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Yeah, I am fairly excited about this game — more curious, really, I guess — while I maintain a degree of skepticism.

After Oblivion, yes, you can bet I will be sampling this game via unofficial trial version before I pay a cent for it. I think it would be foolish to do otherwise. But hey. I'll be thrilled if the game is as good as I'd like to hope it might be, though. I think it's possible. There will be flaws, but I am sort of counting on it not being nearly as stupidly broken as Oblivion...

The new approach to crime & punishment seems promising. One of my biggest problems with the original game (aside from its general banality) was the psychic guards.
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The Skyrim version of Zelda's vengeful swarm of chickens?
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how?
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It sure as hell made Oblivion more tolerable, so maybe I'll find myself doing the same in this one.
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Boils down to: NPCs take all the art out of Oblivion.

I mean, they were so obnoxiously paper-thin it became like watching a crazy animated doll-human bashing its head against a pane of glass, with me standing on the other side, knowing it could never reach me. Completely brainless and absurd. That's how the game felt to me whenever I passed by or tried to interact with quest givers and inessential NPCs. I'm pretty sure I never encountered a character in the game that "really deserved" to die (though Martin was pretty boring), but I couldn't have cared less about any of it.

Honestly, I wouldn't mind if Skyrim gave me some reason to feel invested in my character or his world — then I might have a bit more respect for it — but if it's just another game where all I want to do is be a total rogue and fuck around and kill stupid things indiscriminately for loot I might find that enjoyable for a while.
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Yep.
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BenRen would be right at home as an NPC in Oblivion.
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To be fair I could understand taking offense at or being disgusted/bored by this sort of "fucking kill everything" approach to a game (I'm listening to the Metroid podcast), but my feeling is that Oblivion begged to be approached that way lest it come off as constantly insufferable, but that's exactly why it's a bad game. Or, at least, one of the biggest reasons...

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New Vegas is way more enjoyable in that regard. There are plenty of NPCs that are a pleasure to talk to. Actual dialogue, humor, and voice acting is there.
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love it
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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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I'm always way too overloaded with my own armor and a pile of weapons and ore and flowers and shit to even think about stealing my victims' clothes for pocket change. I probably haven't looked through all the perks closely enough, but I really hope there's one that increases the load I can carry. At least I have this companion, Lydia, to lug things around for me.

Companions are nice to have around, but Lydia sure isn't as entertaining as any of the companions from New Vegas.

I guess I've pretty much settled on making my dude a barbarian with two-handers and heavy armor with a little bit of magic thrown in. I'm enjoying the blacksmithing and alchemy stuff, and I've crafted most of the armor I'm wearing now and refined it all up to superior quality.

This game is kind of gorgeous.



On my way to my current destination I climbed a mountain and stumbled upon a second dragon. He was pretty easy, too, but these fights are just fun to look at.



When I got to the bottom of the mountain I found some kind of derelict old dwarf fortress occupied by bandits and some kind of goblins or whatever.



I don't know much about TES lore — are there actual dwarves in this universe, or are they extinct?



Anyway, continuing onward... It's kind of weird that this game seems to be about as good as I'd hoped. At the very least it has held my interest far longer than Oblivion ever did.
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I'm getting the feeling that going through this again as some kind of thief mage would be a lot of fun.

Anyone know why it is that certain shouts don't seem to work immediately after you get them? The Frost and Dismay shouts do nothing for me.
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But I did, I think...? At least for the Frost one, I know I killed a dragon and then walked up to some runes and absorbed the shout. For the Dismay shout I didn't fight any dragons, but absorbed it from runes on a wall just the same — and it's confusing, because they're listed under my shouts just like the ones I can use, can be added to my favorites and hotkeyed, etc. So it doesn't seem to make any sense.
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i've been trying to take this game very seriously



that took me a couple of tries after they did it the first time
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I still haven't decided. The Jarl of Whiterun has the best attitude, I think, being aware that he isn't comfortable favoring either side but will inevitably find himself having to draw his sword at some point. If I'm forced, I still think the Imperials are the greater evil. I challenged one of those racist Nords to a duel of fists and beat him senseless.
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No, they first tell her they suspect dark elves of being spies, then threaten to get some bros together and pay her a visit in the night. Still pretty terrible.
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I find myself switching back and forth between first and third person as I go just to get whatever view looks best/feels most comfortable/breaks immersion least depending on what's going on at the moment. Combat feels a little better in third person, I think, especially as a two-hander melee juggernaut flinging himself around. If I go for a power swing in the first person view and end up stumbling past my enemy I get a little bit disoriented, but being able to see everything around me makes it a lot easier to regain my footing and go for another attack. It doesn't feel perfect and fluid and just right the way that Demon's and Dark Souls do, but there is a different sense of weight and motion going on here and I rather like it. In its favor, it actually feels like my character is putting a lot of effort into swinging this huge battleaxe, and despite the lack of visible wounds or dismemberment the impact of each blow feels pretty good. There are definitely moments where it fails and feels a lot flimsier than the aforementioned, but for the most part I don't really have a problem with it.



Looking forward to exploring these dwarven ruins, if I manage to find the key...





