Sno

We all seem to have a different ideas about what should be spoiler tagged. Personally, i think the existence of Blackreach is a big one, an exciting and huge 4-mile dungeon cavern that ties pretty heavily into the main quest, but you guys were all talking about that without any concern for that being a spoiler.

From what i've been reading, some of the more annoying/unavoidable issues can come from when radiant story does something dumb, namely setting up a quest in a dungeon where it would be impossible to complete it. (The examples i've heard are that some more scripted quests may permanently affect the makeup of a dungeon, and then if radiant story later sends you to that location to do a quest, it may be impossible to complete the later quest.) ^ To be clear, i haven't personally had this issue, and it's apparently quite rare. It sounds like there's only a few incidents in which it might happen, and with the way Radiant Story works, it's kind of just a simple oversight. It's Bethesda not making sure certain locations are excluded from the system. You know, it'd be annoying though, i can see how it would be a problem. Just the way people play, taking new quests en masse, it could be hours before you realize there's a problem, and by then it'd be way too late to go back and try to re-roll the quest. Man, how do we all feel about the bugs though? The PS3 version is a total clusterfuck from what i'm hearing, utterly unplayable at about 50 hours, too much junk data about the world state loaded into memory for the PS3 to deal with. (Apparently all three versions are very poor about managing memory, it's just the PS3 that is hitting a ceiling. Here's the thing though, apparently all of their games have been poor about memory management and broken on the PS3, just nobody really noticed/cared before?) It's a weird thing though, Skyrim in general is much less bug-ridden than previous Bethesda games, but it seems like that because so many people are playing this one, Bethesda seems to be taking more shit over this game than ever before. From my personal point of view, i'm just glad it doesn't crash. I'm glad that, with as much time as i have in the game, the number of actual, detrimental bugs i've encountered is still fewer than a dozen. Count that as one subjective experience that is largely OK with the state Skyrim shipped in. I think i'm very apologetic and understanding of the issues faced in bug-testing a game like this though, most average gamers definitely are not. That said, 1.2 was kind of a shit fest and broke some very visible things, and i'm not entirely convinced that Bethesda will really go to any great lengths with regards to patching the game's numerous reported issues, because that's not really how they handled Morowind or Oblivion. (For both, it was maybe a couple dozen bug fixes to games that have literally hundreds of significant outstanding issues.)

Doooo I? It doesn't even tie into the story, it's just a dynamic event that starts happening very early in the main quest, and then randomly after that. But whatever, consider it spoilered. This started happening to me periodically after the 1.2 patch, but most dragons still give me souls.

I guess i'm the resident contrarian now - I like the long dungeons. I like having all my gameplay tools prepared and then actually needing to use them to make it through a long encounter, actually needing to dig into my piles of potions and scrolls and soul gems. Given that Elder Scrolls is essentially a numbers RPG, the only time it's ever remotely challenging is when it's putting your preparedness to the test, making you go long stretches without resupplies. So, an idea, i think what the game maybe actually needs is a clearer indication of how big the dungeons will be, prior to entering them. I mean, am i wrong in assuming that the real problem you guys are finding with the long dungeons is that you maybe have other tasks on mind that you want to deal with instead? Kind of getting into the "Shit, when does this end? I have all this stuff i want to sell, and i have to turn in those other two quests." mindset? Perhaps there should be some kind of innocuous tag that is like "Ok, this is a word wall dungeon. You're going to be here for along time, make sure you have your shit sorted out." ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY HOURS. GOD HELP ME. I've barely even touched any of the faction stuff! I've just been doing some of the main quest stuff and any one-offs i come across, but i just keep finding more and more! Apparently a fetch quest i did somewhere along the way tagged my briar hearts as quest items, and then never cleared that flag. So now i have these valuable, useful, and rare ingredients that are basically inert clutter in my inventory. A lot of other small things, some journal entries not clearing out even though the quest resolved properly, and a handful of weightless quest items not being removed from inventory. Just messy little things that have no real harm. There was one time i had entered into a room and noticed that a floor tile had failed to load, but reloading an earlier save fixed it. I've seen a lot of really creaky stuff in some of the daedric quests, some of that stuff was just barely working. I had some big problems with the Sanguine quest. ( ) I've seen some dragons bug out in really crazy ways, but most of the time they still work fine. (Only seen problems with them post 1.2) The 1.2 or 1.3 patch seems to have broken the whole thing where , but that apparently doesn't affect anything quest-related, it's just a dynamic environmental thing that i'm missing out on. I still stand by the statement that this is probably the most bug free game Bethesda Game Studios has ever released. Only seen four crashes in all these hours, and the game runs super smooth on the 360.

