[DJ]

For the non-Jolly-Rogering set on the left coast, the game drops at 9PM Pacific Time. Confirmed!
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[another coma]

[Mr. Mechanical]

[remote]

love it
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[Mr. Mechanical]

[CubaLibre]

EMERGENCE

Warren Spector eat your heart out.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[bza]

I am going to play a female argonian thief/assassin and rely on pots/baskets/bowls to disable my victims. They call her... Hides-Your-Eyes.

Of course, she'll have a crippling skooma addiction as well.
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[DJ]

I thought skooma was more of a Khajit thing.

Speaking of which, is anyone playing as a Khajit?

Also I am going to be a colossal fucking nerd and recreate my Warcraft Orc in Skyrim. Think of it as redemption for that character. I always had in my head what I wanted that character to be until it became clear that WoW is only an RPG in the loosest sense of the word. I wanna remake that guy the way he was when I thought him up: A crotchety, insane asshole with a crippling drug problem and a bad habit of lighting people on fire because he can. Also the idea of an Orc magic user still entertains me.

Also because I wanna see if I can actually make, in this game, what "Shaman" was in my head when I started WoW instead of "Chain Heal Bot". Someone who can speak to animals, control the elements, and routinely consumes herculean amounts of intoxicants resulting in fighting dragons while naked and tripping balls.
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[Dark Age Iron Savior]

after seeing the follow-up on that account (the guy puts the bucket over the dudes head and then murders the lady with a stealth kill kind of deal), I'm left with even more questions. Would the guy react if he heard the lady scream? Will he eventually notice her dead body after asking the player if they are looking for something in particular? Will a villager with a bucket on their head react to a monster that you lead into town, or does it only apply to player crime?

[diplo]

Oh, right. Jeremy Soule is scoring this. Guess it's time to find the soundtrack.

[Flylighter]

It's funny because that video applies directly to my character, I decided to make a thieving, pickpocketing backstabbing jerk. I dunno though, that sort of takes the fun out of it.
I levelled up four more times pickpocketing the shit out of people. This lady offered me the key to her house as an invitation to help myself to supplies. However, the 'take gift' screen came up blank because I'd already pickpocketed the key off her, and her house was already looted. I also got a necklace that makes me block better with my hide buckler! Also got a sweet orcish bow. You can pickpocket right the fuck in front of other people though. Just as long as you're behind the victim, other bystanders won't care. So uh, that's silly.

I forgot to mention it took all of three minutes of play time before I had to start managing my carry weight with stuff I wanted to sell. Way to go on that bit I suppose, I have to play the weight-to-value-ratio game again. You can also run over foot-high physics objects, kicking them into yourself for damage. I also watched my beginning-of-game companion hit an enemy so hard the ragdoll(?) flew across the cavern and clear through the ceiling, never to be seen again. Also the UI is disgusting, clearly a husk of the console UI. ALSO, setting favorites for weapon-switching doesn't work right now, so switching between my bow and my dagger/buckler is a massive pain in the ass, amplified by having to navigate the UI to do so.

My character is still a total babe though.

That's cool on the Saul Tigh bit B Coma, I looked it up and was excited that the guy's getting work.
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I'm on Steam! ----- I'm on Youtube!

[Flylighter]

Ok guys,

1. Pay the archery trainer in the town to skill up your archery
2. Pickpocket the money back, skilling up your pickpocketing
3. Pay the trainer again to skill up again
4. Pickpocket the money back again, skill up pickpocketing again
5. Level up! You beat Skyrim
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I'm on Steam! ----- I'm on Youtube!

[DJ]

IT'S UP.

GO.

(reboot steam if you're on steam)
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[thestage]

[DJ]

PC Gaming master race checking in with auto-settings:



Yerp.
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[parker]

No human could create a ui this terrible.
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[L]

DJ I just want to say I appreciate how consistently excited you are in release threads for three-dimensional PC games.

