I’m a big fan of the Elder Scrolls games - I played Morrowind nonstop for MONTHS, and i’m in the midst right now of trying to play out as many of the side quests in Oblivion that I can stand do. (Just finished the thieves’ guild quests for the first time, which were surprisingly epic.) I intend on buying Skyrim soon, but it’s not quite in my budget at the moment. I’m leary of heading into the main thread for fear of spoilers, though I suspect that what happens is that You are an Imperial prisoner, suddenly released for no apparent reason, and become a confidant of the Blades who expect you to become The Chosen One and save all of Tamriel from some sort of cosmic evil.
I’m wondering if anyone who’s played the game would be willing to answer for me, in a non-spoilerish way, a few of the questions I have about the game so I can decide how long I feel like waiting before picking it up.
How is the leveling system compared to the earlier games? I’ve read that they’ve gotten rid of primary attributes (strength, intelligence etc.) and major/minor skills. Is it more intuitive? Too dumbed down? Does it require as much metagaming as Oblivion? How’s the difficulty curve?
Enemy levelling. I HOPE it’s not done as in Oblivion where the monsters outclass you rapidly. Did they learn their lesson and streamline it the way they did for Fallout 3?
How’s the quality of the voice acting? Is it still just one guy voicing all the humans, one guy voicing all the elves, etc.? Am I going to hear dozens of people in half a dozen cities having the same conversation about the mudcrab they saw the other day? Are there any recognizable voice actors?
The plot. In a non-spoilerish way, is it as derivative as I jokingly suggested above? Is the world as deep and immersive as Morrowind was? How are the side quests?
The leveling system, for the first time in the history of the franchise, does not suck. Each skill has a “meter” that fills every time you try to use the skill. Even failed attempts advance the meter, although not as much as successes. When the meter fills, the skill rating advances a point, and your level meter increments slightly. More skill points are needed to advance the higher level you are. Pretty much how the previous games worked, but now, you don’t tag anything as a “class” skill. Improving any skill gets you closer to leveling, which makes it easy to shift your characters focus as the game progresses.
There are no attributes, per se. You have Magicka, Health, and Stamina (which governs how long you can run and how many power attacks you can make), but that’s it. Your character doesn’t have any other inherent stats.
The major change here is the introduction of Fallout-style perks. You get one every time you go up a level. The perks are all tied directly to the various skills in the game, and are arranged in trees. You need a minimum skill level to get any but the most basic perks, so you can’t spend a bunch of time brewing potions, and suddenly learn how to fight better with a sword: you could level up just using alchemy, but alchemy will be the only skill in which you have a high enough rating to get any perks.
The perks are a little less fun than the ones in Fallout: they’re do a good job of giving you interesting new ways of using your skills, but they don’t have any of the whimsy that make the leveling system in Fallout so memorable. Still, it’s a very solid mechanic that gives you a tangible and unique benefit every time you level up.
Enemies have fixed power levels. You can easily wander into a dungeon populated by creatures whom you have no chance of killing. If you wait for several levels before you go back, though, you may find that the formerly invincible foes go over like ten pins now.
The voice acting is great. There’s a wide variety of voices, and they do a good job of giving the different in-game nationalities distinct accents. I haven’t recognized any celebrity voices so far.
The depth and immersion of the game world has pretty much always been the only thing the Elder Scrolls have had going for them, and Skyrim does not disappoint. The world is huge, and amply populated with ruins, keeps, caves, temples, towns, and so forth. The environment is also much more interactive: you can actually use things like saw mills and there’s a decently sophisticated crafting system for making weapons and armor.
I haven’t beaten the game, and I’ve been doing tons and tons of side quests, so I haven’t actually gotten that far in the main story line, so over all, I can’t say how good it is. Your spoiler is pretty much on the nose, though, except the only reference I’ve found to the Blades so far is a book that mentions they were disbanded some time prior to the start of the game. The rebel organization, the Stormcloaks, initially seem to be their stand in for this game, but the sides in the war for Skyrim aren’t as clear cut as they first appear.
I’ve played every game in the Elder Scrolls series (Except one). Skyrim is the first one that I would say is truly a great game, instead of a flawed game with flashes of greatness.
The Blades are pretty much gone, and the reason you escape (not “are released”) is spectacularly apparent.
It’s a lot easier to understand, much more intuitive; just use the powers you intend to keep on using. With each level you choose to raise one of three qualities; Magicka, Health or Stamina; and you can spend one point on a Perk or save it for later. The Perks are what let you really customize your character; they are things like “Half Magick Use for Novice Destruction Spells” or “Do 20% More Damage With Bows*”
it does seem like Fallout III to me.
There’s some repetitiveness of course, but it seems better than Oblivion. There’s more scripted conversations between NPCs, and more location-specific chat. And I did recognize some voices, including from Oblivion; I had a “hey, that’s Valen Dreth” moment in one inn.
Gobs of side quests. They range from “go kill the bandit leader in this fort” to fairly complicated affairs. I do find it immersive, although Morrowind still has an edge for the sheer alienness of the terrain and culture. Still, Skyrim feels nicely “alive”; people go around doing jobs like cutting wood or working the forge, they talk to each other, etc.
Bows are also a lot better in Skyrim than there were in Oblivion.
I could not disagree more. Although most of the significant NPCs have unique voices, the shameless recycling of the 4 or so male Nord voices really started to bug me as I progressed through the game. Beyond that, the quality of the voice acting is just not that great.
Here’s a link to my, mostly negative, spoiler free thoughts on Skyrim from the other thread. It probably goes without saying that the rest of that thread is spoilery but I’ve linked to just my post which is not.
It doesn’t require any real metagaming and is certainly more intuitive but it is far too dumbed down for my taste. You get 2 choices at level up the first is to increase either Health, Magicka, or Stamina by 10. The second is to select a perk. Even adding both these together you get a net effect that is much smaller than the choice that stats represented. For all the pain in the ass stats where at least a character with 100 str and 35 int felt and played differently than one with 35 str and 100 int. Similar differences are much less noticeable with the perks.
It’s identical or nearly so to how Fallout 3 handled it. It’s still possible to screw yourself if you gain too many levels off non combat abilities but it’s not as easy to do.
The quality of the voice acting was a step down from Oblivion overall in my opinion. But the quantity of voice actors was increased significantly many of them just aren’t very good. I haven’t heard much in the way of the constantly repeated dialogues but I haven’t spent a lot of time in the towns in Skyrim.
I don’t find it anywhere near as immersive as Morrowind. Mostly just because the setting seems more generic. Especially as the towns are comparably small and there’s rarely much reason to hang about in them. And the wilderness and various arbitrary dungeons seems much more like a generic fantasy setting without much of the unique strangeness of Morrowind.
I can’t really comment much on the plot, I haven’t played through the whole thing. One really annoying thing though is a lot of the plot segments, for both the main plot and some side quests, have dialogue sections with different characters talking to each other while you have to stand near them and listen. This is really annoying because if you get too close to them sometimes one or more of the plot NPCs will initiate their “The player character is near me, I must greet him/her” ambient dialogue so you end up with a situation where NPC A is explaining the plot to NPC B while NPC B is giving you some annoying greeting such that you can’t hear what either of them are saying and if you have subtitles on they’ll usually end up being the plot irrelevant greeting junk.
It also happens for some of the other ambient dialogues. Two characters are talking and you are trying to listen in but you accidentally get a touch too close and one or the other starts their player character greeting so you cant hear the quest hook or lore info they were talking about. Very annoying.