First Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Details Leaked
- Thread starter Tom Goldman
- Start date
Ick.Anoctris said:
Maybe they've wasted all their bad lines on Patrick Stewart, Sean Bean and Terrence Stamp.
They shuffled off the script to the latter without fucking proofreading it. It was just a concept pre-write that they yanked from the email of the only guy with real talent.
Hooooly Fuck.
If they deliver on this one, well... Christ, I may never leave the house, I'll be registered deadin no time.
If they deliver on this one, well... Christ, I may never leave the house, I'll be registered deadin no time.
Why am I suddenly feeling as though I'm not going to enjoy the new TES? Dual wiedling is nice (sounding) addition... but are they just going to map primary and secondary weapons to both mouse button or are they going to have both keyed to a single mouse button?
Either case I'm not sure it's all going to be that great.
And the magic system sounds a bit hokey ... it's sounds as if they just want a handful of spell types that have alternating effectiveness based on your ability in them.
Which is nice given the 800+ Spells (non modded, non self created) spells you had to navigate through in oblivion to find the one you wanted just because all your quick spell places you had occupied with spells you use more often.
But at the same time I can't help but feel a loss of all role playing aspects and a complete dive into action-adventure.
Either case I'm not sure it's all going to be that great.
And the magic system sounds a bit hokey ... it's sounds as if they just want a handful of spell types that have alternating effectiveness based on your ability in them.
Which is nice given the 800+ Spells (non modded, non self created) spells you had to navigate through in oblivion to find the one you wanted just because all your quick spell places you had occupied with spells you use more often.
But at the same time I can't help but feel a loss of all role playing aspects and a complete dive into action-adventure.
Drop a Deuce!!!
Can't wait to make a Redguard Dragonborn hunk to take on the horde.
He'll cause more racial tension than a black Heimdall; but he'll prove his worth by slaying dragons and seducing Viking women in the masses.
I will call him:
Barodarik.
Can't wait to make a Redguard Dragonborn hunk to take on the horde.
He'll cause more racial tension than a black Heimdall; but he'll prove his worth by slaying dragons and seducing Viking women in the masses.
I will call him:
Barodarik.
I have one small flaw with this cant i make female character because it says he is dragon borne
ReiverCorrupter said:
Hopefully, the Perks will fix that. If they add in the Sykrim equivalent of Fallout's 'Bloddy Mess' ability, that would be most awesome. After playing a Bumper Sword wielding muscle bound melee meat-head in New Vegas, I found it hard to go back to Oblivion. Being able to use the Bumper Sword's forward power attack (a 360 round-house sweep) and judge the distance just right so that I purposely decapitate my foe, is just plain awesome. It really makes you feel that the weapons are actually doing something when they hit your opponent, as opposed to just draining their health bar. Being able to cripple limbs was great too, and it they bring that over into Skyrim, then we'll have some fun.
Imagine either Stealth based weapons/artifacts/Skills/Perks that allowing you to do added limb damage, enabling you to more easily cripple your foe in a fight. This was one of the tactics you used in Fallout to deal with Deathclaws, those giant mutated horned lizards almost the size of a T-rex (and with a matching temper). Unless you where especially kitted out to be a sniper and could drop them with a critical headshot, your best bet was to cripple their legs. These things can easily outrun you unless you cripple their legs, allowing you to keep your distance from their armor shredding claws.
Now in the context of Oblivion, how much more fun would the combat be if you could really target specific body parts? Cause a Nord highwayman to drop his greatsword after crippling one or both of his arms, then watch him try to put up a fight with his fist (also, make it so that looting the corpse of a disarmed enemy still allows you to get their dropped weapon, just like in New Vegas). Stealth based characters would now have a true way to disable and disarm their enemies in combat. Now the choice between a Greatsword and a Longsword/Shield isn't just about damage and reach. Now it also involves how much risk you want to take by increasing your chances of crippling limbs through brute force, but also making you more likely to be crippled in return (using a two handed weapon). Weapons like Axes could cause more critical hit damage, maces could be more likely to break limbs, and swords could do more damage with a higher critical chance, but at the cost of less limb damage. Now you have a system for greater variation with your weapons, supported by relevant mechanics.
I just think that, ironically enough, they did melee combat so much better in New Vegas than Oblivion. Skyrim had better be taking some notes of what it's post-apocalyptic predecessors did.
