226 replies to this topic

[Space Voyager]

Anybody looking forward to this as much as I am?!

I loved Oblivion - except the utter drag through the portals till the end, I loved Fallout 3 and DAMN this one looks to be shaping up even more to my liking... Bethesda delivers every time.

I'm still not certain whether I like post-apocalyptic or fantasy setting more but DRAGONS... Dragons I like MOAR.

[Lysear]

Yup   one of the very few games i will be getting on release day

[Azrael Strife]

I did not like Oblivion. The inventory sucked, and... I don't know, the characters movements felt silly. Despite being the same engine, I liked Fallout 3 a lot more.

Oh, the one thing that kept me from playing it for real was.. the auto levelling monsters. A goblin would become more powerful as you levelled up yourself, that was senseless and made the game unplayable for me.

I hope Skyrim brings some more realistic character movements, do away with the stupid auto level monster concept, provide a real inventory management that does not require mods to be decent, and optionally provide more interesting dungeons to explore. The secondary dungeons that are scattered all over the world felt a bit too much of the same to me, but that is secondary to my other complaints.

[Space Voyager]

Azrael Strife, on 20th April 2011, 2:21pm, said:

I did not like Oblivion. The inventory sucked, and... I don't know, the characters movements felt silly. Despite being the same engine, I liked Fallout 3 a lot more.

Oh, the one thing that kept me from playing it for real was.. the auto levelling monsters. A goblin would become more powerful as you levelled up yourself, that was senseless and made the game unplayable for me.

I hope Skyrim brings some more realistic character movements, do away with the stupid auto level monster concept, provide a real inventory management that does not require mods to be decent, and optionally provide more interesting dungeons to explore. The secondary dungeons that are scattered all over the world felt a bit too much of the same to me, but that is secondary to my other complaints.

Just wanted to say a lot of good things about mods for Oblivion - and those were more or less necessary - but I noticed you already know about those.

Still, Bethesda at least leaves modding doors wide open, contrary to CA for instance.

In the recent interviews (like the one in the preview at Gamespot) it was stated that there will be no auto levelling for monsters. The levelling may vary a bit but a mudcrab will stay mudcrab, it will not mutate into supermudcrab at any point in the game. Just like it was - as Tedd Howard said - in Fallout 3.

[Sunflash]

In order to keep from going insane, I've been avoiding all further information about this.

Still, someone scream when it goes up for pre-order or something. I don't need to eat /that/ badly....

[Space Voyager]

Not certain but I think I saw a "secure your copy" at Skyrim homepage...

Not going to do it though, Thorondor sobered me pretty well in that department. Patience, wait and see, wait for updates, patches, lowered prices... THAN preorder.

[Space Voyager]

Nice interview at Gameswelt.

And if you're not sure what the trailer shows, here's a good explanation.

[Bomb Bloke]

The patches will be important. Better games have more annoying bugs - to this day, Oblivion is still extremely unstable.

I still play that game on and off. Modded the heck out of it, and keep throwing more into the mix whenever it starts to get boring. The two I started with were Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul (which turfs the bulk of the "monsters level with you" silliness), and a "bag of holding" mod (as I've played the whole "stop adventuring whenever your inventory gets full" thing in a million other RPGs before).

The main quest was complete rubbish, and probably shorter then any of the guild-related quest for who knows what stupid reason. But, yeah, still playing the game on occasion. At this point I even have mods which add in most of the other provinces - currently partway through Morroblivion.

... Bah, don't get me started, or I'll go back to playing it and never be seen again!    It's the sort of game that makes me think long and hard before I start playing any new title (eg Skyrim), 'cause I know I'll burn up all my free time until it's "cleared"...

[Space Voyager]

Bomb Bloke, on 3rd May 2011, 12:52pm, said:

The main quest was complete rubbish, and probably shorter then any of the guild-related quest for who knows what stupid reason.

Agree with everything you've said - and I hated the main quest from the bottom of my heart when the game was finally over as most of it were portal crap over and over again. Got boring as hell.

But the vastness of game, side quests etc etc (and definitely some obligatory mods, the two you mentioned, Saddle bags, Darker nights...) made it all worthwhile for me.

