sea's (Mostly Technical) Skyrim Initial Impressions

[octavius]

So far for me, this game is Oblivion with a return to the stupider Morrowind spellcasting and more SHIIIIINE! Seriously, my eyes hurt just playing this game for an hour, why is everything so damn shiny?!

Because you have HRD or Bloom turned on, probably by default?

 

[Gord]

Man sea, seems you have been hit by the infamous "Bethesda game for unexplainable reason runs like shit on my pc, even when everything else runs fine"-bug.
That is almost a Bethesda trademark thing by now.

 

[Metro]

My Skyrim impressions:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/EricSchw ... C_Game.php

You may notice I don't talk about the actual game much. That's because I spent most of my time tweaking INI files and trying to figure out which parts of the interface work and which ones don't.

Good stuff, not that I'm surprised. Friend of mine who bought it (despite my efforts to talk him out of it) mentioned the same thing last night: atrocious UI even worse than Oblivion's (didn't even think that was possible).

 

[Peter]

Dragons might be confirmed for not being cliffracers 2.0. On my way up the mountain to see the Graybeards, I met my first random one (I'm assuming so because it was simply named 'Dragon') and it had been like 3 hours since the MQ quest that introduces them, and the fucker was slaughtering me. All of my attacks were taking like 3% off of his health, and one burst of fire breath from him took me down to like 50% health. Ended up running into the Graybeard temple thing to get away from it. Shit was p intense bros.

And this all happened on Master difficulty, btw.

So far I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Way better than Oblivion and F3, but not quite as good as Daggerfall and Morrowind. Great atmosphere, both in dungeons and outdoors, and combat feels a lot more slicker than in Oblivion. I'd disagree with Mastermind about it being comparable to Dark Messiah, as combat still lacks oomph. But still, while the game is a joke as an RPG, at least this time around we're getting a decent open-world action game, as opposed to Oblivion which completely failed to deliver on both the RPG and the action front.

Haters gonna hate.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Finally I started playing the game, and played for a few hours. I was expecting to be disappointed, but the game is actually pretty nice. Most of my complaints would be nitpicks, like how fruits/vegetables seem to respawn as soon as you leave the area, some buildings like the inns seem to come back over and over again, the dual wielding system seems pretty confusing to me, and it looks like Fallout New Vegas with better lighting and DirectX 10 effects. Creation definitely is nothing but a Gamebryo fork. These games are all too similar in look and feel.

Oh yeah, and the keyboard interface is absolutely awful, I can't believe I would be yearning for the Oblivion interface. Though it already seems to have been improved with an update.

And it's really hard. I remember I could set F3 to top difficulty and breeze through it. This time if you put the difficulty to real high, and attack any creature that's not small fry, you'll have sensations of being in Gothic. My mage keeps getting absolutely slaughtered.

As much as I like the content so far, I think I'm also getting tired of Bethesda-type free-roaming games where you need to look everywhere all the time to find all the content, it exhausts me. I actually tend to favor games with far less content.

It's sad if most books are re-used from the past though. I did hear a Morrowind song in the main town, and what appeared to be a song remixed from Oblivion whilte climbing a mountain.

 

[sea]

I'm pretty sure it's because Xbox 360 controller is switched on by default.

360 controller boxed is checked. Main menu works fine with a mouse and I can exit the load menu by clicking on any of the other menu options.

The first leaked version had really buggy menus, are you sure that's not the one you're reviewing?

I was initially going to pirate it but decided to buy it instead. After not pirating games for so long it felt weird to do it again, especially because I can afford a full-price game from time to time and I don't really want to mess around with cracks and stuff anymore. After a lot of positive praise about the gameplay itself (and frankly, the game is way better than Fallout 3 and Oblivion), I knew I'd end up buying it at some point anyway.

I did not experience the menu problem directly, but doing more investigating I think you're right about it being a crack issue. Considering the number of interface problems even in the legit version (such as certain hotkeys inexplicably working/not working, key binding problems) I assumed that other players were having significant issues themselves.

 

[hanssolo]

The most telling sign of how half-assed this game is are the books. The books in this game are copied. From. Morrowind. No new books, they are copied. The Wolf Queen, the Real Barenziah, they are all here, but there are far fewer of them now. "Oh, we wanted to pay homage to a great classi- " No, fuck you, you wanted to add spice to the gameworld without doing any fucking work for it, you assholes.

