Skyrim: thoughts?

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Thu Jan 05, 2012 4:49 pm

I dunno, I mostly ignore the cooldown powers, and the skill trees are mostly crap with nice highlights. Most of my perks are "+1 to damage", after all, even if a few are great.

I think Skyrim shows that even if your game's magic system has many problems, even if a great number of the rules don't actually work (i.e., bugs), even if there's disparity between classes and some skill trees are ridiculously more powerful than others...the game can still be wildly popular as long as the base world the game plays in is interesting.

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Thu Jan 05, 2012 5:40 pm

You can't compare the two because they happen across different time frames. Skyrim effectively has no cooldowns for the same reason that Neverwinter Nights effectively has no cooldowns: the game is running too fast for you to care that there's actually a two-second delay between sword swings. Additionally, because you have to choose actions and targeting in realtime, your options in Skyrim are by necessity much more narrow and direct than DND options, otherwise you'd run into option paralysis.

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Thu Jan 05, 2012 6:34 pm

Doom wrote: I think Skyrim shows that even if your game's magic system has many problems, even if a great number of the rules don't actually work (i.e., bugs), even if there's disparity between classes and some skill trees are ridiculously more powerful than others...the game can still be wildly popular as long as the base world the game plays in is interesting.

In a single player game, game balance isn't always all that important. There's nobody else's spotlight to consider, so you can just go and make the main character as powerful or as weak as you want.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Fri Jan 06, 2012 2:03 am

Parthenon wrote:Another thing is that a huge number of people want to make our weapons and armour ourselves, and that some sort of secondary skill that adds increasingly powerful masterwork bonuses onto an existing magical weapon could work.

Skyrim may have gone a bit too far on the masterwork bonus though. Smithing bonuses can improve weapons to retardedly high levels to the point that they can outshine magical enchantments.

Ganbare Gincun · Post by **Ganbare Gincun** » Fri Jan 06, 2012 5:15 am

Swordslinger wrote:In a single player game, game balance isn't always all that important. There's nobody else's spotlight to consider, so you can just go and make the main character as powerful or as weak as you want.

When you have two character types that can kill things relatively quickly at high levels and one character type that takes forever to kill things at higher levels, you have a design problem on your hands that is going to be a very unpleasant surprise for 33% of your players starting about halfway through the game. Thank god I bought Skyrim for the PC. lol

Vnonymous · Post by **Vnonymous** » Fri Jan 06, 2012 5:42 pm

Skyrim has a whole bunch of problems that a lot of people in this thread (and even me in another thread) have pointed out. It really isn't quite finished, and needed more work and more effort put into the quests(making them actual quests rather than, you know, fedex missions).

But when the creation kit comes out, the game will become pretty decent. Oblivion was fixed from a pile of arse into a much less shit game by some mods(FCOM for one), and I personally can't wait to make some awesome fucking mods for Skyrim. Imagine a skyrim with a combat system that worked like Dark Souls, more options for quests(even having options at all for some of them), non linear dungeons, a world that reacts more to what you do and has more interesting spells and effects.

That's when I'll play Skyrim again.

Although really, I think we'll be better off waiting for the Creation kit to come along and someone to make a total conversion. There's just too much stuff that, thanks to voice acting, can't really be fixed by anyone who isn't Bethesda.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Thu Jun 14, 2012 3:48 pm

Does anyone know of a 3.X conversion for the Dragon Shouts, specifically for a Dragonborn that takes the armored fighter archetype for combat (bear constellation?)?

NineInchNall · Post by **NineInchNall** » Thu Jun 14, 2012 11:23 pm

Kaelik wrote:I still don't understand why all durational buffs in all video games are not set to either on giving their benefit and decreasing your maximum magicka slightly, or off, not doing anything.

Why the fuck have they not figured out that recasting the same thing whenever it wears out is the most boring stupid shitty thing that anyone ever does in any videogame. Even stupider than crafting 40,000 leather bracers to skill up.

As a mild bit of self-promotion ...

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Thu Jun 28, 2012 4:33 am

So, anyone get Dawnguard? Apparently you can be a flying vampire now...

NineInchNall · Post by **NineInchNall** » Thu Jun 28, 2012 5:05 am

Nah, Bethesda doesn't get any more of my money until their games don't require tons of mods to make good.

Seriously, I have over 200 mods installed and active. Only a small portion of those are extraneous things like anime armor. Most of them are graphic, sound, and gameplay updates to make the game not look/sound/play like it was released 10 years ago.

