Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

[Dallen68]

Back on the skills/attributes vs. perk tree thing: (sorry for being late to the party)IMPO: It would be ideal for the player to choose "nothing" in this regard. I would set it up so your just "a character" for like the first 3 or so levels, and how you play determines what your class, major skills, and major attributes are. After that, your play would determine what "perks"you get. Ideally, the player wouldn't "know" about perks that don't apply to him. Sometimes, you'd have a minor choice to make; such as birthsign or getting some specific training.

[AndalayBay]

I thought I heard somewhere that that's what they did. You select very little about your character to start and it sees how you play to set everything up. Now I could be misunderstanding things entirely - that happens when you reach my age :lol:I just hope they do it better than what they attempted in Oblivion. I have absolutely no idea what the tutorial character gen thing looks at, but I think it's suggested Acrobat to me pretty much every time.

[Arthmoor]

The Oblivion tutorial is supposed to go by the skills you used while getting to that point. I don't think I've ever had it suggest acrobat at all. I've had it suggest agent, mage, and warrior, but have never managed to get it to suggest one of the more specialized classes.

[Dwip]

I got a lot of acrobat and agent and I think nightblade. Even for guys I played totally differently outside the tutorial. Game in general rewards stealth-based play a lot, but the nature of being level 1 really REALLY rewards it.My understanding of the perk thing is that Todd said in as many words that it's pretty much going to be like Fallout, but I guess we'll know when we have the game in hand.Per graphics discussion, this comment by a guy named wererogue on Twenty-Sided makes a lot of sense to me.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

Well that's nice. Problem is' date=' it's true, and even Todd has said as much. They're doing this to draw in more casual gamers, who are typically console users. PC users are becoming an increasingly more "hardcore" crowd of gamer.

That said, I think the kind of console gamer that brought all this on (not you Kayle, obviously) is dragging the rest of us all down to the lowest level. Gaming quality in general is being stifled by 5-7 year old hardware. For God sake, we're all still using DX9. Features get cut from games so they'll run on the infernal Xbox 360 and it's paultry 512MB of RAM, in an age where 2GB is now considered minimal and 64 bit operating systems are the norm - not the exception. Probably the only thing that's of any relief is that the Xbox 360 is a tri-core processor and companies woke up one day to realize this and most recent titles will take advantage of more than one core if you have them. Hello massive performance improvement in Fallout 3 vs Oblivion.

When the 720 comes along and runs DX11 with a decent amount of memory and a good video system, we'll be far less likely to be generally upset by the situation.[/quote']The 720 (idiot name, btw) is unlikely to solve the core problem - buttons vs keyboard and mouse.Any game that has to be ported to a console is inherently restricted in the things it can do because it has a prohibative limit on its control set up. You could never do X-Wing on the XBox because fitting the 20 different targeting functions, ELS, map and weapon management - not to mention wingman control - onto a console's gamepad is imposible. This tends to dumb down games in terms of mechanics, that's not too bad if the game is a straight FPS - but if that FPS happens to be Flashpoint you've got problems. So either you gimp the poor bastard console gamer or you cut down and streamline the system, accept limitations but have a working model for everyone.In the case of TES, what Todd Howard has clearly decided is that he wants to move from a D&Desque system where you create you character and then play them to a Fableesque one where you get a blank slate and then develop your character from there. The problem with that being that in Fable you always start out as the same person and become someone different, TES has moved in the opposite direction now, start out as someone different and end up the same person, every time.That's why we've moved from stats and skills to skills and feats, sorry, I meant to say perks. It's still only 2/3rds of a system though.

[AndalayBay]

The Oblivion tutorial is supposed to go by the skills you used while getting to that point. I don't think I've ever had it suggest acrobat at all. I've had it suggest agent' date=' mage, and warrior, but have never managed to get it to suggest one of the more specialized classes.[/quote']I've never had it suggest mage or warrior. I think I've had it suggest Agent, which wasn't too bad. I run everywhere - I never have it toggled off. I also sneak and use magic. I run SM, so you can do magic sneak attacks. But I run when sneaking The walk pace is too slow for me and drives me crazy! I use the sword every once in a while too. And I wear light armour.Oh well, we'll see what Skyrim does.

