YEEEEEEEEEES!!!

[SimpleComplexity]

"We've slowed down how fast you move backwards" Howard says. "So a guy who is charging you, you can't just back up from him. In Oblivion, you ran backwards at the same speed you ran forwards. The biggest reason we changed that was the visual one; in third-person, it just looked ridiculous."

 

[Darth Roxor]

What a truckload of bollocks. They should get some cheap and cheesy power metal band to do the soundtrack, all the epic dragonz bullshit fits perfectly.

 

[Turjan]

Those things are important, but so is a good engine to power it. While gamebryo may be a good engine, the variant utilised by Bethesda is extremely lacking.

• You are guaranteed a crash every 10 to 15 minutes, regardless of what you do
• Even on low settings, performance will be absolute shit (seriously, I get 5 FPS on my rig with low settings; Unigine's benchmarks run heaps faster and are at least a hundred times more demanding on hardware!)
• Shader/Hardware detection routines are horrendously broken - the below could be fixed by swapping a few shader packages
• Shipped shader packages are broken/incomplete - with Oblivion I couldn't experience the evulz of "bloom" (rendered my screen completely gray), nor see shadows; with fallout 3, I had to disable heads to even get ingame; so everyone was running around headless!

The boring game play aside, I'm a bit at a loss here: do people really have such severe technical problems with the engine? I experienced the oft-mentioned micro-stutter, but crashes and graphical artifacts? Oblivion ran very reliably on my machine, and though bloom looked pretty crass (it's overdone), HDR + AA looked quite good (LOD and draw distance issues aside).

My problems with Oblivion were not really of technical nature.

 

[Darth Roxor]

BTW, since 'on level-up you can raise health, magicka and stamina', does anyone else also get the feeling that attributes like strength, personality etc might be completely out?

 

[Konjad]

What a truckload of bollocks. They should get some cheap and cheesy power metal band to do the soundtrack, all the epic dragonz bullshit fits perfectly.

I think jpop would fit Skyrim perfectly.


Anyway I'm totally uninterested in this game... damn, even Arcania was more interesting for me but about Skyrim I don't give a slightest shit. It could be worse than Arcania, it could be mediocre or it could be great... it doesn't matter to me at all.

Oh well, there's a lot of new cRPGs coming in 2011 that sound much better so I guess there's no real reason to be interested in TES V especially when Beth tells the shit they already did before Oblivion was released.

 

[Coyote]

I'm going to wait for more information* before drawing conclusions, but my first impression is that the consoletards had it right all along: Bethesda is making Oblivion 2, not The Elder Scrolls 5. There are some minor inclines in Rohit_N's list, but nothing that sounds truly game-changing, and they're balanced out by further lore rape and an even more generic-sounding story than Oblivion's. If the combat is more of the same (as it appears to be from screens and the lack of hype to the contrary) and it isn't drastically decreased in frequency or increased in variety, Skyrim will need some extremely well-designed quests or fun exploration for me to look past its tedium, level-scaling or not.

I don't really care for the idea of randomly generated quests, even if they're only there to supplement the handmade ones. First of all, randomization can detract from a game if done poorly (see, for example, Oblivion's chest contents), and it sounds like most/all non-faction side quests will be generated by this "Radiant story system". And while randomized content can help make a game more interesting on replays, it doesn't matter if the game lacks replayability in other areas - quest design, fun combat, major gameplay differences between classes/skillsets, etc., none of which Bethesda excels at. Plus, randomized quests seem less effective than other forms of randomization at extending a game's lifespan, because the quests will necessarily be limited to a number of basic archetypes/structures. Even if some of these structures are fairly complex (i.e. more than just the go here, kill this, fetch that, etc. sorts of quests that you might expect), it won't take long to notice that you're basically completing the same types of quests over and over again. If you randomize the structure of dungeons and the placement of powerful items within the world, OTOH, even veterans never know exactly what to expect around the next corner or where to go to get the Mentor's Ring within five minutes of starting the game. Skill checks and multiple paths and outcomes just seem like much better ways to add to replayability within the arena of quests.

