TES V: Skyrim

Could someone elaborate on the simulation elements mentioned? I haven't played the older TES games so it's hard to appreciate what is lacking compared to the old ones.

 

It was a "simulation", in the sense that you had a huge world were you could do anything you wanted, with a lot more tools in your disposal to do it...
The complexity of those games was huge, in terms of equipment, skills, attributes, well in terms of everything!
That's why many people think that the newer games in the series are significantly dumbed down.
In a sense, the new games are. I'm just not sure if they could be done the "old way".

I still think that Morrowind was the best game in the series. But it's not really because of its technical merits, or because you had more options available.
For me, it's because of its art direction and the lack of map markers. The first is completely subjective of-course, the later, although it's great when you can play a game for five hours straight whenever you want, it would be gamebreaking for me now...

And although I'd like Skyrim to be a game with "open cities", cauldrons, separate skills for axes, spears and levitation, (ok, seems I could go on for ever here, just multiply by ten if we are talking about Daggerfall), I can easily escape within the game, as is...

 

On a side note, I was a bit disappointed with the Dwemmer ruins in Skyrim.
I only found one, and I haven't gone inside, but I hoped that they would be like in Morrowind.
It's about art direction again... In Morrowind, you could see that those things were there for hundreds of years, that the land around them had almost swallowed them through the passage of time.
But in Skyrim, they seem as if they were built more recently than some of the common towers you can find when traveling the world...

 

After all my tweaks, I've concluded that forcing 16x anisotropic filtering is the most drastic enhancement you could make. High quality ambient occlusion is too dark for my taste. Also, tree and grass self shadowing is a nice touch, too. Homer spent like a half an hour guiding me through un-fucking myself when I changed the ugrids and encountered failure to load and red menus.

 

For those interested in roleplaying there's a new app for iPhone, iPad and Android featuring an interactive map of Skyrim, which lets you use markers, annotations, etc, and it 's free.

http://www.dragonshoutapp.com/

 

I looked this up, and I really see what you mean here. The ruins in Skyrim look like they've been very cleanly excavated and thoroughly preserved.

This, one the other hand, makes it seem like they've gone untouched and are ripe for exploration:


edit: after watching a few more of those "Places of Morrowind" videos I'm convinced Morrowind's settings / art direction with Skyrim's graphics would be nirvana.

 

Anyone know how many shouts are in the game? Also, what's the level cap? I've decided I'm not looking at any maps that give away the position of locations such as dungeons and ruins. I'd rather discover them on my own, which so far, isn't a problem. The best part of the game is exploration.

 

That's with one hundred mods active
In the original, because of the fog, you couldn't ever see the whole ruin!
Then again, it's been ages since I played the game...
Perhaps my memory of it, is part what I remember, part my imagination filling the blanks


And since we are talking about old games, here is something old made into something new

Dungeon Master is alive!

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/beta-gameplay-legend-of/724451

 

http://xlengine.com/

 

I don't think there is a level cap, but here are all the shouts:
Skyrimragon Shouts - UESPWiki

(so 20 in total)

 

I've only found one Dwemer ruin thus far, Aftlund I think it is, and it is almost swallowed by the ice on the exterior. But given that in the universe fiction the ruins are maintained and patrolled by the advanced Animunculi that the Dwemer produced in vast numbers (Who incidentally are giving my lvl 16 destruction mage a bit of trouble, spiders I can handle but the spheres just hurt - I can barely put down one of the nasty wee buggers) why wouldn't they be in fairly good condition?

The fiction stresses time and again that the Dwemer built to last with secrets of metallurgy that the other races can only dream of. In particular their common construction metal retains its edge and is very corrosion resistant.

I don't see that Dwemer ruins being in good order is all that wrong really.

 

And you have hundreds of years passing between each game and no technology gets improved. No new weapons, no new magic.

You just have to suspend your disbelief wrt. the history, though Bethesda better come up with a better engine for the next game. Most of the issues stem from Gamebryo.

