Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

[Starnum]

It's awesome, lets talk about it!

In true Starnum fashion, my first character is a high elf who loves to slash and burn.

[War Machine]

I've been waiting for a good deal on this game but nobody is lowering the price. 60 for a PC game is too much. I played it a little though *cough*bay of corsairs*cough* and I had a blast, the game is fun. Although I stopped playing cause I wanna buy it. Hopefully someone will lower the price for a holiday special soon.

Edit: I made a recording of me trying to save someone from getting executed:

[Starnum]

LMAO, it was a valiant effort, but the game just wasn't having it. Nice try blending with the crowd when the dudes came after you, but sorry, this isn't Assassin's Creed, lol. That was some sweet "Weekend At Bernie's" style marionetting there at the end too. Was the tea-bagging really neccessary tho? Hahaha, j/k. Cool video bro.

I've noticed that this game has the least glitches of any of the Bethesda games I've played before, which is pretty sweet. Though I did have to reload the other day when the boss I killed dropped through the floor with the damn quest item, heh.

One of the biggest improvements I've noticed with this game, compared to previous Bethesda games, is that the character designs are a lot better. For once, there's more than like 3 character designs! Also, some of the women actually have attractive faces. Elder Scrolls and the Fallout games are great, but I always thought the women looked all funky in the face. This game, I'm happy to say, does not suffer from this problem. The elves still look kind of weird though. I did my best to make a cool looking Starnum, but I still couldn't get the brow and the eyes to look quite right.

I was gonna wait to buy this game too, but it's just too damn good and too damn expansive to wait. I have a tendency to be playing at least a couple games at once. I imagine I'll be playing on this one for a good while to come.

[War Machine]

Thanks, I was still laughing when editing the video. Anyway, Skyrim really is a big step up from the previous games, the only thing I didn't like so much are the menus. While it moves and feels very responsive, I don't quite like the way it has everything organized. It's still a chore to sift through all your stuff to get rid of the trash or stuff you don't need.

Nitpicking a little bit, I found it odd that they missed the additions they made to Fallout games where the game allowed you to see your companions on the map, or that the game messaged you if they died, or that the companions were faster than normal just so they wouldn't fall too far behind you, or that there's a Hardcore mode where you need to eat and sleep semi-regularly.

The other thing I found quite odd is that they still kept the leveling system from Oblivion. I think it makes sense to level up the skills you use, but I kinda hate that leveling anything makes all the enemies stronger to the point where you can't kill a single one (big flaw from Oblivion). This didn't happen to me on Skyrim cause I didn't play it that long and because I was careful not to grind skills, but a friend was complaining about that a lot. The problem is that leveling anything makes the enemies stronger, so if you level speechcraft, alchemy, smithing, etcetera, you'll have a harder time beating the game than someone who didn't do those things. So really, it only makes sense for enemies to get stronger when you level up combat skills, but even that has its flaws. For example, s character who only has One-Handed at 100 is essentially as strong as someone who has both One-Handed and Two-Handed skills at 100 because they can't use those skill interchangeably. So the second character will have a harder time beating the game because the enemies will have leveled up more than the with the first character.

I recommended a friend to use a mod to replace the leveling system in Oblivion cause I didn't want him to go through the trouble I had when I played it. So unless Bethesda changes the the leveling system in Skyrim, I think I'm gonna get a mod to replace it.

All in all though, the game is still a lot of fun. And I agree, the glitches are very tame compared to previous games.

Also, some of the women actually have attractive faces.

This cannot be stressed enough. It's not that I demand much on that department, but quite frankly, the women in in all the previous games were an eyesore.

[Starnum]

Those are some really good points. I hadn't thought of some of that stuff. It's a shame that those things aren't included and aren't better in the ways that you described. We can only hope that these things come under consideration for the next game.

