Skyrim
Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2011 10:01 am
Just wondering if anyone else got Skyrim. Had a couple issues with it and also want to know if anyone knows what to do about it (PC version). So this is basically a review for any interested parties, + question right up top.
Spoiler alert, btw.
The Question
I have been faceplanting myself into Skyrim heavily since I got it, and I have a "review" of sorts to give. Then, it crashed and took all my save files with it. I had sunk about 25 hours into it already (level 15 char, having done a huge amount of sidequests etc.). What's sleep? Anyway, for everyone's info, if you play Skyrim, it places HUGE (3-5+ mb/per) save files in your My Documents folder. This is pretty standard, but the kicker is, if you run out of disk space, it doesn't warn you, and it doesn't tell you that your save failed, it just lets you carry on oblivious. And apparently corrupts all of your old saves as well. Seeing that it's a Bethesda game, and thus notorious for crashing and losing saves, I really should have been backing it up elsewhere. Oh well, lesson effing learned. In any case, I am mentioning this mainly because I want to know if anyone else had issues, and how to fix them. I'd heard that running out of space could cause problems, but also heard of saves randomly deleting, and of save files at level 15 specifically corrupting. Anyone know wth?
*****
So, my review of Skyrim thus far. I've always loved TES games, and played Morrowind through more than once--it's one of my all-time favorites. So bear in mind, I went into Skyrim with good expectations. All in all I think it's worth a play, and good in places, but BACK UP YOUR SAVES on a different drive and be prepared for some gray areas, both graphically and plot-wise. Your mileage may vary.
The Game Itself
The Controls
Even with mouse sensitivity at full, turning is slow. On char creation it's exceptionally laggy. To pick up certain items off the floor you need to center the mouse cursor over the item, which in some cases might be 2 pixels wide (case in point, circlets for your head--you can't pick them up by the "middle," only the outer rim), which is difficult with the jerky cursor, to say the least--and placing objects is still as difficult as in Oblivion. That said, there's a "stock bookshelf" option, which is nice. The keybindings are nonintuitive, although fairly easy to learn. I've read that they cannot be changed, not sure if that's true. The menu tends to be pretty complicated--for example, to drop an item on the ground, you have to open the menu, select the category of item you want, find the item and select it, and then press the "drop" key. There is a nice "favorites" menu where you can favorite items, and then just hit the Favorites hotkey to select your preferred weapons or spells--easy to swap between your bow, magic & melee weapon. All in all it's acceptable (I've certainly seen worse, ex. the newest FF mmo) but not great. In combat, the mouse movement is okay if set to max, but on menus it's a real pain.
Char Creation
I'm disappointed with this aspect of the game. You can change your character's race and gender, then customize their face. You can't change their body (bar a mediocre "weight" slider that has little bearing on their actual size), nor can you pick anything to do with their history or powers. Unlike the other TES games, where you pick their star sign, "profession" and so forth, in this game you're just a clean slate. While that's good in many ways (you can choose what to skill up in as you go) it also means you have little to no expression of self or connection to your character, imo. You're starting off with a boring char whose only real customization is the face.
The World
And here's the main draw of the game: the great interactive RPG world. If you like the Vrykul areas of WoW, you'll love this. Unfortunately, that's all it appears to be: gray and snowy, very undersaturated and cold. While that's probably the intent, it also is very dreary and monotonous. It is beautiful in places, to be sure; the graphics are good and don't appear to lag at all, and the day/night cycle combined with weather really makes an impact. But it's like having a single cake every day rather than a combination of foods--nice at first, and boring as hell after awhile. There are tundras vs cold forests vs mountains, but it's all similar in the end, very copypaste. There may be more to it, but if so, I hadn't gotten there by level 15. Oh, and the side missions? "Go into cave X, which looks exactly like every other cave and mine and crypt in every TES game ever." Since when does a military fort have a long, labyrinthian crypt where they store their prisoners at the VERY END of it? SEEMS A LITTLE IMPRACTICAL. It seems that they designed the dungeons first, and the plot later, and just sort of stuffed it all together and hoped that it worked.
The worst part is navigation. For example, at one point, I needed to get to the top of a mountain. There's no way to fast travel before you find a place, but at the same time, there are no clear roadways on the maps. This means that I circled the mountain, searching for a way up, for about an hour before I remembered the spell they'd implemented specifically for this: a spell you use to point you like 10 yards in the right direction. The fact that they had to put a spell into the game to help you navigate is a sign of how bad the situation is. On top of that, 10 yards isn't far, and every time you want to use it, you hve to dismount (takes a couple seconds), ready your weapons, cast the spell, then mount up again--very clunky, and very poor design imo. Roads on the map would have been simple enough; I'm really not sure why they don't have them.
