V The Elder Scrolls

[Tanukitsune]

Yeah, something similar has happened to me. The quests all seem to be disconnected and quite linear. Not a lot of different ways to solve them. Sometimes you have two choices, and that's it. But they are usually not completely broken either, just that you might have either more or less information than the game is expecting.

Lockpicking is easy in this game. It seems half the time I pick a lock, I end up having more lockpicks than I started with (many locked chests contain a few picks). I currently have about a 100 lockpicks so I can easily waste 5 or so on a lock without much worry.

Yeah, it's silly, I had so many I found a master level lock and wasted a few on purpose just to raise my lockpicking level raise faster.

I think the QD Inventory mod might have messed up my game, I'm not able to enchant items, I have enchantments, filled soul gems and items that can be enchanted, but when I choose all three I don't see a "craft option" or anything new!

EDIT:

Never mind, apparently it was because I was using the 360 controller, once I turned it off the craft option appeared.

Edited December 18, 2011 by Tanukitsune

[Brannigan]

Man, the Thieve's Guild questline is awful. You steal like three things for them and

suddenly you're the greatest thief anyone in the guild has ever seen and you deserve not only to lead them, but to be given the power of the god Nocturnal, a privilege granted to members of thieves guild, apparently, once in periods of centuries.

It's like Bethesda wanted to convey what it feels like to be part of a seedy criminal organization, but didn't have the patience to make anything that does that effectively.

I haven't done the mage's college yet, but of the guilds I've done, only the dark brotherhood makes any sense as to why you end up leader.

[Garple]

Man. No offence to any Elder Scrolls fans, but seeing this list really reminds me that I hate their universe. It just seems so bland. Maybe you have to play it for a long time before it becomes more compelling, but I remember reading the booklet that came with Oblivion, with all the history of the world in it, and it was SO dull and uninteresting that I couldn't take any of it in.

That's how I felt about Dragon Age.

[JonCole]

I haven't done the mage's college yet, but of the guilds I've done, only the dark brotherhood makes any sense as to why you end up leader.

Response regarding the Companions, don't click if you haven't completed that storyline.

Well, considering that there's no real "leader" in the Companions, I feel like that guild questline makes a bit of sense. Kodlak and later the Dragonborn are the Harbingers, which is essentially the most respected member who acts more like a counselor or adviser. This is evidenced in practice with the actions of Aela and Skjor; while Kodlak didn't necessarily approve of their extermination of the Silver Hand, he couldn't order them to act differently since all Companions are equal. It makes sense that the Dragonborn would become the chief adviser after exterminating the Silver Hand, reforging the artifact central to the guild's history, and directly honoring the memory of the previous Harbinger.

While Skyrim might not have the best story in the world, I feel like there's generally an internal logic which governs the separate story threads. That alone does a good enough job for me in keeping the plot relatively cohesive with respect to many other open world games.

[subbes]

[elmuerte]

LOL

[Erkki]

I'm getting kind of tired of Skyrim. I've played 50 hours (and I only got it a bit more than week ago!) so clearly it has something going for it. But in that 50 hours, I suspect I've seen only about a quarter of it (Whiterun, Markath, Windhelm, some places in between, and I've done only half of the quests given to me in Windhelm so far).

It's definitely better than Oblivion, but the formula is the same since Morrowind -- explore, do quests, head back to town to sell stuff before you become encumbered. And worse, often I want to store stuff at my home, but I only have a home in Whiterun so far, so quite often I will end up making my way back there, encumbered, on a horse, and on the way there will be events that make me get off my horse and fight, and I will find more loot off the bodies and become more encumbered.

And the world is still quite generic fantasy with lots of similar places, just this time it's are a bit more interesting (than Oblivion). It's a good game, but I wish they took a different direction in next games -- having less filler. Maybe I'm playing it wrong by collecting that much loot. I guess Dragon bones/scales take the most of the weight limit, but I'm assuming I'll be able to craft something from them eventually.

[Gwardinen]

It's definitely better than Oblivion, but the formula is the same since Morrowind -- explore, do quests, head back to town to sell stuff before you become encumbered. And worse, often I want to store stuff at my home, but I only have a home in Whiterun so far, so quite often I will end up making my way back there, encumbered, on a horse, and on the way there will be events that make me get off my horse and fight, and I will find more loot off the bodies and become more encumbered.