So Nintendo's pictochat-inspired solution for friends list communication is on the eshop today. It's a free download, so you should all probably get it. It's a fun little thinger, i've been toying around in this app with some friends for much of the day. Crudely drawn pictures flying back and forth over the internet, only some of which were infantile drawings of penises. It's basically the wii's messaging system, the one that nobody ever uses, cross-bred with the DS's pictochat. It's clunky and, relatively speaking, kind of useless. The 3DS needed something like this though, so it'll probably be fine. Also, the way you see the pictochats be sketched in when viewing them upon delivery is super, super charming. It is remarkably dumb that you have to unlock basic usability features through repeated use of the most basic functions, while some other basic functions have to be unlocked by spending play coins! This is not a game, Nintendo! This is a basic system tool!

I have no idea how many games i played this year. It wouldn't be easy to count, sorting out all the 2011 games from my personal library. I'd guess it was probably in the vicinity of 30? That sounds right. You know what? i might keep track for 2012 as well.

Yeah, there's no end-game. You finish the main quest and you just keep going.

The only truly random quests seem to be the ones you pick up from inns, the little ones where you're handed a bounty notice. Everything else is an actual, designed quest. (To an extent, the radiant story system chooses dynamically which dungeon you go to in almost every side quest involving a dungeon, and then populates that dungeon with the appropriate objectives for that quest, alongside whatever narrative/quest was already there. It's a really, really interesting way to do it that works really well.) Nevertheless, even if you're looking at just the main factions and the main quest, you're at least looking at six quest chains each of probably fifteen/twenty hours or more. (Thieves guild, Companions, Dark Brotherhood, College of Winterhold, the main quest, the civil war, and i feel like i'm missing something.) There are so, so many substantial one-off quests though. The daedric quests are particularly noteworthy, but certainly not the lone standouts.

The main quest is the thing with the dragons, yeah. Also, from my past experience with these games, you can probably expect to sink around 200-300 hours or more if you want to do "everything". So... Probably don't try? Probably. I think i might try. But i wouldn't recommend it. They're such different games though, and i think Dark Souls is able to be what it is because it's a controlled, directed experience. I mean, even though it's ostensibly a very large game with a very big world, there's still a predictable path of progression there. They know what people are going to do, and can design around it. They can make the systems really tight and really balanced, get stuff really refined and working really well. Skyrim doesn't have the luxury of having any idea what the player is going to do, there have to be much broader tolerances for what the player can get away with. Skyrim also doesn't have a resurrection mechanic hauling a player back to a safe restore point upon death, you are fully committed to encounters and have to deal with them right then and there. I just don't know how you would build a game like Skyrim for the kind of gameplay that Dark Souls has, i don't think you could. Random, completely unrelated complaint - The absence of sorting options in the inventory sucks. It really, really sucks. It has always sucked, ever since Morrowind. I don't understand how this isn't something they've ever addressed. My potions menu is a nightmare, the naming scheme on those things is not conducive to an alphabetically sorted list.

Having now seen every corner of Skyrim, i think the Reach is my favorite region. The Forsworn are annoying enemies, but that whole area feels precision engineered to be beautiful, some really incredible scenery.

They treat the Argonians even worse! Make them live in a shelter on the docks.

It starts when you pick a side, it's the only part of the game where you one quest path locks out another. It apparently also runs autonomously, with or without your input. So if you join either faction and then go around ignoring it, it will still be happening, there will still be battles going on outside of cities. I've really been enjoying the dungeons, i think they are a dramatic improvement over the dungeons of Oblivion. Do you just not like the dungeon diving aspect of the game? Actually, actually... Looking into it more, don't worry about it. Apparently they got rid of armor-based magic debuffs in Skyrim, it doesn't affect casting anymore. (It is, however, still a thing in Morrowind and Oblivion that was never really explained.) As for the races, it's not the greatest justification for it, but the distribution of starting points for skills doesn't really matter much in Skyrim. The way the leveling works in this game makes progression perfectly even for every race. There is no race that has a higher theoretical cap or anything, and there's nothing like higher endurance giving you more HP per level. Unless you're really concerned about how much work you will have to put into certain skills in the opening hours of a playthrough, the abilities really are the only thing you need to be aware of. TES has always been kind of bad about surfacing information though, i think Bethesda wants the games to be more experiential than numerical, but the armor debuffs were always a shining example of something important not really being properly conveyed. Current information tells me that the armor debuff on casting is gone, so there you go, your mage/enchanter build isn't fucked. That's kind of the TES experience for a lot of people. Look at all the people who bitch about Oblivion, but never stopped playing it. Morrowind too, even. People have nothing but rosy memories about that game now, but i remember how much it crashed and how bad the dice-role combat was. There's a perk for illusion that makes your casting quieter. Well, people have had that complaint about every TES game.