All in all, though, the graphics themselves are very well-done, and aren't laggy in the slightest... although my horse, I must say, is quite fat >.> (Incidentally, the horse is also awesome; if you dismount to fight, it will often either assist--and he can kick some serious butt--or he'll flee a bit to get out of harm's way if the danger is too much.)
The music is not noticeable at all, unlike Morrowind's plethora of beautiful scores, bar ONE pretty song that's been ported over from Morrowind itself.
The Quest(s)
The plotline of the world--essentially, a war--is nebulous and murky at best. There's hostility from several conflicting factions, and I guess you're supposed to sort of take a side. But nowhere is the plot history or either point of view explicitly explained, nor do they give you a right or wrong option--anywhere. There's just your generic oppressor/keeper of order vs your generic freedom fighters/rebels. I suppose that's so you can choose your own side, but as both sides seem to give only their own version of events, it's a bit crap. Neither side was compelling enough for me to care bar rescuing a couple individual npcs. The history/background isn't sufficiently explained imo, and you aren't prodded to join either side, although your sidequests have to do with it, and you CAN choose to pick sides. But it's unclear, and confusing, and there appears to be no way to try and make peace instead. In addition, instead of right vs wrong, there's often wrong vs wrong, for example choosing between letting an ancient tree die vs infiltrating the sanctuary of the "mother" tree to provoke it by stealing sap (and thus getting people killed). The worst bit for me is that the good ol' Thieves Guild isn't fun and games anymore, stealing from the rich and whatnot, but instead is beating down hobos for cash and framing innocent people to get them out of the way. There's also quite a few places in the storyline where you have chat options that are basically rephrasing the same opinions--you're forced to be rather opinionated in a certain way (there's no middle ground or opposite standpoint you can choose). In other words, you're limited to a single moral choice to further the storyline. All in all, it seems bland and depressing, as opposed to the glory and fun of the other games. It's almost like they went for reality instead of a fantasy game, which really puts me off.
The exception is the main storyline, which is fairly neat. There are dragons, which is nice, and my favorite part of the game thus far was hearing them speak to one another and to me--one was very very reminiscent of Sovereign from Bioware's Mass Effect. This storyline is slow, though, and they seem to forcibly restrict you from progressing too quickly along it, padding the game out with side stuff you have to complete to become strong enough to carry on with the main plot. There's also some things I never thought I'd see in a TES game (or maybe I just forgot 'em since the days of Morrowind)--grind quests. "Bring me 5 of X," "Bring me 10 of Y." It really detracts from the immersion, although happily I've only seen a couple of those.
Difficulty-wise, someone here screwed up. There are many fights that are not even a challenge, and then suddenly a monster will come out of the same place that is nearly impossible to beat. It's actually recommended by the Wiki page that you cheat your way through some places due to the strange difficulty level. It's not a difficulty based on tactics, which I wouldn't mind at all--it's just that the monsters take ages to down. After fighting four or five things at once and slaughtering them all, I encountered a monster with an enormous health bar--even with cheat toggled on, streaming magic nonstop in a flamethrower gout at its face, it took nearly two full minutes to kill. If you want to do it without cheating, you'll need to strafe around the room for five minutes, guzzling potions the entire time like a Nord in a meadhall. That's not fun, or even challenging, it's just another tick on the "boring" page.
One thing I did forget to mention is the voice-acting--briefly put, it's good. It isn't ever bad (bar one extra who is trying to sound like AHNOLD), doesn't detract from the story, and quite a few of the characters sound real & heartfelt. The XO from Battlestar Galactica's in there right at the start, and easily-identifiable; I'm fairly certain that the voice actress who does WoW's new Aggra is in there too (although I could be wrong).
Skills & Abilities
This is part of the game that I find truly awesome. As in the other TES games, your abilities & skills improve by level the more you use them, and this in turn levels your char itself. Each time you level, you get perk points (a la Fallout 3) that you can spend to improve skills in certain ways, although each perk has a prerequisite skill level required from the pertinent ability (ex. you can't buy Lockpicking Skill X unless Lockpicking is at 30, etc.).
However, where it really shines isn't even the combat skills, but rather the other stuff. You can grab a pickaxe and mine ore that you find, smithing weapons and armor; you can gather hides and skins from wildlife that you hunt, and turn it into leather, which you can use to craft armor. You can disenchant enchanted items and learn to create those enchantments, and you can cook meals (with various effects) and alchemy potions with TONS of food & ingredients that you can find all over Skyrim. You could live in the wild if you so chose, hunting the wildlife, creating your own armor, food and potions from berries, meat and plants. It's a lot easier to get into and more intuitively done than the other TES games, and a very cool aspect of it.
