So, with Skyrim coming out in November, many people's social lives are going to disappear. If you are going to play it, what do you plan to do ingame?

I'll probably be playing Skyward Sword instead around that time.

Hmm i don't know if i'd buy it.I liked the first one,but the first one also is one of those games i love for some reasons and get bored for other reasons.

The first game was really flawed in that it had a huge amount of bugs,and the dungeons were all very repetitive.

I'm hoping they at least spend more time in bug proofing it and making sure the dungeons are fun and adding more quests as a thief or assasin or warrior.

I'm kind of hoping that this will be the one RPG this year that actually improves on its predecessor, not that in this particular case that would be saying very much.

Hmm i don't know if i'd buy it.I liked the first one,but the first one also is one of those games i love for some reasons and get bored for other reasons.

The first game was really flawed in that it had a huge amount of bugs,and the dungeons were all very repetitive.

I'm hoping they at least spend more time in bug proofing it and making sure the dungeons are fun and adding more quests as a thief or assasin or warrior.

I dont know what is par for the course for dungeons in this game, but the recent demo footage released showed a huge dungeon with thieves, giant spider, undead warriors, puzzles, and an artifact.
I think this game will surpass Oblivion in the long run, It seems the terrain is more to my liking and npc interaction is in real time

---------- Post added at 10:25 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:24 AM ----------


I'm kind of hoping that this will be the one RPG this year that actually improves on its predecessor, not that in this particular case that would be saying very much.

What do you mean, did you hate Oblivion or noticed its flaws?

I think it was playable, and some of the questlines were fun in a dopey kind of way, but that's about it. Skyrim looks much better.

I know what you mean, most of the time in Oblivion I just rode around searching for Steel. Well that and every other armor and weapon type.

Videos:The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Demo Part 1 - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xwboyafbwc)
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Demo Part 2 - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7WohnlLEQo&feature=relmfu)
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Demo Part 3 - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt7IeycKJKQ&feature=relmfu)

Skyrim does look pretty good I admit, and I'll probably end up giving it a go myself (at least til Dragon's Dogma is released sometime next year), but I doubt I'll buy it on release, as I'll be busy in Steelport in Saints Row The Third :D

Skyrim does look pretty good I admit, and I'll probably end up giving it a go myself (at least til Dragon's Dogma is released sometime next year), but I doubt I'll buy it on release, as I'll be busy in Steelport in Saints Row The Third :D

Thats why I have Gamefly :)

Chances are by the end of the season, I will be renting from everywhere I can.

Rev:
You do realise that Dragon's Dogma is being made by Capcom, right? As in the company who haven't produced a good, original game for like... 8000 years, it seems. Seriously, Capcom have well and truly lost their mojo in the last 5 years or so, and I wouldn't get my hopes up too high on this.

As for Skyrim, I'm looking forward to it. I know some people feel Oblivion was overrated, but I always liked it. I played it again recently, and even after all this time, I still had a great time going through it again. So if Skyrim is better, then that *should* mean that I'll really enjoy this game.

(He said, crossing his fingers, touching wood and clutching a lucky rabbit's paw...)

Rev:
You do realise that Dragon's Dogma is being made by Capcom, right? As in the company who haven't produced a good, original game for like... 8000 years, it seems. Seriously, Capcom have well and truly lost their mojo in the last 5 years or so, and I wouldn't get my hopes up too high on this.

As for Skyrim, I'm looking forward to it. I know some people feel Oblivion was overrated, but I always liked it. I played it again recently, and even after all this time, I still had a great time going through it again. So if Skyrim is better, then that *should* mean that I'll really enjoy this game.

(He said, crossing his fingers, touching wood and clutching a lucky rabbit's paw...)

I agree. :)

Well tbh the recent RE games have been good, Street Fighter has had a boom, and Lost Planet was fairly successful so I wouldnt count Capcom completly out.

Note that I said 'Original Games', as in not established franchises like RE and Street Fighter. I'm talking new IPs.

Pretty much ALL of their new IPs for like the last decade nearly, have been utterly awful. And I do include Lost Planet in that - that game was not good, and I can't believe it got a sequel.

Gotch ya, read your post wrong.

Cant wait for the moddders to get a hold of this game, cant wait to use Conan's sword and ride dragons :)

Just so long as this game doesn't have the terrible levelling up system of Oblivion, where the game is actually easier if you stay Lvl 1 for the whole game (along the fact that it was just retarded that you even *could* stay as Lvl 1).

But yeah, I'm pretty jazzed for this game. Its probably the only game left to come out this year, that I'm really all that excited for. I doubt I'll end up liking it as much as Fallout: New Vegas, but if I do, then that'll mean its one hell of a game!

Rev:
You do realise that Dragon's Dogma is being made by Capcom, right? As in the company who haven't produced a good, original game for like... 8000 years, it seems. Seriously, Capcom have well and truly lost their mojo in the last 5 years or so, and I wouldn't get my hopes up too high on this.
Monster Hunter.

Dragon's Dogma seems to bear a fair few similarities to Monster Hunter too, though a little toned down on the difficulty. The similarities are even more striking now with the Monster Hunter 4 trailer out, which shows a hunter on top of a Rathalos and stabbing it in the back repeatedly.

Anyway, yeah, I actually like Capcom a lot. Monster Hunter is easily my favourite series of games and Lost Planet 2 is probably the most fun I've had with a third person shooter ever. I am probably more excited about Dragon's Dogma than I am about Skyrim, though that really depends on the extent of the co-op in DD. Capcom hasn't said much about it yet...

the only way for me to like capcom (momentarily) is to plug my nes and play some megaman 2.
or both ducktales

Skyrim thread turned into Capcom thread. :)

I hope there is a Conan total conversion mod in the works, watched some more gameplay demos and the enviroments of both Hyboria in Conan (1982) and Skyrim look very similar.

Monster Hunter was released what, 5-6 years ago now? Like I said, they haven't come up with a good original IP for over 5 years now - a long time in this industry, as that's usually about the same timespan as a whole generation of consoles.

Plus, I think Monster Hunter sucks, but hey...

Monster Hunter was released what, 5-6 years ago now? Like I said, they haven't come up with a good original IP for over 5 years now - a long time in this industry, as that's usually about the same timespan as a whole generation of consoles.

Plus, I think Monster Hunter sucks, but hey...

.....this is a thread about Skyrim :)

Which isn't out, thus limiting the number of things we can say about it. Getting ourselves all worked up over features which have no guarantee of making the finished game, or enthusing over demos, screenshots etc which history teaches us, we should believe at our peril, isn't very helpful.

Its not we don't want to talk about it - there's just nothing to say yet! (I take your point though, apologies for going off-topic).

when everything has been said about an ureleased game, the only solution is to derail it.
therefore, until something else new is known about skyrim, this is a wtf capcom thread

I just can't get into the Elder Scrolls series. I have tried and tried to love it.

I don't like Bethesda nor do I appreciate First Person RPGs though.

Monster Hunter was released what, 5-6 years ago now? Like I said, they haven't come up with a good original IP for over 5 years now - a long time in this industry, as that's usually about the same timespan as a whole generation of consoles.

Plus, I think Monster Hunter sucks, but hey...

You did also say the last decade...

I just can't get into the Elder Scrolls series. I have tried and tried to love it.

I don't like Bethesda nor do I appreciate First Person RPGs though.

Why dont you like Bethdesa or FPRPGs?

I dont idolize the devs but they do a pretty good job at making a big immersive world, and 1st person helps in the immersion.

My take is that Bethesda's games are generally technically sound for this type of game, and their worlds feel big and open. That's the big draw they have - if you want a game like this, with a big world that you can explore for months and months without seeing everything, they are pretty much the only show in town. And fair play to them, they do it well, keeping the amount of glitchs for such a complex genre, to an acceptable level.

But their writing is fairly basic for the most part, with side quests, characters and main plots that are not up to the standard of the worlds they create. You get the odd flash of inspiration like John Henry Eden in Fallout 3 (who has fantastic voice acting from Malcolm Mcdowell, but his dialogue is noticeably better than the other characters, anyway). It was the same in Oblivion actually - most of the characters were utterly forgettable, but Mankar Cameron was pretty good, because of better quality of dialogue and great acting from Terence Stamp. Not that surprising that Eden and Cameron are similar characters (intellectual, visionary bad guys).

Plus the fact is, the combat is not great in these games. It never really feels like you are actually hitting someone with a melee weapon, you don't feel the impact etc. They frequently put in completely broken skills, spells and systems (Invisibility in Oblivion, VATS in Fallout etc). And the gunplay in the Fallout games is just atrocious.

And yet for me, none of these failings dull the allure that exploring such big, atmospheric worlds holds. Its rare to get such freedom and be able to spend so much time exploring for the hell of it, without getting bored. Because there's always something more to see just around the corner, and it always feel like its something that you and you alone have found, even though you know that's obviously not the case.

So unless they show they can sustain an interesting narrative or make combat genuinely rewarding, it'll probably just be more of the same. But that's okay, because its something that we can't really get anywhere else at the moment, at least not at the same level of detail and quality.

Well said

Why dont you like Bethdesa or FPRPGs?

I dont idolize the devs but they do a pretty good job at making a big immersive world, and 1st person helps in the immersion.

Bethesda seem to be a 'one trick pony' for me. All of their games are incredibly similar to me and maybe if they tried to do something different, I may respect them as a developer a lot more.

The worlds that they craft in their games are beautiful, don't get me wrong, but the games themselves are generic copies of one another seemingly just with different skins.

FPRPGS are just not my thing... And I even have trouble liking most WRPGS; I dislike Bioware almost as much as Bethesda. That's just my opinion though and I know that a lot of people feel differently and that's okay.

Maybe I'm a Japanese gamer in the body of an Australian? >.>

Taken as a whole, I don't think the Elder Scrolls games are any more similar than you'd expect from a franchise.

