Sounds like a fun game, but they don’t offer a free trial, so I’m gonna go to Gamespot to see what they have used.
For those of you who play and who know my limitations, do I need to go all the way back to version I, or is it close enough to WoW so that I can start a little higher?
Graphics look awesome.
Thanks
Q
The game isn’t out until November, so you’re going to have trouble finding it. You can get the previous titles Morrowind and Oblivion pretty cheap. The gameplay in those two is close enough to the upcoming version. Arena and Daggerfall are pretty old and it’d be a chore to get them to run. While references to the previous games are present, the story isn’t a continuous narrative and each game has its own standalone plot. The Elder Scrolls is fundamentally very different from WoW in terms of gameplay model and player culture.
Yeah, I knew about the November release - sorry I was unclear, Palooka. Thanks for the game description and and recommendations.
Q
What are your limitations, out of curiosity?
The Elder Scroll games are single player, so that’s of course a huge difference, but if you can make your way through WoW I don’t think you’d have much trouble at all with Oblivion or Morrowind. You have stats and gear to keep track of to try to make your character stronger, story lines to follow, and quests to complete, which is something you do in WoW all the time.
The biggest difference I think would be combat, but even then it’s not hard. No harder than grouping in an MMO, I don’t think. They’re good games, definitely worth a try. If you get one of them for PC be sure to look into some of the community mods, they go a long way towards improving gameplay.
I think the biggest thing you need to become accustomed to in the Elder Scrolls games is the extremely hard to understand (for new players) leveling up system.
Yeah if you don’t understand the leveling system it’s very easy to make a non-viable character by the end. As you level so do the creatures around you so if you don’t keep up your damage output they will get more and more powerful while you do pitiful damage. However if you’re playing PC there are tons of mods out there so if you get stuck you can always give yourself some cheat items and power through.
In fact the best part of Oblivion is the various mods to make the rough edges of the game better and finding what interesting things others have made. It’s no harder then installing the various WOW mods which I believe you are familiar with.
Thanks, guys! Maybe there’s an Elder Scrolls levelling guide for dummies on the net somewhere.
I’ll be playing XBox 360 though.
Q
Supposedly they fixed the levelling. They claim that you level your skills, and get more character levels out of your higher-ranked skills, such that levelling your swordsmanship from 51 to 52 gives you more of a level bonus than levelling a magic skill from 14 to 15. This might work as long as they didn’t throttle your health and magic too badly, and don’t level-scale too badly, and…
Well, it’s Bethesda. I’ll believe it when I see it. They are somewhat legendary for never learning anything. Apparently this is because they have a strange practice of rotating their staff around, so that your games are always being made by amateurs to that genre.
Sounds like it’s a good thing that I’m getting a very early (cheaper) version of the game. Plus, I’ll trade the copy of Civ/Rev (which I find very difficult) in which should lower the price even more!
Q
?
How are you getting a very early, cheap version of Elder Scrolls? I’m sorry, but every post you’ve made in this thread leads to believe you don’t exactly know what this is. One of us is missing some critical information here, and I’m honestly not sure who.
I took it to mean he was going to play Morrowind or Oblivion; earlier games in the series.
As long as the world is huge and rich, with a dead simple modding architecture, I could not care less if Skyrim’s leveling system is totally busted. Oblivion’s leveling system is totally busted too, but there’s a surfeit of mods to fix that problem. Same with its UI, its stability, its woefully repetitive dungeons…
Quasi, I’ve never played Morrowind (still waiting for it to drop to five dollars or so on Steam…c’mon, guys, it’s nine years old, it’s not worth twenty bucks), but I’ve played Oblivion—with a panoply of mods—many times over. It’s heartily recommended if you can find a good deal on it (and its eminently worthy expansion pack, Shivering Isles), but it’s not going to be a requirement in order to enjoy Skyrim. The lore is typical Tolkien elves-n’-dwarves, isn’t required knowledge for enjoying the game, and I doubt Bethesda is going to stray very far from tried and true RPG gameplay mechanics.
That’s it, and I’ll play them on the 360 instead of online. I’m sorry guys! I used to be able to make sense here.
Sorry and thanks for helping
Q
Morrowind was a lot of fun, but might seem really dated now. I think it would be better to try it first before Oblivion (if you’re trying both), because I can never go backwards in a series without be frustrated by older graphics, etc. Enjoy.
I think that for a 50% game, I shouldn’t need to download somebody’s kitbashed levelling scheme.
I think it’s a mistake to play them on the 360. I mentioned in the other thread about Skyrim that I played Morrowind on PC, but Oblivion on 360. They’re great sandbox, but they do need mods to get the most out of them. You won’t get what the hype is about them otherwise.
Leveling was good in Morrowind and Oblivion. The only problem was enemy scaling in Oblivion. Using your skills increases them. Ten increases in your primary skills results in a level up. Easy.
Oblivion’s leveling system was not THAT bad. Yes, if you picked ALL non-combat skills then leveled them up you would end up failing, and yes if you didn’t level up endurance early on you ended up kind of low on HP but it’s not like you really needed to game the system to do well. As long as you made a reasonably well balanced character - 1+ weapon/offensive magic skill, 1 armor skill, some way to heal (alchemy/restoration) you could do OK though the whole game.
Of course that’s not to say there were not problems, but I think the whole ‘easy to make the game unplayable’ thing is totally overblown, especially since you can learn every skill to max so even if you screw up your stats you can still do well eventually. If anything it was the opposite, it was too easy to make a super character (why can mages wear heavy armor and use shields and still shoot massive death fireballs with absolutely no penalty?)
The leveling creatures was kind of annoying, though for the most part it made sense - after all, the big bad was growing in power so obviously he would send more powerful (and numerous) enemies. Guards are busy protecting the towns, so less time to patrol, so there’s more bears and stuff instead of just crabs. Town guard leveling with you (actually your level +10 iirc) was really stupid though, and it made escort missions a massive PITA since the npcs for that didn’t level up (or if they did, not enough).
It beat morrowind anyway, which was a very fun game but absurdly unbalanced and since the world didn’t level with you quickly became incredibly easy even if you didn’t abuse the broken game mechanics.
Once you understand the system of course it is fine but it is screwy and easy to end up with crappy characters. My first playthrough I was going for a ‘rogue’ and ended up with 100 Speed and everything else pretty low as I was getting +5 speed modifiers and everything else was +1 or +3. I was leveling so quickly that creatures would soon destroy me if I couldn’t outrun them. By the endgame most of my playing was running like crazy shooting a few arrows and running more. The worst mission was one where I was supposed to protect the king but he’d be taking a dirt nap 5 seconds in because I couldn’t keep creatures off of him and I couldn’t kill anything as I couldn’t get my sneak attack arrow shots in. I did beat the game with that character but it was a pain.
Considering there’s a thieves guild, mage guild and a warrior guild you’d think all of these would be viable builds and play styles but they really aren’t. You have to stat track and skill track in order to level up ‘correctly’.
You can easily end up in a situation where you have to grind your minor skills over and over to get at least the +3 before you level or be totally outclassed by endgame.