So The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim comes out in the States tomorrow. I know of a few places that are doing midnight launches tonight. IGN has given it the expected 9.5 tongue bath but do admit that it is glitchy and the NPCs still talk like mannequins. I'm on the fence but a few of the changes from Oblivion are welcome, especially the magic system. Who's planning to pick this up and what are your expectations/fears?

The faces are still ugly.

It's 2012.

Oh dear.

It's been out in AU for more than 24 hours. The changes to the combat system (somehow dual wield means no blocking, lol) are at least interesting, but the exact same plot as all the other elder scrolls games and random fetch quests aren't really selling me. Maybe it'll look like more fun later on in the game?

I pretty much expect there to be nothing I haven't already seen, which means plot-diluting guild quests that ignore the mainline, hundreds of 'proceduraly generated' fetch quests until my eyes go square, and combat where you still walk backwards. At least I haven't seen any water textures running uphill yet?

Is the main quest still completely insipid?

Ohhai. I herd u want infinite quests? I need some bandits dead. Before you sign the bandit killin' contract, what lvl r u? K, then you get these bandits.

Also: I only need to know one thing: WHERE DA CLIFFRACERS AT, DAWG?!


tl;dr: I'm super stoked. Ima be freezing my butt off tonight waiting for release in the cold. and I ain't shamed, neither.

Had it pre-ordered for release day delivery. Unfortunately I've got a lot of things to get done tomorrow, so I don't know if I'll get my hands on it until Caturday.

Looking forward to it, at any rate, being a huge Elder Scrolls nerd. The music seems fantastic (a good step up from Oblivion in that department), and the combat/magic system looks cool. Looks like they neutered the birth-sign things, which seems silly but that's kind of minor.

Visual aesthetics: Weapon designs, ugh shoot me; but the Legion looks pretty cool from the brief glimpse of them in one of the videos. Voice overs seem vastly improved, and I'm sure I heard a dark elf in the one of the videos speak like he's got a mouthful of gravel, which is a vast improvement from Oblivion's dark-skinned prancing fairy-people of joy and sunshine.

Grabbed it on Steam on lunch. Pre-downloading now, unlocks in 4 hours, which is 3 hrs earlier than I would have been able to get it from a midnight launch...

Goddamn does it look pretty in the videos and screenshots. I'm eager, loved Morrowind and Oblivion.

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"You were doing OK until you started to think."
-ICANT, creationist from evcforum.net

Buddy o' mine says crack is already exist and he's playing his Steam copy as we speak. His first text to me:


SPOILARZ: You start in jail.


2nd


Okay, you escape from jail. I won't say how, but there may be


3rd


Patrick Stewart conspicuously absent. Growing apathetic.



4th


Here, there be dragons.




Anticipation growing.

If you missed the 'story exactly same as other elder scrolls games' thing, you need help. You start as a prisoner in a land where political chaos looms due to the death of a regional leader (but not really) and you get to read a bunch of fluff about people who don't matter while magical doom gets ever nearer (but not really). Just like Morrowind!

Well, I'm almost done decrypting, so here goes the rest of my night, and probably most of my day tomorrow.

Yeah but hey, starting as a prisoner was pretty much tongue-in-check by Morrowind already

My current computer is a pile of crap, so I won't even try to run Skyrim on it, especially since Oblivion fried my then-current pc back then

Goddamn is Skyrim beautiful. I've only played a little so far, but right from the start, the redone magic system looks vastly superior to Oblivion. Lightning spells look like lightning! The beginner fire spell works like a flame thrower instead of firing a painfully slow generic-looking "fireball" that looks like every other fire spell in the game!

I shouldve taken the day off.

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"You were doing OK until you started to think."
-ICANT, creationist from evcforum.net

I did. Unfortunately, I succumbed to sleep at about 6 AM.

It's not often that a game looks better than the pre-release screenshots I've seen, but Skyrim sure the fuck is. I don't know if the screenshots are from the 360/PS3 versions (which correspond to the 'Low' graphics preset on PC, IIRC) or what, but with everything maxed out it looks fucking gorgeous. The usually-shitty autodetect maxed everything out for me, too, which saved me some time I would otherwise have had to waste not playing the game.

There's only one thing I don't like so far, and that's the keyboard shortcuts for the inventory system. I vastly preferred the shortcuts in Oblivion/FO3/FONV, where you clicked on an item to take it, press A to take all, or pressed E again to exit the container. Now R is take all, E serves the same purpose as clicking on the highlighted item, and exiting a container is Tab, which isn't even labeled at the bottom of the screen like the other two shortcuts are, so I had to figure that one out by trial-and-error just to get out of the first chest I looted. I like the rest of the changes to the inventory system, though.

Also, I can't seem to get favorites to work at all, but then I did rebind it to the F key so I could make Q quicksave. I don't know if that has anything to do with it.

Giants are complete and utter bastards. They keep using me for tennis practice.

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EBC: Northeners, Huh! What are they good for?! Absolutely nothing!

Cybertron, Justice league...MM, HAB SDN City Watch: Sergeant Detritus

Days Unstabbed, Unabused, Unassualted and Unwavedatwithabutchersknife: 0

Played three hours, have yet to see anything. Frequent trips back as I keep up my long running Elder Scrolls Kleptomania habits. Gotta say the first time I saw things that were in fact nailed down made me a little sad.
I want to steal the barrels too damn it.

