The Glade 4.0

OMG the mailman just came it's here it's here it's here go to sleep baby it's time for playing!

Well after getting past being weirded out by the lack of stats, I'm really enjoying this one. It seems to have fixed about every complaint I had about Oblivion.

It's shore purrrty.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Shouldn't you have gotten sick and uninstalled it by now?

It's fun. I probably spent too much time playing it this weekend... D:

_________________
"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I'm enjoying it so far but the engine is definitely behind the times. A few minor annoying aspects of gameplay not worth mentioning but one huge one that's a big problem for me, which I'll try to see if I can alter with a console command. Namely, your health auto-regens, making health potions pointless. Thank you Bethesda for caving in to the dumbed down console market completely.

That isn't caving. It's a conscious design choice. Consumables create problems for a game designer.

There are two different approaches players will take to consumable items. The first is to use them, and the second is to hoard them for a rainy day. Players who take the second approach will avoid using these items for fear that they will not have them later, even doing so in situations where they really do need them. Most of the time, they'll figure out how to get through a given scenario without their consumables and eventually realize that they complete entire games without using things like health potions at all. This leads those players to simply sell any consumable they acquire.

So you have one type of player who uses all the consumables they find and perhaps buys more at stores within the game, and a second type of player who sells every consumable they find. In a game like Final Fantasy where you can just go kill stuff for money, this might not be noticeable. In a game with a fixed amount of experience and money provided to the player, it's a huge issue.

The first type of player blows through early encounters where consumables have a bigger impact on fights. Because they are literally using up money to win fights, they have less available to purchase equipment that adds passive bonuses to their characters. This causes their characters to be less effective in the late game, and in turn leads to their continued use of consumables creating a sort of perpetuating problem.

The second type of player gets the **** kicked out of them early in the game because they won't use their healing potions to restore any damage they've taken. They won't use those wands that cast spells they won't otherwise have access to for another ten hours of gameplay. They save all that stuff for a "later" that never comes. Then they eventually sell that stuff when it becomes useless and put the money towards equipment, and that additional equipment bonus makes their characters more powerful for late game encounters.

The first thing game designers did to address this dilemma was to itemize late dungeons with equipment that was vastly more powerful than anything you could buy from a shop. Anything you need to win endgame encounters is going to come out of a treasure chest. Problem solved. Spending money on consumables no longer prevents you from completing the game because money is pointless and ultimately only good for purchasing more consumables to heal your character with.

That solution **** over the other type of player. You can't just say, "Oh well screw them. They should just start using those health potions." Saving consumables for an emergency is a valid decision on the part of the player. Since we've decided to start rewarding the use of consumables by handing out the equipment that those players would otherwise have a hard time affording, something else has to be done to address the problem that hoarders face early on.

This is further compounded by the fact that consumables like healing potions exist because they are a staple of fantasy literature, not because they improve the game. If you're designing a game, you want it to be fun and engaging. You don't want the player's overall experience to depend on how they manage their potions for the first ten hours of play.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

You forgot that there's also the type of player that sells some consumables and then also uses some, especially for the really hard fights. It's somewhat of an internet meme that only the two types above exist, but lots of people save the best consumables for boss/unusually hard fights while selling most of the trivial and moderate ones.

_________________
"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm very early on still, need to talk to the Jarl, but I'm enjoying the game a LOT more than I did Oblivion. The UI is better, the leveling, etc., is better, and I'm willing to pump some time into this.

If I can make a good archer, that is. Started wood elf of course.

I watched a friend play this for a bit on Friday. I'm considering getting it. Still unsure though.

_________________

Holy shitsnacks!

The health auto regens so slow that it's not that helpful when I'm facing a doom wight and if I had less HP the doom wight would kill be before it regen'd anyway and many tough things can shoot spells. It's nice, because if I'm done with a fight, I don't have to use my pots. I still need to use pots. I have to or die. Maybe early on it trivializes them, but I assure you that you still want them.

_________________
"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I'm still very early in the game (like at Bleak Falls Barrow) so hopefully things get more difficult and I'm actually forced to use some of these potions during combat, and have a reason to use alchemy, but the game simply didn't need to add health auto-regen. I haven't had a problem with the way every RPG of the past handled that. Another gripe so far is no UI feedback for active effects. I also noticed that the hot keys (1-8) don't bind both hands, only one. I'm sure those problems will be altered with mods in the future though. Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly enjoying the game, but the hype was too much, and I'm a tad underwhelmed...so far.