[The Veteran]

Oblivion was possibly the largest anti-climax of my adult life... I pre-ordered it and was one of the first in the country to get hold of the collectors edition but it very quickly let me down. Stupid lockpick 'minigames' no visible map (and a crappy one when you did open all those extra screens to see it) keys stored individually in the inventory (?!?!?!) and a whole host of other compelte crap.

I believe there was a 'psychic guards' mod for Morrowind which prevented silent kills being automatically detected by the law for miles around, yet the same problem persists in Oblivion and once again it had to be fixed with an unofficial mod! Then there's the stupid conversation 'wheel' thing, what the hell is THAT!?

Honestly I've tried so many times to play through this game so it can grace my completed pile but it's just not good enough to make me want to find out how the story ends. I couldn't give two turds about the gates of oblivion, the town of Kvatch got levelled by monsters from ONE of those gates. Am I balls going to go through dozens of them ALONE! What a pile of crap...

Needless to say, I'll be waiting for favourable reviews of Skyrim before I part with my money this time round. And I mean reviews of people like Bomb Bloke and Azrael Strife, not IGN and Gamespot who are clearly going to love it regardless :s

[Bomb Bloke]

The trick is to ignore the main quest until you've run out of things to do. By the time I started it, I'd polished off every guild mission in the game, and my speed stat was through the roof (I dedicated all enchantments to it). This meant that I spent very little time going through Oblivion gates, as they're only available for a few missions and then they're gone for good (short missions at that, when you've got ~200 speed). I eventually intend to bring them back with a mod, as there's some unique armour through them that I want a full set of (even if I'll never wear it).

I get the impression much of the interface was changed to benefit console gamers. That said, Morrowind was fun enough to play on Xbox (even if it obviously never should've made it past quality control - probably the most unstable game the console has to offer).

[The Veteran]

So once again, pc gamers have to suffer at the expense of the console market? At what point did the games industry become so unbalanced that consoles deserve so much 'special attention'? Sony of course will always be console biased as they don't offer any real PC hardware (or software) but look at Microsoft... They have massive investments in both desktop and console systems yet still we seem to be getting increasingly lumbered with console software on our PCs. Even things like STEAM and GFWL seem to have originated from the depths of these odd little boxes, feeling totally out of place on a household computer and simply serving to clutter up our gaming rigs with masses of completely unnecessary software.

I cannot stress enough how much I HATE the console generation, only the Wii is unique (and even that's not as true now as it was even a year or two ago) but that doesn't even come close to attracting the same kind of demographic as any other system. The PS3 and XBox and whatever may well be aimed specifically at hardcore gamers but the PC has been doing that job for decades before they came along! Of course there have always been consoles as they were essentially designed to bring the arcade into our homes, but each time a system became obsolete the desktop had already adapted.

Show me an improving console and I'll believe it's a worthwhile investment but the fact is, if you spend the same amount of money on desktop upgrades as you would do on release day priced consoles, you'll always be one step ahead. The point is, consoles are upgraded with 'next gen' hardware which outdate most mainstream desktops on release day but then that's it. They stay the same while we continue to improve our systems and soon the PC reigns supreme again.

So why don't developers realise this? Stop wasting time and money on bad ports of games from one medium to another and simply make more good games. I'm loving Dead Space at the moment but I get a funny feeling each time I turn it on when the first screen I see says 'press any key'  

[Space Voyager]

As a side-note; I love Bethesda for allowing complete modding of their games. Oblivion was "not really best" when I first tried it, than mods came, than mod packs came, than the game took a wholly different shape.

As a contrast you have SEGA and CA with their sudden turn in Total War series that closed-off the modding almost to the point of non-existence. Not to mention the Steam exclusive...

This is why I plan to buy Skyrim at some point and definitely will not buy Shogun2 at any point.

[Sunflash]

I love being the oddman out.

Which is good, because I absoutly enjoyed 90% of the vanilla Oblivion. (Only mod I added was mark/recall, and that was later on anyhow!)

Oh well. Guess that's a perk of being easy to please.

[Knan]

Bomb Bloke, on 4th May 2011, 2:00am, said:

The trick is to ignore the main quest until you've run out of things to do.

Well, in Morrowind I never got around to the main quest - and as a result still don't quite grasp what the game really was about

I got a nice collection of stuff in an abandoned house I adopted, though. And yes, he was a pro burglar - why do you ask?

