Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

I may have just requested 11/11 off from work >_>

haha awesome

this is pretty much the only game these days that i was willing to preorder without reading a single review first

this and demons' souls, yes.

oh shit, just realized i have november 11 off!
but also that i ordered through amazon and they may not send day of.
I may have to change my shipping method.

just pick the free deliver on day of release option!

?
u pulling my leg?

nope. that and the $10 discounts are really the two best reasons to buy video games from amazon

u r not!
just cancelled my old order and updated! Yay!

i swear that option wasn't there when i pre pre preordered originally

nothing really quite like buying Skyrim for $50 to be delivered to your door the day of release

i dont want to get sucked into this (esp after putting so much time into batman already this month) but damn

so this has basically the same combat mechanics as fallout, right?

pre-download is up on steam <_<

I ordered a copy even though I barely have time for it.

Would love to have a go at this but I could stand to actually play more of/finish Oblivion first, dammit.

basically determined to spend all day 11/11 with this on PS3 as soon as it comes in the mail
will undoubtedly need to spend a half hour downloading patches

I'd real curious to see the first batch of unembargoed reviews; I know they're gonna slaver but I wanna see what bones they pick

will be happy if this game ships even slightly less buggy than fallout 3

I could not get into Oblivion at all but the hype for Skyrim intrigues me.

all the hype of skyrim to me just seems like "Oblivion with dragons!!!!"

i broke down and order this :(((((((

only on my 2nd playthru of dark souls. this will have to wait for a while.

gawd i am so lame: i can't find time for dark souls. gonna save it for christmas break.

This has broken the street date here. Half the people I know have already bought it.

Yeah N says he's on his way to get his now. Unforch its locked to single-user online activation so I wont be able to borrow his copy :( bums. Why didmnt he get a console version dammit.

Mods mods mods. Consoles are nice n all, but you've got to mod these Bethesda games.

I hope my copy arrives on time, I want to spend the weekend hating on this and working out how to fix it, hehe.

yeah i have no idea why i bought this, i thought the skill system in oblivion was retarded and i hated the classes and the combat. but it just looked so gd pretty

I have saved myself considerable amount of time and heartbreak by rendering myself unable to play this game. What you basically need to do is make sure you have no consoles and no PCs in your house and you have to spend all your money.

Pretty dumb but I finally pre-ordered this today. Left it late enough that I'm not going to get delivery until Saturday but I won't have time to play it tomorrow anyway and this way I get a FREE CLOTH MAP.

awwwwww shit really they got a cloth map i am so psyched for this

uh oh - noticed some 9/10 reviews starting to creep in, dragging the average down

i'm kinda excited for this but not enough to marathon it tomorrow. i'll probably play it the same way i played oblivion i.e. wander around and look at things and not advance the storyline much

wtf giving this game clearly the goty and all time 9/10 fuck these assholes this is a perfect game and anyway i notice they gave oblivion 10/10 and then they rite that this is even better than oblivion so how can oblivion get 10/10 but this only get 9/10 also they're clearly sony fucking asshole fanboys bc they don't recognize how great this game is and why do they keep giving 10/10 to sony games like uncharted: indiana jones' revenge when this is clearly superior do u notice they don't mention enough DRAGONs i mean DRAGONS are incredible and also in this game you can do stuff like talk to ppl and wlak around and this is really an 11/10 i mean that's the valid score but i'd forgive someone for giving it 10/10 even bc that's still pretty good but 9/10 is total bullshit. nb i haven't played this game yet but i know it's going to be amazing and these assholes are just looking for attention and that's why they're not giving it the fair score EXPLINA THAT TO ME ECPLAIN THAT!

lol

a spade of dragons

i thought the skill system in oblivion was retarded and i hated the classes and the combat.

― and a butt (Lamp), Thursday, November 10, 2011 12:20 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah i'm kinda waiting to see if the character build system has been overhauled

character build system sounds completely overhauled but combat supposedly still the same old same old. combat never bugged me too much in oblivion but it seemed like a missed opportunity that a part of the game that could potentially be so rich was left so thin.

My Amazon delivery date's moved to Monday. Cloth map be damned. Cancel!

first person melee combat is a tall order, design-wise. i don't know if it's possible to do right.

that is true but they could still do a hell of a lot better.

i would hate this: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/11/09/you-can-play-skyrim-forever.aspx

re melee combat, what the hell i'm just gonna put these here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWISsk0cy74

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTVC25hYJaY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv-Vut0xb9Y

what we know about this kind of fighting is that it was really fluid, even in armor, much more like wrestling with a tool in your hand than swatting at each other.

hmm, i am skeptical. i am pretty sure melee combat is all about standing still and hitting the right trigger over and over until someone is dead. this looks like something else.

first person melee combat is a tall order, design-wise. i don't know if it's possible to do right.― goole

I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to do just that.

