Skyrim IV: Oblivion

[ObadiahtheSlim]

Keep in mind that Skyrim is only roughly 16 square miles. For perspective, Manhattan (the smallest of the 5 boroughs) is 23 square miles.

[t209]

Keep in mind that Skyrim is only roughly 16 square miles. For perspective, Manhattan (the smallest of the 5 boroughs) is 23 square miles.

What is the size in Oblivion? (I want to know if Elderscrolls game map is getting smaller.)

[AgentPaper]

What is the size in Oblivion? (I want to know if Elderscrolls game map is getting smaller.)

Cyrodil (oblivion) is about double the size of Morrowind. Skyrim is slightly smaller than Cyrodil.

[pffh]

So, I made a nord and made him a werewolf. Now what does it mean that I can't get a restful sleep?

What the others have said but you can just get the lovers stone that gives more xp then restful sleep anyway and doesn't stack with restful sleep.

[Arcran]

What the others have said but you can just get the lovers stone that gives more xp then restful sleep anyway and doesn't stack with restful sleep.

Lovers Stone isn't as good as the specific ones for leveling though. People only use the sleep bonus to be able to power level Smithing, Alchemy, and Enchanting, and in all cases it would be better to pick up The Warrior, The Thief, or The Mage respectively.

[Triaxx]

Better is stacking them. Combine lover's comfort, and the Guardian stones for a thirty-five percent bonus.

I'm also seeing the moderation message. I have a copy of it from before though so... Heh.

[Om]

Just to say that I'm really enjoying Skyrim. Which is strange given how little I liked Morrowind or FO3 (skipped Oblivion and have no regrets there). I'm not sure what it is about Skyrim (maybe the setting/scenery or the combat? Certainly not the writing or plot) but I'm having a blast. Really glad that I let myself be convinced by the press and bought this

[Triaxx]

Oblivion wasn't bad to be honest, it was just... too serious. Skyrim is serious, but it has enough humor even if it's dark humor, to make it worth it.

And only one annoying persistent quest giver. (Markarth guy) Unlike Oblivion's he's much easier to dodge given the ratwarren nature of the city. And unlike FO3's you won't see him chase you across the map through radiation enough to instant kill you just to shove a quest down your throat.

Now that I think on it, I find both Skyrim and New Vegas similar in a couple of aspects. They're being very serious, and giving you two (or more) sides of the story, but the humor is just dark enough or just askew enough that you find yourself chuckling without it just being uproarious, and you realize it just doesn't fit. Oblivion and FO3 were like that.

Plus you find bits of writing in Skyrim that fill in the blanks on a lot of things. I mean, I was swimming off the coast and ran across two skeletons with names, floating in the water. I get up on shore, weapons drawn expecting a fight at the camp and find a journal, explaining the two were there for the fishing. It's just... very interesting.

New Vegas had the same way. I mean, who didn't wonder about the gas station, then get to Nipton and have the picture completed for them?

[t209]

Lovers Stone isn't as good as the specific ones for leveling though. People only use the sleep bonus to be able to power level Smithing, Alchemy, and Enchanting, and in all cases it would be better to pick up The Warrior, The Thief, or The Mage respectively.

Actually it's a good stone if you plan to be Thief Archer or Nightblade (Mage Rogue)

[Anteros]

I can definitely understand that for Morrowind, but Oblivion? Cyrodiil was largely just a massive forest--the only "alien and strange" parts were the Ayleid ruins. Not to spoil the plot too much, but I would definitely suggest you play through the main plot until the part where you have to go to Blackreach--if you want alien and strange, you won't find better!

It was mostly just forest. Except for the constant road trips into hell.

[Kesnit]

I currently play on the 360, so cannot use mods. However, my fiancee is considering picking up the PC version so she can play with mods (which, of course, would let me do the same).

One of the skills I miss from Oblivion is the Unarmed skill. I remember reading about a mod that allows unarmed combat to increase One-Handed, and (I assume) use the One-Handed perks. I mentioned that mod to my fiancee, who then asked "does that mean you could decapitate someone with unarmed?" She also asked "what does that do to the scripted brawls in the cities? Is there a risk of decapitating an NPC because of that perk?"

Can anyone answer those questions for us?

[factotum]

It was mostly just forest. Except for the constant road trips into hell.

Which largely consisted of identical towers and lava lakes everywhere...I've seen creepier, more alien environments exploring Minecraft.