[Eldo]

I've played a fair bit of the game, played as a dark elf and named him Drizzt. He's a dual wield with light armour. I was slaughtering everything left and right, and I thought the game was too easy. Until my friend told me that the normal mode was for pussies and retards. Unfortunately, I don't have the time at the moment to play it at a harder difficulty at the moment. Will let you guys know what I think.

[brunoafh]

normal mode was for pussies and retards

This is the golden rule.

[uncempt]

I've been waiting for a good deal on this game but nobody is lowering the price. 60 for a PC game is too much. I played it a little though *cough*bay of corsairs*cough* and I had a blast, the game is fun. Although I stopped playing cause I wanna buy it. Hopefully someone will lower the price for a holiday special soon.

You should definitely buy a copy. I played all the way through a pirated copy of Morrowind (with all the cinematics cut to reduce file size! noooo!!! where's my ending!?) back in uni and I felt so bad when I realised the hourly cost would have been mere pennies.

It is a great game and I think the enemy levelling works much better than for Oblivion. I just finished the main quest which has a nice epic feel to it. Not sure how much more I'll play it now though. I'm level 31 - am I missing out on much higher level stuff?

[dialdfordesi]

I loved Skyrim but it was too bad that the main story wasn't strong. The thieves' guild storyline was the thing that kept me coming back to play more.

[War Machine]

I got the game like 5 days ago for 40 on Steam and I already have 42 hours played.

Following on Eldo's advice I changed the difficulty to Very Hard for this game and it's not fun. The problem is that the difficulty of the fight against every enemy is very disparate, some deal practically no damage and you can kill them in 3 hits tops, while others can kill you in 1 or 2 hits and you need to hit them about 20 times to kill them. Dragons take forever to kill because they attack a little more often and very rarely land or stop for you to get a chance to hit them. You can survive in very hard and keep playing, but it feels more like a chore. I think Hard is a better balance of difficulty and entertainment.

And also, after having played a little more, it does seem like the leveling in this game is a little better than on Oblivion. So far I haven't felt like the difficulty increased ten fold because I decided to grind my smithing skill to 100.

[Eldo]

Well, I played as a pure fighter, dual wield and light armour on Expert. The only thing I leveled up on was health and sometimes stamina. I was pretty much invincible anyway by the time I reached level 30 or less. By level 27, I was a killing machine. Afterwards, I concentrated on smithing (I was incredibly rich at that time, so I bought a tonne of cheap materials) iron daggers (which really required one iron ore and some leather) and leather helmuts, and sold it back to the blacksmith for about half of what it costs to buy the materials. Then, to acquire some funds I went side questing to get magical weapons/amour and sell those to get my funds back up to rinse and repeat the smithing process. By the time I hit 32-35, I was able to smith the best weapons and armour in the game (daedric weapons and dragonscale armour). It was getting too boring for me so then I used 2 handed weapons (which was only level 18). It kept the challenge going for a little while. I actually had to go back to using dual wield when my health went a bit low with certain enemies (ie dragons). Then I started to concentrate on enchanting, but there weren't too many of those petty soul gems to use (or buy). I got bored of it and proceeded to finish the game. The difficulty on Expert was a joke by then. Although I forgot that you could increase it to master. Magicians, however, were still annoying as well to fight, but one power attack wipes them out.

In regards to your dragon floating on mid air, I found that it could be due to them not finding a place to land. I usually run around the damned place where it's an open plain. But I agree, it's annoying as shit.

