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the following is safe to read for elmuerte but spoils a previous posts

argh... spoilers...

Sorry, I thought about adding spoiler tags, but ...

then again... what TES game didn't allow you to become head of everything?

But I now added them in case anyone else feels spoiled by that.

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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.

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to be fair, there's a huge difference between reading about blackreach and seeing it, that place is something to experience.

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I recently discovered that place... I soon felt creeped out and was happy my missions said I could leave.

It's strange how the game never scares me, but the ambiance of some areas just make me feel so uncomfortable and creeped out.

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I was kind of leaning towards joining the Stormcloaks, but didn't want to pick a side until I find out more about

the Thalmor. I'm glad I waited for information on them. Seems like Ulfric had something to do with them once and still could. On the other hand, my character is a Talos worshipper (and wore a Talos amulet at the Thalmor party, which noone noticed) and Stormcloaks should be more to my liking. Or maybe not, there are many nuances to this.

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I haven't reach that point yet, the point where I want to take sides. I'm only in for 80 hours, so it's too early.

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Welp. I've begun that dark road, chaps. That twisted, curvy road of modding Elder Scrolls games. Just to give you an idea, from the somewhat limited (yet surprisingly robust) category of available mods;

- Enhanced Night Sky

- Enhanced Blood Textures

- Lush Trees & Lush Grass

- Enhanced Flora and Fauna

- Skyrim HD

- SkyUI

- Real Water Textures

- Enhanced NPC Clothes

- And of course, our dark master, Skyrim Script Extender.

I put 60 hours into Skyrim when it came out, almost 10 of those without sound before I had the brainwave to go into the BIOS and force non-HDMI sound. I loved it. So do I need these mods? No. But godsdamnit, I refuse to revisit the later years of Oblivions existence in which I spent six to eight hours every couple of months installing mods and then never playing the godsdamned thing.

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A lot of the texture replacement mods i've been seeing look really horrendous.

Sure, tile the shit out of that art, or redraw it with less detail, but as long as it's higher resolution = success!

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Yeah, i have a steam account, but i'm not on it enough that it'd be worth adding me.

Maybe someday when i rebuild my PC, but not right now.

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Yes, that doesn't really look much better to me. Sure, it adds more detail to the textures, but it adds it incorrectly. The wood texture of example is scaled way too large, you shouldn't be able to see detail like that on a huge wood beam of that size. And the carpet looks just as terrible.

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Yes, that doesn't really look much better to me. Sure, it adds more detail to the textures, but it adds it incorrectly. The wood texture of example is scaled way too large, you shouldn't be able to see detail like that on a huge wood beam of that size. And the carpet looks just as terrible.

Well the carpet in the original is a specific way which is used, opposed to HD which is a modern style, which is not suited to TES.

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Yeah, I've already modded Skyrim pretty extensively myself but you do have to be really careful about checking whether replacement textures and effects genuinely look better to you. There have been numerous things in the game I'd quite like to improve (such as furniture and interior walls) but all the mods I've seen to do so have taken the styles of the textures in totally different directions. I don't want Skyrim to look different, I think Bethesda has a good eye for holistic art styles, I just want it to be a better version of what it already is. Some texture mods accomplish that, many don't.

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The contrast in the carpet texture is ridiculous, that's probably the main reason it looks bad.

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I hardly notice the carpet when I'm playing anyway, but I seemingly have a more pressing matter, in which any mist/fog or directed light rays cause me to see a transparent after image. So once I get that taken care of, we'll see how I feel about the bloody carpet.

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Damn it... I was forced into taking sides. I wanted to complete the dragonborn quest line, but the general wouldn't talk to me unless I completed or failed the quest to join the legion. So I had to pick sides... and I chose the Legion because I just now realized I could have joined the stormcloaks and fail that legion quest.

ah well...

Also,

I need a dragon to fly up a mountain or something, but

why do I need to use the dragon I trapped in whiterun? Can't

I simply ask the the head of the graybeards to fly me there?