You might still have to be in stealth for it to function properly, and not have been seen when you started using it, and the second you do anything other than move, the effect will disappear. It does work, there's just a lot of restrictions on it. In fact, it works the same as it always did, perhaps you're confused about Skyrim no longer have the chameleon spell, which quite frankly, was always totally broken and should be gone.

Not optimistic about Kingdoms of Amalur?

On the topic of armor, light armor is also quieter in stealth than heavy, and i've been reading that there's apparently invisible debuffs to magic casting that are the most severe with heavy armor? (I think both of these traits were in the previous games? I can't remember for sure, i don't think they were ever explained there either.) Smithing wrecks things even worse. With buffs and perks, you can smith well past the legendary rating cap and can theoretically get any armor set to the 80% damage reduction cap. (Which is apparently around 560 points?) Still, a lot of where the armor balance breaks down is very end-game, and very min-max. So if you're already committed to heavy armor, or just want to play a heavy armor build, it's nothing to worry about. Skyrim is not a game where competitive builds matter. (Daedric armor also looks sick.) On the topic of Conjuration, I've read that summoned zombies/daedra possibly gain conjuration exp for the damage they deal? I dunno, it seems like there's a lot of weird ambiguous rules for how the exp gains happen in this game. They obviously tried fairly hard to close a lot of the simpler exploits. However, Conjuration is my highest leveled magic skill, just from using the summons. In general though, the magic skills seem to level very slowly through the 20-40 range. There the starter spells have grown kind of useless, but the game hasn't populated the environment with any stronger spells yet. (With stronger spells offering dramatically bigger gains.) As for my own troubles, I personally haven't been getting alteration ANYWHERE. There's a few alteration spells i use pretty frequently, but i just never see any results. And as for training, the only thing i've been using that on is pick-pocketing, since it's a skill that i never apply. I mean, I want some of its related perks, but i'm not really playing a thief. Also, all this busy work about going from town to town to try and offload loot, trying to min-max the economy, it sounds very tiresome and dull. I just find one merchant who has the things i want and then buy those things, leaving the merchant with maybe an addition 2k over their starting gold, and then i sell enough of whatever disposable loot or crafted items are in my inventory to bottom out the vendor and put me back in the positive. I repeat that every time i wander into a town, and i'm usually sitting on around 20-30k. (With i think about 70 in speech for not really trying to power-level it at all. Also, give to the beggars, the temporary gift of charity bonus is always handy in towns.)

Also, in case anybody is curious, the trick for getting DS/DSi games to run in their native resolution on the 3DS also works for these GBA games. (Which appear wretchedly blurry when stretched to the limits of the 3DS screen.) You just hold Start and Select when starting up the games to do this, but be prepared to do some squinting, the GBA games appear just absolutely tiny when run like this. (It's like playing a GBA Micro!)

Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim all have had big problems in how they balance the different sets of armor against eachother. Light armor pretty much always comes out on top. (Still, once you have the perk that makes equipped armor weightless, it doesn't matter. So don't worry about it, stick with your specialization.) If you really want to tank, try specializing in blocking, don't ignore that. Some of the block perks only apply to shields, but some of them are useful for two-handing as well. Also, bashing can actually stagger enemies out of the animation for a power attack, preventing them from even hitting you. As for Alchemy, you just have to watch out with the ingredients that are a little heavier, like the troll fat and the toes. I've also focused on alchemy in all of the games since Morrowind, so i guess i'm used to it. I've been keenly aware of how much of a game-breaker Alchemy potentially can be in these games, the encumbrance feels like a fair offset. Though Skyrim quietly does a lot of other small things to try and keep Alchemy in check, such as duration effects simply not stacking, for example. (There's a few small weird exceptions and contradictions, mostly relating to the food buffs. When you're using potions and food to apply a bunch of different buffs for a battle, keep an eye on your active effects list in the magic menu to have a sense of what the game is actually allowing you to do.) Also, there are tons of other partners besides Lydia that you can hire/find, if you just want a mule.