So, at the end of the game I was:
-Level 43
-Level 79 on 2 handed, level 100 on one handed, level 91 on light armour
-Level 100 on smithing, level 80 on enchanting
-Have insane armour rating due to dragonscale armour (upgraded to legendary) and matching set perks
-Have shitloads of money (sold every single weapon that I didn't need, I crafted the weapons myself and upgraded them to legendary but no enchantments)
-Have that house in Solitude with all the upgrades and Whitehaven as well

My tips (or rather my play style) to you is:
- Never buy weapons or armour, they become available to you through slaying enemies. Sell shit that you don't ever use (if you're playing melee with dual wield swords, what's the point of having bows, knives, warhammers etc in your inventory). The only thing you should buy are potions and crafting materials.
- Don't spend perks and save them up until you hit the right level to spend them. Concentrate on combat orientated perks then do other shit like, I don't know, speechcraft shit. I maxed out the damage of my one handed attacks and light armour protection with the perks. The later perks for one handed attacks that are related to power attacks depend on your play style. Needless to say, I didn't take any of them.
- If you're going to smith and enchant shit, maybe save time and do it together. I crafted an iron dagger and enchanted it with absorb health with a petty soul gem and it sells for 600-1200 septrims (depending on your bartering level). The only limitation afterwards is how much the shopkeepers' money have on them. I maxed out smithing first, then tried enchanting. It may have been smarter to do it together and less time consuming.
- If you need materials and you bought them all from one shopkeeper, travel to another town, buy their shit and use their forge. They replenish their stock in a couple of in-game days.
- When you're smithing the weapons for your own use, use a blacksmith's potion (increases the effectiveness by 20%) and upgrade your weapons/armour at the same time. By the time you kill your first dragon, dragons were fucking everywhere (dragon bones and scales). And I wore matching sets to take advantage of some of my armour perks.
- I took training when I was offered. It helped me level up quicker and gave me some perks to spend. I didn't care what the hell I was learning.

This is a very long post, but being an open ended sort of game means we will have different experiences and play styles. Discuss.

[War Machine]

From what I can gather, Bethesda doesn't want you to grind levels or attempt to do everything in a single play through (which is what I always do in RPGs if I can). They want you to, essentially, only use a few skills and do the quests you can with what you have. Then, after finishing the game, make a new character and do the quests you haven't or couldn't do using different skills. I am not doing this though, I'm gonna do everything with my character (be a thief, an assassin and a hero) and stop once all the non-repeating quests are done and I'm level 100 everything.

As for my current character, I did exactly what Eldo said, almost to the letter. This was before he made his post, so I'm pretty sure he hacked my computer and copied my save so he could see what I was doing.

Anyway, I'm now level 100 Smithing, Enchanting and Block; level 92 One Handed, level 75 Heavy Armor, level 50 Restoration, Sneak and Archery; and 30 or something Illusion and Lockpicking (I think I'm about level 47 on my character). I have the whole Daedric armor set upgraded to legendary and each piece is enchanted with 2 buffs (pretty much all the combat essentials: +40% One Handed Damage, +78% Stamina Regen, +60% Magic Resistance, +40% Sneak, +60% Magicka Regen, etc), and the second I started using that enchanted armor I became a tank. I changed the difficulty back to Master (very hard) cause the game was ridiculously easy. I never use any potions and just carry a few for emergencies, but most of the time I just use the healing spell I started with whenever I need health.

Unfortunately, being a tank is not enough when you're playing bosses in dungeons on Master difficulty, they can still kill me in 3 or 4 hits. Luckily, I have the last perk of the Block skill, which lets me do a charge attack with the shield that knocks them over (it works on every regular sized enemy, even bosses). The best part of it though is that I can do another charge and hit them even as they're getting up, combined with the fact that I regenerate stamina almost as fast as I spend it, I can knock down enemies, hit them a few times with my axe, and then repeat until they die. I can't get hit because I don't let them attack at all. Dragons are still strong cause I can't do the shield charge at them, but now that Eldo said how to make them land they're not so tough, usually I just bring him to attack someone else (my follower for example) and I just whale on him with my axe until he's dead.

I still don't like the leveling system. It's exactly the same one from Oblivion. It's beginning to bother me how much like Oblivion a bunch of annoying things are.

PS: To level up Enchanting more easily, I went to the college of Winterhold where almost every person there sells soul gems (about 5 or 6 different vendors). I also enchanted my sword and bow with a 1 second Soul Trap so that I can fill up soul gems whenever I kill something (they get about 450 hits before running out, so the enchantment lasts very long).

[Eldo]

I didn't spend any leveling on mana, so I couldn't cast many spells. I still have the default healing spell which suck balls. I don't use any other spells. It's difficult to heal yourself with a crap healing spell. That's where the potions come in handy. I've got crap loads of that.

How is it like using shields? I find that I obliterate everything with dual wield anyway; where my offence far outweighed my defence. The power attack does three attacks and knocks the enemy back. Despite what people may say, running is the better part of valour. I don't know, I didn't get hit very often until I used two handed weapons. I play in 3rd person mode so I always try to flank the enemy and rotate the camera so I go around them.

Everyone told me how hard it was to kill a giant. I killed my first one on level 20. Admittedly, I did die a lotta times... took about 30 minutes until I got it right. They 1 hit KO me at the time if I was unlucky. I had this guy on the ropes with maybe 2 hits left to go. But I had to be impatient and tried to power attack the fucker. Needless to say, he bitch slapped to the direction of the ground and I went flying to the sky. But after that, they were a joke. They have a very distinct attacking pattern.

Yeah, I went to the college and bought/stole all the soul gems previously, but because I was conserving the common gems and higher quality ones for recharging/finalising enchanted weapons I only had the petty and shit grade ones to use. I kinda gave up on enchanting because the game felt too easy and I didn't really need the enchantments with my awesome weapons. I might start as a new character later down the track, but I felt like I've explored everything (even though I haven't). The only finalised enchanting I made was on my boots to increase my carrying capacity.

Did you join the Dark Brotherhood? I was invited to it, but I didn't join because I was too much of a goody two shoes. So I did something else instead... it's funny because I didn't know what I was doing at the time.

[LordMune]

Eldo, you inspired me to seriously pick up Smithing. I went from Smithing 40 to 93 over a couple of hours yesterday, gonna craft some of dat dragon stuff later tonight. I might try War Machine's protip and go after Enchanting next.

Also finally got around (at level 42) to joining the Dark Brotherhood. Found some hand-wraps in their Sanctuary that double damage out of Sneak; so yes, that is a total 30x damage multiplier on dagger blows when Hidden. The Sneak skill is broken enough as it is, and I'm not sure what good 30x is going to do- I'm already comfortably one-shotting dragons and giants with the standard 15x dagger perk. This fucking game.

[Starnum]

I've been taking my time with the game and savoring it. I've played it quite a bit, but I haven't really gone on a binge with it. For example, I'm still only level 28, lol. My elf character Starnum is a good guy, so I'm waiting to do the The Dark Brotherhood and Thief Guild with my second character. He's going to be a sneaky Khajiit guy, I'm thinking. Starnum is an in your face slash and burn character, so my assassin Khajiit will be the stealthy one. Usually when I fight difficult enemies like giants I blast them with fireballs and keep my distance until they go down, and then I run up and finish them off with my sword, heh. I'm thane in most of the holds now, arch-mage of the College of Winterhold and the leader of The Companions. My main skills are destruction magic, one-handed weapons, heavy armor, and restoration magic. Last night I went to Solitude for the first time and did the quest in the Thalmor embassy. Next I'll probably knock out all of the non-repeating quests in Solitude. I may still have some quests in Riften to do as well. First time I went down there everyone was talking about thievery, which isn't really Starnum's thing, so I didn't spend much time there. Here's a question, are all high elves Thalmor, or is that just a specific type of high elf?

Oh, you know what Skyrim needs less of? Loading time! LOL. It's like the first ten minutes or so of every game is all loading. Load the game > Quick travel to my destination (loading) > Enter the dungeon (Loading). Is it time to play the damn game yet! You guys know how it is, heh.