For example, here's a before and after of just a small patch of ground:

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Thu Jun 28, 2012 6:21 am

Yeah, Skyrim was basically my last besthesda game. It was fun, I sunk tons of hours into it, but once you've experienced it all the glaring problems become obvious and infuriating. Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas, Fallout, and Oblivion were all games that were in need of what was basically an entire overhaul. For all the same reasons.

If I pick up anymore Bethesda games, it will be because they are dirt cheap at the time.

Aryxbez · Post by **Aryxbez** » Thu Jun 28, 2012 10:45 pm

DSMatticus wrote:Yeah, Skyrim was basically my last besthesda game. It was fun, I sunk tons of hours into it, but once you've experienced it all the glaring problems become obvious and infuriating. Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas, Fallout, and Oblivion were all games that were in need of what was basically an entire overhaul. For all the same reasons.

If I pick up anymore Bethesda games, it will be because they are dirt cheap at the time.

Fair enough, I myself probably won't pick up any DLC, unless they're far more compelling, and otherwise go down in price ($20 for Dawnguard?!). Although, to nitpick, Fallout: New Vegas was done by Obsidian Entertainment, Bethesda was just the publisher. Otherwise, the Fallout games seemed to be the better of the games using that engine, in setting/story, gameplay and the math otherwise working better (New Vegas stretched levels to 35, but breaks down after that point padded sumo style like in Fallout 3).

Do you think the Rage! game engine would be good for a future Fallout game?

Also given they've somewhat worked on, or otherwise own Fallout titles, I wonder why haven't learned from those games for quest lines. Good sum in Elder Scrolls games as obvious, don't offer any real choice, it's pretty much "heroic guy" all the way. Although the DLC sounds vaguely promising with the idea player might be able to help the villain swallow the sun or something.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Thu Jun 28, 2012 11:23 pm

Aryxbez wrote:Although, to nitpick, Fallout: New Vegas was done by Obsidian Entertainment, Bethesda was just the publisher.

It's fairly obvious where New Vegas took its design queues from, so I'll concede the technicality and maintain that the point stands. It is an improvement on Fallout in terms of gameplay (and then a kick in the nuts in terms of content, sadly).

But the Fallout games mostly just annoyed me. How hard is it to instead of pretending to be a shooter-RPG, to just be a shooter-RPG? (Auto-aim, I'm looking at you. Also, less cartoony 'pewpewpew away the bandits hitpoints with numbers,' more actiony.) And I'd really like some massive delevelling in virtually all Bethesda games. There do need to be 'this tall to ride' benchmarks for fighting the super powerful things, but bandits should stay fun-to-beat-up encounters, and not because you give them 10 times as many hitpoints as you did before and give them the best equipment in the game. That is the opposite of fun. It would actually be less harmful to the game to just have bandits there and steamroll them than to turn them each into a pink-skinned human daedra. But ideally, a combat system that makes lots of low-level mooks actually a threat to high-level opposition would work fairly well for a Bethesda game, and hitpoint bloat is generally very bad at that sort of thing.

NineInchNall · Post by **NineInchNall** » Thu Jun 28, 2012 11:39 pm

The math in New Vegas was odd. The fact that it took 50 sneak-headshots from my rifle to kill a deathclaw was utterly retarded.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 1:11 am

NineInchNall wrote:The math in New Vegas was odd. The fact that it took 50 sneak-headshots from my rifle to kill a deathclaw was utterly retarded.

Indeed, the level of just HP piling they did was dumb as shit.

And I may remember this wrong, but didn't Deathclaws have like no armor too, so the big lean tough scaly thing was taken out best by flak instead of armor piercing. That was dumb as shit.

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 3:10 am

NineInchNall wrote:Nah, Bethesda doesn't get any more of my money until their games don't require tons of mods to make good.

Seriously, I have over 200 mods installed and active. Only a small portion of those are extraneous things like anime armor. Most of them are graphic, sound, and gameplay updates to make the game not look/sound/play like it was released 10 years ago.

I think its part of the bethesda model that players can go in and re-texture everything. Even if Bethesda did make everything super beautiful (which Skyrim was much better than previous games) people would be going out and improving on them. I agree it is kind of annoying but I doubt they are likely to change it.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 5:13 am

Kaelik wrote:And I may remember this wrong, but didn't Deathclaws have like no armor too, so the big lean tough scaly thing was taken out best by flak instead of armor piercing. That was dumb as shit.

