Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

[Lantyssa]

Hi, I'm an explorer.  I like playing with all kinds of skills.  Most of them weren't combat.

[Sky]

Yes. You can make excuses til the sun goes down, they fucked core game systems. Did they learn the lesson for TES5? Let's hope Fallout helped.

[Sheepherder]

Hi, I'm an explorer.  I like playing with all kinds of skills.  Most of them weren't combat.

Hi, right before my post I left the Imperial City Dungeons on a stock knight character, hit AdvancePCLevel 10 times to simulate the worst possible way you could level (x1 attribute modifiers, no skill gain) and knocked over the top level of Vilverin in two pieces of rusty plate with a steel shortsword on normal difficulty, netting myself a spiffy Dwarven Warhammer.  Maybe next time I'll do it with the stock Bard class.

Yes. You can make excuses til the sun goes down, they fucked core game systems. Did they learn the lesson for TES5? Let's hope Fallout helped.

Like having armor and weapons equipped that you're trained in to fight effectively, unless you happen to drop the difficulty, at which point you could kill anything with a rusty spoon?

EDIT: My spoonyness has blocked out the sun.  I netted some ~3000g in loot in the process.

[Slyfeind]

I started playing Oblivion just a few weeks ago. My only complaint is it seems so damn small. It's like the whole game is a little forested town with neighborhoods that they call "cities". Decent looking though, and a heck of a lot of fun to run around in. I honestly don't give a piss about the core game system because it doesn't get in the way of me seeing all the cool shit.

I did cheat my way through the vampire thing though. I had to alt-tab (meaning save and quit and load a browser then reload the game because it won't let me alt-tab) too much to figure out what to do, and I wanted to get back to saving the world, so I did a ~player.additem EverythingForTheVampireCure just to get it over with.

Still playing the crap out of it.

[Sheepherder]

Huh, what's this disease?  Doesn't seem too harmful, what's with the ominous Latin name?

[Ingmar]

In the unmodded game leveling too many non-combat skills won't fuck your game unless you get absolutely "I'm level ten and haven't gotten a single skill up that will aid me in combat, or used any of my non-combat abilities to acquire better equipment" retarded about it.

It is pretty easy to fuck yourself over with a custom class, you pick off a bunch of interesting looking stuff from the list, level up a bunch running around crafting crap or whatever, and then you wander into that troll painting quest and doom. 

It also leads to the lawl of the 'optimal' way to play in a certain sense being pick only skills you'll NEVER use as your class skills, and finish the game at level 2. Intuitive, it is not.

[Sheepherder]

I probably should have taken Mercantile instead of Sneak, not that it mattered the way I did it.  And no, there are no other mods except bugfixes and UI stuff.

Not that your unintuitive argument is ungrounded, because the system is shitty.  It's just far harder to completely doom your character than you make it out to be.  In fact, I think I might try dropping the difficulty to minimum and fight my way through the trolls.

Please sir, may I have another?

[Lantyssa]

Look, maybe you're the gods' gift to gaming.  Because I didn't mod the leveling system, my first playthrough wasn't very enjoyable.  I got a good ways, but it wasn't fun, and it caused me to restart with one of the more reasonable systems which was that my tag skills are what determined my level, while the others just added to stats.

Whether it's doable or not is irrelevant.  That was my experience.

[Sheepherder]

Those pics were an unmodded leveling system, which is a shitpile.  That being said, the vanilla system only grants levels based on major skillups, and does in fact grant stat bonuses for minor skill ups.  The problem with it is that you can only assign three stats to go up per level and any bonuses you don't use are lost, so the optimal way to level is to get 3x5 stat bonuses by leveling one major skill ten times and two other skills with different governing stats ten times each while avoiding using all other skills, which is needlessly neckbeardy.

Anyways, I cheated my level up to 21 using the console, getting the minimum of attribute points per level (3), and sticking them all into intelligence/willpower/personality.  In that quest Ingmar mentioned I just grabbed the scripted poisons the questgiver hands you, dodged through all the trolls, looted the quest item needed to escape, sprinted back to the quest-giver, and when the two trolls that followed me back were busy raping the quest giver I danced up behind them and stabbed them in the back with two of the scripted poisons each, which was immediately fatal.  At which point I handed the quest item to the erstwhile punching bag and sauntered out of the pocket world to be greeted by the adulation of the humble peasant folk.

I was just roleplaying a Bard.

I like to imagine I was squealing like a girl the entire time.

[Tebonas]

You just proofed Lantyssas point there.

