Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

[Arthmoor]

Andalay, I'll try and have a look at that here in a bit. My heart just isn't in the fight with the CS though and it's been hampering efforts to even look at Oblivon stuff since it decided to turn on me again. I've about had it with the thing at this point. Following what's going on in that side quest of yours is next to impossible using just TES4Edit.As far as the Skyrim DB, I guess I'm dumb. I got the note that said "we know" but the trail died right there with no further indication of where to go or when. No quest update, nothing. Just a really happy kid all alone in that nice big house. That kid doesn't deserve a house like that all to himself. I'd sure like to evict him and take it over.Disappointed in the marriage system btw. I wasn't even intending to marry and a Nord woman in Whiterun practically begged me to. So I did. We went to the chapel in Riften. When it was over - poof. She just vanished and I can't find her now. WTF, really? And me with an actual house in Whiterun too.

[AndalayBay]

Just the base CS now? Yuck. Even if you could just give some suggestions on how to handle a quest like that, it will help.Apparently the for DB quest:

You just have to sleep and things will proceed.

[Arthmoor]

I haven't tried it with just the base CS. I suppose I can though. I'd feel dirty.And yeah, told you I was dumb. That was it. In a game where sleep isn't remotely necessary for anything, one wonders why they'd continue to use that mechanic.

[Dwip]

@prettyfly -Ah, horkers. Them and the whole ice sea thing gave me Bloodmoon flashbacks.@Samson - Maybe she has a house?@Random - So, turns out I was totally wrong about tm and achievements (just got the one for 50 dungeons, yay). In honor of that, pretty pictures for Hanaisse.Gal gro-Gorath, orcish killer of man, beast, and in a rather adrenaline-filled moment a while ago, two giants and a mammoth at the same time. Full orcish he smithed himself and a super sweet artifact mask.This is the interior he's standing outside in the other pic, or at least half of it. It's really deep. Dungeon visuals in this game are ridiculously badass. I'm really impressed.The ultimate prize, another word of power to fuel my shouts. Handily, right about the time I found the barrow itself, a dragon flew up and landed behind me. I actually have a couple of spare souls I haven't stuck into words yet.And speaking of dragons, here's the aftermath of another encounter. I walked up to this place, said "If I go around that corner, am I going to get into a massive fight?" Yes, actually, yes I was going to get into a massive fight.And, lest you think it's all dragons all the time for me:Here, have a Dwemer ruin. This one was actually pretty compact on the outside, if no less cool. These are not Morrowind's slightly comic Dwemer ruins in the least.Here's the inside. Or part of the inside, which was massive and spread over 4-5 cells. One of the crazy, crazy things about this game is its use of what we used to consider exterior statics inside, seamlessly blended with interiors so that one moment you're in a hallway, and the next you're battling centurion spheres high over a city. Most of these ruins utterly dwarf Kerrach. We modders have our work cut out for us.

[Arthmoor]

Indeed we do, especially in the questing department. Because, holy crap, there are some really surprisingly great side quests. Like this one where some guy in a tavern in Whiterun challenged me to a drinking contest. Silly me, I accepted, thought I had won, then the next thing I know I'm being woken up by an angry priestess of Dibella in Markarth - and 3 days have gone by! The quest than ensues is no small thing either, it's a big sprawling Skyrim spanning adventure that has yet to come to an end.And yes, I now desire to see a Dwemer ruin for myself. The trip to Markarth btw, that spiraled into another entirely unrelated quest series. Have I mentioned I have yet to really pursue the main quest? Seriously, I haven't had this much fun with a game in YEARS. Bethesda deserves huge kudos despite the crop of bugs they've cultivated this time around. Thankfully instability ain't one of them.Also, yes, Dwip, wife has a house in Whiterun. She's nowhere to be found, which is apparently a bug that's surfaced with others. Somehow you're supposed to just know you have to immediately talk to your new spouse right as the ceremony concludes. Which would have been nice if she hadn't vanished BEFORE the priest was done talking! I'll try loading an old save, getting her formID, and then seeing if I can console her back into play.BTW, I just realized I haven't seen any sign of mithril. Another victim of the chopping block?

