Bethesda Details Skyrim's "Legendary" 1.9 Patch

[Ragsnstitches]

Damn, I've never ever hit the level cap with any of my 20+ characters.
Was this really a problem?
Regardless, cool addition I suppose.

Well, more so then just hitting the level cap, this allows players to bump up their level faster rather then pumping time and effort into skills they have little to no interest/investment in.

As far as I know there are 81 perks available in total for player use. But in practice, without exploits, getting all of them is a long road when you find yourself leveling skills you have no perks invested in (imagine trying to level destruction while you only have the capacity to use novice level skills at level 50). Trainers can only be used 5 times per level meaning by the time you reach 50 and are bringing the other skills up, you will be waiting a long as time to take on another trainer.

This is a great idea. A shame it doesn't open up the perk system, but making the vanilla perks more easily achieved without exploits is very welcome.

Also, a dozen fixes on that list are very welcome, especially the one where companions now equip better gear if given to them.

 

[CardinalPiggles]

That's a LOT of bug fixes.

My favourite one to imagine is the last one. I'd totally use a courier wearing only a hat, whilst playing You sexy thing in the background.

 

[Kevlar Eater]

-Fixed a rare issue where player could become stuck in Night Mother's coffin during "Death Incarnate"

Night Mother - I only wanted some company. One could only take Cicero's ramblings for so long...

-Fixed rare instance of couriers who would appear only dressed in a hat

Few things are creepier than a dude giving me a message, wearing just a hat and me wondering why his willy is free.

 

[piinyouri]

Damn, I've never ever hit the level cap with any of my 20+ characters.
Was this really a problem?
Regardless, cool addition I suppose.

Well, more so then just hitting the level cap, this allows players to bump up their level faster rather then pumping time and effort into skills they have little to no interest/investment in.

As far as I know there are 81 perks available in total for player use. But in practice, without exploits, getting all of them is a long road when you find yourself leveling skills you have no perks invested in (imagine trying to level destruction while you only have the capacity to use novice level skills at level 50). Trainers can only be used 5 times per level meaning by the time you reach 50 and are bringing the other skills up, you will be waiting a long as time to take on another trainer.

This is a great idea. A shame it doesn't open up the perk system, but making the vanilla perks more easily achieved without exploits is very welcome.

Also, a dozen fixes on that list are very welcome, especially the one where companions now equip better gear if given to them.

Ah I see. I never try to get all the perks so that excludes me.
And I agree with the fixes. I've wanted a lot of those fixed since the game came out. I'm surprised Beth is still patching the game this far in to be honest. No complaints on that of course.

 

[King of Wei]

It took them this long to give a reward for Vekel's quest? Better late than never I guess.

Legendary skills seem cool. Now Sneak can fund all of my perks!

 

[Xarathox]

"Fixed rare instance/issue -insert bug here-"

Uh...none of those were ever fucking rare. In fact, they're more common than things actually going right. Also, I bet the Skyrim boards are up in flames over the Oghma Infinium fix. *goes to look*

Edit: Well... color me wrong. It's gotten like, one mention.

 

[grigjd3]

Actually, this is the most dramatic patch I have ever seen from Bethesda. For the most part, their patches are pure bug fixes. Generally, Bethesda hasn't been interested in the idea of "power gaming" having unabashedly made their rules systems broken to begin with. In Oblivion, without cheating and without abusing any bugs what-so-ever, you could give your character equipment which give him or her 100% magic resistance and 100% damage reflection, meaning that the only way to hurt your character was to fall off a really tall mountain or get hit with an arrow. In Morrowind, a disease you got during the main quest could be combined with an exploit using shrines to raise your physical stats to any level you want, and in those rules extremely high stats had an effect. Even in Skyrim, if your magic resistance is high enough and you are equipped well, there isn't a real challenge offered in the game's combat. Given this, that Bethesda is giving a nod to power gaming in order to enable you to gather more feats is a major change for the company. I guess it came about with Fallout 3 and the increases to the level cap offered there. I'm not so sure I am a fan of this decision. At any rate, it's a clear departure from their previous rules philosophy.

 

[Souplex]

I feel like I've encountered most of the bugs they mentioned fixing.
This patch is much appreciated.

 

[Keneth]

No mention of the fabled Fortify Restoration Potion bug?

"Working as Intended," I suppose?

 

[Xarathox]

Actually, this is the most dramatic patch I have ever seen from Bethesda. For the most part, their patches are pure bug fixes. Generally, Bethesda hasn't been interested in the idea of "power gaming" having unabashedly made their rules systems broken to begin with. In Oblivion, without cheating and without abusing any bugs what-so-ever, you could give your character equipment which give him or her 100% magic resistance and 100% damage reflection, meaning that the only way to hurt your character was to fall off a really tall mountain or get hit with an arrow. In Morrowind, a disease you got during the main quest could be combined with an exploit using shrines to raise your physical stats to any level you want, and in those rules extremely high stats had an effect. Even in Skyrim, if your magic resistance is high enough and you are equipped well, there isn't a real challenge offered in the game's combat. Given this, that Bethesda is giving a nod to power gaming in order to enable you to gather more feats is a major change for the company. I guess it came about with Fallout 3 and the increases to the level cap offered there. I'm not so sure I am a fan of this decision. At any rate, it's a clear departure from their previous rules philosophy.

