V The Elder Scrolls

[Sno]

I visited that location, but I can find the treasure :/

If you go up to the dungeon entrance and hop down on the right, you should see the chest hidden behind the waterfall.

[elmuerte]

then I must be blind because I've been behind the waterfall multiple times

[Brannigan]

Became a vampire, really not all that bad. Just adds a fun little side thing where every 3 days or so I need to sneak into a house and feed on someone or else everyone wants to kill me. Which is fine since I'm a sneaky bastard anyway. My only gripe is that the powers won't permanently stay in the favorite list when you lose them, always have to re-add as I become more blood thirsty.

[Erkki]

So there's this game store near where I work. It has been closed for a while, they have been doing inventory for a long time, but today as I walked past I saw people in there and no closed sign on the door and knocked. They let me in and I looked at the shelves and there was Skyrim, finally. All the other stores here still don't have it.

So I can finally start playing this, but now I'm also in the middle of Arkham City, Dead Island and replaying Red Dead Redemption. I know I can't play 4 open world games at the same time -- is Skyrim buggy enough to save it for last when there have been more patches?

[elmuerte]

I have no problems playing it. I do have problem putting it aside to play Arkham City.

[Thyroid]

Bethesda's bugs are funny. Everybody get naked.

[brkl]

That's a feature!

[Orv]

He uh, took the time to pickpocket all their clothes, guys. Plz read article, thx.

[Thyroid]

He uh, took the time to pickpocket all their clothes, guys. Plz read article, thx.

I did! "Bug" was the wrong word to use: I posted that in the afterglow of a full day cramming. Sorry. I just think it's funny no-one at Bethesda thought they should account for this. In Morrowind, I was told I had no shame undressing in a tavern and talking to one of the people there. You'd kind of think a game with an 8 year advantage, tech-wise, would take that a bit further and at least have people wonder, out loud, where their clothes are.

[Erkki]

I played a little. At first I thought there was something wrong with the mouse sensitivity, but adjusting that didn't make it any better. It's actually the keyboard movement controls that are a bit too jerky if you want to move only a little and the FOV is horribly narrow. But I guess one gets used to that.

[Roderick]

I've been ignoring this topic so far for fear of having things spoiled, but I do want to assure you that my save game clocks in at 85 hours at this point and I'm still getting 'firsts', such as recently exploring my first Dwemer ruin.

Generally speaking the game is brilliant, exactly what I want from Elder Scrolls. It's so expansive and the written books are great again. Lots of repetitions from earlier games, but also great new ones. Look up 'A Hypothetical Treachery'; it's good.

There are a few minor spelling errors and quirks in the game here and there. It's not just that the accents are all over the place (why are Dunmer suddenly rural Brits? Do I even hear a Dutch accent?) -British English and American English are mixed willy nilly. Half of the time, Deadric prince Vaermina's name is misspelled as Vaernima. And why are the dwemer suddenly openly referred to as 'dwarves'? That shouldn't happen.

I can't imagine what a job it must be to keep track of all this stuff in a game that has such an enormous amount of text, so I always just consider it part of the charm. With Elder Scrolls, I'm not looking for a perfect game. I'm looking to be engaged and intruiged on a level that few other games can offer and Skyrim does exactly that.

[Sno]

And why are the dwemer suddenly openly referred to as 'dwarves'? That shouldn't happen.

This, at least, is justified.

Now hold on a second, let me get my nerd on here.

The races of men generally refer to the elves by different names than the ones the elves use for themselves. So it makes sense that the Nords of Skyrim would know the Dwemer as Dwarves, when in Morrowind they were properly referred to as Dwemer.

There's actually several books detailing this specific naming confusion. (Specifically, "Dwemer" apparently means "deep folk" with "deep" having at some point been mistranslated as "short" and the western provinces as a result coming to know the Dwemer as Dwarves.)

It's one of the more interesting aspects of TES, that a lot of contradictions and inconsistencies are built up as elements of the lore, embracing confused and conflicting histories as flavor for the setting. (The above story about the origin of that name is even only one of several accounts regarding why the Dwemer are called Dwarves in western provinces!)

[Sno]

I did! "Bug" was the wrong word to use: I posted that in the afterglow of a full day cramming. Sorry. I just think it's funny no-one at Bethesda thought they should account for this. In Morrowind, I was told I had no shame undressing in a tavern and talking to one of the people there. You'd kind of think a game with an 8 year advantage, tech-wise, would take that a bit further and at least have people wonder, out loud, where their clothes are.

Well for one thing, NPC's in Skyrim will still yell at you if you run around naked.

And it's kind of an edge case, going around pick-pocketing everybody's clothes. That's not even a perk you can get until pick-pocketing is maxed out, isn't it?