If you're an alchemist, the ingredients can really add up too. Probably a full 100 points of my encumbrance meter is ingredients atm.

I have been quite disappointed in this though, the individual quests are very linear. Maybe Oblivion was that way too, maybe i'm remembering it wrong, but i do remember being struck by how dynamic and open-ended the quests in Fallout 3 could be. It often seemed like Bethesda had accounted for every action you might consider, and this feels like a big step back. You might be given a quest that pegs your character in a negative light. If you don't want to play that role, you might have an out at the very start of that quest that is just "KILL EVERYBODY!" That's dumb though, obviously you want to go through the quest and see the content, so you play along and now you're characterized as horrible and evil without any middle ground. There's been a bunch of incidents like that, where it feels like there are obvious potential quest paths that just aren't there. There also seem to sometimes be hidden quest paths that aren't suggested by any dialogue or journal entries, things you just have to take a chance on to find. The game is very hap-hazard about this though, because often trying to skirt the boundaries of what the quest allows won't yield any useful results, you'll just get dead ends or fail the quest and get a huge bounty for your troubles. The game's inconsistency about this is super frustrating, having hidden objectives and paths that encourage experimentation, but only for a tiny handful of the total number of quests in the game.

Well first off, you're making a terrible mistake in trying to collect everything you can. Resources in TES are infinite, the only items you should ever worry about trying to salvage are things that have low weight and high value, or are unique one-off items like the daedric artifacts. (Gems and jewelry are especially great for easy money.) I mean, people should really stop obsessing over the dragon materials. Dragons never stop appearing, you can always get more of those materials for when you finally max out smithing and want to make sick dragon armor. I see so many people struggle in adapting to this mindset, TES games are games where you DO NOT NEED to grab everything you see. (Or at the very least, have some fortify strength potions to bump you into the green again so you can quick travel back to your dumping spot.) I seem to be an outlier in that i absolutely love having these kinds of additional restrictions placed on the player. I love encumbrance as a mechanic, and i love weapon and armor degradation systems, i love when games have those extra layers of simulation. It makes the game feel more fully realized to me, more immersive, and it forces me to be more thoughtful about how i play. I am into that. I think the hardcore mode in FO: New Vegas was brilliant, and i wish more games did things like that. (Give people like me what i want, and a "softer" mode for people who just want to tour the content.) Again, i think a big part of this is just needing to adjust your mindset for TES, 98% of the shit you see is shit you do not need to be carrying. Unique items aside, there's always going to be more of the stuff you leave behind, and it's not like you'll have trouble making money if you're more selective about what you carry, things like gems are worth a ton of gold. If you're just looking for skill books, you can tell them apart by them starting at around the 50 gold range, while most other books are around 5-20. I do also carry a lot of books though, and for the same reasons. It would be nice if they weighed just a bit less. (Maybe 0.5 instead of 1.) I really don't think the main narratives actually matter all that much in TES games. Or, at least, Bethesda has never been good at it, and so it's never been why i play their games. For me, at least, it's the context that is important, and i think Bethesda is best-of-class in that. The world-building, the lore, all of that stuff. Also, I look at the progression from Morrowind to Skyrim, and i think what has changed most is Bethesda trying to get a handle on their gameplay systems. They obviously feel comfortable with where Morrowind took the series, and they've been slowly refining the balancing act between all the different parts of that design, whittling down the stuff that was deemed unworkable or superfluous, while expanding on the things that need to work or that people had responded well to. They've made big leaps in design between these three games, and they're getting better at making this game.

It's very Twin Peaks, yeah. It's much less overt about it than Deadly Premonition, but the tone and style are definitely there, as are a lot of small homages. Had Alan Wake made it through development with its original open-world design intact, it would have been extra crazy that it came out in more or less the same time frame as Deadly Premonition.

I can't say i've heard any particular clamoring for AC3 to be set in feudal Japan, but even if there is, it's kind of a separate phenomena from the long-lived trend of Japanese companies making Japanese games primarily for a Japanese market with wildly anachronistic and stylized takes on their own history. (Koei, hey?) I think you're confusing actual japanese people with weeaboos.

Now i feel bad about not putting more thought into it, should i go back and rectify this?

Half-Life 2 is maybe a good comparison? You're on a linear path, but the path can at times be very wide. So unless you're looking for the barriers, you often won't notice any. Definitely a linear game with linear environments telling a linear narrative though.

I just did Blackreach as well, that is an awesome area.