Still here, still playing Skyrim, just got frustrated with mages and ragequit that character for a while to go play one who distrusts magic. I've been coming back around to the magic system lately, though, so I'll get back to playing him soon. For now, just some random thoughts:
Radiant questing - I thought this was super-awesome when I first started playing, and I still think it's interesting. But now that I've played enough Skyrim to see through all the fancy randomization and recognize when I'm being given a radiant quest, it seems a lot more repetitive and less awesome. I still think it has it's place, but it's frustrating for people who go for 100% completion.
Random events - On a related note, random events you come across on the road...yeah. Good concept, seemed amazing the first time I encountered each of them, but after that point it rapidly got old. Two examples: first, the old orc. Now, anyone who's played Morrowind might figure out where this is going, even without encountering him in Skyrim. My experience in Skyrim(highlight to read spoilers): I encountered him on the road, and agreed to give him an honorable death. We drew our weapons, and I slew him. No fancy loot, so it was actually a bit of a let down - I was honestly expecting something Umbra-like. However, what really bugs me is that this event continues to spawn even after he's been killed - I encountered him again 5-10 minutes later on the same road. How many death-seeking orcs are there in Skyrim? My other weird experience concerns the random event of the Alik'r warriors speaking to the Redguard woman. Again, highlight the spoilers: Even after my completion of In My Time Of Need(Saadia's side), this event continued to spawn for me. The Alik'r should have gone back to Hammerfall once I'd killed their leader, right? I think that the events could have been solved by including a greater variety with the game, having them spawn less often, and including some checks for some of them(to make them one-off, or stop happening after a quest was completed).
Crafting skills - Don't get me wrong, I love my crafting skills. But I feel that, when all three are taken full advantage of at once, they're extremely overpowered. I almost feel like you should be allowed to smith, or be allowed to enchant, and not both. That just seems to lead to über-gear, especially when you add in enchanting and blacksmithing boosts gained through alchemy. I do really like the alchemy system in Skyrim, though, and I think that in the hands of a proper role-player these issues are nonexistent. I guess I shouldn't let what silly people do for lulz on youtube bother me, even if it is overpowered to the point of being an exploit.
NPCs with no sense of direction - So, I'll go off following some NPC for a quest, and everything'll be fine, until they start running off in the wrong direction for a while before realizing their error and turning back around to go the right way. Bit silly. Delphine was a pretty bad offender with this, oh, and speaking of Delphine and A Blade in the Dark(highlight the spoilers!): so, she wanted to see me kill a dragon to prove I was the Dragonborn, right? So on our way there, we totally pwn a dragon. She's super unimpressed by this feat, but once I kill the one at the burial ground, she's all worshiping the ground I walk on. Way to pay attention, lady.
Dragons - Pain in the ass for meelee-only characters. I flirted with taking up archery on my warrior, but decided against it because it went against the character so strongly. But it's hard to get that dragon on the ground! I found that sometimes they won't land at all if you're in a tight place, like on a bridge or on very mountainous terrain. So you sometimes have to run quite a distance, with them breathing fire/ice down on your head, before you can find a place where you can actually fight them. Loving the early-game loot drops though, I can go ahead and sell it all since I'm nowhere near the point in the game where I'll be making my dragon armor set. However, that brings me to...
Wealth - It's way too easy to end up filthy rich in this game. In Oblivion, I had to scrimp and save to buy my first shack in the waterfront district. In Skyrim, I do like four quests and I can go ahead and buy it. It costs something like 7.5k fully upgraded, comparable with Oblivion's cost, but unlike in Oblivion 7.5k is nothing to raise, even at low levels. In Oblivion, I could only get my hands on that kind of cash during the early game if I was playing a thief character who looted every home they could get their hands on. In Skyrim, I was swimming in gold by level 10. I've been sitting comfortably between 20k and 25k for the past several levels(the warrior I've been playing is level 18). Admittedly, I haven't been paying for training, as I haven't felt that any of my skills are lagging terribly far behind, and besides I never really got in the habit of paying for training in Morrowind or Oblivion. But still, that's a lot of gold.
Ansilvund - This is my favorite dungeon so far. I was sent there by a radiant quest from Windhelm. Location: southeast of Windhelm, follow the signs towards Riften through the lowlands and then climb a hill up a dirt path. It's right near a Dwemer ruin, if you find that one then you need to go back to the path and keep going up. Contents: mages and draugr. I really enjoyed the level design, and felt that the dungeon's "gimmick"(finding out that the hated legend of Fjori and Holgeir was actually true!) worked well. Also, the boss fight at the end was pretty challenging for my particular character build - your mileage may very.
