[Mr. Mechanical]

I am also excited for Skyrim to the point of pre-purchasing on Steam about a month and a half ago. I don't know what kind of character I'm going to play but my first attempt at the game will probably be a jack of all trades type thing until I decide to specialize in something. Then I'll probably start over. Though of course you since it's a TES game breaking the game over your knee and exploiting its systems are like the whole point after a while so I'm not really that concerned about the character itself.

I'm really looking forward to exploring and fighting monsters and looting everything. I must have spent about 80 hours or so with Fallout 3 which up to this point is still the most time I've ever spent with any single Bethesda-developed game. Since it seems like they're taking some design cues from that game with Skyrim (the level-scaling, perks upon level up) I'm pretty excited.

What we've seen so far of the environments looks promising but I hope there are some more unique and strange locations to visit. Also the characters don't look like total ass anymore and the environments are even more detailed. Animations are hugely improved as well. It's like there's finally a TES game where all the basics are covered and we aren't being asked to settle for what's comparable in other, lesser games.

And if it turns out the game is horribly broken or terrible in some way (more broken or terrible than usual for a new TES release) then there's always the mod community. Hell I'm excited to see what comes out of the mod community eventually. They've yet to let me down with these games.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

Where are the comparisons to Demon's Souls coming from? Everything I've seen of the game makes it look like Oblivion combat basically. I haven't played Demon's Souls though so maybe there's something there that I'm not seeing.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

I wasn't really sold on the game when it was announced and thought the Nordic angle wouldn't be that interesting. Then I saw the screens and videos of that one character with the Frank Frazetta looking viking getup and horned helmet and I was like damn I want to play that guy.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

Just going to get the bottom post out of the way here...
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

...so I can get us off to a new page with some info about the game's ability and perks!

http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1233644-sammus-eurogamer-qa/

Note: This isn't a complete list, just what's been gathered by a fan who had played it at a convention.

[Mr. Mechanical]

http://kotaku.com/5848132/skyrims-map-leaked-is-massive

http://img.elderscrolls.net/news/map.jpg <- All the words are in Russian but I count what appear to be 9 major cities (if that's what those crests are indicating) and 7 or 8 smaller settlements. It's all very spread out and cool looking, and delineates the major territories. Can't wait.

edit-Upon closer inspection I also notice about 20 small red X's dotting the map at various places. No idea what those might be marking or if they're even marking anything at all.

edit2-Dragon Fight!
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

http://imgur.com/a/RFee1/noscript <- Leaked manual for the Xbox version.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

What's Arena like? I've never actually played it but I think I downloaded the setup for it since Bethesda were giving it away at the time. I think they still are, actually.

Anyway, Alec Meer from RPS got to play Skyrim for a while and wrote a couple things about his experiences.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/17/skyrim-the-zombie-torturer/

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/17/skyrim-the-bad-vegetarian/
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

I'm not really planning on playing either of them anytime soon. Though I do still have a save on Daggerfall that I could return to if I wished.

What I'd really like though is for someone to take Oblivion's basic combat model and somehow put it in Morrowind. Morrowind is more fun to explore and poke around in but Oblivion has better hack 'n slashing. It would be nice if fighting stuff in Morrowind was as fun as it was in Oblivion.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

Yeah but I like being able to push a button to bring my shield up rather than hope it does it automatically. Though, yeah, a good spear really was the way to go in Morrowind. I never tried messing around with the different attack directions and instead always used the "select best attack" option from the menu.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

Apparently it's the first half hour of the game.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

I'm still rocking my Phenom X2 from when I put this computer together last year and it's been working out pretty well though in certain games it's more obvious that it's the weakest link. I'm planning on upgrading it to an X4 or X6 but probably not until after the new year. I doubt Skyrim will be much of a problem for though since the game was built to run on an Xbox.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

Turns out the PC specs were announced a while ago: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/25/sky-high-or-below-the-rim-skyrim-specs/

[Mr. Mechanical]

I think the 360 version leaked a week or so ago.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

Yeah I had heard that the default fire spell every character starts with now was basically a flamethrower instead of a wimpy little fireball. I'm glad to hear it delivers.

I think the wood and ore are for the crafting part of the game. You can make new armor and weapons and stuff.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

I found out just the other day actually that you can indeed become a werewolf in this one. No idea if you can become a vampire though.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

I don't know but I suspect we'll have to wait for the mod community to step in before we can play as wereboars.

Also I may have been wrong about werewolves being in the game. I think you turn into one for a particular quest but that's it.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

http://www.bethblog.com/index.php/2011/11/07/skyrim-official-strategy-guide-blog-1-something-to-shout-about/

Holy hell that looks like a cool guide. Sounds like top notch toilet-reading-material.