Some news

Eurogamer demo thoughts

played using 360
guards say "stop right there" but i didnt hear any criminal scup
lokpicking is kinda odd, its gone fallout style but theres two things poking into the keyhole instead of one. you move one around till it allows easy movement of another
the stealth icon (eye thing that replaces crosshair) has been improved. begins as a flat line, as enemies begin to realise where you are it starts to open.
no dragons in the demo sadly, or dragon shouts
the atmosphere created is amazing, both seeing and hearing a snowstorm as you climb mountains is perfectly done
reading books increases your skills again
water is far improved
theres no more glitchy walking up the side of a mountain like in oblivion
no hint towards the story was given in the demo, however it seems the dragons are seen as a bit of a myth at the start, some NPC's say they saw one whilst others refuse to believe and call them crazy
killed a roaming friendly hunters dog....hunter was not pleased
all items can be viewed and rotated in the menu with brilliant detail
found a fireplace with cooking pot hanging above it, when using the pot it gave me an alchemy type menu with requirements needed to make food such as bread and soup
the character creator is massively improved over oblivion, options for facepaint on all races with a multitude of colours is a good addition
on the first loading screen there was a quote from the dark brotherhood referring to the night mother
the way the map works is a nice touch but i couldnt help but think it was far smaller than oblivion
enemies can be left to your mercy if their the last left in their group/taken enough damage, physically kneeling down and begging to be spared
no 2 people sounded alike
spriggans are really annoying
giants are bloody powerfull
theres a run button this time, you cant run whilst stealthing you can still jump whilst stealthing though
pickpocketing seems to work the same as fallout
argonians have a unique racial spell which lets them rapidly recover health over a short time
mudcrabs are slightly bigger and look marginally more menacing

Source: Guy on Facepunch boiling down a preview.

that no 2 people sounded alike is very unlikely.
usually the races have just 2 VAs per race.

well, unless they do it like fallout, where only nameless (ie scavenger, etc) enemies had the same voices.

aslo, theres a very heated battle over which is gona be better, dark souls or skyrim.
i, as a gamer, simply said: both.
but the battle is still raging hard.
and it amuses me

Its a fire mainly stoked by IGN from what I have seen.

You cant spell ignorant without IGN.

I dont see how people can compare the two(well more like start a war between the two), they are a completely diffrent breed and I plan to play both tbh.

from what ive read, its all about dragons this, dragons that.

People these days :notgood:

If the dungeons are bigger,and more diverse,i hope this also means that there aren't any sacrifices in gameplay.
I still hope they give lots of reasons to steal and to become a warrior or mage.And my biggest hope:They fix all the damm bugs related to encounters.You know,so guards don't accidentally hit each other while attacking one monster and say:ON GUARD!! and start taking turns shooting each other.One of the biggest things to get rid of,is make sure that there aren't any spelling errors that could cause you to have to change the language to french,because a certain vampire cure quest has a translation error and asks for an item with a spelling error.

Also:I hope that if they allow you to steal,they at least allow things to respawn in those stores.

Another thing i hope they fix:I hope that they don't allow townspeople to fight for you and die,because this could actively break a game.

I had a bunch of people who loved me in oblivion,and they would literally go and attack guards for me and die bravely.I think what happened with the alchemist,is that i had such high relations with the alchemist that she went out and attacked a guard and got herself killed.

The only way to make stealing an attractive option, would be to severely restrict the amount of Gold you can earn without heavy, heavy questing. They'd also need to make Gold a very desireable thing (i.e something that you really do need, as opposed to something that you hoard because there is never anything worth buying that you couldn't just loot etc).

If Gold was made vital and made pretty difficult to get hold of, then stealing would be a viable option. But if you can just loot enemy's weapons and armour, find huge stacks of gold by just roaming around, never really have to eat or drink anything or have to sleep etc, then Gold will be as it is in most games - pointless after the first couple of hours.

In practically all RPGs, you soon find yourself with untold riches, because there is never anything useful enough to buy that you really need, nor is the stuff you do buy, expensive enough to put a serious drain on your gold. Just 1 or 2 quests, hauling various loot to the shops, will set you up nicely for pretty much the whole game!


That's where Demon's Souls was on to a winner - Souls were EXP *and* they were money. You couldn't loot enemy weapons or armour, and trying to farm souls was not that easy, because of the steep difficulty and possibility of losing all your souls.

I'm looking forward to Skyrim, but I think that it will be a 'popcorn blockbuster' of a game compared to the almost certainly more hardcore experience of Dark Souls. But that's fine - after a month of so of something that is apparently just as murderously unforgiving as Demon's Souls, I'll be well up for something a bit more relaxing!

As I said before, Bethesda's games are for enjoying rambling about the countryside, levelling and looting as you take in the scenery. If Skyrim is more than that, it'll be a pleasant and largely unexpected bonus.

They are two diffrent beasts, I hope to play both but due to PC modding I will stick with Skyrim.

Just talking about Dark Souls has me on edge - I can't wait for it to come out, but at the same time, I can't believe I'm going to put myself through that agony, all over again!

I'm not kidding about Skyrim - I'm liable to be a physical and mental wreck by the time I'm through with Dark Souls, such is its demands on your concentration. So some leisurely exploration and fantasy 'dale and dungeon' crawling with a merry step here and a Broadsword to the orcish face there, will be just what the doctor ordered!

Vrykolas,you answered the first question,but what about the bugs?

I seriously hope they fix those.There are some bugs that ruin oblivion's gameplay
I am also interested in what quests they will offer us.Will there be more class quests?
I saw a video of wielding 2 magic spells at a time on youtube:

Elder Scrolls V Skyrim: Official Gameplay Trailer - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjqsYzBrP-M)
that is the trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic6dKnv3WdU&feature=related
Gameplay for elder scrolls 5 skyrim.

Thats pretty much the reason why Im getting it on PC. The modding community often fixes a lot of stuff and improves others.

Well, what do you mean by bugs exactly? A game of such size and complexity is bound to have them, because there are just so many moving parts, so to speak. There's just so much for the game to keep track of at any one time, that glitches are inevitable.

I played Oblivion all the way through just a few months ago, and I can't remember any bugs offhand (at least none that my brain recognised and memorized as being inordinately annoying). Compared to Fallout: New Vegas for example, Oblivion runs like a dream (and I say that as a dyed-in-the-wool New Vegas fanatic).

I have many issues with Bethesda's games, from combat to handling of loot etc, but in terms of technical competance by the designers, both Oblivion and Fallout 3 run very smoothly and with minimal bugs and glitches (at least those that are actual game breakers, anyway). I think you have to be realistic about these things, for there to be no bugs... well, that just isn't going to happen.

The fact is that games like this always work better (i.e there is less chance of reality breaking oddities) if you play as a 'Good' character, don't attack friendly NPCs and generally cause havoc in peaceful towns etc, and don't go around stealing everything that isn't nailed down. Because these often lead to unusual situations, and games are often bad at dealing with such things (like in all games, where you can exploit the AI to make whatever it is you're doing, much easier than it should be etc etc).

They try to plan for all eventualities, but there is only so much that you can do. A living player (as opposed to an artificial intelligence) is always going to be able to create scenarios that the computer finds very strange, and unable to deal with. A large factor of these games is accepting that sometimes, you have to work with the game to create the atmosphere you want.

And sometimes, that involves overlooking the occasional odd and out of place glitch or oversight in the AI's programming etc. Its not perfect and its annoying when these things happen, but they can't be expected to cover everything in a game this complicated. As long as they get the important bits right, I'll give them a pass on the rest.

As for the PC... Look, there are many PC gamers who are perfectly nice people. But many are insufferable snobs who treat console gamers like the lowest forms of life on the planet. I'm not saying you are like that N-10, but I know plenty of people who are. So, I prefer to stay out of such waters, and I'll be getting the console version.

I have Oblivion and Fallout 3 GOTY on both PS3 and PC. Yeah, I know people that like to always say consoles suck and I am not one of them. If I had the money I would get Skyrim on both, but I just dont have enough cash.

I have both,and i play both console and pc games.

Oblivion glitches i'm talking about:

The infamous vampire quest error which is due to gramatical error of some sort in the programming.
You have to change the language to french in order to fix it.

How guards react towards each other.Sometimes,a guard is attacking an enemy,and another guard joins in and accidentally hits the other guard causing the guard to attack him.As i said in an earlier post:I went through and got hit by an arrow and heard a guard say:HA!! you will never get me.For the empire.

I was like:WTF? i didn't attack any guard or cause any trouble,so i went around and found 2 guards taking turns killing each other.
They should find some way to prevent this from happening as it can cause problems.

Ok another glitch:if you are doing the vampire quest and go into the next room where you give in the blood grass,the game glitches out a little and can cause you to get stuck in that room.

2 famous exploitable glitches:1 the duplication glitch which involves having 2 scrolls of 1 type and 1 of the other.Click twice on 1 scroll and then drop a regular item you want to duplicate.This will allow you to duplicate almost any item,but there are a few items that don't work with this infamous exploitable glitch.

The second glitch,involves a cupboard for food in the warrior guild.There is a pattern which i forget how,and this causes you to have infinite amount of that food which is always there.You can keep getting resources for alchemy this way.

OH YEAH!! i forgot about yet another glitch i just remembered:

You create 1 character and leave him right at the gate before saying you are finished with the class and race you want and save there.create 2 save files and take one to an inn and sleep till you level up,and before you get the screen of your level up,go and pause the game and load an old game to pass your level onto your new character.You can level an infinite amount of times to max out whatever skill you want and stat points.

Oh yeah and another glitch that is exploitable:The paintbrush glitch which i think is done around the palace area to get on top.Doing this would allow you i think to get the end sequence.

Oh yeah:I forgot 1 bug.The infamous door glitch.Dead body in doors way=Shaking body which moves as if it were alive.

There may be bugs i don't know about in oblivion.
Fallout 3 was less bugged than oblivion,far less bugged.