[The Veteran]

Morrowind was a great game and it really deserves to be explored to the very last cave! I lawnmowered the entire continent and even swam out for some distance around the coast before I considered myself to have finished the game. I did Tribunal and Bloodmoon too as well as making myself a small island to live on and if I may say so one of the coolest mods ever lol. It's twofold and comprises of a free quick-travel system and a nifty little base of operations. I think the final version had 8 hidden doors/trapdoors scattered around the island (hidden behind wall hangings and just off the beaten track. The Balmora trapdoor was just under the ferry station outside the city ) Inside I used the castle tileset to create a building where all external doors led to the top of a tower at the bottom of which was a complex of rooms consisting of basically everything you'd ever want. A nice bed, suits of armour on the wall and countless tables and shelves to store unique items on. The real fun comes from playing through the game and starting with nothing, then slowly filling the rom with random crapola. I want to share it now I'm talking about it actually as I never have before... Will look out some pics if I have it on this comp as I'm very proud of my little stash lol

But anyway, yes, play every last little bit of it, it's the best Elder Scrolls title to date without a shadow of a doubt!

[The Veteran]

I can't find my morrowind! And I should have 2 copies!!! Crisis averted though as I found a working nocd patch for now. I do legally own it so I'm not doing anything wrong and don't condone piracy etc and so on...

Anyway I found my most recent savegame in which I've just installed the Tamriel Rebuilt stuff (mainland Morrowind) and to account for it I rather drastically enlarged my mod. Sadly that means there are a lot of empty shelves as I loaded up the game from before I started playing through the new content to avoid bugs but I took a bunch of screenies of my personal mod/collection and stuck 'em on photobucket here for anyone interested

Here's the heart of my collection with Wraithguard, Keening and Sunder front and centre in my main store room! I also have a Dwemer table in the room behind me, a bunch of neat wall armour and stacks of weapons, unique and common. Bear in mind that the original mod comes without any items (save the wall mounted ones) so all the stuff in these images was placed by me and it took some time


Oh and this is my island. Butcher, lumberjack, watchtower, tavern, 2 ports and a gentlemens club! Even a few working quests to pass some time...

[Bomb Bloke]

Knan, on 9th May 2011, 5:42am, said:

Well, in Morrowind I never got around to the main quest - and as a result still don't quite grasp what the game really was about

You could just about say that the fact you never finished it pretty much sums up the point - to do whatever you want. It's one of the few games that really DOES classify as an RPG, because there's no right or wrong way to play it.

... 'cept on the Xbox. I'll probably end up porting my save game to PC, as it's just too unstable to get much further...

The Veteran, on 9th May 2011, 8:52am, said:

Here's the heart of my collection with Wraithguard, Keening and Sunder front and centre in my main store room! I also have a Dwemer table in the room behind me, a bunch of neat wall armour and stacks of weapons, unique and common. Bear in mind that the original mod comes without any items (save the wall mounted ones) so all the stuff in these images was placed by me and it took some time

I tried something similar in Oblivion. However, I happened to choose the building with the maid (it being the largest you could officially purchase and all - and since the mods I used cranked the price up by about 10x, I was certainly gonna stick there once I was able to buy the place!!), and one day she decided to walk right THROUGH some display cases. Que the physics engine kicking in - equipment, gems and artefacts flying randomly about the room...

[Sgt. Strike]

I'll wait a little while before trying out the game. I kinda liked Oblivion, myself, and that it could be heavily modded. I actually PC over console myself, but some games are a little better on the console than the PC. But ALL games are made on PC. There used to be a time when they were made on the PC, but was rendered on the Mac. The changes made to games from the PC to a console can be numerous, and onerous, due to the console, the controller, etc. Consoles are essentially not much more than a massive video CPU, power supply, dvd drive (or blu-ray DVD), and a controller. Actually, that's the non-hard drive version of the consoles. The ones with hard drives in them, the drives aren't really all that big. I believe the X-box had, initially a 10 gig drive. Maybe 20 gig. And that was IDE too. The PS3 and X-box 360 have SATA drives, and not really big, compared to what a PC can have, like 2 terabyte drives. Oh, and a networking card, if not even a wireless card built in.

[Space Voyager]

Seven minutes of gameplay.

Tags: GameTrailers.com, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - E3 2011: Gameplay Walkthrough (Stream), PC Games, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360