Regarding the combat skills themselves--it's cool to be able to wield fireballs in one hand and a dagger in the other, to use stealth and to be able to one-shot a hard enemy from stealth with a longbow. However, it doesn't really feel like there's a lot of practical difference between the styles. It may just be me, but stealth doesn't feel like as much of an option as it used to, and heavy armor doesn't seem to make much difference. Enemies don't seem to care if you're using magic or a warhammer; they either die, or they don't, and not much advantage seems to be had with either. That's not to say there aren't differences--you have a magicka (mana) bar that will run out, and melee weapons are restricted to melee range. Somehow, though, even fireballs manage to feel boring.
Stability
Always a big factor in Bethesda games. I encountered very few in-game glitches. Very often when out riding, the game would freeze for about 5-10 seconds, which I am guessing means that the game is loading an enemy or encounter of some kind. This happens often enough to be very frustrating. The game only truly crashed four or five times, which is some kind of record for a TES game. However, then the game did one of those lovely instant-close crashes, and the majority of my save files vanished; the remainder were corrupted and can't be loaded. That kinda ruined the track record, needless to say.
Anyway, there's my take on Skyrim--beautiful, but monotonous. I'd be interested to see what others think after some gameplay, and if anyone knows how to fix corrupted saves, let me know.
Spoiler alert, btw.
The Question
I have been faceplanting myself into Skyrim heavily since I got it, and I have a "review" of sorts to give. Then, it crashed and took all my save files with it. I had sunk about 25 hours into it already (level 15 char, having done a huge amount of sidequests etc.). What's sleep? Anyway, for everyone's info, if you play Skyrim, it places HUGE (3-5+ mb/per) save files in your My Documents folder. This is pretty standard, but the kicker is, if you run out of disk space, it doesn't warn you, and it doesn't tell you that your save failed, it just lets you carry on oblivious. And apparently corrupts all of your old saves as well. Seeing that it's a Bethesda game, and thus notorious for crashing and losing saves, I really should have been backing it up elsewhere. Oh well, lesson effing learned. In any case, I am mentioning this mainly because I want to know if anyone else had issues, and how to fix them. I'd heard that running out of space could cause problems, but also heard of saves randomly deleting, and of save files at level 15 specifically corrupting. Anyone know wth?
*****
So, my review of Skyrim thus far. I've always loved TES games, and played Morrowind through more than once--it's one of my all-time favorites. So bear in mind, I went into Skyrim with good expectations. All in all I think it's worth a play, and good in places, but BACK UP YOUR SAVES on a different drive and be prepared for some gray areas, both graphically and plot-wise. Your mileage may vary.
The Game Itself
The Controls
Even with mouse sensitivity at full, turning is slow. On char creation it's exceptionally laggy. To pick up certain items off the floor you need to center the mouse cursor over the item, which in some cases might be 2 pixels wide (case in point, circlets for your head--you can't pick them up by the "middle," only the outer rim), which is difficult with the jerky cursor, to say the least--and placing objects is still as difficult as in Oblivion. That said, there's a "stock bookshelf" option, which is nice. The keybindings are nonintuitive, although fairly easy to learn. I've read that they cannot be changed, not sure if that's true. The menu tends to be pretty complicated--for example, to drop an item on the ground, you have to open the menu, select the category of item you want, find the item and select it, and then press the "drop" key. There is a nice "favorites" menu where you can favorite items, and then just hit the Favorites hotkey to select your preferred weapons or spells--easy to swap between your bow, magic & melee weapon. All in all it's acceptable (I've certainly seen worse, ex. the newest FF mmo) but not great. In combat, the mouse movement is okay if set to max, but on menus it's a real pain.
Char Creation
I'm disappointed with this aspect of the game. You can change your character's race and gender, then customize their face. You can't change their body (bar a mediocre "weight" slider that has little bearing on their actual size), nor can you pick anything to do with their history or powers. Unlike the other TES games, where you pick their star sign, "profession" and so forth, in this game you're just a clean slate. While that's good in many ways (you can choose what to skill up in as you go) it also means you have little to no expression of self or connection to your character, imo. You're starting off with a boring char whose only real customization is the face.
The World
And here's the main draw of the game: the great interactive RPG world. If you like the Vrykul areas of WoW, you'll love this. Unfortunately, that's all it appears to be: gray and snowy, very undersaturated and cold. While that's probably the intent, it also is very dreary and monotonous. It is beautiful in places, to be sure; the graphics are good and don't appear to lag at all, and the day/night cycle combined with weather really makes an impact. But it's like having a single cake every day rather than a combination of foods--nice at first, and boring as hell after awhile. There are tundras vs cold forests vs mountains, but it's all similar in the end, very copypaste. There may be more to it, but if so, I hadn't gotten there by level 15. Oh, and the side missions? "Go into cave X, which looks exactly like every other cave and mine and crypt in every TES game ever." Since when does a military fort have a long, labyrinthian crypt where they store their prisoners at the VERY END of it? SEEMS A LITTLE IMPRACTICAL. It seems that they designed the dungeons first, and the plot later, and just sort of stuffed it all together and hoped that it worked.
