f13.net

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/12/11/skyrim-elder-scrolls-5-coming-11-11-11/


Didn't see a thread about this.

Okay, this shit pisses me off.

"We need evil chromatic dragons, everyone else has them."

"...And generic fantasy humans, every good story needs lots and lots of generic human characters"

 :headscratch:

Anyways, its the same engine as fallout 3/oblivion so I'm not as excited as I might have been. source (http://www.joystiq.com/2010/08/16/bethesdas-new-game-is-for-current-platforms-pretty-far-along/)

Everytime I see trailers like this I hear in my head Cuba Gooding Jr's voice, only instead of it saying "Show me the money", it says "Show me the ingame footage". 

At least they have Max Von Sydow!

This thread is destined for greatness.

You smoking crack again?

It's the fifth game in a series that has featured generic fantasy humans and evil dragons since , uh, 1994.

If you should be outraged about a recent announcement and its plot, it should be Mass Effect 3. That's some generic shit.

The engine is apparently brand new.
http://twitter.com/Bethblog/status/14010984884604929# (http://twitter.com/Bethblog/status/14010984884604929#)

Yeah. Because we all know how unpopular standard themes are in games and other media like books and movies. People just hate that stuff.

I don't think anyone (bar maybe sheepherder) has a particular problem with it.

Indeed, aaah, the drama that will play out in this topic (maybe not like over at RPG Codex, but I'm sure we'll be up the task in front of us :D).  :drill:

It's not unlikely to be Rage's engine (id Tech 5) since both companies are now owned by Zenimax. It should have the capabilities expected by Bethesda. That's not to say it's going to run well, because I believe more in Bethesda's ability to cripple an engine than in id's ability to create an impervious engine. :-P

Also, that they said they were working with id on their new engine when Zenimax bought id probably means they are at least using some of the rage tech.

So if Carmack is writing the engine can we expect only people with $3k in disposable income to spend on a PC are going to be able to play it with more than 4 fps?

Three appearances in six games outside of lore.  One appearance as the time god/dragon in Oblivion, one boss guarding the imperial palace in Redguard, and some randomly generated whelps in Daggerfall.  Lore-wise Arena, Daggerfall, Redguard, Battlespire, Morrowind and Oblivion all have a preponderance to mention them in relation to said time god, or in service to the empire.

Oblivion would have been more interesting if Blizzard Bethesda hadn't fucked with the roman theme that the imperials had going in Morrowind.  You just know they're going to fuck with the Nords too.

I wasn't aware Blizzard had anything to do with TES.  :oh_i_see:

(http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109g/fslip.jpg)

Ah, 1994, when the world was already populated with generic fantasy series that were into their fifth or sixth game. Bard's Tale, Ultima, etc. Which is why TES went under my gaming radar until people obsessed over Morrowind and I ignored them until Oblivion. Which gave me good reason to put them back on ignore.

Sheepherder has a point that atmosphere wise I think Morrowind's departure from medieval Western styling was far more interesting than Oblivion's world. I'm not too bothered by dragons but I would appreciate it if the game didn't decide to just go with every generic fantasy trope. Fuck hopefully setting it in Skyrim will mean the Imperials are back to being Roman style legionnaires rather than knights and wizards. If they make an effort to introduce an interesting guild/caste type system for the Nords I think it could be interesting. That said I'm a sucker for Bethesda games, I'll buy it and probably enjoy running around like a hooligan. Weirdly I never really enjoyed doing that same stuff in GTA games.

Nah, they'll just use the version that they developed for the iPhone.  :awesome_for_real:

So, just to be clear what you are saying is that there have always been dragons in TES?  Because that looks like what you're saying.

edit: Also, the retro Morrowind love is great.  Am I the only one who remembers all the whining about brown, ash, brown, ash and brown ash?  Or how basically mod teams had to redo every single texture and model in the game?  Or that almost no one finished the main quest and complained endlessly that Bethsoft needed to tighten up the quest system and story?

I remember one thing about Morrowind. Cliff Racers.

Fuck Cliff Racers.

Yeah, getting rid of fucking cliff racers was the one mod I really, really needed. That said I did actually like Morrowind for all it's annoyances and I even managed to finish the main quest storyline, though I didn't really bother discussing it on-line so maybe I just didn't get people telling me about how depressingly brown everything was.

I loved Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion. Never came remotely close to finishing the main quest in any of them. Daggerfall due to a bug, the other two due to not caring. I actually ran mods to entirely remove the main quest in some Oblivion playthroughs.

I've always had tons of complaints about the ES series artisticaly - The brown mud world of Morrwind, the Down's syndrome looking population of Oblivion, and the voices - Oh God the voices!   :ye_gods:  The Orcs in Oblivion sounded like the Tick after a three day bender, and the female elves sounded like an angry Dame Edna.

Despite that, there has never been a PC game with a more open sandboxy world, combined with such a strong modding community - so I forgive them a lot.

So, any gameplay videos yet?  :awesome_for_real:  I may be alone in this, but cinematic teasers/announcements do very, very little for me.  I tend to ignore them completely nowadays.

I like the bit of the TES series I've played.  They're no masterpieces, but they're usually fun for at least a solid month and the replayability is extremely high.

Morrowind was more sandboxy fun than Oblivion, but the main plot was something I could never finish.  Oblivion had a more finishable main plot, but hasn't drawn me back as muchas Morrowind (which I used to play at least once a year) and didn't have as interesting of a world as Morrowind.   

I cautiously look forward to this game making my new PC feel like it's extremely low end.   :oh_i_see:

My favorite memory from Morrowind is that wizard falling from the sky, picking up his spellbook with his 500 times athleticism or whatever and using that + levitation to jump from miles around (and falling to my death from it most of the time)

Never played the first two TES games. Morrowind had a more interesting sandbox to play in, but as most here have said the main quest was just meh. Oblivion had an easier-to-follow story; my only complaint was the repetitive oblivion gates. It got so annoying that I was literally just training through them to the orb at the top, rather than sneaking or clearing through.

You didn't have to clear the gates.  Only had to clear a handful for storyline purposes.

It was more than a handful IIRC. You had to clear the ones outside all the cities to get their support, then another round of them for another step in the main quest.

This.

Morrowind should've pulled me in. I spent way too much time playing Arena and Daggerfall. Not really optimistic about TES5, it will look even prettier than Oblivion most likely, but I mostly liked TES for the massive dungeons of Daggerfall and I don't see them ever returning. Gothic 3 may have been a stumble, but Risen>Oblivion imo (just as I felt Gothic 2> Morrowind, especially with the NotR expansion).

You are a horribly broken person.  I remember going through random dungeons that were so freaking large it would take several play sessions and you would get dick all from them and they weren't even part of the story.  Assuming you didn't fall through the world and lose hours of play and have to start over that is.

...and you'd need a horse and a wagon standing outside the dungeon so you could do loot-trips back up to clear out your inventory for more useless junk. Or was that just a dream I had? I can no longer remember, too long ago.

We should really start a pool on how many minutes into the game they run out of money for him and kill his character off.

I contracted lycanthropy so early in Daggerfall that I didn't care much about items.  Since I didn't know it could happen, it was a lot of fun to run with it.

Well, that was the idea I think. They weren't actually waiting outside. It was more like putting your horse & cart into your pocket and not being able to take them out again while in a dungeon.

I get annoyed when people talk about how Daggerfall was the largest game world EVAR. Uhh, yea but it was almost all randomly generated.

Besides, doesn't Vanguard have it beat now?  :why_so_serious:

I'll complain about it, but I'll end up buying it anyway.  As many complaints as I have with Oblivion, I still logged a lot of hours wandering around and sort of just doing what I wanted (sort of like Fallout 3 for me in this regard), and as long as there is still a similar amount of freedom to ignore the main storyline in this one, (especially combined with mods), It'll probably scratch my RPG itch better than anything else that I see coming in the next year or two.

No idea but EVE certainly does.  :drill:

I enjoyed Morrowind back in the day and played it through to completion more than once. Oblivion was less entertaining, for a variety of reasons, although (as it has been so often stated) the stealth aspects of the game were superb.

I was incredibly pissed off when I actually found the treasure and then couldn't find my way back out of the dungeon because the map was a tangle of identical corridors and rooms and the "exit" was a texture on the wall of a hallway somewhere.

I still remember this one time that I was on an "assassinate this guy" mission and spent like two weeks of game time looking for him, searched every inch of the dungeon and couldn't find him.  Eventually, I just started trying to rest everywhere (since it won't let you if there's an enemy near) and found him that way: he'd been stuck inside a statue underwater.  For two weeks.  I had to scavenge a bow from a skeleton somwehere and shoot him to death in the hand since he couldn't get out of the statue and I couldn't reach him.


That's kind of beside the point, I think.  There's way more" stuff" to do in Daggerfall, regardless of how it's generated.  In Morrowind, if I roll a thief, I always have to do the same thief missions in the same order every single time.  If I roll a thief in Daggerfall, the missions are randomly generated, I can do them in any city (wth a thieves guild), and I can turn down whichever ones I don't like.  There are fewer mission "types" in Daggerfall than there are in Morrowind (or Oblivion or whatever) but even if I draw the same mission in ten different cities, it'll be a slightly different experience.  Compare that to Morrowind, where I know exactly where every guard and every locked door is ahead of time because I've already done it a half dozen times.

People did the missions in Morrowind? I just robbed that one big ass treasury for all the best gear in the game, then did the main quest line

Always has been dragons, they've always been exceedingly rare, and they've always been lawful good.  Apparently they're not now, because Bethesda needs a new big bad.

I don't think I've ever actually complained about ash, and ash storms, and blight storms, and brown.  They always sort of seemed to fit together thematically to me: that this corner of the world is a miserable theocratic shithole.  Shitty brown shanties covered in mold and adobe houses seemed appropriate.

Oddly, that never occurred to me.

The game was too fucking ugly in every other way to get caught up in worrying about the colors, imo.

The only really jarring thing was the quality of the human and beast models, textures, and animations.

Hopefully they will unfuck the leveling system (or at least put in a few alternates) so I don't have to install 10 fucking mods to make the game playable.

I really need to go back and pick up Oblivion again (still have all the mods and such installed), but it plays a lot like Darkfall, and Darkfall is more fun.

Yeah I can only hope they've learned something by having a NOT shitty leveling system in FO3.

While the SPECIAL system converted into a fantasy setting would indeed be awesome, I suspect they just use it in Fallout because it comes with the territory. I drool at the thought, though.

Judging from Oblivion speech mini game...if they're going for SPECIAL once more, at least it'll be replaced with a Speech check.
But looking back at Oblivion 'Be the guildmaster of all guilds' typical design, expect more shallow experience in a big world with wasted potential. Bethesda is just not that creative in the writing dept.

Even Fallout 3 with its fun gameplay had nothing to offer in terms of main quest writing except for killing giant orcs with slo-mo attacks.

Oblivion? My name is Patrick Stewart, you're the chosen one, I've seen you in my dreams, even though you're in the jail for a crime I cannot even recall,  I trust you, here's a really special necklace, save the kingdom from satan, please.

So? Lots of good games start that way. Old man gives hero something on his way to battle evil.

EDIT: My Zelda image borked.

But there's just not very much meat to the main story past what you learn in the first hour.

I never felt any kind of special connection to the world in Oblivion, whereas in Morrowind you were slowly introduced to the whole back story that gives an actual justification why you and only you can save the world, and gives you personal reasons to care about that wasted stretch of land. Oblivion managed the amazing feat to make defeating gigantic demons from beyond reality seem dull, generic and repetitive. (To be fair, some of the side quests in Oblivion were pretty nice)

If you're playing these games for story you're missing the point. If you want story go to Bioware or some of the JRPGs. You play Oblivion to get turned loose in a world where you basically pick a direction and go "I think I'll go this way." In fact, my main disappointment in the game is that it had map markers this time. It was much more fun when finding something out in the middle of nowhere was a total surprise.

I liked that Oblivion marked things so I could get back to them once I found them. I do not want games to mark things for me before I stumble onto them, but once I do, I don't like hoofing fedex-style back and forth.

Maybe I'm remembering wrong but I thought it had a Fallout 3 style "mark on the compass" to show there was something for you to find?

It did on the minimap yes, but you couldn't fast-travel to that point until you located it.

I'm pretty much the same way. I loved Daggerfall (even though I was completely terrible at it, being only, what, 14 or 15 when I got it?). Morrowind is one of my favorite games of all time. I hated damn near everything about Oblivion, yet I still logged a good 300-400+ (heavily modded) hours on it. The Elder Scrolls games just rub me the right way for some reason.

As long as the "consolitis" isn't as bad as in Oblivion and they bring back at least some of the features I liked from previous games - such as the wider weapon selection from Morrowind and maybe a toned-down version of its more robust equipment layering - I'll be a happy camper. I'm one of the precious few people the leveling system doesn't bug that much, though I'd be happy to see it improved.

I had some good fun with Daggerfall, actually. The game was not without many problems, which were annoying back then, but would appear absolutely inexcusable by today's standards.

Still, my price of admission was easily returned in just one event: I made a khajiit with a lot of thief skills (a cat burglar, haha,) and got her up to about level 6 before I took a thieves guild quest - essentially find something in a dungeon and steal it. Ridiculously long dungeon crawl ensues. I spot a large chamber from a colonnade I am navigating 1 story up. In the center is a large pyramid structure with an altar up top - I can see that my quarry is an item on that altar. At the base of the pyramid, on either side of the only stairs up are a lich and a frost atronach. I'm level 6, and there's no possible way I'm sneaking past or fighting these guys, so I did what any sensible person would do: I dropped down into that pit and ran like crazy for the top of the pyramid. As I passed, both the lich and the atronach missed me with their spells - and killed each other!

But as far as Bethesda goes - they really need to find another job for their art director. I can respect that he went to school with the CEO, and that they are showing him loyalty, but at this point the guy's conspicuous lack of ability is taking a horrible binge-drinking dump on every new title they release. Skyrim will likely be no different.

I'm not sure he's the problem.  Oblivion didn't have universally shitty art direction, some of the outlying cities and settlements were pretty cool.  For the most part it's just everything at the centre of the main quest (Imperial City, Cloud Ruler Temple, Oblivion, The Blades, The Legion) that looks like ass.

Almost universally the shitty art looks shitty because it's way too damn small to be so full of grandiose buildings and battlements which are seemingly completely out of place.  Seriously, Cloud Ruler Temple is three fucking buildings on a stone foundation, one of which is a stable, and it's supposed to be a fortress capable of holding back the assault of divine beings.  No outbuildings at all, no lesser defensive works except for the massive fucking foundation, and it's all done in a Pagoda and light wood frame style that makes no fucking sense in a freezing mountainous region

There's exactly ten main quest hellish Oblivion worlds.  Three are unique and correspond to the Kvatch, Cheydinhal, and Bruma.  The remaining seven are randomly chosen from when you use an Oblivion gate.  All cave systems in Oblivion are random, and there are exactly six interiors that can be chosen from.  If you ever wondered why Oblivion looks copypasta'd, that's why.  Of course, it's all over the top, completely non-functional even for a hellish plane of existence, almost devoid of interior decoration, and almost completely consisting of linear tunnels with monster placement at regular intervals.

Imperial City looks like shit with a dong stuck in the middle.  It gives the impression of enough population for a shitty little village living in an absolutely fucking palatial setting, yet their houses are universally cramped little boxes made of well dressed stone.  Outside the city there are almost no lower-class construction, outbuildings, or agriculture.  The entire city appears fortified to the fucking teeth with almost no defensive depth with every section of rampart linked in one massive (inaccessible) concourse linking all the towers.  There's absolutely no exterior above-grade construction or construction down the slopes of the hill it's placed on, making the entire thing very flat and dull from the player's eye.

[/essay]

You just described the dungeons in Asheron's Call 1. Of course it's all modular construction, slapped down as quickly as possible. How else do you think explorer-oriented sandbox RPGs can slather the landscape with thousands of content points of interest? They have to take shortcuts, to prefab, and be willing to let some areas just be "here's a bunch of cave pieces and goblins. Have at it."

If you need everything to be hand-crafted, carefully planned, and glorious, then play a BioWare or JRPG. Without a content team the size of SWTOR's, a sandbox RPG just can't give you that.

Except I don't want everything to be handcrafted.  Prefab sections and leveled lists are fucking fantastic in my book, and all of the scenery in Oblivion except, you know, Oblivion, is actually somewhat uniquely pieced together prefabricated sections.  Bethesda didn't even go through the :effort: of sticking a few randomly toggle-able wall, rock, or bridge sections into the seven random Oblivion worlds.

You want Diablo III.

Burn the heretic that doesn't. 

/runs

Yes. In Daggerfall (and Arena, am I the only one that played that one?), the graphics were so primitive, we could fill in with imagination. I do have to admit, I was able to make one character in Oblivion that was decently like I wanted it to be. But the vast majority of the character (and really, even the mob) art is pretty uninspired to awful (it's bad when EQ2's art direction trumps you). These guys need to find the shoulders of giants to stand on - one of my (few) geek squee moments was seeing some of RIFT's design is pretty clearly influenced by Erol Otus.

On random dungeons - that's another place where technology seems to hurt more than help. Sure, some of the dungeons in Daggerfall were a bit generic, but a LOT of them had really cool twists to them that were entirely randomized, mostly because you could slap pieces together so much better with the more primitive art and geometry. Oblivion just seemed like endless riffs on ABCD: ACB ADBC ABCBAB, etc.

I spent months wandering around the original Arena's environments. But this was back when it was maybe one of the only games around.

Now there's so much going on that it's difficult to spend that much time doing random shit.

I loved Arena, and loved Daggerfall more, but they were both buggy pieces of shit at launch, and Daggerfall at least for months afterward. Didn't stop me playing them, but buggy as all get out.

Morrowind was better, but there were still broken parts, not just the faces. And 'no cliff racers' was the first mod I installed for it.

Morrowind's music was way better than Oblivions. The sound in total was better.

The difference being between the two being:  I actually finished fallout 3 and new vegas, but couldn't be arsed with oblivion after hitting my 3rd oblivion gate.

