[Felix]

I have no doubt that I'll get eight or ten really enjoyable hours out of this, which is much more time than I get out of most games, though because it's Bethseda, it'll end up feeling like some miserably small proportion and I'll walk away with the notion that I was worn down by the redundancy &c. &c. &c.

We'll see when I have a whole weekend for it to ruin, though...

[Felix]

My VRAM keeps bottlenecking lately, which is sort of frustrating because the one thing on my system that never bottlenecks is my GPU clock.

[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.

[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.)

[Felix]

That first dragon goes down a little too easily, if you ask me.

Seriously, though, I wish Skyrim had some more rigidly enforced gender roles, because this game makes me feel like a rapist.

[Felix]

You gotta sell that armor!

[Felix]

[Felix]

The commenters on this mod suggest that Skyrim should feature more pubic hair:

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=77

[Felix]

Every time I get asked to do something in this game that involves stealth, or really anything other than "enter this cave and kill some dudes," I get incredibly frustrated at the total lack of any contextual affordances in the player's moveset. Crouching behind a door and doing a frogwalk because you're obligated to "pickpocket" somebody to progress in the game really is not my thing.

[Felix]

Yeah, I think my single biggest problem with this game (other than the female-corpse-derobing) is how little the player seems to actually partake of the world around them as compared with a game like Human Revolution, which is similarly not-at-all-innovative but is probably the nicest-feeling 3D game I've played since MGS3. It's impossible (and pointless) to hate Skyrim -- it basically succeeds on scale alone -- but trying to play in third-person for more than five minutes and watching your dude do nothing but move his feet around glitching through every other floor really drives home how limited the game is. It's occupying my thoughts when I'm not playing, and then I boot it up and remember that I don't really want to endure fifteen more hours of stun-shouting-and-zapping bad guys.

Is there anything you can do in Skyrim that you couldn't do in the first Thief?

Maybe it'll get more interesting when the warring-factions bit becomes more prominent. This is the sort of thing I'd tolerate in a multiplayer game, but as it stands, it's just exhausting.

[Felix]

The "combat," narrowly defined, is actually improved (as it was in Oblivion, among few other things) and is about as good as I'd expect from a first-person RPG. Blocking feels good, two-handed spellcasting feels good even if it basically cries out for a spell-combination system that isn't there, and the range of melee attacks available to you is pretty reasonable.

It's just that interactions in Skyrim, including combat, still basically feel like one upright rectangular box bumping into another upright rectangular box the same way that they did in the late 90s. It's a credit to the developers that your blows actually look and sound like they have some sort of impact, but they don't quite feel like they're connecting, due to an outmoded design philosophy that extends far beyond the combat.

Like I said, it's both impossible and pointless to discredit the game on the basis of this, because the sheer scope of it really is that impressive. But the art direction needs to work really hard to sell it, because the lore is incredibly dense and the player's range of interactions aren't that interesting. They might've been able to better-conceal this if the character development system rewarded micromanagement, but I already mentioned how impressed I am with the effective removal of core stats.

[Felix]

The others are mostly on the periphery of the world. The pacing is sort of weird in that you won't happen upon another city until about 2/5 of the way through the main quest.

[Felix]

It's pretty hard to think of a reason not to sink a good 10 skillpoints into Destruction if you use any offensive magic whatsoever.

[Felix]

I just got a really good one-handed sword that has a bonus against dragons, as part of the main quest, and it drains soul energy like a motherfucker. This is basically a license to keep up my lazy off-hand-spellcasting fightermage practice I've been up to so far. The destruction perk that makes two-handed spells stun enemies more often than not is really great, too.

Also, I don't understand how I spend dragon souls. It seems automatic?

I kind of want to do the talking dog quest, but I can't find him. Enjoying the College of Winterhold stuff meanwhile.

[Felix]

[Felix]

hilarious horse protip: they can climb, lumpy gallop and all, much steeper mountains than you can. I managed to cut out about half the time getting to high hrothgar with a horse I stole on the way up.

I've also found dragons fighting giants, which is very convenient because the giant always wins in a state that leaves him actually killable by me.

oh, and Lydia gladly took the full set of Blades armor that appears once they reclaim their sanctuary. she's now an even more effective bland meatshield.

Silent Casting chain lightning is so awesome that now I really want to train sneaking high enough to get the run silent perk just so that I can achieve total apathetic stealth dominance.