A fancy dodge system could help but making melee combat as intuitive as the dodge/block system in Super Punch Out doesn't seem so realistic since Punch Out assumes standing in one place and all the enemies are humans capable of having a smart dodge/block AI.

Then I thoght about having some sort of combo attack system but I've never seen this in a First Person game.

I don't really have any more ideas. One thing I've heard that makes melee combat more fun in Oblivion is having a mod that sends hordes of enemies all at once. I'm sure that would be more fun but it doesn't have much to do with melee mechanics.

If any of you have good ideas I'd like to hear them

the solution is to stop making games where first person is the default view

What was the name of that Source engine game from a couple of years ago which was all based around first person melee combat? Didn't play that far into it but I seem to remember it having some nice ideas.

Ah, Zeno Clash. Might give it another go.

kinda feel like the solution to the first person melee combat problem lies somewhere down the kinect road.

first person perspective is an abomination imo and should be abolished. certainly it has no business in any kind of RPG. and there have been some 3rd person action RPGs that have done combat really well in recent times.

For trapping soul, you need to have empty soul gems on hand. You can find them all over dungeons and buy them in shops, whatevs. But make sure they're empty if you're trying to fill them with souls. And I think you need to cast the spell and then kill the entity upon whom you cast the spell within a limited time? It's been a while because I've been coasting on the dozens of soul gems I filled for quite a while now.

Yep, I have an academic understanding of the mechanics of trapping souls, but I haven't put it into practice yet, mostly because I feel a little too squishy to spend magicka on anything but flaming enemies.

I just played an amazing dungeon that was part of the Hangover quest. So the dungeon is filled with mages, most of whom I can easily dispatch, but at the end I have to fight a fairly high level wizard who throws lightning at me, which I didn't realize also saps my magic on top of pretty sizable damage, meaning I died to this bastard a bunch of times. Out of a sense of let's try something else, I see a hallway I haven't explored yet and sneak into it, and I see that it has a trap where a spiked gate that slams into anyone who steps on a pressure plate. I think that maybe I can lure the wizard into this trap, if he avoids it at least I'm in a place that has a choked point. So I sneak attack him to knock off about a third of his hp, and he starts looking for me as I hightail back to the corridor. He steps on the trap and BOOM the spiked gate finishes him off. The level design and the challenge and the novel solution plus the quest line all made tqhis quest... A NIGHT TO REMEMBER.

yeah, for all the dungeonses linearity you have some real fun leeway in how you go about dealing with the baddies

I'm missing Lydia (RIP) now, because the one housecarl I have access to is Valdimar, and nearly every time I try to give him stuff to carry, he asks me, "Do you want something my thane, or do you want to give me something?" in his deliberate Nordic drawl, which is driving me crazy.

maybe a similar mission, or the same, but I had something similar which took many many attempts and could only be achieved by using a rush shout to cover the distance to the magician, then knocking him unconcious, trying to deal as much damage as possible whilst eating all the apples/bread to keep my health up and once he revived, trying to knock him unconcious again.. any gap or slight deviation would just destroy me and i'd have to start again...

I swear, I took days replaying that same 40 sec part till I had it right, man I miss my Skyrim save on my PS3...

Was there a portal you could go into after you beat the boss? I just finished another quest that culminated in going to another plane of existence to fight a warlock and some high level minions that I had to cheese, but the loot was worth it.

I've been putting off choosing a side, I mean, I instinctively am against imperial hegemons, but I'm a dark elf and the Stormcloaks are racists. Then again, the Stormcloaks weren't the ones who swooped in on a fort I cleared of bandits before I had a chance to collect all the loot because I was already overburdened.

stormcloaks might as well be wearing red Make Skyrim Great Again hats, i couldn't deal with their racist bullshit when i played through in 2011 or whatever but revisiting in this era it's like gah

xps: Yep, illusion tree (which complements with conjuration tree) is easy mode. Spy foes at a distance, cast fury/frenzy/mayhem, twiddle your thumbs, repeat as necessary, send in a atronach to mop up the lone wounded survivor. It's kinda fun with despicable factions (which also include Stormcloaks for me). Playing assassin, just be invisible, all the time. Works perfectly in the basic game, but it has its downsides in character progression facing late game bosses (unless you work up magicka potion making).

The last time I played through (fighting a depressive episode in late 2016) I recall I was barely ever wounded. Just infinite money from potion making, no one could ever see me, most adversaries died to fraternal violence, and my dagger had a 15x damage bonus.