Daggerfall: where becoming a werewolf was actually full of win!

Oblivion in action is like watching a zombie shuffle along: totally surreal.  Morrowind is watching that same zombie shuffling along then jump with all his might, clear all of half a foot, fall back towards earth, stop short of it, and glide forward while suspended above the ground for three metres before finally landing and continuing his shuffle.  Yet it's still more fondly remembered.  You have to fuck up badly for that kind of result.

Hey man, Morrowind blew my little mind the first time I played it.  I would get a House Redoran tattoo if I wasn't such a pansy.

It does look very, very bad now though.

Morrowind blew almost everyone's mind, and it had nothing to do with the game mechanics, because they almost all universally sucked.  It was just a really cool world to fuck around in.  Oblivion isn't, and it strikes you in an uncanny valley way that shit is not as it should be, whereas Morrowind just plain backhands you with the weird and tells to to man up, bitch.

I found riding around on giant whale-bugs completely hilarious.

I think it's really age-dependent. Arena blew my mind, Ultima 4 blew my mind, Morrowind was just a prettier Daggerfall with worse gameplay. Never finished it or Oblivion.

I enjoyed them all.  Maybe it's because I'm a massive explorer-type though.  As long as the story doesn't get in my way, I'm happy.

I have tried to play Oblivion twice, and both times my interest just totally petered out soon after I escape and start walking around the first city. I think I once went riding out of the city and found a hidden dungeon, got lost in it and never went back to the game.

I played it for just long enough to note 3 things:

- leveling system was pants on head retarded
- combat was click mouse swing sword, with no promise of any greater depth later on
- game was the single ugliest rpg I had ever played (for its era)

I logged maybe 4ish hours total. My mind was not even a little blown. I could have gotten past the 2nd two issues, if it weren't for the first one, ugh. I managed to 'finish' Oblivion, since the leveling was a slightly smaller pair of pants on head retarded in that one, and they fixed some of the ugly.

I'd be interested in seeing how this game will deviate from the basic formula established by previous Elder Scroll and current Fallout games.

I seriously, seriously doubt it will. Skyrim's announcement, to me, is like a new season of a favorite television series being announced. It'll look better, have slightly refined techniques, but will be the same formula and mechanics that have made the series what it is, with all new content to consume. This is where I see video games as an industry right now.

If they start getting creative, then they'll be doing what Squaresoft has been doing with Final Fantasy: experimenting with a specific configuration of a genre rather than refining it. *This introduces failure into a sure thing,* and why we get what we get.

I don't want them to get creative with this one. I want them to make it bigger. The games are getting smaller and smaller from Daggerfall > Morrowind > Oblivion. I'd like to see them reverse that trend with this title and give me a huge world to wander around in for a long period of time, exploring new crap.

That would work for me. Fix the character leveling (and the related "encounters level with the player" crap), give me a giant world to explore, and let me loose. Here's my $60.

Screw what they did in Oblivion.  Drop me off the prison boat in Skyrim and drop the hint to talk to some guy about Draugr leaping out of the sea and eating fucking faces and I'm happy.  Because unstoppable gluttonous sea zombies that eat those who were their kin in life are fucking awesome, and dragons are fucking lame.

Existing in a world like you want would be great if the content was being continually generated. The flaw to your play style is that, eventually, you run out of areas to explore / content to experience.

Then you buy the next game. If the world was large enough, you got enough entertainment out of it for your money.

Considering I got two solid months out of any of the Bethesda games, along with numerous later flirtations, I'd say I do get my money's worth.  Especially compared to other play styles that burn through them in under a week then never touch it again.

This really bit Gothic in the ass, ended up with Piranha Bytes losing the franchise. To be fair, Gothic started out as a smaller, more hand-crafted world, so returning to their specialty with Risen really worked. So I guess by extending that logic to Bethsoft, going to a more randomized giant world would be a good move for them.

Of course...they do have to contend with being a console game, now  :oh_i_see:

To be fair, what bit Gothic in the ass was that their games would not function, and combat was infuriating on a level not seen since 1996.

I'd disagree, and so would enough fans to keep the franchise going through 5 full releases :p They know they're niche and many developers could take a lesson from them about knowing your audience and not over-reaching your grasp.

I'd love to hear you explain to me how Gothic 3 was functional and not combat ass, but that's not for this thread.

I will say that the strength of the Elder Scrolls franchise has always been exploration, so I hope they don't strive for something else.

Yes, the Elder Scrolls definitely satisfies the "To Explore" need of gamers. It barely addresses the other three.

Same, I did recently get bored and finished morrowind.

This time I just picked up a dedra diakatana and went around raping shit.

It tries to hit on some of the achiever shit with all the guildmaster titles, but that's not the main flow. There's certainly no social or killer.

Achiever needs something that matters. XBox Live Achievements are as close as you can get. That's the power of them; their ability on a meta scale to satisfy. In-game achievements are given more meaning when attached to Live Achievements... to an Achiever.

But, yes, not really the point of Elder Scrolls.

Kotaku has a post from Game Informer mag right now.  Sounds like Skyrim is going to use a classless system and you earn skill points by how much you use them in the game.  Level is then tied to skills, so learning a lot of low level skills keeps your overall level low, yet leveling one or two skills very fast raises your overall level fast. 

Mob scaling is more Fallout3 than Oblivion. 

To be fair though, Oblivion is pretty cool until you escape.

Honestly, not really in the case of Oblivion, because the thing about exploring, is that you have to find something.

Playing Risen reminded me how I dislike mob scaling. Creeping into a new dungeon, peeking around corners and seeing some earth-pounding Ashbeast or creepy ghoul and then running before they see you. Or the first encounter, trying to get away or just watching the thing one-shot you in a bloody haze.

The way Oblivion handled mob scaling was the #1 reason I never made it more than 10 hours into the game.  There needs to be insurmountable odds in some instances - things I just can't beat.  Otherwise it just feels like CandyLand.

The #2 reason was how character levels were based around skillups; I found myself trying to game the leveling system too much and that turned me off, too.  I hope they get some of these things fixed.

There are mods for Oblivion correcting both of those problems.

I like the skill ups advancement, but there was something about it that was messed up in Oblivion, where you'd hurt your stats by levelling up, was it monster level scaling by character level, so if you picked too many locks without skilling up combat skills, you'd be facing advanced monsters without the skills to fight them? Iirc, then that was still a scaling issue and not advancement.

Anyway, I like mods like FFH2, that create a fresh new game with the old one's engine. Oblivion you need mods just to fix what the hacks at bethsoft fucked up. LIke, a lot of mods. That's indicative of a bad game.

It was because it didn't matter what skill you leveled, it contributed to mob scaling.  Maybe you wanted to do a little basket weaving, or you happened to be wearing a different category of armor than you normally would... skill raises and then so do mobs.

Yep, but for whatever reason every time I attempted to use mods on Oblivion it made the game unplayable.  I spent well more than twice the amount of time playing Oblivion than I did trying to get it to run the way I wanted.  In the end, it was just easier to not play it.

I have to admit, I found the Shivering isles expansion a far more engaging place to wander around in and play in than oblivion itself. I mean, yeah you wound up trapped there according to the lore but hell you became a Prince, and it was a really well designed place to mess about in.

If I ever reinstal oblivion I'll probably go straight to the shivering isles and toss the keys to the rest of the world into an oblivion gate on the way.  :grin:

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.

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

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.

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.


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.

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.

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

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 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? :grin:

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.

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. :awesome_for_real:

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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. 

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.

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.

:why_so_serious:

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.

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.  :sad:

Think Anthony Hopkins.

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.

What ho? An article on combat in Skyrim? Have at you! (http://www.gameinformer.com/games/the_elder_scrolls_v_skyrim/b/xbox360/archive/2011/01/24/skyrim-building-better-combat.aspx)


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

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.

Sounds like garbageBethesda.

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!

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.

Agreed, and they removed that for Risen. I lightly cheated in Gothic 2 but I was pretty blatant in 3 due to the knockdowns, straight Marvin Mode to God. Risen I hardly cheated at all, mostly gold and some LPs to get started.

Great, if the camera shakes can't be turned off my motion sickness will kick in and I'll puke all over my keyboard. Elder Scrolls with stunlocks sounds like the puke will be will deserved, though.

It also depends on the knockdowns. Am I knocking things down or getting knocked down? Is it equal opportunity? Do my skills play into it? Am I getting knocked down more often in the beginning because I don't have these skills?

If it's a matter of skills, and the beginning is our hero getting put on his ass frequently, that will cost them in the reviews.

Video game fighting is fun precisely because its not realistic the huge majority of the time.  Realistic medieval combat sounds especially bad.

Yeah we don't play games in fantasy worlds for realism. Developers need to realize that. They also need to realize that absolutely any downtime you put in a combat situation on the player in a single-player game (be it stuns, knockdowns, mezzes, fears, etc) are going to piss them off. It's simply not necessary.

If they implemented some rage mechanism whereby my character eventually went berserk if he was knocked down (cc'd) too much and I got to rip the head off of the fucker knocking me down (if I managed to survive to that point), then I'd be ok with that as a tradeoff.

Its already implemented, its just replace my character with "me" and "the fucker knocking me down" with "my monitor."

Seriously though, it just sounds frustrating, there are few things I hate more (in games) than losing control over my character.

If they want us to specialize in one weapon type, they need to make each weapon type its own skill, and add special strikes / attacks that we can activate with the 1-8 quickslots.  You train up a magic school, you have quite a few spells to choose from and use.  By comparison, melee is dull/boring - you just swing, power-swing, and parry/block, and that's it.

And yes, that would make melee kinda like WoW's system.

"Hey guys, we're removing the auto-level content; improving the UI for the pc version; adding some depth and character to the dungeons."

Look, I fixed your fucking franchise, you knobs. Or just go ahead and keep pushing it further down the shitter. Civ V all over again imo.

And fuck WoW's melee system, snatch Rift's soul/melee system.

edit - I would like to thank the recent reminder of Bob & Doug's movie to re-insert hoserisms into my normal vocabulary. Also, my fiancee says fuck you all. Except nicer, without the cursing. More of a look, really. But, you know.

Camera sway, knockdowns, staggers, and all that shit are already in Oblivion.  Also:


I can tell you right now that maces > swords > axes, unless the axe bleed ignores armour, in which case it's maces > axes > swords.

What if "punishes" means "chops off limbs"?

Then it would say "punishes enemies by cutting off their motherfucking limbs."

I missed this earlier, but I love how they've decided to add dual-wielding while proclaiming realism.

But...but...what about unarmed?  :grin:

Yeah this. Something that always eluded me about D&D when I was a wee lad, was the idea that enemies would be using the magic items in their hoard.

Choose one:

a) They were in the process of looting when you showed up.
b) Boss Dragon/Lich/Mummy/Vampire/Gnoll/Orc/Ogre/etc... jealously hoards shit and eats underlings that borrow it.
c) Badicalthon rule #1: always identify, always.  It's your genitalia on the line.

I'm thinking something like Vindictus' combat system, personally.

Well, now. If we're going to get silly and invoke actually good systems, I'd dig up my old secret desire for a monk class based on Oni.

And a spell effect system based on Sacrifice.

I'm with you on Oni, 100%

I'm actually really liking the spell system from Magicka - demented amounts of fun.

:oh_i_see:

Revolutionary  :awesome_for_real:

Aside from anything said so far, I love the setting.  I always try to play big burly viking types (nord in oblivion!) and the fact that this is set in pretty much the land of the nords is awesome, for me.  I love the screenshots so far, mountains and snow.  Can't wait.

Read that article in my son's Game Informer and at least it sounds like they are trying.   My favorite quote was the one about how they changed the inventory/skills/etc interface and they said "so we asked ourselves, what would Apple do?"  :why_so_serious:

Glad to see fallout style perks made it in.

While I'm making jabs at Bethesda, enough with the shitty head/face modeling. Go talk to 2k Czech or whoever the hell is doing their face tech. Going from Mafia 2 to F:NV is jarring, Bethesda's faces have been horrible since Morrowind, ffs.

Someone should let him know that we either want to kill the wizard fast, in which case we want to damage health fastest way possible, or we want to mess with mana, in which case we need a spell that transfers mana to us, which shock doesn't do.

I always make my own spells anyway, because their spell names are confusing.  I want fireball, fire bolt, and fire touch all sorted under "Damage, Fire", next to "Damage, Frost" and "Damage, Shock," at the beginning of the spellbook.

Who's not going to chose fire?

This spell does the most damage, this one...

You can stop right there, hoss. All the gamers just checked a box and moved on.

FROST SHOCK

There are plenty of secondary effects that you can put on spells that will make people want to use them. Snares have trivialized way more RPG fights than big damage nukes ever have.

Elder Scrolls games let you customize your spell effects, so part of Sheepherder's :oh_i_see: is that we've been able to drain health and magicka at the same time since Morrowind, and I mean damage the wizard's health so he dies, and at the same time transfer his mana pool to myself, which is much more useful that the Skyrim version of the Shock spell.

I could see Shock being useful if all wizards have an auto-self-rez if you kill them without draining their mana first.  Cause otherwise, dead is dead, mana-drained or not.  Also, Howard isn't mentioning the fact that spells with multiple effects cost a helluva lot more mana to cast than spells with one effect.  So we keep finding valid answers to his rhetorical question of "Why shoot fireballs?"

This would have had more impact on me if I'd ever played a caster in any Elder Scrolls game.

The only tactic that made sense to me in Morrowind as a caster was getting a levitation spell and lots of summons. Except I never had the patience to actually play a caster long enough for them to get powerful enough for me be able to basically stop playing the game, so I would stop playing.

I just ran around smashing things with a 2Her while learning healing spells in my own made up class called the Jedi Knight!  :awesome_for_real:

For today's wishlist for an aggregate gaming experience, the stealth aspects should be as good as Thief.

Thief's stealth gameplay was great because of its level design, moreso than its mechanics.   The Elder Scrolls games can't have the kind of detail oriented level design that makes stealth fun because they have too much content.  To some extent this is true of combat, too, and no matter how good their mechanics or how pretty their caves are it won't matter if every dungeon still has five haphazardly placed guys running at you from random directions.

That sort of level design philosophy is hard to fit properly into an open world too.

Well, yeah. But the mechanics of the AI, the awareness states (NOT COUNTING THIEF 3), the monologues, etc. The functioning light meter and sound that played off surfaces (even if Garrett wore hard heels for some reason).

Also, it's not my fault that it's Elder Scrolls Vs Sky!

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3667682/ElderScrollsVsSky.jpg)

Alchemy is good the way it is, since the best way to train it is to eat zombie and nightshade until it becomes poisonous hundreds of pounds later.  Just like real life.  I eagerly await eating several tons of steel scrap, raw rabid bear meat, and Draugr flesh in TES:V.

I'm somewhat tempted to go into detail about the problems Oblivion has with mechanics, editor functionality, and in-game engine issues.  That might call for it's own threadnaught though, because there's so goddamn much of it.

Damn. Somebody knows me pretty well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9eGtyqz4gY (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9eGtyqz4gY)

First trailer with in-game footage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSRtYpNRoN0

Oh mah achin' pc.

As much as I think the franchise has been weakening over the years...the viking in me says buy buy buy.

Damn it.   

I hated Oblivion, but this is calling my name, probably because they used the god damn Morrowind theme, and I loved that game.

Yeah, if it is anything like that they're likely getting both a PC and PS3 sale from me.  It just *looks* like something I'm going to play for a long time.

What little I've seen of the man-vs.-dragon fights has been pretty goddamned epic. Better than they have any right to be, given that they can fly and you can't. (Or at least you can't in what they've revealed so far.)

I'd still like to see a closeup of more of the people, see if they have gotten away from populating the entire nation with characters that make Peter Lorre look atractive. That being said, this trailer still deserves at least a reserved *squee*.

The combat in Elder Scrolls game always makes me sad.

Somehow I think the way they depict the dragon fight won't come close to the actual experience.

Do want.

No Viking roots here, but I have a flashback to the days of yore in Everfrost!  :awesome_for_real:

I missed being able to explore other cultures in Tamriel. Arena was kinda great like that. But it's more economical to focus on one region.

I'm sure I will buy this just to be disappointed in it as always. Here's hoping they learned enough lessons about what they did right in FO3 vs. Morrowind/Oblivion that I will be wrong about that.

It's always one step forward two back with Bethesda.

My inner viking isn't painting his face with woad, donning his berserkr, and chewing his shield yet.

I'm intrigued. I have a sudden need for fur and wenches.

 :hello_thar:

Pedobear prefers his wenches without fur.

We don't have a yiff emote.

I closed my browser just after I posted.  Then the entendre hit.  Well played sir, well played.

Bethsoft has claimed that this edition will have children in it.  Combine that with the known fact that the first mod to any Bethsoft game is a full nudity mod and  :pedobear: is appropriate.

edit:  I literally can't wait for the shitstorm that comes up once a youtube video of someone killing a naked child in the game hits the news.  You'll see that footage 40 times a day for a week.

Furry naked children.  This will end well.

Furry naked children?

(http://www.insidesocal.com/sgvcrime/kittens.jpg)

I never got into the series before 3, so I went and downloaded Daggerfall since it's free. Once you get past the Doom graphics and configure the interface into something useful, this is actually pretty awesome.

Radicalthon time?

Nah, it's not really that type of game. I'm just a solo dude running around fighting in dungeons to get loot, doing randomly-generated quests. There's no Imoen for me to stab in the face, No Drizzt for me to mug, no narrative for me to subvert. Baldur's Gate was a really unique game in that it presented a complex story but still let you do whatever the fuck you wanted. It's a combination that not even Bioware does anymore. KOTOR might have let me be a Sith Lord, but if it had as much freedom as BG, I would have chopped Carth's head off five seconds after meeting him and replaced him with a player-created character written as a necrophiliac. Just because.

But you know, it's okay. Not every game has to have a huge story. Whatever story there is in Daggerfall? I'm not looking for it. I'm having a lot of fun being a random dude looking for fortune and glory in a vast world that doesn't give a crap about him. It's a nice change.

