The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim post-release thread

The Game Room
61

No kidding! I finished that today, too. Very much fun.

Skyrim just seems realer than Oblivion. I remember all the hype when Oblivion came out about how NPCs actually acted like real people - they walked around, reacted to the world, did things, etc. But when the game came out, they were more or less just as dumb as NPCs everywhere.

Skyrim seems to do a lot better job at that. I’ve only been to a few places, but so far, the NPCs have much more of an “actor” feel to them. If you sit around in a bar, for example, people will come in and you can hear them ordering drinks in the background. I kinda feel like I’m in a movie.

Plus, it’s drop-dead gorgeous. All of it. Even the ugly bits.

Now, if I can just convince Mr. Athena that no, we don’t need to go out tonight, we should just hunker down. Isn’t there some kind of sport on TV? Gah. Real life is much too demanding!

62

That’s why I sent the wife and kids out of town this weekend (and made her think it was her idea :D).

But this game is way over my own expectations. It’s a blast to play and just looks great…and despite the fact that I can’t run Rage, here I’m running the game at the highest video settings with zero latency or lag, zero video atrifacts. No problems at all. And it’s really immersive. The only time I’ve come up for air basically is to post to this thread and eat occasionally.

-XT

63

Just got a very weird glitch, infinite magic. My magic bar doesn’t even appear when casting spells and I can cast all day. You might be thinking that this is a very good thing, especially for mages like me, but I don’t want to cheat.

It appears to be triggered by a quest in The College of Winterhold, the one you do for the dark elf to clean the magic wells.

Reloading doesn’t fix the problem, but according to yahoo answers…Jesus Christ…opening up the console and typing player.ShowRaceMenu fixes it.

Edit: yeah, that fixed it. Very odd. Still, if you want to cheat, there you go.

64

Outside of the steam client: Steam Charts

65

The info isn’t conclusive btw. On non-steamworks games it only shows the number of people playing through steam - company of heroes for example often only has maybe 1000 people playing it on steam, but 3-5k from within the game’s user stats. Also it doesn’t include people in offline mode. Still, 225k people playing at once is the highest number I’ve seen.

66

Well After it got decoded I got about 30 minutes in before work, got through the intro and ran around the world a bit. It is a beautiful game, but kind of depressing when I ran across something like bleak barrows, just reminded me of real winter just about to kick my ass.

My only issue was I need to find somehow to reduce spin rate. I kept doing 180’s when I was just trying to turn to face the guy on my flank, took a lot of unnecessary hits.

About to start over with some actual thought into character construction(damn are elves ugly these days in Elder Scrolls world, also gotta see what I can do with face contructor)

67

What is this archery you keep talking of?

Oh wait, you mean the poison delivery system, yeah it is very useful.

My new favourite. frenzy inducing arrow into a group of bandits. Hilarity ensues.

68

I had that happen. The other major bug I ran into was the game suddenly massively slowing down after a long play session; that was cured both times by saving, quitting to desktop and restarting the game.

69

I caught a butterfly :slight_smile: and apparently tore it’s wings off :frowning:

70

IIRC, pulling off wings is listed in the statistics screen.

I also found it cool that when my Argonian swam in the river he could catch some salmon.

71

Okay so…

How is the character advancement system?

How is diplomacy/speechcraft/haggling handled?

Is the environment varied from region to region?

Do cities and other locales have their own individual flavor?

Does it feel exotic (a la Morrowind) or just like normal European with some pointy eared people (a la Oblivion)?

72

I need to bump this, because I’m having the same problem (PC):

I’m still in the intro, but I have a longsword, a longbow, and a quiver of arrows.

What I want is for ‘1’ to be equip longsword, ‘2’ to be equip longbow (and arrows? Do they need to be equipped?)

I can set them both from the ‘Q’ menu, and what’s funny is that it works once. Set the favorites, hit ‘1’ - there’s the sword. Hit ‘2’, there’s the bow (and I can shoot, so arrows are working.) Hit ‘1’ again, back to sword. So far so good. But then ‘2’ does nothing, and when I go back to my favorites menu the hotkey on the bow has been erased.

73

No classes this time, so when you enough skills have been increased you level up. You can pick perks based on your skill level and previous perks picked, or save up your perks to use when you’ve enough skill.

Speech is still a skill and combines with Oblivion’s mercantile, improves from selling stuff from what I’ve seen so far. You can persuade people based on the speech skill or intimidate based on level, or flat out bribe.

Yes. Haven’t explore that far but so far have seen towering peaks, frozen coasts and rolling tundra.

Yes. Again, haven’t explored that far, only discovered Whiterun and Winterhold along with a load of little villages, but they have their own flavour all right.

