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Vesperas_

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

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GeckoYamori said:

I've completed the dungeon and uploaded it to Skyrimnexus. But naturally, the servers seem to go bonkers the minute I'm done with it.
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=10632

I've also added it to that clunky mess called Steam Workshop
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=13058&searchtext=


I played through it, it's pretty good for a basic bethesda style dungeon. I liked the colored lighting. Two problems stuck out to me though. The stairs up and out of the dungeon didn't smoothly transition, and in the early tomb part there's a lighting glitch on one of the torches around the corner. Also the little hole in the troll section looked like you should have been able to crouch through it, kind of misleading. I'm being nitpicky here, but you might want the feedback.

To spice it up, I feel like you could do some ramping up to what's in the tomb, though. Make a little book at the entry way, explaining why the dude's a pyromancer for example. Include a little lore, or even give him some custom armor he gives on drop or something that modifies destruction magic. As it stands, the level was well constructed, but it needs more oomph to make it an interesting, quest worthy kind of piece.

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I just played it too. The flow isn't bad, but it's far, far too easy for my lvl 44 archer. The only thing that took even one hit point from me was the lantern trap.

The part with the trolls was entertaining, although I couldn't figure out how the trolls got in there. The only hole was too small for me and they can't work the doors. It was funny watching the second troll go stand over the dead draugr because he didn't see me. He looked confused.

I noticed the same issue with the stairs as Shaikoten. You can't walk up the middle where the two pieces connect without jumping. The centre-left torch (as you're going down) also flickers. If those torches are casting shadows they probably shouldn't be, since that area passes the limit on how many can be visible and their radius is small enough that no shadows are visible.

The lights in the tunnels with the draugr had some glitches too. Some of the chandeliers flicker. Here's a good explanation of the flicker and a way to fix it in some cases. Skyrim has a stupid engine.

Some of those chandeliers have seams in the shadows on the floor (as do some of the braziers). Rotating the y-axis of the lights by 90 degress will probably hide most of those. Also watch for light sources that are on, but don't cast light. Obviously the little candles are ok, but I saw a wall torch that was flaming, but not casting light.

I think the room with the trolls and the entrance room have the best lighting in the dungeon. The placement and shadows work well there. The light from some of the candles and chandeliers elsewhere strikes me as too bright and clean-looking considering the location. The large areas with no lights at all look flat to me. The omnipresent, blue ambiance makes reminds me of the caves in 90s episodes of Star Trek. It's strange and areas with no other light stand out.

I liked the location. The stairs outside are cool, especially since I had a dragon following me around.

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I recently reinstalled Skyrim and haven't taken the time to actually play the game and make a high level character, so I couldn't test the dungeon difficulty properly across higher levels. It felt pretty challenging to me at low levels though I have some hardcore mods like PISE installed. I think in past ES games you could have a separate game install with no other mods solely for testing, but with Steam I don't think this is possible anymore.

For the troll room I wanted to make it look like the trolls had dug through to the collapsed wall. I don't think I want to make the whole any bigger since I don't want the player to go through there. Trolls do know how to work doors, at least when it comes to pure game mechanics.

I know about the seam in the shadow. This part is very tricky, I've already rotated it because from a different angle the animation from the brazier, or the sconce or the rope or something made the shadows move around a lot which just didn't look right. I've already cut a lot of fat from shadow-casting light but didn't manage to spot everything. The torch lights at the stairs don't cast shadows, so I'm not sure what the problem is there.

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I would say that the troll-hole could be a hair smaller, the problem is it just looks like the player should be able to crawl through it and it kind of feels like an artificial barrier when they can't. Or another way you could do it is put the hole up high where the player can't get to it, but it's kind of in the spirit of the game where you should be able to explore anyplace you see. That's one of Romero's old level design tenets.

Don't worry about the difficulty though, the placement near Riverwood should designate it as a lower level dungeon, which it clearly is. If you want to include a little more level appropriate challenge though, I would recommend fire rune traps, given what the boss is.

It's a good level at this point though, it just needs polish, polish, polish. You'll get there!

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I'll redo the cave hole somehow. Several players are already confused and and think you're supposed to be able to go through there, so bad mitake on my part. I won't be doing any major revisions to the dungeon design at this point, better if I save that effort for a new project.

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It's a tricky problem to make a cave hole that looks like it would permit trolls but block the player. I can't think of how I might do any better than what you have already. The hole had me confused too, which I forgot to mention.

I noticed the blue light doesn't look as saturated on your screens as it does on my machine. Did you take those with a lighting mod installed?