And the world is still quite generic fantasy with lots of similar places, just this time it's are a bit more interesting (than Oblivion). It's a good game, but I wish they took a different direction in next games -- having less filler. Maybe I'm playing it wrong by collecting that much loot. I guess Dragon bones/scales take the most of the weight limit, but I'm assuming I'll be able to craft something from them eventually.

I go back and forth on whether the whole carry weight system is a good idea. It does promote less totally insanely unrealistic behaviours at times, but a fairly equal amount of time it just ends up promoting other behaviours that aren't much more sensible and are considerably more time consuming and irritating. It's become OK to me that I'm able to carry a ton of shit in games at this point. Until we have a genuinely much better inventory and economy system in games in general, I'm all right with the idea that I can just carry whatever I need to carry.

Encumbrance does not qualitatively improve my play experience. So I essentially turned it off (console commands to increase my carry weight beyond the point at which it matters). I rarely recommend anything that could be classed as "cheating" in a game like this, as it really survives on you buying into a certain amount of hardship and beyond that buying into the consistency of the world as an "other" to yourself. However, having thought about how I played the game before and how I play the game now, I can honestly say I enjoy it more without encumbrance.

In my case I just didn't want to be penalised for spending a lot of time outside of Holds, and for questing geograhically. By which I mean just going in the direction of something that is nearby and relevant to me, and exploring things I came upon on the way and then continuing in any given direction as long as there is a sensible reason (within the quests and so on I'd already taken on) to do so. That's hardly what I'd call really hardcore wilderness exploring, particularly in a game like Skyrim, but I was constantly either having to interrupt it or just abandon a bunch of items (some of which would be important to skilling up for me) everywhere I went.

Additional reason: stopping to read every single book everywhere I went was totally screwing with the pacing of the game for me. So now I carry a lot of books with me, allowing me to read them when it feels thematically appropriate or when I feel like a change of pace. Books are not weightless.

[Wubbles]

It seems like Bethesda has spent their last few development cycles working on improving the parts of their games that have the most visceral impact on the play experience (physics, animations, graphics, voice acting) while dodging around what ought to be the most important part of the Bethesdan experience - storytelling. They've certainly improved hugely since Oblivion, Morrowind, and Fallout, especially in terms of non-dialogue-based storytelling, but I don't understand why so much of the writing put into Skyrim is still so bad.

I suppose pacing is a large part of the problem Skyrim. I wonder if Bethesda worries that players'll get bored of the same themes after a while, so they try to keep questlines short, expecting players to move on to different ones.

[Sno]

I'm getting kind of tired of Skyrim. I've played 50 hours (and I only got it a bit more than week ago!) so clearly it has something going for it. But in that 50 hours, I suspect I've seen only about a quarter of it (Whiterun, Markath, Windhelm, some places in between, and I've done only half of the quests given to me in Windhelm so far).

It's definitely better than Oblivion, but the formula is the same since Morrowind -- explore, do quests, head back to town to sell stuff before you become encumbered. And worse, often I want to store stuff at my home, but I only have a home in Whiterun so far, so quite often I will end up making my way back there, encumbered, on a horse, and on the way there will be events that make me get off my horse and fight, and I will find more loot off the bodies and become more encumbered.

And the world is still quite generic fantasy with lots of similar places, just this time it's are a bit more interesting (than Oblivion). It's a good game, but I wish they took a different direction in next games -- having less filler. Maybe I'm playing it wrong by collecting that much loot. I guess Dragon bones/scales take the most of the weight limit, but I'm assuming I'll be able to craft something from them eventually.

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 go back and forth on whether the whole carry weight system is a good idea. It does promote less totally insanely unrealistic behaviours at times, but a fairly equal amount of time it just ends up promoting other behaviours that aren't much more sensible and are considerably more time consuming and irritating. It's become OK to me that I'm able to carry a ton of shit in games at this point. Until we have a genuinely much better inventory and economy system in games in general, I'm all right with the idea that I can just carry whatever I need to carry.

Encumbrance does not qualitatively improve my play experience. So I essentially turned it off (console commands to increase my carry weight beyond the point at which it matters). I rarely recommend anything that could be classed as "cheating" in a game like this, as it really survives on you buying into a certain amount of hardship and beyond that buying into the consistency of the world as an "other" to yourself. However, having thought about how I played the game before and how I play the game now, I can honestly say I enjoy it more without encumbrance.

