[DJ]

I pre-purchased Skyrim yesterday.



I feel $60 is really overpriced for most games.

For most games. I'd have paid $100 here, no questions asked, content in the knowledge that I'd be getting my money's worth.

I'm currently feverishly trying to clear my plate for when this game hits, because man, November is going to be a bitch.

I'm definitely in the pro-Bethesda camp. I'm aware their games aren't for everyone, and they certainly have enough errors and missteps to warrant disliking their game style, but for those of us who get off on exploration porn, there is simply no substitute for the kind of hit that a new Bethesda game will give you.

Can't fucking wait.

Post your future characters and plans here!
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[DJ]

I figure I'm gonna shell out the money eventually anyway. Might as well just let Steam charge me now and preload once I can, right?

S'what I did for Deus Ex too.

If I know, 100%, that I'm going to buy a game (this doesn't happen often), I'm pretty okay with just paying for it on the spot. Money's spent either way in my head, so let's just get it out of the way.

S'kinda weird. Games are one of the few things I will actively not pirate. I unabashedly download movies and TV shows and music albums freely, but I've got that itch to "support" games I enjoy, even though realistically one purchase is a tiny drop in a very large bucket and I really do have better shit to be spending my income on, and besides I'm well past the point of being able to claim any kind of moral high ground. My iPod's got 100GB of music on it. Come on.
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[DJ]

Nice to see they're using the Fallout NV blood effect despite this not being the Gamebryo engine I guess.
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Yeah I'm really not sure where the Dark/Demon's Souls comparisons are coming from, outside of just generic "Game Design Done Got More Complicated" applications.

Things I've heard through the grapevine that have me excited:

-- No more Gamebryo engine. This is the fucking engine that would not die, probably because it's technically pretty powerful and you can get decent looks out of it, but it is so unbelievably twitchy and strung together with fishing twine that inevitably any game made in it releases as a glitched-out mess. It can be fixed, and once you trim all the errant code it works, but it is really just fundamentally broken. Now Bethesda's using their own in-house engine, which...Has me a teeny bit worried, but hell it can't be any worse. I hope.

-- More Morrowind weirdness. Bethesda took the complaints about Oblivion's relatively staid setting to heart and Skyrim's been promised to contain the kind of violently non-Tolkeinian shit that was so prevalent in Morrowind (and Daggerfall to a lesser extent). We probably won't have floating air jellyfish, but I'm betting there will be a good-sized run of unique flora and fauna to get attacked by.

-- Better level balancing. Oblivion was notorious for fucking this up pretty bad; Fallout 3 was much, much better and they've said they're going to be using the F3 version so I'm pretty cool with that. No more needing to mod away the bizarre level curve for NPCs, hopefully!

-- Game is motherfucking huge. Much bigger than Oblivion and bigger than Fallout 3. Yessssss.

-- Dual-wielding. 'Bout time!

-- Norse mythology. Morrowind had an aboriginal vibe to it, Oblivion had...Uh. Something terribly generic. Now we're going the viking route and I'm absolutely okay with this. Solsthiem in Morrowind was one of the cooler locations, lore-wise, and I'm pretty excited to see Skyrim proper. Ultimately I'd love it if they'd set one of these games in Elswyer or the Black Marsh, particularly after some of the fleshing out of Black Marsh lore you could root out in Oblivion, but Skyrim was like next on the list after those two.
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Actually now that I think about it the Nords in the Elder Scrolls games seem to have a lot more in common with Germanic tribes than they really do with vikings. You don't see a whole lot of Nordic shipbuilding (that would be the Redguards) or, really, much expansionism.
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[DJ]

So I am now one of those guys who bought a new PC (really, I just bought a new CPU/Mobo/RAM, my graphics card is a Radeon 6970 so plenty good enough) for Skyrim, specifically. Like Battlefield 3 but somehow I feel like I get to keep more of my dignity, maybe.