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I've been playing this game in the most "fucking around" way I could think of. When a guy leaving the tutorial cave said to me "Head to this town to talk to my sister, she owns the tavern there." I said "great!" and walked in the opposite direction up the side of a mountain. I've now been playing for about 6 hours, am almost level 10, and have not done a single piece of story content. I am pleased with this. My Argonian lizard-wizard Paul Atreides (named for his glowing eyes) seems to be off to a pretty good start.

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One weird thing about Skyrim is that now that I've been playing video games for a while, I can tell when a random item is going to be relevant to some quest in the future, so I've had a couple scenarios where someone said, "Could you venture forth into such-and-such cave and retrieve the stone of..." And I say "You Mean this?"

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well duh...

quest items are usually unique and therefor have names

also, you cannot sell them or remove them from your inventory

The fact that things have names sort of spoils it, then again, the quest becomes figuring our where the quest for the item is. I have quite some quest items, but still to matching quest.

@Miffy "my sister"? yeah, I followed the other guy for a while and then split off. After 80 hours (or so) I decided to go back to some "main quest" stuff. And that's the magic of true TES games for me. You can simply, like we Dutch people say, "go your gang". I hope TES6 will become even more Daggerfall like allowing you to actually become a trader yourself (for example).

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Damn it... I was forced into taking sides. I wanted to complete the dragonborn quest line, but the general wouldn't talk to me unless I completed or failed the quest to join the legion. So I had to pick sides... and I chose the Legion because I just now realized I could have joined the stormcloaks and fail that legion quest.

ah well...

Also,

I need a dragon to fly up a mountain or something, but

why do I need to use the dragon I trapped in whiterun? Can't

I simply ask the the head of the graybeards to fly me there?

You don't ever have to choose a side, I didn't. Makes the dragonborn quest a bit different.

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I was due to sort of a quest bug. I accidentally triggered the "join the legion" quest and the general wouldn't want to speak to me until I closed that quest.

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I was due to sort of a quest bug. I accidentally triggered the "join the legion" quest and the general wouldn't want to speak to me until I closed that quest.

I literally just ran into this same issue and ended up having to start the civil war quest to progress any further in the main quest.

So i'm fighting for the imperials now, but whatever.

I also had a weird issue where the treaty talks wouldn't begin because the game wouldn't recognize me sitting in that chair at the head of the table. When i reloaded an earlier save and did pretty much everything the same way, it ended up working the second time through. I have no idea what the problem was, but it was one of the scarier and more potentially game-breaking moments i've had with the game.

I also do not like the way in which they are forcing you to choose between the blades and the greybeards, it seems very forced.

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hurray for me... I beat the main quest line.

The main quest is the one with the dragons, right? Or is that the war one?

Anyway, it appears that I'm now a absolute bad ass. Dragons and dragonpriests no longer put up a major challenge. I can even take on 2 dragons at the same time.

That's a bit of a shame though.

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I also just finished the main quest.

Was it just me, or did the climax feel a bit abrupt? It felt to me like there was a quest or two missing from somewhere in there.

Prior to completing it, the civil war quest and main quest were interlocking in some really crazy and scary ways.

There was that aforementioned thing about the faction leaders not giving normal dialogue options, and then after that

since i had to start the civil war, i decided to play along for a bit and got up to a point where i needed to talk to the Jarl of Whiterun. Thing is, while the dragon is held captured in Dragonsreach, the relevant civil war dialogue does not appear for him. I had to finish the game to restore Dragonsreach to its default state before he'd be back on his throne and ready to talk about quests again.

Now that i have a clearer sense of how Bethesda is managing their NPC's with these things, it'll be easier to predict how odd quest interactions might go, but i went a good ten hours with all of this just terrified that i had broken my game. (Really though, even if it didn't actually break, the way certain between-activity quest states are precluding other quest states is pretty shit, but it's a small thing i'm willing to forgive on the fact that it didn't actually break.)

Also, holy shit, i have a pet dragon.

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