Can't have a party in Daggerfall, and can't mod one in.  Morrowind and Oblivion, on the other hand...

I really tend to find party members to be a nuisance rather than something I enjoy having, I'll be glad to play through Skyrim solo.

This a million times.

I do love how they handle bow and arrow use, but swordplay always felt weak and chaotic to me. Just walking around exploring things and talking to people in Oblivion was always pretty nifty, and I in fact ended up just doing that more than fighting, almost ignoring the fighting aspect altogether with the random sniping of some woodland creatures.

edit: to fix my hamfisted typing

Oblivion sucked the sweat off a dead mans balls.  This trailer looks exactly like Oblivion.

No.

Thanks.

I enjoyed Oblivion but not really that much as a game. The fun in it for me was just running around the world and seeing random crap, some of the side quests had cool stories and I enjoyed customising my character with spells and magic items (the RPG equivalent of playing dress up). The mechanics really never drew me (or I imagine anyone) in, whether I'll enjoy this game is going to come down to whether they've implemented more enjoyable mechanics or managed to add in an awesome story. Without either of those then there's probably not much in this that I haven't already done and frankly the story is not likely to be particularly strong based on track record and the trailer.

If you're not in the least bit interested about balance or sanity, you can set NPC companions flagged as essential.  In fact, I'd say that Oblivion / Skyrim (probably) makes one hell of a game for Badicalthons due to the essential flag, the fact that the AI responds to friendly fire with drops in disposition, that drops in disposition can result in spontaneous combat, and the fact that the AI's ability to aim a fireball or arrow is absolutely abysmal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxSbetnaD0A

Doesn't look like things have necessarily changed that much beyond the fact that graphics are a bit better now than then. vOv

This.

Also, where are people getting the 'OMFG DRAGON BATTLES' shit from? Hidden under all the bad camera angles, flapping wings, and manic cutting all I see is a bunch of  generic_nonconnecting_sword_swing and generic_flame_breath.

You're technically correct, while at the same time not right.

Comparing any of the other games they've done (which, yes, has always been The Same Damn Game) to Oblivion is to miss out on what made up to Morrowind great and made Oblivion suck donkeys.  Indeed, the very fact that they constantly pursue graphics while eroding gameplay and leaving other things entirely unchanged from Arena is part of the problem here.

I have more sympathy for Arena being 'Omg, you swing a sword and decrease a healthbar' way back when than I do Skyrim 'Omg, you swing a sword and decrease a healthbar'.  This should be obvious to anyone with half a brain.  Therefore, I don't mind pointing it out to you.

Also.  Console.

That's all I'm saying.

And all I'm really seeing from that trailer is that we'll be able to fight with a sword from the first perspective, and that the graphics aren't going to suck too badly. I couldn't even decide if it was recorded on a console, and I certainly couldn't see if they had an autobalancing problem like oblivion had. Hell, it could easily have been Two Worlds 2 we were seeing here.

But what would they have to do to make you go "ooh, this looks interesting", then? Because last time I played one of these games (admittedly a very very long time ago), the story was more interesting to me than the actual fighting mechanics.

Classy. :awesome_for_real:

This just in, Scots are dicks.

I liked Oblivion except for the stupid portal popping. Someone needs to pull the head Elder Scrolls guy aside and tell him that vaunted main story you love so much? Yeah most people consider that an annoying chore that gets in the way of the actual fun.

I hope they learned from Fallout and Skyrim will rock.

I liked the sandbox part of Oblivion, only the main quest, the UI, the leveling system and the mob scaling were retarded. The rest, though...  :awesome_for_real:

I liked Oblivion, a lot; much more than Morrowind which I never finished. My two big beefs with Oblivion were the retarded mob scaling and the repetitive gate closing, which I ended up just training through to the keystone while spamming heals on myself after the third or fourth one.

Despite the hate here, Oblivion was massively popular and for many (console gamers particularly) it was their first RPG; a whole generation of gamers who had previously only played Madden and Halo picked it up because it played like an FPS. It helped that Oblivion launched on the 360 which was (is?) the market leading console, unlike Morrowind on the original Xbox.

Mob scaling always sounds good in theory for a single player game. The implementation leads to boring grinds you can never escape.

I like mob scaling when it's applied to main quests.  Outside, it makes things a bit too samey.  Developers should make some areas dangerous just because they're dangerous, not because you're level 15 and all bandits now magically wear mithril armor and wield mini-guns.

However, when applied to main quests, the scaling needs to be capped.  If someone can't complete it due to difficulty or character build, they should be given the option to just simply out level the encounter.

Yeah. I think the only real problem with the Oblivion main arc was simply the unending repetition... Because running through one Oblivion gate is quite cool, but having to do that a dozen times blows.

That's probably the reason that while I hated the main Oblivion arc, I enjoyed the main plot of Shivering Isles just as much. There, the main arc is filled with memorable unique set pieces instead. (Playing mad dungeon master, fighting your mirror image, interrogating half the city etc.)

Admittedly, there were several other problems too, but things like level scaling can be modded away easily, while repetitive gameplay can't.

Someone at a development meeting probably said, "Man, the main story arc is too short, what can we do to lengthen it a bit?"

Suggestions probably revolved around implementing a faction grind, but they had those already. What else, what...else... uhhhhh, what about having them recruit people? That's always popular in Bioware games! But how?!

Hmmm, we have all these gates everywhere, maybe they would have to stop them in every single city! It's brilliant and will waste hours of time!

The more I read about this the happier I am that I just ran through the gates invisible and closed them without fighting enemies.

Does it? I find the whole idea repellent. Stinks of narrative causality.


As for Oblivion, I just didn't play the main arc at all. It seemed patently absurd for my character to be fucking with gates when doing so was clearly making the threat worse. After a while one of the much more interesting side quests hit a bug and I gave up altogether.

I played it stock the first time through. I followed the main quest through Kvatch and a couple gates (which were nigh impossible to fight through with an archer) and experienced the "hilarity" of lowly bandits suddenly finding caches of Glass and Dwarven armor. I gave up.

Then I added mods to remove the mob/loot scaling and to turn off the main quest entirely. I've probably put more than 120 hours in to it over multiple games since. 

That's the problem with a "wide open world" sandbox game:  each little area is its own little cell, separate from the rest of the world.  There are all these quests, but they're not inter-related, and as soon as you step outside the main plot line, you're a stranger, and no NPC knows who the hell you are.  

I think that what Bethesda needs to do is implement a much-more complicated system of keeping track of the player's quests and achievements, and some sort of NPC news system so that the NPC's hear about me and change their side-quests accordingly.  They shouldn't be scaling the mobs with player level (and accomplishments), they should be scaling the quests and the narrative.  Don't ask me to kill rats or collect pillows if I've killed Dagoth Ur, dammit.

On the other hand, it IS pre-facebook etc, so you can't really expect everyone to know who you are unless you were to tell them. I haven't got that much of a problem with there being cells of quests, as long as they're not done like one of the first people I met in two worlds, who went from "GIT DA FUK OFFA MAH LAWN" to "please help save my daughter, pwetty pweez" in 10 seconds. That is jarring.

What if the Oblivion gates had actually been well-designed video game levels, instead of dreary slogs?  Why can't we have a fun game inside of the sandbox?

I don't understand the complaints about mob-scaling, since the cost is a minor violation of the integrity of the world, and the benefit is that you don't obsolete massive swathes of content every time you level.  Maybe people would like mob scaling better if the combat was actually fun?

The level scaling isn't a problem if you pick your skills such that you deliberately never level.  :why_so_serious:

If Oblivion gates had opened to a different version of the realm controlled by a Daedric general. Like realms that mirrored their own personalities, and you had to fight your way through their own traps and tests. One plane could have been the eye in the tower, one plane could have a series of logic puzzles, one plane could have been a combat arena, one plane could have been a trading game where you had to acquire various flavor items from other daedra to trade to others (think Windwaker).

That would have been fun. Running to the top of the same copy/pasted tower 8 times wasn't. Whoever thought that would be a grand idea should be barred from design ever again.

My favorite part of a leveling system is the ability to render swathes of content obsolete. If a dungeon is too hard, I can go gain a level or two then go back and it'll be easier. This is not the case in Oblivion; you gain a few levels and so do the mobs, it's fucking absurd.

This is MMO designer bullshit talk infecting single-player gaming like a fucking plague. "Obsoleting content" my sweaty nutsack, it's called "getting to roflstomp shit" and it's awesome.

Totally.

Perhaps even fucking awesome.

I want to be able to go through a horde of kobolds like a lawnmower at level 28.  I also want to wander into the beholders lair at level 2 and get my shit pushed in.

The only reason anyone ever scaled mobs in a single player game is to make less work for the developers and less development time to push it out the door.

Oblivion sucked balls.

A point for consideration: most mods that "remove" the scaling don't, but instead just increase the number of permutations, set floors and ceilings on NPC level and the highest tier of gear obtainable through less use of generic lists.

On a completely unrelated note that Fordel talking about armour in the Rift thread got me thinking of: Bethesda needs to rework their armour system, again.  Increasing returns in time to live with linear increases in AC, and AC being dependent upon skill is a goddamn terrible idea.  These two factors combined are probably responsible for almost all of the whinging about non-combat characters becoming ridiculously hard once you get into the double digit levels.

Level scaling can be good, if it's used with certain constraints:

 - Not all mobs should scale. The climactic dungeon of a quest line may be all leveled, but if I'm ambushed by random bandits, only their captain should be leveled.
 - Not all scaling mobs should scale at 100% of the speed of the player. It's OK to make them somewhat stronger over time, but the player should gain a little edge over non-boss mobs as the game progresses.
 - Most scaling non-boss mobs should have hard max levels.
 - Once you first enter an area, the level of the mobs in there should be locked in, so as to allow intentional outleveling of areas that are too hard. (AFAIR Fallout3 had this, while Oblivion didn't)

Sheepherder is right, they don't completly remove the scaling, but they at least put some appropriate caps to it. OOO is probably the most popular one out there. They didn't just put limits on the leveling lists, they added more monsters to the game to give you more ranges. There were bands of bandits for example, that if you were unlucky enough to run in to at level 3, would kick your ass. There were other bands that you would encounter closer to starting areas that became fodder by level five.

They based the difficulty of encounters on region rather than just level. The farther I ventured from civilzation, the greater chance I would encounter something nasty. There was still some scaling within those encounters, but a minimum level minotaur was still going to slaughter my level five ass if I encountered one. In stock Oblivion, if I were to run off in to the wilderness at level 3, I would have never encountered that Minotaur deep in the mountains, instead running in to that same numpty bandit in his patchwork hide armor.

Basically, Oblivion's stock scaling meant one of two things: you optomized yourself for combat and no fights were ever a challenge, or you didn't optomize and you got your ass kicked from level one through fifty. OOO lets me explore, judge where I am compared to the content, and decide what to do based on what I enjoy. Which on occasion is raining fury upon a lair of those numpty bandits.

I don't mind roflstomping some shit -- if I'm wandering around in a field and I get eaten by a level-scaled wolf at level 20, that's no fun.  What I hate is discovering an awesome dungeon for the first time and not really getting to enjoy it because I there's no drama or tension when everything dies with one click.   Why should the whole game be boring just because I've been playing it too long?    Maybe it's not right to scale the mobs everywhere, all the time, but for people who like playing with the game mechanics the alternative is that combat becomes progressively less and less interesting until its trivial by the end.  I am not defending Oblivion, a game whose combat was extremely boring all the way through, but I do think some kind of level-scaling is necessary in open world games.

On the other hand, I do think that encountering a monster that's too strong for you and grinding until you can clean its clock is something that's been fun since Dragon Warrior I, a game which consists pretty much entirely of that experience over and over.  Maybe its no good wrong fun, but I think it's a mechanic worth preserving, and I sympathize with the complaints that level-scaling makes it impossible.

You make my head hurt.

Level-scaling sucks. You mean you don't find it rewarding to stumble across that awesome dungeon entrance (I'm an explorer type), sneak in carefully and see three demons that can smear the wall with your entrails, and hope you can outrun them before they give up the chase? Because to me, that's a solid gaming experience.

There's a reason I love the Gothic Risen series, and mob difficulty is one of them. After the initial learning curve, it makes for a much more tense and interesting game world if you can't just skip and dance into every nook and cranny and be assured that everyone will win their trophy. As much as it grates to hear mmotards talk about accomplishment, there is a sense of accomplishment once you can go back to that awesome dungeon and take out those demons who chased you away, especially if you do it while still slightly under-leveled.

And it's not because I went and ground out exp so I could go back and do it, I just played the game normally and once I had some experience and better gear, went back and tried it again.

Oblivion sucked balls, as they say in Scotland.

What about a system that scales from the bottom up? 

Player lvl 1 of 20 = Game mobs 1-20
Player lvl 10 of 20 = Game mobs 7-20
Player lvl 20 of 20 = Game mobs 15-20

So that a group of 15s is still challenging to a 20, but a 20 on 15 solo should be simple. 

Rats should never scale

Even ROUSs?

Rats should never be a mob in the first place. Show me crushing a few rats as a toddler in the intro if needed, but other than that, I have killed enough rats for 1000 lifetimes.

Sky, I think his point was the opposite.  He hates stumbling upon a dungeon while exploring, sneaking in, and discovering he out leveled the 3 demons ages ago and everything in the dungeon is trivial.

Oblivion level scaling sucked ass, as well as combat, and many things.  I'm not against the idea of level scaling in general, however, for games like this.  Just needs to be done correctly.  First, as Hawkbit suggested, NEVER scale down enemies.  Every monster has a base bad ass level they start at and never go down from, regardless of how shitty you are.  Second, make the mobs scale against you much slower.  That way you can still out level mobs, but they can somewhat keep pace to make them not insignificant.  I guess you could just make it so that the scaling only happens to certain dungeons or special area's in the world, leaving the main world untouched (so those random camps of bandits and kobalds can always still be roflstompted).  That way the special/cool content can remain relevant longer.

So yeah, I don't know.  I'm not against the idea in theory, as long as it is done elegantly.  Oblivion sure as fuck didn't do that however.

We covered this.

How about not using levels.

Stalker series does this well.


Those always spawn at max.

I want smart encounters that have some reason to know about me to scale and I want that scaling to be more complex - by adding more grunts, then add leutenants, adding tricks and traps, then adding bosses and making the bosses tougher.  I also want a bunch of static encounters that do not change.  I want it all!

I want lower level mobs that are smarter. A lvl 2 gnoll shouldn't ever try to attack me when I'm a level 20 badass. It wouldn't just wander around hoping that I don't see it. It would run for the hills.

Yes! I want goblins that piss themselves and beg for mercy - offering up their loot if I just don't slaughter them.  Occasionally, I want it to be a TARP! and have them try to push me into a TARP! where they will then try to feed me to something horrid.  I would really like it if they had written "TARP! LOL!" somewhere on the trap, but that would probably be too immersion breaking for you purists.

Stalker does have a subtle leveling system however. Basically the further you progress you get access to the better armour and Guns, and even in the starting areas batter equipment spawns in the traders over time.

It didn't make bloodsucker lairs any less dangerous.

Exception granted  :grin:

This. The demons would see me, one pushes the other into my way and the other two bolt for the depths of the dungeon.

But, you know. AI. I've given up bitching about it, apparently good AI is a lost cause.

Maybe your head hurts because you seem to think i said the opposite of what I did say.  I don't think we disagree at all.  In fact, I think that the awesome dungeon experience you're describing is why a solution that does away with levels loses something that is fundamental and fun about computer rpgs.  

What I don't like, as somebody else says above, is getting so powerful that big chunks of the game aren't fun for me anymore.  Level scaling done right can help to mitigate that.

So go to a different dungeon, then.  That's the whole point of a levelling sytem: whatever level you are, some of the content will be tough, some will be easy, and you can take whatever you feel like doing.  If you want a quick stomp, you go to a lower level dungeon.  If you want a tense challenge, you go to a higher level dungeon.  If you want a straightforward but fair fight, you go to a dungeon your own level.  When you scale the dungeon with the player's level, you lose that choice.  EVERY fight becomes the same, for the entire game, always.  What's the point of having a level system at all, then?  What purpose does it serve?  Why design one system that doubles the damage you deal every time you eat ten banannas if you then immediately have to design another system that doubles the enemy hitpoints to counter it?


You don't have to get rid of levels, you can just tone them down a bit.  The problem is the philosophy that a level 99 character can singlehandedly murder a dragon, while at level 1 he was getting savaged by mice and gumdrops.  You can do a reasonably realistic game with levels where a skilled swordsman can take out a novice, but still allow for the fact that no amount of martial skill will let him punch a bear to death.

I think it's important for the main central storyline stuff at least to level scale, personally. I don't think I'd enjoy a D&D game where the guy at the end was either trivial or unwinnably hard, not sure why I should feel any different in a CRPG setting. Other than that I think a 'looser' sort of scaling is more ideal, where you know that certain areas will be too hard for you at first but you never have to waste a lot of time fighting trivial bullshit. If something's that trivial just skip it with a cutscene of my dude going nova or something and let me move on.

That's not acceptable for a game that is supposed to embrace exploration gameplay.  If you are just out exploring, there is no way to know if the dungeon you randomly found is lower level or higher level than you.  If it's too low level, "find another dungeon" isn't acceptable, because you now feel like you wasted your time exploring to find a worthless dungeon and as far as you know, the next one you find will be the same.

The game should reward you for exploring, not punish you because you didn't explore at the exact same points the game developers thought you would.

Exploring != Random Encounters.  The ruins guarding a magical artifact of great power should be difficult.  Clearing the mice out of Grandma's Cellar should not require me to bring siege weapons and a party of veteran warriors.  There are ways you can (hopefully) show players how difficult an area is before they step through the door, without spoiling the entire experience for them.

As someone who is primarily into exploration, I've never said "Oh, this sucks. I missed this cheese dungeon early on and now I just wade through it easily." I just wade through it quickly, see if there were any story bits in there, and get back to exploring. Die, you runty little bastards, die.

