Skyrim made Dragon Slaying boring

KiKiweaky

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I killed my first dragon and it was rather scary, afterwards I was like 'HOLY SHIT!!!! I just killed a dragon AAHAHHHHHH' but eh yes I'm on 15+ and its just getting tedious haha.
 

Levethian

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Wintermute_ said:
reclaiming some truly unimportant and inconsequential item and returning to town
It was a dragon burial site map, delivered to the blades. Did you look at it?
Wintermute_ said:
a dragon randomly shows up. Completely out of the blue. No lead up. No suspense. Just... go slay that dragon.
Because dragons usually send a notification via email before they swoop down from the sky ;)
Wintermute_ said:
Nope. I must walk 2 minutes out of town. Into the middle of a field.
The story is about the threat of dragons attacking settlements. It was attacking a settlement. Not sure the Whiterun 'King' would be bothered if there was a dragon a vast distance away.
Wintermute_ said:
Thank heaven he didn't remember he had wings
My first dragon wouldn't bloody land. Varies I guess. -_-
Wintermute_ said:
above all UNCHALLENGING fight possible. I had a tougher time slaying the city guards!
The Witcher 2 was flamed for including a difficult dragon-related experience at the start of the game. Skyrim would have made no friends by making it hard. Or, you can play on Master difficulty.
Wintermute_ said:
Here's my problem with Skyrim: It focused on populating a massive world where you can truly do almost anything. The problem? there is no reason to do anything. Dragon slaying is just as mundane as killing a wolf pack, and just as difficult, which is to say not very. When making the game, the developer smeared a wafer thin layer of story over the sprawling landscape and sent it off for the players.
This I get - Bethesda had to spread it's resources thinly, no doubt, and work hard on 'big picture' procedural systems to make the world feel alive rather than concentrating on fine detail. Mods can't come soon enough.

wurrble182 said:
i really do think the game could stand to lower the spawn rate of dragons the more souls your carrying around though...
I guess. In one of my saves I've only met 2 random dragons by level 26. Weird.
 

repeating integers

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I went round to my friend's house today (along with 2 other friends), and there I saw my first Dragon encounter.

The dragon was hovering in the air. We (well, the one playing, but I'll keep on saying "we") shot at it and it began to, erm, fly backwards.

It then started doing this weird jiggly dance thing in midair. While going backwards. Then it went through a load of trees. And then a mountain.

It drunkenly flailed about and frostbreathed into the middle of nowhere. We cast Dragonrend on it. It went up. It kept going up. It disappeared out of sight. As my friend put it, "it's somebody else's problem now".

It came back, though. We nearly offed it for good. Then it went back inside the mountain (backwards), and this time it never came out.

It was... interesting.
 

Terminal Blue

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It sounds like you had a bad experience with that fight, or the AI just went derpy for a second (Dragon AI tends to do that). I found that fight harrowing, and though you're right in that it's not particularly difficult thanks to your unkillable NPC friends, I still found myself getting straffed or flamethrowered from the sky and going "eeep"!

The dragons do have a range of attacks, and they do shout - higher level dragons shout more and have a bigger range of shouts (if you have the general subtitles on it translates their growling into shouts just like it does with the draugr). They won't be freezing you into ice or blasting you around, but they definitely have a weakened form of Fus Ro Dah.

I do think the weakest dragons in the game are incredibly weak. I think they had to be so that level 2 or 3 players could still beat them, the Dragons do ramp up in difficulty though. I've been killed by them occasionally at every level for doing dumb things.

What does kind of annoy me is that certain playstyles suit dragon fighting much better than others. Your illusionist might be an unstoppable badass for most of the game, but in a Dragon fight.. yeah, don't try to frenzy Sahloknir.
 

Faladorian

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Wintermute_ said:
Ohhhh don't worry it's just the first dragon it needs to be easy, it gets harder and harder until eventually you finish off the game with an epic battle to the death with Alduin World-Eater...

Or so I wish I could say. Just for a little perspective:

I defeated Alduin in about twenty seconds, taking NO damage at all, and needing only to take one stamina potion. It was fucking retarded.
 

scorptatious

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Really? I found fighting dragons to be pretty exhilarating. Especially when you're fighting a higher tier dragon solo.

I admit though, they do become a bit easier the more I leveled up. But hey, that only shows how much my character has grown and improved since the beginning of the game. First time I actually faced a non-quest line dragon, I had to hide and rely on the help of a mammoth in order to take it down. Now, I'm able to solo Frost Dragons with little to no issue.
 

darkonnis

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For me, the dragons are the worst bit of skyrim. I fast travel anywhere and they turn up to try and ruin my day. I wouldn't mind so much if it was a straight up fight where it actually made a proper attempt at killing me.
But instead they just fly round the sky endlessly not doing much except distracting my followers and stopping me from fast travelling further. They stop, blast me for 70% of my HP and bugger off again.
Now, i just summon my 2 atronachs and just let them beat it for me, literally because the fights are so dull its pointless.
Fighting the draugr on the other hand is fun experience, some of those fuckers just keep coming and coming. despie the fact the whole worlds been blown into oblivion by fireballs.