[prettyfly]

Well, to be fair we've gained armor variety overall. Not that I endorse cutting stuff that doesn't need to be cut.I'm really surprised to hear that the quests are good, because from what I saw in the leaked footage prior to release they looked pretty bland. I haven't really done many myself because I've been trekking across Skyrim to get to Winterhold and looting various dungeons across the way. But now that I'm there I'm enjoying what I've seen of the Mages Guild and am looking forward to going through it.

[Dwip]

Apparently I need to go drink in Whiterun some more. Did the brawl, confronted a dude, but didn't see anybody to have contests with. Shall have to check this out once I get done word hunting, which seems to be my thing. That and wishing for a merchant with some actual freaking money so I can sell my loot stash.Haven't seen mithril at all, though I have yet to totally see everything offered by the smithing branch (I just hit ebony), so there's a slight possibility. That said, I'm starting to hit the fade between elven/orcish and glass/ebony, so maybe not. Plenty of interesting armor floating around, though, so I can't say I've felt the loss overmuch.Smithing seems to be really, really worth the time, btw, insofar as I routinely have much, much better armor than the competition, and have for ages now. Been using the skyforged axe I got in Whiterun for eons, but the armor boost is really noticable.One of these days I'll make it out to Markarth. I just got to Falkreath a little while ago, and I'll probably skip out on it soon enough to go do some more dragon hunting. I really, really want to see what all the words do. Speaking of which, you remember that lightning one from the demo that causes storms? Yeah, I have that. It's amazing.Speaking of bugs, I'm impressed by the stability. I'm also impressed that I've only seen a couple of outright legitimate bugs, and very little of the BS floating rock stuff we used to deal with. I have issues, but not many of them are bug-related.[edit re: prettyfly]IMHO, quests are about on par, maybe a little less good than F:NV's crop of quests with regards to choices, speech options, and such. What I've done of the MQ so far has been really epic, and most of the time you see a named quest appear in your journal, you know it's going to be pretty amazing. I've got a few problems with the Companions questline, but that's mostly about compression - cool quests, but I somehow managed to complete the whole thing in very, very short order.As an aside, if you happen to find yourself in the more well-off parts of Solitude, and you hear some guys talking about a cave, and one of them wants you to go check out that cave? You totally want to do that thing. Some of the most amazing visuals I've seen in a videogame ever.

[prettyfly]

Mithril is definitely not in the game. And Smithing FTW. Pity I'm not able to make dwemer stuff yet though because I got all these dwemer spare parts lying around.Also, this is to the south of Skyrim. Psymon found it.Someones gone to an effort to recreate Cyrodiil's landforms. And for that matter, the White Gold Tower is still there.

[Arthmoor]

Yes, Dwip, go drinking. In fact, that event alone has prompted me to visit taverns more often simply because I'm noticing they have actual people in them that we as modders didn't put there :)Mithril isn't in the light armor perk tree where it would belong, so I'd say it's gone but I guess not missed. I just made the transition to Elven/Dwarven drops not too long ago.Re: Cyrodiil. They seriously recreated the entire landmass?!? I mean, wow, if that's a genuine shot there that's pretty crazy. Why even put that in when nobody will ever be able to see it without disabling the game borders? The southern mountains would obscure that entirely. Does nobody remember Pale Pass?

[Sigurð Stormhand]

Re: Cyrodiil. They seriously recreated the entire landmass?!? I mean' date=' wow, if that's a genuine shot there that's pretty crazy. Why even put that in when nobody will ever be able to see it without disabling the game borders? The southern mountains would obscure that entirely. Does nobody remember Pale Pass? [/quote']Paying it forward to the modders?

[AndalayBay]

Guys, I'd like to get some opinions here, if I may. In your opinion, is the exodus of players to Skyrim larger than it was for players jumping ship from Morrowind to Oblivion? From what I've seen so far, I'd say yes, but I wasn't around when Oblivion was first released, so I don't know if this is normal.I ask because I'm involved in a couple of modding projects for Oblivion. In the case of DBC, we were supposed to have mod 2 take place in Cyrodiil and then were going to do mod 3 in Skyrim. We've already been thinking of doing part of mod 2 in Cyrodiil and carrying the rest into Skyrim instead. In the case of Black Marsh, we're starting to wonder if we should just port it to Skyrim and not bother with a TES IV version at all.I just feel like I'm releasing these mods to an empty theatre.