The reward is from interesting story bits that might be in the dungeon, not fighting tougher snotlings.

As I said, I like the way it's done in Risen, but maybe the questing and strategically placed bottlenecks keep you focused on properly-leveled areas. In Fallout-NV, I'm more disappointed by the amount of bland stuff not worth exploring because they didn't take time to itemize or add lore elements (a failing with Bethesda, but I'm surprised to see Obsidian do the same thing). And way more disappointing than out-leveled mobs is them acting like they aren't. That's really the only way you can keep content fun and believable imo.

You can't really compare the two;  you can't blow heads off in Oblivion.  That makes finding enemies in Fallout so much fun, no matter the level.

I think your problem is you are treating below level and above level differently, when to explorers they are fundamentally different.  

Encounters that are above your level aren't an issue.  You may try and see that you are getting your ass handed to you, mark it down on the map and try and figure out a way you can beat it.  You then give yourself a goal to get yourself powerful enough to be able to tackle the encounter, and it helps with immersion.

Encounters that are below your level that you randomly came across suck, because there's no way to make it fun without fundamentally gimping yourself or restarting.  It doesn't make the player create a goal and it's just a waste when you are trying to explore.  

True. Though the reason I was thinking along those lines was running into an area with those lizardy guys in F:NV last night. I mostly just let Boone and ED-E (buffed weapons) deal with them. At this point, I'm letting them deal with pretty much everything while I just explore. My weapon quality isn't great and I don't have repair kits or extra weapons to fix mine.

The problem with not scaling with level for Oblivion is that it had no way to gauge what's in any given hole.  If you could look at a cave entrance and see blood and glowing runes all over it and think, "Oh hey, there are badass demons in there, I should steer clear." it'd be nice and straightforward.  But no, you could walk into a dungeon and find either a bunch of crippled children having a birthday party, or Satan, and it always looked identical from the outside, leading to lots of "ohfuckohfuckohfuck" moments and "yawn" moments, with precious few balanced challenge fun moments.

A claim could be made that not every monster out there clearly identifies its lair, and that's fair, but at least in that case you should be able to talk to the nearby residents for things like, "Be on the watch around Pemberton Cavern, sir, there's bandits that live there."  There should be some method for a player to find out what beasties live where short of actually jumping into their nest.

I'm going to start sounding like Oscuro's fanboi, but OOO adresses a lot of thesee complaints. Multiple new lairs added to the landscape, along with NPC dialog that actually tells you whats in them. He also tended to put clues outside the lairs to give you an idea what to expect. Goblin caves for example often have a guard or two outside the cave. They are usually killed by passing patrols, but the corpses make it pretty obvious what is inside.

As to AI - the mod community has shown that there is an awful lot of room to improve things. Popular Oblivion mod adjusts the animals to actually scan you when you get within detection range. Looks at your personality and willpower stats, whether you have a weapon in hand, etc, and dictates the animal behaviour on that. No more anoyance of wolves harassing a 20th level warrior - they run like shit when they see you.

Wolves and rats aren't scaled in Oblivion.

Kitsune, that is a good chunk of the reason why I like Morrowind: almost all of the really bad places to be had associated lore.

Well, that's only half the truth. While the rats themselves are fixed in level, the spawn itself is level-dependent, so at level 1 you get rats, at level 5 you get wolves and at level 10 you get big bears. Although it's slightly more distinct visually, it's really the same thing gameplay-wise as spawning human enemies with different gear and stats.

The bethesda engine click to zone defeats something the gothic/risen engine seamless engine allows: looking inside a cave/dungeon entrance to see what's lurking in there.

Even so, Risen was pretty good about the locals giving rumors to the tougher dungeony areas.

The fundamental problem with scaling, and this is ignoring all the other bad design whinges about here (such as lairs not indicating their difficulty through lore or description - this is just bad game design) is that it takes the idea of 'play the game as you like' out of exploring.

I've said this again and again, but the best thing about the first few chapters of BG2 was the ability to beat a few 'oh shit' fights and then roflstomp shit afterwards. Bad level scaling takes away the ability of the person playing the game to choose their fights in this way. Those who like to hurt their brain with things really hard and then take it easy get told 'no, everything is as hard as the difficulty level, all the time, no matter the choices you make'. Which defeats the idea of 'choice' completely.

BG2 did scale, though. Try running, say, the d'Amise Keep section a few times at different levels and you will see the mix of monsters you fight vary pretty widely. The big set piece encounters like dragons and such didn't scale but the makeup of 'trash' monsters most certainly did. Outside of spellcasters, though, the power curve of a 2nd edition D&D character is not all that extreme however so it probably wasn't a very evident change for most people. It isn't Oblivion-style scaling, but there is scaling nonetheless, and it is a reasonably integral part of making Chapter 2 not turn into a boring slog by the end of it.

We've been over this before too, and I knew someone was going to mention it. The thing with BG2 was that you could beat up a dragon and lich or two and out pace the other crap with equipment.

The scaling itself was thus able to be avoided. This would have been impossible if all the fights were scaled as you'd never have been able to get at that really good equipment early.

The better example is BaK. But not enough have played it to se it as an example. I would absolutly use some of it's world and encounter design if I ever made a RPG though. The best RPGs don't just let players play a type of character, but also give you the ability to play the world, and its encounters, in fundamentally different ways. Not just differences in sequence, but in difficulty and content too.

Well, since you want to get technical. (http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/ILevCreaLevelDifferenceMax)

Man you save your game, then poke your face into the dungeon. If there's a dragon you run like hell, if it's kobolds you roflstomp and move on. It's like some of these babies have never played an RPG before.

Oh no I'm obsoleting 'huge swathes' of precious content!

What did you do to get such a high level, anyway? How much content is there in this game, that you can get to high level and still have "huge swathes" of lowbie shit lying around unseen?

Anyway, what I want is more/better procedurally generated content. Then we can have so much of it that ever seeing it all is out of the question anyway. Procedurally generate a huge world, then have your developers go in and polish it a bit, throw in some hand-crafted points of interest. Then turn me loose.

You know what's great if you outlevel huge swathes of content? It gives you something to do that's new when you reroll. If you go back and stomp it for completionist since at uber level, then complain wah it's too easy now, you're being a dick.

I would like to see this in more than just RPGs. I've been waiting for someone to do something like this in driving games as well. I can just imagine how awesome it would be to have a driving game with RBR's physics, combined with either a real world replica (I wonder how much google would take for a dump of their data, including roads), or just a huge procedurally generated world.

PC Gamer gave this a 94.  Yes, I still get a hard copy of that magazine, I like real paper, call me a luddite.   In any event, the review left me thinking it was far worse than that though.  

My big question is basically this:  I couldn't get through Dragon Age one, I crapped out sometime in the middle of the dwarf quest line because it got too damn tedious/repetitive for me.   I'd be happy to play a good single player RPG again, but if I didn't like DA, is DA different/better enough to capture my attention?

Wrong thread? Else, how is someone reviewing a game that comes out in November?

He's wandered into the wrong place.

If you want a challenge, that's what the difficulty slider is for. Bethesda can't be bothered to balance all its content around all possible scenarios. They give the player that power.


:oh_i_see:

Sort of like DMing a campaign in which you are also the only player.
 :uhrr:

Another option is to gate the content, so that all the easy crap is at the start, while all the hard crap is toward the end. It's artificial, but so is level-scaling, and at least gating content doesn't feel as heavy-handed.

Gating content would be a pretty new aspect to Bethesda RPGs and really outside of maybe having a newbie area (which you really don't need in a single player game) not one I'd particularly welcome. The whole idea of these games is to be immersed in a world you can tromp around, setting up gates and barriers all over the place would not contribute to this. Also put me down in the 'get crappy mob levelling out of my game'. It's not horrible in the main quest provided it's not a hard tie to the character's level (i.e. everything just levels at the same rate you do) since it means the main quest doesn't become one of those easy roflstomp encounters and hopefully lets you continue with it whenever you want so you can do a speed run without bothering with side quests (I guess if you don't really like these sort of games?). Making every encounter the same level of challenge leads to far fewer epic moments.

Although on the subject of epic moments I'm really hoping they devote a bit more time to designing some of the world properly. Putting actual giant ass fortresses in for Blades (if they're in) to use or at least making settlements look the way they're meant to. Seeing as I don't think Skyrim is meant to have any giant sprawling metropolises this is probably actually far more possible than it was with Oblivion.

Risen had that to some degree. There was plenty of places you didn't want to stick your nose, but a lot of things were either soft-gated by a mob in a bottleneck (if you could beat him, you could handle most of what followed) or hard-gated by the story (lizardman invasion). Worked well and didn't seem artificial at all.

I don't think they need mob leveling either. Mob conning works just fine. Just don't make it a "skill" where I can't figure out a mob's strength until I hit 100 in scouting or something.  :x

There are multiple, unaddressable base issues with the setup of Elder Scrolls games. Being able to scout by popping your head into a dungeon, figuring out the difficulty level (or dying), and then reloading your game is one of them.

Is there a way to reward a player for playing smartly instead of gaming the mechanics? I would think the first step would be to remove the ability to save anywhere... oh shit, the SCREAMS. LIKE THE TORTURED SOULS OF HELL.

That's not an Elder Scrolls -only issue; saving games is pretty much a staple of single player RPG's, and the screaming is because if it's removed we also have no way to get out of a bug or glitch with the game (and they all have them).

So, anyway, problems with Elder Scrolls games only, that you don't normally see in other single player RPG's?

My list:

- Their lore is becoming confused - dragons?  Since when?
- Tamriel has several provinces all with their own cultures and several extinct races, but trying to explore archeological / historical sites is an exercise in combat, rather than puzzle-solving and exploration. 
- The games lack in the story and plot departments.  Huge world, but it's really all the same (and seems randomly generated by a computer), very few interesting plot lines.  "Content" in an RPG is the plot, not the number of monsters to kill.
- Some of their game mechanics suck (melee combat in TES 3 and 4 for example), as mentioned before (I don't have ideas about how to fix or improve, though).

Not sure which of these they'll address in Skyrim, and I guess I'll wait and see what they do.

I think there were dragons or something like that in one of the earlier ones, Daggerfall maybe?

They were considered extinct in Tamriel (killed by Cliff Racers :why_so_serious:) and greatly reduced in Akavir, but still believed to be around over there. But they've been part of the TES back story for a while.

Like Ingmar mentions, there has been mention of Dragons before.  In Daggerfall, there were "dragonlings" and you'd get quests to go hunt a "dragon" (only to find out it was a dragonling).  My favorite character from Daggerfall was a Dragon Hunter, I geared him up to fight dragons and searched all over trying to find one.  And I think the Emperor in Oblivion turned into a dragon at the end or something (or was that Mortal Kombat: Annihilation).

But, yeah, their lore pretty much sucks.  On the up side, there's relatively little of it, unlike something like WoW, so it doesn't get in the way as much.  If you're looking to explore archaeological sites or whatever, I can't even think of an archaeological site or historical event that isn't plugged into the main plot for whatever game it's in.  What really hurts my head is the whole "What happened at the end of Daggerfall?   Er, shit, um... okay, it turns out that the world split into a bunch of parallell universes, but only around Iliac Bay, and each of the endings happened in a separate one, and then they all kind of recombined into a world where they all happened but none of them actually happened."  Thanks, chief, you really sorted that one out.

Modded back in by absolutely everyone before you can even say boo.

Fucking cliff racers. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YECdOTzZOZc)

EDIT: Found a wiki with a pertinent article.
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Dragons

If the alternative would be some sort of console-inspired save-points, there would be screams. Screams of frustration.

The closest to "not save anywhere" I would agree upon would be a requirement to be able to setup camp or something before saving, or I would hack it back in like WUA says.

The idea of changing the save game system just because you don't like the way other people are playing a single player game is a little pants-on-head I think. You can always self-impose whatever sorts of silly save game rules you want on yourself.

Tamriel is the continent including all of the games made so far, since there are no cliff racers anywhere else, I assume you mean Vvardenfell.


The Dragon Break didn't only occur at Iliac Bay, and it wasn't strictly speaking parallel universes.  Hero removes powerful macguffin artifact from the aether, breaks time, I'm my own grandpa.

I rather like the lore.  Even when it goes full-on freaky shit.


The first text quoted never appeared again after Arena, and the second is one of the developers deliberately fucking with people.  I think Ted Peterson actually explicitly singled out the latter one and said "Yes, we're fucking with you."

Ahem. Speaking as the guy who can fag up pretty much any thread on the board with a lore discussion at the drop of a hat, I have to say... lolwut? Elder Scrolls has metric shitloads of relatively complicated lore. Not only that, but it's presented in a refreshingly mature sort of way, as mythology and history, full of biases and ambiguities. I loved the two biographies of Barenziah in Morrowind, an official one painting her as a saint, and an unauthorized one portraying her as a slutty khajit-yiffing burglar. The slavery/abolition stuff? All the Vivec shit? There's tons of lore.

The difference between Elder Scrolls and Warcraft is that the Elder Scrolls lore is relatively unobtrusive. It's there if you want it, but they don't really give a shit if you just skip it. It's background color. By comparison, Warcraft lore is nothing but 100% monster fights and soap opera. If it doesn't revolve around marketable characters and make a good comic book, it didn't happen. Azeroth has no folklore, or religion, or color, or real history. It just has a timeline of superhero battles.

/ramble

Yeah the background lore in Morrowind was one of my favourite aspects of the whole thing. You could just skip it all and speed run to punch Dagoth Ur in the nutsack and it wouldn't really make the thing any harder or more complicated not knowing any of the back story but having the conflicting historical accounts and question marks made the whole thing far more interesting to me. I like not really knowing  if I'm on the right side or not (or at least if my allies are really as good as they make themselves out to be) and I like being able to find titbits about the history of conflicts I'm getting drawn into. It is at least much more interesting than having an NPC go 'blah, blah, blah dragons, ash-demons, blah, blah 1066 and all that. Now kill me some rats'. I don't think I ever really felt there was as much richness in Oblivion's world but that may have simply been the design itself feeling more generic since there were certainly plenty of plays and novels around to read.

Hopefully part of the problem was just the generic feel of the setting and putting it in Skyrim will actually force the designers to be a bit more creative in crafting the world/culture. That alone would probably go a good way towards making this a must-play for me though it's probably almost as big an ask as improving the gameplay.

Also, actually READING the lore and whatnot occasionally led you to a hidden shrine where you found, as written in the scrolls, a fucking awesome Soul Gem that totally broke the game for you in a fun way.

Indeed, I think ALL those items were in little books hidden about the place.

Top Notch.


Oblivion sucked balls though.

I stumbled upon it just exploring, but yes.  Sometimes you found the place first, sometimes you found the reference which led you there.

WUA talking about Daggerfall is making me want to go play it though.

http://www.elderscrolls.com/daggerfall/

go go go.

I loaded up the Daggerfall.  I'd forgotten the fun little things like:

 the third monster in the starter dungeon being an imp that you can't hurt with your starter iron weapon

 starting with just three spells in my book, none of which I can actually cast

 getting randomly diseased or poisoned or some such in a fight with an archer with no warning until after I'd saved my game (and no way to cure it)

And still having some fun despite all that sort of shit (and the horribly low-rez graphics)

Try this (http://theelderscrolls.wiwiland.net/?title=Daggerfall_:_DaggerfallSetup_EN) instead.  It has a ton of unofficial bug fixes and a nice windows installer.

Other than the primitive graphics and sound, it's the best game in the series to date. I've done nostalgia trips through old games, but I've never played one this old for the first time and had it impress me this much. Even the latest version has the occasional bug or quirk, but nothing serious, and nothing that won't be rendered moot by the meticulous multi-file saving regimen a game like this pushes you into anyway.

And the occasional quirk is a small price to pay for a game this ambitious in scale. Sure it's procedurally-generated, low-res, and thus kind of samey, but I'm still staggered by the sheer fucking size of the world they give you to run around in. I can be doing a bunch of shit up north in the snow with the stereotypical fantasy white people, then go so far south that it's tropical and everyone's black. It's the only RPG I can think of with a world so large that I can actually leave pseudo-England and go somewhere else.

Isn't Daggerfall just two provinces? I thought it was Arena that let you wander all over the whole continent.

(http://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/large-video-game-worlds2.jpg)

Ah, so it's just two provinces, at Ridiculous Scale then. Gotcha.

Procedural generation is great, isn't it?

Fixed. Let's face it, there are 478 incorporated cities in the state of California, but if it were an average RPG province it would have like eight cities and maybe two dozen places of business.

To be fair, comparing modern California, with something like the 9th largest economy in the world -- to typical RPG populations is unrealistic.  Worlds with medieval levels of technology can only support a few villages, hamlets, towns and the occasional city.

To be fair, the average developer fucks it up anyways.  But they'd rather concentrate on the villains than the villeins.

To be fair, Daggerfall's world is about 2/3 the size of the UK but supposedly "only" has a population of 750,000.

You talking about Daggerfall reminded me I had it on my hard drive.  Which reminded me that it was the other hard drive.  Which caused me to seek a download and (independently) stumble onto that easy-does-it install pack KallDrex linked.  Which got me to roll a new character.  Who got one-shotted by the Imp in Privateer's Hold before it had occurred to me to save.  Which reminded me why I never got very far with this game.

Elite had a bigger game world.

So did Lords of Midnight.

Possibly also MULE, scale was never entirely clear.

Lords of Midnight shocked me at how small it is when I look back on it.  Also, how frigging cleverly coded it was to suck out so much of my childhood.

Doomdarks Revenge was much, much bigger.

I would cheerfully kill people for a remake of LoM that recreated the feel of the original.  Alas, no-one has the magic formula for Nostalgia Glasses.

Technically, Elite had a bigger game world (scale-wise) even if purely on the basis of having more than one solar system :why_so_serious:

But I remember getting into the biggest freighter ship in the game, loading it to the brim with hydrogen and a fuel scoop (to scoop more hydrogen from the stars/gas giants) and travelling as far as I could get, only to fuck up and save 1 or 2 jumps before my jump drive died due to lack of servicing.

