"narrowing" :?

The art of getting narrower, clearly.

Yes :Y

I'm a damned handsome Breton who currently seems hard as bloody nails. First impressions are: the world is beautifully realised as you would expect. Especially worthy of note are:

• water - just gorgeous
• much more organic and less obviously modular dungeons, buildings & towns
• Greater sense of individual purpose in NPCs (though not as much as Bethesda was bragging)
• Really nice light
• And the mammoths are bloody gorgeous. They and much of the other wildlife (a much greater diversity than in Oblivion) aren't that bothered about your presence, which I like. You can provoke them into a fight if you want, but if you don't they'll leave you alone

The contact of feet with the ground does suffer from Fallout's Flintstone physics - your character seems to slide to a halt, rather than stop. And more generally, the physics is still eccentric; I bumped into a cauldron & it flew around the alchemists shop like a beach ball.

But I've played it for about three hours non-stop, which has to be something of a recommendation.

Did you choose to be a skinhead, or is hair one of the things that is still depressingly shit?

I chose, basing it on my own No. 3 shave. There's about a dozen hairstyles, and a range of facial hair; though flowing locks are clumpy.

Ahaha, you look like a pirate :D

And yeah, agree with your comments. It's sumptuously rich, visually.

Just killed my first dragon.

The fight was, well, a bit dissapointing. Run around a bit avoiding the flame breath, wait for dragon to land, STAB, repeat.

Admittedly there was a group of NPC's shooting arrows at it, which may have been what caused it to land. Maybe when i start fighting them by myself it might get more exciting.

As much as i'm enjoying this game, and i am very much enjoying it, i'm feeling a bit weird at the moment.I don't think i'm really connecting with my character yet. I'm playing as a Redguard, mainly dual weilding swords but with destruction magic as a backup. The dual spells thing is awseome, but the novelty of the two swords wore off pretty quick. It doesn't seem all that effective, and not being able to block is a real pain.

I might actually restart as a heavy armour wearing, claymore wielding Orc. I like Orcs. My favourite Oblivion character was an Orc with red skin. He was fucking badass.

EDIT: It wouldn't let me give my Orc red skin and the hair options for the Orc are all rubbish. Now i really don't know what to do.

How far do you have to get into the main quest before dragons start turning up? I want dragons but I don't want to get too far into the main quest til I'm done with everything else.

If you want to block then aye it's either shields or two handed weapons.

Dual wielding is all about being fast and nimble. Wait for them to swing, dodge away, dart back in while they're still in the swing and stab stab stab stab stab and then dart out again before the next swing lands. i.e. be very mobile (so light armour (which finally makes sense as a skill)) and essentially just avoid getting hit and time your attacks and feints and stuff right. I'm really enjoying fighting with dual daggers.

Magic is very powerful this time though. I tend to resort to that or archery if I'm up against a caster. Lightning is good because it saps their magicka.

I've not done a successful backstab yet though. Sneaking is a lot harder than in previous games. Hard to get close.

But yeah, the combat is massively improved from Oblivion. Have to use the weapons sensibly for them to be effective. If you try to just bash away like in Oblivion then the person with the biggest weapon (i.e. Manthorp) will win.

In summary, fuck blocking.

(giggle)

Aye, pissed myself at that when I first saw it.

The coders must've been so proud when they made a system where sneaking actually works based on whether the NPC can see you or not. And then they see this video and go "oh... yeah :( ".

:')

I am tempted to buy it; I enjoy real world explorey games: in every GTA I've attempted a few missions, got bored, cheated and just wondered around stealing buses (the passengers still get on :D :$ ).

Coincidentally, I was playing GTASA before Skyrim came along. I love just dicking around in that game.

Buuuut... Skyrim/Elder Scrolls games are a very specific thing. It's not open world ine the same way that GTA is (it's more open really, it's just far less of a playground. It's far more about developing your character and being attacked by things and looking at things). If you've played Morrowind or Oblivion and enjoyed it then yeah, definitely. If not... well, it's an awesome game but I'd try a 'demo' first to see if you like it.