And I bet The Real Barenziah is still missing a rather conspicuous barbed catdick.

 

[Gerrard]

Apparently half of the music is also taken from Morrowind and Oblivion.

. It feels like a somewhat improved Dark Messiah, only without kicking enemies into spikes.

Improved with shittier combat?

 

[Metro]

So how are the dungeons? Interesting to explore or horrible and cookie cutter like Oblivion's?

 

[Peter]

More linear but still much more interesting. Nice atmosphere and quite varied in design, and some even have some cool traps and puzzles.

 

[Drool]

My impression so far:

While I was mindlessly trekking around Whiterun, a pack of hired thugs approached and told me I need to be gone.

Attempt 1: Readied weapon to clash with those ruthless mercenaries. Got brutally slaughtered after 30 seconds. They were too tough for me with Master difficulty setting.

Attempt 2: Loaded recent save. Slid down the difficulty setting to Adept. Not really changed anything.

Attempt 3: Loaded recent save. Ran to Whiterun guards asking for assistance. As soon as those hired thugs approached, these sons of bitches with their motto: "You disrespect the law, you disrespect me." quickly fled the scene and left me fruitlessly escaping my imminent death. WTFF????

Attempt 4: Loaded recent save. "What the fuck should I do now?" Even though I constantly tried to outrun those mercenaries, they were always right behind my neck. Then suddenly a thought crossed my mind that I just joined The Companion aka Fighter Guild in Whiterun. Would they stand by my side or, or, ....As they were the only ones who have the ability to divert my fate I could think of at that moment, so I gave it a try.

You can imagine how triumphant I was when I witnessed my Shield-brothers & sisters jumped on those sons of bitches right after I successfully lured them to their hideout. Sweet justice!

 

[msxyz]

Awesome glitch of the AI:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt5aUdijAN8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PG2CPSx ... re=related

 

[MetalCraze]

More linear but still much more interesting. Nice atmosphere and quite varied in design, and some even have some cool traps and puzzles.

By cool traps Peter means axes from Oblivion that you can just run through and they will chip off only half of HP at best

By puzzles Peter means "if you are 15 years old and you are retarded you can call them puzzles"

 

[Stabwound]

Like myself and someone else said, if the dungeons near the "beginning" are any indication, they're vastly improved over Oblivion dungeons. Traps, small puzzles, variety, "boss" monsters, etc. They're really fun to explore, in all honesty.

I'm glad some people are actually trying the game rather than ranting from the sidelines without having played it at all, or playing the introduction and basing it all off of that. Yeah, even I laughed at the stupidity of the "bucket on the head" video, but it's actually a fun game.

Sit there trolling the Skyrim threads all day like a fucktard or play the game. It's choices and consequences!! I know which choice is more fun to me.

 

[Peter]

More linear but still much more interesting. Nice atmosphere and quite varied in design, and some even have some cool traps and puzzles.

By cool traps Peter means axes from Oblivion that you can just run through and they will chip off only half of HP at best

By puzzles Peter means "if you are 15 years old and you are retarded you can call them puzzles"

Y'know what Skyway, I agree.

I guess I should've said 'p good for a Bethesda game'. Yeah, the puzzles and traps are banal shit boring by normal standards, but for a TES game, they're rather nice.

But what's the point of arguing with you, eh?

 

[Steve]

I'm about 3-4 hours in, mostly focused on the main quest and some random side quests. Here are some of my impressions so far.

- The graphics are pretty outdated and bad but most times the scenery makes out for that.
- Combat is shit, hack & slash with no thought given into the process, retarded AI getting stuck on all kinds of shit.
- Worst fucking UI ever.
- I've been in 3 dragon battles so far with one of them being a random encounter, all of them played out the same way, I just ran circles around the dragon casting heal in my other hand and hacking it with an axe in the other hand.
- Some bugs, nothing gamebreaking.

 

[MetalCraze]

I don't understand how some retards can compare it to Gothic or DM.