[Bingle]

So are the dungeons actually decently designed? You know, because with the addition of some sense of pacing, that would automatically place them over Morrowind and Oblivion.

maybe i should replay morrowind. i might be taking my memories of oblivion and slamming them in the other unjustly.
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[CubaLibre]

[bort]

the hooker doesn't get back in your car again.

[DJ]

The world opens!

[Flylighter]

[scratchmonkey]

Man yeah the UI is a total abomination.

I just got to the opening-up bit as well. I only auto-detected at High Graphics. Oh well.

(And yes, my pack was also entirely full of loot within the first 5 minutes.)

[bza]

Just played for an hour or so, and in that time became a jerk. I started off by wandering in the opposite direction the game wanted me to go, fought some bandits, and came across a seemingly abandoned tower. Suddenly a spriggan rushes out, turns invisible, and starts swiping at me while bugs cloud my vision. I'm dead pretty quick. Reloading my save (PC gaming master race quicksave) I combine my flames and sparks spells to burnocute the spriggan, finishing her off with my sword. For my troubles I found a magicka potion and a stamina potion inside a chest in the little garden within the tower.

A few minutes later I spy three people walking down a lightly wooded path, and from cover let loose a few arrows. Only one of them hits but it's enough to cause two of the three to rush me while the third runs off screaming. I take them both out with a combination of magic and swordplay to find that the woman was apparently some sort of nobility or perhaps a gem merchant, since she was loaded up with gems and jewelry. I hope this doesn't come back to bite me someday.

I make my way into the town, called something like Fayreath, and immediately start looking for someone to pawn my ill-gotten goods to. Instead I find an alchemy shop. The owner seems alright but she only sells potions and food, which I don't care about. I enter another house but the woman inside refuses to enter any sort of dialogue with me, just saying that the war's been hard on their town. I sit down in her chair and level up before quitting for the night.
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[DJ]

I immediately wandered off the given path, found 3 bandits who tried to kill me, killed them instead, took all their crap, wandered into town wearing the blood-soaked clothes of the bandits I just killed, picked a fight with a fellow orc at a bar, killed him, took his shit and put it on which necessitated dropping all the previous crap I owned on the floor, told the bar owner it was cool if she just collected all the armor I just dropped (words cannot express how cool this is), chatted up the very emo Redguard lady in the alchemy shop, left when she refused to sell me anything because it was 2AM, wandered around clutching bees out of the air for a while, eventually made it back to the actual starting town, and here I am.

It's raining.



SO FAR SO GOOD.

Morrowind taught me that at least doing a bit of the main quest right off the bat is a good idea until you have some solid footing, so I'll be doing that tomorrow. In the meantime, I may as well get to bed as I do have work in the morning. But the weekend?

Dear good the weekend.
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[costel]

[Swarm]

[Mr. Mechanical]

I ended up only playing a couple hours last night because I couldn't stay focused past 1 a.m. The game auto-detected my settings for medium but I cranked everything up anyway just to see and it's still quite playable (though not 60 fps). So the engine really must be super optimized I guess. Though I just enabled a couple of shadow settings that are off by default in the .ini (see this post) so we'll see how much of a framerate hit that ends up being.

Anyway I had a pretty good time last night. I'm playing a female Dark Elf named Ar'ylia. I haven't really given her a backstory yet but she's a refugee who's pretty down on her luck at the moment. After completing the tutorial area, which was mercifully brief and engaging enough to get me interested in the main quest, I got attacked by bandits like others and used my magic and bow and arrow to kill them. On one of them I found a treasure map pointing me to a treasure near Riverwood, which I found by the time I got around to walking over there. Before doing that I had to pick a lot of flowers and one nirnroot, sell some meat and pelts to a lonely huntress and her dog doing some late night mining on the mountainside, discover an ember mine and my first set of standing stones where I selected The Mage sign so now my magic skills level up faster.

I think I'm definitely going to start off using magic because holy hell it's really fun to use. Right now I'm in Riverwood but haven't talked to anyone yet. I think I'm going to do the first few steps of the main quest so the dragons show up for real because I don't want to start exploring without having to worry about getting attacked by dragons. It would just be more interesting the other way.

