Has anyone been attacked by two dragons at once? It just happened to me a little while ago. I suspect it was just a random glitch, since I was on a quest with some NPCs and they said nothing about it, but man, what a fight.
The worst part was, while running around crazily trying to fight two dragons, I stumbled into a Forsworn encampment. So, after killing the dragons, we had to wipe them out too. I went through my entire stock of potions keeping my magicka up (playing as a mage).
That happened to me earlier today… 1 Ancient and 1 Blood.
Honestly, though, the dragon fights have become quite tedious. The dragons seem to have severe cases of ADD. They’ll swoop down to attack me then fly to the other side of the area to attack some mudcrabs. 90% of the fight time seems to consist of waiting for the dragon to stop flying around and attack me.
Wow Blackreach…
It’s like the stuck a whole extra world in the game, I was just going to finish one last quest before bed. :smack:
Console commands.
Did you play the two recent Fallout games? They had a passive IFF on the compass, which told you which entities were friendly and which were enemies, without any action on your part- no spells, shouts, or the post-apocalyptic equivalent thereof required.
I’m just surprised it wasn’t implemented in Skyrim.
Because Skyrim is Fallout? The latter has a technological bent, so it’s understandable that you’d have radar. There’s absolutely no reason you’d have that kind of technology in a fantasy setting.
I cannot agree more. I had just started thinking how repetetive the dungeons were, and then I stumble into Blackreach. Floored.
Especially when i realized it linked up several topside locations, and covered such a big chunk of the map. Although I’m a little disappointed that there wasn’t more lore to be found. For such a jaw-dropping environment, there was very little in the way of interactivity or even books; I was totally expecting the pump-house to have to be fixed or something.
Yet you can shoot lightning from your hand and breathe fire instead? Come on. Towns, ruins, caves and so on you can’t see (or even otherwise know are there) automatically appear on the compass (just like in the Fallout games, so why not something telling you whether those people you can see are friendly or not?
I know there’s no radar in Skyrim, but there’s plenty of magic, and like I said before, I’m really surprised there isn’t some sort of always-active magic IFF (Identify Friend or Foe), that doesn’t involve finding the right spell or levelling something up to a certain point or whatever.
I really don’t see why people have such a problem with the idea, to be honest.
Yeah, It’s a bit more empty then I would prefer, but still a great explore, and great looking. And I can totally expect some DLC based on Blackreach, and the Dwemer.
Something I just noticed: I loaded up the game (PC version) and was doing other things while the music played on the screen where you can Click Continue and I realized after it played a while, the music is the theme from Morrowind. It is with a chorus rather than an orchestra but it was the same melody. Loved that because I loved that little piece of music.
Wolfman, Runcible, how do I get to blackreach? Is it early in the main quest missions?
Nothing to do with the main quest:
It’s accessible through some Dwarven ruins if you have an item that you get from Septimus Signus. He’s located in a cave north of Winterhold.
Well, the main quest will eventually take you there.
I haven’t played Skyrim, so I can’t offer too much in the way of commentary, but I just wanted to post this hilarious youtube video of the best arrow shot I’ve ever seen in a video game. It’s from Skyrim.
I think doing it through spells or abilities is a **much **more interesting way of handling it than just making it automatic. It makes it a choice. It makes the player have to think about it, decide whether getting it or something else is more important to them. It’s exactly the kind of thing I want to see more of in video games. Interesting game mechanics and abilities. Especially abilities that aren’t necessarily all about combat. In Fallouts 3 and New Vegas the radar even worked on your Perception stat. The higher it was the larger the range of the radar. It makes for a great way of marrying convenient and useful game mechanics with player choice and giving it an in game justification.