From the very beginning of the game you can kill enemies both with a sword and with spells easily, you can carry a shitton of things at level 1, you have a shitton of mana which regens at a speed of health regen from CoD, health itself regens very fast making healing potions redundant (considering that you can have a healing spell at level 1 that coupled with neverending mana makes you almost invincible), dungeons are one long linear corridor (unlike in that shitty Oblivion where they actually were non-linear). Combat is primitive - twitch (A)wesome instead of at least some combos, RPG-like combat is of course out of the question. Quests are barely possible to do without quest compass (your journal never contains anything useful but a quest name so if you were told something 2 hours ago and forgot - you are out of luck unless you will turn on quest compass since NPCs never repeat what they said once again). The lockpicking minigame is tedious - in that shitty Oblivion you could've used a character skill instead, here it's unskippable. And finally the game world. It's much much much smaller than in Morrowind and because Beth added shadows it consists of corridors - meaning copypasted mountain walls that you can't go through and need to make your way through rare corridorish passages to let the game load the next area.

Yes bar level scaling Oblivion seems to actually be a better game.

 

[Metro]

Awesome glitch of the AI:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt5aUdijAN8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PG2CPSx ... re=related

If only that worked in real life. Hmm... maybe...

I don't understand how some retards can compare it to Gothic...

They mean Gothic 4!

 

[Trash]

Took awhile but finally something kicked my ass. After beating the overlord undead thing in the temple on the mountain (nice dungeon btw) so easily I feared it would be a cakewalk all the way. Met some judicar with a few guards who were taking a prisoner along. Me asking a few too many questions pissed the judicar off who then proceeded to spam some nasty electrical spell and kick my aforementioned ass.

Also had my first 'wow' moment concerning atmosphere. Was nearing Windhelm/holm/whatever and the morning turned all grey and rainy. It looked so damn depressing it reminded me of the usual cold Dutch winter mornings. Pretty cool to walk around in that on some fields underneath a city wall. Then I wanted to enter the city and found out it had to load and it was shit again.

All sorts of elements like the combat, sneaking and magic feel like it could have been much better with a little extra thought put in the process. Radiant AI also is too stupid to believe. Still, the more interesting gameworld, the little events you constantly stumble upon do make it fun to hike around in it. Game keeps going from incredibly lame and stupid to hey I actually like this and back again.

And golly, those little streams really look neat.



Also, how the fuck did the retard in the gameplay stream video spend 20 minutes trying to pick a lock? Even the biggest fucking tool should be able to figure out that rotating the pick is the way to go. Making even the 'hardest' lock a fucking cakewalk. Really, wtf.

 

[Excidium]

It's better than Oblivion at least.

I don't understand how some retards can compare it to Gothic or DM.

I don't understand either. Unless they're comparing the UI, which was just as bad in Gothic.

 

[Tel Velothi]

So now Codex loves Skyrim?

 

[Trash]

Defenitely no comparison. Does look like Bethesda played it and took some pointers though. That they then went all Bethesda on these pointers is just Bethesda being Bethesda.

So now Codex loves Skyrim?

I hate his popamole generation and their constant need for handholding.

 

[Excidium]

So now Codex loves Skyrim?

Where did you get that idea? Even the 3 or 5 people with positive impressions say it's an "ok" game at best.

 

[villain of the story]

The most telling sign of how half-assed this game is are the books. The books in this game are copied. From. Morrowind. No new books, they are copied. The Wolf Queen, the Real Barenziah, they are all here, but there are far fewer of them now. "Oh, we wanted to pay homage to a great classi- " No, fuck you, you wanted to add spice to the gameworld without doing any fucking work for it, you assholes.

Don't you say? LOL. You might be interested to know that about half to 1/3 of the books in MW were "copied" from Daggerfall and even censored in the process. You haven't read The Real(TM) The Real Barenziah until you've played Daggerfall (or just read it from Imperial Library), along with some other books.

 

[MetalCraze]

It's better than Oblivion at least.

That's a very big question. As I've said Oblivion has some things done better. Namely character system (incl. health, magic, lack of bottomless pockets at early levels etc). Hacking minigame can be avoided by using character skill, dungeons are non-linear, world is bigger and open.

However if the game was possible to play without the quest compass and it was harder without the imba character that attacks with LMB while healing himself with RMB from a quickly respawning mana pool maybe it would've been more to the side of Divinity 2 which I liked quite a bit.

But it's too damn simple.

So now Codex loves Skyrim?

Where did you get that idea? Even the 3 or 5 people with positive impressions say it's an "ok" game at best.

The previous page is almost all love. The fact is many people do like it. The problem is of course that they keep shitting on Oblivion and also try to compare it to Gothic and DM which are both unreachable for Skyrim in their leagues (Gothic is much more feature rich, not dumbed down and DM has a much better and fluid combat)