It's easy to say that it would be kind of nice if they'd acknowledge that they've been robbed, and then maybe went to stores and bought items to replace things they've lost, hey? Wouldn't that kind of be getting into some feature creepy territory though? There's always going to be something more they could have done, in a game like this. At some point they've got to ship a product and call it done.

Which is all to say, i don't think that's the sort of thing whose omission is worth being bothered by.

[Roderick]

I had anticipated this very answer, Sno, you walked RIGHT into my trap! Haha!

I agree with you that it's exactly the in-universe confusion and contradictions in lore that make it so appealing, sometimes you just don't know which subjective account of some historic batle is true. However, two problems still remain with the naming of dwemer as dwarves.

1. It's logical that the dunmer, altmer, bosmer et al are collectively known as the elven races. They need that monniker to signify the collective. There is, however, only one 'dwarven' race, the dwemer. So there's no need for that collective name, even if it is correct in-universe.

2. It's not the in-universe part of the game that subjectively calls dwemer dwarves, it's the interface. 'dwarven armor' and the like. That's just messy, since it arbitrarily mixes dwarven en dwemer. To my recollection this didn't happen in Morrowind, where the word dwarf rarely if ever fell. I could be wrong on this though. It just irked me that dwemer were referred to as dwarfs.

Going on a tangent, I am perpetually disappointed that the whole dwemer theme is never exploited fully. This disappointment was already present in Morrowind, so it's not Skyrim-exclusive. The dwemer ruins in these games are largely just tile-swaps for regular dungeons. They look really cool (steam, valves, pistons, gears, whatnot), and there is a bit more emphasis on levers and extremely light puzzles, but it's still pretty vanilla.

The first time I went into a dwemer ruin I was expecting all the machines I found there to have some purpose, to be able to activate and do cool things. In Skyrim, you can pick up dozens of weird dwemer gizmos, but then the only purpose they serve is to melt into dwemer ingots. How much more interesting would it be if you could craft and construct actual dwemer machinery? Little drones to help you, or explosives or whatever? World of Warcraft has a whole engineering class which is the best. It would perfectly fit into Elder Scrolls. Well, maybe next time.

(Except, there won't BE a next time for the dwemer since maybe only Blackmarsh has some dwemer ruins still in it!)

(So, what do we expect for the next game, Summerset? Elsweyr? Valenwood? I'm thinking Valenwood.)

[JonCole]

(So, what do we expect for the next game, Summerset? Elsweyr? Valenwood? I'm thinking Valenwood.)

Given the huge time gaps between games, it's hard to make any kind of informed guess as to what the next game might tackle. I was about to question Valenwood because from what I understand, it's a fairly unpopulated region with Wood Elves throughout the forests and a couple of disparate, small Imperial outposts. But honestly, who knows what will go on throughout this next era (or even what already happened between when I picked up that lore and now) that might spell differently for that region?

On a slightly peripheral note (and perhaps retread, as I haven't read every post in this thread), has anyone checked out the associated novels for the series? I'm mildly interested, but I really haven't heard a thing about them in a critical sense.

[Erkki]

So I've already played 11 hours and so far like it a lot. It definitely feels like an Elder Scrolls game, which is somewhat of a shame. I hoped they would have picked up more from recent open world games. There's hardly any ambient chatter with companions. Horses are slow (or at least companions keep up really well) and generally the travel vs. fast travel times are so far apart that it often makes sense to go for fast travel. Did anyone return from the Throat of the World without using fast travel? I think Red Dead has crazy horse speeds but that works much better.

But otherwise, it's been awesome so far. I should probably look into some graphics tweaking guides, though, because things that are far don't look pretty at all.

[Roderick]

I never use fast travel, I only use the ingame carriage method of transportation, which is limited between the major cities.

I'll do you one better though. I play without the map. I've never used it, never even looked at it. Don't bethink me an idiot though, there's a sound reason here. I've found that maps are so useful in a lot of games that you spend too much time looking at them instead of using the game world itself. And since you see the exact shape of the world, you also see its borders, which limits your imagination.

For the 90-odd hours I've been playing so far I have been forced to search for visual reference points in the environment and it's been fantastic. I've gotten lost on countless mountains, had no clue where I was and had to negotiate ravines and grasslands just to discover where I was. I use the compass to point me in the general direction, but even there I wish the game gave me descriptions of where I should head instead of pointing it out to me. My point is: maps take away some of a splendour of exploring and I wanted to check out if I could do without. I've been having a wonderful time.

As a fun excercise, I plan on drawing the map once I finish the game from my own experience, and then comparing it to the actual map. For science.

