Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

[Thomas Kaira]

Never mind.

[Ysne58]

One of the reasons I don't like doing the faction quests, every single one of them ends with the player becoming the leader. I disliked that feature in Morrowind and Oblivion as well.

[Ysne58]

Got attacked by an assassin. Someone wants "that poor fool dead" signed by Astrid.

[Thomas Kaira]

A spot of good news: it does appear Bethesda fixed the Archive Invalidation bug. So far, the two texture replacers I've installed have each worked properly without any need for fiddling.

[Arthmoor]

Well, someone did it, hi-res road signs: http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=436Good, because the standard ones are almost illegible.

[Dwip]

Man, those are way better than the vanilla signs.So, some things from yesterday.1. Found a place that wasn't so much a dungeon as a complex of dungeons. There were no less than three in the same local area, plus a dragon peak nearby. I'm sure at some point I'll stop being impressed, but today isn't that day.2. I'm somewhere or other in the world hunting dragons, and I find the dragon fighting something or other. Something or other turns out to be 4-5 draugr and 10-odd skeletons, none of whom were particularly pleased to see me. However, the Storm Call shout doesn't particularly care what they think about much of anything.3. Is it just me, or is Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ actually a disciple of Kynareth in Whiterun? I mean, he's right there healing the sick and the whole thing.

[Thomas Kaira]

Okay, it's official. We have a known issue for Skyrim.Skyrim was not designed to be played with V-Sync off, and as such framerates beyond 60 FPS can cause major physics bugs and flashing water (accompanied by severe slowdowns). If you wish to not use V-Sync, you will need to limit your FPS using the FPS Capper tool.EDIT: regarding the main menu music... I think all that would be needed is to start it later into the song. After the 35 second mark, it definitely makes itself worthy of an Elder Scrolls menu theme.

[Arthmoor]

Be afraid, be very afraid. Blood dragons will pound you into sand if you're not careful. So imagine my distress upon reaching the top of a summit marked as having a dragon's lair (note: compass GPS is as bad as ever) and finding that there are not one, but two dragons roosting. No problem, right? WRONG. Turns out they were both blood dragons. I've never fought 2 at once, let alone 2 blood dragons. It was probably a minor miracle that my stealth and archery favoring lizard survived the encounter. Having Lydia for cannon fodder helped.So I figured, victory, let's stroll up to the word wall and collect my prize. HUGE GOD DAMN MISTAKE. Just as I get almost close enough to start making out the word, a sarcophagus pops open and out springs one of those named draughr lich things. It had shout powers. It also had nasty exploding fireball spells. That nearby rock I was using to duck dragon attacks came in handy once I sprinted my ass over to it again - nearly dead because lich boy burned my face off.Let me tell you, that lich was 100x the opponent either of those dragons were. In the end, victory, thanks in large part to Lydia being an AI distraction while I pelted it with arrows. I'm surprised she didn't die. Anyway, I approached the word wall with extreme caution this time. No more nasties, but I was surprised yet again to find it had not one, not two, but THREE words inscribed which were #1, #2, and #3 word of a complete shout I didn't have yet.Score one for epic battles with epic prizes. I can see now why they took out armor and weapon degradation.

[Thomas Kaira]

Uh oh... I still have yet encounter a Blood dragon. Toughest I've fought so far was a Frost dragon, and I've only just had my first double-dragon day (one was a random lay dragon just outside Whiterun, the other was a Frost dragon at a word wall). I now have five shouts, four of which are already known from the demos (Unrelenting Force (Mastered), Whirlwind Sprint, Become Ethereal, and Fire Breath). The one I just got was not previously revealed, so I will spoiler it:

Kill (Krii): Word one in Marked for Death, which saps your opponents' health and armor

My next activity: Return to the Graybeards and get the location of another word wall before heading for Riften to continue the Main Quest.Oh, and so far, every encounter I've had with dragons has been quite interesting and tons of fun. The one in Whiterun got into a fierce melee with some patrols before wandering off to kill some bandits (one of which was a boss bandit, who conveniently brought the dragon down to critical health for me). Easy soul there.The Frost dragon was also fairly simple, since I had a fort tower available to use as cover. Sniped at him from up top while ducking back inside when he came to pull his Mr. Freeze thing until he crashed down to earth at the foot of the stairs leading out of the tower. Easy kill from there.But from the sound of things, its only going to get worse.