But couldn't you use some self restraint and not abuse these glitches. They are fairly obscure (I didn't know about any of them), and I just don't see why if you can use some save game, load game jiggery pokery, that has anything to do with how the average player experiences the game.

And what's this about the vampire quest? I contracted Vampirism almost straight away on my first playthrough, and whilst the quest for a cure was long and ardous (and a lot of fun), I don't remember any glitch with it (and I did get cured, without aid from the internet, as I wasn't even on the internet back then).

Even knowing all this stuff, I just don't see how or why it matters. If doing something at a certain area, teleports me to the end sequence or breaks the reality of the game in an annoying way... I just won't do it! If the game was forcing me to do it, or blocking important quests or locations etc, *then* I would have a problem.

And the thing with the guards... again, the game doesn't deal well with unexpected situations. It expects 1 guard to be more than enough to take care of you, and the rules governing who treats who as a threat are pretty loose. In fairness to Bethesda though, they realised this and their subsequent games have been much beter on this front.

Though I still can't recall that situation ever happening to me (but there have been many unusual happenings, just nothing that bothered me).

The vampire quest in the english language version is bugged.
Its a known bug too,because there is some sort of glitch related to something being mispelled and having to change the language to french in goty edition.I think this is a bug that is specifically for goty edition.

1 of these bugs i discovered by accident.I was in the warriors guild and noticed that it was an endless item.

Oh yeah! i forgot about another glitch:There is a rich guy in the imperial city who has an infinite amount of money.Knock him unconcious and you can steal an infinite amount of cash.

As for use:I don't bother with them.If i use a bug,i lose interest and quit the game because i can't be bothered.

And didn't Vampire: The Masquerade have one of these too, now that I remember? If you put your bartering skills up, you could buy equipment in shops, then sell it back straight away for more than you bought it for. Infinite cash ahoy...

And I don't have the GotY edition of Oblivion, so that would explain why I didn't have any problems on the vampire quest.

Vampire the masquerade is 11 years old,oblivion is like 5 or 4 years old?

It also seems to have far more bugs than vampire the masquerade.

As i said:Oblivion has a lot of bugs.Some of them you have to look for,others are a little more obvious.

I wasn-t looking for the cupboard bug in the warriors guild.The rest i did look up,but i don-t use these bugs because it kills the point of playing the game.

Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines?
or Redemption?

if your comparing age between bloodlines and oblivion then its only 1 year diffirence.

Redemption is far older however.

The first one - Redemption (or was it Bloodlines, I can't remember now).

Anyway, that thing with the buying and selling is one of the only clear memories that I have of that game, beyond the heroic 'To the Abyss to thee!' cries, when you smash barrels.

I'm looking forward to the new Elder Scrolls game, although I will admit to any and all that I am harshly, even perhaps unfairly, critical when it comes to sequels. Not to mention the fact that I didn't care much for Fallout 3, not for lack of playing it (stopped playing around 30 hours), but for a lot of what I saw as shortcomings. These shortcomings included: dull, barren, lifeless landscape, broken battle system (VATS), annoying blood splatter, little variety in music, and particular attention to minute detail on things like rocks and cracks in the ground. The only reason I mention these is because I see a few of the same things in previews of ES:V.

Let me just try to count the ways that Bethesda has made Skyrim similar to Fallout 3. 1. The game takes place in a northern icy continent that doesn't seem to have much vegetation, but is rather mostly mountainous and rocky gray. 2. They continue the Perk leveling up system from Fallout 3, which is not necessarily a terrible thing, but there is one problem I had with it: when I leveled up, I always kept getting the further perks for the same stats because I didn't want to just get the first level perks for other attributes. 3. They have the really irritating (to the point of disgust) blood drops on the screen that DO NOT FADE THE FUCK AWAY, that are just there to look stupid. 4. In the previews of ES:V, I saw a ton of attention to the most minute aspects of the game, like rocks, pebbles, cracks in the ground. But in Fallout 3, that was to the detriment of creating an interesting environment. I truly hope that the same doesn't carry over. I haven't heard enough music in Skyrim to judge (although I'm thinking that the Scandinavian chorus music is pretty cliched), so I hope to God they have better music in it than in Fallout 3. They've got Jeremy Soule (same composer as Oblivion), so I do have high hopes.

I know I'm in the minority of gamers who didn't like the direction of Fallout 3, but it should be obvious to players of both Fallout 3 and Oblivion that Bethesda borrowed very heavily from Fallout 3 because it was received such high praise. But I think they're playing it safe by building around what they've gained approval for, rather than inventing something new and innovative, which was exactly what they did for Fallout 3 (even if I didn't like it, I'll always endorse creativity and experimentation). By the way, I don't yet know what to think of the whole dragon aspect; to be honest, I think it's kind of childish, but we'll have to wait and see.

In short, I'm dismayed that Bethesda's copying so heavily from aspects of Fallout 3 (which I didn't like), the relationships of which are quite apparent, but I still have hope that it'll be good.

You and i have similar problems with remakes and sequels,cept i think i simply became a pessimist,because more and more games became to my disliking,and i started losing hope in entire series.I do hope they don't fuck it up as bad as the supposed dragon age 2 staff did.I heard terrible things about dragon age 2,like:Being more linear and not being able to even talk to people in the game except for the people who the game wants you to talk to.

I did hear that they improved on some parts of the gameplay allowing you to have a character go behind and attack from behind in the menu of choice,or something alike.

I wasn't the greatest fan of Fallout 3 (although I love New Vegas), but that was mostly down to the awful main plot. I love the Enclave and President Eden, but they don't show up until near the extremely rushed and silly end. I also didn't like the general lack of activity in the Capital Wasteland - there just didn't seem to be anything going on.

Hardly any locations had more than a handful of quest and next to nothing in terms of a wider story. Allies were also very disappointing, because there weren't many of them, they were hard to recruit, and only had dialogue when you recruited them (ever after, becoming drones that fight alongside you). I felt with all the great atmosphere, this was a big waste. New Vegas fixed all of that, and is primarily why I consider it the superior game by far, despite the crippling bugs.

And whilst post apocalyptic isn't usually my thing, I did really like the blasted vision of the future in Fallout 3. Its just breathtaking to look out over all the devastation, and feel really, really alone. Its bleak and not for everyone, but I loved it - in fact, I much prefer the game to be serious, and could do without all the black humour surrounding Vault Tec etc.Some humour is necessary given the setting, but I feel they go overboard, so nothing seems that serious.

I'll miss the radio in Skyrim, because I feel it really adds to the whole Fallout/FO: New Vegas experience. It was so comforting to go into a dark, menacing Vault and have President Eden's soothing voice talking about all the stuff the Enclave was just about to do! Really made you feel a connection with him (and 3 Dog too).

Basically, I just want there to be ongoing storylines, that side quests and people in certain areas of the map can tie into. If the world feels realistic, then it seems a shame to just make it so static like Oblivion and Fallout 3 were. In New Vegas, each area of the map had factions actively working against the others, and it coloured what kinds of side quest you got, and who you would (and would not) meet, given whose terrority it was etc.

And of course, the main story will probably be terrible. In fact, there is basically no chance at all of it being any good. I've never been very interested in Dragons really, but it is Fantasy, so I can't really complain about them putting such things in. Especially when it answers one of my main criticisms of Oblvivion (that none of the enemies were really that big, Ogres and Daedroths were pretty much the biggest things in the games). Kind of limited how heroic you could feel, when you were constantly battling small fry.

I heard some bad stuff about new vegas.

Like:It was shorter than the original game.There is of course the problem that its easier to access on xbox360.
I don't know if ps3 has it yet.

If that's true, it wouldn't be by much. And I kind of doubt it is, especially when you factor in the fact that the second half of the main quest has four distinct paths.

The main issue New Vegas has in comparison to Fallout 3 is that the world map is pretty badly designed, which ends up discouraging exploration in the early game. Also, you only get a perk every 2 levels instead of every 1. Everything else is better.

Just for the love of God dont head toward that Mining Op early on.

Hopefully some legacy issues (people or enemies flying into the air, NPC's important to quests wandering off or disappearing, etc.) will be fixed but I guess I will have to wait till November to find out.

New Vegas is appropriately enough, a game you are either 'all in' for, or one you won't touch with a ten foot pole. The glitchs are extremely wearing on even the most patient of gamers, but if you can see past them, its the best of the 3 games we have been discussing IMO.

And to be fair about the Mining area, you are *constantly* warned off going that way. Its a good illustration of how New Vegas is different from Oblivion and Fallout 3 though. It puts specific enemies in specific places, so you don't just get randomly ambushed by Deathclaws and the like whilst you're out exploring.

When you start encountering hard enemies, its because you've strayed into their established territory on the map, and there are plenty more about if you don't hoof it in the opposite direction pronto!

And as for content, size of map etc - utterly irrelevent. For a start, its highly debatable that its is smaller anyway, and secondly there is still a metric ton of content to keep even the most hardcore completionist busy for months and months and months. The content is also much better IMO, as Obsidian are far better writers than Bethesda.

I loved the game but it just had a freakish amount of gamebreaking glitches that I could not get past.

I was just saying because even at a higher level that place is a hellhole.

Ah, no way. 50 or more in Melee weapons gets you the Mauler Special move, which guarantees victory over any Deathclaw (even the Alpha and Brood Mothers). Just use it, they fly away to the floor, then you leap on them bashing away until they die - works *every* time. Handled right, you can keep peeling off single Deathclaws, until you clear the mine, no problem. Great source of EXP too.

And then laugh out loud at the 3 very modestly armed Great Khans who are somehow camping up top. They must be keeping *really* quiet!

And then game crashes when you enter canyon :sad:

Its a mark of how much I love the game that I can put up with the frequent crashing. I will say that after the DLC packs and their patches, it is *much* better. Dead Money, Honest Hearts and Old World Blues all ran smoothly and never crashed once. Lonesome Road had some big problems though, and was definately a step backwards (lots of crippling slowdown, and some outright freezes).

