The Elder Scrolls V

[Josef Nader]

i'm not seeing any cats - are there no skyrim cat characters out there?
Does skyrim allow cat players? - cos if so i wanna see them.
If not, shame on skyrim.

Cats and lizards are -FUGLY- in Skyrim. Especially the females. Tiny pencil necks and misplaced heads. Argonians look like someone took an Iguana head and gave it a human body, and Kajiit look like someone lopped the head off a tiger and glued it onto a mannequin. Disappointing, as I really liked playing Kajiit and Argonians in Morrowind and Oblivion.

 

[Murphy]

They had standard bodies in Oblivion too, didn't they?

I loved the Argonian waddle in Morrowind. The movement animations in general were fugly, but the Argonian waddle looked so right...

 

[Reise]

Character creation. The removal of attributes and the allocating of points is too simplified and streamlined with no control over how my character progresses. They call it a "Deep and complex levelling system" which it's not. This is levelling akin to Call of Duty. Use a weapon often enough to improve in it and you'll get special perks. Daggerfall is still the high point of the TES character creation. I want my character creation in an RPG to resemble the same way I do in pencil and paper roleplaying.

It's funny you mention Daggerfall, because aside from choosing major/minor skills, you increase them exactly the same way in Skyrim. Do something and it gets better. Difference is, in Skyrim you can't gimp yourself immensely because you happened to be doing a lot of one skill and not another. At the end of the day you still have control of what you actually improve in thanks to the skill points.

And I think they always used words like "streamlined" to describe this leveling system, never "deep and complex".

 

[Harb]

It's funny you mention Daggerfall, because aside from choosing major/minor skills, you increase them exactly the same way in Skyrim. Do something and it gets better. Difference is, in Skyrim you can't gimp yourself immensely because you happened to be doing a lot of one skill and not another.
.

In Daggerfall/Morrowind if I would set out to be a warrior I would have my Primary, Major and Minor skills. All of these would be set around the warrior class. I wouldn't for example take a skill like Mysticism, what would be the point. If I wanted to be a Mage I would set up a Mage character with Mage related classes. So I would choose a number of weapon based skills such as long Blade, short Blade and archery as my primary skills and then probably a bunch of athletic classes such as running, dodging and jumping as my major/minor skills. These are the skills I would level up in the quickest as I would be using them as it's what my character is set up to use and would get the modifiers for them. For me to level and become adept in something like destruction would be very difficult and time consuming because of my low points in intelligence and because I would hardly ever use it. This in turn would effect decisions in game such as being turned away from the Mages guild etc.

Now in Skyrim leveling is rather silly. I can pick up a long bow/staff and within one extended fight can bring archery to the same level as my one handed skill. I can level up by failing, I was levelling my lockpick skill by breaking lockpicks.

I'm a stranger who is great at everything. Spells? I can cast those with ease, want to tackle a giant up close the next minute? sure no problem I'm also adept at heavy armour and double handed weaponry. Want to take down a dragon using a bow? sure no problem. The only reason the game is like this is because people complained in Oblivion that they wanted to change race/class after 3 or so hours of playing and couldn't. Well now in Skyrim you can be mage, warrior, assassin, battlemage. thief, burglar, healer, nightblade, ranger, sorcerer and bard all in one.

In Skyrim I am the Kwisatz Haderach. It's not fun, doesn't promote different play styles and is way too easy. Add to this regenerating health and I really am a super being in Skyrim. I am Shepard in disguise

 

[Xendance]

The problem with Oblivion wasn't that people wanted to play all the things.
The problem was that in order to actually do well at higher levels, you'd have to have some useless major skills that you almost never used. That way you didn't level up too fast and prevented the enemies from scaling up until you had sufficient skills of your "real" major skills.

 

[Murphy]

You could bump up the difficulty a notch or two and suddenly you'd find yourself quite useless with a bow, without the sneaking and archery perks, and you'd find your destruction magic tickling rather than devastating without the ability to form those dual-wielded uber-spells and without the various bonuses from the perks and with loads of health but the stock 100 mana.

If you insist on playing on a setting so easy that you can just take up a weapon of your choice although you have no training with it at all and waste everything with it it seem to me like that's your fault. Not saying it necessarily is, just that it seems like it to me, judging by my and my two brother's personal experiences.

I'm a wuss and I'm only playing on adept. But I'm an archer and when I try to kill something bigger than a draugr with destruction it's going to take a lot of running away and a lot of potions and thanks to my stock 100 Stamina I'm out of breath after two Power attacks with my one handed weapon.
My brother on the other hand plays a sorcerer and if he were to try to fight with a sword without all of his nice shield spells he'd die pretty much instantly.
I'd say the chances of getting something done with combat skills you're not trained in aren't that much higher than they were in Morrowind. Oblivion is kind of hard to compare with the leveling and all.

Stats: For all their supposed complexity the stats didn't do a whole lot to enhance the experience in previous games. You picked your skills and that was it. Every once in a while you'd level up and you would pick the stats with the highest multipliers, which were always the same.