[AgentPaper]

What do you guys look for when exploring a dungeon? What makes it fun, and what makes it un-fun? What's your favorite area in an existing dungeon, and conversely your least favorite area? How long of a dungeon do you prefer?

I'm planning to crank out a slew of additional "generic" dungeons for various parts of the game, to hopefully release as a sort of dungeon pack just to add more interesting stuff to the world that you can explore. I'll probably also add at least one epic dungeon, but of course I won't be telling you which one it is, so you'll just have to explore them all to find out!

[LordShotGun]

What do you guys look for when exploring a dungeon? What makes it fun, and what makes it un-fun? What's your favorite area in an existing dungeon, and conversely your least favorite area? How long of a dungeon do you prefer?

Try to make the dungeons not have to backtrack similar to where most of the major dungeons had an alternate exit or locked door of some sort that allows you to quickly exit the place after you finish it.

If you haven't already, watch this video for some ideas about dark dungeons or dungeons with platforming.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGIgXeGC6Dg

[SlyGuyMcFly]

What do you guys look for when exploring a dungeon? What makes it fun, and what makes it un-fun? What's your favorite area in an existing dungeon, and conversely your least favorite area? How long of a dungeon do you prefer?

Traps you can lure enemies into, traps that you activate because you were dodging that Draugr. Those are good traps. Traps in the middle of a empty hallway are entirely pointless. The minor platforming sections in some the dungeons were cool. Alternate routes into or through a large room are always appreciated. Puzzles that require use of Shouts are good. In general, puzzles that aren't "rotate the thingy to match the picture" would be nice.

Backtracking through empty dungeon portions is annoying if you must do a lot of it, but dungeons that are basically a long corridor are a terrible cure for this.

But the main point for me? The really big one?

Interesting boss fights.

Ok, so combat in Skyrim kinda sucks. Sad, but true. But I think it's possible to make more engaging boss fights that "exactly the same as all the dudes you just killed, only with more damage and HP". Case in point: the final fight in the Galdur Amulet questline. That was pretty cool. There should be more of that sort of thing.

[Triaxx]

I actually enjoy the rotate the picture puzzles, but I like the one from Skuldafn where you had two right answers.

And don't put all the door traps on the bottom. Higher up, or at the top of the door is better. If you want to be really evil, you could add them to non-hand doors. The kind you open with levers.

I know my dungeon will have them. Heh, heh, heh.

[Hazzardevil]

Where is this mod? I couldn't find on the nexus.

Here.

Also, I have a problem, this is minor spoiler for the main quest.

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I have to do never ending season, the quest where you have to organize a truce between Imperials and Stormcloaks. But whenever I go to talk to Ulfric to get him to see the greybeards, I talk to him and then just tells me to go and prove Galmar right or wrong about the crown, the answer should be simple, do that quest, but I had the same problem before I did the previous quest and I had him saying to go and kill a Ice Wraith.

Does anyone know how I can find out the console commands to try and solve this problem?

[Morph Bark]

Cyrodil (oblivion) is about double the size of Morrowind. Skyrim is slightly smaller than Cyrodil.

Huh, and here I had heard that Skyrim was about 8 times as big as Morrowind, though still only 1/4000th the potential size of Daggerfall or thereabouts.

[t209]

I finished the Imperial questline (even though I read 827), and I have one questions.

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Can Galmar or Ulfric be seen in Sovngarde after soul trapping them?

[factotum]

See, all these things saying that Skyrim is so much bigger than Morrowind...it may be true, but it sure doesn't FEEL bigger. I remember the time I used the levitation shrine at the Tribunal Temple in Vivec, which gives you 12 hours (in game time, not real time, obviously) of levitation, and I wasn't able to levitate all the way to the extreme northern end of the island before the blessing expired (I ended up somewhere near Gnisis), even though I was able to go in a straight line. Without tricks like that it would take much longer to make that journey, mainly due to having to go around the Ghostfence.

Is Skyrim bigger than that? Hard to say, since it's no longer possible to go from one end of the map to the other in a straight line. It doesn't really feel like journeys take all that long, though, even if you don't use fast travel.

