Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

i bet it's badass

it involves turning into a wereworlf if you have lycanthropy.. fuck that noise. I ran into a couple vampires earlier this morning and freaked out that I would get vampirism..

they got rid of them for oblivion but when you became a vampire in daggerfall you belonged to a particular house of vampires w/ varying benefits and disadvantages. it was very Vampire: the Masquerade'esque

are there whores

vampire whores?

no just whore whores

i'm sure there must be tho now that i think about it i can't remember running into any yet...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=j50u0zUeCmU

i got turned into a vampire.
weaker in sunlight
"possessed of an unearthly thirst"
Took a cure disease potion.
the end.

no shit? that's all it takes to get rid of vampirism these days? the alchemy field has really made some strides over the years...

i think you can also go to a shrine.

in the old days you'd have to find a vampire hunter and get him some ingredients so he could make a cure for you.

ok i have this now due to crafty trading at gamestop

stupid being at work

how the hell have they created the flowing streams of water in this game? shit looks incredible.

TBF that vampirism/cure thing was the same in Oblivion.

Yeah this is a slow starter huh

I got a pretty dope staff valued at 1800 gold twice cuz the staff fell off the body after I killed the dude, then appeared in the inventory of the body too. sweeeeeeet.

jjj: yes but once it gets all four wheels on the ground, whoa nellie

I thought that was a joke because it starts with your execution being interrupted by a dragon burning down a castle

yeah but that intro part's not all that fun, it's basically just a tutorial. the game really picks up when you go into your first dungeon.

Or at the very least when you get out into the open world.

it was that dungeon that got me and the realization that what i thought was gonna be a five minute bullshit excursion was actually a really well crafted trip into the bowels of the earth and each new room opened up into a fresh, unique exciting chunk of architecture

I'm having to curb my competionist tendencies with this, and it feels odd. Usually in a town like Whiterun I'd make sure I'd exhausted all the sidequets before pressing ahead with the main...but the more I clear the more it generates for me, I need to force myself to let go and just move on.

yeah you can't complete all the quests, it'll just generate more. its usually pretty obvious which ones are the main scripted quests and which are the generated ones though.

Already I'm treating this as the last-thing-before-bed relaxing random mission type game that Morrowind was so good for. I'll do the main quest if it's the low-hanging fruit of the minute, otherwise I'll do whatever. Give me a thing and I will do it.

i.e. last night it sent me on a big long mission to find THE SEPTUM OF GOR-BLAGUÜL or some such and at the very end it said "FAIL, SOME GUY BEAT YOU TO IT, NOW GO HERE INSTEAD". Ordinarily I'd be razzed off but with Skyrim I'm not invested in the individual goal so much as the overall experience.

I dunno, I'd find that annoying! I guess it depends how immersive it all is tho.

pickpocketed a guard and got away with it.
wandered out of the city and hey, here's three massive guys he sent to kill me.
Which they do.
Like fifteen times.
Until I just take off running and they get hung up on a bug that keeps them trapped in a small area. So i jump up, fire magic at them to kill them and fall back. and do that like fifteen times.
Some of the glitchy combat makes this not very fun sometimes.

i thought they only send the guards when you don't get away with it. otherwise... how does he know it was you???

i have no idea! but when i ganked the thugs there was a contract on me from a guard in their pockets saying "kill that dirty thief"

does it not tell you if you got caught? that'd be sweet

oh man the possibility that sometimes this game pretends you have successfully pickpocketed someone but then sends powerful assassins to kill you for it is the single best thing i have read about it so far

They were RIDICULOUSLY overpowered; three guys in heavy armor who appeared as soon as i walked out of town, said "We're here to teach you a lesson", surround me and then bang the shit out of me.
Seriously, I kept dying for like ten minutes until I finally leapt over the top one and just lit out running off the side of a cliff on some omar shit.

Already I'm treating this as the last-thing-before-bed relaxing random mission type game that Morrowind was so good for. I'll do the main quest if it's the low-hanging fruit of the minute, otherwise I'll do whatever. Give me a thing and I will do it.

i haven't had much spare time so i've kind of been playing it this way too, and really enjoying it! after thinking about enchanting again (i was whining about it earlier), i realized that the combination of me being a really low-level enchanter and the fact that only filled gem i had was something called a "Petty gem" probably resulted in the really weak results. i'll probably continue to enchant shit, in the hopes that a few weeks i'll be enchanting everything with Inflict Diarrhea

i like that this game is happy at any time to kill you. idk if i am just pushing forward too hard for my level, but i got killed a bunch of times on the thousand steps. fucking troll asshole. i am level 5 btw.

also as an added bonus that def taught me to follow RPG tradition and remember to save often.

from what i have read there are places/enemies in the game that are never leveled down.

this is in the mail!!!

hey btw if i join up with the companions, does that lock me out of the other guilds, or can i switch when i get to the much despised by nords magic college?

i decided to walk to winterhold or whatever, the place with the magic college. i left whiterun on saturday afternoon and kept getting distracted by stuff i came across. investigated a dead horse in front of a lighthouse, spent like 4 hours clearing a dungeon underneath. agreed to investigate some nightmares, ended up arguing with a disembodied daedric lord. i finally got to winterhold on monday night with some not insignificant playtime in between.

i am both a companion and a student at the mages college.

oh also i am enjoying the fairly realistic casual racism that permeates the game, nords saying stuff like "well of course he stole that, hes a dirty elf".

xpost ok awesome. i am thinking that i should derail the main quest after doing this graybeard dungeon crawl and just do random shit for a while.

*indirect spoiler alert, maybe?*

fwiw, i purchased the strategy guide along with the game (hasn't actually helped...at all, basically. i think i just wanted an easy reference table for items and shit, not the other 400 pages that come in the guide), it suggested finishing the first 1/3 or so of the main story arc before branching off, which i think is around 7-9 main quests. the reasoning was that you'd pick up skills and unlock features (like the shout ability, etc) during the course of that first 1/3 that would come in handy with all the sidequests. so i dunno, i'm still doing a lot of random shit but i am trying to finish up this first bit of the main story arc sooner rather than later.

oh hey, should I get this y/n

Definitely.

dan, you will love it.
i got derailed at the greybeards already! too much to do!

so now that people are playing this, is the gameplay/combat actually fun? or is the appeal mostly about exploring the giant massive world, which i think might just stress me out?

i think i might be enjoying this thread more than i would enjoy the actual game.

kk brb, heading to Best Buy

combat is fun but frustrating at times. I really like the brawling.
as mentioned before, enemies often get confused by the parameters in which they can explore and will often stand ten feet in front of you gnashing their teeth and you can fire spell/bow and arrow them to death.
On the other hand, sabretooth tigers are monsters that fly all over the goddamn plain after you. it's inconsistent.

I have a friend who does AI for games and according to him there haven't been major advances in pathing for like forty years.

that sounds about right.