That does sound much better. It would be a little awkward from the first person perspective using melee though. They'd have to change the collision, you're sword swings across you so if you aim at an enemy's leg at close range, your sword is still probably going come down on his head. I must confess I never played Fallout. I'm sure it was a good game but the setting just didn't appeal to me. I thought I recalled them having a selective aiming system though, something like that would work. Fable used to have a fun target selection system for ranged weapons too, but they got rid of it in Fable 3 for some strange reason. Too bad, because it was a lot of fun to shoot people's heads off then here the popping noise and the fountain of blood. Cartoony? Yes? But still very satisfying.EvolutionKills said:
Melee combat is just always better from the 3rd person perspective, you just have much more awareness of your character's body and surroundings. The problem is the TES games just look so ugly from 3rd person, your character is extremely awkward and it's hard to tell what he/she is aiming at. I think it would be better if they fixed the third person view so that the camera was tighter and the character's motions looked more fluid and responded more fluidly, then the game would be a lot more fun. A targeting system would help a lot, there could be a lock target button (left trigger or bumper is most intuitive I think) where the camera would zoom close to being over the shoulder and you could sub-select limbs. Doing any fancy movement in 1st person is disorienting. I really liked Fable's combat system, I think TES could go a little more in that direction. It's tough though. The entire game is designed to be viewed from the first person perspective, so having a combat system that switches to 3rd is obviously a bit difficult.
Can we maybe not reminisce about Oblivion? It looked boring and still didn't get exciting after several hours of play.
Instead, let's all remember Morrowind!
Instead, let's all remember Morrowind!
-----------------------------------
Will I be able to import my Oblivion character or game save into the new game?
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This is not Mass Effect.
The article clearly stated you play "Dragonborn" and the game plays 200 years later than Oblivion.
Will I be able to import my Oblivion character or game save into the new game?
-----------------------------------
This is not Mass Effect.
The article clearly stated you play "Dragonborn" and the game plays 200 years later than Oblivion.
ReiverCorrupter said:
I'm guess from your posts that you're a console gamer, and not PC. So the next game I'm about to mention you might not recognize or have played, but it's worth a shot.
The absolute best first person melee combat that I've played, was 'Dark Messiah of Might and Magic' (later released with the subtitle 'Elements' on the 360). Developed on Valve's Source engine, it was a solid action RPG. Some of the reasons the melee combat felt so visceral was that the game was built in a de-facto FPS engine, the aforementioned Source (Half-Life², Team Fortress 2, Left for Dead series, etc.). So the game had solid collision detection and fluid controls. The game also had an immersive style of first person, when you looked down you actually saw your legs and chest. When you moved, your head bobbed realistically to how you were moving. But the game was mostly action with light RPG elements. It was also linear, so they had more control of the games pacing.
That being said, I still have high hopes that this game will rub off on Skyrim. 'How?' you might ask? Well, for the same reasons that I hope this new engine will hold up better than the Gamebryo one powering Oblivions, business acquisitions. Bethesda's parent company is ZeniMax Media. Zenimax Media was created as a shell company by the founders of Bethesda Softworks to expand their properties across platforms. Recently, ZeniMaz Media has made some acquisitions. They purchased developer 'id' and brought John Carmack's team under their wing in June 2009. More recently, they bought developer Arkane Studios in August 2010. Arkane Studios was the team behind 'Dark Messiah'.
So ZeniMax now has at their disposal Bethesda Softworks, id Software, and Arkane Studios; whose credits include the Elder Scroll, Fallout, DOOM, Quake, and Wolfenstein series. Arkane was also tapped by 2K Marin to help develop 'Bioshock 2'. If anybody can get an excellent handling first person combat game, running on a stable engine, and set in an engaging and deep world, it's these guys.