[Erkki]

Respect

[elmuerte]

I haven't even been to that mountain yet (only 64 hours on the clock).

I only use fast travel to travel between cities where I own houses.

[Gwardinen]

I kinda want to play this game more but three things are stopping me:

1) The combat system isn't great to begin with and only gets more boring/irritating as time goes on. I'm in a particularly annoying situation right now where I have the expert-level Destruction spells (which are basically powered up versions of the apprentice-level spells) but don't really have enough magicka to use them consistently. So I usually end up using the apprentice-level spells anyway, which is somewhat boring, mildly ineffective and probably stunts my levelling of the skill.

2) I tend to play it on my TV because playing it in a 5:4 ratio on my monitor isn't particularly brilliant, and the TV is significantly larger as well. I'm doing this more and more with PC games that I use the gamepad to play (as I do with Skyrim because of the dodgy UI for mouse and keyboard). It does mean that it's kind of a hassle to actually set it up and start playing, though. Nothing crazy but the extra minute or two of screwing around makes me even less likely to just go "screw it, let's do some Skyrim!" and double-click the icon.

3) There is so much stuff in that game. I'm more than 50 hours in and I've still not done much of the main quest, or the Thieves' Guild or Dark Brotherhood quests. I'm part way through the Companions' line and have completed the College quests, but there are still at least two holds that I haven't even been to yet either. It's kind of intimidating, and tires me just thinking about it, which makes me shy away from actually running the game and trying to get through some of it.

Edit: Oh, I haven't even started the Imperial Legion line either. I've decided on them because I'm an elf and the Stormcloaks are super racist, but that's about it.

[JonCole]

1) The combat system isn't great to begin with and only gets more boring/irritating as time goes on. I'm in a particularly annoying situation right now where I have the expert-level Destruction spells (which are basically powered up versions of the apprentice-level spells) but don't really have enough magicka to use them consistently. So I usually end up using the apprentice-level spells anyway, which is somewhat boring, mildly ineffective and probably stunts my levelling of the skill.

Do you have any progress in Restoration Magic? I found this to be an unfortunate consequence of being a mostly combat class with some destruction magic on the side, because I rarely dabble in Restoration but it has a couple of critical paths that keep your available magicka high (which I imagine is particularly useful for a pure mage). That said, you might want to invest some points in that and Enchanting, so you can put some good magicka regen enchantments on your armor.

3) There is so much stuff in that game. I'm more than 50 hours in and I've still not done much of the main quest, or the Thieves' Guild or Dark Brotherhood quests. I'm part way through the Companions' line and have completed the College quests, but there are still at least two holds that I haven't even been to yet either. It's kind of intimidating, and tires me just thinking about it, which makes me shy away from actually running the game and trying to get through some of it.

It does have an almost paralyzing level of choice at times, I have to admit. Don't worry about not visiting the holds, though, as some of them simply have very little to offer in comparison to the major ones (which is probably why you haven't visited them yet). I've had a little bit of success keeping away that sense of being overwhelmed by thinking of my progress more as a story. While the appeal of doing everything is obvious, I like the idea of my character becoming the leader of whatever guild and saying to himself, "Yeah, I think I'm gonna take a break and find that one guy's ring or that one mage's soul gem."

[Gwardinen]

Do you have any progress in Restoration Magic? I found this to be an unfortunate consequence of being a mostly combat class with some destruction magic on the side, because I rarely dabble in Restoration but it has a couple of critical paths that keep your available magicka high (which I imagine is particularly useful for a pure mage). That said, you might want to invest some points in that and Enchanting, so you can put some good magicka regen enchantments on your armor.

Yeah, I have a little progress in Restoration. I have the first rank of that perk that increases magicka regen. I also have both magicka cost reductions for Destruction and increased magicka regen from all of my gear, but it's still not really enough. This is definitely the weak point of playing pure mage.

[ThunderPeel2001]

As a fun excercise, I plan on drawing the map once I finish the game from my own experience, and then comparing it to the actual map. For science.

You'll have to post your map so we can all compare.

It sounds like an interesting way to play, my only personal fear would be hitting the invisible barrier... Or that the game wasn't designed well enough for me to make my way to important places with the map. (Can you ask people for directions?)

[JonCole]

You'll have to post your map so we can all compare.

It sounds like an interesting way to play, my only personal fear would be hitting the invisible barrier... Or that the game wasn't designed well enough for me to make my way to important places with the map. (Can you ask people for directions?)

There are signs on the road and stuff sometimes.

[ThunderPeel2001]

There are signs on the road and stuff sometimes.

Cool. In that case, playing it like Rodi is another thing that makes me want to play this game.