[Dallen68]

Well, kind of. Oblivion does make a suggestion at the end of the tutorial, but mine would be more comprehensive than that; which is why you'd be level 3 before being assigned a class. Some of it would be how you handle combat situations (which is what it is now), some of it would be how you respond to certain questions, (except it wouldn't be a one-off interview like in Morrowind); some of it would be how you spent your "free" (as in non-combat) time.I've gotten a wide variety of things from the Oblivion one. But normally I'm still level 1 when I get out of there. How I handle it in my head is the same as I handled it in Daggerfall and Morrowind: whatever class it gives you is the education your parents paid for; and may or may not have anything to do with the rest of the game.

[Thomas Kaira]

Clearly I watched an entirely different prequel trilogy from what you two describe because aside from Jar-jar it was all perfectly fine.

Perhaps this dinosaur should venture over to Red Letter Media and listen to a psychopathic, pizza-roll craving, senile old fart explain in great detail exactly why the prequels sucked in comparison to the original movies.Seriously, this guy makes some really good points.

[Arthmoor]

Or no, maybe this dinosaur won't do that because this dinosaur doesn't care what another dinosaur thought of a good trilogy. Honestly, I don't get the bashing AT ALL.

[Thomas Kaira]

But he analyzed the films with a team of cheerleaders, who all came to one unanimous conclusion......that if he let them go they wouldn't tell anyone. :tongue:

[AndalayBay]

Now I remember why I hated those movies so much! That's ok, I will promptly purge it all again. But I will remember not to waste my money on buying them...

[prettyfly]

The original Star Wars movies were rightly hailed for their revolutionary brilliance at the time, but, seriously, take that away today and there's not to much left going for them. Well, actually, my main gripe is that the story is so ridiculously detached from whatever else is going on in the galaxy at the same time (the rest of the stuff isn't cliche because George was the first to use it).The new ones failed to do anything revolutionary like the original trilogy did, but they did do away with the main problem I had with the original trilogy. Which leads me to conclude that...how is it possible to compare these movies properly in the first place anyway. btw, fuck jar jar.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

The original Star Wars movies were rightly hailed for their revolutionary brilliance at the time' date=' but, seriously, take that away today and there's not to much left going for them. Well, actually, my main gripe is that the story is so ridiculously detached from whatever else is going on in the galaxy at the same time (the rest of the stuff isn't cliche because George was the first to use it).

The new ones failed to do anything revolutionary like the original trilogy did, but they did do away with the main problem I had with the original trilogy.

Which leads me to conclude that...how is it possible to compare these movies properly in the first place anyway. btw, fuck jar jar.[/quote']The original films were much better edited, couldn't go off into whacko weird land because of tech/budget and were held together by some excellent performances from the likes of Harrison Ford, Peter Cushing and Alec Guiness, in paticular.

[Arthmoor]

You guys bashing the prequel trilogy remind me of all these people on the Skyrim forum bashing the game for not being like Morrowind enough

[Sigurð Stormhand]

You guys bashing the prequel trilogy remind me of all these people on the Skyrim forum bashing the game for not being like Morrowind enough

Now that's just rude.

Gramps.

[Thomas Kaira]

George Lucas once said "a special effect without a story is a pretty empty thing." (sic)After looking at the prequels, I have to say that he is now a massive hypocrite. He threw away everything that made the original series good (clear, defined characters, battles that allow them to progress, and for the time, amazing visuals) and turned out what were essentially three passionless cash-cows designed to do nothing more than put people in seats and sell merchandise. The characters were nonexistent, the battles were mindless shlock with so much shit going on you suffer from brain overload trying to watch it all, and the visuals are surprisingly flat and boring due in large part to over-reliance on green-screen and bad camerawork.And that's just putting things lightly.And perhaps we should move this discussion elsewhere, too. How the hell does this have anything to do with Skyrim?

[Arthmoor]

Well, I hate to be the odd man out here, but after having specifically listened to Lucas on one of the DVDs say that he wanted the 1977 trilogy to look AS GOOD as the one we got more recently, I don't think he's a hypocrite at all. In fact, he even flat out said he wanted the prequels out first but the technology available in 1977 wasn't good enough to do what he wanted done.It's ironic you choose to slam the new ones as having bad green screen, because the originals were 100x worse in that regard. There's a reason he had the originals remastered, and even then it didn't fulfill everything he wanted from them. Keep in mind all 6 were made before CGI was far enough along to be seamless. Obviously 3 of them were made before we even had CGI, so....And I simply don't get the whole passionless cash-cow thing. I mean really, have you compared those movies to any of the TRULY awful stuff Hollywood churns out? Did you notice how many battles were "mindless schlock" in the original trilogy?So yeah. Skyrim isn't Morrowind. Or something.

