Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

[Ironwood]

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

[stray]

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.

[Zetor]

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!

[Lantyssa]

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

[stray]

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.

[5150]

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.

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)

[koro]

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.

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.

[rk47]

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.

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)

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

[luckton]

 

[Paelos]

The boots on the crab are 

[NiX]

The boots on the crab are 

Or the wings on the helmet.

[Sheepherder]

Those are not Dwemer boots.

[MisterNoisy]

System requirements:

Minimum:

Operating System: Win XP/Vista/Win7
CPU: Dual Core 2GHz
Memory: 2GB RAM
Video Card: DX9c with 512MB RAM

Recommended:

Operating System: Win XP/7
CPU: Quad-Core CPU
Memory: 4GB RAM,
6GB Hard Drive Space
Video Card: DirectX9 video card with 1GB Memory
(GTX 260/Radeon 4890 or higher)

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

[Bunk]

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

[Sky]

[Hawkbit]

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. 

[CaptainNapkin]

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.

[Sky]

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'.

[Bandit]

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

Longtime Elder Scrolls fans hoping Skryim would take full advantage of the PC's strengths: unfortunately we have to disappoint you. Game director Todd Howard says besides higher quality textures and bigger resolutions, it "looks the same" as on consoles, and it's "mostly a DirectX 9 game in terms of how the shaders work."

He does note DirectX 11 support is a possibility down the line, however: "When it comes to DirectX 11 there are things they get us for free, like performance gains. You’re going to get performance gains out of it versus an older version. But the specifics DX11 does, like tessellation and all that kinda stuff, we aren’t taking advantage of that right now. That doesn’t mean we won’t in the future. We aren’t right now because we want to author it so it looks great.”

On the bright side, the new engine means Skyrim looks quite lovely as is, just nothing mind-blowing, which it could be. No doubt the modding community will improve the situation before long, though.

[Hawkbit]

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.

[Malakili]

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

[Rendakor]

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

[CaptainNapkin]

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.

[Ironwood]

Oblivion was utterly beautiful.

As a game, it blew.

[NiX]

Oblivion was utterly beautiful.

As a game, it blew.

Hopefully this means they found a happy medium.

[Ironwood]

The demo looked good.

But who knows.

[Hawkbit]

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

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

[Morfiend]

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

[Ironwood]

Yeah.

[Paelos]

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

[Sky]

Oblivion was utterly beautiful.

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.

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

FIFY  

[NiX]

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.

[Sky]

if you put it on a PC, maxxed it out and tweaked some config files waited months and modded the shit out of it, 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.

[MisterNoisy]

Oblivion was utterly beautiful.

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.

Fixed spoiler for you.  

[NiX]

Fixed spoiler for you.  

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