[Mael]

Finished the MQ earlier (yesterday?). So many freakin' options. After finishing Companions I pretty much just plowed straight through and still ended up one skill-up from level 30.So I started a new character, a female khajit stealth bow-shooter, because who doesn't like female khajit stealth bow-shooters? Anyhow, I just ticked off level 15 owning some random bandits and I go and buy my house in Whiterun and dump all my crap off. I'm headed out to that god-forsaken town that's as far from every hold as it can be, tracking down Sam the drinking buddy (possibly the most laughter I've had in a month and I've only just started the four different quest chains you get just from waking up in Markath and then talking to Ysolde back in Whiterun -- I wonder who else in Whiterun is going to have interesting dialog options for me). So I'm discovering the stuff that's between Whiterun and R-whatever so I can fast travel back and check it out later. I get a few in and there's a tree symbol and I remember the place from the first playthrough, so I sneak up and hear "rawrwaraaaar" about five seconds before I'm eaten by a cave bear. I put three arrows into it and barely dented its health. So I reloaded, snuck way down south to the giant camp first, watched the bear run off after a rabbit, then went in and looted the camp. Back to business.I'm headed west again and I notice a dragon wall thingy to the north and decide that since i've only gotten two words so far, I'll go grab that. I get about halfway there and there's a house sitting around looking lootable (thief after all). But wait, my first randa-dragon! And I start fighting this thing and I'm doing jack all to it between my dwarven bow of fear and unrelenting force. Then it goes and flies north and start blasting at something up there. Meanwhile I pepper it with arrows, mostly ineffectually. "You just stay up there and fight that elk," I said. Then, as it flies back down and lands in front of me, I find out what it was actually fighting... the cave bear. No no, not the cave bear... the cave bear and its mate.I'm bolting for the house. Bears and dragons can't come in houses. And once I get down there I turn around and watch the bears annihilate the dragon. "Yay", I cheer. Until they start rampaging down the hill towards me. So I duck into the house thinking, "I'm sure this old lady won't mind if I chill out in here for a few hours." The old lady turned out to be some Dunmer necromancer who promptly ice missiled me to about 2% health before I could get back out the door.And who was waiting outside the door? Cave bears! So I dumped a 50 stam pot and 8 22 healing pots I had made earlier and sprinted down down down the hill. I hide behind a rock and pray. After about two minutes the icon finally goes to hidden. I pop back up and look around -- no bears, no necromancer. Glee!I sneak back up to the house and find the necromancer dead in the bushes (along with all of his chickens -- dem bares be meen). I loot him and his house for about 500g worth of alchemy mats, almost none of which will help me make the poisons I want.Right then, back to it. I start sneaking up the hill towards the dragon rock again and before I can make the tree line the bears find me. Once again I'm sprinting like a madman. I manage to make it up onto some rocks where the AI apparently can't get (NPCs don't get to jump after all) and so I stand up there and shoot the bears down. This takes about 30 arrows and three or four minutes. Cave bears are seriously serious business.When I finally get up to the rock, there's an ice troll. Already dead. I have never been so happy to see a troll. It must have pissed off the dragon before the dragon came down to eat me.All that and I got the word for disarm. I feel like that will actually be pretty handy when I'm further into barrows and draugr wights are being generally unkillable for me. And I'm not even half of the way over to that town yet...

[Ysne58]

Guys' date=' I'd like to get some opinions here, if I may. In your opinion, is the exodus of players to Skyrim larger than it was for players jumping ship from Morrowind to Oblivion? From what I've seen so far, I'd say yes, but I wasn't around when Oblivion was first released, so I don't know if this is normal.

I ask because I'm involved in a couple of modding projects for Oblivion. In the case of DBC, we were supposed to have mod 2 take place in Cyrodiil and then were going to do mod 3 in Skyrim. We've already been thinking of doing part of mod 2 in Cyrodiil and carrying the rest into Skyrim instead. In the case of Black Marsh, we're starting to wonder if we should just port it to Skyrim and not bother with a TES IV version at all.