It's like in Diablo. They did away with the stats in the 3rd one and initially people complained, but if you stop and think about it, the stats really added nothing to the game. Strength for equipment, dexterity for equipment or max block, nothing on Energy and everything else in vitality. That's what everyone did with every character. Now that mechanic is gone and no one is ever going to miss it.

Except in Oblivion the stats didn't even make sense like in Diablo. Aside from what Xendance said, even assuming you wanted to level up and leveling up was good for you...
In Oblivion you want the skills you want to be using to NOT be your primary skills so you can get higher multipliers for stats per level up. Character creation and development as you think you're doing is an illusion and the most efficient way to make your character as powerful as possible is doing the opposite and calculating exactly how many skill-improvements you need to get to the max multiplier and leveling up at the right moment so you can get the max possible level with the max possible multipliers.
And get endurance early on because if you get it later you lose valuable health-points for no reason.

Nah, thanks. I'd rather do what people without insight into this system do, which is pick what they want to use, forget about the system until the Level Up prompt shows up, and then in a sleep-walking fashion increase the stats with the highest multiplier => i.e. my stats. But if you think about it, do you have to do this manually? Do you really lose anything if it's done for you?
I can't speak for you, but I don't miss this one bit.

I don't know what your problem is with leveling the lockpicking skill by failing. We learn from our mistakes. Plus the minigame here is much better than the one in Oblivion and, imho, much better than the random chance in Morrowind as well.

As for the health regeneration: It does almost nothing in combat so it hardly turns you into a fighting machine. All it does is heal you up in between fights so you don't have to [wait] [cannot wait here but maybe a couple of feet over there] [no? maybe over here] [here?] [ah, there we go] [wonderful, now enjoy being refilled] [HAHA! AN ASSASSIN ATTACKS YOU IN YOUR SLEEP MOTHEREFFER! HAVE FUN GETTING OUT OF THAT ONE]

At least the waiting had role-playing purposes in Morrowind, even if the 24 hours to heal everything should realistically be extended to weeks or months of waiting, so with the puny 24 hour healing period the immersion isn't that much bigger, imo. Oblivion already did away with all pretense and made you fill up completely in just one hour wait time.
I'd rather skip that nonsense completely then. One stupid, repetitive menu action less to take care of after every fight.
Have my bars fill up on their own in between fights. Not during fights, mind you, like in Halo or CoD, but in between fights. And they did that really well in Skyrim, imo.

What matters to me, as far as character creation is concerned, is being able to chose my race, customize my face and body and then play whichever "class" I want to play. And Skyrim allows me to do just that.

What I really dislike about the character creation in Skyrim is how the weight slider works.
For females you have to crank it all the way up for them to look good but there is no way to go over the max to make a pudgy Breton girl.
And for males you always get a really muscular body and the weight slider just blows you up. You can't get a bit of a mead belly though, which would be awesome for a true Nord.

Ok, accepting you have to play a really fit character for some reason, it would still be nice to at least see more variety in body types among the population, but there are no fatties anywhere!
They even got lizard people for crying out loud! LIZARDS! But no fatties?

I'm going to bed now. This took a turn into depressing thought territory...

 

[Reise]

In Daggerfall/Morrowind if I would set out to be a warrior I would have my Primary, Major and Minor skills. All of these would be set around the warrior class. I wouldn't for example take a skill like Mysticism, what would be the point. If I wanted to be a Mage I would set up a Mage character with Mage related classes. So I would choose a number of weapon based skills such as long Blade, short Blade and archery as my primary skills and then probably a bunch of athletic classes such as running, dodging and jumping as my major/minor skills. These are the skills I would level up in the quickest as I would be using them as it's what my character is set up to use and would get the modifiers for them. For me to level and become adept in something like destruction would be very difficult and time consuming because of my low points in intelligence and because I would hardly ever use it. This in turn would effect decisions in game such as being turned away from the Mages guild etc.

Right, but in Daggerfall nothing is stopping you from still leveling minor/misc skills.

In fact some of them may end up leveling faster than major skills anyway depending on your play style and what you chose.

TES games were never really about classes and all that anyway. They always seemed to mix it a little.

 

[Josef Nader]

In Daggerfall/Morrowind if I would set out to be a warrior I would have my Primary, Major and Minor skills. All of these would be set around the warrior class. I wouldn't for example take a skill like Mysticism, what would be the point. If I wanted to be a Mage I would set up a Mage character with Mage related classes. So I would choose a number of weapon based skills such as long Blade, short Blade and archery as my primary skills and then probably a bunch of athletic classes such as running, dodging and jumping as my major/minor skills. These are the skills I would level up in the quickest as I would be using them as it's what my character is set up to use and would get the modifiers for them. For me to level and become adept in something like destruction would be very difficult and time consuming because of my low points in intelligence and because I would hardly ever use it. This in turn would effect decisions in game such as being turned away from the Mages guild etc.

Now in Skyrim leveling is rather silly. I can pick up a long bow/staff and within one extended fight can bring archery to the same level as my one handed skill. I can level up by failing, I was levelling my lockpick skill by breaking lockpicks.

