Skyrim (in Off-topic)

The game is UNBELIEVABLE!!!
Too bad it's a Steam game, but ... WAAAAAAAAW. It's amazing, I'm really at a loss for words on how to describe my 4 hours of experience with the game. Anybody who was doubting, rest assured, it is definitely worth the money.

This game is the best game I've ever played, only playing 3 hours into it, and if the main quest line is any good, it's going to beat Morrowind... It deserves game of the year for 2010, 2011, and 2012...

I shall be playing it by sometime tomorrow afternoon, I can't wait.

My first install kept crashing hope it works this time i still play oblivion to this day and played morrowind up till oblivion came out so i cant wait

i never played elder scrolls... i'll give it a try.

All worries I have had have been alleviated... this game is amazing.

well, i dont have it :(

http://kotaku.com/5858593/get-a-look-at-this-skyrim-360-console/gallery/1

Wait a minute, I thought it was available on PS3.

so i heard i can pirate it.. (pirates it)

Agreed, if it's such a great game, then the company that developed it definitely doesn't deserve to reap the profit from actual, paying customers.

u think, i actually get cash? all the cash i got is from collecting 3 years long.

your logic is sound

i never played elder scrolls... i'll give it a try.

what if your deaf... no logic :|

it's worthwhile, Gun. I still have Oblivion on my computer. If I had a machine that could actually run Skyrim, I'd definitely be getting it.

Ouch, my pride. Well played fellow troll. For the rest of you, was not speaking for myself.

Shame on you. Oblivion, despite the aged graphics, is still an amazing game. I didn't care for Morrowind, but many critics consider it one of the best games of all time.

Gun...who are you even talking to

Yes, it is available on PS3, as far as I know.

I had a GameStop gift cert burning a hole in my pocket so I snagged Demon's Souls earlier this week since it is a $20 "greatest hit". Skyrim will have to wait until Christmas, I think, going to ask for more gift certs!

I have almost 200 hours wrapped up in Oblivion. Great game. I'm at the point where I just walk around killing everything killable.

Well that's good, because if it's as great as everyone says, I'm going to need to check it out.

Sooo...does everyone here love Elder Scrolls games? I tried my best to like Morrowind and Oblivion but just couldn't get into them. Don't mean to come on here and troll, but I'm just letting the people who haven't played the games know that not everyone out there is a huge fan...despite what everyone else and all the reviews say. The game just wasn't for me (well, the last two. Can't speak for Skyrim).

One big question. Is it more like Morrowind or more like Oblivion?

Don't know. Never played one.

I'm just letting the people who haven't played the games know...

Listen up LB, that's where you come in. Also, Idk how to put the text in a blue box like that lol

T-Beck, I didn't like Morrowind. And to quote in blue bars, just type a closing bracket (>) followed by a single space and the quote.

I played enough Morrowind to enchant up some armour and weapons and go god mode...

Any game that allows me to travel around while invisible and kill stuff with one shot gets surprisingly uninteresting surprisingly fast...

Put an angle-bracket in front of the line you want to quote, like this: "> quoted text here."

Now that's funny!

Test Test... i just found out how to quote xD

Now you can steal other people's words.

And add text smiles, or "lol" to the end.

Everything in the Elder Scrolls series has been MASSIVE. Massive in content, massive in quality, massive in playability and hours logged. That is a franchise that is synonymous with every positive adjective in the dictionary.

Finally got a chance to start playing today.. I have only one gripe with the game so far, and that would be the new menu system. I find it incredibly awkward to navigate through with a mouse and keyboard, with the character creation menu being the least mouse friendly thing I've ever come across. Looks like I will be playing with a gamepad till a decent mod comes out that optimizes the menus for mouse/keyboard.

Visually the game looks great, I'm almost ashamed that this is the first game I've played that I cant run with everything completely maxed out, its so pretty looking.

That's all I've got so far.. I'm only like an hour into the game, so we'll see how it unfolds from here. I'm rather excited to dive backing another elder scrolls game, ignore the main quest, and wander the land stealing and killing my way to infamy.

I have it for the xbox.

The only complaint I have is the loading times. Especially in town when you enter multiple stores/inns.

I know a couple of you said you were playing through Steam, so...keep an eye on your statement.

The more I play the more I get frustrated with the long loading times.

It is really bad when you are in town and visit very building. About 1/5th of my playtime is waiting for loads.

I agree with the loading times, the dungeons are pretty epic though.

So is this another online MMO, or a single player thing?

All of the TES are single player.

I would have bought it so fast if it were an MMO

That's a plus in my book. I prefer single player.

