So, here's some extended opinions of Skyrim after playing for much longer. I'll try to avoid any spoilers but I will be talking briefly about dragons.
Graphics;
One of the things that really concerned me coming from Oblivion was that Bethesda were going to half-ass the animations. And they did. Okay, the hair is annoying and the low-resness of a console port gnaws on me, but the animations really were avoidable. They're better than Oblivion but not by much. After coming from a lot of foreign MMO's, the animations in this game really come off as rigid and lazy. Not all of them are terrible, but combat animations, especially FPView and the sequence kills, really detract from the experience. Throw in animations like saber cats and bears and it really goes downhill.
Post processing and particle blending serve Skyrim well in many regions, attaining a respectable level of quality despite lacking high-rez textures.
I sincerely hope this game is moddable. Not Oblivion "argh my face what is this doing" moddable, but actually realistic to make TC's in.
Combat;
To me, the game's about combat. All RPG's are about combat. Sure, there's exploration and story, but I don't go into these games for the story. If I do that, I'll be disappointed. I'd rather wander around looking for the next big thing to fight. Unfortunately, combat doesn't really seem to have gone anywhere since Oblivion. Melee combat lacks any and all depth present in even the simplest action RPG's. Which is odd, because it's a console port, and consoles favor ARPG's better than PC's do. I am not sure why melee combat is restricted to positional and "power" trigger attacks, and doesn't have any form of non-passive interaction.... but it doesn't. This doesn't give level/monster designers much room in designing fights.
This makes fights fall into one of two categories for me: Curb stomps, or reverse curb stomps. The difficulty of the game
wildly changes at the flip of a dime. I'm playing on the default difficulty, because I remember dying a lot to imps in Oblivion. In Skyrim, I regularly 1shot most enemies I come across. Then, enemies 1 or 2shot me. Just like that. The game supposedly has an autolevelling system similar to Oblivion, but I get the impression some monsters, particularly minibosses and dragons, don't autolevel. Dragons are easy, but more on those later. The minibosses I encounter are usually Undead of various nature. The lengths I have to go through to kill them are long, painful, and involve abusing the archaic AI engine.
Now, onto Dragons. As the primary combat feature of the game, I expected a lot more from dragons. Every dragon I have yet encountered flies around on a wild, erratic path with horribly unrealistic turning radius/speed, breathing fire that does, at best, moderate damage. No spells, no Shouts, no special abilities. They seem to only be able to land on pre-determined waypoints and at specific intervals; they're heavily scripted. This makes them easy for me to kill, because all I have to do is sprint when they breathe, take no damage, then hit them when they land. I am using dated armor and their melee attacks hardly scratch me. A few whacks, they fly up, I run around, they land, they die.
According to HKS this is a little different for casters, which comes as a surprise seeing as he's been telling me about how horribly broken Sparks is. Sparks is a channelled spell, one you can apparently "spam" to achieve insane damage rates at no mana cost (think about beam ticking in sc2). Despite this he apparently runs out of mana too fast to kill them easily.
I guess ARPG's have spoiled my taste for combat, as I have always enjoyed the fighter-esque depth out of that genre, something Skyrim seems sorely lacking in. But I guess that's what mods are for, as apparently some mods for Oblivion heavily altered the combat system.
Sounds;
I have encountered a few bad bits of voice acting but nothing particularly atrocious yet. I guess what stands out to me the most is that they only had a handful of voice actors doing all of the voices in the game. Half of the guards sound like Arnold. This is a bit comical, but it breaks the mood immediately.
All of the SFX are pretty decent except for one colossal exception - the sequence kill sound. It is
very bad. It is so atrociously bad that, when combined with the poor animations and silly camera, I usually throw up when I hear it. It is low frequency and so out of place, I really cannot fathom the unimaginable internism that inspired them to release with it still in the game.
Gameplay;
I guess the overall appeal of Oblivion, Skyrim, and the other Elder Scrolls games is the open world nature. However, I always found Oblivion to be lacking so much in the way of finding anything worthwhile that I grew very bored of it very fast. Skyrim offers much better gameplay in this regard, but I am starting to feel the repetition of the design at work.
Encounters are scattered on the map in grid sort of formation and follow a fairly basic formula. Enter dungeon, punch guys, maybe solve a generic puzzle to open a door, kill more guys, open box and find nothing of particular value. This may or may not involve 1-2 hours of me shooting a guy with my low bow skill behind a rock because he 1shots me if he gets close or not. I think what I enjoy most about these areas is the subtle details.
A puzzle has you solve it non-obviously by referring to a book noted in a Negromancer's journal. The book makes mention of animals, and these animals are the order of the blocks you must arrange to open the door. The game does not tell you this, like most Western games do, and so it took me a while to figure out that the answer was not obvious and I had to actually pay attention.