Well, the theory there is easy. Not sure how hard to implement it would be, but random "world" dungeons, etc simply check your level when you first stumble in, and lock to that level range for the rest of the game. That way you get the "level appropriate" experience when you go in, and if you piss off elsewhere and come back later more geared and levelled you can also ROFLSTOMP the place.

edit - spelling

It wouldn't be hard to have your monster spawner object inherit data from your zone object, which could in turn inherit data from your region object.

Thing is, you're just trading one set of problems for another.  Some people will rail against any easy-mode dungeons being in their game.  Some people will be pissed that a high level dungeon is sitting right next to a low level one because they visited it at level one but not the other, and if you're not careful to construct your inheritance tree is such a way as to make multi-zone dungeons one object you'll end up with dungeons that have a massive jump in difficulty between zone breaks just because the player stopped exploring at that point.

It could work for smaller flavor instances, but I think the main instances need to be what they need to be. A kobold fort should be a kobold fort, sorry you didn't make it there earlier, Charley.

Hey, it's Just SolA being next to SolB. Or Droga and Nurga.

And besides, it means that you know that any non-story-based dungeons you enter will be level-appropriate. If you want to gimp them by sticking your head in all of the doorways, that's your own business/problem in a SP CRPG. Yep, Sky, that's what I meant when I said "random world dungeons". Main quest type stuff could still be queued for specific reqs/levels. Those are much more likely to be that temple with the glowing runes outside, or the Kobold fort, etc

Also, that map shown above made me want to play Just Cause 2.

If you're only scaling random encounters down, and never scaling them up, what's the point of leveling them at all?  Just so that when you first bump into a randomized non-story cave at endgame that it's not some shitty little kobold hole?  That's not actually a problem that needs to be solved.

Maybe we need more games without levels.  Make some enemies easy, some not.  Difficulty is then a shallow curve with new abilities and new items, but not so much that caused by having a twenty level spread and all the gnashing of teeth.

Say a merging of TES and Deus Ex.

Straight from E3, gameplay walkthrough with Todd Howard (6m56secs:

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2011-elder-scrolls/714852?type=flv

It's mostly about combat and dragons, though.

I watched about two minutes of it, only to confirm that I will be all over it at release.  I like the UI, really slick and minimal.

That video.   :grin:

I saw a bunch of stuff posted over on www.reddit.com/r/skyrim and its looking fairly decent.  I almost always buy Bethesda RPGs on day 1 despite their usual bugginess, and I suspect I will end up getting Skyrim right away as well, unless I hear something absolutely terrible about it.  Even though Oblivion was a disappointment when compared to Morrowind, I still spent hours and hours just exploring.

edit: this is why I'm a whore for these games: http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/2025/article/elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-6-minute-gameplay-footage/

It does look really cool. Did he say there would only be 3 factions though?

I am assuming there are minor mission giving factions, but those are the three 'character' factions. Wow that video was gorgeous. Do want.

I love the idea of being able to mix and match dual wield on the fly like that.  Sword/Staff Gandalf style imo.

The whole concept of casting two spells, one in each hand, then combining them for effect is awesome.  I hope it plays out well. 

Also, dynamic dragons are awesome.  300+ hours of content?  Yes please.  I'm frothing over this like others are over BF3. 

HD version: http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2011-elder-scrolls/714852

Prediction: Dragons will end up being the Skyrim version of Cliff Racers. :P

:mob:

doh

Bethesda are absolutely goddamn horrible at implementation, case in point:


 :uhrr:

Nah, because injured ones will actually crash land.  :grin:

No mention of the Dark Brotherhood?  :cry:

I'm sure there will be another assassination group.

Hmmm... strange. Looks like the Dark Brotherhood was confirmed back in January. I would have thought that would be a faction mentioned in the video but of course the eye candy did say fractions.

Hated that first person melee combat. He said you could do 3rd person though, hopefully that's better.

Yeah, it was odd to spend all that time on animations that you can barely see in 1st person. I wonder what the first-person experience is when he jumped up on top of the dragon's head. There was a finishing move he pulled on the undead that looked like it would've been cool...if you could've seen it.

Considering how shit the character animations were in their previous games, I can understand why they chose to actually put some effort into it this time around. It has long been the weakest part of their games, art-wise.

They likely used them for all other humanoid NPCs as well so you're going to see it all over the place, even in the 1st person.

I'm thinking they're probably also betting on people using 3rd person more than 1st person, while the neckbeards that desire such can stick to their 1st person fighting style.

I don't think first personal fighting is necessarily a neckbeard thing. For many it's an immersion issue in a game centered around the world.

I have always thought the weakest part of their games is the lack of a story.  Oblivion's story could have been written by a fifth grade school kid.

Just a side note, has anyone seen anything about a toolset being released with Skyrim?

Well I did say "art-wise" :P I've never paid too much attention to their stories, to be honest - I just like these games for the sandbox/open-world/superb immersiveness.

Wasn't criticizing nor was I trying to minimize your comment, just sayin... for me the biggest problem with their games is the story line is garbage.  Its really funny to hear them tout 300 hours, when I can't actually imagine a game holding my interest for 50 if the story is crap.  The game art wise though looks beautiful to me.

I really want to know about that toolset though, I hope there is more information to come out about it.

Are you talking story or just general lore.  I think their lore has generally been just fine.  The story line within the games is hit or miss but I almost never complete those quests anyway.  Like Xuri said - the sandbox/open world parts of the game are what keep it worth playing in the long term.  Hell, they could take the main story line out of the game altogether and I'd still buy it.

Howard kinda eased around that during the gameplay demo. He slid past a bunch of questions.

The dragon stuff did look pretty cool as long as it doesn't get too obnoxious (cliff racey). But Oblivion's trailers looked nice, too, and I thought that game was pretty bad. Still need to try and go back and play it with mods to fix the inept development.

For me the problem is the actual gameplay itself is garbage (offer not valid for FO3). I like the wandering around and looking at stuff etc., but the combat in particular has always left me incredibly annoyed.

Story for sure.



Ingmar:
Yeah I agree that combat has been weak as well.  I remember the first time I went through the game being incredibly frustrated by it.  I thought when I booted it up from a year ago that it had improved from the begining but your right it still was lacking.

I thought Oblivion's combat was fine. Morrowind's missing thing made me lose my mind when I went back and played it.

WHIF!
WHIF!
WHIF!
WHIF!
<you hit for 2>
WHIF!WHIF!WHIF!
<you were slain by an elf>

According to Craig Lafferty - lead platforms for Skyrim are consoles. PC version will be a port.

Not that suprising, Oblivion was rather obviously built focused on the 360, just based on the UI alone.

Not exactly going to deter me, I'll be buying it on PC for the modding community alone. Looking forward to possibly playing in 3rd person without the animations making me want to cry. Though I have noticed a lack of footage of townsfolk yet, so I'm wondering if we are in for another kingdom of butterfaces.

Only thing that makes me sad about Skyrim so far is finding out that Saints Row 3 is launching within a week of it.

I've bought Oblivion at least three times across PC and PS3.  Finally bought it on a Steam sale so I can prevent losing the discs...  I fully plan to buy Skyrim on PS3 at launch and PC a few months later when the mod teams are in full effect.  Unless the game is dogvomit, which I suspect it won't be.

Designing for a console doesn't bother me unless you make combat like Fable.

I would agree but the unmodded Oblivion UI was foul.

Managed to beat the game with it.  I've played with worse. 

Yeah. I had to get a mod for the UI this latest play round as I could not stand it. If only I could find one that allows you t0 use 100 or so of the keys on your keyboard. If anyone knows one could they post it?

I have to disagree with the negative comments on Oblivion's combat. I play with Oscurs Oblivion Overhaul which makes the game a lot harder, and frankly the Hand to hand combat becomes very tactical in a way. You have to be blocking and moving around, and on the tougher enemies slashing like a madman simply does not work as they will be blocking you and you will be doing almost no damage. You have to figure out when you can risk power attacks, slash when they drop their guard and use magic a lot. Hell playing a Jedi style illusion mage is a lot of fun and you can zip in semi cloaked and command a some of them to attack on another and watch as they all kill themselves. Great fun when you pull it off perfectly. You really have to watch what you are doing. I'm certainly enjoying it on this playthrough.

It's not that the console-port of the UI made Oblivion unplayable - which it didn't - it's the principle of the thing. The UI could easily have been more suitable for the PC-version, they just couldn't be bothered to put in the minimal amount of effort it would actually have taken them to do tweak it. That's what bothers me, and is the reason why Skyrim just went from "pre-order" to "let's wait and see" for me.

I forget, what was the horrible part of Oblivion's UI again?

The inventory screen would show you like 4 items at a time unmodded, it was GIANT MENUS that were pretty clearly designed to be read on a TV sitting 8 feet away from you rather than a monitor in front of your face.

Oh yeah the horrible inventory thing. That was a pain, but nothing to do all  :angryfist: over.

Well, anything with text on it had the same problem.

I always had to remember not to sell those pants instead of equiping them, and then remembering what I stole, and the constant crap you'd get for materials even though you didn't want to craft.

Seeing that they fixed the 3rd person changes this from "meh" to instant buy for me.   If they improve on player - npc interaction as well then I'm going to be pretty pleased with this one.

I'd like to see the dialogue wheel go to a game of dialogue Peggle.

Leveling system has to be the Fallout "spend points" rather than the Oblivion mess for me to consider it before it goes to a cheap sale. Unless I have a moment of weakness.

That's why real men buy it on the PC.

To be honest I used to console to add 10 points onto certain skills that never would have gone up otherwise. Sitting there casting a 1 point destruction spell for 2 hours with a weight on my cast spell button to raise a level while I read a book was not my idea of fun.


It was more like 10 items, but what really drove me crazy was there was one key for map, inventory, spells and Personal information. Tab. Then you had to move sliders back and forth between those 4 categories, THEN then from the (for example) Map section you had to select whether you wanted Local map, Cyrodil map, Quests, completed quests or active quest.  Everyone of them had similar. i spent more time fucking around with menus and tabs than adventuring and I was about ready to punch the screen after a couple of hours. It would have taken 12 programming minutes to add all those to a seperate function key for the PC. Even the mod that added the 4 categories to the first 4 function keys just about made that bearable.

And only 8 spells/items can be hotkeyed when you could have 50 spells and dozens of items in your inventory??? (And if you want to change them you have to use the slider/tabs all over again)

For all that Oblivion is very enjoyable, and the Shivering Ilses expansion was brilliant. But ffs guys, the PC has 140 keys not 12. At least let the player assign them to a function if you are too bloody lazy to find a use for them.

Roughly 230 different commands on my QWERTY counting the permutations of shift/ctrl/alt.  Not including a bind/rebind function for most or all commands in your PC game should be a jailable offense.  It's so simple, and offers so much to the player.

Edit: to put something on topic in this post...  I'll be buying Skyrim six months or so after release unless people around me convince me that it's mecha-raptor Jesus.  The modding community was the only thing that saved my Oblivion disc from being smashed in frustration.

http://www.gamersmint.com/bethesda-consoles-to-be-the-lead-platform-for-skyrim-aim-to-make-it-really-accessible


Derp.

Honestly, did Oblivion not sell well? What do they think they are going to get out of making the game dumber? Did they learn nothing from games like Civilzation going this route on their 5th iteration?

But 'stats' are SO CONFUSING!

:oh_i_see:

Can you say steam bin purchase?

If a developer ever wanted to kill my interest in a game, go ahead and start tossing the word "accessible" around. Those fucking cockknockers.

Remember when they mentioned they thought the game world was almost too big?

Kinda makes sense when you think about it now...

Two words. Oh and Shit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le-ogIVQmmY

Look at what they did with the control scheme - shoulder buttons are your hands.  Of course this is consolized.   "You are what you play" is their tagline.  Frankly, the stats/leveling system just got in the way of a great experience in Oblivion.  I personally felt the min/max experience in Oblivion really got in the way.  This way, you just play as you like and the game adapts around you.  It sounds neat, in theory. 

I really love the TES style of skills increasing with use but the way it ended up working in Oblivion was  :uhrr:. I just wish they could do it right, if not, I guess give me Fallout style.

Civilization 5 was apparently a huge success.... amongst everyone apart from the core Civilization-fanbase. Maybe that's what they want. *shrug*

I always felt Oblivion managed to be successful despite itself. If you could get past the ugly art (the graphics were fine), the terrible systems, the incoherent or right-out missing storyline and emptiness of the world, you could get to enjoy a pretty cool game.

One of the neat things the OOO mod did was add a fuckload of dungeons. A playground around every corner.

Suddenly getting red flags on this.

Edit: Durr. Could have sworn Modern Angel had posted since the no-stats statement.

I'll still buy this no matter how much I bitch, I just want to go on record as saying that now.

You know PC is not the target market when they use the word 'controller' and 'shoulder buttons' in an interview.
But what about the PC exclusive world editor kit?

In another e3 demo I heard them say left mouse and right mouse for left and right hand as well, so take that for what you will.

Yes, that makes sense. I'm not worried about them screwing up the combat. I'm worried about them shrinking the world, removing even more factions, and letting the copy-pasta that creeped into Oblivion run wild. Seriously, the gates? That's shitty design.

About the lack of stats thing; this interview http://au.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/video/6308920/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-todd-howard-interview?tag=videos%3Btitle%3B3 (http://au.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/video/6308920/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-todd-howard-interview?tag=videos%3Btitle%3B3) explained the system they'd switched to had removed the stats (Str, Dex, End, Wis etc) in favour of just Health, Magika and Fatigue. They also condensed the skills available (again) so, for instance, the old weapon types are now only Single Hand Weapons and Two Handed Weapons. What they've then done to replace the stat gain on level is put in a perk system. Inside each of the skills is a list of possible upgrades to customise how you want to use the skill. I think the only example they gave was something along the lines of in Single Hand Weapons there was a perk to make axe-type weapons cause bleeding wounds and mace-types to ignore a portion of armour.

There's also a little bit in there about NPC difficulty scaling.

I don't mind them scaling back some of the stupid skill gains.

I shouldn't have to level 1 or 2 handed swords. I shouldn't have to level 3 different types of armor. It's armor. How exactly does my experience with wearing better armor make it more effective at protecting me?

I'd be more in favor of changing that skill to affect the encumbrances of armor rather than the effectiveness.

 :oh_i_see:

So Saints Row 3 is coming out in November right?

Nah, seriously, even though I know I will bitch about it endlessly, I know I'll still end up getting this. The basic system did need reworking, it just sounds like they went a bit too far. I didn't really care that much in Oblivion about what my actual stats were, I think I really just cared that they were going up and that I had control over which ones I focused on, based on the character concept I had.

Completely doing away with classes and stats though? As long as the "based on how you play" mechanics let me develop on distinctly different paths, then maybe it won't matter. If a stealth spec'd archer/alchemist and two hander melee grunt don't play and feel significantly differently though, they may have lost me. This is supposed to be an RPG, right?

I liked that aspect. Try sparring with a rapier and leather armor and then change out into chainmail with a two-handed sword and let me know how much the skills transition.

Really, the biggest problem with the old way was the level scaling. But I'm a fan of skill gain on usage, the character develops the way you play it. The other problem is min/maxing, but that's a level 8 error.

Well, in Oblivion, Anything from a claymore to a dagger were under the skill "blade" and Anythinjg else was a blunt, and you just had 2 categories for armour, light and heavy. That was simplified enough for me. If you need things simplified more than that You probably need help getting your clothes on in the morning.

Min maxing is unavoidable. people who Min and Max will find a way to do it no matter what system you craft. Whether its by jumping in place for 17 hours or chasing squirrels, they will find a way. All systems can be min maxed as you are playing a mathematics system on a computer rather than an analog system a la real life. Min maxers live to figure out the algorithms and then bitch to everyone else about how easy the game is.

Making a type of armor lighter as you have experience with it makes more sense?

Min-maxing to the point of becoming a deity is like half the point of this series. Morrowind wasn't about whatever the fuck the story said, it was about becoming uber as fuck and then kicking in Vivec's front door and cockpunching him to death and going "NOW WHO'S THE GOD?!"

Maybe for you it was. I was in it for the exploring and when I was so overpowered that the main quest didn't offer any challenge anymore I just quit because it was the worst part of the whole game. I had more than 100 hours of fun till then, so I certainly won't complain about that.

Well consider it from the point of view of strapping yourself now into heavy plate and swinging a sword around. I'm guaranteeing that the longer you did it, the more accustomed you'd get to the armor and the lighter it would seem. It's like people training with weight vests and swinging heavier bats.

Actually, it would increase your STR, and END or whatever that stat was, as well as you're ability to move under the restrictions of the armor.

I see what you're saying but I would think that would have more to do with a strength stat increasing than skill with a particular armor type.

EDIT: Sky, get out of my hheeeeaaaadddd.

Right and that's fine. My point was referencing Morrowind, not Oblivion. There were several skill choices there that made no sense. I do like the skill system for many things, but some just made me go whaaaaaa?

There were 21 skills in Oblivion. Here's the ones I really thought should go:

Athletics - gain points by...running, and then run some more. Grats, now you can run without getting fatigued. While that's real life, it's also stupid that you have to level it by running.
Speechcraft - who didn't hate this one? Anyone? No? Moving on.
Acrobatics - like Athletics, but with bunny-hopping like a crack-addled Counterstrike player
Block - find something to hit you. Put up shield. Get hit repeatedly for about 2 minutes. Heal. Get hit again. Heal. Kill the animal. Rest up. Repeat. Snooze.
Mercantile - buy sell BUY BUY SELL SELL BETTER DEALS!

To this date they've confirmed 18 skills will be in Skyrim. One definitely getting cut will be the small-child-locked-under-the-stairs of the magic family; Mysticism. I think they realised that when Mark and Recall never made it to Oblivion, they killed any hope of that magic group being accepted by society.

Also Paelos, the Athletics grind was nothing like you describe. Everyone knew you got faster skill gain from SWIMMNG :grin:

It was joyous the day I discovered I could macro practice Stealth and Athletics by wedging down the W key while facing a corner near a sleeping beggar.