Really, I love the Elder Scroll games. But that was always despite the Leveling system. It is indefensibly bad.

[Sheepherder]

You just proofed Lantyssas point there.

Not really.  I have yet to find any insurmountable "you must be this combat focused min/maxing to play" moments, unless you have some strange aversion to the difficulty slider, in which case neither I nor Bethesda can help you.

Oh, and apparently it's totally viable to strip naked and punch the trolls to death at minimum difficulty, same character on an earlier save.

[Slyfeind]

It is pretty easy to fuck yourself over with a custom class, you pick off a bunch of interesting looking stuff from the list, level up a bunch running around crafting crap or whatever, and then you wander into that troll painting quest and doom. 

It also leads to the lawl of the 'optimal' way to play in a certain sense being pick only skills you'll NEVER use as your class skills, and finish the game at level 2. Intuitive, it is not.

I'd say it's not intuitive to someone who has never played a fantasy RPG about killing things. It's entirely possible someone might think this is a game only about picking flowers while jumping through a field, but if you've ever played a game about killing medieval monsters, there's just some things it's safe to assume (i.e. players are going to pick skills that have to do with killing medieval monsters).

[Bunk]

I remember that quest well. Was about 8th level, playing a rogue archer type. Apparently I missed with the poisoned arrows, cause the trolls didn't die. And there were no shadowy places in that entire world to sneak in.

About an hour worth of perching later - including having to jump off and run in circles to pick up arrows that missed - I finally got out of there.

The problem with the balance was that everything seemed balanced towards heavy armor / big weapon melee. Anything else, and you better get skilled at running backwards while shooting, or have a really high jump skill.

[Sheepherder]

Actually, it heavily favours heavy armour + shield.  Armour rating can account for up to 85% of physical damage, and a successful block for 75% of the remainder (96.25% total), a weapon only gets half of the block damage reduction.  There's also the block knockdown and disarm perks when using a shield; two-handers get absolutely nothing special that one-handers don't.

Magic is the other extremely strong contender (probably better than heavy + shield) if you have something form of damage reduction (worn armour, shield effect, damage reflection, resist normal damage), use weakness to magic multiplicative stacking to buff direct damage spells, or abuse illusion effects.

Bows are just shitty.  I'm not entirely certain why.  Probably because the pathfinding AI is bugfuck insane and thus impossible to hit.

[Surlyboi]

Which is why I'll only play Oblivion if I can use Fallout weapons. 

[Slyfeind]

Now that all makes sense. I thought people were loading down with crafting and social skills, then wondering why they kept dying.

[Ingmar]

Now that all makes sense. I thought people were loading down with crafting and social skills, then wondering why they kept dying.

The classic mistake is picking athletics or whatever (the one that levels just from running around) and leveling up a few times with that and some other miscellaneous stuff as you're starting out.

[cironian]

Which is why I'll only play Oblivion if I can use Fallout weapons. 

Is there a mod for that? Because there really should be. Going Army of Darkness on the hordes of Oblivion sounds like way too much fun for no one to have done that yet.

[K9]

Bows are just shitty.  I'm not entirely certain why.  Probably because the pathfinding AI is bugfuck insane and thus impossible to hit.

Wierd, last time I played through oblivion Bows + Stealth was easymode for most of the game. Running and gunning wasn't so great though.

[Tebonas]

If you are stealthed the weird pathfinding doesn't work against you, so you have an easier time hitting the enemies. As soon as they try to reach you it gets frustrating.

I take it you were one-shotting most enemies?

[Sheepherder]

There's a significant negative health modifier on NPC's up to level 4, and pretty much everywhere you go you can find the best quality arrows for that level range, ergo most are easily in one-shot range of a stealthed archer.  However the way skills and leveled loot works as you climb levels the armour rating of enemies climbs exponentially, and equivalent arrows are not so common.  Thus bows turn into glorified melee weapons later on.

[Kageru]

Betheseda needs to realise every one of their games only becomes decent once someone mods their levelling system to something sane.

[Hawkbit]

Pics out of the latest Game Informer are sexy as hell.  I'm actually afraid of what it is going to function like.  I really, really hope they can get the PS3 version happening because I'd love to kick it on the couch with this world. 

[Paelos]

Betheseda needs to realise every one of their games only becomes decent once someone mods their levelling system to something sane.

I've actually only noted major problems with the leveling system when it comes to certain things, while others seem completely normal. I wonder what people would post as skills in Oblivion that levelled normally through regular play, versus ones they thought were tedious and ridiculous.