Everyone I know, and sometimes strangers in my Japanese class are talking excitedly about Skyrim.

_________________
"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If you want to hit the mathematical level cap ...

You must be more OCD than previous Bethesda games.

_________________

Digging this game greatly so far.

So much to do. I love the interface, weapon/spell switching is so much better. The smithing/alchemy/enchanting interface is also much improved over Oblivion.

If I had to give up every game except one, this would be the keeper. I only ish I had the time to get as lost in this game as I would like really like to be.

_________________
This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

Is it a linear story line with side quest or more of a go explore thing. In Oblivion I feel like often times I was left thinking, ok now what.

_________________
“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

It's definitely a sandbox game; although, the core narrative seems more compelling than in previous Elder Scrolls titles.

_________________

Kinda halfway trying to talk Phe into playing this game. She's picky about her games, but it (maybe) seems (possibly) like a good thing to which to graduate from Dragon Age. There are only so many times you can hear DA and DA2's lovely score.

Coming from you, this is a glowing review.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I'd say this ...

1. It's pretty in a visual way that Oblivion and Morrowind lacked. While there are still some issues with the art-direction on non-human races, things here are better. Environmentally speaking, the territory of Skyrim (that's the 'country') feels more cohesive, complete, and a thing unto itself than its predecessors.

2. It's more playable. It feels more playable; it feels more like the game promised in Morrowind: doing things levels your character organically. You get better at being a protagonist by being a protagonist. And, to that end, it's a huge improvement over its predecessors.

3. Character Systems are simultaneously, "OMG! You listened!" and "WTF were you thinking?"

Points 2 and 3 kind of play off each other, but it's important. There's still this core element of previous Elder Scrolls games to it: you have to be OCD to min-max. Only, in this case, you have to be OCD beyond the level required by previous titles. On the flip side, see point 2: You don't have to be OCD to just play the game with a reasonable degree of confidence that your character will end up ok.

Honestly, it's a huge improvement that maintains the "Elder Scrolls" core systems identity without the drawbacks that made other games unplayable unless you understood the systems. In this case, the system is only an impediment if you're totally unaware of how it works, but even then it's still better than the old system.

The Min-Max thing is ...

Well, to hit Mathematically Maximum Level, you can raise no skill more than once per level. Period.

So, that's obnoxious, but not game breaking. In the predecessors, your character could end up useless in a game where NPCs are tied purely to your level. That seems to be solved here.

4. Again, the core narrative seems more compelling than previous games. And, it's a curious thing as to how they do this ...

The narrative abandons you as soon as the "hook" sequence is over, just like Oblivion and Morrowind. Only, in this case, you ...

1. Don't have to run clear across the entire god damned "world" to follow it.

2. Following it feels like something you would do, at least in the sense its a morphologically correct quest structure.

3. It's not weighted down by some horrible, "OMG this is an Epic" introduction by Patrick Stewart.

_________________

I thought something like this might be the case as I was about an hour into the game. Though I didn't realize you'd only be able to level each skill ONCE per level? That's insane! What is the skill cap and level cap? I've never hit either one in an ES game.

I'm having a lot of fun playing. My laptop (Radeon 6750M, 8gb RAM) is running this game admirably at 1080p on my tv. Everything set to high/ultra minus shadows (medium) and AA (off). Not a giant fan of turning off AA, but at the distance I'm playing, I prefer the frame rate. FPS drops to probably 25 at times but still better than my 360 or PS3 would be playing it.

It's better than the old system in terms of overall playability, its more obnoxious if you want a max level character. Skills cap at 100; the Mathematical Level Cap is somewhere in the 70s according to Todd Howard.My Dell XPS 15z runs this very playably at 1080p on Ultra Settings (no FXAA, 4x AF).

_________________

I should mention that this game is windows only and my laptop doesn't have proper video drivers for Windows. I can't really tweak anything :[ I do however run at 16x AF

Honestly, I haven't tried pushing it up that high. I just wanted to see what it looked like in a specific spot, I had no idea that it would actually be playable on my machine with those settings.

_________________

In my experience 2x - 16x AF doesn't present much of a performance hit in most games. I always set it to max.