As I've said many times in the past though, I'd rather play a great game that only works some of the time, than a rubbish game which works all of the time.

Is there a GOTY version yet.

If so I might get it on PC.

I liked New Vegas more than 3 but the damned glitchs made F3 and Oblivion look like flawless games.

Don't you actually have to be named 'Game of the Year' to get something like that? The glitches made that extremely unlikely, if that's the case. And I wouldn't get my hopes up anyway, if the game is still buggy all this time later in Lonesome Road, the problems are obviously too great to be fixed without them expending more time and money than it would ever be worth.

Not ideal, but that's the way it goes sometimes...

I meant like a complete set. :laugh:

Im used to saying that :laugh:

a complete collection is also the reason why im holding back on getting FNV.
if theres is official word that NV will not get a goty or complete set, then ill just have to buy the dlc, ugh, i hate that

As long as you prepare yourself mentally for the glitches, I wholeheartedly recommend you pick it up - its one of my favourite games of this gen. The DLC packs are okay (Dead Money and Old World Blues are great, the other two less so), but they aren't essential.

This talk of GOTY saddens me. If the game worked how it was supposed to, it *would* have been GOTY...

already played it.
im not in the least bothered by them, which happened rarely to me.

New Vegas is appropriately enough, a game you are either 'all in' for, or one you won't touch with a ten foot pole. The glitchs are extremely wearing on even the most patient of gamers, but if you can see past them, its the best of the 3 games we have been discussing IMO.

And to be fair about the Mining area, you are *constantly* warned off going that way. Its a good illustration of how New Vegas is different from Oblivion and Fallout 3 though. It puts specific enemies in specific places, so you don't just get randomly ambushed by Deathclaws and the like whilst you're out exploring.

When you start encountering hard enemies, its because you've strayed into their established territory on the map, and there are plenty more about if you don't hoof it in the opposite direction pronto!

And as for content, size of map etc - utterly irrelevent. For a start, its highly debatable that its is smaller anyway, and secondly there is still a metric ton of content to keep even the most hardcore completionist busy for months and months and months. The content is also much better IMO, as Obsidian are far better writers than Bethesda.

In the original version of fallout 3,it was also sometimes dependant on where you went to get certain enemies.

Example:I started encountering deathclaws and alike really far north area in a ruins area.
I also encountered lots of yao guais.The first time i played,i had the ability:animals being my friend,so the yao guais didn't attack me,but they didn't help me either.I kinda like this ability,but its not really necessary.Oh yeah:If you don't want to fight super mutants in hordes,don't go to the underworld or german town,because those places are filled to the brim with super mutants,and super mutants are your worse enemies early on with their spiked clubs and their chainguns and rifles.There is even an area on the way to the underworld,where i found a super mutant with a rocket launcher on top of a building shooting the missles at me at long range,and believe me,i had to use vats to see that guy.That wasn't even the first one i saw,i saw like 3 more around that area with rocket launchers,and those guys hurt and will kill you if you aren't careful.

New Vegas simply recognises that combat is not one of the game's strongest suits. People like to explore, and whilst you must always be ready for combat, there are times when you simply want to get from A to B without too much fuss. So if you stick to roads, and stay out of the territory of factions that hate you, travel and careful exploration is nowhere near as dangerous as in FO3.

Healing items and the caps to buy them are more plentiful, the combat skills are beefed up so you don't have to rely on ammo all the time, and the game is careful to keep items like Enerrgy Cells and Dynamite in ready supply, so people aren't punished for taking those skills (as both were very hard to come by early on in FO3).

But if you feel up to the challenge, you can forge off into the mountains, canyons, highlands etc and go looking for trouble (which you will definately find!) Its just an altogether better presented and better thought out experience. Especially as the locations and characters are all much better and tie in directly to the ongoing plot, if only in small ways sometimes.

In FO3 meanwhile, if you walk about the wastes just having a most about, you can get set upon by Deathclaws, Yao Guai and other what have you, anywhere on the map. It gets very tedious later on, because although you are very tough, Deathclaws are still lethal (and those Robobrains that cripple your head aren't hard, but are very annoying).

And yes, some enemies are specific to certain areas, but the stories they are involved in are usually extremely small scale. You don't feel like its a real world, just a collection of events happening in total isolation. Take Tenpenny Towers for example - you can kill Alistair Tennpenny, and nobody gives a damn. The people just talk as if he was still alive!

Or Evergreen Mills, the Bandit stronghold. There are no quests associate with this place, and no-one notices or gives a damn if you clear it out - same for Paradise Falls. And its a shame with Evergreen Mills, because they've set up this whole camp and series of buildings with a community, and you can't interact with it in any way, no matter what your Karma is, or who you know or anything.

Paradise Falls you can interact with, but only in a very small way. It just seems like such a waste to put these locations in the game, but then not let you do anything in them. Even late in the game, you'll probably still be doing most of your business in Megaton, because its one of the only friendly setttlements, and has everything you need in a base camp.

This kind of thing breaks the illusion completely. Whereas in New Vegas, if you kill someone from a certain faction, it has immediate and drastic consequences. But conversely you *can* kill any and everyone that you meet. No people with special invulnerabilty, like your Dad in FO3, who you can happily punt about the room with rocket launchers etc and he'll just say 'Will you behave yourself?'

I didn't mean to get this thread on the Fallout track. I just meant to show some comparisons (although comparisons will inevitably be drawn, seeing as this is so highly anticipated and Fallout 3 and NV have been well received).

As of last Wednesday, Skyrim will be out in less than a month! And as a player of Oblivion, I'd like to just list some obvious additions to Skyrim that I've seen in the demo and that people have been discussing. Maybe we can talk about these:

1. Dragons/Dragon abilities
2. "Creation" Engine
3. Emphasis on Nordic mythology
4. Character construction not limited to class
5. Perk system
6. Dual-wielding weapons/magic
7. Automatic healing
8. Weapons and armor can't be repaired
9. Level of detail/rotatability on items
10. NPC communication in real-time

Some obvious similarities with Fallout 3 that are apparent in the demos include:

1. Blood drops on the screen when attacked (which I find incredibly annoying)
2. The sleek font
3. Perk system
4. The ability to stop time to aim shots (even though you can't have the computer system aim for you, the V.A.T.S. ability to stop time is carried over in an archery upgrade that allows you to briefly stop time)
5. A quite barren landscape (Skyrim being mostly mountainous and lacking the forests and woods of previous Elder Scrolls games; to be fair, there are vegetative areas, but the game definitely advertises itself as being more rocky, mountainous, and just plain barren...kind of like Fallout's landscape aesthetic).

Needless to say, we don't have the experience to talk about these changes while playing the game. But I'm wondering what people think about these in the abstract. (Additionally, I'd like to retract my earlier statement about worrying about poor music; from the demos alone, I can see the music will be very engrossing, just like the other Elder Scrolls games)

I think the two things Im exited about most is new character customization and the dual wielding.

I can finally have a hulking barbarian, a mid sized ranger, or a small thief.

Sword in one hand and freezing spell in the other. Hell.Yes.

Hey olde,i heard that there will be some more races in skyrim:

Night elves:Some evil elves that are good with i think magic.
High elves:Hated by some for being arrogant and some sort of good at being rogues or something

Yeah its true about the vat system being in skyrim.I got a magazine about skyrim talking about it being used for archers.
Supposedly also being able to wield 2 weapons at a time,cept maybe bows since they are 2 handed.

I don-t know how good the game is going to be,because it does have promising ideas,but you never know untill you play it.

VATS system doesnt bother me.

I dont use it for normal fights but if it requires first shot kill near an ally then I use it.

I got to look up the elves. I remember a mod having those races but nothing canon.

Nostalgia gamer, Oblivion had both of those races. The High Elves were called Altmer and Night Elves were called Dark Elves or Dunmer.

They might include some other races though, if you were thinking of something else.

The V.A.T.S. didn't annoy me too much. We all know the old adage, "If you don't like it, don't use it." And that's perfectly acceptable to me, you don't have to pause time or have the computer aim your shots. I just find stuff like that to be kind of a crutch and can ruin a game. My reasoning for this lies in the question, if you can get a guaranteed headshot, why wouldn't you? I'd think it would be more effective to just not have the skill and make the player aim him/herself. You could argue that the employment of a time-freeze ability is Bethesda's attempt to cater to the younger crowd who just want to see headshots or see shit get blown up without using any skill, and that saddens me. All I can say is, at least it's not mandatory. :)

Ah, I forgot they had other names for the elves. I always go with their specific race name :laugh:

i dont think they are going to add any more races. not friendly races anyway.

as with morrowind, oblivion and fo3, ill wait for a goty or complete set of skyrim.

I know I'm stoked for this game, but after seeing the live-action trailer...

Is it just me, or is having a single Nordic warrior face off against a dragon one of the stupidest things you've ever heard? I'm sorry, but no one is badass enough to down a fucking dragon. Dragons kick all sorts of ass, lay waste to entire villages, and wreak mayhem and destruction throughout the world. And you're supposed to go off against it with a broadsword and a fire spell? I'm sorry, I just can't get over that, at least not until I play the game. God, I hope they prove me wrong. So far, the addition of dragons to this series seems to me idiotic, gimmicky, and childish, and Bethesda has me shaking my head.

But how is the additions of Dragons in this game any of what you said. Dragons have been in Elder Scrolls lore for a while. You remember the Akaviri wars with the Empire? They are reptillian and said to be dragon like. Plus its not the first time dragons have been in the Elder Scrolls: Lore:Nafaalilargus - UESPWiki (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Nafaalilargus)

I'm not opposed to their existence in lore, or if they're a special boss battle. I'm more irritated at the fact that your character goes around getting into fights with them...maybe it sounds silly, but I think that fighting them takes the magic out of the idea of dragons. They're supposed to ritually turn men into smoking piles of ash. I realize that Bethesda wants to make the player feel powerful, but I mean, one guy standing up to twenty dragons (during the course of the game)? That's ridiculous.