Also the game has gone gold officially and should be available for preload on Steam sometime this week before releasing on Friday.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

Game is available for preload. It's downloading now. 5.8 gigs. Eeeeeeh. Just a couple more days until Friday.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

I don't think Skyrim has an Athletics skill. Or Spears :/
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

Oh my god the next 26 hours or however long until it unlocks are going to be excruciating for me. I hope Steam unlocks it early so I can start playing it tomorrow night instead of mid-morning Friday.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

http://skyrim2011.info/

Less than 90,000 seconds until release. How about that.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

So the game is getting a lot of really good reviews but that hardly tells us anything. RPS said it was the new Best Elder Scrolls Game Ever, ousting Morrowind. Less controversially PCGamer raves about it without treading into hyperbole-territory. I particularly like that they mention the world is chock full of neat, unique places and areas to discover in comparison to Oblivion's "sparse repetition".

When I turned my computer on a minute ago Steam downloaded something for Skyrim that was 18 mb in size but the game still remains locked for me for presumably another five or so hours. I am probably going to stay up really late playing it if it actually does unlock at midnight.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

[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.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

I don't know, I'm not using hotkeys or favorites for anything so far and I think the UI is fine. Whenever I need to equip something I'm in and out in a couple seconds. I like that I can just use wasd + e and tab for everything. And with the armor/damage/gold ratings I can tell at a glance whether whatever I'm looking at is worth equipping/picking up or not so that's nice too.

I'm almost level 5 now. I completed Bleak Falls Barrow and spent most of it burning stuff up with my dual fire spells. I liked that there were some light puzzles and traps throughout the place. I hope there's more where that came from. After I got out of there I went back to Riverwood to return the golden claw and on the way discovered an old woman in a shack who was secretly some kind of alchemist because she had an alchemy lab in her basement. She tried to silence me for learning her secret but I silenced her first and got out of there then I hung out with Alvdor or whatever his name is in Riverwood and had him teach me how to smith and forge and stuff. Then I went and found his wife and she told me to stay away from her husband. Then I played hide and seek with their daughter in the rain. Listened to the bard at the inn sing a song and then did a little mini-quest for him. Now I'm back in Whiterun and I'm about to fight my first dragon.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

There are now dragons roaming the skies in my game. When I started playing this afternoon I was getting ready to embark on a major journey across the map to the next location in the main quest after High Hrothgar. However, after I made it into the snowy mountains past Whiterun I encountered my first dragon in the wild. I tried fighting him but I was not up to the task so I had to run away.

Figuring that now my goal of getting the dragons occupying the game world was completed I decided to head back to Whiterun and do some side quests. I ended up exploring this dungeon called Volderuun or something like that, a ways outside Whiterun. The boss and a few of the monsters in there were far enough out of my league that I had to cheese it a bit to beat them by hit and running with my bow and arrow until they lost interest in me, then rinse and repeat. It took me a good while to get through that place but in doing so I leveled my sneak and archery skills a good bit to the point that they're my highest level skills now.

Now I'm level 11 and I'm just wandering the land doing whatever strikes my fancy. I really like how unique all these locations I've been in so far have been. I can't remember all the names too well of all the places but I remember the architecture and the other little details, their layouts and the things I found in them, and none of it's felt cookie-cutter at all. And so far I've only really explored the central part of the map. I also really like all the fog and snow and rain effects, and how the wind blows cloth and big patches of cobwebs. That last dungeon I was in, Volderuun, really felt dank and creepy with the deepest parts featuring fog wafting over the floors. It was very atmospheric and that was just a minor place for a little side quest. The attention to detail in this game has been so far quite staggering. Everything feels handcrafted and it just seems like there's no possible way it could be unless like a million people worked on this.

Also, I've not had any crash-to-desktops or anything like that happen so far. Though I have experienced a couple odd glitches. For instance, I saw a priest in Whiterun sleeping on thin air next to bed and the skeleton of the first dragon I killed mysteriously showed up first in the outer area outside Whiterun and then again right outside the main gate. Also I've seen the odd bit of rock floating above the ground or missing a side but other than that stuff it's been surprisingly stable and glitch free.

And it sounds weird to say it but I really like everything they've simplified. Usually simplification of complex game systems is cause for complaint but in this case it actually works. I like that the perks I choose now define my character and not a mess of numbers.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

What do you mean, Teflon? I've cooked lots of things that gave me various benefits, like a vegetable soup that restores 1 health and 1 stamina over 720 seconds.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

Just did a quest for a priestess at the Kynareth shrine in Whiterun. Had to go to get sap from a special tree that was sacred to the religion and before I left this guy named Maurice asks if he can come along because he's never been to see this tree. So I'm like okay sure. This was the second leg of the quest btw, the first part involves finding some special dagger that can cut into the tree. So me and this new guy take off and right away I was like damn I made a mistake taking this tool along.

