Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

[koro]

When I started Skyrim, I told myself that I wouldn't use any fast travel aside from maybe the carriages. That lasted about ten hours of play until I slowly began to realize that, unlike Oblivion, Skyrim was heavily designed around using fast travel as part of the base game. There are a significant number of "back exits" to dungeons that lead out to cliffs overlooking a sheer drop whose only options for getting to the bottom are: attempt to mountain goat it to the bottom without dying horribly, turn around and trudge back through the dungeon (which is sometimes not an option thanks to one-way points of no return), or fast travel. It happens too often to be coincidence or design oversight.

So I made a compromise with myself: I'd run/ride to discover places, but if I needed to get back to a place I would use fast travel to do so. When I had my "no fast travel" rule in place, I'd see all these interesting places that I would pass by, but I wouldn't go to explore them because I'd be nearly overburdened with cool stuff from the previous interesting place I was just at. Once I began using fast travel, the amount of places I'd go out of my way to explore shot way up, and I don't feel the least bit bad about it.

[stray]

I use it occassionally. The main downside is lack of random exploration experiences... and less dragon spawning if you just walk around more (from what I heard.. I can't tell if it's true or not).

[K9]

Scrolls just feel so useless here. A single 50-damage fireball is pretty much nothing for damage beyond the very beginning of the game, and all the Master-level scrolls share the same weaknesses of Master-level spells: they take too damn long to cast.

Conjuration scrolls are pretty sweet. I found a summon storm atronach scroll at level 10ish on one of my characters that was the difference between beating a tough boss fight at that level and not.

[Sir Fodder]

One other excellent tweak was to remove the delay on changing from 3rd to 1st person view, don't know why they put that in there, its much better without it. Also have FOV at 100, some fish-eye-ness but it becomes unnoticeable after a few dozen hours.

[koro]

What's the tweak to remove that stupid third-person to first-person delay? I haven't noticed it anywhere, and it drives me insane.

[stray]

lol.. i wouldn't have even noticed it if it wasn't just mentioned. you mean when it zooms in/out right?

[Paelos]

I just fired this up today for the first time.

And lost about 4 hours of my weekend. I was supposed to do laundry.

That didn't happen.

[stray]

laundry? i live in a pigsty myself. don't feel too bad.

[rk47]

oooh yeah i know what u mean. like...a bucket full of them. 10 am ... let's do it later..boot up system....did the sun just went down? FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

[Paelos]

Yeah I just showed up today in an old sweater and khakis that may not have been ironed.

Nobody noticed so far.

[Sir Fodder]

What's the tweak to remove that stupid third-person to first-person delay? I haven't noticed it anywhere, and it drives me insane.

I think its this section on the end of my skyrim.ini file that does it:

[Camera]
fMouseWheelZoomSpeed=60.0000
f1st3rdSwitchDelay=0.9500
iHorseTransitionMillis=001
fChaseCameraSpeed=4.9000



Anyone know if there is a tweak to move the 3rd person view "locus of hearing" from the camera location to approximately where the character's ears are? This has bugged me greatly in all the games using this style engine...

[Sir T]

Just bought it, and played though some of the tutorial. Actually somewhat impressed with how well it runs on my machine (and this is the first time steam has recognised that i actually have the cd in the drive... god i hate steam)

It got choppy though in the combat sequences and difficult to control and i was reduced to pointing my finger in the general direction of the bad guys, spraying flame and hoping for the best.
My computer chose medium quality as the default. The whole thing feels sluggish. Any tips in improving performance? And for the beginning part (no i haven't read all 70+ pages of this thread)

[Kail]

It got choppy though in the combat sequences and difficult to control and i was reduced to pointing my finger in the general direction of the bad guys, spraying flame and hoping for the best.
My computer chose medium quality as the default. The whole thing feels sluggish. Any tips in improving performance? And for the beginning part (no i haven't read all 70+ pages of this thread)

The big thing for me was turning down anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, which were initially set at something like 8x.

So far, this game is impressing the hell out of me.  Graphics are amazing, sound is excellent, setting is good (minor quibbles aside).

I'm a bit frustrated by the gameplay, though.  Like others have noted in this thread, it seems like the challenge is a bit binary, either I'm destroying enemies with one hit or they're killing me with one or two hits.  Game sends me off to High Hrothgar, and there's an ice troll on the path who can literally two shot me.  I've run into a couple of them since, and I have no idea how the hell I'm supposed to kill them; they regenerate faster than I can heal myself and they take off a quarter of my health bar per hit versus my five or so precent pokes at theirs.  I'm playing a Nightblade type character, magic and stealth, and I have no goddamn idea how I'm supposed to do anything without doing stuff that feels exploity.  I can kind of fudge difficult fights by running around a pillar or something while healing myself, but there has to be a better way to do this.  I can't seem to win a straight up fight with the tougher enemies no matter what; I can't move fast enough to dodge, can't block without mucking around with equipment to empty my offhand all the time, can't absorb much damage or dish out much it seems, it just seems frustrating.  I had to fight an Elder Dragon yesterday, the damn thing was LITERALLY one shotting me from full health, not once or twice or something but EVERY ATTACK it would do this if I was in range (otherwise, breath).  I eventually killed it by luring it into a forsworn encampment, but I keep thinking "there's gotta be a better way to do this" over and over again.