I like the idea of dragons in the abstract, but when they're this prominent and they habitually swoop down just to get killed...I mean, dragons don't just do that! Then again, I admittedly don't know how strong they actually are. I'm basing this off the demo where Todd Howard seems to walk straight up to a dragon--through a breath of fire--and takes him on with his sword like it's just another day out in the field. It just seems kind of absurd to me right now, I'll have to wait and see.

Pretty sure in those demos stats were maxed out and their items were enhanced. If you are ever playing Fallout or Oblivion console commands can give you anything, and dev game demos often run with cheats. Like the Halo Reach screenshots with 999 bullets in the magazine.

Well it all depends, really. If your guy was just a regular bod with nothing remarkable about him, then it would be very strange. But heroes frequently have spells, magic swords and armour etc and sometimes have other innate abilities (magical properties of their bloodline, touched by the Gods, that sort of thing). A dragon may have raw power on its side, but unless it is one of those games where Dragons can speak and are intelligent, its still just a beast. And Man has proven conclusively throughout history that his mind and ability to plan and equip himself, trumps whatever gifts nature has given to other creatures.

And besides, is it really any more far fetched than your lone warrior killing literally thousands of enemies over the course of the game, often without any real effort at all? More silly than heroes who can level up to be so tough, that even if they stand naked in front of several armed people, they'll barely take any damage because they are so much higher level than them?

As I said earlier, Elder Scrolls is a fun, adventurous romp. If you want an experience that is closer to 'how it would actually be' then you should play something like Dark Souls. You have to take games for what they are.

Thanks, that puts things in better perspective for me!

theres a difference between lore, and actually seeing dragons ingame (there were no dragons in previous TES games.)

I just posted a link to the article of a dragon from Redguard. That is a Elder Scroll game. You fight him irc, says the player (Cyrus) defeats him.

never beaten any TES game before morrowind so i didnt get the chance of getting to that point.
however, it says it was the only one.
the teaser trailer for skyrim points out that dragons "would come back"

Redguard takes place a very long time before Skyrim.

Redguard- 2nd era 864
Oblivion- 3E 433
Skyrim- 200 years after Oblivion

So by the time of Skyrim many people would have forgotten about the actual existence of Dragons, hence the Return of Dragons. They would have been considered myth, since the last known dragon died in Tiber Septim's Reign.

One recurring complaint of Oblivion was that the enemies never got that large (Ogres and Atronachs were the biggest, but they were roughly man sized). With a world so large and barely civilised outside of the towns, it was disappointing that even when you foraged right out into the wilderness, you never met anything really big or bizarre. So in that context, the return of Dragons is welcome.

Redguard takes place a very long time before Skyrim.

Redguard- 2nd era 864
Oblivion- 3E 433
Skyrim- 200 years after Oblivion



yes, i actually knew that.

let me say it again: the teaser pointed out dragons would "come back", they "should have acted, the TES foretold their coming"

Ok, couldnt tell if that was a question :laugh:

Release time, New content

TES V: Skyrim Main Theme - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7orgok_8h0)
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Dovakiin's Day Off - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K27GuSSha0s) = Possible spoilers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECZungmWTmM=Obvious spoiler

I don't know how people are leveling so quickly.

I've put around 16 hours into Skyrim and I'm only a level 11 Breton mage.

The way the system works, its easy to level up if you set your mind to it. Its certainly easy to get certain skills up. For example, Want to increase Block - just find any enemy and block against it - forever! Theoretically, you could stand blocking against the first enemy you meet and get yourself up to 100 Block, levelling up every now and then. Get hold of some buff/heal spells, and you can level those up in the same fight as well.

Anyway, my thoughts on the game thus far are as follows:
Well, to me, it just seems like Bethesda's other games - i.e it looks very nice, and the world is impressively large and all that. But the quests are boring and the characters are uniformly uninteresting. I continue to find Bethesda's writing utterly souless and amateurish, compared to that of Bioware, Obsidian etc. They just don't write characters and quests that it is possible to really care about.

Basically, this game lives and dies on the exploration and dungeon crawling (which is just fine). You could take all the characters out of this game, replace them with generic shopkeepers called 'Blacksmith', 'Shopkeeper', 'Wizard Trainer' etc, so you could get supplies and spells etc, and I don't feel you would really lose anything. Because the story (in both the main and side quests) is so uninspiringly written. I just don't care about what is happening in Skyrim, and I certainly don't care about the whole Dragonborn thing. The real killer is that I actually am very interested in what is happening in the Empire and how the Thalmor have muscled in, but that just underscores my frustration at being out here in the boondocks, hundreds of thousands of miles away from where the real action (that I care about) is at!

The game does look very impressive at times though. Perhaps not a technical marvel, but on a grand scale the soaring mountains and dragons swooping about is impossible not to admire. Those moments and those times when you are hewing your way through trap and monster filled dungeons are when this game really comes alive. But that isn't really enough for me, and I'm finding the game to be very heavy going as a result. As I say, I'm really disappointed at how banal and flat the quests and characters are, and Bethesda's writing especially for evil characters borders on the utterly childish.

The 'Guild' quests that I've tried have been underwhelming too. Completed the Mage's Academy, and it would have felt like the biggest anticlimax of all time, except for the fact that all the rest of it was incredibly dull as well. I did get a kick out of the Dark Brotherhood trying to recruit me though, only for me to wipe them all out. Feared assassins indeed - lol!

I don't hate the game, but it feels like I'm punching the clock on it, rather than enjoying it. Turn it on, log a few hours, feel like I'm making some progress, turn it off and then think 'Wow, I kind of don't want to play that game again...'

Skyrim isn't nearly as good as New Vegas, I think. I liked Fallout 3 more as well, really.

And yeah, levelling up is incredibly easy. A bunch of skills go up pretty fast (especially smithing) and it's pretty easy to exploit the system. You can leave the tutorial with several skills at 100 because of an exploit.

They've taken so many of Obsidian's improvements to the overall experience of these games out of Skyrim. Conversations aren't quite back to the Fujin style interface of Oblivion where you'd walk up to someone and say 'WORK?', 'TOWN?', 'GUILDHALL?' but its not far off. To be fair to Bethesda, they did make the improvements first in Fallout 3, but Obsidian refined them to the point where the dialogue felt real and nuanced. Now its back to 'Is there any work?', 'What's this town like?' etc etc.

And unkillable NPCs... *Why* did they put these in the game, after New Vegas showed how you could get by without them? If people want to go on a killing spree, then they have to accept that they may kill quest givers (and New Vegas at least flagged up when you did this, in case you wanted to change your mind and reload). But no, unkillable quest givers are back, leading to all kinds of farcical situations where you have no option but to run away bevause no matter how many thousands of times you down the guy, you cannot defeat him (and its not like they are legendary warriors - the only remarkable thing about most of these characters is that they offer quests).

Plus the penalties for accidently hitting allies who insist on throwing themselves in front of you during fights is as harsh as ever. They instantly turn hostile, with guards dropping everything in the middle of fighting a dragon which is assaulting their city, to arrest you on the spot, take you to jail, bail you and then you all rejoin the fight!

Basically, the game world has only the barest semblance of reality to it. The illusion is easy to break, even when you're not trying to (and its all the more jarring in those circumstances). There's hardly any choice in the quests beyond doing the quest or not doing it, and hardly any quest has events with far reaching consequences.

To call this game shallow is to demean the word - add in the non degrading weapons and armour, recharhing health, absent core stats, lack of stat requirements to use most weapons and spells... the whole thing is just a dispiritingly mainstream oriented and dumbed down experience.

The biggest problem I have with the game is that a lot of the locations don't feel lived in. The forts and the camps feel designed rather than natural. One example is a bandit fort with a prison full of spiders. There's several dead bandits down there, but the bandits living up top in the fortress don't seem to give a shit. The bandits don't mention it in their throwaway lines. Instead, they were just talking about cleaning up their act and paying their fines as I snuck around them. There's no diary (I don't care how contrived this can be) saying, "Well, today, a few of our friends went down to kill the spiders and they all died." They handled this sort of situation much better with the large ants inhabiting the basement of that school in Fallout 3. There was an entry in the terminal by a raider that acknowledged the situation and this "Dear Diary..." thing was justified by his interest in learning how to use the terminal.

It's just pretty rare to find a backstory like this in the game. Sometimes you'll find diaries in dungeons, but it's not as prevalent and never as interesting as it was in New Vegas and even FO3.

Oh, and speech checks are handled so much worse than they were in New Vegas. That was such a great aspect of that game, but it's rarely touched upon in Skyrim. What a let down, man.

The game is fun enough though, I enjoyed my time with it.

Okay, so I guess by now, its pretty obvious that I am not the world's greatest fan of this game. I continue to see it as a generally backwards step for reasons I have already stated. But I don't want to sell the game short and just come across as some malcontent, griping for the sheer crochety joy of it. There were a couple of things I did like about the game, so I might as well fess up to them.

1) The Daedra Quests.
When I came to make my character, I spent like an hour on the character creation screen. My overwhelming instinct was to make a Lawful Good/Neutral Paladin style character. A sword and shield, heavy armour, light buffs and healing magic 'righter of wrongs' kind of guy, who helped the weak and punished the wicked. Because I always do this in this kind of game. But I promised myself earlier this year, that I was going to attend some 'Paladins Anonymous' meetings, and try to kick the habit, or at least broaden my horizons a little (I do play other characters in these games, but my canon and/or first character is usually a Paladin). So I finally settled on a dedicated spellcaster, and resolved to be a cannibalistic, bathing in blood, ritual dagger wielding, demon summoning, deceitful, monstrous, hate filled wretch of a person.