Male character models - So ugly! What is it with the hands and arms? The females are so much more natural-looking. I haven't been playing chicks because they're hot, it's more that they're actively not horrifying from 3rd person back view.
User interface - Still sucks. But I found a neat mod called SkyUI that takes care of a lot of the suckage on the inventory page; they're still working on the other parts of the interface. I downloaded it, and it works and looks great. Check it out here, on Skyrim Nexus. Also, just fyi, you can actually zoom in on things in your inventory by hovering your mouse over the image and spinning your mousewheel. The first claw puzzle in Bleak Falls Barrow was a bitch before I figured that out, I was squinting at my screen and trying to figure out what all those tiny pictures were supposed to be. Maybe I'm just stupid, I don't know, but I figured I'd toss that out there in case anyone else reading this is similarly stupid.
That was more random thoughts than I thought I was going to have, sorry. Before I end this overly-long and rambling post, I want to share a very interesting YouTube channel that I came across earlier today. Check out HostMikePushkin's Skyrim tutorials playlist. Obviously I haven't checked them all out, as there's a lot of content on there for almost every type of character, but he seems to have his head screwed on properly and approaches things more maturely than most of the youtube crowd. Also, I'm really loving his accent.
It looks like WoHP's been reset now(had to ask Calan to do that, I'd managed to pwn an important ladder while attempting to set up some stuff for this weekend...I swear, my time DMing there is just a huge list of things I've fucked up, I'm surprised they keep me), so I should get back to working there. I do have a Let's Play post written, as soon as I can get over the horribleness of the screenshots and add them in I'll get that posted. Happy last days of 2011!
4 comments:
I love how, as I read stuff, I slowly forget the earlier parts as I read on. But, whatever, I actually do remember something I wanted to say/agree on.
Crafting! I played an Argonian warrior, and thus naturally worked on my crafting. I considered light armour for a short while, but quickly decided on a rather strange argonian, and went with heavy. So I work on my smithing, eventually get daedric stuff, improve it a little, and... I've no idea how to do spoiler warnings in a comment, possibly because I suck at HTML, but my craft stuff is way better than anything I can find, even daedric artifacts. Which I find horribly lame. It's not like most enchantments really make any difference.
Another thing I just remembered. Not regarding your post, but is it just me, or is stamina absolutely useless? Maybe I'm just too used to/fond of Morrowind, but it recharges way too fast, and the only times it gets used is for power attacks (which often aren't very good, especially if you dual-wield one-handers).
Admittedly, I can't remember if archers use it or not, but I'm quite sure mages don't. So the only reason to increase stamina would be to get extra carrying capicity, but for that you can always just use a companion, since they NEVER DIE, unless you actually try to get them killed.
If you level smithing, you'll never use dropped mundane equipment again. If you level enchanting as well, you're an overpowered character who just ruined all drops in the game for yourself.
Stamina is essential for characters who wield 2-handed weapons. Power attacks do suck for one-handed weapons, they're not really the focus of that combat style. But 2-handed weapons rely on power attacks to deal large amounts of damage, and the fast regeneration is necessary to be able to consistently use them in combat(since a single power attack will take out 1/4-1/3 of my stamina bar at level 18, and I usually have to hit each enemy with one(sometimes two) before they're weak enough for me to finish them off with a normal swing). Also, stamina is used to sprint, which has combat applications, again, in 2-handed weapon combat.
Are you sure that companions never die? I find them annoying, so I don't use them, but I keep reading stories about how they run ahead and get themselves killed off. Also, the unlimited capacity of followers is a bug, I'm pretty sure...don't you have to do something pretty exploity involving item stacks to trigger it?
I've never had unlimited item capacity, they just have so much capacity, I never really need more. As for them dying, they'll 99% of the time, get half-down (on their knee) before they're actually finished off, at which points mobs just completely ignore them until they're back up again. I think I've only had a companion die once or twice without it was myself who accidentially did it.
As for stamina, admittedly, I haven't tried two-handed weapons, as I didn't like them in the other games, but I suppose they may be favourable over one-handers in Skyrim. Shields never seem to do much good, aside from the bash to interrupt power attacks.
I also never really bother with sprinting. I didn't even know about it until hours into the game.
Ah. Well, I don't use companions anyway, because they're annoying, so there. :p
I don't know what the "optimal" meelee weapon configuration is for Skyrim. All I know is that the character I'm playing now uses greatswords, because I'm one of those silly role players. >_>
Everyone keeps raving about dual wield, though, so I get the sense that that's the optimal strategy this game.
I learned about sprinting because at around level 50 2-handed the most powerful attack for greatswords unlocks...which involves sprinting. I probably never would have really used it if I hadn't had to in order to deal awesome critical damage.
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