The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Preview
We take an extended tour throughout the world of Bethesda's upcoming open-world RPG 'The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,' and live to tell the tale another day.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim helps Bethesda usher in a new game engine.
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replyGarnett Lee posted a new article, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Preview.
We take an extended tour throughout the world of Bethesda's upcoming open-world RPG 'The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,' and live to tell the tale another day.-
Due to an error in posting, this has been resubmitted to our system.
I take the blame. Now... say it with me folks... "XAAAAAAAAAAAV!!!!!!"-
There were a few comments on the original. But those are lost. The issue was I set this post to be picked up by Chatty too soon, so it already disappeared from our 18-hour cycle.
Sorry about that!
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So it's Oblivion with guns duel-wielding?
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Was duel-wielding intentional? Please tell me it was. Accidentally brilliant.
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dear god this game looks so epic, hopefully I can resurface to the world before Christmas!
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"The upgrade doesn't appear to have made its way to faces yet, which still look uncomfortably unnatural."
It's disappointing to hear that. At least the rest of the game seems to be shaping up well. In any case, faces in the PC version will be fixed up by a mod less than a week of the construction kit's release. Console players will be forever trapped in a world of fuglies.-
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Bethesda doesn't exactly have a long history of populating their games with decent looking characters.
I present you with exhibit A:
http://www.thisblogrules.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/all-videos_adoringfan.jpg-
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It was mentioned before that they hired extra voice actors.
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Lookit that derp.
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I'm sad to hear that about the faces, and then nothing about character interaction. Oblivion and Fallout 3 were both good, immersive games, but the bubble always burst for me when I interacted with NPCs. Wooden dialogue, janky animation, broken pathfinding and horrifically ugly faces just don't do it for me. This is an area where other AAA studios were showing Bethesda up years ago. I hope they've put some effort into catching up.
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Read some of the earlier previews (I think here or other sites), they touch on this. Now the NPC's will go about their business and aren't locked into the conversation with you with that stupid zoom, it's more.. natural I think they put it.
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"Underneath the skin, though, lies one of the most significant overhauls to the game. Gone are the classic role-playing set of attributes like strength, intelligence and wisdom."
So now we have no way of making strong, intelligent, wise, agile or dexterous characters? Insane. I mean, why remove these stats? They are hardly difficult to understand; they hardly push away the casual market, which is the usual reason why game companies do stupid shit. Even WoW, which is now uber casual, has stats with mutiple purposes - and plenty of them at that!
I think my point is why dumb it down any more?-
I don't think it dumbs it down. Only difference is that everyone starts on the same page. One major thing they saw was people constantly remaking characters once they played for a bit. "Oh shit, I didn't want that as my Major! I should have put more points in X!" So now if you are a stealthy character, use it. It will get better. Running a lot makes you run faster. I guess they just saw that the attributes are kind of redundant. It does make some sense though. Skills still get more powerful on use. That's what matters.
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You could get rid of the major/minor dilemma and still have stats :(
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I could get behind these changes. If you sneak around a lot, do you really need 2 modifiers(dex + skill) instead of just one(skill)? If you like to stab things after sneaking behind them, your 1handed skill should level about the same as your 1h skill, again eliminating the need for two modifiers. Backstab will probably be a perk that you get for leveling up your sneak skill, with increasing backstab damage being a factor of your sneak skill. The only loss is that you can't have a high stat help offset the disadvantage of using a low level skill. But since skills are only low in Elder Scrolls because you never use them; it shouldn't be a huge factor. You also won't have two players swinging their swords doing the same amount of damage, except one swings his sword really, really fast while the other swings his sword with more strength.
I'm curious how they'll handle some of the annoying rules like encumbrance. In Oblivion, mage types would occasionally put points in strength just so they could carry more stuff. I wonder if in Skyrim you'll have to allocate a point to physical stat to do the same thing.
Anyway, I can't know for sure until I play the damn thing, but I'm going to try to maintain some hope despite the fact that I enjoyed Morrowind more than Oblivion.-
That's another question I have that I don't know whether or not it has been answered. Elder Scrolls punishes the hell out of you if you don't choose the appropriate sign to be born under. I can't imagine playing a mage character without choosing to be born under the sign of the mage or apprentice. If they're really trying to free things up, they may have to eliminate the sign system.
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Meant this as a reply to kingdepork... Oh well.
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I think perks are more or less signs. I like that they wanted people to not create a character beforehand skill wise, but to play naturally and let the game adapt to you.
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Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised to see bonus magic perks that come from leveling magic-related skills and the like.
I hope they're mostly creative perks ala Fallout and not just boring shit like +10 damage. I've always felt like the ES games could benefit from that sort of thing.-
Technically you probably don't even need to level your magic skills before taking the perk, from the sounds of it you'll be able to take a perk going towards whichever skill you want when you level.
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Hopefully they'll give players more clever ways of wrestling with encumbrance. I'd personally like to see feather spells that can be targeted at a specific item to permanently (but reversibly if necessary) enchant it into a much lower weight item for carrying, without limiting opportunities for further enchantment of course. "Hrm, it's a 76 pound warhammer. Maybe I should make it an 8 pound warhammer instead?"
