Skyrim IV: Oblivion

[Volthawk]

2. Skyrim is such a dump. Really, at least in oblivion, major cities have the gall to be major. Here, I visit what marked in the map as a major city, and they have like two houses, an inn, and the jarl's palace. What a sad place to be a jarl.

Sounds like Winterhold to me. If it is, note that it used to be a bigger city, but most of it collapsed into the sea before the game started (the local Nords suspect the College was behind it in some form).

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Anyway, do I have to pick a side in the civil war?

Nope. You can mostly ignore it, though if you do you'll have to briefly get involved to broker a truce between the two sides so you can deal with the dragons. And you can't get the house in Windhelm until you either earn Ulfric's trust by working for him or conquering the city for the Empire. Other than that, though, your involvement in the war can end right after you arrive in Riverwood if you choose.

[pffh]

And you can't get the house in Windhelm until you either earn Ulfric's trust by working for him or conquering the city for the Empire.

Yes you can. I got it long before even starting the civil war questline.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Really? I thought in order to get it you had to either have Ulfric's trust or put Brunwulf in power.

[pffh]

Really? I thought in order to get it you had to either have Ulfric's trust or put Brunwulf in power.

All I know is that I got all the houses (and Windhelm was my second house) before finishing the main questline and I didn't start the civil war questline until I was sure I had done almost every other quest in the game first.

[Triaxx]

The house is actually related to quests you've done in the city. I think being able to buy Hjerim is related almost entirely to Blood on the Ice.

[Flickerdart]

I'd recommend doing the Civil War early on though. Doing it when you're legendary Dovakhiin, slayer of gods and all around badass turns it from a major struggle involving dozens of men fighting along with you to a mop-up operation starring You, with some annoying people you're not supposed to kill tagging along.

[Lamech]

I'd recommend doing the Civil War early on though. Doing it when you're legendary Dovakhiin, slayer of gods and all around badass turns it from a major struggle involving dozens of men fighting along with you to a mop-up operation starring You, with some annoying people you're not supposed to kill tagging along.

Wow, wow, wow. Are you telling me there were people I wasn't supposed to kill? Ah man I think I screwed up a lot of those missions. /silly But yes basically correct. Those missions are a bit weak with storm call or summon dragon.

[t209]

I'd recommend doing the Civil War early on though. Doing it when you're legendary Dovakhiin, slayer of gods and all around badass turns it from a major struggle involving dozens of men fighting along with you to a mop-up operation starring You, with some annoying people you're not supposed to kill tagging along.

I did and

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Kodlak and Ulfric praise me for the victory over Dovahkiin. I still see Galmar even though I soul trap him.

[Triaxx]

I've started a short lived character, a redguard who's sole purpose is to complete the civil war for the imperials. So far I'm less than impressed. The Stormcloaks ask me to kill an Icewraith. Not strictly an easy task, but not that impossible.

The imps? Oh, go clear out this bandit infested fortress. I'm not sure if that's confidence in my abilities, or just trying to get me killed. Not that I can't do it, but seriously.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I've started a short lived character, a redguard who's sole purpose is to complete the civil war for the imperials. So far I'm less than impressed. The Stormcloaks ask me to kill an Icewraith. Not strictly an easy task, but not that impossible.

The imps? Oh, go clear out this bandit infested fortress. I'm not sure if that's confidence in my abilities, or just trying to get me killed. Not that I can't do it, but seriously.

Or it could be they wanted to capture a strategically important location and what better way to test your loyalty and ability than to sic their new Dovahkiin recruit on 'em?

[Hazzardevil]

So, I was browsing mods for skyrim, I found a rather good one.

Here's some pictures I took of it.

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Evidently the Adeptus Astartes enjoy getting drunk on one of the

[Cespenar]

I've started a short lived character, a redguard who's sole purpose is to complete the civil war for the imperials. So far I'm less than impressed. The Stormcloaks ask me to kill an Icewraith. Not strictly an easy task, but not that impossible.

The imps? Oh, go clear out this bandit infested fortress. I'm not sure if that's confidence in my abilities, or just trying to get me killed. Not that I can't do it, but seriously.

So, Bethesda is apparently uninspired in their quests? Gee, that's news to me.

[TheEmerged]

So, enchanting & smithing hit 100 now but it's going to be a while for alchemy. Now that I can put two enchants on things I might as well enchant that "crafting" set I had planned first (+alchemy & +smithing to 100, a few ancillery enchantings). It's a good thing I've been buying up Grand Souls since this is going to cost a fortune of them...

...wait, why is it only letting me select one gem for enchanting even with two enchants? It couldn't be true that this perk is letting me put two enchants for the same soul is it?

