Skyrim - Two months later.

[Daniel_Rosamilia]

Well, I've got two characters at the moment:
A level 4 Nord who I'll use to do alternate stories with (destroy the dark brotherhood instead of joining it and the stormcloak line instead of the Imperial line) and a level 81 Dunmer (didn't powerlevel, just did ALL the questlines) who I'm currently using to get the Thieves Guild back to its former glory courtesy of side-quests, which are pretty good for stealing random loot.

It's good fun, although I'll probably burn myself out after I full-level my Nord character.
What I'd love to see in a Skyrim expansion is this:
- Possibly more backstory to the Dwarves and their disappearance
- Some sort of indication of what happened to Vivec after the Oblivion Crisis happened and he ran away to Akavir (not sure if I got the right place)
- Maybe a trip to Morrowind or Mournhold (not Solstheim, there's enough snow in Skyrim, don't need an island covered in the stuff)

What I'd like to see in the sequel:
- The return of the Morrowind armor system (Light and Heavy, medium was a bit useless, as the strongest armor was weaker than light armor's strongest) and the ability to wear more than one ring and amulet (possible limit of 6 rings and 2 amulets)
- Maybe the return of the Acrobatics and Athletics skills, although, with the Skyrim setup, there may not be any particularly useful perks for them)
- Spears and crossbows (I know this is a very common complaint, but I was a big fan of spears in Morrowind, and crossbows, although they were heavier than most longbows, did a fairly high amount of damage)
- The setting's something I'm not too sure about, but Valenwood or Elsweyr seem to be the best ideas)
- A crossover of sorts between guild storylines (in Morrowind, to finish the Fighters or Thieves guild was to, unless you knew exploits to keep them both alive, kill the leader of the rival faction, which was quite a challenge, as they were usually perfectly countered to the guild you were working for)

EDIT: Just realised I've got most of the achievements, which is a bit sad, since I've hardly touched it since I rediscovered New Vegas (Old World Blues, how your juvenile humor entertains me)

 

[ELD3RGoD]

I have played 3 characters, got none of them to 50 and if I'm honest I find it hard to get into the mood to play it again.

Good points:
Graphically better than the previous titles.
Decent sized world.
Magic system is pretty good.
Talking to people is generally less irritating.
The main quest was pretty good.
The Mages guild was pretty fun.

Bad points:
Annoying repeated dialogue from shopkeepers.
Lack of weaponry to choose from (Spears, Shortswords etc.)
'Special' items look no different from regular items (I was expecting red eagle to be a badass special sword, it was just an ancient nord sword with an enchantment... wow.)
Assassins guild is a repeat and it's boring. I only enjoyed the finale.
Most quests are boring.
Lack of armour pieces (Greaves, pauldrons etc.)
Lack of enemy types and difficulties.
Once you level a skill to 100, you're practically invincible.
Companions are damn annoying, the AI for them is poor. If I want them to wait, they'll usually storm in to a fight anyway.
The Thieves seem like a bunch of arseholes rather than 'noble thieves.'
The Companions was boring as hell.
Dragons are boring.
Can't become an Orc warlord and combine the tribes (Really annoyed me.)
Can't join the Thalmor.
90% of quests are the same.

Those are just some of my bad points. Honestly, I can enjoy the game when I'm in the mood but these things ALWAYS annoy me.

 

[go-10]

I still enjoy it but not as much anymore, the main problem is the combat, after playing Dark Souls the combat in Skyrim just got horribly boring and I put it to the side and kept on playing Dark Souls and Arkham City. After I finished both I put Skyrim back in and combat fucking sucks! I hope for the next one they concentrate more on combat mechanics and less on mountains and snow

 

[No-one Special]

Oh I have one more thing to add to my dislikes from before.

Level 100 Enchanting. If I disenchant something at level 100 and then go to enchant another item with a grand soul, you would expect that enchantment to be the same. But, when at level 100 I disenchanted a Master Robe of Destruction to put on my Daedric Armour, the stats go from Fortify Destruction 22%, Magicka recharge 150% on the robe to Fortify Destruction 15%, Magika Recharge 10% on the armour.

Did you ever think that maybe I might want some armour as a mage that didn't suck? Yeh the Archrobes are good, but I have bugger all health because I spent it all on my magicka cause I'm a damn mage! Let me enchant stuff properly!

/rage

 

[FateOrFatality]

..it's that the modding tools only just got released and give a few month and there will be an insane amount of mods that will completely transform skyrim.

Damn it man, I saw you post this and nearly went into a panick thinking the CK had been released without me even realising it. I don't think I've ever switched tabs as fast as I did just then. Cheers for that one.