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I think the decision was about a renewed emphasis on the soul of Elder Scrolls: The Elder Scrolls series is meant to let you "be whoever you want, do whatever you want" in a lush fantasy world, but Oblivion's leveling system punished players for playing naturally. To give a refresher, the system had three fundamental problems, which were bad enough individually but interacted terribly:
The first problem was that the strength/quality of a level-up was contingent upon the manner of leveling. Final Fantasy VI made this same mistake with the Esper system: Your characters your characters would get certain stat boosts depending on the Esper they had equipped when they leveled up. Since not all Espers were created equal, players who wanted to max their stats tried to put off leveling until they a.) got Espers in the first place, and b.) got the best Espers in the game.
Oblivion shared this fundamental flaw with FFVI, but Oblivion's complexity made it AWFUL. Want a +5 boost for three attributes? You'd better get 10 skillups in skills governed by those attributes before getting 10 major skillups! You had to carefully plan your leveling in advance and play each level using only a specific set of skills that you intended to level. This was unnatural, annoying, and difficult, and it led to a lot of time-consuming minor skill grinding before letting yourself level up. (Since your final HP depended on your endurance at each level up, the game also compelled you to raise your endurance +5 every level until it reached 100, at the expense of other attributes languishing at 40.)
In short, making level-ups vary in quality was madness. It is IMO the single biggest mistake designers can make with a leveling system, and it made the game more stressful and less fun that it could/should have been. I spent half my time updating my stats in a spreadsheet instead of playing (360 version though; I should've gotten the PC version for the useful mods). There's nothing wrong with rewarding players for number crunching and stat-strategizing, but the rewards should be more situational (like making smart weapon upgrades), and opting out shouldn't permanently gimp your core character for the rest of the game.
The second problem was that your class choice at the very beginning of the game determined how painful the leveling problem would be. It was bad enough with a custom character designed specifically for efficient leveling, but it was murder for built-in classes. Classes like Warrior interacted terribly with this system, because all of the skills you relied on most were major skills. For Warrior, you could only get +5 strength on a level if the ONLY major skills you leveled were governed by strength. On top of the nonstop leveling stress, Oblivion's inflexible class system led people to constantly restart the game to recreate their character.
The third problem was that monsters leveled up along with the player. If you didn't get three +5's (or two +5's and a +1 luck), you just permanently limited your character's growth, but monsters always level steeply. If you didn't agonize over every level-up for efficiency, it wasn't long before the monsters outpaced you (at least on high difficulty levels).
In short, Oblivion's level system was a mess. Instead of providing depth, the baroque complexity broke the system. Once you eliminate the variable-strength levels and inflexible classes, the ideal result would be a more natural skill-based system with attribute modifiers for depth. Level up skills with use, and once you level up e.g. 10 or 20, you get a level up and a perk. Attributes could either be increased by spreading fixed-quantity points at each level or more indirectly by increasing governed skills (the latter should be independent of any kind of leveling window to avoid an Oblivion repeat). Including attributes for system depth still makes sense to me: If you level up your blunt skill a lot, your increased strength should help your other physical combat skills as well.
It seems like Bethesda went a step further and nuked the attributes altogether, which were the only systematic ties between logically related skills. I tend to agree that they went a step too far in the right direction and eliminated complementary depth for no good reason. As nice as this depth would have been though, Skyrim retains a solid, flexible, and fun core system a million times better than the one in Oblivion. The heart of the system is leveling up skills with use for a natural role playing experience, and I think Skyrim will capture this without all of the obtrusive cruft that caused players to spend as much time leveling and agonizing as they did playing. While traditional attributes linking skills might have been nice, I'm REALLY looking forward to playing Skyrim now that I know they fixed the obnoxious problems from Oblivion.
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It won't be as bad as Oblivion, I believe it will be more in line with Fallout 3.
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Typo error ; replace "heath" with "health"
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Sounds like 360. Default PS3 controls generally don't use the triggers for attack actions.
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It's definitely the 360 they're talking about, but I'd like to point out that a majority of PS3 games ARE using the triggers for attack actions nowdays - espcially in multiplatform games where they keep the controls as similar as possible to the 360.
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I just made an epic post on the leveling system, but...I'm looking forward to the new combat system too. I'm glad they're making it feel more intense, but what I REALLY hope is that they make it more fluid and responsive.
People made fun of Oblivion's animation system for diagonal sliding and unsettling facial expressions at odds with the dialogue, but the biggest problem with Oblivion's animation system was that the combat system was a slave to it: If I barely tapped the attack button and immediately changed my mind and decided to block, I was screwed...because my character was going to swing, bring his sword back, and PAUSE before finally putting his shield up.
I can only hope that this aspect of animation and combat has been improved. The Elder Scrolls may not be action games or first person shooters, but anyone who decides to use real-time combat instead of a turn-based system should put just as much effort into fluid play control and battle mechanics as they would for any other game. Having sloppy mechanics is not a central tenet of the RPG genre, so "it's an RPG" just isn't an excuse to half-ass fluidity. Bioware is progressively learning this lesson by improving their core combat mechanics with each passing game, and I hope Bethesda has decided to evolve similarly.
...I also hope they kept all the fantastic strengths from the previous games though, like the cool guild quests. :) -
I wonder if I can still keep casting a lighting spell over and over and leveling up my illusion magic... Man I wish I had a decent PC.
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Has anyone figured out what language the hearty warrior chorus is speaking? Or is it just some made-up tongue that sounded totally awesome?
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It's a language the developers invented for Skyrim and for the native tongue of dragons, called Draconic...and I agree, it sounds totally awesome. :D
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here take my money take my money... I don't care
I just WANT!!!
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