[Dwip]

Funnily enough, blood dragons hold no terror for me. Then again, I'm level 35 now, so the only things that really hold terror for me are dragon priest liches and multiple draugr death lords. That I now, by luck of the loot draw, have +80% frost resist, +30% fire resist, and +30% shock resist helps a lot, of course.@Samson - I know that fight (mentioned it earlier). Thus far I think it's the hardest fight I've had in the whole game. The dragons were hard but managable, but that lich? OMFG.@ThomasKaira - I have that shout (at level 2 now, actually). It's pretty great, though not the world ender that Storm Call is (the thunder/lightning shout from the demos)As to the Graybeards, turns out it's possible to run them out of words, at least for a while. Granted that was some 20 barrows later (I've been busy).Currently rocking the Legion storyline, which is pretty badass, although I think I just got sidelined into another Daedric quest.[edit] Oh, and a note re: Smithing, now that I have it at 100%, which is that it turns out that you can upgrade old armor to be as good or just about as good as armor 2-3 tiers ahead of it. Case in point, I have a suit of dragon armor now (save those dragon bones/scales, kids), but it turns out my Orcish stuff is just about as good armor-wise, and I'm loathe to give up +50 health armor, +15% two-handed damage gauntlets (actually iron I kept around forever), +50% frost resist boots, and a +30/30/30% fire/frost/shock resist helmet for +40 more armor or so.Which is to say that smithing is really, really buff, possibly even OP.

[Arthmoor]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that leaning toward stealth, archery, and light armor is starting to bite me in the ass now. I'm level 25 and most things are easy enough to kill, except those damn shout capable draugrs. Also I think perhaps their magic is fully developed because that one fireball took 190 out of 200 health from me. My own can't do shit in return. Makes fighting mages in general extremely hard.So is dragon armor a heavy armor or a light? Or does it matter? I get the feeling Skyrim is just like Oblivion where if you're not using heavy armor you're a dead duck. You're obviously having much better luck with smithing than I am because I can't make shit yet. I had to actually make a bunch of jewelry to push the skill to the point it's almost ready for tier 2 perks. I guess this is normal? Also, using smelters doesn't seem to contribute to the skill and I think it should.

[Dwip]

The smelter thing annoys me too.Best way to get better at smithing is by smithing stuff. Either go raid a couple iron mines, or buy a stock of iron ingots in Whiterun, pick up some leather strips (buying them or picking up every pelt in the world helps), and make an asston of iron daggers and hide bracers. If you have the petty soul gems to spare, they double as useful enchantment leveler vehicles. It's a bit of a grind, though it's not too bad if you just make it part of your run back to Whiterun to sell crap routine. Alternately, drop mad cash at the Skyforge dude for training, and just keep doing it. I got pretty good because I conciously prioritized it as a main skill for a long time.You can make light dragon armor, yeah, though I can't tell how good it is because my light armor skill is like 18. Mine happens to be heavy, you get both via the same perk, sort of like you get both light and heavy if you pick up the advanced armors perk.As to mages, it's ice mages that used to kill me before I conciously picked up a ton of frost resist - the slow effect is brutal to a melee character.I had the same kind of trouble with shout draugrs at that level, too. May just be a quirk of the leveling system.

[prettyfly]

Wisp's seem to explode when you kill them which is cool. And for that matter, yay the dungeon design because its bloody epic.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

Sigh.I think I may have to buy this game after all.Computer should be coming out of the shop, looks like it's going straight back in for the bigger HD and maybe a new graphics card.

[Thomas Kaira]

Seems Bethesda has screwed over the PS3 players yet again.Fallout 3 was a mess, with inferior graphics to the 360 version and not very great framerates to boot, but now we have Skyrim, which shipped for PS3 with a game-ending engine bug.Why do they keep on pulling this shit? Oblivion was late to the PS3 and didn't get any DLC outside the GOTY content, Fallout 3 was inferior on the platform, and now Skyrim is utterly and game-endingly broken?Bad press is now circling the web about Skyrim's PS3 bug, and the entire PS3 tech forum over at BGSF is spitting venom. Bethesda is going to pay for this one, I'm sure of it.(Returns to my PC version which remains blissfully ignorant of above problems)

[Mael]