I just feel like I'm releasing these mods to an empty theatre.[/quote']I'd be tempted to just move it all to Skyrim and just support the mods already released for Oblivion. There will be people who continue to play Oblivion, just as there are still people who play Morrowind. But lots of people are playing Skyrim.

[AndalayBay]

Yeah I finally got Skyrim loaded up and played the intro. I can see the appeal :tongue: Combine that with all the frustrations people are having with the CS and I can see people moving on.

[Hana]

@Andalay, some people aren't jumping ship at all.I was looking forward to playing DBC, but to hear it'll be "to be continued" in Skyrim just kinda totally turned me off. Unless I'm misinterpreting, I mean, why would I bother?

[AndalayBay]

Well DBC is a three parter, so we're trying to figure out where to locate each part. Awakening is in Cyrodiil but the ending is a cliff-hanger. We were thinking of doing Consequences in Cyrodiil and setting it up so that it ended the story there. Then if you play Skyrim, you can pick up the story again and play part 3 of the mod.We're just having a tough time even getting Awakening done. Even our testers have moved over to Skyrim - deserters! And I need some technical assistance and even my trusty Argonian has been snatched :lol:Maybe we should discuss it in the WIP thread on Beth or on Dark Creations. But I knew there were some long time players here, so I thought I'd ask here. Seems every thread you start on Beth these days turns into a flame fest.

[Arthmoor]

Well, I'll tell you what. The main reason everyone bailed on Oblivion should be obvious as hell. Case in point, Mael's absolutely glorious account of cave bears, dragons, trolls, and necromancers. Also, the quest he's talking about is easily one of the best ones ever made.Let's not even begin to talk about the crash fest that Oblivion is and generally always has been unless playing it purely vanilla. This may well happen with Skyrim, but I doubt it'll be quite as bad unless folks insist on bloating it with megatextures. Which, sadly, the impatient crowd is starting to do rather than making Bethesda fix their broken shit.I wasn't paying attention on the BGS forums when Oblivion was launched. I joined that crowd about 2 years after the fact after the major tools were already in a usable state and many of the initial overhauls (that were badly done btw) came along. I imagine the exodus from Morrowind was probably bigger than any of us realizes, but it obviously had a backslide once Oblivion's instability began to show.I would say that since DBC is more or less done you're going to just have to go with it in Oblivion. The next two portions of the story are almost certainly going to need to be in Skyrim because I honestly doubt a lot of folks are going to pay attention to anything but the largest of large mods. Like Nehrim or some other TC people have been waiting on. Even the Nehrim guys are going to have a hard time getting people to care.Yes, I've more or less lost any will to give a rat's ass about Oblivion given my troubles with the CS and with its general instability. The RST update is one of the few things I'm still waiting on because I want to see what the deal is with training an apprentice, and of course Dwip's mausoleum mod. I'm certainly not alone in this considering how sharply the activity level has fallen.Even the Bash team no longer seems interested since much of their work stalled shortly after 295 and the SVN still has two critical bugs in CBash that have yet to be fixed and show no sign of being fixed. So even the support tools are in a bad state.

[AndalayBay]

Yes, this is what I'm seeing too. I think shadeMe has given up on the CSE too. We should probably have created a separate topic for this rather than derail the Skyrim thread - sorry about that. Could you move these posts to a new topic?Amadaun is playing through the DB questline in Skyrim and has reported that she sees so many holes in the plot that we should have no problem injecting our stuff in there. I've suggested that we start a new thread to discuss in on DC and I welcome your thoughts on the matter.In terms of Black Marsh, it sounds like it would be harder for them to move to Skyrim given the events that took place in that area and that the native Argonians have become extremely xenophobic. They even consider other Argonians from Cyrodiil to be a different species, or something. Not entirely sure of all the details, so I'm probably mangling the lore rather badly, but it sounded like Black Marsh would have to change things rather significantly to make the move.