I'm a stranger who is great at everything. Spells? I can cast those with ease, want to tackle a giant up close the next minute? sure no problem I'm also adept at heavy armour and double handed weaponry. Want to take down a dragon using a bow? sure no problem. The only reason the game is like this is because people complained in Oblivion that they wanted to change race/class after 3 or so hours of playing and couldn't. Well now in Skyrim you can be mage, warrior, assassin, battlemage. thief, burglar, healer, nightblade, ranger, sorcerer and bard all in one.

In Skyrim I am the Kwisatz Haderach. It's not fun, doesn't promote different play styles and is way too easy. Add to this regenerating health and I really am a super being in Skyrim. I am Shepard in disguise

Actually, I'm calling bull-chips on that. Yeah, anybody can swing a sword and get to a decent level in swordsmanship with ease, but you'll never be able to really rely on it without dumping some perks into the skill tree. Perks are the really valuable level-up currency. Everything else is just arbitrary numbers. You could level your 1h skill all the way up to 100, but without those perks you'll be swinging a limp noodle next so someone who spec'd into swords.

I'm going back through playing as a mage right now, and without having a few points in the relevant magic school the spells you cast are preposterously expensive. I've been forced to narrow it down to the big three. While I can cast spells from the other schools, it drains my magika so quickly that they're useless in a pinch.

So yeah, you're totally wrong on that account. You -can't- be everything. You're FORCED to spec into something, it's just you aren't arbitrary tied into one "set" of skills as you were in previous games. Want to be really good at sneaking and 2h axes (like my character)? Great! Spec into those too skills. Those are basically the only two skills I have perks in, but I'm a stealthy tornado of axe'y death. Yeah, I -can- cast a spell, but it's next to useless against the more serious enemies I face, and it's hardly worth wasting the time for next to my main skills.

 

[sampsa]

I visited my father's place a few days ago and spent some time watching my step brother to play Skyrim. I'd like to ask if the whole game is dull and grey. No mater where he went city or wilderness everything was grey houses, grey stone, grey sky with occasional snow. One thing I liked in Oblivion was the vivid wildernes and cities.

Also the populated areas looked like dead. I don't know if I'm too used to Bioware's cities where there is very lively folk, but I'm not getting this game if its all grey all the time. So is it?

 

[Murphy]

See for yourself.

But if you judge artistic value by the number of colors on the palette and you're so judgmental that you think the game is all gray... don't get it. :/

 

[Zennousha]

I visited my father's place a few days ago and spent some time watching my step brother to play Skyrim. I'd like to ask if the whole game is dull and grey. No mater where he went city or wilderness everything was grey houses, grey stone, grey sky with occasional snow. One thing I liked in Oblivion was the vivid wildernes and cities.

Also the populated areas looked like dead. I don't know if I'm too used to Bioware's cities where there is very lively folk, but I'm not getting this game if its all grey all the time. So is it?

If you believe it to be dull and grey, then the tundra alone should make up for every little bit of that. It's glorious.

 

[Oldih]

But if you judge artistic value by the number of colors on the palette and you're so judgmental that you think the game is all gray... don't get it. :/

Most of the screens that people usually post around are about winteric white and gray lands of nature, which themselves look quite well done but at the same time I wonder if it's because a lot of people haven't seen anything like that done in such manner before or IRL.

 

[I. Kant]

I found it funny that it should have been a Finn who wrote the above comment.

 

[Josef Nader]

I visited my father's place a few days ago and spent some time watching my step brother to play Skyrim. I'd like to ask if the whole game is dull and grey. No mater where he went city or wilderness everything was grey houses, grey stone, grey sky with occasional snow. One thing I liked in Oblivion was the vivid wildernes and cities.

Also the populated areas looked like dead. I don't know if I'm too used to Bioware's cities where there is very lively folk, but I'm not getting this game if its all grey all the time. So is it?

Well, let's not forget that Skyrim isn't a neon techno-future city. All of the colors and breathtaking landscapes come from the natural environment.

It's the difference between a Rocky Mountain vista and Times Square.

 

[LightsabeR]

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Werewolf Tag - YouTube

 

[DraKon2k]

I dislike the fact that most side-quests are stuffed under "Misc." and have no description to them :/

 

[SiC-Disaster]

Lol i thought you were unable to kill children in this game?

 

[LightsabeR]

Lol i thought you were unable to kill children in this game?

In the vanilla version you can't, it's a mod.

 

[SiC-Disaster]

In the vanilla version you can't, it's a mod.

Good to know that you can at least make it a possibility
I considered making a story mod or something similar sometime due to the fitting setting of the game for one of the short stories I once wrote, and being able to kill off children is something I would really need for that.



dont look at me like that, im not a psycho

 

[Murphy]

I dislike the fact that most side-quests are stuffed under "Misc." and have no description to them :/

Yeah, some extendable info would be great. I have a side quest that just says I should tell on someone. I don't know what for, what he did, if I decided to help him instead, nothing. Just a name. With the way some of these quests can be advanced accidentally this can be a problem even if you're not a forgetful fool like me.