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.)

In my case I just didn't want to be penalised for spending a lot of time outside of Holds, and for questing geograhically. By which I mean just going in the direction of something that is nearby and relevant to me, and exploring things I came upon on the way and then continuing in any given direction as long as there is a sensible reason (within the quests and so on I'd already taken on) to do so. That's hardly what I'd call really hardcore wilderness exploring, particularly in a game like Skyrim, but I was constantly either having to interrupt it or just abandon a bunch of items (some of which would be important to skilling up for me) everywhere I went.

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.

Additional reason: stopping to read every single book everywhere I went was totally screwing with the pacing of the game for me. So now I carry a lot of books with me, allowing me to read them when it feels thematically appropriate or when I feel like a change of pace. Books are not weightless.

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.)

It seems like Bethesda has spent their last few development cycles working on improving the parts of their games that have the most visceral impact on the play experience (physics, animations, graphics, voice acting) while dodging around what ought to be the most important part of the Bethesdan experience - storytelling. They've certainly improved hugely since Oblivion, Morrowind, and Fallout, especially in terms of non-dialogue-based storytelling, but I don't understand why so much of the writing put into Skyrim is still so bad.

I suppose pacing is a large part of the problem Skyrim. I wonder if Bethesda worries that players'll get bored of the same themes after a while, so they try to keep questlines short, expecting players to move on to different ones.

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.

[Sno]

Yeah, something similar has happened to me. The quests all seem to be disconnected and quite linear. Not a lot of different ways to solve them. Sometimes you have two choices, and that's it. But they are usually not completely broken either, just that you might have either more or less information than the game is expecting.

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.

[elmuerte]

Sno is rigt, you should loot everything, it's no good. Well, only in the beginning it might be useful. Just collect gems, expensive jewelry, occasional potions, and unique items. Enchanted battlehammer? Unless you are going to use it, leave it. Way too heavy and doesn't earn you much money.

You should really watch your potion and scroll intake. I really have a shit load of them but I rarely use them.

[Sno]

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

[Erkki]

I do not collect everything. Well, besides the valuable stuff (I do wish the game would actually display the weight/gold ratio) I do try to grab most magical weapons though, so I could learn the enchantments. Usually it turns out something I already know as I can't remember what I already learned.

Most of the ingredients should be weightless, though! They made that conceit for arrows (thank god!) so why not for ingredients? Also I have a lot of potions -- you never know when you need 'em (and I'm not just saying that, I've actually used most of them and been selling the ones I don't use).

I wear heavy armor, battleaxe, bow, + a heavy one-hander for emergencies. With all the loot sold/stashed, all this with the potions and ingredients adds up to weight/max of 270/370 (and I have taken most level ups for Stamina, currently level 25 I think).

[edit]

But then, if the ingredients thing was fixed (sometimes I just resort to eating random ingredients that I have more than a couple of to drop weight) and perhaps if potions were lighter, I wouldn't mind the system so much -- it absolutely makes sense that you can't carry everything around. And it was better when Lydia was still alive, I could load some stuff on to her. But she died during a fight in Markath and I decided to let her be dead instead of quickloading because she had annoyingly little to say about things.

[Erkki]

Also, I'm not sure how the game levels up enemies, but sometimes it seems that Heavy Armor is not that useful (and that the game takes armor rating into consideration when leveling enemies). For example, when I'm wearing the best armor I've seen so far and a Forsworn with two swords can kill me in 3-4 hits or one with a bow can kill me in 5, I'm thinking why didn't I go for light armor (but now I've leveled heavy armor up so much that it seems too late to go for light).

[Sno]

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.

[Brannigan]

Also, I'm not sure how the game levels up enemies, but sometimes it seems that Heavy Armor is not that useful (and that the game takes armor rating into consideration when leveling enemies). For example, when I'm wearing the best armor I've seen so far and a Forsworn with two swords can kill me in 3-4 hits or one with a bow can kill me in 5, I'm thinking why didn't I go for light armor (but now I've leveled heavy armor up so much that it seems too late to go for light).

By the end of my 2 hander run, my character was pretty much invincible in heavy armor, only magic could hurt me.