Oh my THERE'S a happy little detail that snuck up on me. I ended up being able to make my crafting set *and* most of my adventuring set with the grand souls I'd planning for just the crafting set. Add a couple more souls and my adventuring set was done too.

In other news, 100 smithing + perk to improve armor + a full set of smithing enchants = easily broken armor cap, as some of you were nice enough to warn me before I burnt too many perk points on the +armor talent. In my adventuring set, I break it without using the shield.

That in turn led to my next little discovery. I ran into a random bear while walking to my next word wall, and noticed I was close to the next point of both destruction & light armor. So I beaned him with firebolts until I was out of mana, then let him beat on me while my mana recovered... On a lark, I loaded the Healing Hands spell to see if I could heal the bear. Yes, you can in fact heal the bear Suddenly it doesn't look like Destruction is going to be as hard to cap as I'd come to fear, and I'll be able to level restoration, block, and armor a bit in the meantime.

====================

Finally, I've hit a snag. The last update did something to my video settings and I'm having trouble finding useful help on it. My screen goes grey underwater; I had this problem in WoW once up a time and there was some setting that eliminated it, but I can't find what the setting was in WoW nor anything helpful about it for Skyrim. I also get a weird "flicker" effect on some walls when moving but that's very minor. No addons, for the record.

[t209]

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...-v-skyrim-dlc/
Possible Skyrim DLC?
-Can't wait for Spears or Orsinium or Morrowind (now a wasteland).

[VanBuren]

Bethesda Softworks senior designer Joel Burgess took to his personal blog to share a transcript of his GDC speech, which is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the company's development philosophy, how they transition from game to game with a single development team, how they approached various design hurdles in regard to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the importance of maintaining a proper workflow, and much more. Regardless of what you think of The Elder Scrolls, it's pretty amazing what BGS is able to accomplish with a team of less than 100:

While the game existed in some conceptual form for a number of years, full-scale production didn’t begin until Fallout 3 was finished. We are a one-project team at Bethesda Game Studios, so most of the content team was still on Fallout 3 DLC throughout 2009. This means that Skyrim was only in full production for around three years. We are a large team at just under 100 developers, but we aren't massive, either. Some other games with similar scope involve literally hundreds of developers spread out across multiple studios worldwide. Everyone at BGS is based in Maryland and we have tried to espouse an environment where everyone knows and can approach everyone else on the team. We do use some outsourcing, but it is quite limited. Mostly we outsourced armor and weapons, which we still did our own concepts and game-specific implementation for. Speaking to level design specifically, we had a team of eight LDs on Skyrim. Between us, we were responsible for over 300 locations and events in the game. These include very large, multi-hour dungeon crawls, smaller experiences, all the way down to one-room affairs and exterior locations. Level designers also were responsible for areas of the game you may not expect, such as the traps system and combat design for certain creature encounters.

The last data point I’ll share is one I’m especially proud of. In an industry plagued by delays, where you expect a big game like Skyrim to slip once or twice, we hit our ship date. We didn’t just hit our date, but we called it to the day over a year in advance, and of course we knew that date internally for months ahead of the announcement. Furthermore, we didn’t just ship in North America, but finished the game in enough time to cert, localize, print and ship to nearly every territory where the game is available on the same date worldwide.

The point of all of this is to highlight that while we are a well-backed studio, we aren’t extravagant in our resources. While we have steadily grown over the past ten years, we’ve avoided explosive growth. How we are able to do that while continuing to make games known for their massive scale is in large part thanks to our studio culture.

My boss, Todd Howard, has several mottos for the studio. One of these is:

“We can do anything, but we can’t do everything.”

Taken skin-deep, this is simply a statement about having to choose your battles. But looking a little deeper, there are some further implications. First, it implies a high level of ambition. Every developer at Bethesda has pet features they’d like to see appear in game, or we wouldn't have to be selective about where we pool our resources. To that end, we’re very good about seeking compromise. I think we’re good about recognizing when something isn't quite working and re-thinking if we need to scale back or cut the feature. The most important thing about this is that it doesn't live in some mission statement or is only held by an inner circle of highly-placed leads. Every developer in the studio ends up embracing this approach to development.

[Cespenar]

Regardless of what you think of The Elder Scrolls, it's pretty amazing what BGS is able to accomplish with a team of less than 100:

Of course they can make games with such a small group. They don't hire writers!

*rimshot*

[Triaxx]

Who need writers when there are bandits stealing swords? Have at thee!

[Flickerdart]

Who needs writers when you have curved swords? Curved. Swords!