Sadly Skyrim has been largely a disappointment to me and mostly for that reason. It has a slight fraction of the interesting and difficult choices and abilities as did Oblivion, which itself had a fraction of of what Morrowind brought to the table. And while in Oblivion the simplifying didn’t bother me too much that was because Morrowind was a bit of a mess. Most of its mechanics were horribly implemented and poorly explained. Simplifying and streamlining it all made sense. But Oblivion was comparatively well polished. The mechanics that existed in it were not excellent but were acceptable. It should have been a launching off point to further polish the mechanics and start recreating some of those dropped from Morrowind with a more careful eye about setting up the formulas that drive the mechanics so that they actually work decently. Instead they just continued to simplify. Eliminating stats, eliminating disposition, eliminating many skills, eliminating signs, eliminating spell making, making enchanting so dull they might as well have eliminated it, reducing the statistical differences between the races, reducing equipment slots, reducing spell choices. Eliminating every single spell, ability, or statistic that affected the way your character moved through the game world. And the improvements that were made, or rather attempted, are largely lackluster. The perks system is a good idea that was ruined by the decision to glue all perks to a governing skill and then including so many “gimme” perks you effectively have to take to make that skill worthwhile and in some cases forcing you to take perks you will never use just so you can pick another that is higher in the tree. Playing Skyrim ends up feeling like I’m just playing a dumbed down version of Oblivion but in a different setting.
The only real improvement over Oblivion I’ve found is in spell casting. The channelled spells work well and are a nice new way to cast and the missile spells actually move fast enough that you can conceivably hit a target that isn’t asleep or in melee range. But even that improvement is lessened by the decision to make spell tomes completely unavailable to you until you have a very high skill level in the associated school of magic. Which has the effect of making it so you have no way of knowing which spells will be available at the end of the day, or whether you’d want to level a given school of magic to access them, unless you look it up on line or something. It was just a bizarre and pointless decision to hide this information from the player. It also has the effect of making it so you never really have access to spells that drain a significant portion of your Magicka and when coupled with easy availability of Rank’s Robes of Spell School as well as the quite fast default magicka regeneration has the effect of making it seem like you have damn near infinite magicka, eliminating one more portion of choice and difficulty and dumbing down the game ever more. And having a slight fraction of the total different spells effects that were in Oblivion or Morrowind makes the improved spell casting way less exciting than it should have been.
The only thing more disappointing than Skyrim is that I appear to be the only person disappointed by Skyrim. Which is only going to bolster the gaming industry’s annoying obsession with simplifying everything and reducing player choice, especially where it relates to the advancement and customization of a character, whenever possible.
No spell making? Yeah, that’s a big disappointment. I really enjoyed the combination spells I was able to make in Oblivion, and tweaking the magicka drain on other spells to suit my combat style. Are there any work-arounds to not being able to create custom spells?
I stumbled upon a cave named Shimmermist Grotto wherein I…
…fought a giant Steampunk Robot! Awesome! Tough fight too!
I agree with most of your criticisms. However, I’m still enjoying the game for what it is rather than missing what it isn’t. I was pretty shocked the first time I leveled up, since I thought I still wasn’t done building a character (haven’t assigned stat points or chosen skills or sign or anything) and here I’m faced with almost nothing to choose in my level-up.
It will be interesting to see if mods can re-introduce any of the stuff that was lost, or if the dumbing down of character shaping has removed the game infrastructure to do so. Signs should be easy, since they haven’t actually been removed - they’re just optional and you can switch between them.
Fortunately, the world they’ve created is full of cool stuff to explore so I don’t spend much time fretting over the 3rd consecutive simplification of the TES character system.
Brostoevsky, you’re not alone. They simplified things that I really would have liked to see expanded and expanded things that I really didn’t care about.
It’s still one of the best games of the year, I just had such high expectations. The one thing that really did surprise me was how the Radiant quest system actually appears to work. I was expecting a disappointment similar to Radiant AI.
It’s not without its flaws. I certainly don’t need to see another what’s-a-milk-drinker-like-you-doing-here orc. It is innovative and standard-setting though.
I just picked up a book in the game that described what you found.
It sounds like a Steam Centurion built by the now-extinct Dwarves, who were master metalsmiths.
The book is called Herbane’s Bestiary and I found it on the Alchemy table in the ruins of Sarrthal, near Winterhold as part of the Mage’s Guild quest.