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GeckoYamori said:

I've completed the dungeon and uploaded it to Skyrimnexus. But naturally, the servers seem to go bonkers the minute I'm done with it.
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=10632

I've also added it to that clunky mess called Steam Workshop
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=13058&searchtext=

Not a bad effort. A little too easy and a a little too dark in some places though.

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Okay, according to Steam, I've put about 180 hours into Skyrim, and I haven't even gotten beyond the first act of the main quest... there's just so many side quests spread out over so many places (that's good).

As someone who owns/played Oblivion and hated it, Skyrim is currently at the very top of my RPG list. How just one development cycle have made such a difference!

Some of the improvements noticed were...

Skill/Perk system: No more guessing at the beginning of the game of what you want to do. You try your hands at the skill, be it magic or sword, then the game rewards you specific perks based on how often you used them. Try then buy is better than buy then try. This system is ideal for me.

Much better feel of the combat system: the effects of your weapons on enemies is a lot more pronounced this time around. The weapons feel like they have weight to them, and fighting is at a slower, confrontational pace rather than hack-and-slash. Flinching and death animations goes a long way. I will never get tired of ragdolling people off cliffs with Fus-Ro-Dah.

Much better environments: No more copy-paste; each town has their own architectural design. From the ancient Nordic dungeons to the highest peaks, Skyrim is a fantastically designed world... some of the best I've ever witnessed in a video game.

Voice acting / dialog / NPC's: One of the biggest reason why I didn't take a liking to Oblivion, is the flat dialogue and voice acting. Skyrim has some pretty unforgettable NPC's backed up by excellent voice actor/actresses. Heimskr the Talos Preacher in Whiterun, for example, sticks with you long after you've finished the game.

My impression of Skyrim so far, is that it's one of those rare games that seems to fulfill the artistic vision of the development team... the amount of detail and character count is staggering. It is literally the most expansive game I've ever played.

Oh, Skyrim is the best looking game I've seen thus far, some shots:


Click on image to see it in 1080p with 16xAA


Click on image to see it in 1080p with 16xAA

Skyrim, for all its improvements over Oblivion, is still far from perfect. Some of my biggest gripes:

The user interface is clearly consolized... I still have to go into the menu to switch spells and weapons. Switching from sword, to fire, to ice, to Fus-Ro-Dah, is an exercise in unnecessary tedium. The lack of 1-9 keybindings hurts skyrim as far as the PC game experience is concerned.

The game engine is 32-bit. It can only utilize 4GB of RAM max, any higher and game stability suffers. While this limit is fine for 98% of Skyrim players, if you pile on extremely high resolution textures while extending draw distance like I do, this will hit Skyrim engine's limitations rather easily.

While the combat system have improved much since Oblivion, there is still much work to be done. First person combat still feels floaty, and weapon impact is not great; sometimes you feel like you're slicing through air.

For all its flaws, Skyrim does more things right than wrong, and the things it does right is fantastically right, and is currently one of my favorite games of all time.

The Good:
+ Expansive, jaw-droppingly beautiful environment
+ Deep lore/storyline
+ Attention to details is A+
+ Lots of quests/content, this cannot be underestimated
+ Very non-linear gameplay
+ Lots of combat strategies at your disposal
+ Excellent voice acting
+ Excellent art direction
+ High production values

The Bad:
- Consolized UI
- 32-bit game engine
- First-person combat feels floaty
- Retard AI (does a lot of things right... still, plenty of fuckups)

The Ugly:
- Guards won't help me find my stolen sweet roll

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Doom Marine said:

For all its flaws, Skyrim does more things right than wrong, and the things it does right is fantastically right, and is currently one of my favorite games of all time.


That is probably the best way to sum up my own feelings of the game.

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Doom Marine said:

The Bad:[/b]
- Consolized UI
- 32-bit game engine
- First-person combat feels floaty
- Retard AI (does a lot of things right... still, plenty of fuckups)

You forgot that besides the lore there's barely any depth to it, just like any other Bethesda "RPG". It's vast, certainly, but very shallow.

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Call me crazy, but NPCs making wrong assumptions about my character only reinforces the immersion, to me. People aren't omniscient psychic beings in real life, why should they act that way in video games?

If the argument is that the character is supposed to be famous for his good deeds, again, I feel having NPCs simulating individuals, with their different opinions and perspectives to be more convincing than if they were part of a hivemind. Perhaps that guy has been burned too many times by so-called heroes and doesn't trust any of them anymore. Perhaps he's poor and resentful of anyone richer than him (which the player character might be). There's a hundred of reasons you could find to justify the way this NPC acts.

I find many complaints about RPGs lacking depth are due to the complainers being fairly shallow themselves, at least in their understanding of human behavior and psychology, or the way the world works at all.