Somewhere in the middle. It’s a standard medieval fantasy type setting, but with giants and herds of mammoths wandering about. Definitely feels more exotic than Oblivion’s samey forests, not quite as alien as Morrowind’s Telvanni mushroom towers and ashlands.

Some info on hotkeys:
http://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/m8tnk/guide_how_to_use_18_hotkeys_for_items_and_spells/

74

It’s pretty simple, really. You basically only have 3 stats that you can put points to…magic, health and stamina. That’s it. You get a perk ever level that you can put points to, but there are level caps on most of them. The perks are in skills that you actually use. So, for instance, if you shoot a bow a lot, like me, your bow skill goes up…and you can put your perk points into archery. If you swing a sword a lot with one hand or two, well, there are skills for both, and you can put your perk points there. However you play, you will develop skills in whatever it is you do, and as you get more points you can add perks that give you enhancements to whatever it is you do.

I don’t really develop those things, as they bore me, but I recall a message saying that my haggling went up after doing a lot of barter. I know you can intimidate people or influence them, but I don’t play that way so I’m not sure how it works exactly.

Well, I haven’t been everywhere (far from it), but there are mountains, hilly regions, wooded areas, moors, rivers and river valleys, lakes. It’s pretty much set in a Scandinavia-esque type setting, so you probably aren’t going to get tropical beaches or deserts, if that’s what you are looking for.

I tend to avoid cities as well, but the one’s I’ve been in are varied, but only so much. Again, it’s sort of a Northern Europe setting, so you have a lot of stone fortifications and buildings…and tons of stone ruins. There is some Gothic type structures as well, but that fits in too.

I never played either game, so can’t really speak to that. It’s ‘exotic’ if you find Scandinavia exotic, I guess. The scenery is pretty breath taking, and some of the dungeons are pretty scary (especially the sound effects), but overall it’s not alien if that’s what you mean. The non-Human races (and even the various human races) all seem to blend in, but I assume that’s part of the back story to this empire they are always talking about.

-XT

75

I think you need to equip the items first. Then set them to a number.

This is how it’s working for me:

Put my dagger, my flame, my heal and my bow on my favorites menu.

I equip my dagger in my main hand and my flame in the off-hand. Set my dagger to 1 my flame to 2. I then switch flame to heal on my off-hand and set that to 3. Finally I equip my bow and set that to 4.

That seems to work.

76

My main strategy so far has been to just frenzy all my enemies so they can fight it out until just one remains then I calm him, shoot him in the back with an arrow, and calm him again over and over until he dies. It’s hilarious. On the hardest difficulty I’ve ran into some enemies that take 20+ cycles of calm, shoot, calm. I can hardly believe the game lets me do that. I wonder if it’s possible to enchant a bow with calm. That’d make the game a complete cake walk.

Waiting long enough also fixes it. The quest is supposed to give you a 2 hour Fortify Magicka 100 buff but instead gives a 2 hour Regenerate 100 Magicka per second buff. But some buffs, this one included I think not 100% sure, don’t have their timers run down, or maybe just not run down as much as would be expected, when waiting/sleeping/fast travelling. So it will seem to last forever as it runs about 2 real world hours.

77

The main problem I’m having atm is with NPC followers. I can’t seem to get them to want to hang back, so they get in my way, and I end up damaging or even killing them instead of the mobs attacking us. They also seem to agro mobs from a greater distance in the dungeons. A lot of time I can fight one or two mobs at a time, but when the followers get involved they bring out seemingly everyone from the area.

-XT

78

I had the same issue; Kinthalis’s suggestion of equipping the items, then assigning the hot key seems to have fixed it. Thanks Kinthalis!

79

Here’s an interesting feature; you can get quests from books. I was looking though the books in a room behind the Jarl’s “court wizard”, read one called IIRC “Lost Legends” and it gave me a quest to find out the truth behind the legend in the book.

80

Gah, it’s so great! I hate that I have to be at work all weekend- my vacation doesn’t start until Monday. I got to play for 3 hours this afternoon before work. I can’t wait to play more tomorrow.

What’s thrilled me is all the other stuff you can do. Tanning leather! Cooking food! I have like 40 cabbages in my inventory! I spent a half hour hunting for a salt pile, and another 15 minutes unsuccessfully chasing a deer, missing with every arrow. I managed to corner it and hit it 3 times, but not enough to kill it wil my lousy weapon/skill. Then it ran off. And I loved it!

Oh, can you drown? I kept going underwater while chasing my deer and was too focused to test it out, then forgot. But it seemed like there was no air guage.