Actually probably not.

Anyway my roommate and I are going to be co-building our PCs next Saturday and will be taking pictures/video. I'm sure there's a nerd shame pile somewhere we can add those to.

PC gaming master race 4 lyfe.
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[DJ]

Bethesda claims they have a new QA tool to help eliminate (or at least vastly reduce) bugs this time around. We'll see; I'm not exactly holding my breath but it didn't stop me from pre-ordering the game months ago. I wish they'd test their games better but the end product is such where if this is what we have to put up with, so be it. It is going to annoy me but it won't prevent me from playing their shit. Plus, hey, patches. New Vegas is actually pretty fucking stable now! Somehow!

(For PC anyway; woe betide you if you got the PS3 version, which is not a mistake I will ever make again)
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[DJ]

Do I play an Orc or an Argonian?

Currently leaning towards Orc.
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[DJ]

I...You guys.

I am gonna geek out on this motherfucker so hard.

SO HARD.

It's gonna be bad and I apologize in advance.

I'm almost 30 and I'm still doing this.


FUCK IT.
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I'm leaning towards Orc because playing as a Nord seems way too obvious and I wanna subvert that at least a little, but I'm also very much along for the ride on this one and playing Big Aggressive Species seems apt in a way I'll find enjoyable. I'm sure playing Female Wood Elf who becomes Nordic Hero will be amusing in its own right but my first time through I'm willing to go according to script a bit.

Or maybe not. We'll see what fits once I have it in hand. I'm really just gonna roll with where it takes me. Male Orc is where I'm leaning but that's just based on conjecture so far, I'm totally open to changing it up based on what I see.
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We are torturing one of our CS guys at work by repeatedly announcing the time -- in minutes, then in seconds -- that he's going to have to wait before he can play Skyrim.
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Breaking the Holy Writs by linking to Kotaku but oh well: The Elder Scrolls games were really fucking ugly.

Don't be That Guy who says Daggerfall actually looked good for its time. It didn't. At all. >:(

Don't even get me started on the fist-eatingly horrible Staying At The Inn music that used to drive my dad so nuts that he'd demand I played the game with the sound off and I don't blame him.

Neither was Battlespire (although it had a pretty character creation screen) or Redguard.

Also apparently there was an nGage ES game -- I found it because I was sure Kotaku missed a few ES games in there -- and I haven't played that one fuck fuck fuck no I am not digging up an nGage emulator fuck you.


(oh god yes i am)
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[DJ]

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

IT'S UP.

GO.

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

PC Gaming master race checking in with auto-settings:



Yerp.
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The world opens!

[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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[DJ]

I like my new armor.

[DJ]

Have not even begun to start the main quest.

I really should.
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So, uh, looks like that Oblivion enemy-levelling scheme is either gone entirely or greatly reduced, because some of these missions I'm going on are clearly beyond the ken of my poor level 8 shaman. When some little goblin guy can chunk out 3/4ths of your health in a single hit and he swings twice a second, it puts the fear of The Nine in you pretty good. When you have to fight him and and giant dwemer mech simultaneously, that's the game telling you to Get The Fuck Out And Come Back Later.

I'm okay with this!

I still kinda cheesed them to death by getting my lightning bolt hits in and then running away until he leashed back to his starting point several times, but meh.
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Yeah the removal of stats thing is odd, but I'm liking it so far. It helps that the perks are generally really powerful as opposed to the Fallout model, where they were useful but still mostly secondary to the stat core outside of a few must-haves. Even if you misplace a point in Skyrim, chances are you got something handy out of it. A 20% flat increase to damage with a particular weapon for a single point is the kind of design decision you don't see much in a post-WoW world, where a 1.7% damage increase is considered massive and potentially game-breaking. I've always hated that that bled into single player RPGs, where you're expected to spend five levels worth of stat increases for maybe a 5% higher crit chance or whatever. Skyrim is like "Hey here's some big dollops of whoop-ass all at once." Even the low level perks are monster increases to your skills.
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I'm going to be terribly amused when people find out how much Dark Souls actually sold, realize it's now mainstream, and start calling it crap compared to whatever other desperately-underground thing Google told them exists.