 

Skyrim has been great thus far, but I've come to realize that for nearly every quest, I'm not the one shaping events. I'm sort of just along for the ride, going in whatever direction I'm told. There are some particular moments where you can influence the outcome of a quest -- forcibly failing or choosing between two outcomes, but it's otherwise fairly shallow.

There is one particular instance I'd like to have seen a little (or hell, a lot, to be honest) more dynamic in --

Spoiler

the battle for Whiterun. You can't lose, and that's annoying.

I was on the Imperial side, and it went through my mind how cool it would be to lose Whiterun and start going down the path of a war that the Stormcloaks could possibly win. Hold order would change, the Jarl would obviously be executed, and your thane status would be meaningless. You'd proceed to help defend Solitude and Markarth. Losing either hold meant they've effectively won (Solitude being the canonical home of the High King / Queen of Skyrim, and Markarth being the Imperial's strongest point of defense), and you can choose to serve under Ulfric or go underground, Dark Brotherhood style, as the Imperial's last hope for re-establishing order. Along the way, holds could have dissenting citizens under this new order and every day/week/month there would be executions to serve as examples, there would be people who would report you as an Imperial, and people silently supporting your cause who would assist you. It would have been amazing!

BUT NO. You can't lose. You can lose the sub-objectives, but certain NPCs on your side are invincible, and the percentage of Stormcloaks to poach gradually goes down without fail.

Come to think of it, I think it would have been better if the objectives didn't explicitly say you can do one thing or the other, and instead allow you to discover these choices on your own.

 

xatnys, the murder mystery quest in Windhelm doesn't explicitly reveal your options.

 

You noticed that too huh?

Maybe they should make a crazy sci-fantasy TES someday. Wood elves in space with LightBows!

 

Don't give them ideas! They need to fix the tech first!

 

It's all relative obviously and I haven't played Morrowind in the last 5 years so a lot of it I'm sure is rose tinted spectacles. running around was certainly a pain, but it added to the cost of being a vampire, you couldn't get caught out in the day time running between locations.

But to me at least it's the quality of the content, the assassin quest line in Morrowind was one of my favorite series of quests in any game. By comparison the best of the "guild" quests in Skyrim was probably the Thieves guild line, which is very short.

Oblivion I had issues with because the level scaling was totally broken and the end of the main quest line was incredibly weak.

I had 90+ hours in each of Morrowind and Oblivion, I'll put the same probably into Skyrim and that's a lot ore than I've put into any other PC game outside of WOW in the last 2 or 3 years.

FWIW I don't min/max in these games and I usually can't be bothered with the crafting skills, the the fact enchanting is overpowered never really affected me.

 

How did you build out your character for a battle mage?

 

I took mana at every level.
And I put every point into destruction if available and conjuration if not.
I joined the magic guild as soon as possible, since some of the quest rewards have mana regen.

There is still a lot of running away involved with higher level mobs that have elemental resistance of any sort.

 

I don't quite the point you are making here - I was simply pointing out that Dwemer ruins should be in good order as they have Animunculi servicing and repairing them. Most of the Nord barrows I have been into have tree roots through them, passageways collapsed and chunks broken off various pieces when they are inhabited by the undead. (Who apparently don't house clean.) But bandit occupied caves and ruins tend to be tidier in the sections where the bandits are.

The issue of no new magic is explained to some extent by the fiction - the abolition of the mages guild in Cyrodiil thanks to the Oblivion crisis. That is why the college in Winterhold is so special - it is independent of the mages guild and its library in particular is one of the last of its kind within Empire controlled territory. So concerted research into magic seems to have stalled.

Add to it that every time someone has researched technology too much either a calamity befalls them (see the Dwemer and their hubris) or a Daedric regent gets a little precious and fiddles with things. Several texts reference the fact that several scholars (usually elvish) strongly believe that the formation of Mundis was intentionally done to be a punishment/lesson by Aedra with the Daedra interferring for good measure.

So there are game fiction reasons for why things are largely the same old, same old. The reality is probably that Bethesda simply haven't given it too much thought as they iterate their game design.