Maurice was braindead, I couldn't give him any orders like a proper companion, and he was always rushing in to fights to fight bandits and monsters with his fists (even after he eventually picked up a bow which he never once used) and he kept getting himself killed. Since I was curious to see what happened when we got to the special tree I did my best to keep him alive which meant reloading saves frequently. So we eventually get to this place which was in this really cool part of the world I'd never been in before and we head to this tree. There are already some other followers of Kynareth camped out at this place and one of them tells me not to cut into the tree or bad stuff will happen. At this point I'm like something is fishy here because Maurice is always acting impatient whenever I try to talk to him and this is the first I'm hearing about cutting into this tree being a bad idea. Would have thought the priestess at Whiterun would have mentioned that, right?

So I'm of course thinking there's something going on here that the priestess back at Whiterun isn't telling me about. So I take the dagger and of course once I cut into the tree to get the sap about four Spriggans spawn. Takes me several tries but I eventually get past it and make it out of there with the sap ready to head back to Whiterun. Only it looks like Maurice didn't follow me back out of the place the tree was in. Also there's a dragon flying around not far from there so I can't fast travel until he leaves. So I got back inside to find out what happened to the guy and wait for the dragon to fly off. I find Maurice the Idiot mining ore somewhere in there. I wait and wait on him but he never stops mining and I can't mine with him because the game only lets one person mine an ore spot at a time.

So I leave him to it and head back to Whiterun and turn the quest in and... nothing. The priestess thanks me and now I can train up my restoration skill with her if I want. That's it, no big dark secret twist. Very lame payoff. I'm tempted to go back and murder Maurice and see if I can't get the Dark Brotherhood to contact me so I can play some good quests again.

Also I bought a house in Whiterun and stored a bunch of stuff in the chest inside. Also parked Lydia in there because I'm still doing the whole stealth thing and she'd just cramp up my style.

Oh and another strange-obviously-a-Bethesda-game occurrence: I go back to the house by Riverwood that belonged to the witch I killed. I find a note in there confirming she's a witch and that she's expecting a niece or someone to come live with her and train to be a witch. I figure since she's dead and no one's around I'll help myself to some of her stuff. So I steal some goods thinking I'll get away with it since there are no witnesses. I get back to Whiterun and am immediately confronted by the guards and have to pay a fine (or use my title as Thane to get them to look they other way but I paid up because I find that kind of cronyism or whatever you want to call it distasteful). Later on I'm in Riverwood again and two hired thugs attack me out of nowhere for being a thief. I dispatch them and loot their bodies, finding a note from who I think is the witches niece or whoever telling them to take care of me for stealing her aunts stuff. I drop their bodies in the river and watch them float away.

Sort of along the same lines I accidentally killed Maurice on one of my attempts at the quest I was talking about. I decided to head back to Whiterun to turn the quest in anyway but of course, even though there were no human witnesses to my crime the guards still knew automatically that I killed him. So I got to reload that one and try again.

[Mr. Mechanical]

If you find a new power word but don't have any dragon souls you can't use it so you have to get a dragon soul and then go into the shouts menu and it will let you select the shouts you haven't spent any souls on. I don't know if there's an automatic setting but that's how it's worked for me so far.

I just got done exploring a cave to the northeast of Whiterun that a passing guard mentioned. It was really pretty and led to a room that was built by dwarves where I fought a centurion. That was really cool and I can't wait to stumble onto some more dwarven ruins. They're probably my favorite locations I've discovered so far.

Also, on my way back to my house I encountered a ghostly headless horsemen but I think it was glitched because it gave me the prompt to speak to him but pressing it did nothing and it appeared that the horse he was sitting on was invisible. Still pretty neat though I bet there's a quest tied to it.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

I just discovered Labyrinthian. Holy hell there is probably a really cool quest associated with this place because I found a wooden mask that, when worn inside the throne room it's found in, transports me to the same room but in a different era and I can't get out because I don't have the right (presumably quest-related) items to get the door open. Started exploring one of the dungeons around it, Lost Valkygg I think it was called, but stopped because it's getting late and I have to get up early. I wish I didn't have to get up early. Oh well.

[Mr. Mechanical]

NeoGAF thread on .ini tweaks and other settings to play with and a decent roundup from PCGamer of some early mods that might be worth checking out. Also RPS reports on a map mod that looks neat.

Probably going to try some of these out when I get home. Definitely the higher resolution blood mod and I'll probably tweak the shadow resolutions.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]