[Sheepherder]

The only really glaring issue is the 3-15 stat points you get each level up, and the shitty way they calculate health.  The stat problem is due largely to a pretty massive range, which just begs to get gamed, but gaming it invariably pisses off the person doing the gaming.  Make it so that a level up is +1 to all stats, plus the three electives, and you have a working system.  The health problem could be solved if endurance -> health wasn't just an incremental increase that occurs at level up, unlike every other stat bonus in the game.

[Sky]

I really, really hope they can get the PS3 version happening because I'd love to kick it on the couch with this world. 

[Sheepherder]

I'm sort of curious now, how many of the people here actually know how to do their own modding with the CS in Morrowind and Oblivion?  That might account for differences of opinion, because I actually have fun seeing what I can do with the CS.

On a completely unrelated note: the one thing I always found jarring in Oblivion was loot.  It's surreal going to a dungeon ostensibly to loot the place and finding that the most valuable equipment is to be stripped off of bandit corpses.  It makes me feel like I should be under pursuit by a novice detective with the aid of an incarcerated cannibal with a high opinion of himself.

[Muffled]

I always figured that if the place was inhabited by bandits, they would have gathered up and either be holding or have sold all the valuable shit by the time I got there any way, so it never bothered me.  Definitely breaks the usual RPG dungeon logic though.

The detective and cannibal reference went straight over my head. 

[NowhereMan]

Think Anthony Hopkins.

[Lantyssa]

I'm sort of curious now, how many of the people here actually know how to do their own modding with the CS in Morrowind and Oblivion?  That might account for differences of opinion, because I actually have fun seeing what I can do with the CS.

I didn't do too much, but I made a few races.  A winged fairy and a couple of armored golems.  Plus a couple of other little tweaks I've forgotten now.

[Stormwaltz]

What ho? An article on combat in Skyrim? Have at you!

In the early stages of development, Bethesda watched fighting videos to study how people react during melee battles. The team found that most encounters featured more jostling and staggering than was present in past Elder Scrolls titles. Using the Havok Behavior animation system, the team is more accurately mimicking the imbalance prevalent in melee combat by adding staggering affects and camera shake. Don't expect button-mashing marathons where the attacker with a bigger life pool wins the war of attrition. If you're not careful on defense you may get knocked around, losing your balance and leaving yourself exposed for a damaging blow that can turn the tide of the battle. Knowing when to block, when to strike, and when to stand your ground is key to prevailing in combat.

(snip)

Your warrior can equip swords, shields, maces, axes, or two-handed weapons. Specializing in a particular weapon is the best way to go, as it gives you the opportunity to improve your attacking skills with special perks. For instance, the sword perk increases your chances of landing a critical strike, the axe perk punishes enemies with residual bleeding damage after each blow, and the mace perk ignores armor on your enemies to land more powerful strikes.

A good offense must be accompanied by a good defense. To make defending a less passive activity, Bethesda has switched to a timing based blocking system that requires players to actively raise their shields to take the brunt of the attack. If you hold down the block button, your character will attempt to execute a bash move. If you catch a bandit off guard with the bash while he's attacking, it knocks him back and exposes him to a counter or power attack. Players can block and bash with two-handed weapons as well, but it isn't as effective as the shield. Warriors who prefer the sword-and-shield approach can increase their defensive capabilities with shield perks that give them elemental protection from spells.

Sounds to me like someone's been playing Mount & Blade.

[Sky]

I've been warned not to point out what effect that article might have that would affect you.

Also, yay! I've always wanted a stumbling jostle simulator.

Anyway. 'Hold down the block button' says it all.

[NiX]

Sounds like garbageBethesda.

[Job601]

I just don't understand what the thinking behind the ES leveling system is.  It certainly doesn't produce good gameplay, because as noted above the stat point system is frustrating and counter-intuitive.  Isn't there a game design lesson somewhere that says that players are going to do whatever it takes to be powerful, so you should make sure that the most powerful tactic is also fun?  I really get the feeling that Bethesda wants to punish players for trying to min-max instead of creating "realistic" characters, and the leveling system is an attempt to make gaming the system as painful as possible. 

P.S.  Getting "realistically" knocked down so that I'm unable to control my character during combat sounds like a blast!

[Paelos]

The knockdowns are what ruined Gothic III for me. I could deal with the stupid combat until you missed once, got knocked down by a wolf, and then got repeatedly stunlocked on the ground until you were dead.