And I'm really glad that I did, because if I did my usual character, then I never would have gotten to play through the various Daedra quests (you can turn against the Daedra in a handful of them, but mostly they are serve the Daedra quests). And I have to say, that whilst I don't rate most of the quests in this game at all, I really enjoyed most of the Daedra ones. Many of them are played for laughs (its pretty black humour though), and I just find the general quality of the quests better. The ideas behind them, the actual execution of the quests, the laugh out loud moments (usually when some poor NPC sap gets horribly killed), and some genuinely powerful scenes (also usually when an NPC is horribly killed, but when the moment is played straight and not for laughs).

The writing of the evil characters is still pretty silly, and the voice acting for the Daedra princes is mostly OTT scenery chewing, but most seem to pitch it just on the right side of cheesy, and/or produce a performance that is appropriate to the tone of the quest (because as I say, some are played for laughs, others are not). But whichever way you slice it, these quests are the best in the game hands down for me. Without them, I would have given up on this game much, much sooner. And the artifacts you get usually rule too...

2) Falkwreath.
Its kind of strange that I like this place so much, considering that its one of the sleepier areas of the game world. Not a hell of a lot actually happens in this town, but its still by far my favourite of the towns. Usually cloaked in mist and fog, there's a really sombre feel about Falkwreath that works very well for me. A mate suggested (and I think he's right) that I might like it because it looks the least like the rest of Skyrim (its far to the south, so there's not much snow, not as many mountains, more greenery and just less 'vikingness' than in other areas).

But it isn't just the visuals. The huge graveyard is there because of war casualties, and its probably the only place in the game that really deals with that side of things, the cost of war etc. In other places, its all politics and macho chest beating about glorious battle and so on, but this town seems to express the drama in more down to earth fashion, which is very refreshing. There's a journel you can find written by the priest and its really powerful stuff, as he writes about his crisis of faith having had to bury a young man who came through town recently, charmed everyone with what a decent young man he was, then was ambushed and killed on the road by bandits who tossed him in a ditch after robbing and murdering him a few days later.

It just seems like the locations and some of the quests surrounding Falkwreath have more 'heart', of a kind that I wish the game had more of. So much of this game is 'let's turn it up to eleven, man!' spectacle and sound and thunder, but this quiet little town does more for me than any number of dragons and fighting, singing vikings ever could.

With one exception anyway...

3) The Theme Music.
Because this really is great. A choir of what sounds like big, hearty vikings, bellowing at the tops of their voices, a song that inspires thoughts of heroism and adventure in the kind of way that these songs are supposed to, but usually just end up sounding cheesy and samey to other Lord of the Rings style stuff. This is cut from that same cloth, but the sheer gusto of the singers makes you want to move up North, paint uour face blue, start calling yourself Sven Hrothgar and go out looking for trouble with a double headed axe.

Its great stuff, and I always let it play out a bit before I hit Load.

So anyway, that's some of the things that I did like about Skyrim. I know I haven't been the most positive of people about this game, and I still consider it a big disappointment. But the game does get some things right, and I did at least enjoy those aspects. Like most of Bethesda's games, I see it as a good starting point, but I'd want them to go back over everything, and add much more personality and depth. But hey, it is what it is.

sooo... any favorite mods?

I played the game for about 20 hours over the first 5 days it was released and then stopped. The game is huge and visually stunning, but it has about zero depth. Once mountaineering on horseback lost its novelty it was pretty much all over.

For the record though, I loved the game for all those 20 hours before I realizing how shallow it was. If you like wandering around a lot and crafting items you don't need with your practically infinite supply of money, this is the game for you.

I agree, but the push this game is getting means we shouldn't be surprised if its named Game of the Year. Which would be a disaster, as it would continue to cement the idea in developer's minds that like Mass Effect 2, RPGs should stop trying to be RPGs and just be action games with very little depth below the glossy surface.

Look at the WRPGs that were released this year. That battle's already lost, dude. Next to Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dungeon Siege 3 and The Witcher 2, Skyrim is practically a hardcore pnp-style RPG.

You're right of course, but its still utterly depressing...

Just to check... Am I the only one who always reads "Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim" like a bout between Elder Scrolls and Skyrim? Like "Marvel VS Capcom" or "Spy vs Spy". I do hope not.

So I bought Skyrim, and been playing for about 3-4 hours or so. Level 5, slain my first dragon, been named the 'Thane of Whiterun' and have a personal servant (who from what I've heard was apparently a marriage prospect, but due to a bug, one can not marry Lydia), spent too much time chopping wood to get the 5000 gold to buy my first house in Whiterun and in general just aimlessly explore. I admit, I'm enjoying this outing into the world of the Elder Scrolls moreso than I did in Oblivion... hated how my character looked so bland.

Don't play as a wizard then - the Archmage robes are so powerful you pretty much *have* to wear them, but they look utterly rubbish. I couldn't stand how my character looked in this game.

Somehow, the game ended for me when the disappointing main quest line ended. After 35 hours of playing. I might come back to it, when there are some interesting new mods, though.

I'm no fan of this game, but the Main Quest is not a good way to judge the game's quality. Bethesda always screw up the main quest, and the Guild/Civil War/Daedra quests (whilst still far from perfect) are much better. Bethesda should just stop putting in any kind of Main Quest IMO - it always sucks, so why bother? Its not like people play their games for the story anyway - its the exploration, dungeon crawling and character customisation that people actually care about.

One of my main beefs about this game is that the loot sucks. There just isn't enough different looking sets of armour, weapons etc. And the choice of spells is terrible. It takes forever to get access to better spells, and even then there aren't enough of them.

Its not like people play their games for the story anyway - its the exploration, dungeon crawling and character customisation that people actually care about.

Sorry Vrykolas, but I have to disagree with this, to a degree. I've just finished the Companion's quest arc, and I enjoyed it. Granted that's a side story arc, but saying that no one plays a game (whether it'd be a Elder Scrolls game or another) for the story and rather for the other aspects is detrimental to the overall game itself. The 'exploration, dungeon crawling and character customization' are only three parts towards the game. There's the GUI, music, voice, character design, locations (as in how they are designed and look in the final game) as well as, in some cases the most important part, the story... these all need to be well made, implemented and fit together well to make a overall decent game. If lacking in any of those aspects, then success of any game will suffer from each aspect which doesn't fit in with the others.

I said the Main Quest wasn't what they played it for. I stated quite plainly that the Guild quests were better (as they always are). I still consider Bethesda's writing to be poor though, and I didn't get much out of any of the Quest lines. There wasn't a single quest or a single NPC that I felt any but the most superficial interest in.

Which just leaves the gameplay, and that is practically identical to previous Elder Scrolls games, despite them claiming its some brand spanking new engine. The game is just shallow beyond belief, too easy and too repetitive IMO. But hey, if you like it, then its money well spent, right?

I've been playing the game for a good while now and even I haven't completed any of the story quests (Companions, College of Winterhold, etc.), I'd like to share my thoughts. I haven't looked at reviews, and haven't read any criticisms besides what's here in this thread. I pretty much agree with what everyone has said already here.

My general opinion is that it's okay. I like the gameplay, but that's because there's little straying from the model set by Oblivion. In terms of combat, I enjoy the addition of dual-wielding, although I'm finding that I only use that for spells. Then again, I never go the warrior route, I go the destruct magic-archer-stealth route. Other than dual wielding, there is basically no change to the battle system, I've found. In terms of graphics, there is little to distinguish it from Oblivion, besides things being a little sleeker. I sure as hell hope they didn't spend all their time coming up with the Creation engine because it doesn't show and wasn't necessary by any means. It actually looks just like the Fallout 3 engine, but this is coming from a guy who barely touched that game at all. That being said, here are the things that I felt were improvements:

The Perk system is really an improvement, which I didn't recognize until later on. The dragons are also really cool, I enjoy fighting them (although I find they're too easy in comparison with the other fights from missions and things), which, as some people know, before the game was released I thought I wouldn't.

As people have said, it's hard to get invested in the characters because they lack personality and that spark that makes them seem human. They basically exist as an excuse to give you missions, and that's not enough for me to get invested in. This actually got me thinking about Oblivion (the only other TES game I've played) and whether or not I was actually invested in those characters too.

This has been said before, mostly by Vrykolas, but I completely agree that Bethesda can't get the main story quest to be interesting in the least. In addition, more than half of the missions in general boil down to one of two things: A. Go to an outpost or cave and kill everyone there, or, B. Go to an outpost or cave, kill everyone there, and return an artifact. I don't understand why Bethesda can't think of more interesting quests.

I feel like this game could be renamed "Mountains and Bears." A huge chunk of this game is just finding the landmarks by walking nearly 360 degrees around mountains. I mean, I get the whole "We're in Skyrim, and there are mountains in Skyrim!" but this isn't the damn Himalayas. And those goddamn cave bears that want your fucking blood...Seriously, I feel like a park ranger most of the time. It's unreal.

Bethesda totally fucked up the Speech skill. Now, I was no master at Speech in Oblivion by any means, but here the Persuade/Bribe/Threaten thing is totally arbitrary. I also can't tell how people feel about me and I can't increase my rapport with people without just doing missions for them.

I really dislike taking people to accompany you on missions because: A. They die easily, and B. They are completely incapable of sneaking. When they see an enemy, they rush out, give away our position, and proceed to get mauled. Focusing on the stealth aspect, they're a real detriment for all but the most necessary of missions.

I still only have access to the lower-level spells, of which there are about 35 and only a handful I use. I'm level 26, so I sort of expect new spells to come at each passing level, but no luck.

I really hate the idea of including creatures like the "Falmer" and the "Forsworn." Their only defining traits are that they're ugly and primitive (i.e., evil??); their motives are defined by their races of ugliness and primitiveness, which is not only completely superficial and one-dimensional (notice a theme?), but also racist, bordering on the racial "distinctions" and hierarchy of Nazism. Also, as if we couldn't tell they're evil enough already, the names are clearly supposed to be associated with "The Fallen" and "The Forsaken." Either Bethesda completely lacked creativity or is insulting our intelligence by beating us with their nominal designations. I wonder what it symbolizes when Bethesda doesn't give you the option of joining the sides of the Falmer and Forsworn?

