Topic: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

@DarthNocturnal That's true. They did get that part right.

@KirbyTheVampire Legends may be a TCG but, hey, at least it's not another MMO.

I enjoyed Fallout 4 a lot because it was like a less serious Skyrim with a narrower but more satisfying combat system. I honestly can't even freakin' wait until The Elder Scrolls 6, that dismemberment system in a melee combat-heavy game with a new setting and next gen trappings is going to be just so dang nice.

Of course Fallout has what I would refer to a categorically worse setting that Bethesda at least harnessed to create some very dry comedy if you read some of the terminal and tape entries. Probably the biggest disappointment in that game was that the magic system was just gone due to narrative constraints and melee combat was simplified to fast / medium / heavy. I like that they made the melee kill cams all first-person so as to not break immersion.

@Deathwalka I'm a first timer, never played Skyrim before and I'm about 20h in on Switch.

I think it's a great game that offers more freedom than most games, and it has deep RPG mechanics that manage to surprise even a well-seasoned gamer. It seems to be very balanced as well, the gameplay and its many nuances are easy to grasp for the most part. It plays out very naturally. Different kind of gamers will be drawn to different parts of the games world, based on their preferences and things they learn from traveling.

Part of the feel of freedom are the permanent changes you can manifest on the world by making friends and foes. Another part is of course the big character customization, and more subtly, that objects and bodies stay where you drop them... they still lie in exactly the same position where I dropped them 15 hours ago which adds a great deal to the realism and immersiveness of the game. You don't have to worry that items disappear when you leave the area. At least not for some extended periods of time.

I guess for remembering the thousands of objects and their position the game file must be huge, and in fact it is the biggest save file I have so far: 257MB - And I think that's amazing since I have created 74 different Skyrim save/load slots so far! My other custom-heavy Switch game is Disgaea 5 Complete with a 110MB save, but again that's for multiple save slots. In comparison, the 7 save slots of BotW need 64MB.

The difficulty spike is starting to get tiresome. I’m at this “retrieval” quest. But there is this silver hand leader who is way too strong. This is not far into the companions quest line. It’s also a quest line you can start in the first town you visit. So I’m not sure what this game wants from me to be honest. It feels like a cheat having to lower the difficulty all the time...

Sorry if this has already been talked about to death, but I just bought the game and I have a concern.
The game looks great on the Switch screen in Portable Mode, but the image is way darker (I think the contrast is off) in TV Mode! Especially in-doors and caves can be so dark that it's barely playable. Is there any way to remedy this? I don't think that my TV settings are to blame, everything else looks great on the same telly.

By dark I mean that shadows can appear as almost black. Inside a normal house where in portable mode you can see all the walls and people faces, in TV mode the walls that have poor illumination can be pitch black and half of people's faces are dark as well. When something is well lit, or when there's a snow storm outside where everything is evenly lit, it looks okay.

@Moshugan There's a brightness slider.

@Haru17 Where can that be found? Settings > Display only has HUD Opacity, Crosshair and subtitle options.

EDIT: Ah um, hiking up my TV's brightness setting does help. The image can appear a bit washed out in parts though. It remains to be seen if other things look too bright on the TV after this.

@Spanjard Since you now have the werewolf power, what generally helps me is to transform and then strategically use power attacks so that he's not able to get up. So do a power attack, rip into him while he's down, then when he's almost up again, use another power attack to repeat the process.

@KirbyTheVampire Thanks a lot for the tip! That helped me out incredibly. I did beat him before with a lot potions, but now I reloaded my save to do it like this. I also forgot to feed till now I just realized.

I never changed the difficulty setting. It's set to normal by default, and I don't intend to change that ever. Changing it to easy or very easy would be like cheating. If there are tough enemies that homerun me into the sky I'll make an escape at my next attempt until I'm strong enough and happen to cross them again. Though one day I'd like to try the highest difficulty from beginning with a new character.

The core gameplay is much like many other western action-rpgs, in fact much of it reminds me of some of the best classic topdown/isometric RPGs I ever played, like Ultima Online and Planescape Torment. Of course it is not a Zelda by any means from the gameplay aspect, but that's a different genre anyway.

From what I've played and in my opinion
Skyrim is maybe 40% action-adventure and 60% action-RPG.
Zelda:BotW is 90% action-adventure and 10% action-RPG.

You might have found yourself spamming arrows, but if you haven't got so much interest in playing an archer but were, let's say, more of an alchemist guy, you would have most likely gone that route instead, because it would have been your natural preference and it certainly wouldn't have been pointless. It would be more work on a certain level to be a good alchemist (especially since arrows have the benefit of not weighing anything), but different people different tastes. I believe some players really never use bows and just go for straight alchemy.

Yeah, maybe. I cannot see why you you think bow has better gameplay though.
Bow is distance aiming and attack.
Magick is medium range aiming and attack.
Melee weapons are close range aiming and attack.
For me there's no balance issue or any reason to praise the bow and damn the other means of combat in the same breath, because from a gameplay perspective they all play exactly the same.

