:dubious: I think you’re doing it wrong…
Are you just doing mundane errands? If you want more combat join the Companions or just explore more ruins. But I really can’t see how you’ve seen so little combat unless you’re actively avoiding doing anything or are playing a pure stealth build.
And also, I’d like to add. If you want more combat, go attack a kid in town. Hell, go attack anyone. Then slap the guards around. Once you kill one or two of them, they know you mean business and will totally leave you alone. When in doubt, just steal or attack someone. Makes things more interesting.
Ha; I played a Stormcloak Argonian whose internal justification for joining was to weaken the empire by splitting off Skyrim and help kick off a new Thalmor/Empire war. And in the end when they are all weak from fighting each other the Argonians of Black Marsh will go forth and crush the filthy mammals beneath their boots! MWAHAHAHAHA!
My justification was to take control of the already in place rebellion, kill off the leaders and ditch the Nord-power bullshit. Then go to war with the empire, kick Thalmor ass, kill the false line of emperors, and put a true Dragon Born on the throne again.
So how much combat should be in one hour game play?
Could it be because of the quests I’m doing?
Agreed. Also, I’ve yet to play my “Fuck you, I’m going to be able to come back and crush you later anyways” run through it.
Sure? I’ve no clue what you’re doing, or what quests you’ve done or haven’t done. Maybe Skyrim isn’t for you, and you should trade it in/break it/burn it/peddle it for a baseball.
Oh wow. You guys are a lot more creative than me! I DO have a Khajit I just started so maybe…she’ll figure that the siding with the Stormcloaks will bring about more profit in the long run. Hmm because if the Stormcloaks win, and the Imperials have been in charge of most of the import/export business of Skyrim, then it’s going to need a new source for goods. And of course, the Khajit would be more than happy to provide that. Ok so maybe not the more cunning plan XD But it works for me!
Yeah, Destruction is plenty good on its own. Destruction + Conjuration however is very much like taking candy from a baby, only the baby has only one arm. And he’s dead.
Pop an atronach, center AoE effects of the same element around him, rince, repeat. Drink mana pots as needed, they’re fricking everywhere even if you skip Alchemy for some reason (why ?!).
Illusion is touch and go IME - early on it’s really crap because your skill (and thus the level cap of the spells) don’t scale up as fast as the enemies do. Once you get to the mid-tiers and have the right perks however, it’s pretty smooth sailing - I played a pretty successful Nightblade sort of character who’d skulk around, silently make people turn on each other, then backstab whoever was left. Had some trouble against dragons and some other bosses though (like the mage questline bastard ghosts who keeps throwing you and your weapons around the room), but then every melee-centric character struggles against those, at least until they have good Shouts to rely on.
As for ditching crafting, no way man. I love the low-tier armours’ look too much, and you pretty much have to take it to 100 and invest a couple perks in there to keep them competitive later on. Although yeah, tagging Smithing up to the high 80 and picking the Steel perk first thing will make the whole of the early-mid game a breeze, as you’ll blow the PC’s damage/armour values through the expected roof for these levels.
From the Khaajiti and Argonian PoV, the Empire’s not much better - sure, they might be more polite or discreet about being racist slaver assholes, but that almost makes it worse. Like they’re doing you a favour kicking your ass around or something, or like they’re “deeply sorry to do it but let’s be realistic dear it’s the way of the world wot can’t be helped and you have to admit y’all are all a bit on the thievish side, right ?” Fuck that shit man.
Makes me wish *Skyrim *was a bit more like New Vegas in this regards and you could tell **both **factions to fuck right off, go your own way, and eventually grind them all into the dirt. Or at least have a Twin Lamps questline in somewhere ! 
That did annoy me. I mean, they make you SWEAR to whatever side you go on and then that’s that. Well what if I wanna play double agent? Or what if I change my mind halfway? Assholes. Lemme be a backstabbing spy if I want to be. Sheesh.
It depends on your quest and your play style of course, but I found that I spent far more time crawling through hoards of draugr and ruins filled to the brim with bandits and Forsworn than anything else.
You haven’t actually said what you’re doing. Are you tackling the main quest? That takes you through a bunch of dungeons. Are you doing the guilds? I remember most of those being fairly combat heavy. Have you joined one of the armies? I found these fairly dull, but you clear out a few forts IIRC.
I can perhaps see someone mostly avoiding combat by only doing whatever minor errands they stumble across in the towns, but practically all of the major quest lines (and many of the meatier side quests) put you through significant amounts of combat.
I haven’t played Skyrim until recently, but I did watch a few Let’s Plays. The story failed to draw me in so I haven’t watched anyone play beyond the first few early quests, unlike other games like Fallout 3 and Half-Life 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV which I used to watch copiously.
