Skyrim

[UB_]

New Vegas DLC were just amazing in their own way because they expanded the in-game story. Something that FO3 didn't. And I don't think I'll give a damn about Skyrim DLC since the game looks large enough (then, I'm always on the Fallout side).

[redeye]

Skyrim game price is sticking for now, 60 bucks ! whoa. Seems like it can be justified I hope it is good.
But of course I will wait a year or so, cheapskate (and broke) lol

[Z-enzyme]

Well, I had fun installing mods for Skyrim. It looks and plays a looooot different now.
[spoiler]




It's an ENB mod which I modified a bit to remove annoying lens effect and overbright (still a bit overbrighten tho) but I like it very much. The AO makes it look a lot better, colorgrading increases the depth. Just to show off XD[/spoiler]

[UB_]

I remember asking on BU tips on how to defeat Giants and Hagraven when I was lvl 18

Now I'm lvl 35 and basically I'm badly trashing almost everything I see on the highest difficulty to the point of not even using any potion. Focusing on One-Handed/Heavy Armor/Destruction/Conjure, and on Enchanting/Smithing. These last two has been pretty useful for me to become a walking machine and I don't have Daedric stuff or double enchantment perk yet. I'm alongside and married with this Jordis girl from Solitude who is (with some good magic equipment) trashing most of the stuff as well.

Dragons are the most boring creatures ever and I think I'll resort to the Deadly Dragon mod. High mages are right now the strongest enemies. Lastly those treasure maps look hilarious and levelling up is a pain in the ass.

[Z-enzyme]

Start anew. I do it often. Don't do smithing or enchanting. Try role-playing your char. And, yee, do mod your Skyrim to be more challenging.

[Bleeder91<NL>]

Tried getting 2handed weapons to 100, but then I took an arrow in the knee. Now I'm 100 Conjuration/Archery/Sneak/Lockpicking.
Seriously, the game is a piece of cake with Bound Bow Spell, 3x sneaking damage and some archery perks. Even on hardestest difficulty the AI's stupid/blind, even the dragons prefer attacking a wolf over you.

[Mister_Prophet]

Bethesda games are not known for their difficulty, but rather their sense of discovery.

I very nearly one-shotted Alduin in my endgame climax. After level 15 Giants and most other creatures in the game were hammer fodder, the deadliest foe I encountered consistently were high level enemy mages using electric magic. This is pretty much my experience with Oblivion and Fallout 3, although Broken Steel added the super-buff enemies that could take mininukes to the face and keep on trucking. I didn't find a comfortable difficulty until New Vegas, playing on Very Hard with Hardcore mode enabled; even at level 50 you can get insta killed by Deathclaws and some of those enemies in OWB and LR scaled with you as high as cap it seemed.

[UB_]

Some enemies in the NV dlc were scripted to be stronger, like the Deathclaws in LR (one-hit kill melee).

[UB_]

Half-assed REVIEW of TES V: Skyrim
by UBerserker

Note: no screenshots
Another note: I'm not reviewing stuff for a while and we're talking about something huge here now, maybe lazy stuff ahead.

I never played a TES game in my life except Oblivion I guess, but I never finished it. I didn't even get past the beginning parts because I was too young and couldn't understand these RPG shit (western type) that much, too confusing and not worth wasting time. When Japan became pretty shit with their RPG games (with the sole exception of Atlus/Megaten) I decided one day to finally try out Fallout 3 by Bethesda. They said it was Oblivion with guns, and had almost nothing to do with the original Fallout series at all - which is somewhat true after having played it. NV was the real FO3 as far as I can tell and it was obviously superior (of course Obsidian had some devs of the old Fallout games, the game couldn't be worse).
After these two post-apocalyptic games I managed to understand how Bethesda WRPG worked, so why not try out Skyrim? The first real TES game I'm going to beat. With most of the gameplay being identical to the previous Fallout games I should feel at home by playing Skyrim, right? At first glance, not really.