[Dwip]

Speaking for myself, I've spent 5 years on Oblivion, and those were some fun years, but I am so very done now. And why not - if you can name some aspect of the game, it's probably better in Skyrim. For myself, I played through the tutorial and said something like "I'm never going back to Oblivion, am I?" Probably not. I'll probably finish RST at some point, put out AFK_Weye's final bugfix release and AFK_Mausoleum, and then I'm done.We're in the first blush with Skyrim right now, and I wouldn't want to generalize too much, but my feeling is that there's an awful lot of people in my position, and having watched a few game launches in my time, I'll say that it's incredibly rare to see people having as good a reaction as almost everyone seems to be having with Skyrim - not a lot of naysaying on the official forums that I can tell, and people elsewhere are basically saying "I expected a buggy POS, but this is totally amazing and I can't stop playing!" Yeah, we ARE just coming off the first weekend of release, but I think that's going to last. It really is that much better than Oblivion ever was.You can probably expect a certain amount of interest once the people who started on Skyrim start going back and picking up the older games, and obviously there will be those like Hanaisse who don't switch for one reason or other, but my sense is that Oblivion just doesn't have the fanatical love that Morrowind has going for it, and I personally don't see a whole lot of future there.Of course, we're having this conversation pre-CK and pre-any sort of real tools, so this is obviously going to be colored by that, but...

[AndalayBay]

And I finally got Skyrim loaded up and played the opening, and my heart never beat that fast ever in Oblivion! That was damned cool. We have a big battle at the end of Awakening and it just doesn't compare.So yeah, we need to finish Awakening and give it its due, but we do need to move to Skyrim.

[Dwip]

...and that was when the talking dog showed up.

[AndalayBay]

??Have you guys remapped your key settings? I did and now I can't pick up a book. In fact I couldn't get out of the book reading menu. I saw someone on Beth talk about rewriting their Controlmap_custom.txt file, but mine isn't a text file - it looks like it's compiled. So maybe it's corrupted...Edit: As usual, I'm not the only one with that problem. Here's the fix. Man, I haven't even finished the tutorial yet and I'm loading my first mod...

[Dwip]

Haven't touched my key settings at all, but IIRC there were people with issues over at Bethsoft.And no joke, there's totally a talking dog. Here he is, glitched out on a gate:Falkreath has some...interesting...quests.Also, a public service announcement. See this guy?Yeah, so, I fast traveling back to Falkreath, and I really had to go to the bathroom, so I fast traveled and left the game unpaused. How bad could it be in the middle of a hold, I wondered. I hear the sounds of fighting, and I'm like "That's odd. I wonder what's goin...oh wait, I'm being jacked by dragons again, aren't I." Ran out, popped the button on my pants, scrambled around, fought the dragon, won, absorbed the soul, then went looking for the button.Which is to say, always remember to pause.Everyone in Falkreath was really impressed, though:

[Thomas Kaira]

Another needed mod has been downloaded: FPS Limiter.Simple function: restrict the number of pre-rendered frames your GPU can process and limit the framerate to a user-specified value. Since this is vanilla Skyrim, I've placed the limit at 60 FPS, but once the really big mods start coming in, I will likely drop it to 30.Why needed? To prevent those physics glitches that occur when your FPS is too high. Since 60 FPS is the benchmark for ideal PC performance, that's why it is there, and the physics has stopped being stupid, so I'm happy.But, I do have to say that I am pretty amazed as to how stable Skyrim is running. I've been going at the game for about 20 hours now and have yet to get my first CTD. Performance is better than I expected, but unsurprising since the graphics are essentially enhanced console quality. I'm not really going to need to stress about a GPU upgrade for my PC until the next console hardware line is revealed, it seems. The 8800 GT is still plenty strong, and my new Core i5 CPU is definitely a major leg up from my old Core 2 Quad; it's picked up a lot of slack since I installed it. I probably would have had major issues with Skyrim's shadows if I were using my old CPU.

[Mael]

So the guy I finished with, an argonian tank (shield, mace, heavy armor), which I played almost entirely in third person, seemed a lot more graphically responsive and smoothe than the guy I'm playing now, who I am playing almost entirely in first person. I wonder what's up with that. Maybe it's just a point of view thing.Gonna give that FPS limiter a try. I have gotten used to the mouse menu lag, but it still irritates me.