The games strengths for me, like the other games are the faction based missions. Dark brotherhood was immense, mages guild was meh, companions was fairly cool, on to the thieves guild.
 

phantasmalWordsmith

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I must admit, fighting dragons is not what I hoped it to be. To be honest, I wanted "dragon slaying" to be an interesting fight...Like when I play Monster Hunter, they did Dragons crazy but it presented a unique challenge
 

Wintermute_

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bussinroundz said:
Wintermute_ said:
And really, its okay. RPG's are okay where they are now and where they are heading. We got the Elder Scroll series there to give us freedom and exploration, and studios such as Bioware to give us story- and emotional-context.
I'm really sick of hearing this bullshit, that just because It's an open world/open ended game that the writing/quests/characters have to be shit. WRONG !! Try playing New Vegas. I know none of you fangirls want to admit it, but wake the fuck up. Bethesda is only good at making some nice outdoor enviorments. Jesus F. Christ.

It's okay where they are heading ? One makes LARPing/hiking sims and the other makes interactive movies with homosexual relationships. OK.
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU. Although your a bit inflammatory about, you have an EXCELLENT point.
You have a massive open world game that lets you do just about anything and to make a unique character? Thats great but so what? That doesn't mean the story can get away with being sparse and poorly constructed or that it's fine that every character is just a quest vending machine or exposition dumper.

And what's the point in having a few hundred "quests" available if they are all just vehicles for quick experience points and copy-pastes of one another after some point? And hell, thanks to that stupid fast travel system, rare is the time when you need to even walk to do them.

I say again, I want a REASON, a motivation, to do the many things available in Skyrim, not just the ability to do them just because I can.

When I played Skyrim, I assumed I would be playing as the guy with the awesome horned helmet in the commercials, with some great character background to give me a basis on which to develop my own character in the game. Instead I'm a soulless random prisoner that for some reason locals took to sending on errands.

It's a good game people, but not a great game. It's not game of the year, and I would not spend 150 hours or $60 on the timesink.
 

CrazyHatMan

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Wow mate, give it some time is my advice. Hell, i was playing a battlemage (mace in one hand, fire in the other) and once i got up into the higher levels and met my first frost dragon, i ran and hid under a bridge, sniveling and chucking fireballs whenever i could. Yes the dragon fights are a bit easy, but hell, the early one's you meet are just cannonfodder. Buildup for the blasted Ancient dragons that will rape your face if you so much as blink in their general direction, or if you just happen to be in the same postcode area. Point is, give it some goddamn time to grow on you you big baby.
 

Dexiro

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"Bawwww I got hyped for Skyrim and was disappointed that X wasn't 100% perfect", we get this thread every other day.

The dragon slaying is fine. It's better than any of the wooden combat Bethesda has thrown at us thus far so what are you complaining about? If the dragons weren't good enough for you of all things then I suggest you put down the Elder Scrolls games and find something else to play because it doesn't get much better than that.
 

Pyramid Head

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I'm with you on this one. I went for a Khajit assassin/thief specializing in using bows and switching to magic when things went tits up and my position was discovered, and all i ever did with dragon encounters was let the dragon take on an NPC and shoot it in the face. In fact at one point the dragon died when it ignored me in favor of A FUCKING CHICKEN!
That weirdly survived the encounter. Something you may notice if you keep playing is that if you gain stealth and ranged attack abilities, the difficulty curve will break as you gain the ability to kill enemies that you should have been avoiding. But the dragons? They never pose a threat unless you're alone, and even then all you have to do is
A. If it's an open field, keep running until the dragon targets a random bear or bandit group
B. Take cover when the dragon uses a breath attack and use your own voice to stun it and hit it with whatever element the dragon isn't
 

Mystify

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The dragon fights are some of the most interesting opponents in the entire game. Not necessarily the hardest, some of the bosses where just mean, but definitely the most interesting. They are flying around, they are breathing flame, they are landing and taking off, you are seeking out cover from their breath weapons or drinking potions against it, etc. I never fought a dragon with my mage, so maybe chucking magic at them isn't any more exciting than chucking it at anything else in the game, but it does spice up martial combat. At least until you get into high levels and tear through them like tissue paper, but thats also par for the course.

As for the combat in general being poor, its better than most elder scroll games. However, it is unrealistic to expect the dragon combat to be amazing when the normal combat is so-so. A bigger and better opponent isn't going to revolutionize a flat combat system.
 

I forgot

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Hammeroj said:
I forgot said:
It's these kind of stories that I wonder how anyone was excited for this game. The problem I have with Elder Scrolls, Fallout 3, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Fable and other games of similar blood is that they fuck up the action in Action RPG.
For that reason, I was more eager to play Rayman Origins than this game.
The sad part is that Skyrim also fucked up the RPG part of the game.
How did they do that?
 

VanityGirl

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Christopher N said:
I must admit, fighting dragons is not what I hoped it to be. To be honest, I wanted "dragon slaying" to be an interesting fight...Like when I play Monster Hunter, they did Dragons crazy but it presented a unique challenge
Monster Hunter has some of the most fun and interesting fighting mechanics I've ever played in a game. It takes will thought out strategy and kills to kill them. I freakin' love that game.

Anywho... I pooped on dragons in Skyrim. I think being a mage makes it too easy. My spells were overly powerful.
 

Flailing Escapist

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Just wait until you bump into Ancient Dragons. I'm a level 47 and they still wreck my shit every time.

Or those occasional battles with 2 dragons at once. Holy fucking shit I don't think I've had a more epic battle than those.

The best part is that 99% of the dragon battles you'll get into are completely random. Nothing says, "help me, jesus" like seeing the shadow of a dragon interupt your flower picking.