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Yup, she called it. The quest writing in Skyrim is pathetic. Bethesda should be ashamed of it, especially when they had better examples both in their older games and in New Vegas to follow. Same goes for the followers. The ones in NV were awesome. In Skyrim they ranged between boring and positively annoying.

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Phml said:

Call me crazy, but NPCs making wrong assumptions about my character only reinforces the immersion, to me. People aren't omniscient psychic beings in real life, why should they act that way in video games?

If the argument is that the character is supposed to be famous for his good deeds, again, I feel having NPCs simulating individuals, with their different opinions and perspectives to be more convincing than if they were part of a hivemind. Perhaps that guy has been burned too many times by so-called heroes and doesn't trust any of them anymore. Perhaps he's poor and resentful of anyone richer than him (which the player character might be). There's a hundred of reasons you could find to justify the way this NPC acts.

I find many complaints about RPGs lacking depth are due to the complainers being fairly shallow themselves, at least in their understanding of human behavior and psychology, or the way the world works at all.

You are latching onto only the lesser aspect of the video, which is how the world acts towards your character, and are ignoring the much bigger deal: Actual roleplaying. As mentioned in there, Skyrim has virtually no freedom of choice. You do what the NPCs tell you to do in the first place, and there's no other choice given. You can always choose not to do the quests, but that's not really roleplaying, that's just...not-playing. That's where the real depth comes from: Being able to affect the game world with your own actions, and then seeing the world reacts to your own choices, not actions that you were forced to do.

Just like you, I don't mind NPCs having faulty preconceptions of my character if it makes sense. Unfortunately, in Skyrim you can have professional soldier mistaking your melee-oriented character for an archer purely based on looks. You would assume that a soldier could tell better from looking at your gear and physique, but I guess not. Then there's the whole issue of people walking up to you and throwing one liners without any reason. Normal people don't do that, at least not where I live. So if someone greeted my character in the game like that guy in the video after I spoke to him first, that would be fine. But in Skyrim those people come to you first, with no rhyme or reason, and tell your character to fuck off.

Does that make sense to you? Because it doesn't to me.


Edit:
New Vegas was made by Obsidian, not Bethesda. Would explain a lot.

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Yeah I definitely enjoyed the questing in New Vegas better. Definitely best Bethesda game I've played, probably because it wasn't actually made by them.

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The other problem with the dialogue in Skyrim is none of it makes any difference. Usually all the choices will lead to the same outcome unless there's one that just ends the conversation. The only difference will be the wording of the response. If the choices do have different outcomes then chances are you can redo the dialogue to get the one you want. WTF

The video goes talk much about the factions, but they seem to have next to zero effect on each other. The College of Winterhold doesn't care that you run the thieves guild. Both the Stormcloak and Imperial HQs will let you walk right in and chat with the leaders until you commit to a side in the war (they also repeat the opening story of those quests every time you walk in the building). The list goes on and on. It's really just stupid.

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Yeah, I was mostly reacting to this particular argument rather than making a statement on Skyrim in particular (which I haven't played yet), hence why I didn't even mention the game itself. Also, I have to admit from the video I thought the player initiated the dialog, not the NPC. If it's the other way around, it does seem pushy. I don't necessarily see it as out of place in a different universe with dragons and magic, where social boundaries may not be the same as in ours, but that's highly debatable of course.

Still, I don't agree with the idea freedom of choice or creating your own character makes for good roleplaying - or perhaps I should put it a different way; while it *can* make for good roleplaying, I don't think interesting roleplaying is defined by freedom of choice. In the specific context of 3D intensive, voice-acted sandbox videogames, it seems hard if not impossible for developers to provide an option for every potential playstyle out there, and it makes sense to me they'd stick to one or multiple cookie cutter archetypes. At some point there's no choice but to accept the limitations of the genre and roll with the flow, defining your character at a micro level (i.e. how do you approach a mission to take down a dude, by killing everyone or just stealthing to the target - and again I'm not talking about nor do I know if you can do this in Skyrim, just speaking generally) rather than at a macro level.

Perhaps there's things wrong with Skyrim - likely there's things wrong with Skyrim; but can you imagine any PnP DM who would put up with the level of criticism some people deploy at any computer RPG? Even in PnP you wouldn't, for example, in a campaign focused in a particular war between two countries, suddenly tell the DM you'd much rather build a boat and sail across the sea to an undiscovered land *and* expect him (and this is the key part, because obviously we have all done the first part at least once) to have fleshed out lore for the place, with various cities, complicated political interactions and vastly different individuals within the next minutes. At some level there are always limits, and at some level you have to play along a little in roleplaying for the game to get anywhere.