For New Vegas: I'm going off a wiki instead of the construction set since I no longer have the game installed, but they have 15 DT, and take a flat 15 damage off of every hit. That's actually fairly good armor.

Now, Fallout 3 did not have DT. It had nothing but DR, which was a flat percentage reduction on all incoming damage (and also had no armor piercing effects whatsoever). The end result of this is that wearing armor is just a way to directly multiply your already huge hitpoint total, and who you were shooting at did not affect the utility of your weapon in anyway.

Skyrim went with Fallout 3's idea, which came from Oblivion, which came from Morrowind, and I don't know any further back than that despite my best efforts because those games have not aged well in any way. But as far as I know, Bethesda has always been terrible at armor. Terrible, terrible, terrible.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 12:07 pm

I have no idea if anyone mentioned this yet, but I hated the fact that you had to give up one of the most useful Daedric Artifacts (the Skeleton Key) in order to progress the Thieves Guild quest line. Also, has anyone noticed that quest locations and such are randomized like in Daggerfall? At least there quest targets.

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 4:21 pm

Oh c'mon, if you're doing the thieve's guild, the skeleton key isn't all that good for you (doesn't it prevent you gaining locksmith skill?); if you're in the guild, you can buy all the picks you want and should get the hang of lockpicking anyway.

There is a randomized quest system; it's most noticeable in the Thief quests because you need to do alot of them to get shops installed in your guild. The werewolf guild (sorry, forgot the name, but the guys that want to make you a werewolf) also has such a system, but it's easy to not notice since you get so little for doing those quests, and no long term goal, either.

Istred · Post by **Istred** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 4:59 pm

Every guild has such a system - but only in the Thieves Guild those quests matter.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 6:04 pm

CapnTthePirateG wrote:So, anyone get Dawnguard? Apparently you can be a flying vampire now...

Its apparently only out for the xbox (and will remain so for at least a few weeks).

Personally, I don't know. I had more fun than I expected with Skyrim itself, despite the horrible A and B plots, but the expansion is apparently all about Vampires, Furries and Crossbows, so I can't bring myself to care that much.

Desdan_Mervolam · Post by **Desdan_Mervolam** » Sat Jun 30, 2012 12:16 am

I haven't played Skyrim yet, because I don't own a console and my computer isn't beefy enough. But I don't doubt that I will eventually. To be perfectly frank, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout:New Vegas have spoiled me to the point where I get frustrated if I can't tell the main quest to fuck off for an hour or two while I go see what's going on in that direction.

Antariuk · Post by **Antariuk** » Sat Jun 30, 2012 1:24 am

Desdan_Mervolam wrote:I haven't played Skyrim yet, because I don't own a console and my computer isn't beefy enough. But I don't doubt that I will eventually. To be perfectly frank, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout:New Vegas have spoiled me to the point where I get frustrated if I can't tell the main quest to fuck off for an hour or two while I go see what's going on in that direction.

Wait, what?
That was one of the, if not the only, major selling point of these games: that you could easily abandon the main questline at like any time. If you wander off to explore something else, there is exactly zero negative impact.

Btw, if your computer can handle Fallout 3, it can handle Skyrim. There are some tweaking guides, and you definitely want to habe custom low-res textures from skyrimnexus.com or whatever, but it should be perfectly playable.

Desdan_Mervolam · Post by **Desdan_Mervolam** » Sat Jun 30, 2012 2:54 am

Antariuk wrote:
Desdan_Mervolam wrote:I haven't played Skyrim yet, because I don't own a console and my computer isn't beefy enough. But I don't doubt that I will eventually. To be perfectly frank, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout:New Vegas have spoiled me to the point where I get frustrated if I can't tell the main quest to fuck off for an hour or two while I go see what's going on in that direction.
Wait, what?
That was one of the, if not the only, major selling point of these games: that you could easily abandon the main questline at like any time. If you wander off to explore something else, there is exactly zero negative impact.

Congrats, you successfully found my point. Playing Bethesda games has gotten me to the point where other games I play disappoint me with their inflexibility.

Darth Rabbitt · Post by **Darth Rabbitt** » Fri Jul 06, 2012 3:56 pm

Love it so far, but why the fuck did they think keeping leveled equipment was a good idea?

That was the stupidest shit implemented in Oblivion.