(if you want something more messing-around-in-a-GTA-way then I recommend Just Cause 2 played with cheats. And so does Patch).

For some reason I thought you had hair. :$ I'm not even sure who I was confusing you with.


I found a video showing 80 presents, and which links to screenshots of all 200 presets, for example.

At least it's not quite the clumps stuck to the head I was expecting, but it's still really bad, and no doubt looks shit when moving (or rather, when it's not moving despite running along, probably :().

Out of all that lot there only one hairstyle that goest a bit past the shoulders... which is one more than I was expecting, but it's also only on men, which isn't particularly realistic, even if it's nice that they're not sexist about men being required to have it short.

It'll be a loooong time before we get realistic hair in games I think. I've seen physx demos of proper modelled hair and even when it's just one character, and the whole GPU is dedicated to doing the hair physics and they've reduced the number of hairs people have from like LOTS to a couple of hundred it still looks pretty shit.

Still, being a historically accurate game set in the middle ages, it's probably quite apt. I don't suppose hair was all that clean :Y

Also, most people you meet are wearing hats/helmets/hoods anyway, so fuck it.

S'interesting though. We've got such a high degree of visual fidelity now by getting good at faking it but hair really does stand out because it just can't be faked. Whichever route you take is computationally expensive.

Though as GPUs get better at fluids, maybe there'll be a way to do it with that. Treat the hair as a blob of fluid so it moves around in a swooshy swingy way and then do some clever texturing to make it look right.

I'm not entirely fussed about completely realistic hair, but they could at least put some effort into it - if they used cloth dynamics, or just a number of preset animations, it'd still not look realistic, but it'd be much better than where we are.

But what bothers me is the lack of ranges - and the excess stereotypical RPG styles. There's some of those hairstyles which are instantly recognisable, because I can open up any similar game and select the exact same style, which is irritating.

And the fact that they've got gender-specific hairstyles. (It looks like they've at least not got race-specific hairstyles, for the human/elven races anyway.)

Hmmm, I don't think gender specific hairstyles are a bad thing. I think it's reasonable to expect that some users who choose a male character are going to want more masculine styles (by which of course I mean adhering to cultural archetypes of masculinity, whether they are a good thing or not is a separate debate) and one who choses a female character may well want to look 'feminine'.

Of course you can say it seems like more work to not include all styles for both genders than to do so. But I dunno, maybe the models are significantly different or it's an animation problem or something.

Stereotypical RPG is kinda... I mean, RPG is stereotypical. It's a genre which relies on stereotypes for its language. An RPG which strayed too far from stereotypes wouldn't make a lot of sense in the same way that a crime drama with no crime wouldn't.

Having said that, I think you'd be a bit surprised, the styles are far less stereotypical RPGey than Oblivion for example. There are a lot of the styles from Fallout 3 in there too (or similar ones at least). Angular and asymmetrical and rough ones and stuff.

But yeah, if you'd like unrestricted customisation you'd love Saints Row 2. You can make monsters in that one. Probably the same in SR3, I've not yet played it.

Oblivion did have a hair length slider which is missing this time, though. I guess it's just much simpler to provide stock styles. Anyway, I certainly didn't feel restricted in choice and that's what matters. And there are beards! I'd really rather Bethesda concentrated their efforts on the game itself and leave fleshing out this sort of thing to the modders, which they undoubtedly will do.

As a default/common choice there's nothing really to disagree with there. But limiting choices, especially to a narrow set of archetypes, is a different matter. I probably wouldn't object if there was a checkbox that said "enable (opposite of current gender) hairstyles" or whatever.


RPGs are better when they're a bit different whilst remaining internally cohesive. They don't need grumpy dwarfs and mechanical gnomes and so on to make sense, and there's no reason it can't break out of certain other clichés too, (when doing so makes sense).


Saints Row is some gangstery thing? Don't know that I'd enjoy that, and I'm not going to look into it because I should already be asleep by now and you keep distracting me! :@

Aye you're right about the hair.



Skyrim is definitely that. It's more like Morrowind was in that sense and far far less like Oblivion. Thank fuck.

I meant arrowing. Which is much more fun than narrowing.