OT: 210 hours played. That should answer your question. I've been taking a break to play some Arkham City and didn't play for two weeks because I was in Japan, but as soon as the CK is released I'll probably rack up another 100 hours pretty quickly, including the time I spend modding that is.

 

[Fourspaces]

219 hours played so far, so I guess its held my interest well enough. I find it funny that a lot of the people saying its bad in some way are acting as though this game exists in a void - please, before mentioning how npcs have limited lines, name a Bioware npc with unlimited lines.

But yes, i'm still enjoying it - maybe because I didn't expect this game to be anything but an Elder Scrolls game with improvements over its predecessors.

 

[Joccaren]

219 hours played so far, so I guess its held my interest well enough. I find it funny that a lot of the people saying its bad in some way are acting as though this game exists in a void - please, before mentioning how npcs have limited lines, name a Bioware npc with unlimited lines.

But yes, i'm still enjoying it - maybe because I didn't expect this game to be anything but an Elder Scrolls game with improvements over it's predecessors

Its not as much limited lines as it is VERY limited lines. Some have one line of dialogue, most have about 3. Get into the longest chain conversation you can in Skyrim with one person, so that in one conversation you get them to say as much as possible, I'll bet you my Dragon Age: Origins or Mass Effect conversation will last longer.
Much of the complaint will be with your companions in Skyrim. Though they are the ones you are meant to spend the most time around, they are the least characterised of anyone in the world. Compare them to Bioware companions and hell, Skyrim's suck.

I also don't think it was an improvement. Morrowind was more fun. Largely because you could do a lot of wacky things like jump over a mountain, make custom spells, and those cliff racers were harder to kill than these pathetic dragons.
Granted, it had less bugs than your average Bethesda game, but there were still a ton of quest, Main quest and game breaking bugs to be found spread across the platforms.


On to the 'bad in some way' thing, there is more I will criticise than lack of dialogue:
-World is static. Nothing you do changes anything (A change of guard and one extra line of dialogue from them does NOT count as a change. If people in the streets said one line of dialogue about SOPA 'I don't like SOPA' then kept on with their daily business, would that be reacting? No. It would be apathy), and the world will change nothing on its own.
-Combat is boring as ever. No skill required in melee, not much interesting in spells, and archery is just repetitive and boring.
-No sense of urgency. For anything. WHY am I trying to stop Alduin? WHY do I become Archmage of the college? WHY do anything? This connects to the static world.
-Bad levelling system. Look above at the 'Why'. WHY do you level? Does it accomplish anything? Other than changing the look of your amour if you do smithing? Not really. Level Scaling means that no matter how much you level, those bandits are going to level with you. Add to that the inherent ease of the game, and there really is no reason you'd want to make it easier.
-Lackluster AI. Not everything needs a good AI; wolves, bears, bandits and such will be fine without it. Things like Dragons though need a good AI. They don't have one. They also lack any effective combat abilities or a reasonable amount of health.
-Bugs. I cannot become Thane of Riften because I entered my house before I spoke to the Jarl. I could not get past the Esbern part of the main quest as he finished his dialogue in 1/2 second and would not unlock the door. I could not complete numerous radiant quests as I had been to that dungeon before, and done the quest objective, so then I was stuck with a ton of undroppable quest items and a ton of uncompleted quests. Dragons don't fight me. They just fly around doing nothing until I manage to finally hit them. PS3 users cannot play the game after X hours (Some anyway). More bugs, these are the major ones I come across.
-Very low res graphics, when it supposedly had 'Great' graphics.
-Very few characters are characterised, and those that are are generally the ones along the quest lines.
-90% of quests are 'Go to Dungeon. Clear out dungeon. Return to quest giver'.
-Very samey dungeons. There are only so many times that I can walk into a dungeon and know its exact layout without having ever been there before without calling them generic. Not all dungeons have to be amazingly awesome and cool, but a bit of variety would be nice. That Dwarven dungeon that had a tunnel section that was vertical instead of horizontal - cool. The one that had those gears and bones? Cool. The sheer number of ones with the same/similar layout - not cool.
-Several bad design decisions. When I have to collect 28 or so stones of Berenzia, weighing 0.5 each, I do not want to HAVE to carry them ALL around at all times and be unable to drop them, as one example. Many others will have been covered in my other points.
-Terrible UI
-Many, many useless perks.
-Though many will disagree with me, lack of replayability.

Those are some of my complaints with Skyrim. I have ways to fix each. I would post them, but it is too early in the morning and I should get some sleep.

 

[Frankster]

Damn it man, I saw you post this and nearly went into a panick thinking the CK had been released without me even realising it. I don't think I've ever switched tabs as fast as I did just then. Cheers for that one.

Aw sorry, it's just I remembered it was supposed to be released mid january, and well, its mid january so assumed it either recently came out or will be coming out in the next few days. Did not actually check as I'd rather not find out what the modders are up to lest I stumble upon mods I want RIGHT NOW but will take months before they are done.

So yeh, sorry for giving you a jolt ><

 

[Red_Paw]

From my experience of Bethesda games, I would say that they make very large games with a lot of content, but the quality suffers due to a lack of polish.

I feel although some very minor tweaks would make the game far more interesting and less cumbersome. For example, the amount of loading screens could be greatly reduced by having more shopkeepers outside and an option to either fast travel within a zone or just outside it.

The random Dragon encounters also annoy me at how badly dragons behave. They seem to get bored of you if you can't hit them whilst they're in the air and fuck off to kill a particularly threatening mudcrab.

Furthermore, not being able to jump whilst sprinting bids farewell to more interesting puzzle sequences. Speaking of which, I don't really think that a puzzle should constitute of looking at the claw in your inventory every single time you're met with the same fucking door or glancing at some stones which just tell you the answer for a gate, that doesn't make you think at all. The puzzles which take me the longest to solve are the ones where I'm looking for the lever hidden in the dark somewhere and that's not exactly fun. There was one puzzle which contained a simple riddle which, although it was pretty easy to solve, is the only one I can remember clearly and actually enjoyed doing.

Combat hasn't seen too much improvement from previous games. I don't like the stupid 3rd person final kills, though I do like them from a 1st person perspective, there should have been an option to change that to your liking.

That being said, I've still got 90 hours out of it and there's probably a few more. I just feel like the developers of TES games don't know how to make them fun. They spend so much effort trying to make it immersive yet they clearly don't know how to do that. You make a game immersive by keeping the flow going, cutting out as many bugs as you can, needless loading screens and "what the hell just happened?" moments because every time one of those happens, you realise that you're just sitting in a chair looking at a screen.

*Also, as a side note, the voice acting is wasted since there's a few random people who have their own voice but it's restricted to just them who you encounter once or twice in the entire game. I've only noticed about three male voices and three female ones*

 

[FateOrFatality]

Damn it man, I saw you post this and nearly went into a panick thinking the CK had been released without me even realising it. I don't think I've ever switched tabs as fast as I did just then. Cheers for that one.

Aw sorry, it's just I remembered it was supposed to be released mid january, and well, its mid january so assumed it either recently came out or will be coming out in the next few days. Did not actually check as I'd rather not find out what the modders are up to lest I stumble upon mods I want RIGHT NOW but will take months before they are done.

So yeh, sorry for giving you a jolt ><

No worries, I'm just highly anticipating it, to say the least. You should have seen my reaction when one of my friends on steam renamed a program to "Creation Kit" and ran it through Steam. I was so excited when I saw the little notification pop up in the bottom of my screen...

 

[danirax]

Personally same as you I burned myself out on Skyrim within the first month, I was about to quit but then I took an arrow to the knee, dam bandits, I rolfed and kept playing for a few more weeks and then started modding it amazing how a few mods can change the feeling of every thing..... realistic wolfs, more powerful dragons, weapons, better texture, thunder!, and more...

 

[teh lurker]

What little of it I've played it's not bad. My main complaints about it actually have nothing to do with the game itself, but rather with the TV that I'm forced to play it on. The TV I've got is 8 or 9 years old. It's not even an HDTV, which if memory serves were available when my TV was new. It's great for movies, and games like Castle Crashers and Rock of Ages, but for something as graphics-intensive as Skyrim, particularly when there's text on the screen that I have to read, I can only make out about 1 word in 4. I'll give it another shot once I can afford to get a modern TV, but for now I just can't play it.

What little of it I have been able to play has been fun, but I'm wondering if I'm going to have the same problem with this game that I have with Fallout 3. There's just so much of it, that I find it to be almost completely inaccessible to me. Maybe I'm just getting too old for games like this.

 

[Wolfram23]

I stopped playing it after 5 weeks and 105 hours. Lvl 43 mage and lvl... 28? sneak archer. Barely scratched the surface of the quests, really. Have not done most of the guild quests or the main dragon questline to completion.

I just kinda got bored of it.

However, I was looking at mods yesterday, and in particular there are some pretty good magic mods that might make the game playable again on my mage. Just need to up the difficulty a tad.

Haven't had much time to play it myself I live away for college monday to friday and then work at weekends (my xbox is at home). Gotta admit though if you played it for 105 hours, didn't do the major quests and are only now getting bored I'm excited to get my xbox up and get seriously stuck into it.