I'm also not sure how such quests will mesh with Bethesda's desire to keep everything fully voiced, and wouldn't be surprised if they're severely limited as a result of this (same with the idea of quests being inherited from dead NPCs, although I strongly suspect that's a specific scripted example rather than part of the Radiant system as the article makes it out to be). A quest board-like system might work, but that doesn't seem to be the direction they're going.

I do like the idea of quests that you'll only receive if you have certain skills or reputations, though.

* And by "more information", I mean when the game is out and I've seen reviews from trusted sources. Oblivion demostrated that even if you remove the obvious hypespeak, you still can't trust what Bethesda says about their games, and they're already making similarly outlandish claims about Skyrim.

Edit: Thanks to Rohit_N for the links.

 

[Hirato]

Those things are important, but so is a good engine to power it. While gamebryo may be a good engine, the variant utilised by Bethesda is extremely lacking.

• You are guaranteed a crash every 10 to 15 minutes, regardless of what you do
• Even on low settings, performance will be absolute shit (seriously, I get 5 FPS on my rig with low settings; Unigine's benchmarks run heaps faster and are at least a hundred times more demanding on hardware!)
• Shader/Hardware detection routines are horrendously broken - the below could be fixed by swapping a few shader packages
• Shipped shader packages are broken/incomplete - with Oblivion I couldn't experience the evulz of "bloom" (rendered my screen completely gray), nor see shadows; with fallout 3, I had to disable heads to even get ingame; so everyone was running around headless!

The boring game play aside, I'm a bit at a loss here: do people really have such severe technical problems with the engine? I experienced the oft-mentioned micro-stutter, but crashes and graphical artifacts? Oblivion ran very reliably on my machine, and though bloom looked pretty crass (it's overdone), HDR + AA looked quite good (LOD and draw distance issues aside).

My problems with Oblivion were not really of technical nature.

Firstly, Oblivion was programmed in a way to prevent HDR and AA from being used at the same time.
Secondly, those are all real technical issues I suffered whilst trying to play Oblivion (with or without guns) - it is fair to assume that they are not unique to my setup and plagued plenty of others too.

 

[JarlFrank]

What a truckload of bollocks. They should get some cheap and cheesy power metal band to do the soundtrack, all the epic dragonz bullshit fits perfectly.

Dragonforce?

 

[Konjad]

At least they are trying though.

I highly doubt that?

 

[Forest Dweller]

Is there anywhere where I can find the scans of every page, in order, with nothing omitted?

 

[Oesophagus]

The pressing issue is: how many haircuts will there be?

 

[Admiral jimbob]

Codex will love it. You'll see. We'll have another 100 of threads praising another excrement that is Skyrim.
After New Vegas this is guaranteed.

One person will register after its release and post "hey, Skyrim has a couple of good points, it wasn't very good on the whole though". Skyway will immediately jump on this as PROOF THAT THE CODEX LOVES SKYRIM, talk about it constantly for six months and will continue being the only person with taste in the world.

 

[Luzur]

dragon killer

Player can gain "dragon shouts" after absorbing the souls of slain dragons
One dragon shout involves summoning a dragon to help you in battle, and another teleports you to a location

lore rape confirmed though.

the lore buffs is going to have a field day on this one.
.

I'm hoping they are unrelated to the Akaviri species but instead are something likes servants of Alduin (kind of like the Golems/Atronach thing). This being Bethesda though, I'm not expecting they do it logically.

Dragons in TES are supposed to be very civilized (as in disguised as humans and blending in) and rare, there are like, 8 of them left, 6 in the service of the Empire, 1 is a god who use it as his image and the last in Akavir, but he was a Khajiit/Akavirian catman before he managed to turn himself into a tiger-Dragon thanks to incredible willpower, so how can there even be Dragon Hunters if there are no Dragons to hunt?

did the Dragons suddenly multiply and rise up in revolt?

and Dragon Shouts? wat? i know of the Nords Voices and the Imperials "Voice of the Empire" but i have never even heard of such things as Dragon Shouts since i began playing Arena back in 1994.

 

[Mastermind]

and Dragon Shouts? wat? i know of the Nords Voices and the Imperials "Voice of the Empire" but i have never even heard of such things as Dragon Shouts since i began playing Arena back in 1994.

It probably refers to the Nord Voices. Graybeards are a part of the main storyline after all and IIRC the dragonborn uses it in the trailer. I'm guessing that as the dragon born you might have a special affinity to it.

