Okay, I'm posting my impressions in this thread and be done with it.
The first things I notice are that there's no options until you start the game, and the mouse lags terribly. I find it weird that the mouse cursor doesn't work very well in the menus, it sort of just refuses to work and you have to use WASD. To me this says it was designed primarily for gamepads.
I don't listen to anything anybody says on the intro, I just note that I probably could leap off the chart and run to the mountains and have a pretty good chance of escaping, the terrain doesn't look like you could maneuver a horse well there. But I can't move. When the dragon appears, some bitch says something like "Scouts, what do you see?" when the dragon is right there on a house.
I try to steal everything while the dragon is attacking, but nobody wants to get me off my ropes. I could probably cut them on something sharp or even burn them, but whatever. I have to jump... somewhere, I try it a few times but I always get stuck on invisible walls. Ok. So when I finally get to kill something, I note that there's not that much to the combat, and I don't see the use of a shield at least yet, you can't just block and swing, instead you block and then your opponent hits you again. Mkay. Hitting with bows isn't easy for some reason.
So when I get out of the intro dungeon, I try to kill the guy I escaped with, but he's immortal, of course. Story-important, a shame I didn't listen to a thing he said. Or maybe not, I have my journal.
I kill some hunter in the woods and steal her horse and stuff. Well the horse starts going somewhere whenever I dismount it, I don't know what's that all about but I can't tie it anywhere so I try to kill it. For some reason it has massive hitpoints and when I start hitting it it starts to slowly zig-zag. I have no idea what's that about, but I swing at it a plenty of times, raise my one-handed skill perhaps five levels when it finally runs away. 'K. I'm at some mill, I kill all the chickens and the inhabitants to raise my skill even further.
I should say that I die a plenty, I play on highest difficulty and while it's cheap that everything has higher hitpoints and damage than you, at least it adds a sense of danger to wandering around.
I also note that I can find only iron equipment until I level a few times, then steel equipment starts appearing. Okay...
I get to some town with "The biggest graveyard in all Skyrim". Well the graveyard is maybe thirty to fifty graves. Maybe these people don't bury their dead that much. I notice that everybody repeats their line with maybe three seconds delay. So in the bar that orc says "you look like you drink milk" or some stupid shit like that over and over again so I try to kill him, sadly I still can't get a sense of what the hell is the blocking useful for because you can't do shit while doing it. I also don't like how the bow does shit damage, what use is a bow if it doesn't even slow your opponent down? You have twenty arrows sticking out of you and it doesn't even matter. And it's not easy to hit these fuckers while they are running around. I notice that if you climb on a rock and shoot some bears, they go berserk and run into a village and start killing people. Heh.
When I finally find a magic armor, it's shit. It gives some 15% magical bonus to some skill I don't use, and it has the same armor rating as what I already use. The magic ring at least gives bonus to lockpicking, the fucking shitty minigame I already hated in Fallout 3.
What I'm saying is that I smell level scaling. It doesn't stop you from running into impossible fights, but I haven't been able to find anything good. 'Cept potions, they heal instantly so they're useful.
Anybody know if you can assign your swords and such to hotkeys? I couldn't make sense out of it.
The graphics are nice enough for me, not TW2 level but they're okay. At least the people don't look like mutant rubber camels. The music is really fucking boring and the sound effects aren't that good either.
There's still no climbing skill, which is so weird to me in this kind of a game.
You can pretty much shoot at anybody you see in the wilderness, chances are they are bandits who never even try to extort you for money, they just attack.
There's no whores, so I couldn't roleplay my character, Pilluhaukka (Pussyhawk).