My first impression upon setting foot outside the first time was how much better, art-wise and technically, this looks compared to Oblivion. There is just so much of everything all packed into one space. Walking down the mountain and into a wooded area it all feels like being in that actual kind of space because there's trees and grass and rocks everywhere and not a lot of empty space that isn't being used. It's all very dense and I really like that. Walking to Riverwood I kept discovering locations and things and seeing stuff I knew I'd need to check out later. I don't know how anyone can focus on questing when there's all this stuff grasping for your attention.

I hope I find more treasure maps because they do them here like they did in Red Dead Redemption where it's hand-drawn with the X marked near a location and an inset view of the spot with the actual treasure. In this case it was a giant, hollowed out log which looked exactly like it did in the game world. I love doing treasure hunts like that.
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[scratchmonkey]

I'm playing the same dang character I always play in TES -- a Redguard rogue with a sword and a bow with a fair amount of talk-yourself-out-of-this ability. Although I'm realizing know that it would be fairly easy to play a Conan-style thief/barbarian, so I might go back to that.

After going through the tutorial area, I wound up going to the "first town", listening to all the available story talk, then decided "bugger this" and ran off in the middle of the night to find my own adventures. I was stalked by wolves for a while without them actually attacking, then wound up helping two folks kill a giant in a field in what felt suspiciously like a scripted event to set up meeting the Companions. After my running off in the middle of the night to avoid the main story, I am of course in the town that you're supposed to be in for the next part of the main story.

[drobe]

Move over Metal Gear, the game has changed.
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http://i.imgur.com/9ATgokP.gif

[1CC]

This game looks like crap on my PS3. It's basically Oblivion with less colors. I sure hope this console generation is on its way out.

I couldn't make out any noteworthy improvements on AI or environment interaction either, the world is still segmented as always, and after playing Mount and Blade and Demon's Souls the combat just feels old and clunky. What the hell did Bethesda do all these years?

Most exciting experience so far:
I saw a chicken in the first town and wanted something to eat after barely escaping death, so I axed it and a split-second later hell broke loose. Everyone came after me like I just raped their children. So I loaded my save and tried to rape their children, but I either didn't get an uncut version of the game or those little fuckers really are invincible.

Maybe I'll keep at it until I slay my first dragon, and maybe not. Why did I buy this? Will I make the same mistake again when Elder Scrolls VI comes out? Probably.

[Talbain]

Yeah, seeing this game so far makes me glad I didn't buy it. Xanadu Next is pretty entertaining, and free (recently translated into English).
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[Teflon]

[1CC]

@Talbain: Cool, I had no idea.

[Felix]

I'm actually a little disturbed by the number of women I need to stab to death and leave lying naked on the ground in order to succeed in this game.

Also weirded out by how little disk space this takes up. I know everyone keeps talking about how it's late generation this and that, but all signs do in fact point to this being Oblivion with better art direction. No, the combat is no Demon Souls, but the left/right hand thing is actually pretty intuitive and interesting unless you aren't using any magic, in which case this is a really boring game.

I need to keep reminding myself of that so I won't play any more of it.

[1CC]

Quick question: can you move corpses around? I'd like to make a pile or two.

[LandRoverAttack]

[Talbain]

Oh yeah, also, Skyrim art: http://ettugamer.com/photos/scrolls-five/
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[Tulpa]

Hey is this game better played with a pad or mouse+kb?

I'm probably going to assume pad.
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[Felix]

The spell/weapon hotkeying is probably awful without having 1-4 available for mapping. (It's also not really made clear to you in the game that you can do that unless you assume you can, so it's awful until you figure it out, too.)

[remote]

Been using kb+m and I think that's fine, but maybe I'll try the pad for a while. The favorites and hotkeys are definitely weird and confusing — I have no idea how to switch back to my two-handed greataxe once I hit a hotkey to bring up a heal spell and handaxe.

I'm actually kind of surprised at how much I'm enjoying this game despite the annoying UI.
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam