Ye Olde Official Skyrim Discussion Thread (Spoilers?)

[Geoff_B]

I found a Body Mod and a collection of skimpy armour. I'm going to have some new shallow enjoyment of Skyrim!

I'm sorry. There's non-shallow enjoyment of these kinds of games?

[Lemegeton]

But yeah, one thing I absolutely love is never fast travelling. It lets you see more of the world, things you'd never seen before, scenery at different times of day that look completely new. I have ALWAYS said that Oblivion was the better game but Skyrim was the better world.

i did that with oblivion but alas my free time is more scarce these days so fast travel is abused

[Darkobra]

DO NOT read this unless you have done EVERYTHING! Or damn near enough to not care about faction quest spoilers and so on. And the end of the main story.

SO! How many people have claims to your soul by the end of that fucking game? Become a werewolf? Hircine! Become a thief? Nocturnal! Beat Alduin? "Come to Sovngarde! You've earned the right of passage! We'll be seeing you when you die!" And that's just a handful of the Daedric Lords I've seen amongst other things. I'm half-expecting a war to claim the rights to my soul before I even die!

Honestly, they really fucked up big-time with the faction quests. There's no big build-up. There's no hidden twists or surprises. It's a case of "You don't know how to cast a warding spell? Let me show you! GREAT! You did it! Now you're the archmage."

Or "You know that guy you got absolutely no attachment to and just met two quests ago? Died. Oh. You're replacing him. You've been here a week. Some of us have spent our lives doing this. We don't have anything better to do! You got dragonslaying duties! But you're our guy!"

If they had a team assigned to develop and create each faction, it would have been amazing.

I'm at least thankful that Skyrim did something right with the random spawns in the world. They better do something miraculous with the story in future DLC. Like Shivering Isles amazing.

And that has been bugging me since day 1 of the game.

[Darkobra]

It's more a case of that they think the "infinite quest" thing was a good idea and justified cutting the factions short. Farmer wants Bard dead is not a good quest. And yes, they don't even bother naming them past their titles!

There were many areas that were re-used for quests in Oblivion so isolation shouldn't be a factor. The amount of times I went to the Imperial City and its palace for different quests (Mage, Thief, main story, just off the top of my head) was enough to make you think "Oh, here again!" BUT! it changed. It wasn't the area. It was the presenation. New people spawning. New behaviours. New atmosphere to a familiar place to make it seem more chaotic.

I knew Skyrim wasn't a large world but I honestly did not think that was necessarily a bad thing with how well they worked that in Oblivion.

But I think that's also why I like restraining myself from the fast-travel in Skyrim. I always see something new. It is a fantastic world! I just really wish they made it a game too!

I think maybe I'm going to try Morrowind again once I finish my Golden Sun marathon. I'm going to go in there, clean slate and see what made that game magical to others.

[Darkobra]

Modders rejoice! Patch 1.4 is in beta now. Creation kit due very soon! There are also reports that Bethesda have PROPERLY fixed their coding. So your TESVal and your SkyBoost? Redundant.

There are reports of people who got 40-50FPS with SkyBoost are now getting a solid 60+ with the 1.4 beta patch now available.

"To get the beta, you need to do the following:

Log into Steam
Click on Steam in the upper menu
Select Settings
Under the Account tab, go to the Beta Participation section and select Change.
A drop down menu will appear. Select Skyrim Beta.
Select OK.
Steam will now restart. After Steam restarts, Skyrim will be updated to the Beta version currently available."

Personally, "beta" is one of the words to me that's synonymous with "avoid", but you can just opt out the beta and be reverted to 1.3 anyway. I might give this a go!

[Lemegeton]

for those playing on Ps3 the new patch is out now and it makes a massive improvement to the lag/framerate problems.

[ANeMzero]

So Bethsoft has put together a video of experimental features they threw together in a week sometime after Skyrim came out. They have not however announced any possibility of finalizing and releasing these experiments.

It is a bit devastating to watch under that context, because everything they show is so damn cool.

[Darkobra]

It actually annoys me that they didn't put half of that in the game. Spear combat! Mounted combat! Vampires feeding openly! AND GIANT MUDCRAB! This would have made Skyrim a better game.

And as for their HD mod? It smoothens the rough edges but doesn't do as good a job as Skyrim HD. That uses less resources and actually ENHANCES the graphics. Still a strain though.

[ANeMzero]

And as for their HD mod? It smoothens the rough edges but doesn't do as good a job as Skyrim HD. That uses less resources and actually ENHANCES the graphics. Still a strain though.

For starters, the reason SkyrimHD uses less resources is because they have replaced less textures. The official pack replaces every single texture in the game, SkyrimHD only covers a relatively small portion of the world textures.

Secondly SkyrimHD "enhancing" the graphics is debatable at best.

They do not make any effort to match the layout of the original textures, which in turn causes a fair number of awkward alignment issues. Furthermore they do not attempt to maintain the colour scheme or tones of the original textures, leaving to awkwardly contrasting objects where there was once a cohesive colour scheme.

They also do not make their own specularity maps, relying instead of tools to automatically generate them. While this works to some extent, they tend to be shiner than they should be.

They also overuse photo-textures. There is an abnormal amount of only lightly edited photo-textures, which does add "realism" but also another awkward contrast to the overall style of the game. The photo textures pop out too much when surrounded by the mildly stylized skyrim textures. The inconsistent realism breaks immersion.

