Later they’re a welcome reprieve – “only” 3 hits to kill them on Master!
I’m at 110 hours and level 32. Leveling slowed way down for me once I hit Stealth 100. I guess that’s where I was earning the bulk of my experience. I’m only about 30 hours into the Companions story, 10 hours into the mages’ story, and about 20 hours into the main story, I’d say (everything else has been exploration and other quests).
Looking back, I really wish I had waited for a slow-experience mod so I could just make one mega-character that does everything in the game. I could’ve developed multiple combat skills in parallel and picked one style to adventure with each day. It would’ve been nice to collect all the shouts and clear all the locations with one character. That worked in Nehrim (a smaller game at 60 hours) but there’s no way I want to continue with the high-level character I have now.
I thought this was amusing, about the ladies in my character’s life:
extremely minor spoilers about marriage and housecarls
I became thane of Riften late in the game, and took that housecarl Iona as my follower since she was levelled up close to me at that point. Then I married Mjoll and moved back to my house in Whiterun. With Lydia as housecarl, that’s a lot of strong Nord women under one roof.
I guess it’s something a lot of people have done in their own games, but I thought it was cute when I finally noticed the situation.
Unlike other Bethesda games, Skyrim was actually designed so that you can’t do everything with one character. I think if you get every skill to 100 you wind up at level 80, which will let you get less than half the perks in the game. Considering how much some perks change the way you use that skill and the sheer amount of content in the game, you pretty much have to let go and accept that you can’t see it all in one run.
Good point about the perks. Since I have to play multiple characters anyway at this point, that makes me feel better at least.
Draugrs, Skeletons, and bandits of various types seems to be all I’m seeing except for one dungeon with vampires and one with Falmers and bugs.
There’s not a whole lot more. Dwarven automatons, mages. There are one-room caves with animals. It’s a little better outdoors.
The other problem: the designers had certain complementary themes and associated sets of monsters – draugr go with spiders, Falmer with chaurus and Dwemer ruins – but they rarely mixed those sets. I can only think of one time where bandits led to Dweomer ruins, for example. They could’ve gotten more mileage out of their limited assets by mixing the monsters more often.
Like a lot of things in Skyrim, it’s right on the cliff edge of being terrible. Sometimes I feel like I’ve narrowly “escaped” those pitfalls because other parts of the game are so great. Like I said earlier, I enjoyed stealth killing undead with the bow so much I didn’t mind seeing them over and over. Others might not be so lucky.
I’ve got over 90 hours in Skyrim and lack of enemy variety hasn’t set in for me yet. I guess that type of thing doesn’t bug me as much. I’m fine killing men over and over again in shooters.
Nah, I loved almost everything. But I can see it from a different perspective. Sometimes I’m the one left out in the cold when everyone else loves a game. I feel fortunate about this one.
My most commonly fought enemy are also men. The spell casters are exciting to fight, but usually go down pretty fast if you can get to them before they get to you. The fighters are always a pain in the ass because they obviously put all their points into health when they level up, so they become arrow sponges and can take a LOT of hits before they go down. But the biggest threats are always the archers. They go down easy, but they can still one-hit kill me, even though I have over 230 health now (I’ve stopped pumping points into Magic for a while now, and have been trying to only increase health the last few levels). I think it’s because most archers in the game probably have that critical hit perk, plus a few points into the base archery perk that increases their damage. No wonder they’re able to do so much damage to me even though they only have crappy bows and crappy arrows. Like the Forsworn. They have the worst arrows in the game, and yet, even they can two-shot kill me with their arrows.
Yeah, it kind of sucks being on the outside when everyone else loves a game. I still think to myself: What the hell am I missing? Whenever I play Assassin’s Creed II. I loved the first one so much, but the second game, I just can’t understand why people like it. I especially don’t understand why people like it more than the first. It makes me wonder if I’m playing it wrong, or just doing things differently or something.
I have some issues with Skyrim; it just never cuts very deep and the world simulation stuff still feels like it has a long way to go even to catch up with the space sims of a decade ago. (Just as a f’rinstance, I would like to see inter-city commerce modeled as well as inter-system commerce was modeled in Freelancer, complete with bandit raids and the like.) But the dungeon design shows amazing attention to detail and I like the contextually relevant nature of the mobs. I also like how much stuff is implied rather than shoved in your face – it took me a while, for instance, to realize that the Falmer’s entire way of life is built around the Chaurus, how they use the chitin for armor, weapons, structures, etc.
Anyway, I finally completed the main quest on my mage character, and enjoyed it though like others I wish there were more acknowledgment (hoping for a kind word I went to talk to the Jarl of Whiterun and all he said was ‘shaddup, I have a city to run’). How hard would it be to code in a little congratulatory dialogue at least for the Jarls?
My thiefy guy completed Thieves’ Guild/Dark Brotherhood runs, so I think all there is left to do is play through Companions and Stormcloaks plotlines with my third guy (Nord 2-handed bruiser). Then it will be time to downshift to ‘puttering around’ mode and move on to other games.
I feel about Skyrim pretty much the way I felt about Morrowind and Oblivion. It was well worth the money I spent, it gave me over 100 hours of enjoyment, but it doesn’t go into my personal top rank of CRPG’s (which includes games like BG2, Gothic 2, KOTOR, Avernum 2, Ultima V, etc.). They still haven’t found something, IMO, to replace the ‘oomph’ that a really good narrative can give you. But I hope Bethesda stays on their particular design track, as nobody else will.
Yeah I was thinking about how to do that with limited development resources. Perhaps the regular folk wouldn’t know (or believe) what happened, but the leaders ought to have some dialogue for it.
I feel about Skyrim pretty much the way I felt about Morrowind and Oblivion. It was well worth the money I spent, it gave me over 100 hours of enjoyment, but it doesn’t go into my personal top rank of CRPG’s (which includes games like BG2, Gothic 2, KOTOR, Avernum 2, Ultima V, etc.).
Now you’re being the negative one! I don’t think it lives up to my all-time favorites either, but that’s a tough group to crack into because of nostalgia.
They still haven’t found something, IMO, to replace the ‘oomph’ that a really good narrative can give you.
Exploration gets close. It’s no STALKER, but it’s well beyond Oblivion. (No need to hash that out again.) Like the game, it’s more about the breadth and combination of things than one particular aspect with a lot of oomph.
I get what you’re saying though. We had a thread about favored styles of RPGs that went into that very topic. I leaned toward narrative too. Once they get better at life-sim stuff, I might switch over.
that’s a tough group to crack into because of nostalgia
Well, it’s always hard to remove rose colored glasses, but I try to compare how I felt about a particular game at the time I was playing it. When I was playing BG2 there was a lot of ‘zomg,’ unless I’ve completely rewritten my memory, whereas with Elder Scrolls games it’s more like, ‘well played, jolly good show, keep up the good work.’
But yeah, exploration is where it gets closest to the gaming sublime. When I first saw Blackreach, that was a pretty big ‘wow’ moment.
I see the High Resolution Texture Pack was released as free DLC the other day. For those who’ve installed it, is it an option you can turn on and off, or does installing it permanently override the non-high res textures? I don’t meet the recommended specs for this DLC, so I don’t want to install it if I can’t turn it off after testing it out.
You can just disable the texture packs in the launcher. Look under Data Files. Just uncheck them and hit play.
The only caution I would offer is that downloading the hi-res DLC permanently adds it to your Steam Skyrim files, so if you delete Skyrim and then someday feel like playing it again, the download size will be 9GB instead of 6GB.