[Calemyr]

VanBuren, that is very interesting article. Besides allowing us a glance into the industry, it also answers a question that has preyed on my mind since the blasted game came out: how could the game be so well designed and the items be so unbelievably full of bugs? Things like missing upgrade settings, missing upgrade perks, not being applicable for certain perks, etc. Even if the outsourced resources were very thorough and professional and Bethesda worked its hardest to maintain an active conversation with them, it would be very difficult to keep all the items consistent - especially if perks and the upgrading system were altered due to testing.

I always wondered. Now I know. SPAAAAACE!!

[Knight13]

You're asking why a Bethesda game is buggy? It's Bethesda.

[Coidzor]

Hell, a single Pratchett is worth its weight in gold. Granted there's only two of them at the moment, but I imagine a sufficiently motivated person could change that.

[TheEmerged]

Day 7 /played has begun.

I'm still unable to view underwater. It hasn't caused any critical problems yet, but the dearth of actual instructions on this is becoming bothersome. All I'm able to find are some references to reverting the update but no instructions on how to do so.

Light Armor & One-handed hit 100 -- during the same fight, ironically enough. I've replaced "Bound Sword" with "Bound BattleAxe" at long last, and once I get done with some minor errands I'll be making a Heavy Armor set with all those dragon leftovers I've been stockpiling. Then it will be off to find a couple of bears or mudcrabs

I've set the Thieves' Guild quests aside to run the Bard's College while I wait to get my sneaky skills up. I've bought my second house in Solitude; I rather like having an enchanting tool in the home, but I miss having the apothecary sack right on top of the alchemy bench there. Also, Whiterun seems more centrally located. So I don't think I'll have my in-game wife move into the bigger digs yet.

My alternate sets are going nicely. My alchemy isn't high enough for me to remake my crafting set yet (alchemy/smithing/alteration), and I mentioned the heavy armor set I'm about to make. I've got a roguish set just about done too - primarily sneak & pickpocketing. My skill rank for the two skills still sneak, so having a +160% bonus to them strikes me as a good idea.

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Given reports I've heard about stamina usage in heavy armor, I believe my next perk is going to be the Restoration one that heals stamina when you heal yourself. I've got 3 future perk points pointed at the remainder of the Smithing tree so I can make/improve Daedra weapons.

After that, I've got 4 perks in Heavy Armor that interest me (especially Mr. "worn armor doesn't encumber" Perk). I have to admit the merchant half of the speech tree intrigues me, even though I've got almost 100k gold even after buying my 2nd house and I've got tons of 2k dwarven bows & potions yet to sell.

Which brings me to Alchemy, the next skill I'd like to cap. It's currently in the 80's (insert bad fashion joke here). I can't seem to find enough of the Great 9 to raise this reasonably. Given that I'm not exactly short of funds I thought about seeing if I could just pay a trainer... but it seems the only trainer that matters is with the Dark Brotherhood, traditionally the last faction I run through in these games. So I think I'm just going to have to slog through some lesser potions -- wish I could find a good one for Chaurus Eggs, I've got enough of them for a couple of playthroughs of the game

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Do you have anti-aliasing on? Anti-aliasing is one thing i know that causes screens to specifically go grey.

[TheEmerged]

Do you have anti-aliasing on? Anti-aliasing is one thing i know that causes screens to specifically go grey.

Checked as soon as I got home. Darn it, that wsn't it Thanks for at least trying.

[t209]

Which side did you took in Skyrim Civil War by that comic update

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(Resistance Wiped out arc).

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It was the time I aided the Resistance drive out the tyrants of the Empire and their Thalmor Puppets (this writing does not reflect my belief but to appease Stormcloaks supporter). But I realised now that my execution of Tulius made me look like Redcloak. He told ulfric that he had handed the victory for Thalmor, but he just killed him for his narrative story.

Even though the civil war arc is grey scale,

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Whenever I kill Ulfric, the image of Thanh struck in my mind. Just let him see his resistance wiped out by one man (or thing). I gave him two flower as an offering of his grave.

[Triaxx]

Alchemy? Easy. Harvest some wheat, and murder some giants. Brew healing potions. Also helps with armor/blocking skills.

[t209]

Alchemy? Easy. Harvest some wheat, and murder some giants. Brew healing potions. Also helps with armor/blocking skills.

More easier, find some red flowers instead of giant!

[Divayth Fyr]

More easier, find some red flowers instead of giant!

Ah, but potions brewed from the remains of giants have a higher value, therefore increasing the skill faster.

[TheEmerged]

Heh, I've been afraid to try giants from the way everybody talks about them I've probably got a few toes on stock from buying out every alchemy merchant I run across, I'll see how many I've got.