This game is meant to be played on the PC, so loading times are going to be abysmal on a console.

I actually doubt it's that much worse on the console than it is the PC. Although I don't know why they don't load entire cities, including inside buildings, at once on the PC. It'd surely be able to handle it right? Then, there's no loading screens except from the "outside" to inside cities.

Did installing to the 360's hard drive help matters?

I'm playing on PC and I barely notice the load times at all, they are so short for me I don't even have time to read the little text blurb on the loading screen regardless of how short it is.

Oh and I take back what I said about the menu system. I had an issue that was making my mouse not work properly with the interface which I have since fixed, and now I'm absolutely loving it.

This game makes me want to drop the money on a new gfx card that's for sure, it looks absolutely spectacular. I'm running it on a gtx285 and I can only get it to run smoothly with custom settings between high/ultra and I had to take off AA for FXAA to get a much smoother frame rate and not tax my poor card to death. 4xAA was just too laggy in large area's and 2xAA looks worse the FXAA to me. I did however test the game completely maxed out, and besides my like 10 fps, it looked gorgeous.

Oh the days where I could max out games is already gone, I am sad.

Once I cleared the xbox cache, things sped up a lot.

How do you do that?

1. Go to My Xbox, and then select System Settings.
2. Select Memory.
3. Highlight the correct storage device and press Y on the controller.
4. Select Clear System Cache.
5. When prompted to confirm storage device maintenance, select Yes.

Alright, I'll give that a try when I get home. Thanks Ranger.

Sped loading times while in town to 5 secs on average.

Moving between locations is a bit longer but down from 30 sec to about 10 at most.

Damn that's a big difference... I'm gonna have to do that as well. Sounds like a good thing to do just in general, speed up all games load times a bit.

So I just encountered my first actual random dragon battle (IE: just wandering around) and what ensued was a 20+ minute epic fight between me, this dragon, and random 2 giants we ran into. I'm playing on expert and I'm only level 6 at this point. I was playing on master for the first few hours of the game, but I kept getting one shotted by monsters and it was entirely way too frustrating.

I wish I could have recorded this fight because not only was it awesome to begin with, but right towards the end of it I saw a second dragon flying in the distance. So what do you think happens by the time I finally kill the first dragon and both giants? That's right as soon as I start fleeing the area the second dragon comes swooping in and my insane fight and flight continues until I finally bring it down.

Anyone else fight some crazy battle like this yet?

So i just encountered my first giant... needless to say he knocked me back to Oblivion XD

I did some crazy jumping around to make my way up a steep mountain so I could kill a hawk in its nest. :P
I felt pretty accomplished, after that, lol.
I also killed a elk with a battleaxe! I only kill things if I can do it with my battleaxe!

On an unrelated note, I found a way to use my crazy mountain-goat-like jumping skills to completely scale a mountain and come down the other side. ^.^

Anyone went waterfall jumping yet? It's pretty fun, better make sure the water's deep on the bottom though :)

Just like in real life!

You ever tried to chase a fox down while carrying a two handed warhammer... it's not an easy task.

I tried to kill a fox with my battleaxe, but it ran away so fast that it disappeared before I even got close... Rabbits are pretty slow, though, so I kill them with my battleaxe, real easily!

I punched a chicken in town and got some bounty and the whole town tried to kill me was pretty annoying lol

I finally got into some serious battles today! One giant I lured into town where bounty hunters weakened it enough so that I got the last hit in. The next giant I killed with my battleaxe, alone and naked. I was much faster without my heavy armor on, so I was able to dodge its attacks much easier! I also killed 2 mammoths! Next, I killed all the guards in Whiterun and I'm working on killing all the people in every building, now :D
I'll be a nice guy with a different character, but I think of this as battle training!
One thing that I think really sucks is that some people you can't kill... They just get knocked to their knees and then pop back up with full health in a couple of seconds. Anyone know whats up with that?

Either part of the main quest or main storyline quest, where in killing them you'd be ruining that questline.

If you play it on the PC, one of the first things you should do is DISABLE the default-enabled "360 controller" option.
Allegedly it improves FPS by up to +50%, thanks to some questionable coding choices in the PC version.

Might get fixed in some patch, can't check, didn't get to play it before the honeymoon :P

^also there are a few nice quick ini tweak you can do if you play on the PC and have a decent rig that make the game look a little nicer.

I'm back to playing on master.. I'm telling you a Brenton Mage with the Atronach Stone activated is a beast indeed. Lots of my fights involve dodging and dashing around melee fighters healing and hitting them with shock when I can, then when I fight mages I just straight up tank the damage recover all my MP while I'm healing myself then just blast them back. The fights in this game are way more engaging and playing on the hardest difficulty just makes them that much more fun.