[Eldo]

The load times on my computer isn't too bad, actually. Mass Effect 2 was much longer. The most I've waited was 10 seconds. All the elves design looked, well, a bit ugly but I guess that's how the game designed them to be. I wanted my character to be like Drizzt, but looked nothing like it.

Mune, you should do enchanting and smithing at the same time, methinks. It coulda saved some time altogether. But that'll make the game too easy though; to have an insane weapon plus two enchantments (imagine +15% one handed damage plus lightning/frost damage).

Someone told me that Bound Sword works as a Daedric sword. I guess if you're starting out, cast it all the time so you can have a weapon with high damage as well as increasing both conjuration and one handed weapons.

[LordMune]

Yeah, the loading isn't too bad, on PC at least. You know what is bad on PC? The interface. There are a couple of decent mods that address the major issues, but stuff like the inconsistent keybinds are still terrible. E is take and equip and use? R is give and take all? Sure, let me just EAT ALL OF MY DAEDRA HEARTS before I realize I'm not putting them in my Apothecary's Satchel. (I was just done smithing a couple of Daedric weapons at the time, had to reload a save.)

I really should have done Enchanting and Smithing at the same time, as you say, Eldo. But whatevs! It's not like I haven't broken the game horribly already.

Speaking of which, a reminder that the canon "goal" of Tamriel's existence is its denizens' achievement of CHIM/post-human godhood through the exploitation of game mechanics. The Elder Scrolls lore is cool as hell and Skyrim's generic dragon viking interpretation of the setting still kind of pisses me off if I think too long about it. Not nearly as bad as Oblivion though! And it's not like Skyrim being set 200 years in the future (past games being set within decades of eachother) isn't interesting, the Aldmeri Dominion and its conflict with the Empire being a Cool Thing in particular. Note that I'm probably not even halfway through the main quest yet (about to go find Esbern) so Skyrim's presentation of it might yet sour me on the whole concept.

[War Machine]

I was invited to join the dark brotherhood, but I'm not sure if I wanna go there. I still haven't decided if I want to do everything for the achievements or roleplay and remain "good" with this character.

As for load times, are you playing on a console, Starnum? I remember playing Fallout New Vegas on PS3 before I bought my computer and the load times were compared to the PC version were at least 3 times as long.

Anyway, I was talking to a friend about the Skyrim leveling system and I think we came up with a good change that would make it more enjoyable: Classes. At the beginning you can choose to be a knight, mage, archer, thief, etcetera, all of which have their own starting skills and limits to the skills they can level. For example, a knight might be able to level up two-handed up to 100, but destruction would always remain at zero. Pretty much implementing the class system from old RPGs so that you never become ultra powerful because you have everything or super weak because you leveled up alchemy. Additionally, skills like pickpocket, which have no bearing in combat, will not make the enemies stronger when you level them.

It all sounded like a good idea when I was talking about it with my friend. Once they release the Creation Kit we might just go for it and make a mod.

[Starnum]

Yeah, I'm playing on the PS3. I expected people would say load times were better on the PC version. As for your class idea, it could work, but I've always thought of Starnum as a combat mage. He uses a sword and wears heavy armor, but he still casts spells as well. It's not as traditional, I know, but I like it. So I'd be fine with it as long as they included such a class as well.

[War Machine]

Yeah, we were planning on making lots of classes. Above all else though, we need to test them, but we can't get on that until the damn sdk releases.

[Starnum]

Unfortunately I don't think I'd be able to try out your mod on the PS3, but I wish you the best of luck.

[maryperezbunny]

Hello, I am a berserk fan.

I like skyrim and I made some Berserk modifications for my game. I will post screenshots in 6hrs or so.

[maryperezbunny]

I studied art and design for video games, so that helped make this.

i am making a quest that will send you to kill apostles and ZODD

[War Machine]

Did you take a picture of the screen? hahaha!!!

[Aluja]

HAHAHAH For someone so good with "art" and programs, I don't see the reason why you missed the printscreen button LOL