Anyway: Climbed the Throat of the World today:



Fought a Frost Troll on my increasingly snowy way up:



Finally found the monastery at the top:



The seven thousand steps are completed. I feel like I'm playing Elder Scrolls Batman Begins. Figured this would be a good point to save it for the night as it is NOW ALMOST 6AM I HAVE BEEN PLAYING FOR NEARLY 24 HOURS STRAIGHT aaaaaaaagggggghhhh

Also just before this I went to go do what I thought would be a simple side quest and wound up following a talking dog (this guy:)



across half the damn continent (you know how in escort quests the escort-ee moves really slowly and will die if a snowflake hits them? This dog is the opposite -- it ran at mach speed through the fucking mountain-woods with no indicator on it at all and had usually chewed everything in half by the time I got there while still at full health), into a den full of vampires, and then shit only got weirder from there. For Elder Scrolls veterans, this should be a good clue:



I was beyond shocked that it actually wasn't Sheogorath this time. If you're really, really hardcore then you know what's missing from that statue.

Also the skies in this game are amazing.



This game has near-Morrowind levels of violently Non-Tolkeinian greebles all over it and I love it. It's what I wanted Oblivion to be. I can see why those who aren't Elder Scrolls lore dorks don't quite get it, but for the true believers this is pretty much the holy grail thus far.
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Random question: Did they ever pronounce "Elsweyr" in Oblivion? I could've sworn they did, and it was pronounced ells-WHY-err. In Skyrim it's being pronounced like "Elsewhere".
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Welp. Had to finally use a console command to un-stick myself from a bug. Was lodged torso-deep in the side of a mountain and saving/reloading just stuck me right back in the same spot, so!

Looks like New Vegas rules are in effect, somewhat unfortunately: Use a command in the console and achievements are locked until you restart. Not a big deal if you're not using it to cheat; hack yourself out of whatever problem you're in, then QTD and reload. I do kind of wish they'd implement a cheat vs. DIY bug workaround system with the console but oh well, that's honestly a bit much to ask for considering the amount of time it'd take to implement and the relatively small percentage of players who would even know it's there, let alone use it.

Coincidentally, while researching if this was the case with the game alt-tabbed, I came across this. Note to people with criticism about a game: Even if you have a point, your tone alone is more than enough to make people automatically want to disagree with you on principle simply because you sound like a whiny self-entitled prick. Try to frame your criticism in such a way that you're stating a fact instead of throwing a well-articulated tantrum.
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Assuming you're talking about the same dog I experienced, you can get rid of him by actually completing his quest. The annoyance factor is sort of the entire point.

Also companions can only die if you kill them, which explains why Lydia died for you.

Admittedly, the way this game handles companions is a bit scene-breaking, i.e. how am I hidden if this barking dog is standing next to me? But it seems to be based around player choice, albeit with a pretty liberal range as to what will get you fucked over and what won't. NPCs can't initiate anything on their own, up to and including fucking up stealth. You can kill your companions, but it has to be you who does it; they will only drop to their knees if an enemy damages them too much. So, you do have the option of just offing your friends, a la most other Bethesda games and Fallout 1/2, but the odds of them dying "accidentally" are slim to none unless it was an errant attack on your part. No more "Hey my NPC buddy saw an enemy 3 miles away, ran to some random location trying to fight them all, and died." This was a pretty common occurrence, especially in Fallout 3; I liked it because a weirdly large amount of the time your companion would actually win. What's that, Dogmeat? You just killed an entire abandoned farm full of bandits by yourself and I didn't even notice? Good boy!