The music is good, but am I the only one who heard the MGS4 ripoff? I can't be the only one who heard it, there's an entire song based on the horn-call from MGS4. Was Jeremy Soule that strapped for material that he resorted to copying?

This is less of a complaint than an observation. I find it confusing that the game encourages you to loot caves, tombs, urns, and buried treasures when your enemies are bandits (essentially the same thing). This gets even weirder when you assume the undead lived and died honorably and now guard their sacred tombs to defend that honor. Your character, by contrast, whose history and character is completely absent from the plot, is essentially a sellsword, a mercenary hired to clear out caves for nothing more than a reward. The irony is that your character is less honorable than the undead he's killing. I guess that's not so different from Oblivion, but would it kill Bethesda to make a character history that gives him/her more depth than either a goody-two-shoes, a pompous asshole, or a hired mercenary? You could still do a lot of customization with a character background.

Overall, this game is decent, but as someone here said before, it feels like Bethesda was going through the motions. It's a shame; it seems they emulated themselves and couldn't capture the magic of the previous games. The scenery is beautiful, the music is appropriate, the combat is fluid, but positive innovations are in short supply, the story feels dull and uninteresting, the quests as bland as ever, and one-dimensional characters and races abound. It's a step back from Oblivion in my opinion. But I'm having fun with it all the same. Just not the same fun I had with Oblivion.

You make some very good points there, Olde (we'll have to agree to disagree on the perks though, which are a significant step down in quality of execution from Fallout, but I guess having them in the game at all is sort of a bonus).

Your point about the completely arbitrary nature of your character's moral alignment is particularly interesting to me. I try to roleplay my character in these types of games, and I knew going into Skyrim that making an 'Evil' character would stand me in much greater stead than a 'Good' character (even though my overwhelming instinct is to make Lawful Good Paladin characters). This is because the game does not let you tackle quests in multiple ways - you either do them or you don't do them.

Which means that a Lawful Good character is highly unlikely to have any reason for doing the Thieves and Assassin's guild quests, whereas a more evil or self serving character can do all 4 guilds with no problems. Likewise, a Lawful Good character will have no business doing the bull of the Daedra quests either, and is on extremely shaky grounds as you say, when they go about pillaging tombs and slaying the remains of old heroes etc etc. Such a character is more likely to do the Templa quests, but there are what, 3 of those? Compared to the dozens and dozens of quests you are giving up from the Thieves/Assassins/Daedra etc, that's a poor trade off.

So you are forced to compromise and just accept quests that your character wouldn't do, or just stick to the bland regular quests (or rather the Even More Bland quests). But I learned my lesson on this in Oblivion, and as I say, took an Evil character (or a character I thought of as being quite Evil, since there is no morality gague). And that can't be right, when your only choice is to play an Evil character, or don't even try to roleplay your character in the year's biggest RPG...

I would just say however, that I do actually like the Falmer. They are just a generically evil and sadistic goblinoidy race, but I thought the Dweomer Ruins dungeons were by far the best ones in this game. And it makes a change from killing Bandits and Draugr all the damn time.

Had to restart as my original character save was corrupted, so... got to level 22, completed the Brotherhood/Companions/Thieves guild quest lines as well as numerous others. Now, trying to finish a quest called 'A Forsworn Conspiracy'... and can't. Finished everything listed in my journal step wise, get to the final part (head to temple of Talos and speak to quest giver)... and can't finish it. I've found other quests in Markath can't be either finished or started either. I've tried to complete the quest with a earlier save file... no dice.

Just this morning went to finish to Windhelm to finish a 'Bedlam' sidequest for Delvin of the Thieves guild and can't enter any buildings in Windhelm at all! not even the Palace of the Kings!! I was enjoying myself, but now with all these bugs it's making the game unplayable for me... I can't even install it on my HDD (for my Xbox 360) either. I don't want to start again for a third time, but it's starting to look as if that's the only route left to me, yet knowing my luck I start a third time and that file will either get corrupted or experience all these damn glitches!

Thanks Bethesda... made a game I actually enjoyed from TES series and don't make sure the bugs are worked out before release!

My copy of Skyrim is wasted on me, it seems. I didn't encounter any glitches really. I hear all these tales of Dragons flying backwards, falling through the earth and doors locking permanently etc, but in 100+ hours of play, the only problems I had were system crashes. Hardly a trivial thing of course, but I expect it from Bethesda, and all you have to do is reload.

Doesn't make me like the game any better, but at least my copy seems to work! Or maybe for all its problems with the slowdown later on, the PS3 version has less gltiches? Who knows?

Well, I'm back and I've been playing this game a lot, despite my previous complaints. I think my problem is that I love the combat, the graphics, the music, and the scope, but I'm very nit-picky with the little things. I've got some new complaints as well.

First of all, the crashes. The fucking crashes. Let me tell you, I've had my game crash so many times that I nearly threw Skyrim in the trash. I consider myself lucky when playing and I see an enemy spawn in mid-air because I think, "Well, it always could have been a crash." And as if that weren't enough, the load times are way too long. It's simply unacceptable, especially with the capacity of the PS3. But what's worse, the game would sometimes crash during a load screen! So after numerous crashes and growing impatience at the load times, I decided to do something I've never done before with a game: I turned off the auto-save feature off completely. So it doesn't save when I rest, enter a building, fast-travel, or anything. And believe it or not, I've seen great improvement with the performance. It's riskier, but it also makes the game take less time to run and you don't risk crashing during an auto-save (which is incredibly annoying), and I don't think it's ever crashed on me when I manually saved (I have it for PS3). So if anyone has problems with excessively long load times and frequent game crashes, I recommend trying turning off the auto-save feature.

Next, the glitches. I've been really lucky in that I haven't had a lot of glitches, but I've been on the Skyrim wiki and for nearly every page there is a section at the bottom listing the numerous bugs that have hindered players, some of which essentially break the game. I've encountered only one serious glitch, which is that the chest in the Windhelm house never appears. The wiki says that that might happen if the house is purchased for less than the asking price, and sure enough, I had some equipment on that lowered prices (although I believe you have to pay full price regardless). But there are so damn many bugs and glitches that have been reported for nearly everything, and it's just embarrassing. In tandem with this is my next complaint.

One of my biggest new complaints is that the game is so easily exploited that it's ridiculous. I'll bet it's possible to get nearly most skills up to level 100 in at most a half hour, given the right resources and awareness of the exploit. There are so many bugs and tricks that are possible with Skyrim that I don't even know what to say. I know that TES has usually been easily exploited, but this is taken to a new level of insanity. For instance, I read one guy's post who said he used an alchemy/enchanting exploit to create armor with over 700 points on just one piece, and when you get to that point, the game's not challenging anymore. And I guess that's my point. It's so easy to circumvent the system that I don't feel like I'm being challenged in any way, even though I don't usually take advantage of the exploits. This is a complaint I have with the puzzles, too. They're never hard enough to actually pose a legitimate challenge. The only challenging things are the enemies, and the game does allow you to turn the "difficulty" up (which essentially just makes you do less damage to enemies and makes the enemies do much more damage to you). The game doesn't really reward knowledge that you gain from the geography, from books, or from hints that people tell you across your journey; it's so dumbed down that you're given no challenge, you're given a magic arrow on your compass that somehow knows exactly who or what to approach/where to go, and the "correct" responses to NPCs are always pretty obvious. Combine the exploits with the developers' lack of imagination and lack of challenging quests, and basically the quests do themselves. The only way that Bethesda sort of got around this is by having a ton of caves, bandit hideouts, dragons, and pointless miscellaneous sidequests. They clearly padded the game out for lack of content and imagination.

As you said before, Vrykolas, your character begins to look ridiculous as you do all of the main guild quests. None of them are mutually exclusive (i.e. doing one doesn't prevent you from doing any other), so you end up with a character who's both incredibly noble and lawful and is also an assassin and thief! I guess the main theme is that you always have to follow a code of honor: you have to be faithful to the tenets and leaders of each guild. But the Dark Brotherhood won't ever say anything like, "Yeah, we probably shouldn't contact _____________. He fights for political causes, he's not really an appropriate match for our line of work." And likewise, neither the Stormcloaks nor the Imperials will ever say, "He can't fight beside us, he's a well-known thief and wanted criminal!" And another thing (and this gets back to actually a problem I have with a lot of RPGs): Why is it always like you're the best guy at everything and you become the leader of every guild you put your mind to (this isn't a spoiler, you know this is what happens with these games)? No one's ever suspicious, or even wonders, "How is it that one guy is leading the Companions, College of Winterhold, the Thieves' Guild, and the Dark Brotherhood?" It's not only unbelievable, it's incomprehensible to me.

As I was playing, I got incredibly pissed at the Alchemy skill, and it might take a little bit of description to explain why. The alchemy feature is actually very easy to use, convenient, and alchemy stations are found all over the place in Skyrim. You need at least two ingredients and you can combine them to see if it makes a potion. It helps, obviously, to know the first effect of the ingredients, and this is done by eating them (assuming you don't have the perk that provides more effects upon eating), which uses up the item. The only way to discover the other effects is to combine the ingredients with other ingredients. Now, let's assume you're like me and you don't want to use an online guide. At the beginning of the game, ingredients aren't that easy to come by, especially the rare ones like Daedra Hearts, Pearls, etc. But there are 92 ingredients total, each giving four effects, and there are 52 effects. Since there are 92 ingredients, and you can't combine the same ingredient with itself, there are 8372 (92 x 91) ways to combine one ingredient with another (to make a two-ingredient potion). However, there are only 1091 ways in which combining ingredients will actually result in an effective potion/poison (I read this on an alchemy guide on gamefaqs). Therefore, there is only a 13.032% chance that combining two ingredients will result in a successful potion, and when it doesn't succeed (which, at an 87% chance of failure, is very often), it still doesn't tell you what the effects are. So you're still left in the dust and you've just wasted your ingredients. All you know is that you can't combine those two ingredients. So when you get a rare ingredient (and say you've already eaten it once before so you know the first effect), you'll do one of several things: 1. use the ingredient on another and most likely get the combination wrong and just waste the ingredient; 2. save before using the ingredient, get the combination wrong, reload and try again on another ingredient until you get a combination that works (time-consuming and frustrating); 3. use a guide and not waste your time. Oh, but I haven't even gotten to my BIGGEST complaint about alchemy: You don't get any experience points if you combine ingredients that don't result in a successful potion/poison. And considering only about 13% of your combinations will work, you're looking at a lot of wasted time, wasted money, wasted ingredients, and literally nothing to show for it. This makes no sense to me because even if you combine ingredients that don't result in a successful elixer, you've still learned something, namely, that those ingredients don't combine! Trying out ingredients is still a learning process, and you learn from your mistakes!