 

[Lingwe]

From TESF:

What I dont Like:

1. Skills were cut out again.
2. Cannot cast spells while both hands is wielding weapons/shield.
3. Bullet time? This is propably the worst feature.
4. Graphics is good, but I expected more (because of the hype)

1. you don't know how that will turn out
2. you couldn't in oblivion
3. it's a perk
4. all screens have been scans from a magazine

The "you haven't played it so you don't know how it will work" crowd are coming out of the woodwork again already. Honestly, Bethesda could announce that each game would ship with it's own packet of anthrax that explodes in the user's face when they open the box and there would still be some people on that forum who would be telling other people to quit their whinin' and not knock it until they had tried it.

 

[Turisas]

Shouldn't it be pretty obvious by now that they're making shit up as they go?

 

[Luzur]

I'm also not sure how such quests will mesh with Bethesda's desire to keep everything fully voiced, and wouldn't be surprised if they're severely limited as a result of this (same with the idea of quests being inherited from dead NPCs, although I strongly suspect that's a specific scripted example rather than part of the Radiant system as the article makes it out to be). A quest board-like system might work, but that doesn't seem to be the direction they're going.

hah, i like the "even if you killed her brother and raped her mother infront of her eyes she will still give you the quest, but with a frustrated face" thing they talk about there, cant let those consollers miss out on achievements now can they eh?

no C&C, no pain.

 

[Mastermind]

There's a bullet time perk? I say this with no hint of sarcasm:

 

[Sceptic]

One person will register after its release and post "hey, Skyrim has a couple of good points, it wasn't very good on the whole though". Skyway will immediately jump on this as PROOF THAT THE CODEX LOVES SKYRIM, talk about it constantly for six months and go back to replaying KOTOR.

Improved

 

[JarlFrank]

What I dont Like:

1. Skills were cut out again.
2. Cannot cast spells while both hands is wielding weapons/shield.
3. Bullet time? This is propably the worst feature.
4. Graphics is good, but I expected more (because of the hype)

1. you don't know how that will turn out
2. you couldn't in oblivion
3. it's a perk
4. all screens have been scans from a magazine

Wait, what? You could cast spells in Oblivion while holding sword and shield, or two-handed weapon, or a bow, or whatever.
Geez, they could at least get their fucking facts right.

(But this is one of the features that actually sounds kinda good)

 

[Turjan]

Those things are important, but so is a good engine to power it. While gamebryo may be a good engine, the variant utilised by Bethesda is extremely lacking.

• You are guaranteed a crash every 10 to 15 minutes, regardless of what you do
• Even on low settings, performance will be absolute shit (seriously, I get 5 FPS on my rig with low settings; Unigine's benchmarks run heaps faster and are at least a hundred times more demanding on hardware!)
• Shader/Hardware detection routines are horrendously broken - the below could be fixed by swapping a few shader packages
• Shipped shader packages are broken/incomplete - with Oblivion I couldn't experience the evulz of "bloom" (rendered my screen completely gray), nor see shadows; with fallout 3, I had to disable heads to even get ingame; so everyone was running around headless!

The boring game play aside, I'm a bit at a loss here: do people really have such severe technical problems with the engine? I experienced the oft-mentioned micro-stutter, but crashes and graphical artifacts? Oblivion ran very reliably on my machine, and though bloom looked pretty crass (it's overdone), HDR + AA looked quite good (LOD and draw distance issues aside).

My problems with Oblivion were not really of technical nature.

Firstly, Oblivion was programmed in a way to prevent HDR and AA from being used at the same time.
Secondly, those are all real technical issues I suffered whilst trying to play Oblivion (with or without guns) - it is fair to assume that they are not unique to my setup and plagued plenty of others too.

ATI released an unofficial driver immediately after Oblivion's release that let you use HDR + AA and overrode the ingame settings. That worked very well. The setting was blocked by Bethesda because consoles and Nvidia cards could not show both at once, but it was not a principal technical hurdle for ATI card users.

As to the other technical problems, I have of course no idea how widespread they were. I didn't hear a huge outcry, though.

