Heh, if you laugh at Pilgrim and Adept, you should have tried a custom class of Linguist in Daggerfall. Primary and Secondary skills all languages. Talk about having a hard time levelling!
The game is very pretty, but the AI seems a bit weak. I was in “stealth” mode many times, firing arrows which were landing at the feet of oblivious goblins. Until I actually hit them, they had no idea anything was happening. I also ran into a few with pretty poor pathfinding.
Still, what I’ve seen seems a genuine improvement over Morrowind, particularly in the variety of encounters. I hope to hell they don’t have any of those cliff bird things that frigging INFESTED Morrowind – to the point that I carried magic items specifically designed to destroy them from a distance.
I DESPISED those goddam things. Every five feet, you’d get attacked by another one, and sometimes mobbed by four or five at once. They were like mosquitos-- didn’t take much to kill them, but Christ on the crapper, were they annoying.
Seconded. (Thirded?) Cliff racers were a horrible interruption from real combat. They hovered out of range, they saw you from a million miles away and swarmed you, and they only attacked when you weren’t looking up at them.
Oh — and don’t forget those little maggot guys. Same thing: they latch on as an attacker from 1000 yards out and hop ineffectively at you.
I’ll check the Prima guide to see if “cliff racer plumes” is given as an alchemical ingredient, or if the racers appear in the bestiary. (I’m at work, but the guide is in my car.)
I’m not going to mind the rats and wolves and bears and deer and stuff by comparison.
Anyone have some screenshots of particularly beautiful scenery or just plain cool stuff you’ve encountered?
I still haven’t received this from Amazon, and have learned that even though it has been “shipping soon” (and hence, unable to be cancelled) since Tuesday it won’t actually be shipped until Friday and arrive on Monday, which happens to be the first day of class for spring. Yeah, dropping the $20 on next day shipping so that I could be sure to have it to enjoy during spring break was sure worth it. :rolleyes:
Checked the Prima guide…
Cliff racers: not in bestiary
Cliff racer plumes: not in list of alchemical ingredients
(happy dance) 
I don’t currently have a system beefy enough to run the game, but I’m definitely interested in getting it once I do. If anyone is interested, here is the first look from GameSpy. It seems VERY favorable…and makes me want a PC that can run it all the more! 
-XT
The biggest problem is that it’s clear that they wanted to make an xbox game with a PC port, and not the other way around. They dumbed it down a bit for console gamers. The interface is bad, but console friendly. (See 7 things in your inventory at a time? bleh. And no drag-drop character equipment screen) The skills have been reduced and dumbed down a bit (weapons and armor, at least) possibly for casual console gamers. The hotkey system is simply bad - it looks like they made it for the xbox and gave no thought whatsoever to PC users. We have an entire 75% of the keyboard that’s just totally unused and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Uh… they made both versions at the same time. There was no ‘port’. Yeah, the interface is the same, because it really doesn’t make much sense to make two different interfaces when both versions are released at the same time (unless you wanted to wait another few months for a release).
And I’m actually glad that we don’t have “Medium Armor” and stuff like that. At some point, Morrowind invited people to do strange things just to level (like jumping to the next town instead of walking/running). Having less skills prevents a good deal of that (wearing medium armor instead of heavy to get the next level).
Frankly I don’t see the big deal about the interface. You have the F1-4 buttons to take you to specific info screens. Do you really need to hit ‘I’ when you can hit F2? Or ‘J’ or ‘M’ when you can hit F4?
Well, it make sense… no cliffs ;). Well, not that many at any rate.
According to the GameSpy review, they LIKED the new interface and skill sets. They seem to say they are less complex and easier to grasp. I don’t know obviously as I don’t have the game. Just based on their review though I’m seriously considering buying the thing and trying it out even if my machine doesn’t meet the minimum. Maybe I’ll try the old stand by of putting in more RAM and buy a new video card…
-XT
What I mean is that they designed it for the lowest common denominator - the xbox. They haven’t designed it to use the functionality of the mouse and keyboard - and that’s a huge shame, because it limits the interface. A huge advantage of PCs is having a much more powerful set of controls - that is, the mouse and keyboard - and this game made no effort to take use of them.
Does anyone read all the lore and mythology in the books? I find myself skipping it all because I’m not all that into mythology and there’s a lot of it. I still do tend to read books on practical stuff, like books of spellcasting, alchemy, etc. Am I missing out on good stuff by skipping most of the lore?
Question about how attribute bonuses on levelling work.
Manual says:
When you raise a level, you are given the ability to raise three attributes. Certain attributes receive a bonus modifier, which is determined by which skills you have increased since your last raised level. For example, if you improved several skills that have personality as a governing attribute, then you will see an appropriate bonus modifier for personality.
Ok.
I misremembered - I wanted to increase my strength, so I could carry more… I rested, and only had a 2x strength bonus modifier. I decide to go out and hit stuff with blunt weapons to boost my strength. I thought if I levelled my blunt skill up 3 times, it would give me 3x bonus (giving 5x total). But apparently the way it works is that you only get credit for levelling up a skill once, right? Bonus gets an extra 1x modifier if I level up blunt weapons once, and a 1x modifier if I level it up 50 times, right? So in order to get the 3x bonus for strength, I should level up blades, blunt, and hand to hand each once, right?
The thing I don’t understandable about this, though, is that upon my first levelling I was getting an option for a strength modifier of 5x. How can that be, if the max you can level it up is 3x based on the 3 goverened skills?
I believe the way Morrowind worked was that you got a x5 bonus for the stat if you leveled those stat’s linked skills up a total of 10 times.
That is, raise your Blunt Weapons from 5 to 15 and you get a x5 bonus on your Strength. (Or Blade up by 5, Blunt up by 5, or some combination of Strength-linked skills that adds up to 10.)
I haven’t checked this in Oblivion yet, but I’m not at the point where I’m prepared to obsess over having One Oober Dood with straight 100s. Sure, with care and preparation (and a lot of grinding of skills) it could be done, but a straight-100s-master-in-everything Khajit will play almost the same as a straight-100s-master-in-everything Breton. I’d rather my characters have strengths to explore and weaknesses to overcome. One übercharacter is as any other.
(There’s nothing wrong with making an übercharacter straight-100s-master-of-everything. For some people, seeing all the content on the first time through and doing everything 100% is the point, and they’ll never make another character.)
I’m not interested in maxing the character, just wanted to make sure I had the idea right. I do want to get my strength out of the pathetic 30s, though, so I can carry more than a few items before I have to go back and sell…
By the way, do your potions get lighter as your alchemy improves? I have some potions with the same name, and very similar effects, that weigh different.
According to the Prima guide, the weight of the potion is the average of the weight of the ingredients.
Sorry for all the basic questions - is there a way to tell which skills you’ve improved since you last levelled, or do you just have to remember? If I want to max out bonuses in certain categories it’d be nice to know if levelled in them or not.