Lastly, a number of the SkyrimHD are not even new textures. They are simply original Skyrim textures, upscaled and then layered over with a noise/woodgrain pattern. Hell, even a lot of the textures they actually made new abuse noise filters to add detail. A lot of textures just look needlessly grainy.

[Season's Beatings]

^ Depends where the arrow hits. Skyrim goes for realism. Hit flesh or leather/cloth and you a shit tonne of damage. His armour then you might as well dance round some traps/kitty maul them to death.

I find the friendly NPC problem with sniping to be age old with Oblivion too. Best way is to quicksave before sniping/play as an evil person.

I find the stat increase system when leveling up a harder choice. In theory all 3 stats are useful (magicka less so). But it feels dull.

I find the arrow flight paths to be a bit illogical. I swear an arrow flew *above* my cross-hair instead of falling just below. However I do enjoy sneaking around taking out people with a single arrow. It's odd. In theory because I sneak I ought to be able to avoid killing most things, but I *enjoy* killing. Destroys the whole point of a sniper.

The worst part? Headshots don't do anymore damage than a body hit. Sometimes I use forsworn arrows just to be a prick. Then I have bandits running at me with 3 or 4 arrows sticking out of their face.

I'm fairly certain the arrow drop changes as part of a botched auro aim function that can't be turned off.It averages out the distance between the object the crosshair is on and you. But say your crosshair is slightly off the head or goes through a gap between the arms or legs and then you're targetting the floor. Or the sky. And your arrow goes wide.

I've also found two bugs that keep reoccurring with my bow. I'm playing a Khajiit rogue/mage cause I'm a scumbag like that so archery is fairly important. First bug is that occasionally when I release the bowstring, the arrow stays where it is for anywhere up to 2 seconds then launches completely ruining the shot. And secondly, DON'T TAKE THE RANGER PERK. The one that lets you draw faster. All I've found is it speeds up the draw animation but the actual numbers don't speed up too so you'll be constantly short stroking.

I found a Body Mod and a collection of skimpy armour. I'm going to have some new shallow enjoyment of Skyrim!

I'm sorry. There's non-shallow enjoyment of these kinds of games?

Maybe thats why I'm not having any fun. I was expecting something deeper and more immersive like Fallout 3.

[Geoff_B]

So yeah, necro time.

I've finally started playing this and I've put a few hours into it so far. Now I don't know if I'm not playing it properly or missing something, but I cannot get invested into this game as much as say Mass Effect, Dragon Age Origins or even Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas.

The game looks pretty enough and there's plenty of exploration to satisfy my latent wanderlust but it doesn't feel like I'm doing anything. All I do is go to dark places, kill things and bring back something that someone wants. The story itself seems paper thin - I'm suddenly some super being who's going to kill lots of dragons.

In Fallout 3 there was a karma meter and you had the radio broadcasting stories of what your character did. In New Vegas there was that reputation meter for each town so you could see how towns would react to you. In this game I'm not getting any of that.

I recruited a follower and went to a bandit hideout. Afterwards I was wondering where my follower was and went back to look for her. Turned out she was dead. In Fallout I would have gone back and reloaded a save but here I just said "Oh, okay, thanks for your armour" and went on my way. I honestly didn't care.

Am I missing something?

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

If you want direction play Kingdoms of Amular. Afterwards you'll be craving Skyrim's open worldness.

[Geoff_B]

Direction is easy enough - follow the main questlines - I just don't feel that very much is actually happening.

[Metcarfre]

All I know is I care enough to keep playing even after every time it crashes and freezes, which is about once an hour or so.

[Darkobra]

Oh, the stable patch of 1.5 is causing the recent crashes. A LOT of them. The new beta patch fixes those.

Steam - Settings - Beta Participation - Change.

I don't normally like beta patches but this one stops all that random crashing caused by the new patch.

[Metcarfre]

Xbox.

[Geoff_B]

I actually haven't had it crashing at all, which I suppose is one good thing I can say about it.

I think I'm just going to do the main storyline quests and call it there. I'm really having trouble getting into it.

[Geoff_B]

So I just finished the main storyline quest.

What
The
Heck?

Say what you want about Mass Effect 3's ending but at least it had an ending! I go to Sovngarde, kill Alduin, get a new shout as a reward and booted back to Skyrim. And there is no visible effect on Skyrim. It feels as though I haven't actually done anything!

Seriously? That's it? Come back Destroy/Control/Synthesis! All is forgiven!

[RedNightmare]

^This

[Metcarfre]

Soooooooooo... Does anybody have this on Xbox? Because I'm only about halfway through, and now the game is freezing my system while trying to load any save. So I basically can't play. Previously, it would randomly freeze every hour or two (averaged over time). So, uh...?

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

SWTOR universal quest ending int he last leveling zone
all it is is, gZ. the end.

[Yaxley]

Soooooooooo... Does anybody have this on Xbox? Because I'm only about halfway through, and now the game is freezing my system while trying to load any save. So I basically can't play. Previously, it would randomly freeze every hour or two (averaged over time). So, uh...?

Yeah, I have it on Xbox. I'm about 180 hours in and I think it's only crashed twice. I'm going to place the blame on your hardware.

[Metcarfre]

Only game for which this happens; also relatively new 'slim' model.

[Darkobra]

I've not got it on XBox, but are you on the latest patch? I remember a lot of people had that problem until the newer patches.

[Metcarfre]

I've installed everything it asked me to... I'll have to check.

...uh, how do I check?