[Suedars]

See, all these things saying that Skyrim is so much bigger than Morrowind...it may be true, but it sure doesn't FEEL bigger. I remember the time I used the levitation shrine at the Tribunal Temple in Vivec, which gives you 12 hours (in game time, not real time, obviously) of levitation, and I wasn't able to levitate all the way to the extreme northern end of the island before the blessing expired (I ended up somewhere near Gnisis), even though I was able to go in a straight line. Without tricks like that it would take much longer to make that journey, mainly due to having to go around the Ghostfence.

Is Skyrim bigger than that? Hard to say, since it's no longer possible to go from one end of the map to the other in a straight line. It doesn't really feel like journeys take all that long, though, even if you don't use fast travel.

You must have been doing something different than me. I was able to make it all the way to that one hermit's hut in the Sheogorad region and back down to the Molag Amur area before the Levitate ran off.

[VanBuren]

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim DLC Interview

Kotaku has a short but dense in content interview with Bethesda's Todd Howard on the subject of the company's DLC plans for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Todd reiterates that the DLC will feel "closer to an expansion pack", and as a result less DLCs will be released with bigger time gaps in between compared to Fallout 3's, but also explains that the company is looking to release free pieces of smaller content such as the high-resolution texture pack in between these releases:

"With Fallout 3, it was, 'Ten dollars is the sweet spot for us and we know we want to put out five of them. And we had overlapping teams. We were coming off Fallout 3 and right back in." He describes that development cycle as "a real hardcore loop," but adds, "we just think we can do better content if we approach it a different way."

...

"Because that gap is going to be bigger, we want to put litle things out for free in between. We've already done that for PC with the high-res pack. We're trying to figure out what those things are."

On top of that, Bethesda is planning to explore some of the additions they've showcased in their "Game Jam 2011" video:

"There are definitely things in there that we are planning on exploring," he said.

"It looks like a ton of stuff that could ship right now," he admitted, "but it's in a sizzle video. It's, you know, it's not bug-tested, polished, balanced." He thinks it shows off the creativity of his team and says that some of it is being worked on, but don't take that as the blueprint for the expansions.

Of course, he couldn't resist teasing more: "That wasn't all of it. It's probably 60% of it. The other 40% doesn't show as well in a video or we didn't have good footage."

Top 5 Things Skyrim Should Learn From Dragon Age II (and Vice Versa)

Venture Beat's Rob LeFebvre has put together an editorial titled "Top 5 things Skyrim should learn from Dragon Age II (and vice versa), and given the title there's really no need to explain the content. Some of the points make sense, but the games are vastly different in scope and cater to two entirely different audiences.

While I like them both, I would really like one giant mashed-up uber-game, if you will. Sky Age, perhaps. Or Dragon Rim. No, scratch that last one. Ew, just ew. Hell, let’s just begin with a look at what Skyrim really should improve upon, using Dragon Age II’s example.

...

Better combat animation

Look, I like Skyrim’s combat a lot better than Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s, but no one is using the word “visceral” to describe the battle system here. Fighting still feels like controlling a marionette with rigid strings, and even the dragon skirmishes are more about toddling around in circles until they land and then shouting at them to death.

Frequent weapon changes are encouraged, but the lag between choosing a new weapon and actually getting to use one is, well, laggy. I can’t count the number of times I switched to the Axe of Whiterun only to be stabbed to death by a dead Nord in the time it took to do so.

Dragon Age II, while more of a button-mashing fun-fest, is responsive and quick when choosing tactics, selecting spells, or even switching weapon sets.

More variety to colors/environments

Oh man, Skyrim designers, I get it. Skyrim is a cold, brown, and gray place. Even the underground is brown and gray. And cold. The monsters there are brown. And gray. The dragons, for the most part, are a variety of grayish-brown.

Please, Skyrim, can I have some color? Just a little? The northern lights at night are pretty, but they are not enough to counteract all the…wait for it…brown.

And repetition? It’s like they got the same guy with the bad Nordic accent to design all the inns. Every. Single. Inn. Has the Exact. Same. Layout. And some minor variation of an annoying bard whom I continue to want to shoot in the head.

Dragon Age II, with all its maze-y back channels and Deep Roads and such, at least has some variety in color and in environment.

Not everything’s perfect in the world of Dragon Age, though. What can DA2 learn from Skyrim?

...

Allow for unscripted encounters

There’s got to be a way to bring in Skyrim’s powerful (and sometimes hilarious) dynamically generated goodness into a heavily scripted game like Dragon Age II, right?