All of this shit would be bad enough, but I haven't gotten to the worst part of alchemy yet. Are you ready for it? Here it is: even once I had created a successful array of potions and poisons and had learned all of the ingredients, I found the Alchemy skill entirely fucking useless. Seriously. Are you going to keep a stock of poisons (weighing you down), remember which poisons you have (requiring a good memory), stop in the middle of combat (interrupting and inconvenient) to slather on your sword (theoretically impossible in the midst of combat) to do slightly, and I mean very slightly, more damage to your enemies? I could say the same thing for potions: are you really going to spend time to learn how to fortify heavy armor or one-handed or conjuration so that you're slightly better at those skills? I found the game to be easy enough as it is, and players will only need a select few potions (those which replenish health, magicka, stamina, fortify carry weight, and maybe invisibility). But here's the thing: Those can be easily bought or found around Skyrim, you don't need to invest time in Alchemy to get those potions. In fact, the potions you get that replenish health, magicka, and stamina do so at a much higher amount than you yourself can create, so in fact it's pretty impractical to spend your time making potions that heal you for shit when you could just find or buy much better ones. The only other reasons you might use Alchemy would be either: 1. for the money, or 2. dealing magicka damage to a wizard/magic caster. I have rebuttals for those as well. First, the money you make for most potions is minimal; you have to really know which ones are expensive and even so, the money is never really so amazing that you'd particularly go balls out making expensive potions. You're actually a lot better off doing other methods, like forging or enchanting...or just selling dragon bones/scales and the loot you get from quests. As for the magicka poison against wizards, I found that even when I used poisons specifically targeting their magicka and spell casting capabilities, it was never effective enough to significantly, if even noticeably, change the tides of combat. Lastly, and I mean lastly, I have a huge complaint against the leveling system for Alchemy: your skill level goes up depending on the price of the potion/poison you create. Because of this, I've wasted hours and seen no level progress, but I've also spent less than a minute and seen multiple level progress, which is, of course, absurd. Was it really so hard to make level progress depend on the number of successful combinations, not the price of said combinations, which would have been more intuitive to the player and more realistic?

Hopefully my longer than anticipated rant on Alchemy demonstrates the extent to which I am disappointed with many aspects of this game that I think gamers will often just accept or not articulate. I have thought, and still think, that this game could have, and should have been a lot better. Honestly, I think it needed more time in development, as the problems shine through very clearly in its current state. We would have waited for this game if Bethesda needed a few more months; I would gladly wait for a good game than accept the game early if it has flaws that could have easily been fixed. I know that I have been harping on the annoying things and may not have given enough credit for the positive things. In fact, I still think it's a great game and the fact that I've played it this long attests to a high level of fun that can still be had with this game. At the same time, I think it's a step down from their previous ventures. I know people haven't been posting in this thread for a while, but I'd love for feedback, even if it's just to say whether you're still playing, have stopped, or never picked it up in the first place.

EDIT!

I can't believe I forgot this! By far, the most absurd part of Alchemy, by far, is the fact that your character will eat anything. Anything. So if you don't know, when you first find an ingredient, you don't know any of its four effects. You can eat it and automatically discover the first effect. If you happen to have certain perks (I believe it's called Experimenter), eating new ingredients will reveal more effects (first upgrade is two effects, second upgrade is three, and third is all four effects). So you have the option to eat any of the ingredients you find. ANY OF THEM. Think about the realism here. You're out roaming the world and you find a swamp fungal pod, or you beat a flame atronach and you pick up a bowl of fire salts from its ashes...would you put that in your mouth? Well, your character will. He'll gladly eat anything you tell him to eat. It's like he has the IQ of a baby. It's bizarre because your character will eat stuff like bear claws and large antlers. How do you even eat bear claws? Do you mean to tell me that he rips the claws out of the bear's paws and eats them? And think about it. Your character has to discover various things in the wild to eat; I mean, it's not like you're given a list of all the ingredients in the beginning. So it's pretty obvious for flowers, fish, honeycombs, etc. But then your character kills a sabre tooth tiger and thinks, "Hm, you know what? That eye looks really tasty. I think I'm going to pry it out of its eye socket and EAT IT!!" Seriously, a Sabre Cat Eye is a real ingredient that I can only assume is known because my character is a fucking sadist who pries the eyeballs out of dead cats and eats them, then realizes he just regained stamina or something.

This gets incredibly fucked up when you realize that two of the ingredients are human flesh and human hearts. It's not enough that your character carries those around, but he actually sees these as ingredients (remember, you don't get a list of ingredients in the beginning) and he voluntarily chooses to eat them. Human flesh. It reminds me of the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode where Frank convinces Charlie and Dee that they ate "HUMAN MEAT!" and they go batshit insane. You see, there was a real event in 1972 where a plane carrying a rugby team from Uruguay and 25 of their friends and relatives crashed in the Andes mountains. Twenty-seven survived the crash, but seventy days later, still stranded, only sixteen remained. Those who survived did so by eating the other people, and it was traumatizing. Almost every culture in the world holds the idea that eating the flesh of human beings is wrong. Yet without pressure, without the need for survival, without any seeming motivation, your character will eat human flesh, a human heart. That's fucked up.

But seriously, your character will eat anything for alchemy. He doesn't even cook the shit. He takes deer antlers and eats them raw. He'll swallow a pearl whole (don't people die from that?). He'll eat a human heart raw. That's fucking insane! I didn't know we were playing a psychopath here but hey, I guess this guy is willing to sacrifice his life for the advancement of SCIENCE! And don't remind me how rare human flesh and human hearts are. It's not like, oh, EVERYBODY IN THE FUCKING GAME HAS THEM! But maybe that would be too fucked up, going around skinning bandits with embalming tools and cutting out their hearts and eating them. But if that's the case, maybe they shouldn't have made human flesh and human hearts ingredients in the first place?

I used to play Skyrim a fair bit... but after having numerous quests glitch on me and being unable to finish the Thieves Guild main quest and get the last achievement "One with the Shadows", my copy has been in it's case, on my shelf and covered with a thin layer of dust. Too many faults with what could've been a fantastic game. I may go back later and try again... but at this time, I'd have more fun having my teeth drilled without Novacaine.

This is what happens when you rush out a game to meet a gimmick release date.

Do you think there will be a GOTY version of the game released to address the PS3 glitches and other issues ?

Skyrim takes top honors at GDC Awards - GameSpot.com (http://www.gamespot.com/news/skyrim-takes-top-honors-at-gdc-awards-6365130)

Do you think there will be a GOTY version of the game released to address the PS3 glitches and other issues ?

Skyrim takes top honors at GDC Awards - GameSpot.com (http://www.gamespot.com/news/skyrim-takes-top-honors-at-gdc-awards-6365130)

Possibly, as that does seem to be the standard for most AAA listed games nowadays. If they do, I just hope they work out all of the damn bugs and glitches with missions etc. It'd also more than likely be for Xbox 360 and PC as well as PS3.

Do you think there will be a GOTY version of the game released to address the PS3 glitches and other issues ?

Skyrim takes top honors at GDC Awards - GameSpot.com (http://www.gamespot.com/news/skyrim-takes-top-honors-at-gdc-awards-6365130)

Skyrim is Game Developers Choice Game of the Year? Do they have any standards? Bethesda probably could have shipped out shit in a box and they still would have won. Honestly, ES:V didn't deserve to win, and companies like Bethesda will never feel compelled to work harder if they'll keep getting rewarded for their mistakes.

due to all the glitches.I bought Dragon Age Origins instead.

shrugs.

Obviously I feel the need to wait in the hope that there will be GOTY edition to fix all the problems.

I've got to the stage where I've loaned my copy to a friend and I couldn't care less if I never ask for it back. I will say though, that whilst I don't really care for Skyrim, I don't think its fair to say that Bethesda didn't work hard on it. The game world is extremely large and generally looks and plays to a good standard - at least as much as can be reasonably expected in such a large and complicated game. And there is some promise to the ongoing story arc, the Thalmor and the whole Stormcloaks thing for example, are not devoid of interesting elements.

The problems I have are purely with the increasing shallowness of the series (and hey, its hardly alone on that point, as the whole industry is going that way). And perhaps even more than that, its the fact that critics (and gamers) refuse to accept this, and rapsodise about how deep and involved it all is. Just... no! Its a real heartbreaker to see such a big world with so much promise, get gutted to please the mainstream need for short, sharp bursts of constant stimulation. Yeah, you can play for a hundred hours, but its like watching a hundred episodes of CSI or Murder, She Wrote - amiable enough entertainment, but so lightweight that you can't actually remember anything that happened.

At the risk of sounding all new age, I need games that 'Like... mean something, man'. Just tramping around some mountains and killing lots and lots and lots of the same undead, to get gold I don't need and Exp to make me even more unkillable than I've been since around the 5 hour mark, is all well and good for younger players or young professionals looking to unwind after a day at work etc etc. But if you actually want an involved and meaningful RPG experience, then this is absolutely not the game that its cracked up to be.