Speaking of which, what am I supposed to do with dragon bones and scales?  I assume they're useful for dragon armor, and I'm levelling my smithing as fast as I can afford to, but you need it at 100 to make dragon stuff.  It weighs a ton and I don't have a house to leave it in because I'm spending all my gold on leather and iron.  Is there somewhere safe I'm supposed to leave it, or should I sell it, or what?

[Ingmar]

You can sell it, the supply isn't exactly limited.

[Rendakor]

Recruit a minion and make them serve as a beast of burden until you can afford a house.

[koro]

In Riverwood there are chests in the houses of the two families who let you stay in them depending on who you helped during Helgen that contain normal supplies you're expected to take for yourself. You can store all your stuff in them until you get your own place and those chests do not respawn to the best of my knowledge - as they have the same items in them every playthrough - so can be safely used as storage. Even if they do respawn, they take 30 in-game days to do, which turns out to be a really long time.

Alternately, you can join the Companions, Thieves Guild, or College, which nets you a free place to store your crap anyway.

Game sends me off to High Hrothgar, and there's an ice troll on the path who can literally two shot me.  I've run into a couple of them since, and I have no idea how the hell I'm supposed to kill them; they regenerate faster than I can heal myself and they take off a quarter of my health bar per hit versus my five or so precent pokes at theirs.  I'm playing a Nightblade type character, magic and stealth, and I have no goddamn idea how I'm supposed to do anything without doing stuff that feels exploity.

As best I can figure, you're meant to run from it at low levels and not actually kill it.

[Ingmar]

I just shot it to death with arrows, which is pretty much how I dealt with 99% of the obstacles in the game. Stealth + headshots.

[koro]

I firebolted it a lot on my Mage when I first played and didn't think much of it until I rolled a melee character afterward and proceeded to get my shit pushed in, which is when I realized that it was a static creature and not leveled to you.

[UnSub]

I snuck passed it the first time. Didn't even realise it was there until I looked back.

... but the Blood Dragon that landed in front of me after that was a death sentence (at the time).

[stray]

If you wait to about lvl 15, he's fairly easy.

My first runthrough was funny though. I must've been lvl 7. It sort of resembled Monty Python. "Run away!" I'm not the dragonborn Skyrim needs.

Also tried to be "clever" and use a Fire Storm scroll once... and killed Lydia, along with the troll.

[Murgos]

I used the familiar spell to tank it while I whacked it with a sword.  It took a couple of tries but I got past it by level 5 or 6.

[Sheepherder]

This is pretty much Bethesda's response to the leveled enemies in Oblivion being so thoroughly vilified.

Also, how you guys manage to survive without knowing the fundamentals of trollslaying is beyond me.

[stray]

This is pretty much Bethesda's response to the leveled enemies in Oblivion being so thoroughly vilified.

Also, how you guys manage to survive without knowing the fundamentals of trollslaying is beyond me.

I love that intro picture.

[Malakili]

Some combination of recent patches and new video drivers seem to have finally made this game stable for me with the graphics setting turned up.  So happy.

[Rendakor]

At work my boss and I refer to that troll as the final boss because he was stuck on it for a week; he ended up rerolling because the character he had just kept getting destroyed by the troll.

[Murgos]

At work my boss and I refer to that troll as the final boss because he was stuck on it for a week; he ended up rerolling because the character he had just kept getting destroyed by the troll.

Did he realize he could just go do something else for a few levels?  Get some better equipment/spells and come back?

[Paelos]

I just let Lydia hit it while I stabbed it in the back. I'm very chivalrous.

[Lakov_Sanite]

At work my boss and I refer to that troll as the final boss because he was stuck on it for a week; he ended up rerolling because the character he had just kept getting destroyed by the troll.

Did he realize he could just go do something else for a few levels?  Get some better equipment/spells and come back?

That is fucking quitter talk right there.

[Sir T]

I got past the troll on my second tryat level 6. Basicly a combenation of letting lydia hit it, myfamiliar hit it, me running away while filling it full of arrows and unloading every spell I had on it. Oh and burning through my entire stock of healing potions and magic potions   Basicly I think if you want to hand to hand it better have pretty good armou, a fire enchangted weapon if you can get one (unlikely) and a truck full of healing potions.

Toughest fight I've run into so far actually (aside from one I couldnt win at all) was actually against an orc on the first companions mission. It beat the lard out of us and I couldt figure out why till I found some vampire dust on his corpse and went "Oh"

[Spiff]

if you're sword and boarding the perk that slows down time (to a crawl) while an enemy charges up an attack is a godsend for trolls. Nearly every attack they do is a charge-up so you just stand there, block and interrupt; if you've got the stamina for it, troll shouldn't hit you once  .
Although running and screaming was my preferred tactic first time around.

[Sky]

At work my boss and I refer to that troll as the final boss because he was stuck on it for a week; he ended up rerolling because the character he had just kept getting destroyed by the troll.

Your boss is the reason for shit like Oblivion. Best to plot his demise now.

[Sheepherder]

You know what's fun?  Compiler errors because an Actor is an ObjectReference, but an ObjectReference is not an Actor and may never be substituted in place of one.  I want to slam my head against a desk now, my "doing shit with objects" skills fucking suck nowadays.

[K9]

[Ironwood]

 

[Paelos]

I kinda miss that character tab where you see all your achievements like guild leader of so and so. That's not in here is it?