I haven't played the two examples you mentioned so I can't say anything about it, but if there's a focus on action gameplay and combat controls that allows the player to forget about the character, skills, and equipments stats then it's not an RPG anymore but probably an action game with RPG elements.

@Spanjard No problem. Werewolves don't seem that strong at first, but once you discover the power attacks, it becomes a whole new game, haha. There's also a whole skill tree for them when you press the button that brings up your regular inventory and skill tree. Figured I'd say that in case the game doesn't tell you. Not sure if it does, cause it's been a long time since I played Skyrim. Also, quick tip for the feeding. Once you click on the body to start feeding, if you press the powers button to do a roar, it will cancel the feeding animation but you'll still get the benefits of the feed, and it also has the benefit of scattering the enemies. You can also press the Sheath Weapon button, which will also cancel the animation, but it has the very minor annoyance of "sheathing" your claws, so then the camera zooms closer to your character, so you'll have to press the button again to "unsheathe" them, which is a bit annoying. Not a big deal whatsoever, but I figured I'd throw it out there.

@Snaplocket There is a bit of strategy to the melee combat. Not much, but it's there. Strategic usage of power attacks has saved my life countless times. Then there's the blocking and ability to poison your weapons and such.

I have seen that in melee combat you can block with a shield, and parry / wait for your chance to hit. That's one strategy. Other strategies include playing with an ice staff in one hand to freeze enemies and a sword in the right hand to make crushed ice out of them (that's how I play at the moment). I believe there are many combinations of melee and short range combat that make it exciting enough, even though there of course have been RPGs with better combat before and after Sykrim. A lock-on feature would have been nice (maybe there's one buried in one of the skill trees?).

I personally like the combat, I've seen much worse combat in RPGs before.

@Haru17 I'm sure there's a decent amount of enjoyment to be found, but it just didn't hook me nearly as much as Skyrim. I don't know why, really, because a post-apocalyptic Elder Scrolls-esque game sounds like a lot of fun.

I might try one of the older Fallouts like New Vegas and see what I think. I don't want to write the series off at all.

And yeah, I'm really excited for the next ES game. I think there's a ton of cool stuff that can be done within the universe. They really did a good job of setting up a world with a huge amount of possibilities. Heck, Tamriel is just one continent in that world, and we haven't seen the whole thing yet.

I think all the advancements in game development that have occurred since the release of Skyrim will do the series a lot of good, too. The only major problem with Elder Scrolls games is the bit of jank, so it'll be great when they can iron that out.

You do have the “stagger them with your shield” option. Also, some of the upgrades give more depth in this regard. But really, of all the things that would bother me with this game the combat is the least to do so.

@Snaplocket The credits are on the title screen. And yeah, the closest Skyrim gets to cutscenes is immobilizing your character and having a scene play out before you. Didn't you like Sovngarde though?

And yeah, you can really do some experimenting with the combat. Plant an ash rune and lure enemies toward you with ranged attacks, then stealth kill the enemy as soon as it pops out of the ash rune. Shame there's no stealth attack bonus for magic though.

@KirbyTheVampire What I've been wishfully speculating lately is that they'll take a really long time in development and include all 16 daedric realms as dungeon types. Unlikely, I know, but I think it would be cool to be able to find secret portals in all the places of the world to explore the other planes. Even if they did half of them as single dungeon story sequences, it would still be cool to get a sliver of the locations and how they function.

Beyond that my wild guesses are SMT/Persona demon negotiations / a Middle Earth nemesis system for the generic bandits and a building and tree scaling system for thieves.

@Haru17 They definitely should do more with the planes of Oblivion, but I personally feel like they should keep it to only a couple or so, and really make them expansive. I kinda feel like it would be doing them a disservice to show them all off at once, but have them be really small and short experiences. I'd personally rather see only a couple per game, and have big, expansive experiences with them. It would let you appreciate them a lot more, and you'd know there was more planes to look forward to in future games.

I feel like it would almost end up being like the shrine system in BoTW. They were cool, but you're not gonna really remember individual shrines the same way you do traditional Zelda dungeons. The planes would be a lot more interesting than the shrines, though. Those were just bland, sterile-feeling puzzle rooms that usually only take a couple minutes to get through.

It would really make for a memorable game, though, for sure, and if 6 was the last ES game, I would be all for it. I just think for the purposes of keeping the series as interesting as possible, it's better to have a few planes that are really fleshed out than seeing them all in one game IMO. The element of mystery and discovery in open world games is really important.

@SKTTR that's awesome that your experiencing it for the first time. It took me a couple of attempts to get into it but once I did it's so immersive u get lost in a bubble.

Also to the user saying it's dark in dungeons, I think that's the point, it really would be! Use a torch or get the magic candlelight and u will be fine.

And to those who are saying some people are too hard, well there are many strategies u can use to combat that, that's the great thing about sky rim in that u can plan a battle properly and annihilate your enemies even the strong ones.

So I started a new character a few days ago, and I'm planning to "evict" Anise from her cabin and stay there until I can acquire my house of choice. Does anyone know which specific storage containers in her house are safe storage?

@DarthNocturnal Alright, thanks!