If the basic gameplay loop wasn't so airtight, I might play this again, but forbid myself the "easy mode" perks (which also include archery and all the crafting skills). The lingering appeal seems really in the lore, in 2016 I actually read all the books in a Kindle compilation; its a pretty rich universe, and 15% of the books are actually good writing.

Wow. Always wondered who would ever read all those random books

Most of the texts are only couple pages on the Kindle; 30 seconds to skim. It's a better experience than finding books 2 and 4 of a 4 or 9 volume set in game. I recall the collection was 3 nights for me.

Mind I'd never played the prior games (something like 60% of the books are grandfathered in from them), and am not much of a fantasy-lit fan, yes I made it through LotR as an 11 year old, but balked at Silmarillion. But the nature of the assemblage, built up in geological layers over 5 games, means its a pretty rich universe, with some weird things offscreen. Sometimes one just wants to inhabit a distant universe.

There are whole YouTube channels devoted to exploring obscure corners of the lore, if one just wants to put it on in the background.

i read something recently that said they only really started putting the lore in in Morrowind, but i've never really played Arena or Daggerfall, too clunky. conflicting narratives is a big part of why i love the Elder Scrolls tbh

stormcloaks might as well be wearing red Make Skyrim Great Again hats, i couldn't deal with their racist bullshit when i played through in 2011 or whatever but revisiting in this era it's like gah

So it's choosing between Trump and W? Wonderful.

I pay zero attention to pretty much any video game narrative because narrative is, for whatever reason, the thing that pretty much every video game does the worst. So I've done a pretty good job of ignoring whatever story was taking place throughout the hundreds of hours I've spent on this game.

Narrative has never been Bethesda's strong suit, although Morrowind comes close.

Designers are at pains to reconcile the linear demands of narrative as it unfolds over time (no matter how non-linear the yarn itself purports to be) with the countless options that we have come to expect from video games, which value agency above all. Games such as Skyrim, which stake everything on the freedom to wander, tend to fail as vehicles for storytelling in the traditional sense. Conversely, Planescape: Torment or – if reviewers are to be believed, as I haven't played it yet – Disco Elysium excel in terms of sheer writing, to the extent that gameplay and narrative become indistinguishable. The Witcher 3 comes closest to synthesizing open world design with a story arc worth a damn but it's still too simplistic in the latter department to fully impress (the side quests and DLCs, on the other hand, are stupendously good for the genre).

Note to self: the next time I kill two dragons on my way to a dungeon, gov back to my house to drop off the damn bones and scales. Seriously, I think a quarter of my time playing thus far has been debited solely to inventory management.

#PS4sharehttps://t.co/GBhItadLN3 pic.twitter.com/kVJy6c418R

— Leee (@plechazunga) April 24, 2020

Let’s see if that works, sorry for the PS store link.

One positive of having a companion is that you can make them lug your shit around. Until they die in a battle and you have to make multiple trips back and forth between their corpse and your home in order to get all your shit back.

Yes, inventory management can be a big time suck in this game.

Ah that video came out darker than I expected, it shows me trying to firebolt a frostbite spider in a mine but missing, then resorting to shouting at it which launched it straight up.

Yeah I've been rolling with a companion mage as a pack mule that happens to conjure ice atronachs. I've actually reloaded a previous save if I accidentally kill them to avoid just that scenario, though I didn't do it when I killed Lydia because a) the fight was tough and I didn't want to go through with it again and b) it was in Whiterun so I didn't have to go far to recover the loot.

Always go with the companions that cannot be killed!

Somehow lost Lydia swimming in high seas near Winterhold and now I’ve lost all the loot she was carrying for me

Lydia, oh Lydia, say have you seen Lydia, oh Lydia my pack mule lady

I just picked up a perk where my attacks no longer hurt my companions, so time to let 'er rip!

I tried playing this for the first time a couple weeks ago but didn't get very far. It's very pretty but it also makes me very anxious playing it! Maybe I'm not cut out for CRPGs.

lol i get that a lot, i don't think playing stealthy helps

Every time I come back to this after an extended absence, I'm all like, 'this is one of the best games ever, why would I ever take an extended absence from playing it,' and I'll have a good ol' time for a couple of hours and then the game will inevitably freeze up for no goddamn reason and I'll lose all of the progress I've made in the couple of hours I've been playing and then I'm all like, 'ohhhhh, yeah, this is why I take extended absences from playing it.'

(FTR, I'm pretty sure I turned off autosave because I read somewhere that the autosave function increases the likelihood of random freezeouts, but the failing to manually save is I guess all hubris on my part. But seriously, the brokenness of this game is only just slightly outweighed by its awesomeness.)