So that doesn't strike you as something we'd like to get rid of?

If you played the game normally, you got better at the things you did often. That's cool. Someone gaming the system so they can go 'cockpunch' Vivec doesn't make it any less cool for those who want to play as intended.

Removing it because the cockpunchers don't like it, that's making it less cool to play as intended.

I guess we can agree to disagree, because it's a moot point. Enjoy your shitty action game, while I take five seconds to feel bad about another pc rpg franchise in the toilet. Luckily, europe has my back.

Improve upon != Remove entirely

I like the *idea* of skills increasing upon use, but I don't like any implementation I have seen.  I'd rather just kill shit and increase my skills by allotting skill points or something.  At least then I"m not focusing on what exact actions I have to do to get better at a specific skill, and I can more thoroughly just enjoy the game.

That's fine for combat skills, but doesn't do much for people wanting to run around pickpocketing everyone and their dog or became a fabulously wealthy merchant. You'd have to get bashy XP every time you kill something, sneaky XP every time you acquire something that isn't yours, and poncy XP every time you... make a friend, or something. I don't know if that would be as fun.

You sort of just extrapolated that into something else, but fair enough. People will always game the system, and that's fine. I was listing things that you do just by showing up in the game. Everybody moves, everybody sells shit, everybody jumps, and everyone talks to NPCs. You can make a case for block, and I'm ok with that. The rest of it is stuff that's not a "gameplay" decision, it's intentionally cockblocking the game because it's not a negotiable part of playing. I can't NOT run, for example. It's akin to having a "resting" skill or a "shitting" skill.

Everybody poops, dude.

Fuck that was awesome.    :Love_Letters:

But not everyone moves quickly for long without fatigue, not everyone has good haggling skills, not everyone is charming. If you work at those, you can improve your skills, modified by your stats.

Everyone upgrades their poop skills to go in the porcelain bowl, dude  :grin:

Am I remembering wrong, or was it possible to run around leveling acrobatics/athletics because "woo ding grats" and then find out you just gimped yourself for the whole game because you've now gone up in level and so have the enemies?

Yep.

Only major skills could level you so you had to be careful you weren't leveling from non-combat skills.

Really if they would have just left out the leveled content and put more thought into how the stat bonuses worked when you level I wouldn't have anything to complain about with the stat/skill/level system in Oblivion.

Remove level scaling and suddenly you realize it won't hurt to make a lot of potions to practice alchemy. Really that is my serious complaint about the Oblivion mechanics. You spend all your gold on mixing potions, rewarded with 4-5 level ups in the first city, only to leave town, enter kvatch and encounter daedra forces that kill you in two hits.

Oh, if only you didn't gain 4 levels, you'd be facing a bunch of scamps. Riiight.

This isn't choices or consequences. It's just dumb scaled leveling, even the item rewarded to lowbies are shit quality that aren't even worth wearing.

Morrowind was four types.  Making you specialize in _____ weapon is somewhat sensible.

But the last point is absolutely fucking correct.  Armour skill as a coefficient of AR is horrendously fucking broken.

The way I see it, the whole game is combat focused, either directly or indirectly.  Last time I played Oblivion and Morrowind, and correct me if I"m wrong as it's been a while, there wasn't these major gameplay mechanics that were dependent on your sneak skill nor where there major gameplay based on haggling.  The whole purpose of these skills is to steal shit (money or equipment) that will give you an edge, or to buy shit for less money so you can get more money in the end.

The game is still focused on combat and exploring, and thus if you do a skill-point distribution system based on leveling you don't have to sneak around all these newbie NPCs and be bored just so you can get high sneak, or grind out 500 potions just to make a specific potion.  You don't have to worry about doing anything but exploring new areas and being active in the gameplay, and by enjoying the game the way you want to you will up your stats the way you want to.

Morrowind was just ludicrously exploitable. I mean I became pretty uber in Daggerfall, boosting my stats with lycanthropy and mass-killing guards with my pimped-out custom class, but it took some doing and at least I was killing things. In Morrowind I can become a level 75+ demigod without doing jack shit but learning a couple of spells and training a lot.

Skyrim Collector's Edition unveiled (together with the CHEAP pricing :P):

http://bethblog.com/index.php/2011/08/05/quakecon-2011-skyrim-collectors-edition-announced/

(big image)

So you get a cheap cloth map, a book, and a plastic statue for $90.

Gamers are idiots.

While I was semi-tempted you already get the cloth map for preordering. The dragon statue looks great but not that great. Sadly, if they threw in some ingame items I'd be more tempted. I'm a whore like that.

The accountant in me just can't reconcile the fact that you are paying $90 for something that cost $5 to produce.

I'll be buying the Steam version in all likelyhood.   I buy the occasional collectors editions, but I try to avoid over 100 bucks for them.  I might consider this for 100.

I'd be more bothered by it if that wasn't pretty much the status quo on production prices vs what the consumer is charged.

I always want to grab CEs just for the art books, but it's not really worth it if you need to pay a £100 premium.

Random but serious question: Why are DVD cases such piles of shit?


Like CD cases had that centre thing that held CD's and worked like a charm, but all the DVD cases have these bizarre center pieces that never work right and it's always a pain in the ass to remove the DVD without something breaking along the way. I feel like I am diffusing a god damn bomb trying to take my DVD's out of the case these days.


You can see it in the picture, the middle part holding the disc's is all weird and those little indents that look like they are going to help you lift the disc out? They are actually blocked my a small edge built around the disc slot circumference.


Whyyyyyy  :why_so_serious:

The same reason they put tamper proof lids on arthritis medication.

http://www.newegg.com/emailpromo/?cm_sp=ShoppingGuide122710_email-_-ShoppingGuide122710-_-http%3a%2f%2fpromotions.newegg.com%2fhomepage%2fblackNov10%2fbnr_homeLinkList_email.png

Scroll to near the bottom. You can preorder Skyrim on any platform for 48 bucks.

After oblivion why is anyone preordering this? I'll pick it up on steam for 20 bucks a year after launch. By then the mods to fix the game should be available.

Ditto, the series has been in a serious slide. Though that does remind me I need to try a playthrough of a modded Oblivion some time.

I am probably the only one here who liked Oblivion better than Morrowind, replace the skill system and I would expect this to be better still.

I don't think Oblivion is nearly as bad as people make it out to be.  I like Morrowind more, but I've still enjoyed the hell out of Oblivion, and I expect to enjoy Skyrim.  The combat system also looks pretty neat.

Yeah Oblivion's pretty fun. I only completed Morrowind a few weeks ago and it was fun too. Flying was ace and the "you have to rest to get magic back" added a different dimention to it, but both were enjoyable.

Morrowind was OK, but I liked Oblivion a good deal more. In MW the story was too loose, plus everything was brown; I played the hell out of the game and never came anywhere near finishing the story. My only complaint with Oblivion was the repetitive hellgates.

I've never finished the "main" story in any Elder Scrolls game, in fact, that fact that I don't have to is exactly what I like about the series.

The skill system is not the problem, it's the ridiculous rate of growth resulting from the fact that some important things (armour and weapons, namely) are trinomial functions.  For example:

Armour = (fArmorRatingBase + (skill / 100) x (fArmorRatingMax - fArmorRatingBase) )  x  ( stat / 100 )  x  [Edtor Armour Value]
Armour = (0.35 + (skill / 100) x (0.65) )  x  ( stat / 100 )  x  [Edtor Armour Value]

Minimum coefficients = (0.3825)  x  (0.3)  x  [Edtor Armour Value]
Maximum coefficients = (1)  x  (1)  x  [Edtor Armour Value]

So, a full suit of Daedric is worth 8.6% mitigation at minimum, 75% mitigation at maximum; and a suit of rusty iron is  3.7% - 32.50%.  The numbers themselves are also deceiving, because a linear increase in percent mitigation (one variable) results in an exponential increase in time until death until the hard cap is reached (85%), but it's easy to achieve increases in all three variables simultaneously (increase skill, spend bonus points in Endurance, get new loot).  Now, factor in the fact that you increasing all three variables with level is expected, and mob damage is adjusted accordingly, despite the fact that it's entirely possible to only be increasing two, one, or none.

You see, Bethesda just really fucking sucks at math.  For fuck's sake, I suck at math and I see the problem.

Oh, and the way they divided all like effects into a single magic school with Morrowind and Oblivion is just dumb, particularly on top of the dearth of effects that are actually in the game, and the fact that there is very little overlap.  Alteration is damn near required for any character more than dabbling in magic because it obviates the necessity of armour and security skills, provides CC (burden), provides mobility (feather, water walking, water breathing), and helps counter casters (elemental shields).  On the other hand, conjuration is completely ignorable because the summons don't scale, bound items necessitate other non-magic skills to be useful, and turn undead is a goddamn weak reward for a major skill slot.

No, the skill system is the problem. As in how you raise skills and how it is related to the leveling system. I don't like it.

Different strokes. I LOVE the skill system, it's the only thing I like more in the TES series than the Fallout series.

Yay another CE I can't buy because they decided to throw in a shitty statue.  I like how they tried to make it look pewter to sucker a bunch of poor saps.

Ah, so you're talking the levelup process requiring you to be anal retentive.  That's actually less of a problem and more of an annoyance, and a bunch of people have modded it into some semblance of sanity, including me, although my mods are mostly for personal use and contain quirks resulting from their scripting language being a shitheap incapable of determining the true base stat without ridiculous amounts of data parsing only made possible by some neckbeard hacking the editor with a DLL.

But 3/21 of your premade classes effectively being non-viable past level 6, and similarly equipped heavy armour characters having twice the longevity of light armoured characters when they have only 50% more armour is a serious problem.  I have no clue why the fuck Bethesda screwed the pooch so bad with Oblivion, because motherfucking Morrowind did it right and had proper diminishing returns on armour, despite the fact that almost everything else in that game engine was a clusterfuck of epic proportions; and Daggerfall just didn't bother with armour skills at all.

I think its been mentioned somewhere else in this thread, but it looks like unintentional leveling in Skyrim won't screw you over as badly as it does in Oblivion. Since they've scrapped all the secondary stats, a level (from what I gather) just increases each of your Health, Magika and Stamina and grants you one Perk to spend.

There's also the fact that the world is split into "Encounter Zones" that have only limited scaling. So in Area A you'll encounter creatures of level range 1-6 and over in Area B will be creatures of level range 18-24. If B is too hard, run for your life and come back later. This looks a lot better than that Scamp -> Dremora bullshit.

There's a decent list of answers to a range of questions here http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1207390-skyrim-fan-interview/ (http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1207390-skyrim-fan-interview/) along with some extra info. Player marriages, item disenchanting and tavern brawls events AHOY!

Our leveling system was screwed up. Solution: remove the stats it fucked up! Awesome. In Civ V, gold is too uber...so Civ VI should just remove gold!

Not removed, "streamlined".

Its better that way you see.

Sounds like this will hamper some of the exploration and sandbox aspects of the game while solving their overall inability to scale the game like they wanted.

It really depends on how big/interesting the world is as to how much this will affect things for me. 

With all that's coming out, I'm not sure I'll even be able to fit Skyrim on my dad sized plate, especially if I attempt to get back into shape.   :awesome_for_real:

I've pretty much resigned myself to Bethsoft's "streamlining" of the series, so I've pretty much accepted the lack of attributes, lack of a Hand-to-Hand skill (despite Bethsoft actually more or less making a hand-to-hand skill work properly in Fallout 3), and the removal of custom spell making, which has been a series staple since Arena with a shrug, a sigh, and a "Well, nothing for it I guess."

Now what I will bitch about is that UI. Fuck having my health, fatigue, and magicka bars spread out across the entire length of the bottom of the screen. That kills the ability to readily see what your overall status is without pulling too much of your vision from what's going on in the center of the screen. I know "immersive" UIs are all the rage nowadays, but there's kind of a reason the whole "group all pertinent HUD info together and cram it in a corner" stuck around as long as it did even when screen resolution and graphic fidelity meant it didn't necessarily need to.

I also have a lot of trepidation about the whole new "dungeon level" thing, where if you go into a dungeon at one level, it's locked to that level forever and ever. I can easily see a plucky enough explorer-type who ventures into high enough level areas screwing himself up in the long run by locking nearly every dungeon he can get into at level 3.

Good lord, do you guys play games, or worry about fractions?

The fractions are part of the game, they just aren't transparent to the player all the time.  Yes, you can just ignore the math, but it seems to me if you play something with more than passing interest its worth finding out how things actually work. 

what

I just picked up the complete version off of Steam a while ago.  I'm playing Knights of the Nine right... *dramatic pause* now.  For fuck's sake is their voice acting ever... *dramatic pause* terrible.

But yeah, I've had more fun hacking the game engine into gory bits than I ever will playing it.  Got a problem with that?


They ditched hand to hand, in Skyrim?  While announcing loudly how cool their adventurer bar fights are?  What the hell?

Goddamn, that interview is terrible.  Absolutely nothing I'd be interested in knowing is in there.

People keep saying "Oh, well, hand to had as a skill is gone, but I'm sure you'll be able to go around and punch people! And BARR FITEZ!!!!!"

You just can't, you know... use it in any kind of real combat.

I know some people love being stabbed in the cock, hell that's what the elder scrolls has always been about but honestly? I'm too old for that shit. I'm fine with people wanting the game to be about grinding skills and leet flying hax all over the place. More power to you if you can get any company to make a AAA game like that these days. For me though? I just want some good storylines, fun combat and pretty scenery to chew on.

Bethesda is great at execution of new ideas.

:awesome_for_real:

I think he meant "Bethseda is great at taking new ideas out behind the woodshed".

It's not that much, but here some actual information:

• Game world 3-4 times as large as FO3
  
  
• No killing children

Character Races Screenshots: http://gamerant.com/elder-scrolls-5-skyrim-screenshots-races-jc-99917/ (http://gamerant.com/elder-scrolls-5-skyrim-screenshots-races-jc-99917/)

(http://cdn.gamerant.com/wp-content/uploads/Skyrim-Playable-Races-Wood-Elf-Bosmer-2.jpg)[/list]

Where are you seeing this info?  I've only heard that it's as big as FO3/NV and Oblivion - the 16mi x 16mi size.

http://www.nowgamer.com/news/1019177/skyrim_map_threefour_times_that_of_fallout_3_bethesda.html (http://www.nowgamer.com/news/1019177/skyrim_map_threefour_times_that_of_fallout_3_bethesda.html)

That's why I thought it was awesome, for real.

Faces are looking a LOT better. Too bad for Bethsoft it's coming out when the juggernaut releases. As much as I want to play my inner (and outer, hah!) Norseman FOR GREAT SMITING, the orcs look great.

(http://cdn.gamerant.com/wp-content/uploads/Skyrim-Playable-Races-Orc.jpg)

Thanks.  Interestingly, I never realized that FO3/NV was smaller than Oblivion.  I thought they were all 16x16.  

They finally hired someone who knows how to do faces, amazing.

The faces will look great until I can get my grubby hands on those sliders.

My fat Nord is gonna pwn some sandwiches.

Not sure if making joke regarding an unintended pun or if you misinterpreted my post. <Fry face>

Now you're doing it!

Can't it be both?  :grin:

Sounds like Skyrim will be always-on connected?  I have not heard this before, I think. 

http://kotaku.com/5834914/the-skyrim-team-has-a-better-plan-for-squashing-bugs-this-time

That sounds awful.

Also no surprise here, but 360 gets initial DLC first.  :/

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/112609-Skyrim-DLC-Will-Be-Timed-360-Exclusive

Oh for fuck's sake.

I can't really understand the reasoning behind that.   I mean average guy walking into Best Buy isn't even going to know about the DLC thing and will pick up whatever version he wanted.   This is just going to piss people off when the actual DLC comes out and they finally find out about it.

SO with Deus Ex 3 and Space Marine it's looking like FPS designers might finally be starting to take the PC market seriously in terms of actually taking us into account. Meanwhile the RPGs are just shifting into the 'zomg, makes this suitable for consoles, PC nerds will still buy it.' zone. I love me some Bethesda sandbox RPGs but if this is super console oriented I'll probably end up waiting until it's on a decent Steam sale. Which is a shame because dragons are cool.

I just sent bethesda an email detailing that those two moves just put them off my must-buy list, and also put RAGE off the must-buy list pending news of whether or not they're going to be asshats or not.

Now to watch it get completely ignored. Oh well, probably money saved I suppose.

Same here, enough other games in the pipeline until they patch out the online part for the Game of the Year edition.

Well, it looks like I made the right decision in spending my gaming money on Morrowind. This looks like total ass.

And continuing the parade of "What? Why are you doing that?", there is no weapon or armor degradation in Skyrim:

http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1225036-no-armor-degradation-confirmed/


Admittedly it's not a huge deal in the long run, but it's still kind of puzzling and another notch in my Disappointing Skyrim Design Decisions Belt, alongside the console-game-on-a-PC UI, the loss of attributes, the automatically-regenerating health, and the removal of Spellmaking (the last of which instantly moved Skyrim from still a possible Day One purchase to "I'm going to wait a while and see", erring on the side of "not going to buy it"). Weapon and armor degradation acted as a kind of pacing mechanic: when your gear got busted up, it was a sign that it was time to pack it in and head back to civilization. Investing in Armorer at the opportunity cost of training another more active skill granted you the benefit of being able to stick around out in the wilderness for longer. Sure, Oblivion completely fucked it up by making gear break from a stiff breeze (a problem Morrowind largely didn't have :smugmorrowindfanboy:) while vastly increasing the amount of Armorer you needed to maintain enchanted gear, but all that would've been needed is a change to item health values and how much damage items take from use. More babies out with the bathwater, I guess.

I'm in favor of armor not degrading. In many cases it was entirely too fast, it made taking armorer almost a necessary evil just to get around, and in general it's a PITA.

I'm with the monkey; item degradation was just a tedious mechanic that really added nothing to the game.

Spellmaking on the other hand was fucking sweet, and it will be a shame to see that go.

I expect spell making to be modded back in pretty quickly.