[Felix]

Performance is pretty good for me on a Radeon 4850 with my good old overclocked Wolfdale Pentium! Granted, there hasn't been a game released since I built this machine for $350 two and a half years ago that I can't say that about, so I'm happy. I get probably 30ish frames (can't be arsed to run Fraps) most of the time on 1680x1050 with the default "high" settings and a few other things turned up.

I agree that the mixed up L/R thing is mindboggingly stupid and basically fodder for any HCI wonks to criticize the UI, but it's at least serviceable the same way that the favourites hotkeys (which I wouldn't want to live without, playing the game on a console) are serviceable. What it does mean is that you can't play this game like a roguelike (i.e. all of your scrolls are too much trouble to use and thus useless), but it does lead to almost zero opening a menu during combat.

Also, Lydia's capacity for standing around like a jackass during every important conversation for which you are supposed to be the only one present is amazing, completely ruins any suspension of disbelief, and is one hundred percent apropos of Bethesda. I'm not making an effort unless they do.

Those necromancer robes really are douchey, huh? I got them really early on looking for the first claw-activated dungeon in the main quest, and I only just replaced them with the free armor you get for joining the College of Winterhold. For almost doubled magicka regen, I'm sadly willing to put up with looking like a disturbed eighth grader.

[Felix]

I think she's blocked me in a doorway at least four or five times by now.

[Felix]

Yeah. Skyrim is a very, very "stupid" game. That clearly doesn't make it bad, but holy lord is it dumb.

[Felix]

I'm just at the Labyrinthian quest now -- it's the conclusion to the College of Winterhold (a.k.a. mages' guild) storyline. Pretty breezy, and you get some nice gear from it.

I'm also leveling up about twice an hour at this point, which at level 15 has made me run fresh out of perks I'm sure I want. I'd say it's time to get creative, but what I actually mean is "I can cast infinite two-handed lightning"

[Felix]

[Felix]

I have to do some stupid-ass long dungeon (that apparently has really good art design) to retrieve an Elder Scroll before I can advance the main quest, and now that I have the best sword (Dragonsbane) and armor (Archmage) I'm likely to find, it turns out I have relatively little motivation to keep going. I wish I could advance the civil war questline a bit to see if it's interesting.

[Felix]

So, I decided I was lapsing into "planning on getting a perk up the ladder that would take ten hours of my life" mode, and looked up the console commands to automatically advance your skill levels. It's actually a fairly "natural" way of cheating, insofar as you might just be paying a trainer (or crafting/smithing shitty items) ad infinitum to grind certain abilities -- and I like that, because it keeps my player consistent with the rules of the game, only at a vastly accelerated rate. To wit: my character is now at level 41 after I advanced every tree to get the perks I wanted and would never have trained enough through my regular play (principally Smithing and Conjuration).

I now have a permanent posse of Lydia (in full dragon armor), a Flame Atronarch, and a Frost Atronarch. I can attack a guard in any city, walk away to get a beer, and when I come back the three of them will have decimated half of the town. We brought down a dragon in about 45 seconds, after Flamer (I named her) noticed him before me and shot him out of the air.

Game is now properly ridiculous. For better or for worse, I'm much more inclined to finish it now -- as I said, I really like having an actual party of characters (even if two and a half of them are mute), and the preexisting "challenge" wasn't very interesting to me anyway. Also, Lydia's standing around during every conversation is now much less awkward -- the Flame Atronarch's idle animation is a backflip, which just makes it look like the attract mode from Breath of Fire or something.

[Felix]

I now have a wife. Whose AI script doesn't seem to permit her to leave the house. Or, in fact, do anything other than sit in an old chair at a desk that I couldn't even see under the cobwebs that came with the house and which I haven't bothered to clear out of the way.

I tell you what, it sure does give me a warm feeling inside to stand around my unfurnished shack while my frost atronarch stands stock-still, my flame atronarch does backflips while glitching into the walls, my wife mutters in the corner, and my dragon-scaled womanservant stands around looking earnest.

I've gone so far off the deep end with this game that I've started giving ridiculous titles to my ridiculously powerful double-enchanted +40% one hand damage / +62 magicka equipment. I have the "Pretty Princess Tiara" and "Agony of De Feet" and Lydia has "Footsie Pajamas" and "Hugging Mittens."