Item valuing can be a bit confusing. A weapon that does more damage can be a less valuable item. A weapon that does 12 damage is worth twice or three times more than a weapon that does 14 (numbers are arbitrary).

Crafting has been more complete, useful and a bit more confusing. You get leather regardless whether you got it off from a fox or a bear. You also need iron to sharpen an already existing piece of iron? How does that work? You use a harder material to sharpen an already hard material, that's what grindstones are. I am also curios as to whether it is actually economical to fix-up looted items as you sell them (probably yeah, especially on later levels and with some investment).

Overall, the game is fairly good as of yet. I like how they just removed the annoying class system and allowed you to do whatever the hell you want. They even removed the annoyingly large choice of starsigns you can be born under.
Killing your first dragon is pretty awesome and so are some of the effects regarding Shout. A new, non-generic magic system that actually has some mystery? Gimme.

Oh, and the giants are a pain in the ass. I don't even attempt to bother with hose mofos until I had a few dragons under my belt.

Who cares about money in a game where money will become literally useless? Carting plates around to tell for money has always been stupid in Beth games, and the values never made any sense. It was a real negative reminder of how hidebound Beth is when I realised the game still had thousands of literally useless vendor junk that only exists to create a reason not to take all every time. What do you mean I ended up carrying 240 kilos of pumpkins? What do you mean everything has the same value to everyone, except you who for some reason doubles it? What do you mean this barrel is a container, and this other exactly identical barrel isn't?

People saying positive things about shouting is fucking bizarre. It was stupid in Condemned 2, and it's even stupider now that you can shout so loud it propels your forward with incredible speed, all the better to solve dumb puzzles.

Out of curiosity, Stark...what was the last game you liked?

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"You were doing OK until you started to think."
-ICANT, creationist from evcforum.net

Grow up, dumbass. Did you notice most of what people are saying positively about the game is how it looks? Obviously, as a 360 owner, I am immune to this; it looks like dogshit.

A game that shows Beth is more interested in remaking old games than learning why Fallout 3 was so popular deserves criticism, even if they introduce a 'new, mysterious' magic system to solve Metroid puzzles.

No really Stark, I wasn't trying to be snarky. I don't look in G&C all too terribly often, but I honestly can't recall seeing you ever give a positive opinion on a game.

As for all of the positive commentary being graphics related...well, most of us have only played for a few hours. We haven't seen much else yet. And we have mentioned the positive changes to the class and magic systems as opposed to previous Elder Scrolls games.

I honestly don't have a problem with recycling ideas that were done well in previous games - the Metroid puzzles, as an example, were fun, and I imagine the equivalent will be fun as I progress in Skyrim. Not everything needs to be new and shiny. Doing what's been done before but doing it better is perfectly fine by me, and so far that seems to be a pretty good summary of Skyrim as it compares to Oblivion.

Am I to take it, then, that you thought Fallout 3 was a good game?

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"You were doing OK until you started to think."
-ICANT, creationist from evcforum.net

Fallout 3 was a big step up from Oblivion; Skyrim seems to be half a step right back to Oblivion.

What's sad is people say 'yay no classes' when Fallout 3 had no classes just fine, and the game still has levels for no fucking reason. This should have been expected, not a surprising improvement worth commenting on. What about all the OTHER legacy crap they didn't ditch? What about keeping the hilariously broken/useless Fallout 3 lockpicking minigame?

The awful writing and excerable voice acting prevented me from giving a shit about the story, and (of course, 360 might be different to PC) tooling around in the world is exactly as uninteresting as it was in Oblivion, probably because at level 5 they don't spawn anything interesting to kill. Killing a 'random' dragon attacking a village by standing behind a rock and shooting arrows = epic?

Actually, is the third person camera totally fucked on 360 too? I'm willing to give Beth the benefit of the doubt that surely they didn't ignore a decade of third person camera refinement, and high-profile third-person RPGs. :v

So far I'm loving it. Looks gorgeous on Ultra - atmospheric, stuff makes sense in it in a way that it didn't in Fallout 3 (like no discernible economic basis for any of the towns in FO3), combat system is still fun (I liked Oblivion's system) though a Witcher 2 like system would be better (yeah its twitchy, so fucking what) and the finishing moves are entertaining.

I like the new levelling system a lot too. I don't see why it matters whether there are levels or not.

Also the faces are great, I don't see what's wrong with them.

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Yeah for me the high res was disoncerting. I'm used to crappier gsmrs I guess? Cause I squatted on a boulder, took aim at a man in the distances and started shooting. About four arrows in as the man charged me I started to reaize he was Really Fucking Big and at arrow six I had enough tim to stand and turn before the giant played Polo with my head. Who the hell gave him Halo's gravity hammer?

Pretty sure its a bug. Numerous videos on youtube have been posted of dudes getting hit by giants and flying off into space.

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Does anyone know what the day -1 patch fixed?

I broke the game. For some reason the men in Dragonreach started attacking me, so I fled the city and came back a day later. They're not hostile now.

Problem is, the Companions are now assaulting the Jarl's hall. As far as I know, it's all without cause, to boot.

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"You're wonderful, and you're alive, and you deserve every little bit of happiness that the universe has to offer anyone, no matter who or what you like. Never forget that." - Achewood