Yeah, my purchasing of this game is going to be pretty much wholly contingent on well supported mods are since I expect within a few months the community will have largely hacked together decent RPG mechanics to go with a fun and interesting world. I'm not going to be buying it on release (probably) simply because if the vanilla mechanics are a sucky RPG then I don't want to 1) Play it and 2) Reward them for sucky mechanics. If the mod making support is strong this is going to see a decent community simply moving on from the other TES games. It sounds like they're aiming for a game that's really more Action/Adventure hack n' slash sandbox than any kind of tradition RPG.

If Oblivion is any indication, modders will go into BEAST MODE on this thing.

No spellmaking is a deal-breaker for me.  I hate having to scroll through innane spell names using their stupid console interface - I always end up making my own spell (same power / effects as theirs) just alphabetized by effect, range, and damage.

1. UI is UI.  Expect it to get XML'd to within an inch of it's life within 60 seconds.
2. Attributes.  Had to go.  Or, it had to be the maximum or average of your attribute or skill that determined the number which plugged into the function.
3. Regenerating health.  This is a good-ish idea.  It's actually much easier to balance than the armour shit they pulled in Oblivion.
4. Spellmaking.  This is no longer an Elder Scrolls game, is it?
5. Armorer.  I think I'll actually miss this, even though it was bullshit in Oblivion.


Don't.  The spellmaking system itself was baked into Oblivion's engine and was only moddable because the global variables and functions (there was one for spellmaking, and one for enchanting, both to call up the respective menus) were deliberately exposed to the potential modder.  If they've decided to do away with it chances are it's gone completely.

http://nerdtrek.com/skyrim-answers-bethesda/

Bunch of Q&A bits, including stuff about Daedric quests (it's looking like there may not be any like we're used to), armor degradation (it's not for-sure gone), and two full perk trees, one for pickpocketing and one for smithing:

Actually, I'm ok with them taking it in a new direction. They apparently can't work with what they've turned Elder Scrolls into, since Fallout was pretty decent (if not as good as New Vegas). Turn it into an action RPG, if it can make it fun again.

More ingame footage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSL-r9AIEEU

Here's my impressions from watching all that.

Combat looks good, much more visceral than in the previous editions of hack and miss we had. I like the two hands system and the spells combining.
The settings and graphics look beautiful. That's going to be the selling point of the game, I can tell.
The inventory and UI system scares the hell out of me. I'd have to see it in practice, but I have a feeling it's going to be total ass and need heavy modding.
The map, however, looks great. I like the zoom out version where you can see the landscape with markers. It's a much more accurate indicator of positions.
The scene with the horse riding looked silly. That's a really oddly fat horse. I call him Stubby.
Overall, I'm still excited about it.

I'd written this game off.

I really liked the look of most of that.

Dammit.


(also, big Stonekeep vibe.  No idea why.)

Was that a walkthrough with a controller? "Pull both triggers" Yep.  :oh_i_see: Slo-mo thumbstick look is slo-mo. Inventory gives new meaning to the elder SCROLLs.

I did like the map and 'constellation' skills. Also, I'm a whore for winter and nordic stuff. Quest to chop wood? Fuck yeah!

(http://i.imgur.com/jnvaS.jpg)

Good job, mate.  That is the single-most irritating thing I've seen on F13 yet. 

Because games shouldn't evolve, right?  That makes them "retarded". 

Without trying to bait you, there is an argument to be made that they devolved.

Just sayin'.

I don't mind things devolving if it means they could get the simplest of inventory systems correct.

Why do you hate the paper doll, Elder Scrolls? Is there some moral obligation you have where putting in a normal inventory system that people have used for the last 15 years should be replaced by scrolling shit forever?

Oh look, I can do a closeup of that useless piece of vendor trash I picked up! YIPPIE! Look at the textures on that slice of horse meat! Surely this is the next generation of inventory management.  :oh_i_see:

If we had a rep function on this forum I would have quietly neg-repped that post.

This guy gets it.

Uhm.

Right.

Well, perhaps, but I wasn't defending your way of putting it. 

Looked like a fine system to me for a console game.

Ooooo, that's fighting talk.

 :awesome_for_real:

I know, but you get the concept. :grin:

A lot to like in that video, but the horrible console interface is really offputting. Is there any concrete info about the leveling system compared to the travesty of Oblivion? That and the UI are what make me hesitate on release day purchase.

The UI did, in fact, suck baws.

Levelling just seemed to be 'the same', so not that bothered about that.

The game looked a lot better than Oblivion though, but then again I thought that about Oblivion v Morrowind and, frankly, it sucked.

I'm not entirely sure about the whole 'Big Lizard just breathed fire at you, but you shrug it off' though I'm prepared to accept God Mode on a demo.

Further, THEY WEREN'T DRAGONS.  THEY'RE NOT DRAGONS YOU STUPID FUCKS.

I want them to show the interface to sell shit. That's important. My biggest fear is that I'm scrolling endlessly through my side menus so that I can sell some smarmy Bosmer my pile of roots I picked in the wilderness hidden under the piles of crappy armor I'm trucking around.

They looked like dragons to me.

I WILL FUCKING END YOU.  THEY'RE WYVERNS AT BEST.

FOUR FUCKING LEGS AND WINGS.  THAT'S A DRAGON. 

GATAIOAINGOANSWOGNAON

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85916/bubble_wizard.jpg)

You're using that a lot and I'm sure the meaning changes every time...

Watched the same demo at PAX. Only difference was all the yahoos in the crowd cracking horse armor jokes.

As for leveling, I get the impression that its the same in that when you have X skills go up from use, you level. I think what they did was take out the option to pick "primary" skills, so you couldn't gimp or minmax as easy. This just means you will really level based on what you do. Be curious if it means you can create a truly combat pathetic high level thief.

As for the shrugging off fire thing - the character in the demo was about 35th level.

And yes, I noticed the fact that the dragons were not dragons right off the bat. Though I thought them more Drakes than Wyverns.

I stole it from Yego.  Long time listener, first time caller.

You know what it means.  You've lost the center when you start counting legs.

I knew something was off when I saw the image posted.

These things are important.

 :oh_i_see:

Nobody wants to kill internet wyverns.

I told you, Elder SCROLLs. UI matches the name now. Maybe they could match up the first part and your character could mutter about the galdanged whatsit being a pain in the rigamarole.

Also,


I want them to put in an easter egg for me. The chopping wood quest guy. "Seriously. You've now chopped 73 cord of wood. How many people do you think live in this hamlet, ffs?"

I think that's what happens when Wyvern fuck peacocks....

Everyone has their little taxonomic pet peeves. I fully support Ironwood's descent into madness over this topic.

From what I understand, Skyrim's leveling system works like this:

Your race affects nothing but your look and some racial abilities
You have no major/minor/misc/etc. skills
Your highest skills are what determines what counts toward a level-up. I assume if another skill overtakes one of your highest, it begins counting instead
You get perks on level-up, Fallout-Style. They replace most of the benefits you'd normally get for raising skills in previous games

Then you have dungeons that are locked to the level you first enter them, are stuck at that level, and the fact that they get some "Completed" tag after you open all the containers and wipe out the hostiles within suggests they don't respawn.

Meh.

That doesn't sound horrible.

It all sounds like an improvement to me.

It doesn't sound so bad really.

So we're agreed. Koro is being silly.

Aside from the supposedly never-respawning dungeons, I'm pretty much fine with what I listed.

The "meh" was pretty much my complete lack of faith that Bethsoft will actually pull off the revamped leveling system without fucking it up somehow.

That still sounds fucked up if they are leveling encounters unless there is more to it. If your non-combat skills are leveling you then monsters are going to murder you. There needs to be a hidden or even non-hidden "combat level" that they base it off.

I wondered a bit about this - are you eventually going to just clear an area out of anything to do?

At PAX however, it was mentioned during the demo that they have implemented a "random" quest system. So it sounds like you'll be able to go back to NPCs and get random tasks/quests/etc - which I assume would include spawning appropriate opposition.

If your major skills aren't set in stone the system is self-correcting.

I thought I read that they were doing 'ranges'.  When you enter an area it will spawn monsters in a range depending on your level.  So if you are 15 and go into an area for 8-12 it will spawn 12's.  If you go in a level 6 it will spawn 8's.  Oe some such.

Just like Oblivion?

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1143749/LL1RoadForest.jpg)

Yeah, that sounds exactly like Oblivion and it sucked.

It did.

The mobs were always just loot pinatas in Oblivion, regardless of level.

If low level rogues don't run around with the best armor in game, I would be somewhat pleased.

ur joking. u'll find nothing but rats at level 1-2 dungeon runs. Apples and gems are the best stuff u can find without mod. Only extreme modding saved Oblivion from shit level scaling. I still wonder to this day why console owners find Oblivion tolerable.

I definitely fought Bandits with Glass Armor in Oblivion, and the only mod I had was the UI mod.

Whats the problem with outlevelling content anyway? Its makes the world more believable than "everything is at your power grade whereever you go".

Outleveling is fine.  Glass armor bandits is not fine. 

My complaint was level scaled stuff. Glass armor bandits came in the later levels.
I recall visiting a tavern with the patrons wearing leather when I was level 1-3 ...and suddenly, 5 levels later, they're wearing all those shiny armor and swords. That's just fucked up.

It sounds to me like this is doing things roughly like FO3, which worked fine. There was certainly still trivial stuff out and about in the world even at high level.

So basically we are agreeing here? I can live with that!  :awesome_for_real:

Scaling sucks.  Sometimes it's fun to go in a low level dungeon and ROFLstomp.  Plus it's immersion breaking.

If Skyrim has this, it's going from Day One purchase to wait and see.  Got bored with Oblivion and Fallout 3 BUT devoured FNV. 

OMG we all do agree, hmm, better throw a troll-line out there.  Hmm oh here goes "You are all dicks for liking the same thing."
I bet that'll sting!

I never felt like scaling in FO3 was bad, actually I didn't realize it had scaling till you said that.  The difference being that I actually feel like I"m getting more and more powerful as I level in FO3, and I"m having less trouble with enemies at higher level than at lower level (rather than the level of difficulty staying roughly the same as I level).

FNV had less scaling than F3...F3 wasn't that bad honestly because radscorps are a pain to deal, no matter what level you are. And if you're caught off guard by a deathclaw, you're automatically fucked.
But in Oblivion, there's really no sense of accomplishment when you cleared dungeons from early levels because everything is supposed to be 'managable'

A more glaring example is if you proceed to Kvatch the moment you left the imperial prison, you'll see that most daedras die to ONE hit from your basic iron longsword, which makes you wonder why the guards have problem with these at all, considering a guy who just escaped from prison with basic gear can clean the whole mess on his own.

Well, that's one thing that was great about Gothic/Risen. You could stick your nose into the wrong place, get it bloodied, and then have something to look forward to exploring once you got some gear upgrades.

Why bother in Oblivion, shit will just scale to whatever level you are, so why get better gear/level? It's bothering me just thinking about it, which is good since my resolve was wavering on Skyrim.

Part of that issue is created by Oblivion's fuckstupid class/leveling system though, where if you set your skills up such that the ones you never use are your major skills, you can finish nearly the entire game without leveling into the double digits. The only things I remember that had level minimums attached were some of the Daedric quests.

FO3 I only (painfully) noticed the scaling after adding Brotherhood, because the really strong type of Super Mutant suddenly started showed up, most carrying really powerful weapons.

That's not actually the scaling system.  It's a hidden difficulty setting (http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/FLowLevelNPCBaseHealthMult).

I think this is quite impressive, some chap has printed and bound all the books from Oblivion into a single tome. It is pretty long.


It seems like a nice way to demonstrate some of the extra effort that goes into the game that isn't vital to gameplay, but nonetheless adds a lot of flavour.

Most of the writings came from Daggerfall and Morrowind. The Sermons of Vivec in particular is a mad attempt of a writer to insert fourth wall breaking truths into the in-game lore.

Oblivion? Not so much.

Like what ?

Right, because everything must be new all the time and building on what has come before is strictly to be frowned on.

Mad?  Yes.  Breaks the fourth wall?  No.  In case I haven't pointed it out often enough (http://www.imperial-library.info/content/thirty-six-lessons-obscurity-and-deception) it's just Kirkbride as Vivec playing silly buggers with his imaginary worshipers.

Especially when they are building it using shit bricks. Look, I won't diss the writing so much if the game actually made attempt to plant a decent lore for some quests.
Only two guild quest line is worth mentioning. Fighter's guild is forgettable shit. Mages guild made a mockery of the necromancer. Mannimarco? Hhahha. THIS is the king of worms from daggerfall? C'mon now. The dude doesn't even creep me out. He's just some generic dude I killed in a dungeon. And all the mundane inane tasks for the mage task is also shit. Terrible quests like those made good lore moot, especially when the mages guild accept a barbarian orc with 0 spellcasting in as the guild leader by hacking his way through the quest line.

 
 

The Dark Brotherhood questline is actually pretty good in terms of atmosphere though. Especially when at the end of it I realized my original happy go lucky Argonian had become a total asshole and a vampire to boot.

"Top Five Reasons Dark Souls Will Eat Skyrim's Face"

http://pastebin.com/ducT3ccW

I guess IGN saw the big troll article posted on Gamespy a couple days ago about how Diablo III should totes be an FPS yo, and decided that, by god, they're not going to be outdone with the stupid by their sister site.

I would post some quotes from this but good grief I have no idea where to begin. The title alone should be enough. It's even by another fucking Editor-in-Chief!

Edit: Pastebin'd the article courtesy of GAF because god dammit they don't need more page hits for this shit.

Everybody playing the Multiplayer angle to make his first point against a dedicated single player franchise doesn't deserve to be taken seriously anyway.

Are there even more stupid follow-up points?

The whole article is stupid and pretty much everyone in the comments section in response to the original article is stupid. There's a lot of "excellent article, glad you're giving some good coverage of Dark Souls!", which is utterly ridiculous flamewar bait.

No different than any other form of journalism.  Say something sensational and reap the benefits of lots of views/hits whatever.   Best you can do is ignore the noise.

I wonder whether Bethesda's new in-house engine is actually just a fork of ID 5.  If it's the latter there's a good chance that network I/O is lurking just beneath the surface.

I haven't read anything about this game, but I'm hoping they've learned to make combat more...umm.. fun. "Fun"? Is that a good word around here still?

I'm not sure who's involved in other games of theirs where the combat isn't bad (Brink, Wet), but I'd like to see more of that in an RPG.

I did it preorder though, in any case. I can't get enough RPGs. Even if they're shitty. What can I say..

Bethesda published those games, but I didn't develop them.

Also, you should look into Deus Ex 3, seems to fit what you are after.  You likely already know that though.

Which engine? The one used in Skyrim or some other different engine I haven't seen yet?

Because if you mean Skyrim, it's just a fork of the modified Gamebryo engine they used for Fallout with a different name.

Yeah, I thought we'd discussed that particular topic and come to the conclusion that it was just a modified gamebryo engine.

I think bethesda bought id too late to switch over to id tech 5, but I wouldn't be surprised if id tech 5 or 6 were used in future bethesda projects.

I know someone from either Bethsoft or id (I think it was id, maybe Carmack himself) said that id Tech 5 would be absolutely terrible for a large open-world game like Fallout or an Elder Scrolls title due to the way the megatexture stuff works.

Unless the next id Tech engine is made with an eye for filling Bethsoft's world-design needs, I have a feeling we're going to be seeing the Skyrim/Fallout Gamebryo fork a lot in the years to come.

The Fallout engine doesn't look dated yet, either.

Look dated? No. Play and "feel" dated? I'd say it's beginning to. I'd imagine its technical limits and the stability issues it's had forever and ever are beginning to really become a hindrance to development as well.

Its still good enough for a game that comes out in a few weeks. Starting a new project with it now might be an error in judgement, though.

http://twitter.com/nickbreckon/status/14059634595729408

I would guess this means not Gamebryo.

http://www.gameinformer.com/games/the_elder_scrolls_v_skyrim/b/xbox360/archive/2011/01/17/the-technology-behind-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim.aspx

They even ditched Ye Olde Speedtree.

I never got the vibe that these games felt "alive" (as the article suggests).. they always feel dead and lonely to me (you could say Fallout has an excuse though). They certainly put a lot of work in the technology, but I guess "alive" to me lies in the story and characters. Or maybe I'm just a Bioware fanboy. Who knows. But I'm lookin forward to what they do there. "Radiant Story" sounds cool.

Bethesda has never done characterization well at all, but I think they made some decent strides with FO3. I don't have any particular reason to think they can't make more progress with this one.

Hmm.. I didn't realize they have 70 actors in this one.. including Christopher Plummer, Max Von Sydow, and Joan Allen. Those are some respectable actors. Not to mention Wonder Woman. Heh

Maybe it'll be more than the Patrick Stewart cameo in Oblivion. Seems like they got him to voice like a dozen lines, and that's it.

Well, Patrick Stewart wasn't the only Famous Actor in Oblivion - Sean Bean and Terrence Stamp were also in it, among others - so having respectable people isn't going to be the only factor, writing and direction matter just as much, which is where I think their actual weaknesses there have been, they just haven't made a lot of memorable characters, especially pre-FO3. Minor characters like Dukov (clown shoes!) can go a long way and Oblivion was almost devoid of even those. Even broad, cartoony characters are better than the avalanche of bland clones we got in Oblivion.

Oh, I agree.. I just thought it was an indicator of what kind of effort they were putting into it.

But now that you say Sean Bean and Zod were in Oblivion, I have my doubts again. I would have never known.

I missed them also.  But I bailed on that PoS real early.

That is a waste of both money and talent. Look what Bioware can do with a bunch of minor actors. Or an inferior Trek captain. Flemeth is hard to get out of one's mind, for as small a part as she plays.

The best/most memorable voice acting to date imo was in Jagged Alliance 2 and Wizardry 8 (same voice actors... probably no-names, I haven't checked). Having actual personalities behind the voiced characters probably helped!

Sean Bean played the heir you were supposed to find, so it eventually winds up being a major role.