 

[Turjan]

It doesn't sound like their radiant story is randomly generated quests from those blurbs. It sounds more like it changes different details of the quests. such as locations of dungeons, types of quest items involved, the types of enemies and other challenges you will face, the way in which you receive the quests and stuff like that. It also doesn't seem to be random but instead based off of your character statistics and the way you have been playing the game (and hopefully choices you have made at other points in the game).

If they implement it well it will be fantastic. It will help the gameplay seem like you are playing out a story that is reacting to you instead of just controlling a character that it walking around semi-randomly killing things and amassing items, wealth and experience. This is a pretty important area for CRPGs to advance in if they want to ever be able to replicate the DM experience from Tabletop. And that is most definitely the direction I would like CRPGs to go in. That was the initial dream in making the first CRPGs.

How well it is implemented still remains to be seen. At least they are trying though. Even if they don't succeed there will be valuable lessons that others can use to push CRPGs even further in that direction.

I wasn't expecting this at all. I thought Bethesda would move ever further down the morrowind/oblivion path. I'm glad they are returning to their roots a bit and trying to fulfill the potential of the open world RPG.

I agree that the concept isn't too bad. A good GM does not force the players to go where he wants them to go, but changes the world on the fly so that they think that they went to that place he wanted them to go by their own will. So yes, good idea. I have the fear it will be as well implemented as the famous Radiant AI. We all know how that one turned out.

 

[King Crispy]

(But this is one of the features that actually sounds kinda good)

Agreed. "But WHY can't I still cast my fireball while dual-wielding my glass katanas?????"

Because we said so. STFU.

 

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

Everybody is excited by Skyrim and nobody dares to admit it.

I'll admit it, I'm far more excited by this than DA2, ME3 or Witcher2 even though they'll probably turn out better than skyrim.

I liked Morrowind a lot and find that the TES sandbox formula has a lot more potential than what BIO is headed for, after oblivion however I won't get my hopes up.

 

[Forest Dweller]

Okay, here are my impressions.

Plusses:
+ Gameworld is better and more varied. That one picture of the waterfall is more atmospheric than anything in Oblivion.
+Dual-wielding
+No more backpedalling
+The level-up system sounds better.

Cons:
-No more stats?
-If that one screenshot is really the skills page, :facepalm:
-That bit about killing the shopkeeper and her sister taking over and still giving you the quest in "anger or frustration" is just . So much for C&C.
-You automatically get sent to dungeons you've never been to for each quest. I can just see a woman saying her husband went missing a few days ago and you find him in a ruin on the other side of the map.
-The game has children who you obviously won't be able to kill.

Iffy:
*5 major cities. The question is: are there also smaller settlements (like Morrowind) or are those the only ones?
*You fight dragons and they attack towns. Whether gay or not depends on how rare/special they are. And if you build up to it or not.
*No HUD. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth did this well. It all depends.
*Perks. Could be good or bad. But one every level? Probably bad.
*Dragon Shouts. Again, all boils down to implementation. They've already confirmed 20 shouts, and said each shout has 3 words. Do you have to kill a dragon for each word? Well so much for those encounters being special, unless they are scattered and hidden all over the map.

 

[Nael]

\
*Dragon Shouts. Again, all boils down to implementation. They've already confirmed 20 shouts, and said each shout has 3 words. Do you have to kill a dragon for each word? Well so much for those encounters being special, unless they are scattered and hidden all over the map.

If you read the main section it seems to indicate that you learn the shouts from reading or translating inscriptions in dungeons/tombs. Not from the dragons themselves.

EDIT: But that isn't to say that some words aren't learned from the dragons themselves considering it's their language.

 

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

-You automatically get sent to dungeons you've never been to for each quest. I can just see a woman saying her husband went missing a few days ago and you find him in a ruin on the other side of the map.

I think it's pretty clear that they'll only choose from dungeons in the vicinity, it does however imply generic dungeons that have little do with the quests assigned to them. Wouldn't be surprised if this gets cut.

*No HUD. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth did this well. It all depends.

Early promo shots typically don't have HUDS.

*Perks. Could be good or bad. But one every level? Probably bad.

It's not s.p.e.c.i.a.l, they could just as well call them feats and have them as organized as trees, why complain about how often you get one when you know little about the system and its balance?