And there you go, let's play Skyrim. On PC of course since I prefer playing the superior version. Too superior that you have methods of fixing bugs by using the console.
Skyrim, graphically, looks fucking beautiful. And that's a feat if even underground caves give the same effect; I think Blackreach looks cooler than anything above the surface personally. The strength lies in the lighting. Shadows and dynamic stuff are okay, but sometimes it's oversaturated and way too bright. Too bright that there's this "GETTING BLIND" realistic shit that happens if you look at something super bright and turn your face to the darkness afterwards. Happens in real life too but come on, here it's like the light punches you and you feel like losing senses or having a bad headache.
Almost everything casts lighting, including ice stains, invisible purple sources and some of your shouts I guess, but glowing magic shields do not.
Animation-wise it's one big improvement over the Fallout games DETAIL-WISE. If we're going deeper to the animations themselves then it's like a step-backward. Except Draugr, Dragon Priests and Dragons, people and monsters do some weird-as-shit movements. Do bears in real life stop all of a sudden in order to do extremely delayed attacks THAT GIVE TIME even to an old man to escape? Would you even run like, worse than a fucking sissy-girl if you sprint with active magic in both hands? Okay there's no magic in RL but that running animation still is horrid, and I was playing as a badass imperial guy. Animations in F03/NV felt way cooler. Texture-wise the game is decent, while Alduin seems to be made of gray plastic. WHY? No wonder why he died very quickly.

There are really some breathtaking moments in the Skyrim world map... the mountains, the grand temples, the weather and the sky. So nice that you can change the sky in the way you want with the console.

Playing the game was pretty fun yet all familiar, I couldn't wait more to deal with tons of new locks and stealing shit from people with the same dumb sneak system from Fallout. It's way worse here with the different detection warnings. It just doesn't make sense when the game actually says DETECTED but no further info than just that, except the eye. I began playing the game with a two-handed focused character but I realized that two-handed is fucking boring because all you can do is slow melee attacks.
From two-handed I went to OneHanded+enchant and Destruction, then I went to double Destruction, then I went to Destruction and Conjuration, then I went to double Conjuration, and lastly I went to Conjuration and Illusion. Alteration is out of the way because that school is fucking useless, Healing instead is quite broken, obviously because I barely used health potions, if ANY POTIONS at all. And this is on max difficulty. But the fun in Skyrim is kicking bad people in a fantasy dark medieval era, and annoying, pathetic idiots not worth living, so I'm not complaining. Surely you get broken shit like Odhaviig and Dremora Lords so the game is on the very easy side. Midas Spell didn't make anything much easier except some great conjuration spells and freaking meteors, while Deadly Dragons totally fixed the Dragons.

Vanilla dragons are laughable. Fighting Ancient dragons is as pointless as it gets. My fights with them are generally me joking around with the Master Thunder spell and Dragonrend, then town guards come and it doesn't look like they get killed. Wasn't the story about the Dragonborn, the only person in the whole world being able to defeat dragons, then why there are high-level bandits able to do the same thing? Do you mean they're dragonborns too? Is there some conspiracy going on or all what the dragonborn does is sucking dragon souls?
The story seems okay but like with lately everything Bethesda there's still not much control over various quests. There's this optional one (which is part of the main quest) which forces you to kill a certain big buddy for more optional quests; there's no legit way to end this optional quest without eliminating the target and I was really pissed off at this so I decided to use the Shout to freeze the asses of the ones who gave me the mission and went away. Too bad there were no pits otherwise I would have FUS DO RAH'd them off the balcony :\
Shouts are generally useless. Fus Do Rah is a complete waste (Midas Spell comes with a spell version of it), elemental shouts are not strong enough to justify the recharge time, the two Call shouts are over-broken, and the super dash should be longer. Dragonrend of course makes Dragons less boring to fight, Mark of Death makes everything weaker. But all my strategies are about Summon Dremora Lord, Summon Dremora Lord, Frenzy on enemies. If anything goes bad, it's meteor or thunder storm.
Aside Deadly Dragons, only major mages may be able to deal decent damage (although it's almost nothing currently). Deathlord Draugs with bows are apparently the strongest things since one arrow deals shittons of damage for some reason; had problems with them in the last temple as every Draugr was a Deathlord one. I don't know if there's some armor cap (mine is at 1100-something) but the damage dealt by those arrows was the same even with the armor Alteration spells. Speaking about Alteration, the only good thing about it is the Light spell (the lights orb are thrown in an awfuly way, like if they are balls) because the game is fucking dark and I can barely see stuff inside buildings.