Try playing in windowed mode and you might see an increase in the speed of the game! I just tried doing that, so I could switch to CB and burn BA easier, and everything sped up!

Funny (profanity-laden, of course) Cracked article on Skyrim:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-personality-flaws-skyrim-forces-you-to-deal-with/

Yes Joel it's so you don't screw with the game in morrowind you could and it'd just tell ya you messed up and in oblivion they Made the important ones just
Get knocked out and If you get the steed stone it'll be like you don't have any armor on it's nice if you have heavy armor and it increases your encumbrance

Thanks for the tips, Seigehammer :D

I think I'm a vampire, now... I went into a mountain temple, or whatever, and I fought some vampires. I went all the way through the place, killed the Master Vampire, and gained my second powerword, but as the day broke I saw a message that stated something like "As the sun rises, you feel weakened". Then, night fell and a message popped up, after the screen was obscured in red for about a second, that said something like "As night falls you feel a strong thirst for blood." So, I think I'm a vampire now :P

I accidentally stumbled into some vamps as well, but I cured myself with a potion of cure disease before it could set in.. I also got the hell out of there as soon as I realized they were vamps because I'm way to early into the game to be going vamp yet.

I'm just sad I can't play at all until I'm able to get a new MoBo :(

Yep

You be a vampire. Some good stuff, but in the sunlight you get a lot of negatives depending on how "thirsty" you are.

I finally achieved level 25, and just joined the Dark Brotherhood. Now the fun starts. Sneaking and killing with my bow. The items you get from them are really nice. Big bonuses to stealth and archery.

I think the bow has the highest DPS and is a big overpowered esp with the time stop ability. Learning sneak a few times with the boost to sneak archery damage makes assassinations quite easy.

Yeah the bow is so op in this game big change from oblivion

Bow was OP in oblivion too... After level like 70 sneak I could shoot people with my bow, keep sneaking, and they'd forget I shot them...

Only archer I ever rolled was when oblivion first came out so I could be wrong but from what I remember it wasn't anything like in this game

I one shotted everyone but the bosses of quests, and 2 shotted them before they knew I was there... it was insanely op. But, they couldn't make sneak or archery worse individually, b/c then sneaking would be impossible for melee chars, and then archery would suck for any non-sneaking chars...

Yeah with sneak for sure I'm saying just straight up bow cuz on my 50 oblivion dude it'd take so many arrows to take an orge down archery wasn't maxed on that guy. Oblivion scaled way faster so maybe thats just what makes it seem way better at 50 in oblivion without the slider down it'd take me like 10min a mob the scaling was kinda outrageous

So, being a vampire, I have to drink blood? Do I drink blood automatically every time I kill someone, and it doesn't show it, or do I need to do something special to drink it?

I'd imagine you have to feed on the living muwahwahwahwah!

Try getting close to someone sleeping while sneaking and see what it says.

Heheh, alright!

You have to sneak up on an NPC to activate the drink blood ability.

I do not know if the NPC has to be sleeping.

As you get more and more blood thirst, you gain some special abilities.

I think I found a glitch with sprinting power attacks... If I do one, and then just keep clicking, while holding down the sprint button, then I can continue to do quick sprinting power attacks, even if I run out of stamina, until all my targets are dead. All I have to do is aim correctly and all the targets in the room will die quickly.

this game is like morowwind and oblivion had a baby and it is awwwwwwsome

I just defeated the lich Hevnoraak! I wasn't able to do enough damage to him using that glitch, before he blew me away with his lightning bolt attack, in two hits, so I backed off and decided to prepare first. I got all of the potions I had been saving, about 40, and I put on all my magic damage and shock damage reduction items, and then I went to go fight him again. I also used a glowing mushroom, before the fight, to make myself even more shock resistant, and I began the fight. After all that preparation... I beat him on the first try! I only used 6 minor health potions! He did so little damage to me, it became clear that damage reduction items are very important if you want to be able to beat tough enemies!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onOYn6d0Vas

" used alchemy to boost enchanting to boost alchemy to boost enchanting to boost alchemy to boost enchanting and then when the end of the logarithm was reached and no more progress could be made that way, i used both to boost smithing [...] over 1000 base damage bow "

:)

This post was about to fall off the page! Anyway, I wanna make a battleaxe using that technique Sickone posted :D

I have a set of 1047 armor (daedric heavy everything, including shield) after all relevant heavy armor perks but before any spells :P

Did some more research and apparently, physical damage reduction is capped at -80% (only take 1/5 physical damage), and that cap is already reached at 567 displayed armor rating, so anything beyond that is useless.