As far as how Skyrim does this: On the one hand, I like this approach because I'm definitely one of those people who reloaded Fallout 3 if Dogmeat got nailed by an errant rocket or whatever, especially if I didn't realize he'd gone off hunting without warning me. On the other hand, it removes a lot of significance as far as NPC death could potentially go outside of just allowing the player to be malevolent.

Still, looking back on how I've played games my entire life, I can completely understand why they did this. As much as I'd like to know the option for emergent gameplay re: NPC fuckups is there, the truth is that myself and 99% of players will simply reload rather than deal with the consequences of a character we're not controlling "doing something stupid" that's outside of our direct control. The ultimate solution to this is actually-intelligent AI that won't just fuck off to do its own thing without any input from you while still retaining an immersion-appropriate vulnerability, but we're not quite there yet; this is a suitable compromise in the meantime.
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I've gotta say I'm probably going to stick with Lydia until the end of the game because (and it feels really weird to say this) she can get beaten up better than any NPC companion I've had in any of these games. She's smart enough to pull out the bow when an enemy is unreachable, but if they're on the ground she's up front tanking that shit regardless of what it is, and as a result she's suffered more dragon bites/burns/scratches/tail swipes/wing buffets/etc. than my character is ever likely to, and still answers most interactions with "I'm still here!". I can't decide if that's creepy or awesome.

I need to get her some better armor (she flatly refuses to wear any of the stuff I've given her so far besides the sword and the helmet) but she can take a pretty remarkable amount of punishment just based on what she's wearing, so I guess it's not a big deal. She'll still kneel pretty fast vs. big targets but she distracts them long enough to burn all my magicka tossing lighting hadokens and then re-arranging my shit to finally get my mace and shield out, and that's become kind of invaluable. Plus if she recovers mid-fight she'll actually get back up and go smack them some more, which again is an excellent distraction and gives me enough time to prep some new attacks.

All Boone in New Vegas ever did is attack shit when I didn't want him to and bitch.
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Oh and as far as companion deaths, my roommate got the guide today and it is confirmed: They have to die by your hand, otherwise they cannot be killed. Unsurprising since this is how it worked in New Vegas.

Also yes, skills do matter. The perks are essentially a replacement for the stats, but your actual skill points in a given action still govern its effectiveness. You just don't get the added bonus on top of it. Picking a lock with 100 lockpicking is still going to be much easier than picking it with a skill of 20, even if you've never spent a single point in that tree.
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In regards to the rest of Tamriel being in there:

What probably happened was when time came to draft up the overworld in the Creation Kit, the mandate was "built a really huge, really basic overworld and stick the other countries that border Skyrim in there roughly enough to scale so that we can make sure that Skyrim fits the continent properly". This big map was what was worked off of as the rough textures were replaced with the actual game ground you can run around on, etc. while the stuff outside the borders was left alone. It helps keep the spacing accurate -- you don't have random spurs going off into what should be where Morrowind is, etc.

Having rough, unfeatured LOD textures in there isn't terribly resource-hogging. Those things are all one repeating texture so really it's just a bunch of rendering points saying "Render this part higher to make a mountain" and so on, which isn't particularly resource intensive at all. The game never renders it unless you see it, and the footprint is negligible either way even if the scope seems huge if you actually get there. This is how Daggerfall managed to have such a gigantic landmass on 1993-1996 hardware. It just randomized those points within a particular range and actually let you go there with some 2D foliage slapped on.

You see this in a LOT of games like this, such as Shadow of the Colossus (where you could find unused areas and the cinematic filming areas stuck outside the map), all the 3D GTA games (III had the cinematic "island" you could reach by Dodo plane, San Andreas had all kinds of shit stuck up in the sky), and World of Warcraft (where you had entire unused instances/zones/developer-only areas loading along with the live overworld map, and even chunks of currently-released and still-unused expansion packs, including a gateway to the Burning Crusade Blood Elf area guarded by an elf named "Adon").

Still cool, though.
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