Yeah, I don't really have the resources or time to be a PC gamer. Because of school I now almost exclusively play online games when my friends are online. I played a little FPS on the PC back in the day (SoF). But I never liked the controls. It's true a mouse and keyboard give you far more control, but it just doesn't feel as organic as a controller to me. But this is probably because I was raised on consoles (my first game ever was Goldeneye). Though the PC is still the undisputed champ of strategy games, hands down. I have Star Craft II but my crappy laptop is below the System req., so all I was really able to do was play the campaign. Shame really, but I don't have the time to devote to being good at it anyway, I'll just stick to my beloved Halo Wars.EvolutionKills said:
That being said, no I haven't heard of that game in particular, though 'Might and Magic' does ring a bell. I'll take your word for it, though I still can't quite see a first person as effective for melee combat as 3rd. Perhaps when one is only facing one enemy, but if one is surrounded a first person perspective is quite bad. Then again, one is rarely, if ever, surrounded in TES games, and they seem to be going for a more realistic feel for combat (e.i. if one is surrounded by enemies in real life they are boned). Combat is always more personal in TES too, usually 1v1 and at the very most 1v5.
This is obviously because combat is determined by crunching a lot of numbers between the stats of the player and the enemy NPCs, as well as the fact that the AI of the NPCs have to be more advanced because of their inventories and strengths and weaknesses. Obviously all this adds up so that the game cannot handle a large amount of NPCs fighting at the same time, whereas games like Fable can have 20 hobbes or mercenaries attacking the player at once because these enemies don't have a lot to them. In this latter case a third person perspective is preferable, but I can see how a 1st person perspective might be preferable when you can't have that many enemies.
I can definitely see how 1st person can feel more visceral. It's always more visceral to look through the eyes of the person who is stabbing the other person than to watch from afar; you're in the action itself. That's why all those crazy moments in Modern Warfare seemed so cool, we've all seen those sorts of stunts performed by action heroes countless times, but jumping over a falling helicopter and throwing a knife into someone's eye from the first person perspective really puts you in the action. If they include subtle things like you mentioned to make the player feel more embodied combat would be more frantic; little things like having the screen tilt and move with the player's more visible body when he does things so that the camera feels connected to the player's body and not just like a floating head.
It would also be nice if they had more context sensitive animations instead of the same 'vertical strike' 'horizontal strike' animations that one sees over and over again. For instance, after one downs a kneeling enemy have a brief scripted event where he grabs the enemy by the hair then slits his throat with his knife (though that kind of thing might warrant an MA rating). Or if the player is using a sword, he plunges it into the enemy's chest then pulls it out. Or if he has an axe or hammer he cracks open the downed enemy's skull. Of course if they were going to do this they should include a lot of such animations because no one wants to watch the same thing over and over. I know they mentioned finishing moves as one of the new innovations so perhaps it is something like this. It actually wouldn't take that much to do; just an afternoon or two in the studio with a motion capture camera. They have to do that anyway. The only rule I would keep in mind is to keep the sequence fluid and under a second in length; any longer than that and the player will be frustrated by the character's unresponsiveness.
Not sure if anyone has read the game informer pages but they talk about this a good deal. The spells seem more varied now (there's 85 of them, but rather then just a fireball and a flame touch you get that plus flamethrower like sprays (which hopefully means I can arc lightning, Sith lord style), landmine like trap runes, and more) .
The menus have been changed and made more "Apple" like, ie iphone like. Looking at the map zooms you out to look at the entire world, looking in the inventory makes you actually open a bag and look in the pockets at full 3d models of things, skills have you look into the sky and see your abilities shown by the heavens and spells...aren't really talked about honestly. Apparently dragons are not only around but they'll roam about, ambushing you and razing towns. They seem quite large actually,(in fact there are lots of really big enemies, including giants and shelob like spiders) and you can absorb their souls to power a specific type of magic called (and I'm serious, this is what they're calling it) "Dragon shouts". It basically seems to be a unique type of magic only you can use and that you learn new "shouts" by discovering ancient dragon words around the world and shouting them. In essence it seems to just be a form of unique, powerful spells that only you can use, but that you have to search ancient ruins for. The effects they talked about were stuff like a force push, summoning a dragon to fight for you and a stealth based one you whisper that lets you teleport around.
As per actual combat mechanics I can tell you that you can bash with a shield and that knock back has been said to be important to opening up combat opportunities. Also, you can no longer outsmart enemies by running backwards and smacking them, since you run backwards much slower now. The school of Mysticism magic has been done away with and it's spells merged into other schools. Bow and Arrows are slower but more powerful.