Ah, its good to know about that maximum, thanks!
On an unrelated note, I have found another very minor glitch: I seem to have an arrow, permanently, sticking out of my chest :D

Well my PC is finally back up and running and I just stumbled into one of the quest line Dragon fights, but considering that I'm playing on Master I've decided that I'm going to record it and toss it up on youtube for you guys to enjoy.

Try selling all the arrows you are carrying, or drop them and pick them back up, that does the trick in the other game.

So I FRAPSed that last fight.. and I had it set to record at full resolution.. I now have an 8 minute video that is 20GBs -_-

Get HandBrake and recompress as x264 video.
http://handbrake.fr/downloads.php

Might take a while (depending on quality of encoding chosen) but you can compress that to a tiny fraction of the original size (depending on both quality of encoding and selected options).

I think the older "stable" 0.9.5 release on the main site might not handle frapsed footage (no support for decoding on that particular coded), but one of the latest "nightly builds" ( https://build.handbrake.fr/ ) should be able to (I am using a medium-old nightly build myself).

Anyone still playing?

Tonight I finally got my Dragon Armor.

Incredible game, however, archery is too powerful compared to 1H and 2H weapon usage. Distance factors in a lot.

Yeah, archery is too good I agree, patch is coming out soon: http://www.pcworld.com/article/245089/new_skyrim_patch_12_fixes_all_kinds_of_stuff.html

I'm still playing and still loving it, haven't had a lot of time, but I've done a lot of the guild quests.

I intend to give a 100-hour whirl after the holidays. I've been looking forward to this game for a while, just haven't had the time.

When are you going to do the other 60% of the quests for one char :P

I typically do not have time either, but being between jobs finally gives me a lot of free time. And the wife is just spectacular about things. Letting me get a crash course in playing before starting the new job.

I've surprisingly not played since my last post, but that's only because I've been distracted by LoL once again. (Just one more game.. just one more..)

Perhaps I'll jump back into it this weekend and start to rack up the hours again.

Archery, heh.
Magic supported by multi-enchanted armor to reduce casting cost to ZERO for the entire magic school (preferably destruction, but conjuration also works, and you CAN enchant two schools at the same time with the proper enchanting perks), spamming any magic attack as soon as you can ready it.
Now, THAT is some serious damage.

I am sure magic is great. I have my bow up to 360 damage. Does quite a bit of damage when I am in stealth mode and get a critical. About 2k damage max.

daggers are OP to, i remember that u can boost em up to 200 damage with tons of enchants and spells and such, dual wield them and have 15x critical with them with sneak. if dual wield works for crit thats 400x15= 6K crit. :|

And there's some gears specific for assassination that make that x15 into a x30 IIRC... not quite 12k damage since you have to give up some other pieces of gear, but around 9k-ish quite possible, I guess.

One of my problems with Skyrim is that the difficulty doesn't honestly go high away once your character is very well developed. i run around in a shield/heavy armor build with restoration and I find myself basically unkillable.

Turn the difficulty up?

It goes Higher than Master?

Play a different build and put limitations upon yourself! Go with light armor and sneak to kill everything, or use double-wielding with light armor, like me :D
Yes, I'm now an Orc that is following the main storyline, instead of a Redguard that kills everything that moves, lol.

The enemy level no longer scales like in Oblivion, it scales like in Fallout 3.
That means that the first time you encounter some enemy in some new location, their power is adjusted based on your current level and it STAYS there for the rest of the game.

If you want to make it more challenging than you had it up until now... up your level a lot by doing side-stuff first. Like, say, max out your enchanting, alchemy, smithing and other not-directly-combat skills before doing too much fighting so that your level is as high as possible when you first enter new areas ?

I have. It's just not that hard. it's not WAY too easy, it's just not as hard as I'd prefer it.

Are you playing on the PC or on a console ?
If you're playing on the PC, you're in luck, you can pretty much tweak just about anything.

For instance, you can open the console and...
player.advlevel
to increase your level (without ANY benefits) so that the enemies scale up faster.

Or just get one of the "make skyrim harder" mods.
Like, say, this one:
http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=852
Or many more from that site.


...if you play on the console, tough luck.

Awesome!!! Mods already!?!? I'm gonna try that one out as soon as I can complete 5 quests in a row without dying or reloading. :P

I'm waiting till the actual creation kit is released before I start delving into the mod scene again, the majority of the mods out right now are graphical tweaks. I'm waiting for the good stuff.