I find it much more interesting and ultimately rewarding to try to justify the way the world is than to complain about the world not fitting my vision of how it should be. And in the game.

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Phml said:

In the specific context of 3D intensive, voice-acted sandbox videogames, it seems hard if not impossible for developers to provide an option for every potential playstyle out there

Of course it is impossible, there is no practical way that a computer software could accommodate to absolutely everything that a person using it would want to do, unless it was ran by Skynet. As such, a computer RPG can get away with less freedom and options than you can have in a pen and paper RPG that's ran by a living human being. But there's still quite a bit that can be done within a piece of software, and just comparing, for example, Fallout 2 (1998) to Skyrim (2011) shows how huge the differences can be.

You mention a player doing something completely out of context and silly in a PnP game and expecting the GM to be fine with it. The way I see it, the player should be able to try to do it, especially if it's in character. At that point it's up to the GM to play against the player if those actions go against what's kosher in the game's universe. For example, if the player did try to desert in the war you mentioned, he should be allowed to do so...at the price of facing the consequences. So he could ran away to explore the distant lands, but most likely he'd get caught and hanged as a punishment. There's still freedom of choice available for the player, but not without cause and effect. And that's, I'd say, the essence of good roleplaying. Not just doing whatever you want, but seeing and feeling the consequences of your actions.

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DoomUK said:

Nitpickers.

Yeah, pointing out that a supposed-to-be roleplaying game doesn't involve any real roleplaying is definitely nitpicking. :/ By the standards of the people who hail Skyrim as the best RPG ever both Diablo and CoD multiplayer would be the best RPGs ever as well. Because pretty much the only RPG-esque element in all three is a progression system, which has got nothing to do with roleplaying per-se.

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other than all the negatives listed...
am i the only person who actually lost interest in skyrim (never finished main quest and never even started legion/stormcloak)
because of the world being bland?
while it can be very immersive and it does look gorgeous in a lot of places, the lack of variety in the setting (and lack of color) bored me.

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Jodwin said:

Because pretty much the only RPG-esque element in all three is a progression system, which has got nothing to do with roleplaying per-se.

Then PnP is basically all you've got and you already mentioned that more or less. There may be certain consequences to actions you undertake in certain games, like the fallout series, but generally they are trite diversions and not all that meaningful in in the larger scope of things.

The Lag said:

other than all the negatives listed...
am i the only person who actually lost interest in skyrim (never finished main quest and never even started legion/stormcloak

No, you're not. I got about halfway through the main quest then I did the DB and mage college quest-lines and called it quits after that.

I can't say it's a terrible game, I enjoyed it for about 30 hours i guess, I just didn't like the major fuck up of the magic system and the linear dungeons. I mean, there has to be a middle ground between pointless labyrinths with no reason to ever visit and "every dungeon has to have a quest and a purpose and tons of scripting". Of course there is, and that's why we have fo3 and new vegas <3

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Jodwin said:

Yeah, pointing out that a supposed-to-be roleplaying game doesn't involve any real roleplaying is definitely nitpicking. :/ By the standards of the people who hail Skyrim as the best RPG ever both Diablo and CoD multiplayer would be the best RPGs ever as well. Because pretty much the only RPG-esque element in all three is a progression system, which has got nothing to do with roleplaying per-se.

I just think the game's positives eclipse it's negatives.

I do see that the choices you make in the game are ultimately meaningless and have no outcome on how the game plays, and along with improving the combat a little more it's something I'd like to see addressed in the next ES game, but you'd have to be pretty cynical to dismiss a game as expansive and beautiful as Skyrim based on some RPG puritanism.

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Doom Marine said:

The Good:
+ Very non-linear gameplay

Imo it leans closer to being linear when compaired to the previous titles.

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i agree.
it is the same with oblivion, however, in the way it ushers the player through questlines. i just think the quest and story writing are weakened
in an attempt to make the game less boring for the masses.

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Yeah, pointing out that a supposed-to-be

Nah bro, anyone who knows anything about Bethesda knew at the beginning that there will be no role-playin'. Just a sandbox and tons of porn mods. Tons of 'em.

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It's understandable that it's hard to map out additional conversation trees and implement more consequence in a sandbox RPG as vast as Skyrim... the sheer number of permutations can be mind-boggling. That said, there are a few simple things that Skyrim could've done to implement consequences of character-decision making. I can only think of an easy one off the top of my head right now...

Holds have allegiances to either the Empire or Stormcloaks, joining up with either factions should invoke much more changes and/or hostility in opposing towns. If say, the Dragonborn participated with the Stormcloaks in taking Whiterun, then Imperial holds such as Solitude should be a hostile place immediately.

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