So that dragon slash lich fight you guys are whining about? well, there was only one dragon for me. He died in about 15 seconds. The lich took me about 30 and I never got below 80% health. This guy I'm driving right now is an absolute friggin beast. And this was at like 25th level, maybe. I'm 30th now. Dual-wielding redguard in heavy armor.I think at the time I had a full set of steel plate with two elven swords. Now I'm rolling a full suit of legendary daedric with matching swords enchanted with absorb health 12pts on hit. Chest has +30 health, boots and gloves are both +19% one-handed. Haven't found a decent enchant for the helm yet. Also have a ring and necklace of +12% one-handed. There isn't much I can't annihilate.Previous to this, I went to the Thalmor Gitmo to rescue dude and I wasn't even like "can I have him back please?" I just killed them. All of them. I didn't even bother to loot except the key. BEAST.I think I've finished all the Whiterun quests. At least I can't find anything else. It seems like there should be more with the Battle-Born and Grey-Mane feud, or at least helping Jon and Olfina run away, but I can't seem to get any dialog options for it. :(Starting Riften now. Think I'll be 50 when I'm done?

[prettyfly]

Actually, FO3 also had the same issue, it just took longer to make itself apparent (around 40 hours in my experience).It raises questions about how much Bethesda cares for platforms apart from its beloved 360. We get a shitty port (although the hardware the game is designed for is old enough that we can sort of power through it), the PS3 gets a broken port...but combined these two platforms represent far more of the market for the game than the 360 (provided online sales are accounted for), yet they don't seem to think its worth the effort to ensure that our games run to the best of their abilities (or at all).Are they really just hopeless coder's or is Microsoft slipping money into their pocket?

[Arthmoor]

Are they really just hopeless coder's or is Microsoft slipping money into their pocket?

Probably both. Or at the very least, great programmers, awful QA people. They need to seriously look into who is doing QA for them because although the bugs I have seen aren't show stoppers like there were initially for Oblivion, they're so obvious you have to be blind not to have found them.I think their QA process consists of fast traveling the entire way through only the MQ and when that works, they go gold and that's that.

[Mael]

Oh yeah, I shared this with Dwip yesterday.When I started Reguard of Death, my first thought was to level up his conjuring so I could summon minions for AI fodder. So I'm on my way to Bleak Falls and I'm going through the bandit tower. I kill the guy outside and reanimate him and start making my way through the tower. Then I hear, from back at the bottom, the sounds of combat. I'm here, my zombie is here, WTF?I turn around and walk out onto the planking and run into a pair of necromancers who had killed the other bandits and zombied them. Then our zombie armies did battle. It was really kind of amusing.It's really amazing the kind of stuff that can go on in this game.

[Dwip]

So the Legion/Stormcloak quests are going to make the quest for open cities really, really exciting.In other news, my orc got hitched:And a couple things about that:- Just what every woman wants: a man with a face like that and a long...axe haft.- The implied conversation in this scene goes something like:Aela: This is the happiest day of my life! I even put on new war paint and everything!Lydia: That should have been me up there! Why did he pick you over me? After all that time we spent adventuring together!Me: I tried! You didn't have the dialogue options! It was either her or that Ysolda girl who wanted the mammoth tusk!- Apparently, my new bride decided that doing the whole Companions thing was too much of a drag, and decided to stay at home and open a store, which...sure, right.- Lydia definitely seems to have gone AWOL since the festivities.

[Thomas Kaira]

In other news, I have now ruthlessly slaughtered my first bunny... with fire.

[Dwip]

[Mael]

Yes. The bunnies must suffer. Kill them. Kill them all.

[Dwip]

:(So, this is a thing that happened:Me: Man, how am I supposed to train the last 11 points of heavy armor if I can't get anybody to train me? Oh wait, I know.Stormcloaks: Huzzah!Turns out, with that many of them, they CAN actually hurt me, eventually, and it did take about half an hour to get those last points. Then I raged and butchered them all in thirty seconds or so.Somewhat hilariously, despite my joining the Legion and winning the whole war, Stormcloak camps won't fight me on sight (they just rant about tresspassing), and you can't actually kill Stormcloak captains. Whoops.

[Thomas Kaira]

My first mission for the Thieves Guild was pretty interesting. I was tasked with infiltrating a heavily guarded estate, burning down a few things, and cleaning out the safe. I was obviously successful, thanks largely to every single guard in the whole building conveniently having their backs to wherever I was or wanted to go. :rolleyes:Unfortunately, two lives were lost in the heist, but they presented me with no other choice. Murder is not the way of the Thief, but if he must defend himself, he will.