[Dark Age Iron Savior]

[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.
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[BenoitRen]

[Talbain]

[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.

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

is one of the guilds run by jack the ripper or exactly what are you being asked to do where there is a disproportionate focus on murdering women and stealing their clothes?

[Felix]

You gotta sell that armor!

[remote]

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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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[a pair of gators]

they're mostly extinct

[bza]

I played a bit more and finally started doing the main quest in between wiping out bandit lairs.

The new flame atronachs look neat.

Does anyone know why you sometimes OHKO enemies, and it plays a special animation? I haven't found any reason to it other than it looking EPIC.

[CubaLibre]

Maybe if it calculates a crit and it would be enough to kill them it triggers the animation?
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Let's Play, starring me.

[thestage]

I watched Day9 play this

there was a big tall mountain and a lot of boring cliches and tediousness and the same stupid leveling system

sounds about right

[remote]

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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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[Flylighter]

I'm probably gonna finish it, but after playing a whole lot of it yesterday I basically just feel like I'm playing Oblivion again. I don't know why people were saying the combat was worth writing home about. It IS more functional than Oblivion in that aspect, but still.

What I did appreciate is how it wedges in a bit of forced sightseeing by making you travel by foot to places before opening a fast travel option to that place.
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I'm on Steam! ----- I'm on Youtube!

[scratchmonkey]

Bza, the guy you're slo-mo-KOing in that picture looks exactly like my character.

[cassievania]

this game is so weird

btw who's bright idea was it to add cinematic takedowns that you not only can't disable but also the enemies can use them as well?
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[Mr. Mechanical]

[remote]

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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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[Flylighter]

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Gideon Zhi]

[Gideon Zhi]

Protip: Dragon corpse pieces are heavy! I didn't realize this until after killing my second dragon on the way to High Hrothgar. I ended up fast-traveling back to my house in Whiterun and deposited my dragon crap in the chest - it was nearly half my encumbrance, ugh.
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Aeon Genesis ~ Ambassador Thorman great man! I do anything he say!

[CubaLibre]

[Flylighter]

Guys if you're mining ore veins, make sure to stop your character after every three taps on the vein. It seems each vein gets hit 9 times before being depleted, but the game gives you two ore per vein if you just let it do its thing. You can trick it into giving you three ore if you stop every 3 hits!
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I'm on Steam! ----- I'm on Youtube!

[Gideon Zhi]

[DJ]

I like my new armor.

[rye]

Why is it that I've managed to take down three dragons so far, but am dispatched so easily by a single troll?
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[Gideon Zhi]

Because these aren't Hobbit trolls, they're Willow trolls. Willow trolls are much nastier creatures, and they hit harder and faster than dragons I guess?
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Aeon Genesis ~ Ambassador Thorman great man! I do anything he say!

[CubaLibre]

[DJ]

Have not even begun to start the main quest.

I really should.
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[Teflon]

I killed an Imperial Courier who teleported in behind me in the wilderness while I was on some wildly exciting quest to kill a bandit and then when I went back for my Fabulous Reward later the Jarl's entire longhouse suddenly wanted to kill me. Which was fine with me because the Jarl was an insufferable prick and an imperial flunky anyway except every single motherfucker in there was an essential NPC and thus, invulnerable. Also they'd gotten on Nord Twitter to alert every single guard in the world to my heinous crime (which nobody was around to witness in the first place).

So yeah furiously refreshing skyrimnexus for the de-Oblivionication mods.

Also I guess necromancers just attack everything on sight? Shit lady I'd be down for summoning some skellingtons, we could've been best friends if you hadn't been such a bitch.

[Gideon Zhi]

[GrimmSweeper]

Today I learned that falling a fair distance will INSTANTLY kill you. In midair. Without warning. Although in my case I may have tried jumping from the top of Dragonreach down to the first level's roofs and the developers didn't like that. Haven't fallen from any great heights on the mountains so I guess we'll see. I also managed to hurt myself minorly from time to time from trying to wade through skulls or other lightweight two-hand sized objects lying around on the ground. Harder to manage in Fallout but it was still possible, so I guess that's just a product of the engine itself.

Also, GlitterMIST cavern. Cool atmosphere, alien-like surroundings. Good flow up until you start encountering the insect monsters that start with C. Hate them.

There was a bandit guy on the summit that wrecked me early on. Since I wouldn't be selling any of my stolen goods anytime soon, I had a strong paralytic poison (very expensive too!) handy. Instead of stealthily ambushing him like last time, I just rushed him with my treated sword and started wailing. First touch he stiffened up and after several strikes he received a cinematic death. Then I went down and dispatched his blind man henchman. Him and any two-hander bandits are scary damage dealers if they hit you. I also like how different one-handed weapons feel compared to two-handed weapons. I toyed around with a greatsword for a bit before settling on maces.

[Flylighter]

"Alright, I'm gonna boot it up and do a few quests in the main storyline. Right off the bat."

Six hours later, I'm in another new town across the map, knee-deep in Thieves' Guild business, fencing off my vast collection of stolen goods whenever the fence recharges her purse, level 33, exactly 0 dragons killed and 0 quests further in the main story from where I started.

What I love are the little tidbits of information you get exclusively by pickpocketing/lockpicking into places you don't belong (I'll spoiler them but I don't think they're major plot points):

-While the Gray-manes and Battle-borns are at each others' throats, two of them are in love like Romeo and Juliet!
-There is one truly generous philanthropist in the town of Riften, and he has a gold-digging wife who is cheating on him, probably with multiple people.
-The workers' group-home keeper in Riften is basically a Dibella-worshipping sex goddess.
-This was in a certain rich woman's basement behind a master-locked door:


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I'm on Steam! ----- I'm on Youtube!

[remote]

[CubaLibre]

[bza]

I went to Riften wanting to join the Thieves' Guild, ended up lost in the Ratways fighting off angry vagrants and lowlifes. Hope I didn't kill any guild members...
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[GrimmSweeper]

Running into the black screen crash in Glittermist Grotto. I'm going to see if backing out of there entirely will change things because damn is this frustrating. Otherwise sixth time I'm going to crank down the settings and see if that fixes it.

[Felix]

[DJ]

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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[Gideon Zhi]

I was thinking about the stat removal thing last night. It's an interesting approach, certainly, and keeps the game from being breakable in hilarious ways, like Morrowind's Potion of Fortify Intelligence 23,103,664 Points for 30Mo 26d 15h 24m 46s. But on the other hand, it keeps the game from being breakable in hilarious ways, and it was always kind of fun finding those ways. I liked being able to break an unbreakable Bound Sword over Vivec's head in one attack 'cuz I was too strong to wield it without it breaking :(

The problem with perks is that if you make a bad decision, you're basically stuck with it (unless there's a way to reset your perks, which would be *really* nice, even if it's expensive or only doable on a per-constellation basis.) Of course, this was a problem with traditional stats and leveling too to some extent, but at least with that you could almost always fix your screw-ups by enchanting your equipment, frequently in multiple ways. When I leveled in Oblivion I could drop a few points into a stat that would increase my aptitude with MULTIPLE things, not just one. That kind of bugs me with this.
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Aeon Genesis ~ Ambassador Thorman great man! I do anything he say!