are so ugly

[Kevin]

It did not occur to me you could do that. I suppose you just get a controller separately and download the software? I am not sure Skyrim is worth the trouble, but that would enable you to play the game as it was apparently designed and still get mods which I find are always necessary for Bethesda games both because they are so buggy and because the characters are so ugly

I got a wired controller plugged it into my Win7 machine and was done. It has native support. The wireless controllers you need to buy a receiver that plugs in then deal with batteries. I didn't feel like it. The 20 foot cord the wired ones come with works fine for my PC and it was only like $30. I actually got it so that free copy of Dirt 2 I got with my video card would be playable but have used it for several other games (and emulators as well playing old genesis games needs a game pad). Worked great for Fallout 3, Dirt 2, Dungeon Siege 3, and now Skyrim.

[Thenryb]

Thanks, Gnollguy. I will definitely check that out. I am still running xp, so I need to make sure it either has native support or software is readily available. Man, I haven't messed with a controller since Mario2 and Goldeneye days.

As to Skyrim, I agree with some of the earlier comments to the effect that the game is simply dull. I have done very few sidequests that I did not regret accepting. It is to the point that if I do bother to talk to some random NPC, I think I will stop offering to "help". I wish I had never talked with some priestess in Whiterun who wanted to revive the elder tree there. A pure PITA quest with no reward. I thought my character would never escape the spriggins who spawned toward the end of the quest. As in Oblivion they regenerate health rapidly and drop nothing worthwhile. The main quest seems mildly interesting so I may just continue with that if I continue at all. This is unlike Oblivion where you could spend hours on various sidequests without ever completing the main quest.