I think it's a good thing. The way it's being described by the PC testers is the level cap is completely removed. You can continue to re-roll skills to Legendary indefinitely. This can allow those who prefer "pure" classes (like me) without having to level undesired skills to actually get all the perks in skills we do want. **I 'unno, there are always those who will abuse systems to the breaking point just to be "OP, but there are a lot of us who like to play by the rules. And we should get to have the same benefits that the rule breakers do, and this kinda sounds like BethSoft is throwing us a bone.**

Anyways, I'm happy about it. At least I can get back into the game when the patch hits the 360. I got bored with having to metagame all my playthroughs just to mitigate all the glitches I encountered (almost all of them listed).

-----------

** I know TES is all about player freedom when designing their own class, but BethSoft could've avoided all this if they had just stuck with classic arch-type classes. Or at the very least, took a page out of Guild Wars' playbook and combine any two classes. But, that's just me.

 

[SonOfMethuselah]

Wait... that invincible Alduin thing was a bug?
That makes so much more sense. My poor mage just couldn't put a dent in his health. I thought maybe I had attempted to quest while being critically underlevelled with her or something, but her Destruction spells could own any other enemy in a matter of seconds, so that didn't make sense. But I had several other characters to play as, so I just moved on without thinking about it. I figured I'd go back and level her some more, eventually. Guess I might not have to, now, if that was the bug I was encountering.

 

[soren7550]

-Fixed rare instance of couriers who would appear only dressed in a hat

I've had a courier come to me wearing nothing but his diaper underwear. No hat or nothing.

Bit sad to see this one go, I mean, it was frickin' hilarious! I though Bethesda said they'd keep funny non game breaking bugs in?

 

[chozo_hybrid]

As long as the patch isn't as big as the last one was, steam took forever to download that, which was strange considering it's usually fine and goes at a decent speed.

 

[Newtonyd]

That's great and all, but the game is already easy enough as is. Does it really need to give the character a grindable path to god mode?

 

[Callate]

I think so long as you can continue to get perks from the new skill additions, any grousing about the way they raised the level caps is kind of "sour grapes". It's one of the most innately modable and widely modded games out there, and I'm cheered that they're still working to improve it.

 

[Legion]

Hmm, I wonder how many of these bugs have already been fixed in the unofficial patches. I can't believe they still haven't fixed the vampire hood bug officially yet. It can't be that hard when modern have done it with no issue whatsoever.

Personally I am happy with the idea of being able to level up skills some more. I hated having to level up skills I had no interest in simply to get perks in ones I actually use. Although to be honest, I much prefer Fallout's levelling system. The only thing that Skyrim does better is allowing you to choose when to. Assign perks rather than being forced to. The downside in Skyrim is the skill trees themselves. Like having to get the unarmed heavy armour bonus to get two completely unrelated perks. Or needing to get the sneak attack with one handed weapons bonus perk to get the one for archers.

The perfect levelling system is a blend between the two games.

 

[infohippie]

Personally I am happy with the idea of being able to level up skills some more. I hated having to level up skills I had no interest in simply to get perks in ones I actually use. Although to be honest, I much prefer Fallout's levelling system. The only thing that Skyrim does better is allowing you to choose when to. Assign perks rather than being forced to. The downside in Skyrim is the skill trees themselves. Like having to get the unarmed heavy armour bonus to get two completely unrelated perks. Or needing to get the sneak attack with one handed weapons bonus peek to get the one for archers.

That can get pretty annoying. In the smithing tree, I want one of the perks from the heavy side of the tree, and one from the light side, as well as (eventually) dragonbone smithing. This means I have to get very nearly every single smithing perk just to get the couple I want.

 

[likalaruku]

Well, if they're not going to release a GOTYE & they're still patching it, I'm just going to wait until for a complete collection release.

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

Most of those fixes are long overdue, and well appreciated.

Although the naked courier one was funny, I saw him rarely as I only did the main quest once, but I kind of just assumed that was his thing.

After the mailman in Zelda, I have a lax standard of them in games.

Depending on how low they adjust the random dragon attacks if you finish the main quest, I may actually finish it again. The only shout I really like was Unrelenting Force, so I never felt like I was missing anything by letting dragons interrupt my business every 10 minutes for a game of "keep away/attack every other lifeform but me" instead of actually fighting. Not that those rare occasions when they did acknowledge me instead of just preventing fast travel for 6 minutes were fun.

Damn sky trolls...

The releveling I don't really understand. You don't actually go up levels and get more HP etc. I assume. Enemies don't scale past 50 still. Do you get to reallocate the perks in the Legendary tree? Do you get more perk points to put into any of the trees?

Or is it merely that you get to level up the normal way, with all the normal limits, but instead of having to grind up light AND heavy armor to 100 to reach lv 81 you can now reset light to in theory reach 81 with ONLY training light armor and ABSOLUTELY nothing else?

Or Sneak, as that would be really easy to afk train like in Oblivion.

This could make for some HIGHLY specialized builds. What if you did that and you couldn't train up any of your other skills after that point? I know that is not the case but it would be funny.

Now, the real benefit that I gleaned from the article is that the passive bonus from ranking up in a skill will over level. Swords will get more swordy, your AC will raise up higher without needing to go nuts with smithing etc. to reach the cap. And hopefully, and most importantly to me, spells will take even less magicka. Assuming you can stack the reroll bonuses indefinitely you can eventually get zero cost casting without wasting all your enchainment slots. Or simply nudge the costs to a more friendly medium between chugging potions, and being Raiden's avatar.