They say they have a new engine too, and the character models and scenery shots they showed are loads better. Snow actually falls and covers things realistically, not just as a texture they covered a rock with. People you talk to keep doing things rather then standing ramrod stiff and staring directly at you. They also have more voice actors so you don't hear the same people all the time. Apparently you can also do shit around town, like blacksmithing and mining if you really feel like it, though they don't say if this will be more menu based or actually an in game mechanic (making your own weapons would be sweet huh?).
Thats about all I remember.
The menus have been changed and made more "Apple" like, ie iphone like. Looking at the map zooms you out to look at the entire world, looking in the inventory makes you actually open a bag and look in the pockets at full 3d models of things, skills have you look into the sky and see your abilities shown by the heavens and spells...aren't really talked about honestly. Apparently dragons are not only around but they'll roam about, ambushing you and razing towns. They seem quite large actually,(in fact there are lots of really big enemies, including giants and shelob like spiders) and you can absorb their souls to power a specific type of magic called (and I'm serious, this is what they're calling it) "Dragon shouts". It basically seems to be a unique type of magic only you can use and that you learn new "shouts" by discovering ancient dragon words around the world and shouting them. In essence it seems to just be a form of unique, powerful spells that only you can use, but that you have to search ancient ruins for. The effects they talked about were stuff like a force push, summoning a dragon to fight for you and a stealth based one you whisper that lets you teleport around.
As per actual combat mechanics I can tell you that you can bash with a shield and that knock back has been said to be important to opening up combat opportunities. Also, you can no longer outsmart enemies by running backwards and smacking them, since you run backwards much slower now. The school of Mysticism magic has been done away with and it's spells merged into other schools. Bow and Arrows are slower but more powerful.
They say they have a new engine too, and the character models and scenery shots they showed are loads better. Snow actually falls and covers things realistically, not just as a texture they covered a rock with. People you talk to keep doing things rather then standing ramrod stiff and staring directly at you. They also have more voice actors so you don't hear the same people all the time. Apparently you can also do shit around town, like blacksmithing and mining if you really feel like it, though they don't say if this will be more menu based or actually an in game mechanic (making your own weapons would be sweet huh?).
Thats about all I remember.
ReiverCorrupter said:
Trust me, it would take much longer than that. Maybe if you had everything and everybody ready to go, you could bang out all of your mo-cap sessions for your finishing moves, but it takes a lot more than that to get them in game.
Mo-cap data is a good starting place, but almost never a be-all-end-all. It's never 100% how you want it to be, and always requires the tweaking of additional animators. They could fix everything from smoothing out the animation, and adjusting the timing to make it fit better within a sequence, or even completely reanimate whole parts of it to get to the finished product. Once the data is how they like it, it needs to be brought in game and tested. There could be some back a forth here, more animation tweaking following by trying it out in game, over and over again. Heaven forbid they change a sequence for whatever reason (game design decision, engine change, etc.), then you might have to fix it more, or even scrap it and start all over.
So you have a throat slicing finisher, for one human on another. Now what about other creatures with throats? How about the Minotaurs or Ogres? Now you have a size difference, and most likely they'll all require their own sets of moves. That's even more mo-cap time, another round of animating and tweaking and testing. You also have to debug the crap out of it, to make sure it doesn't 'break' under certain conditions. These could be related to relative size (Nord vs Bosmer), their positions (relative animation sequence and/or world space XYZ coordinates), or any other number of factors that can pop up during development.
It's one of the reasons that all of the NPC's in Oblivion had the same voice. It was such an undertaking to give everyone dialogue, and so much had to be recorded, that even casting a separate VO for each race/gender (20 total), not counting unique NPC's and monsters. You already had hours of recorded dialogue, and it was enough of a feat at the time just to accomplish what they did. But with Bioware pushing the envelope with Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and the soon to be Knights of the Old Republic, they keep pushing forward the expectations for game dialogue. If they can come close, it'll be a feat for a game of this scope.
Ultimately, they just have to be careful to not let their ambitions cause them to over-reach their abilities. I'd love to have a TON of uniques finisher moves, and I'm sure there will be quite a few (they where in Arkane Studio's 'Dark Messiah', and they where awesome back then too). But time and money always put limits on your production (unless you're 3D Realms), and rarely are things ever quick and easy. The amount of work to get anything into a game, and polished to a level worthy of a retail release, is always an undertaking.