After playing Dragon Age II for a while, I start to long for interactions with characters that will complain about their knee injuries or their brother in the army without having to slam through a dialogue tree to do so. Even the “random” fights in the bad parts of town feel fairly planned and obligatory.

I sure would like to skip some of the dialogue as well, especially the fourth or fifth time around. In one egregious example, no matter what I choose to say to that jerk of a Templar, he still cuts the throat of the Qunari and then has his followers try and kill us all. Sure would be fun to try and flatter him a bit and get out without having to fight the whole flock, right?

[SlyGuyMcFly]

I actually enjoy the rotate the picture puzzles, but I like the one from Skuldafn where you had two right answers.

I don't dislike them, but good lord could they have used some variety.

[Beowulf DW]

Actually it's a good stone if you plan to be Thief Archer or Nightblade (Mage Rogue)

The lover's stone accelerates skill leveling by 15% for each of the skills. The Guardian stones accelerate their associated skills by 20%. Not much of a trade-off, really.

[Hazzardevil]

You must have been doing something different than me. I was able to make it all the way to that one hermit's hut in the Sheogorad region and back down to the Molag Amur area before the Levitate ran off.

It widely agreed upon that no-one knows how big Skyrim is.
I swear I have heard that Skyrim is thrice as big as Morrowind to 70% the size of Cyrodil.

I do wish there were more creative rotation power, like maybe one where you would have them hidden out the way and you have to solve them all to reach the end, that would be an epic dungeon.
Until you get stuck.

[NEO|Phyte]

I am reasonably sure a big part of the reason Morrowind felt so big is because you moved so much slower.

That said, I'm pretty sure skyrim has the heightmaps or whatever for most of tamriel included in the data files, so someone should be able to size compare that way.

[factotum]

That said, I'm pretty sure skyrim has the heightmaps or whatever for most of tamriel

It only has those for Cyrodiil and Morrowind, and even then only at low detail--they were only put in because the original intention was that you'd be able to climb the mountains and look out over those other provinces.

[VanBuren]

Industry Gamer has some additional comments from Todd Howard on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's issues on PlayStation 3, following on some statements he made at DICE. According to Bethesda's game director, statistically the problem isn't really as bad as it seems, but also added that people afflicted by the bug have all the rights to be upset:

"Statistically, it is not nearly as bad as it seems. Meaning, by all the internal and external data, this is our most solid release," he began. "It's also our most popular by a large factor, so we do have a lot of people on the PS3 who play the games a lot and their games are at a state that the game is just taxing the PS3 enough. That's a fact; so, it really wasn't until we were able to get save games from the users – because, literally, how they play the game over 100 hours – some of it, very little of it, we were able to reproduce and take care of on our own and a lot of it that you're seeing now, we weren't. So over the course of, like, December, the community helped us. We got their save games. We'd literally have to look in and say, 'What quests do they have running, what order? Oh, he's doing this. He's got these dragons here. This script is running. Why is it kicking out this many things?' And the 1.4 update is coming out today on the PS3 and it should – in our internal tests on those games - it fixes it, it takes care of it. But, going through this, we now know, there will still be – a smaller set, but there are probably still people we don't have their saved games and they have [other problems]."

...

"So this is not one thing, this is this whole set of unique circumstances, and the point is, we're going to get a hold of those people then and say, 'Well, let us look at it.' Because, look, when you spend this much time on a game, you want it to perform for everybody. So when someone says it doesnt, they have every right to be upset with us, and we want to attack that and, 'ok, you tell us what's going on. We're going to fix this'," Howard continued.

[t209]

What happens if you soul trap

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Ulfric, Galmar or Rikke before Sovngarde mission? I soul trap Galmar Stonefist before I use it to recharge my weapon.

[Triaxx]

I agree with the guy on a lot of points, but I feel he's not using the system to it's full advantage. I mean, his comment about changing weapons taking a while is valid, which is why we get FUS so early. Tap Z and stagger them, then swap weapons.

I haven't played DAII, so I'm not sure about that side. I don't really agree with his color assessment. Sure, there's a lot of brown and green and white. But also blue and shades of grey, gold, and then the truly interesting colors in places like Blackreach, or other Falmer places.

@Even Human: That's what I was getting at. Skuldafn was different from the rest where you just had to memorize a combination and you were through.

The multi-turners were just annoying.