Now that I finally own a computer that can actually run Skyrim, I doubt I’ll even bother buying it. I did play through the tutorial on my own on my friend’s computer recently, and even found a few secret treasure caches none of the Let’s Players found, but quit right after reaching the first set of Skill Stones (?) and haven’t had an urge to play since then.
Can’t really comment much on gameplay & story, but I will say this – never, ever again will I complain about TES4:Oblivion landscapes being samey and boring. (Snow, snow everywhere!) TES4 had some deep flaws but was nevertheless engaging. TES3: Morrowind still looks great even without mods. TES5, I fear, may be the series’ downfall; although the early clips from Elder Scrolls Online do look promising.
I picked it up a couple weeks ago, and what I’ve found, combat-wise, is that the fights are either almost trivial, or really, really tough. So I’ll end up in a chamber where the draughr emulate bad ninja movies by coming at me one or two at a time, I get through all of them at 90% or more health, then the Overlord wakes up and one-shots me. Very little middle ground of difficulty that would lead me to wanting to adjust the game levels.
The inventory/merchant setups are kind of annoying as well. Nevermind the 30,000 gold I have in my front pocket, picking up that battleaxe is apparently all I can manage, so I fast travel back to a town (which always seems to put me there at about 10pm) only to find that the merchants don’t have enough to buy it off of me. I think there’s a perk buried in the speech line somewhere that gives them more money, but come on, that’s rather ridiculous.
One trick to deal with the problem of stuff being too heavy; drop whatever you want carried and tell your follower to pick it up. They have a weight cap on what they’ll accept from you directly, but none on how much they’ll pick up. Just be careful about dropping stacks of identical items; too many and they’ll merge them into one.
Although since I have the Midas Magic mod I usually just call up the Luggage and stick whatever-it-is in there.
Or you could just pull up the console and type player.setav carryweight 3000 and be set XD
watch, learn, live, love.
note I never played the game, single player games inevitably get boring to me so I rarely spend that kind of money on one.
One of the complaints of Skyrim I read was the lack of fighting in the game and being too easy.
May be Dragon age may be more of game you like it seems to have more fighting and not has easy .
I have not read any thread on Dragon age vs Skyrim on the pros and cons of the comparing it.But from what I gather there more fighting in Dragon age.
Frankly, the weight restrictions and merchant limited purchasing power never really bothered me - guess I was used to it from previous Elder Scrolls games.
Those games are not like *Diablo *or whatever where you pickup everything shiny and compulsively town-portal back to town to bet on more shinies for a bazillion gold each. In *Skyrim *there’s just not enough to actually spend that cash on (besides houses, I guess) because merchant wares are random, most often crap and not worth it ; the stuff you enchant is a hundred times better (hell, just perfectly smithed glass/dwarven mundanes will pack more ooomph than most of the magical doodads you’ll run into) ; and you get more than enough money just picking up loose change, jewelry, rare alchemy components and weightless potions to tide you over and fuel your housing/alchemy/spellbooks/clothing/enchantment/all of the above addictions that any superlative piles of cash you might make off heavier loot is not really worth fretting over past a certain point.
Pick up the battleaxe if it’s an upgrade to the one you’re carrying (or if it’d make a wicked mantle piece conversation item :D), otherwise just leave it. Focus on stuff that has good gold/weight ratio over stuff than only has high gold value.
And if you do have a 30.000 gold worth magic axe and the merchant only carries a thou, well, fuck it, sell it for that then, who cares ? Plenty more where that one came from.
I’ve only played part of Dragon Age: Origins, but enough, I think, to make some comparisons between it and Skyrim.
DA:O did have interesting combat. You had a party, you could customize the gear and (over time) the abilities of every member. I played on the default difficulty and lost a couple fights more than once. There were set-piece battles where there’d be a cut scene-- you couldn’t attack until the scene was over-- and then the fight would begin, with enemies deployed all around. In short, the game was a dirty dirty cheater.
When it didn’t cheat, fights were usually easy, depending on party makeup. With a couple mages in group, you could target enemies behind a closed door with spells that affected areas about the size of the screen. They’d flip, freeze and fry and never think to open the door.
Fights didn’t require micromanagement as you could program allies to do a lot of different stuff, like attack enemies that targetted ally X, drink a health potion after losing Y% of hit points, use ability Z on condition Q. It was interesting. The fights were real time but pause was always available.
I ended up getting sick of the game, though. NPCs stood around like cigar store indians. Cut scenes, jeez, got sick of those quick. And there was these twee gimmick where party members chatted to each other that story RPG players probably thought was marvelous but ended up annoying me to the point of revulsion. I didn’t like the downtime in Skyrim (“ah, time to sell loot… can’t wait to deal with 12 merchants, most with his or her very own load time”), but compared to DA:O, Skyrim was non-stop action.