From the Dwarven Gundam factories to underwater castles, the environments of Skyrim are not so repetitive as the design behind them and offer unique experiences each time. This to me is the greatest success of Skyrim, in that they've managed to make me play it for almost two-days nonstop and not feel bitter. What game has succeeded in this for so many years? I wouldn't give it the 96/100 meta critic rating those pantywaists on Steam gave it due to the interface bugs, animations and console portyness, but I would rate this leagues above everything Blizzard has released post-brood war combined.
I don't think that Dragons are actually random. I think they spawn based on location and based on a script. This is because Dragons do leash, and always seem to appear away from towns and quest areas. I've killed probably about half a dozen various dragons now. I hope they start actually attacking towns soon. I want to see some dudes get stabbed. Other monsters, like bears, vampires, and the like, do seem to be random. And, yes, they do level/gear scale with you, so now I am starting to encounter random guys with elven/dwarven gear at level 22, though the vast majority of preplaced bandits still use fur stuff.
According to HKS, the world actually adapts to you clearing out dungeons. I haven't witnessed it for myself, but this is supposedly one of the big features of the world engine I was not aware of - it generates quests and changes regions you've already been to so you always have new stuff to punch. I only encountered one dungeon where guys were fighting each other, and I don't know if it was random or not. The thought of a truly persistent world at work does tingle my modder's crundle.
Story;
I won't comment on the main story much because I have not done a lot of story-related things so far.
The game tries to breadcrumb you into the sidelines in discreet and subtle ways. It is not like most Western games that stole from the Diablo 2/WoW casual concept of LOL CLICK ON ME TO RECEIVE QUEST. You can receive quests from rumormongering, general dialogue, watching two guys argue/punch each other, reading books can breadcrumb here and there, and almost all of it is really subtle. This is where the true development time of Skyrim no doubt went into - the colossal amount of dialogue and voice acting that went into all of the random junk happening around you. The AI is still really weird, though, like my broad doing the magical chairs with a single... chair...
Oh, yeah. Your campanions can permanently die. My first wench got bent over by a stack of Conjurers. Casters in this game, holy hell are they retarded. I die most often to casters, because it's harder to cheese the really strong ones. I usually have to gratuitously abuse any and all world traps that are available, because they do insane bonus damage to NPC's. I am... the Bear Trap Samurai.
Overall, Skyrim exceeded my expectations. It's one of the few times where I felt like I was playing a real game and not some indie trash like Starcraft 2. It has a lot of rough spots, so if you're on the fence about it, I'd say wait for a patch or two and some mods to roll out. There's already a mod out that changes the DDS compression some intern mangled the faces with.
Ah, time for another semi-review. I was starting an LP a short time ago before depression slapped me up and I stopped working on all of my video material, probably for a long time. This one is for The Ball. It's a UDK indie title, and I bought it when it was on sale because the guys who made it were pretty open about their world and provided a lot of tutorial material. I'm all for supporting those kinds of guys. Unfortunately, their game really doesn't stand up to those standards.
Alright, so The Ball is a puzzle game. This immediately spelled doom for me, because I hate puzzles. But I thought I'd suck it up, turn on fraps, and give it a try. It wasn't the puzzly nature that really struck me, though. It was the sheer, unabridled
laziness.
The world environment has next to NO NORMAL MAPPING. IN A UDK TITLE. WHAT THE FUCK. Okay, maybe Blizzard's interns are too asphyxiated from gfraizer's rod stuck up their ass and in their throat, but there is seriously no excuse to not have normal mapping in 2011 in an engine like Unreal 3. No. Excuse. At. All. Throw on extremely obvious UV/tiling issues on the same damn rock texture they used across much of the game and you may or may not start becoming mishappy.
Yes, that is what should be a streak of oil. No, I don't know why Ropar is trying to eat it.
If you look past the many and immense graphical shortcomings, the gameplay can surprise rod you sometimes as well. Take, for example, the unexpected exploding balls that fall on your head if you place a block in the wrong place. They don't make a sound and their particle effects are so atrociously
awful that you may not even know what the hell happened in the first place. They are instant death, so pucker up for a 5 minute walk back to the puzzle room again because level design is hard.
I discovered my first bug 5 feet into the game - if you rub against rocks you vibrate wildly and make a barely-audible grunting noise. Speaking of grunting noises, I hope whoever did the voice acting for their random dialogue was beaten with a colossal hunk of hardened lard.
I'm sure there's more things I forgot to rant about in both Skyrim and The Ball, but I guess you'll just have to wait for the videos.
/e
I've started to see dragons in small towns, now. They tend to die fairly easily to guards, though.
I've also become a Werewolf and I may or may not have accidentally executed a large portion of Whiterun because I thought I was using a Shout and not transform. Oh well. None of them were very cute anyways. Now I can add some corpses to my other junk heaps in the town.