The game is bottom-line, easy. Probably THIS easy once you understand how the fuck works enchantment, smithing and other shit. Had several issues due to several things confusing the hell out of me: I go in a town and it seems like you can create potions thanks to tons of ingredients; you can enchant items to make them apparently more powerful and useful but first you need Soul Gems. Filled ones, of course; you can create weapons, armors and jewellery items; you can power up weapons; you can power up armors (both statements are separated like the tools you use); you can create ingots out of ore if you EVER find a smelter; you can create skins; you can cook and
I guess that is.
Doesn't feel like a lot of things you can do, but you still feel overwhelmed because they require tons of items to let you create your own things. Carry weight doesn't help either, it's much worse in this game since the huge quantity of potions you get in this game quickly fill your inventory. Really, is cooking necessary at all? Or sleeping? I do not understand what's the point of sleeping here. In this magical world your health/mana/stamina regenerates over time, so all you need to do is wait one hour and that is. Everything revolves around recharge in Skyrim.

As for the various Ability trees, I eventually managed to max out everything, thanks also to the help of the septim-sucker trainers. Max level is 81 which is quite random, though the levelling system is pretty nice. It isn't like other games where you need to kill everything or do pointless or dangerous quests - you need to level up your abilities by using Magic, Attacking, defending, and more. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. I mean it's not like you become more powerful against anything if you keeping fight bugs, snakes and bats. It's not like you become more powerful because you took an item from one room to another.
This system got logic but it's A FUCKING PAIN IN THE ASS maxing everything out. I don't remember how many items I enchanted to get Enchantment to 100. It's boring and repetitive. In this game you do boring and repetitive stuff to become more powerful and access broken perks like two enchantments in one items, conjure two creatures, etc...
This is my personal opinion for each Ability Tree (P.S.: The Level Up menu is fucking amazing and it's even used as a proper sky at the end of the game; P.S.2: selecting the correct AND useful perks made me waste loads of time):

1)ARCHERY: generally used the "Training" option. Bows are really boring and I don't get what's so cool about shooting arrows for the entire game. Wish it didn't take that much.
2)BLOCK: generally used the "Training" option later in the game. Useful only with several perks, otherwise my character gets stunned by blocking bites from the Skeevers.
3)HEAVY ARMOR: what I used for the entire game. Some serious amazing perks and of course I quickly ended up with the Daedric set. I like being heavily armored, that's why I like Epic's bulky character models :-)
4)ONE-HANDED: mostly used for the entire game, until you become too strong to the point of having a super Daedric sword which drains Mana and Stamina, and the Legendary Dragonbane. With good perks, what the hell, you can a Double Charged Attack with both sword and kill Alduin in one go, and keep repeating since I was able to drain stamina from the target. Holy shit overall.
5)SMITHING: of course the usefulness of this is extremely high otherwise I couldn't have "Legendary" Daedric items. Perks are easy to get and maxing out the ability is quite a joke too.
6)TWO-HANDED: boring. It's more entertaining seeing Draugr, Vilkas or Dremora Lord trying to hit targets with their bigass swords.
7)ALTERATION: totally alterates your mind, making you believe the Armor spells are actually useful but it seems like they're only useful when you get a certain perk and when you are totally naked. Like I'm going to do that. At least the Light spell is nice.
8)CONJURATION: decided to get badass with this all of a sudden although summoned monsters helped me a lot by becoming great sources of distraction. Once you get the final perk and starts to summon Dremora Lords, you don't even need to attack. I'm too cool for directly attacking enemies currently. As for the Thralls, that are permanently on the battlefield, and being able to have a reanimated corpse on your side forever, it's all cool, although they usually disappear and you can't have proper undead creatures on your side, so it's not cool.
9)DESTRUCTION: I use this when I want to blow shit up, badly. Fire spells are cool because setting everything ablaze is cool; ice spells are useless on anybody except on you for some reasons; shock spells are obviously the strongest since they have great range, good damage, and hurt mana too; the Master shock spell is great unlike the other two since it's like a free ticket for defeating Dragons. I wish there was some non-elemental spell like a dark blast.
10)ENCHANTING: aka get this to lvl100 to break the game difficulty.
11)ILLUSION: pretty useless until you get some real perks. And you get those perks once you're probably lvl40 or something, when all of your current Illusion spells don't do shit against high-level creatures. Once you get those perks though, have fun casting down RAGE on every poor enemy (except Dragons) and see the idiots fighting each other. Scaring them is also hilarious. You can do lots of nice shit with Illusions spells actually and they practically fix everything which was wrong with the sneak system.
12)RESTORATION: if you keep using Healing spells (as they are too good), you'll end up with thousands of potions in the inventory. Watch out.
13)ALCHEMY: fills your inventory with shittons of bad or good potions. I don't understand the point of Alchemy because Skyrim is already filled of potions, in every freaking place you go. And really, Resistance to Poison as a perk? But if the poison damage is almost minimal at high levels...
14)LIGHT ARMOR: Training mostly, though I used them at the beginning of the game. Useful for stealth characters.
15)LOCKPICKING: Oh my god. Honestly, if you have shittons of lockpicks there's no reason to get any of the perks, and you can open any type of lock from the getgo unlike Fallout games. The only difference is that's now hard as flying fuck. Get used to your lockpick getting broken again and again in few seconds.
16)PICKPOCKET: Training once again. Haven't seen the point of pickpocketing people (which is something I don't like doing...) though I still have to do the second mission of the Thieves Guild.
17)SNEAK: levels up pretty quickly and sometimes even randomly. Not interested anyway unless I wanted to do some occasional stealth kill.
18)SPEECH: there are like, loads of moments when one right answer can level up this ability. Persuasion in this game is dumbed down. I wish it could unlocks answer like FUCK YOU DELPHINE.