About these heavy dragon bits they each drop: can these eventually be used for heavy dragon scale armor, maybe? Got a big pile growing in the chest in my breezehome in Whiterun.
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I haven't, actually.
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She also has a pretty shitty attitude when saying, "I am sworn to carry your burdens..."
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I bet it is. It was only after I had finished a quest sneaking into some upper class party guarded by elves in light elven gear that I started seeing that equipment on other enemies, down in the Ratways of Riften — on the total opposite end of the map. Seemed kind of transparent to me, but I guess I could be wrong.
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Just finished one of the most impressive moments of the game yet: came over a rocky hillside to see a dragon circling a huge pillar of light, and strange ashes blowing in the air. After passing through the small village below I ran up the hill toward the dragon, which was actually speaking as it flew, and upon my arrival I saw it resurrect another before flying off. Its skeleton crawled from its burial mound and could barely form its new body before I sent it straight back to the grave, but still the whole scene was just really cool. After that, the ashes faded and the land's autumnal colors returned.

Next, on my way to Dawnstar via invitation to the museum. Hoping to pick up some daedra hearts and ebony ore...

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Played some more last night and this afternoon, and I've done almost nothing aside from work on my blacksmithing (and occasionally pause to kill a dragon).

Full refined/enchanted Ebony set now, still working up to Daedric, but I think I'll give it a rest and take my time for now. I felt kind of bad that I got almost no use out of my Glass Battleaxe after having used the Dwarven one for so long. This one's only barely better, really, anyway.



About to move forward on that Elder Scroll quest, myself. Still having fun with this.
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No idea what you guys are talking about, but now I wish I'd found them, too.
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Been trying to figure out the marriage thing 'cause I want the free gold, but even after getting the Amulet of Mara I can't get any women to like me. :(

A list somewhere included Lydia, but she offers no such dialogue options. Same with the girl at the Riverwood Trader, who just keeps telling me I'm a strapping young man and we're both not from here (even though my character is a Nord?) and she wants nothing more than to settle down and start a family... I guess I'll do something else for a while. That usually seems to quickly trigger whatever it was I was actually trying to do before (e.g., entering the Dawnstar museum required a random courier's invitation — he appeared about fifteen minutes after I gave up on trying to figure it out and left the town to wander aimlessly).

edit: Oh, fuck. I just had to equip the amulet. Of course. Psh...
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Places where the Oblivion gate emblem appears or lore that delves into all that stuff has the strange effect of making me want to play Oblivion and try to appreciate what little good it had to offer. All the stuff about daedra, Mehrunes Dagon, Sheogorath, madness, insanity, chaos, and so on — maybe there's something there I missed out on? Maybe not, but I guess it's funny how this one is arousing my curiosity about the lore in a game I mostly reviled. (I want to see Oblivion — and Morrowind, of course — ported into this graphics engine. Couldn't be that hard to do, could it?)





Like a nerd, I've taken after Flylighter and started naming my equipment. The chest and gauntlets of my new Daedric Armor are now respectively known as THE DARK SOUL and THE GOD HAND (which is, for me, a reference to Berserk as much as it is to God Hand). I love my battleaxes, but I am now tempted to take the heavy armor fists perk and level my destruction spells.





On my way into Labyrinthian next. This questline involving the Winterhold Mage College has been surprisingly engaging. I can't wait to kill Ancano.
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I must admit I probably went for the most boneheaded, overpowered build in the game. Even then it afforded me the extra perks to max out blacksmithing as I leveled.
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It is pretty bad, but as a result I just don't worry about it.
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Honestly, I'm not sure I'm even approaching this game in the same way that some of you guys have handled past TES games. Sounds like a lot of changes have come about, and it's not like you can play it the way you played Morrowind or even Oblivion, anyway. My reasons for playing it are basically: It can be as much of a bug-infested sandbox as it wants to be, full of bizarre narrative dissonance and stupidity, as long as I can go wander through ruins and wilderness and enjoy the lovely music. Whether I'm exploring autumnal hills or frozen mountain ranges it just feels nice, whatever problems I may have with the game. At the same time, I have to admit that constantly having the sense of immersion subverted by nonsense is a major flaw and wouldn't argue one bit if someone just wrote this game off as total garbage, but I guess I'm just a sucker for the quality of surface-level grandeur found here. I love a game, whatever flaws it may have, that continually urges me to stop and survey my surroundings. The strange thing is its actual art direction is sort of middling at best — I just find the environments really alluring, even comfortable. That's probably the main thing that keeps me playing.
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Dragons are pretty glitchy. I fast-traveled to the Winterhold College once, and found a giant dead dragon — intact, not a skeleton — twitching and flailing in the doorway. I couldn't get its body cleared away with any magic or anything, so it just stayed there for a while. Then, a few days later, when coming out of the college's living quarters, a living dragon was attacking and the body was gone. Huh. Another time, I dropped some dragon bones on the ground in a village because I was over-encumbered, and when I came back to pick them up there was a spot on the dirt nearby that prompted me to search the dragon's empty body... even though its skeleton was way up atop a nearby hill. I could go on.
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