Screenshots seem to be broken, or else I'd share this lovely little family with you all. I might upload a save if anybody's interested.

[Felix]

Lydia actually sat in the front row at my wedding (with her sword clipping through the bench) and congratulated me afterward, which is more than her character has done unprompted at any other moment in the game.

My frost atronarch blocked the exit to the room, presumably so my bride couldn't escape.

[Felix]

Yup. That was my yesterday evening. It was lovely.

The fight against Alduin, however, is incredibly amazingly stupid. There are two identical dragons flying around in the sky. One of them is a good guy, and the only way to distinguish them is by your quest indicator. You have to use a shout every time the lord of all dragons pauses mid-flight to call you pretentious, which then causes him to land for about fifteen seconds during which you can hit him, and he drains your health to about 10% without posing any danger of actually killing you (I believe I have 200 health and it may be that his breath attack is just supposed to do 180 damage but as it stands this is a pretty boring coincidence). Repeat this five or six times.

[Felix]

Sure is! All you need is level 90 conjuration (console commands yay), then go talk to the conjuration trainer at the college. He gives you a quest that takes about three minutes. The reward is Flame Thrall (450 Magicka), and you can then buy Frost Thrall (550 Magicka) or Storm Thrall (afraid to even look, because I only barely have the 550 and I have thunder covered myself anyway; I invested in the "summon two dudes at one time" branch of the conjuration spell tree but not the "cut spellcasting costs in half" branch, or else it'd be a much more reasonable 275).

I have to recast them every half hour or so because they wander off and disappear, and the game doesn't seem to be quite as good at warping them back to my side as it with Lydia (for whatever ridiculous reason), but they almost never die and the ice guy can take a ludicrous amount of damage. Posses are fun.

[Felix]

I have the "double summoned characters' power" perk and that's about all I know. While, needless to say, it's stupidly effective, it does require you to max out a skill tree, and it's also not nearly as broken as the Impact ability, which let me stunlock 90% of the enemies I encountered after about level 8.

[Felix]

It's either a bug or the creators' best effort to disincentivize Destruction magic that all/most of the AoE spells (i.e. the adept and master level spells for each element) will also target friendlies -- which is, of course, the only way of killing them permanently.

Which is really a shame, because two-hand-casting chain lightning a couple times can generally wipe out any mob instantly for only a couple hundred magicka.

tl;dr -- If you've got a good eye for game-breaking strategies, you'll be way too powerful by the time you hit level 10, and it just carries on from there.

[Felix]

[Felix]

[Felix]

[Felix]

> addskill smithing 4000

[Felix]

It is a goddamn crying shame that the most accurate and no-big-deal representation of the Northern Lights is in such a boring videogame.

[Felix]

I halfheartedly decided to finish the main quest yesterday evening, but I keep getting stuck on the "capturing a dragon" mission, which is unbelievably buggy. My companions and summons keep vanishing during the fight, the dragon will get stuck to the castle walls and stop moving, and when I do drain his health, the trap doesn't seem to function.

I think I'm done here. It's a shame, because whenever I boot the game I remember that I really do like my character, but I'm sick of wrestling the engine.

[Felix]

See, now THAT is a mod! Being able to arm the townspeople!

[Felix]

Yeah, I mentioned that several pages back. It's essential, and one of the n reasons that you really really shouldn't be playing this on a console. I don't care if you hate PC gaming, if you hate PC gaming then you better also hate Skyrim or your only option is hating yourself.

[Felix]

[Felix]

Yeah, the Morokei fight was by far the most fun I've had.

[Felix]

Somebody will crack it within a week. I don't know where modders' superiority begins and ends, but somehow I don't think it includes microtransactions.

Also, Ronnoc, I honestly don't think it took more than 20-30 minutes to travel to any new destination in the game. I thought the size/density of the world was one of the things they got absolutely right.

[Felix]

Yeah, Wes -- the "bugs and glitches" are historically the best part of Elder Scrolls. Trust me, that's not the issue. If you read through this thread, you'll see more or less total consensus on all of the things that this game does well and does poorly, because they're eventually blindingly obvious. It's a relatively easy game to like in spite of itself, but it falls down spectacularly in many/most of the respects in which it is supposed to have real merit.

If Morrowind is an accidental and ebullient A-, and Oblivion is an overburdened C+, Skyrim is a solid B -- resplendent and moronic.