You would think so, but no. I actually barely did any main quests. For example of all the guilds, I finished only the mage guild and just started Dark Brotherhood. I also didn't do the main dragon quest, maybe 1/3 of the way through that if I had to guess. There's just a ton of other stuff to do. Like every time you go to a new city there's a miriad of quests, some are miscelaneous but some are more "main" quest in the sense that they get a title in the journal, anyway. Like I probably spent at least 10-15 hours doing Markarth stuff and I'm not even thane there, but there was a whole murder mystery and an underground clan and other stuff.

The main thing that's getting boring though is the formulaic dungeons and fights. After a while they all start looking the same. But, yeah, there are a few more unique quests which is attractive. I'll go back to it eventually.

 

[BLAHwhatever]

I play it every day.
And I can't wait for the modding stuff once the creation kit is out.
Yarrrrrrrrrrr!

 

[Aurora Firestorm]

I have a Level 13 Khajiit male character, and I took him the combat mage route -- one-handed weapons, Destruction magic, and heavy armor. In the end, I dropped it when my social life got overloaded, but I might go back a while now that I've found a "voice to Skyrim" mod where you can shout your Shouts in real life and the game will react. I might just have to sit around my house yelling FUS RO DAH at my screen until my housemates punch me in the face.

The game was fun but exactly what I had expected -- a lot of fun novelty and not a lot of story and character.

 

[babinro]

I've put 70 hours into the game. Putting the game down about halfway through my second playthrough as the game simply lost it's charm. I was looking for something unique in Skyrim...what I got was a good expansion to Oblivion. Needless to say I find it to be extremely disappointing as a result.

I'll likely revisit Skyrim during the gaming lull of 2012 as I've yet to experiment with the stealthy bowman.

For now I've moved on to The Old Republic. A game that I consider my GOTY 2011 and will likely continue playing for a more months until Mass Effect 3 is released.

 

[godofallu]

I beat it. It is done.

I got a little over a hundred hours. It's more than you can expect from most single player games.

 

[Oly J]

I'm currently not in posession of my copy of Skyrim having leant it to a friend, but I had finished all of the main quests clocking 200+ hours, learned at least the first word of 20 dragon shouts and done a lot of misc' quests, when I get it back I intend to make a new character and do things a little differently, after which it will most likely sit undesturbed on my game rack until the inevitable DLC comes out, which I will promptly buy and play ceaselessly until it is done, then it will likely once again sit undesturbed on my game rack until either new DLC comes out or I feel like playing it through again

 

[T.D.]

I'll probably keep playing till Mass Effect 3 comes out then focus on that. For the moment I would say it is inferior to Oblivion.

Main Reasons

1. Dragons are fun and all but I wish they had a bit more strength and moves.
2. QUESTS NEED TO BE INTERESTING. Oblivion had Whodunit, and although Skyrim's Dark Brotherhood had the Emperor it was a huge loss of potential and nowhere near as fun.
3. Bugs. Why are there butterflies? :L
4. SPELLCRAFTING? WHY?

 

[Keneth]

I've played Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and now Skyrim for several hundred hours each. I typically go through 5 stages in these games.

The Newbie:
ZOMG-SOOO-PRETTY-must-play-every-waking-moment-till-I-pass-out-from-sheer-exhaustion! This stage usually lasts from a few days to a week.


The Adventurer:
At this stage I've gotten a pretty firm grasp of the game's mechanics and storyline and I generally know how I want to progress my character. I typically play in a set style (Mage/Warrior/Theif) pretty faithfully. This stage lasts two or three weeks.

The Veteran:
Once I've gotten to this stage I've pretty well exhausted all options of the previously selected play style and begin to branch out into the others. I try a little of this and a little of that while falling back into my dominant style when it really hits the fan. Again, this stage lasts a few weeks.

The King:
I generally go into a "Power leveling stage" at this point. I try to get my character's skills maxed and his equipment just as brokenly powerful as I possibly can. I usually start exploiting a bit and using some console codes at this point as well. This stage lasts until I get bored of it. (This is the stage I'm currently at in Skyrim.)

The God:
At this stage I've done pretty much everything and don't give a crap about keeping it "Legit" anymore. I glitch, mod, exploit, massacre entire towns on a whim, kill my followers in entertaining ways, etc. I am a living manifestation of chaos and destruction. Sheogorath and Merunes Dagon don't hold a candle to me. The world is my plaything, and I will break or burn it in any manner I see fit. Or, I might just go around Wabbajacking chickens for teh lulz. It depends.