[Thomas Kaira]

WHY?!?!??! I WANT ME MY MORROWIND BACK AND I'M TOO LAZY TO JUST GO PLAY IT!!11!!1one!1!one!11! (caps)I dun wanna change. I dun like change, because change reminds me of moving forward and I just like to reminisce on the past.(And yes, I agree there is a lot of that when it comes to the Star Wars prequels vs. the originals.)

[Dwip]

Morrowind? That's way too new. Go Daggerfall or go home.As far as Star Wars goes, a few things.- The prequels show WAY better when you're watching them back to back. They really do.- The big problem with them, I think, is that while in the originals Lucas was telling a pretty simple story expansively told, in the prequels he's telling a very expansive story expansively told. The originals are kind of like morality plays - good vs. evil is well defined, lots for people to latch on to there. The prequels are a lot more muddled that way, and not that that's a bad thing, but there's so much going on it's easy to get lost. So there's vast stretches of movie where you're like "Who are these people and why do I even care?"- There are also entire random sections of story where you say "Wait, who is that guy?" General Grievous, I'm looking at you.- Not to bash all the prequel acting, but there's nothing quite so bad in the originals as Jake Lloyd's child Anakin. I realize some of that's a function of child actors, but Jesus. Hayden Christenson grew on me, but even he wasn't quite as great as I would have hoped. That comes to be a problem when I have to watch them for entire movies.- As bad as the Ewoks may have been (I liked them)...Gungans. Oi. Jar-Jar was your best idea for comic relief? Although without that level of annoyance, the satisfaction I have that Jar-Jar killed the Republic wouldn't be nearly so vast.OTOH, most of Episode III is pretty great, which makes up for almost everything, so.As far as the remasters go, I have a couple big issues with them, which is why I prefer the originals:- 1997 CGI just wasn't up to the task of integrating itself with 1977 film. So whereas the prequel CGI looks amazing (and watch the DVD commentary there, I urge you, especially for Attack of the Clones), the remaster CGI mostly just looks bad and pulls me out of the movie.- Look. Greedo just didn't shoot first. Han shot Greedo and that's how it is. Which is also to say that most of the CGI in the remasters just wasn't all that necessary. Story worked fine without it.

[Arthmoor]

Funny thing is, Lucas did the Han vs Greedo redo specifically to annoy people. He said so himself Which I though was highly amusing.Ewoks, you just had to bring the little furballs into this, didn't you? They're like an entire army of Jar-jars.

[Thomas Kaira]

Well, in all seriousness, Samson, I would recommend watching Red Letter Media's reviews just for the fact that they are extremely entertaining.You don't even have to watch the Star Wars reviews if you want, either. Why not give his Star Trek TNG movie reviews a try, or his Star Trek '09 review (which he liked)?You know what, I've got an idea for a new thread here... Gimme a sec.

[prettyfly]

Hmm, it seems the majority of interested posters on the Skyrim forum are of the opinion that the game won't feature any form of quad core optimization.Somehow I'm unconvinced that they would take a technological step back from FO3 like that.

[Arthmoor]

Consider who you're dealing with. These people on the forum are mostly clueless. The XBox 360 is basically a tri-core Intel based processor. There's no reason to think they won't take full advantage of that, which should benefit us PC users too. We may not get quad-core specific optimizations but I think I'd be pretty happy to see tri-core optimizations. Using 3/4 of my cores beats the pants off Oblivion using 1. The only thing that might screw all this up is the PS3.

[Thomas Kaira]

The PS3 is a single-core CPU that gains its brutal efficiency from its usage of cells. It has six cells in total, and when used correctly, each of those cells is capable of functioning as the equivalent a full core. That means you could almost get seven cores worth of processing power out of that machine.Trouble is, the only people who know how to do this properly are Naughty Dog and SCEA.In a nutshell, the PS3's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Talk about living up to the cliche...

[prettyfly]

I don't think the PS3's processor is somehow going to sabotage optimization for multiple cores on PC. I'm still thinking; isn't it fair to at least expect the same level of multi-core optimization as FO3.