That was Sean Bean? I could have played that role. lol

I didn't finish the game, but was in it far enough. That character didn't exactly materialize much...a plot device at best.

Seems to me that Bethesda's focus and/or philosophy has been more about the world or backdrop.. but to me, "world" is the characters in a story. Even Lore is uninteresting if it's removed from people. There's no method of delivery of the lore that way. None of it comes alive without representative characters. You don't really get to know what the Blades are, for example, without a Blade to talk to/do missions with. You get to meet that one guard of the emperor early on, but he barely says shit.

You don't get much insight into Nords or various Elves. And in that character's case (Sean Bean's), so much is brushed aside. The game just pushes "missions" and he instantly has all your trust. You can tell he has an interesting past, but as far as I could tell, I never see him get much into it. For a priest, he seemed to know a lot about the demon world.. things like that.. But he just mentions it offhand, saying it was a mistake of his youth.

Anyways.. It's early. Apologies if this post seems jumbled.

On the flipside Kvatch is supposedly unbelievably difficult at higher levels (much more than it should be) I wouldn't know because I did it early specifically because of this (and took along as many essential characters as I could find to assist).

Crossing the centre of the map in F:NV straight out of the starting town appears to be a death sentence however (I guess they really didn't want you going that way)

I recently did a playthrough of Oblivion using a rogue archer and put off Kvatch until nearly level 20, to see what it was like at that level. It was an absolute nightmare. Almost nothing but Xivilai and Daedroth, with only one or two high-level Dremora to spice it up. You can't effectively sneak past Xivilai, and they shrug off sneak attack bow shots with ease. I ended up in a drag-out melee brawl with them more often than not, which I really only won with the use of heavily enchanted melee weapons I pack for emergencies.

2-3 Stealthboys would be sufficient to cross the whole straight shot. I did it before.

 :why_so_serious:

The boots on the crab are  :awesome_for_real:

Or the wings on the helmet.

Those are not Dwemer boots.

System requirements: (http://kotaku.com/5853156/your-pc-must-be-this-powerful-to-run-skyrim)


Even for a game leading on consoles, those seem low.

Considering my system just barely squeezes in to Recommended range - I'm happy.

(http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR9BVLV2dPg6DaJfib_02kYgKd1OUQQ6YbhEXyXWmZ6BteOgxHEn3SS7zBX)

They said that the Recommended settings are on a basic 'high' setting, and there will be an 'ultra' setting, so there's potential to push it further.  My 4yr old system can play it somewhere between the two ranges, so I'm happy. 

Though I'm sort of happy I won't have to upgrade my wife's video card for this... am I really seeing this correct that this game is DirectX 9 only?
Not that it changes my purchase of 2 copies, I'm just sort of surprised since we now have DX11 games out. I guess it's a smart move though to make this compatible for most folks' systems.

Scalability is better than crippling. I'm sure it would've played awesome on my old machine I just upgraded, but I have a new machine and wants me some eye candies.

When I hear dx9, I hear 'xbox360'.

I was able to hunt down this snippet concerning DX9/11 for Skyrim:

No offense towards Todd Howard and Bethesda because I love their games, but the chance of getting something added that major post-launch are roughly equivalent to the chances of seeing a unicorn.  They don't tend to come back to their games after the first month of patching.

Someone will make a fancy graphics patch/mod in a year or so.

When I heard "the future" I assumed he meant for TES 6.

Don't get me wrong. Having thoroughly enjoyed Oblivion (yes I loved vanilla Oblivion), Fallout 3 and New Vegas, I don't think the 'old tech' will hamper my enjoyment of Skyrim in any way. Gameplay over graphics, and there are plenty of games out or coming out that I can push the limits with.

Oblivion was utterly beautiful.

As a game, it blew.

Hopefully this means they found a happy medium.

The demo looked good.

But who knows.

Actually you are probably correct; they'll look at DX11 in five years when TES6 and DX14 are out...

Without skimming the whole thread, do we know if they have reworked the horrible leveling/scaling crap from Oblivion?

Yeah.

But we're not totally sure how it operates in practice.

I disagree. Low res textures, lack of most modern effects. It had moments that looked nice, and Fallout 3 gave a glimmer of hope that they might improve TES; but it's hard to shake the feeling that they don't give a shit about the pc anymore. The walkthrough with the retarded controller alone was painful to watch. I'm VERY on the fence on this one - big viking rpg on one hand; shitty console port on the other. Oblivion made me not a fan of the series, and Arena and Daggerfall were two of my favorite games in their times.

FIFY  :crying_panda: :sad_panda:

That screenshot is a bit of a lie as that wasn't a limitation of the engine, but the settings. Of course the 360 version of the game was meh visually, but if you put it on a PC, maxxed it out and tweaked some config files, it looks beautiful for its time.

It looked like garbage on the pc, vanilla release. I posted that shot because I remember the blurry terrain textures and crappy distance trees looking so bad.

Fixed spoiler for you.   :awesome_for_real:

See, that's a fair argument for it being ugly.

Faces were always crap.  That's a given.  But my experience of the landscape and countryside and even the dungeons was graphical loveliness.  I honestly thought I was on to a winner when I loaded it up.

And then, Dear God.

It was certainly a pretty game for its era (models aside), especially once you added a couple mods to fix some of the iffy draw distance issues and such.

Well, I certainly gushed when I first played the game. And I probably got my box price worth out of it. But I do remember it being really ugly if you look up from your feet very far, I'm a fan of scenic vistas and whatnot. I didn't post a face, because as IW says, too easy. Which is what had me hopeful for the new one, faces look decent.

Tempted to load up Oblivion +mods for a spin through. I guess OOO is standard, what else should I be looking for (I've never modded Oblivion, soo....newbler).

Sheepherder will probably sperge out about mods now that you've asked, all I did at the time was grab a couple of the recommended ones from some Penny Arcade front page post, mostly ones to make it prettier.

I did check the mod wiki and saw that OOO seems necessary, then some other one that adds a shitload of new mobs. Then I'd want the pretty textures and whatnot, and I got to mod installers and handlers and proper installation order and said fuck it, I'm going to play minecraft.

I actually don't download too many mods.  If something annoys me I usually fix it myself.

You should download something that unfucks the way you level up and gain health so you aren't tempted to min/max.  I can't recommend anything, because the last mods of this flavour I tried raped my character's stats.  This is why I fix my own shit from now on.

OOO is not required.  It is nice.  That being said, there's not too much you can pair with OOO without getting hairy conflicts.  If you do install OOO, beware that it is designed to crush your balls in a vice at level 1, and if you're not gaming the shit out of the system thing might get very hard.

Necessary:

Archive Invalidation Invalidated (http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=10724) - Bugfix.  Fixes a retarded engine bug which fucks up modded textures.
Unofficial Oblivion Patch (http://uesp.net/wiki/Tes4Mod:Unofficial_Oblivion_Patch#Download_Locations) - Bugfix.

QOL Changes:

Streamline (http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=10400) - Optimization.  More FPS by calling the PurgeCellBuffer function from a script at appropriate times.
DarNified UI (http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=10763) - UI.  This one doesn't look like shit.
Timeslip's Page. (http://timeslip.users.sourceforge.net/index.html) - Mod Manager. Also some shader replacements.
Quest Award Leveller (http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=5701) - Unique items with multiple levels upgrade as you level up.
Dude Where's My Horse (http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3861) - Purpose should be obvious.  Sometimes they go missing.

Fun:

Realistic Ragdolls and Force (http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=5011) - Because gravity is apparently not very consistent in vanilla.
Guide to texture overhauls. (http://devnull.sweetdanger.net/obliviontextureoverhaul.html)

If you're a arr-pee nerd, browse Delte's list of Immersion Mods.

http://sites.google.com/site/delteslist/

I have a set of environment graphics mods I use, but I don't have them at work. I'll try to remember to post them tonight.

I would recommend a utility called BOSS (Better Oblivion Sorting Software), which eliminates a lot of conflicts by choosing the best load order for your mods.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=20516

Cool, that where I started to zone out on the wiki. Seemed like a lot of work to play an old game.

That's the price you pay for overhaul mods.

I tend to go with not playing games that require that amount of work to be good.

Lazy. :oh_i_see:

Mods will fix it...and rape it.

 :why_so_serious:

Vital mods for Obliviion:
* Unofficial bugfix patch
* One of the "Let's get rid of this retarded levelling mechanic shit" ones.

Anything else is just icing.

That reminds me of temple of doom.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/30/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-todd-howard-interview/

Well, at least they caught this particular bug BEFORE release.  :why_so_serious:

Ah Oblivion. I spent more time downloading mods for it than actually playing it. I never could work up the appetite to get into it properly [probably due to the ugly faces].

Best ones for me though were qarls textures, alongside open cities [so no loading screens apart from one or two of the main imperial city part] and the AWLS which stands for Animated Window Lighting System and Chimneys which also included Shivering Isle support. Immersive Interiors might work too with those ones. I like the nighttime and dungeon actors holding torches mod too alongside drop lit torches. Stuff like wyre bash and cobl are required for some mods, BOSS and the ever needed Oblivion Mod Manager [OBMM]. The alternate start is pretty good too. No more Patrick Stewart!

I'll buy Skyrim, I just hope it gives me more desire to play it than Oblivion! Wonder if i'll acquire 100+ mods for skyrim too? Bet the first mod will be a nude one :D

Chickens reporting crimes would make sense in Fable.

So very much sense.

"Hey, what does this setting called responsibility do?  Whatever, 50 it is, I'll change it later if I need to."

This.  Except debugging mod compatibility took even longer than downloading.

I spent more time looking for a way to use Fallout 3 weapons in Oblivion than actually playing oblivion.

My Morrowind playthrough involved almost a week downloading and testing mods to get the game to the point where it was stressing my newly upgraded rig. Sadly the combat was still boring as hell, which is a shame because I love the world.

Bethesda games on a whole have terrible stories and terrible "choices.". As a customer of theirs though I don't expect that from them Bethesda games are free worlds with hundreds of meaningless locations to explore and that to me is the draw of their games.  I do not expect that skyrim will differ significantly.  I do however hope I am wrong as more choice in interactions would greatly help thing IMHO.

I'll be happy if it works ok, the UI is decent and the graphics don't suck ass on the pc.  :grin:

BAR SET HIGH

Though I'm weak and will buy it. I mean, vikings. C'mon.

We need Sjofn to come in and yell HERE COME THE NORSE, BITCHES!

Anyone hear of any pre-order deals?

Seems pretty steeply priced to not give a 10% deal for pre-orders. Or some DLC. Or something!

Also, anyone have a Steam pre-order? Wondering about pre-load window (or availability).

And you can be a werewolf in this one.

http://au.pc.gamespy.com/pc/elder-scrolls-v/1211758p1.html

Being as werewolf is Daggerfall was the best part of the game. I wish this wasn't releasing on a Friday, seems an odd choice (except for the date thing)

Why is Friday weird? Works for me. Then I have all weekend to play.

I have all weekend to work  :uhrr: And releases are traditionally Tuesday.

Its a good thing Batman has been pushed back another week on the PC.  I'd lose my mind trying to decided between playing that or Skyrim. :ye_gods:

I took the Newegg pre-order sale a couple months back that had it at $48 with free shipping.  Haven't heard of any preorder discounts since.  Now I'm just hoping that they ship it to arrive on Friday instead of hosing people and not shipping until the store date.

I just did a tour of the usual suspects and didn't see anything good. Kind of a stingy launch, I guess I'm getting used to getting some kind of pre-order swag DLC or something.

All that stuff is in the collector's, man.  It's only $150...

I'm guessing they know they don't need to discount it because everyone is going to buy it anyways. 

The only thing I saw was a $10 gift card with purchase at Target, which is really only a deal if you shop there anyway. My wife wants the box, I'll probably Steam it.

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

Fuck tradition and the weird habit of some people to take sick days just to play a video game.

Chorus & voice acting in Skyrim. Christopher Plummer, Max Von Sydow, some other English person (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ7lmWc14uo&feature=player_embedded)

I actually booked Friday off properly.

National holiday ftw.

If I didn't have plans with the old lady already.

Awesome find Tao!  Having said that, I think I'll wait and see what other f13'ers say about the game.  Oblivion and Fallout 3 got old real fast.

My "wait for steam sale for all things developed or published by Bethesda" plan hasn't failed me yet.   I fully intend to play Skyrim, but not yet.

I am with you on that. Although I will probably get bored for 10 seconds at some point over the weekend and impulse buy it. I am a weak, weak man.

Eh, you'll get no criticism from me, that happens to me from time to time as well.  I just happen to be set for games right now.

Just out of curiosity what would you consider to be an actual failure condition for this plan?  :-P

I'll be waiting on the feedback from here for the PC version.  I'm so addicted to LoL right now that I can wait with little to no problems.

Maybe buying something and thinking my life would've been way better had I purchased it when it was new?  I haven't put much thought into this I dunno.

Then you failed with New Vegas!  :awesome_for_real:

Heh, I did like New Vegas a lot, but I do recall people complaining it was buggy and borderline unplayable at launch...so... hard to say :)

Damn British Columbians and their weird mountain air.

Didn't match my experience. I had one or two tiny bugs in my whole playthrough. It was more playable at release for me than FO3 was a year in.

You're addicted to LoL? I did not think that would happen.

Strange isn't it?  2-4 games a night, and I'm playing almost nothing else.  But yes, a competitive multiplayer game engrossing me this much is a bit odd.

Is this out today or Friday?  I believe it says 11 Nov. on Steam but if its out today in stores then I will pick it up on the way home from work.

Even if it's out in stores isn't it going to require Steam to run the same as New Vegas?

Friday is the release date. If you can find a console version, you can play, but PC has to wait.

Pre-load seems to be up now on Steam, I restarted steam after midnight EST and it came up as a pop-up to install.

Direct2Drive has it for $54 (http://www.direct2drive.com/3/11413/product/Buy-The-Elder-Scrolls-V:-Skyrim-Download?hph), but not having to create another login is worth $6 to me, so I picked it up on Steam.  Hilariously, I was planning to pick this up later because Saints Row the Third comes out four days later, but I kept thinking about a whole weekend with nothing but a new TES game to sink into at launch and succumbed.

I think I may have a problem.

Pre-loaded PC version on Steam this morning. No waiting required. November 11th it will be playable.

Was referring to if you were able to get a PC copy early. You wouldn't be able to play until Friday anyway.

I made the mistake of reading the first couple of pages of the SA Skyrim thread, where I saw a link to http://intkeys.com/, which has it for $34.99. No way I could pass that up, so I am now a pre-order guy.  :awesome_for_real:

Odd, although their banner adds have Skyrim, the link takes you to CoD MW3 page.

NM, the actual game is up now on their listings.

Also, for CoD MW3

VPN NEEDED:

This is the Eastern European version of the game, activation has to be done with a VPN. You can ask us to make it for you, or do it yourself using the youtube guide:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPMmBHZQQCc

after activation the game will be region free and will work worldwide from your steam account.

How legit is the site?  I've seen key sites like this before but they always have such shady looking sites I won't even try them.

I was doing good until I watched the Animation Video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLLJwInYhd0&feature) they posted today, which led me to the Sound Video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLnPwnJJcFQ).

I've become impatient.

Stop it. :ye_gods:

*waits impatiently for the new LGA 2011 boards to come out so he can run this damn thing.....*

The goon who posted it claims to have purchased BF3 through them with no problems. I purchased through Paypal and it went right through. I will find out tomorrow night how legit they are I guess :grin:

So we can buy keys from the Russian mob now, or something?

I did some more digging on IntKeys.  Apparently they are selling russian keys and a significant number of them have to be activated via a vpn to russia.  Their Facebook page is full of people bitching:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Intkeys/196247380396655?sk=wall

Final verdict:  $25 off is not enough for me to gamble with possible credit fraud

One-time use Paypal credit card number? ;)

Some people will do anything for early access. In a bit over 24 hours, everyone will have access. The suspense is terrific. I hope it lasts...

Within a day of release, people will be shitting on the controls and ui.

That's my prediction.

That's my biggest worry.  I'm going PC with it because I know much effort goes into the PC version modding, and Beth isn't great with the PS3.  I have a gut feeling I'll wish I bought the PS3 version after controlling the PC version though.

An xbox 360 pad might bridge the gap.

Yep, I'm just too damn broke for it.  ;)

Yeah getting the 360 version here. Don't really care about mods so its kind of a no-brainer.

I always liked the mouse/keyboard controls myself. Can't target for shit with a controller. Too wobbly and over-responsive.

Not sure if to buy now. Waiting till price drop and interesting mods to crop up. Xmas is coming, there's bound to be some store specials online. If not, no harm, plate's full for BF3 and GTA 4 DLCs.

Bitching has started with those who have managed to get it early. Apparently there's a bug in the 360 version where the textures downgrade to low-res if you install it to the HDD. Pete Hines has denied it, but a lot of people are encountering the issue.

Any PC DRM to worry about? Is this a GFWL or Steam?

Games for Windows Live, no.  Steamworks, yes.

That's not downgrade, that's "working as intended" xbox graphics :why_so_serious:

Fuck consoles. PC 4 teh win!  :drillf:

We're actually getting both the PC and Xbox versions.  PC via Steam for me of course, Xbox is one of my boys who paid for it himself so I can't complain too much.  We were just talking about how nice it was to not to have attend one of these idiotic midnight releases in person at a brick and motar store like just happened on Tues for MW3.  Friend of mind has a teen who went and spend 4 hours in line to pick it up.  No thank you.

Review embargo is up.  Extremely high praise all around.

Although one interesting note, I haven't seen a review that was based off of the PS3 version.  Mostly 360 reviews with a few PC ones.  Probably not a huge deal either way, just thought it was odd.

Bought the PC version about 20 minutes ago in a store. I'll have to wait around 8 hours for the Steam activation, of course :P  :oh_i_see:

Steam activation should be in about 13 hours.

Neither here nor there, but it's a lot harder to get a Test PS3 than a modded 360 or Test 360. As in, even the big sites only have one or two and it's a busy season so they're probably being used for exclusives.