I could go on and on with the gameplay. I'm 75 hours in, 50% of the game still needs to be completed and I finished the main quest at hour 74. The main quest itself is something which can be finished under 6 hours. Blackreach is the only hard part, and maybe the Draugr temple at the end as well, but the rest is a joke, with quests that end up in some minutes. Strangely I had problems trying to know which missions were part of the main quest, because Bethesda had apparently the great idea to make them recognizable by decorative knotwork displayed alongside the mission titles. Wasn't it easier to write MAIN QUEST here? The same thing is done for the other major questlines but at least you can recognize what they're talking about when you read the objectives.
I'm really happy though that Skyrim is overall super fucking long and doesn't seem to never end. It's the kind of game really worth the sixty bucks - IF not the only one alongside FO3, FNV and any moddable game. See, you don't need Multiplayer to not turn a SP-oriented game into a complete monetary failure :D
There is loads of missions and places that I haven't done/explored, but I think I'll take a break from it for now.

Something I still have to talk about is bugs. I never experienced crashes which is fucking astonishing, but bugs are there and what the fuck. There's Glory of the Dead (the final Companion mission) which I could never finish because Kodlak's ghost never appeared. There was the Hircine-werewolf mission, with the werewolf never leaving out the prison (it pissed me off greatly since that was the first real mission I did after finishing the Helgen dungeon). Certain dialogues that never pop up.
Overall the game worked great but I don't want imagine the frustration of people who encountered bugs like these in the console versions of the game since they don't have access to the console (how ironic) to fix shit up.

Lastly, the sounds. Sound effects really lack because basically the game is almost silent aside footsteps, character sounds and music. Thanksfully there's already a mod doing that but hearing only wind just doesn't cut it. The music is amazing, especially the Dragonborn battle theme.

I don't know what to say anymore because the list of things I have to say about this game is as big as every byte this game is made of. Truly a game of the year contender, though technical issues, unbalanced difficulty and a crapload of Bethesda decisions about anything else just make you wish that they could have released this game in 2012 since 2011 had already amazing games getting released left and right.

9/10

[Bloodshot]

I really like Skyrim a lot, it and Daggerfall are my two favorite TES games. Not sure If I like the idea of having it so you can get good at everything, kinda takes away from the idea of creating a "character", even if it is super hard to max out everything. It feels more like a "Fantasy Action game with RPG elements" then a true RPG.

And I almost wish smithing wasn't so exploitable, for pretty cheap I was able to max out my smithing completely on my second character, so he is the same level as my first char but his armor is the best you can get, minus uniques and enchanted items

[UB_]

If you get good at everything, you'll have some serious problems deciding what to use. Gives you more confusion than anything.
Then of course you can't get all the perks, and some vests net you special bonuses unlike others.

[Mister_Prophet]

Just gonna mention, did anyone else download Dawnguard?

I barely touched it, but so far I've made a full set of Dragonbone weapons and customized sick versions of them to slay some vampires. I've also noticed that you can construct arrows now at forges and there is a place to alter your appearance in the Ratways. Also, lots of new vampire related scripted events in the normal game world and damned if it doesn't seem like they souped up the dragons since I last played. And Crossbows! yay!

Dragonbone Hammer. Make one.

[marjhunaz]

I like this game i want to play this kind of game and experience.


_________
butterfly knives illegal

[Carbon]

I like this game i want to play this kind of game and experience.

First post to necrobump a 2 year-old thread? So far, so good.

[UB_]

Could be a bot considering there's a new big infestation of them in the web recently.
Anyway I forgot about that huge review of mine, can't believe I always wrote so much stuff back then.