[Gwardinen]

I don't necessarily agree that gold is always going to be bountiful. That may be true for certain characters, but I've had plenty of problems affording the things I want. Most notably, certain skills are quite difficult to level unless you seek training, and training is very expensive. I'm at a point now where my Conjuration skill is lagging seriously behind everything else, but realistically I only use it to summon one atronach per every three fights (and again since doing this before the fight doesn't count I either have to wait and use a bunch of magicka right off the bat or use it beforehand and not get the skill increase), and using soul trap on whichever things I need soul gem souls for. I am not getting a lot of Conjuration increases just dynamically at this point.

As a result, I'm relying more and more on training to keep the skill up, which means I absolutely require as much gold as I can get. Meanwhile, I'm also trying to increase Smithing and Enchanting, which I could do by very slowly gathering the needed items or much faster by buying them. The pace I prefer to go at in this kind of game dictates that I (at least occasionally) buy such things. I'm 60 hours in for god's sake, the honeymoon period of not minding when certain things require a great deal of time staring at menus and searching dungeons I have no real story investment in for miscellaneous ingredients for the sake of levelling skills has kind of worn off. That's always been the weakest part of this game for me, but that requires a different post entirely.

I'm well aware that there are tips and tricks I can use to help myself out, like only smithing one thing or enchanting one type of enchantment, like abusing the fact that soul trap works and generates skill even when used on a corpse, like just using the wait function to farm soul gems from certain restocking dungeons. However, if I go down those roads, why not just open up the console and give myself the damn skills? I prefer to have my skills raise organically within the systems present, but it just so happens that one particular lynchpin that was stymieing me was the carry weight. Since I carry all the aforementioned books, not to mention a bunch of smithed goods that I'm waiting to enchant/sell (let's not even talk about the weird behaviours that come out of fast travelling around to every Hold to sell shit) and have no stamina upgrades due to being a pure mage, my scope for things I could realistically find and carry in addition was very small. I happened to think disabling this one part of the system was better than breaking all the other parts for what I wanted to get out of the game.

All of that said, I have mentioned before and I'm willing to reiterate that usually the best experience in these sorts of games comes from working within as many systemic limitations as you can be happy about. So I'm not saying the rest of you are crazy for living with encumbrance; quite the opposite. I'm saying I wish I could, but for how I desire to play this game and how I think I will enjoy it most, that was one compromise that had to be made to save many other systems.

[Orv]

When it comes to armor, the unassailable fact of the math is, light armor is better. It's a lighter load, the perks come out to be as good or better than heavy armor, and as much as I love Dwarven, godsdamn Dragonscale looks good.

As for scrolls/potions. My rule of thumb is I pick 'em all up, and if I don't use them after either an hour of play or three dungeons, I head back to town and sell them or toss them.

[Squid Division]

Using Bound Sword, my Conjuration is through the roof. Plus it levels up my one-handed too.

[Thyroid]

Using Bound Sword, my Conjuration is through the roof. Plus it levels up my one-handed too.

First thing I read this morning, and it registered as being really, really dirty. Seeing I'm not still not awake...can't tell if that was intentional or not.

[Sno]

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.)

[Tanukitsune]

I've only been playing for 20 hours and I'm getting a bit tired, I'm getting tired of the dungeons, they all look the same to me.

Fortunately, I finally encountered a dwarven one for the first time, which brought me to the second thing that's beginning to annoy me. EVERY dungeon I've encountered lately seems to have a puzzle at the end! Please tell me this was just a coincidence....

My next mission in in a place called "Laberynithium" or something like that, which sounds like I'm going to hate the dungeon.

[Erkki]

I think the economy is fucked up. I know they are trying to make things realistic, but there are already so many conceits anyway that it's not worth it. You don't have to eat or shit, and so on. So what does it matter that a merchant has the amount of gold on his person or somewhere -- I'm assuming they have as little gold as they have to support thief characters? They could just have infinite cold and give only a little of that when robbed.

[Tanukitsune]

At least it's not like other games where items cost more or less depending on demand, if you have 50 gold rings, they would buy them for less and less...

It seems Skyrim is must better when you aren't in a dungeon, I'm having fun doing silly fetch quests or non-dungeon quests, but aren't dungeon quests technically fetch quests? You are there to fetch an item, except they take 30 minutes to complete and have a puzzle at the end.

Invisibility is useless in this game, I'm trying to use it in the thieves' guild quest and they can still see me!