The worst part is navigation. For example, at one point, I needed to get to the top of a mountain. There's no way to fast travel before you find a place, but at the same time, there are no clear roadways on the maps. This means that I circled the mountain, searching for a way up, for about an hour before I remembered the spell they'd implemented specifically for this: a spell you use to point you like 10 yards in the right direction. The fact that they had to put a spell into the game to help you navigate is a sign of how bad the situation is. On top of that, 10 yards isn't far, and every time you want to use it, you hve to dismount (takes a couple seconds), ready your weapons, cast the spell, then mount up again--very clunky, and very poor design imo. Roads on the map would have been simple enough; I'm really not sure why they don't have them.
All in all, though, the graphics themselves are very well-done, and aren't laggy in the slightest... although my horse, I must say, is quite fat >.> (Incidentally, the horse is also awesome; if you dismount to fight, it will often either assist--and he can kick some serious butt--or he'll flee a bit to get out of harm's way if the danger is too much.)
The music is not noticeable at all, unlike Morrowind's plethora of beautiful scores, bar ONE pretty song that's been ported over from Morrowind itself.
The Quest(s)
The plotline of the world--essentially, a war--is nebulous and murky at best. There's hostility from several conflicting factions, and I guess you're supposed to sort of take a side. But nowhere is the plot history or either point of view explicitly explained, nor do they give you a right or wrong option--anywhere. There's just your generic oppressor/keeper of order vs your generic freedom fighters/rebels. I suppose that's so you can choose your own side, but as both sides seem to give only their own version of events, it's a bit crap. Neither side was compelling enough for me to care bar rescuing a couple individual npcs. The history/background isn't sufficiently explained imo, and you aren't prodded to join either side, although your sidequests have to do with it, and you CAN choose to pick sides. But it's unclear, and confusing, and there appears to be no way to try and make peace instead. In addition, instead of right vs wrong, there's often wrong vs wrong, for example choosing between letting an ancient tree die vs infiltrating the sanctuary of the "mother" tree to provoke it by stealing sap (and thus getting people killed). The worst bit for me is that the good ol' Thieves Guild isn't fun and games anymore, stealing from the rich and whatnot, but instead is beating down hobos for cash and framing innocent people to get them out of the way. There's also quite a few places in the storyline where you have chat options that are basically rephrasing the same opinions--you're forced to be rather opinionated in a certain way (there's no middle ground or opposite standpoint you can choose). In other words, you're limited to a single moral choice to further the storyline. All in all, it seems bland and depressing, as opposed to the glory and fun of the other games. It's almost like they went for reality instead of a fantasy game, which really puts me off.
The exception is the main storyline, which is fairly neat. There are dragons, which is nice, and my favorite part of the game thus far was hearing them speak to one another and to me--one was very very reminiscent of Sovereign from Bioware's Mass Effect. This storyline is slow, though, and they seem to forcibly restrict you from progressing too quickly along it, padding the game out with side stuff you have to complete to become strong enough to carry on with the main plot. There's also some things I never thought I'd see in a TES game (or maybe I just forgot 'em since the days of Morrowind)--grind quests. "Bring me 5 of X," "Bring me 10 of Y." It really detracts from the immersion, although happily I've only seen a couple of those.
Difficulty-wise, someone here screwed up. There are many fights that are not even a challenge, and then suddenly a monster will come out of the same place that is nearly impossible to beat. It's actually recommended by the Wiki page that you cheat your way through some places due to the strange difficulty level. It's not a difficulty based on tactics, which I wouldn't mind at all--it's just that the monsters take ages to down. After fighting four or five things at once and slaughtering them all, I encountered a monster with an enormous health bar--even with cheat toggled on, streaming magic nonstop in a flamethrower gout at its face, it took nearly two full minutes to kill. If you want to do it without cheating, you'll need to strafe around the room for five minutes, guzzling potions the entire time like a Nord in a meadhall. That's not fun, or even challenging, it's just another tick on the "boring" page.
One thing I did forget to mention is the voice-acting--briefly put, it's good. It isn't ever bad (bar one extra who is trying to sound like AHNOLD), doesn't detract from the story, and quite a few of the characters sound real & heartfelt. The XO from Battlestar Galactica's in there right at the start, and easily-identifiable; I'm fairly certain that the voice actress who does WoW's new Aggra is in there too (although I could be wrong).
Skills & Abilities
This is part of the game that I find truly awesome. As in the other TES games, your abilities & skills improve by level the more you use them, and this in turn levels your char itself. Each time you level, you get perk points (a la Fallout 3) that you can spend to improve skills in certain ways, although each perk has a prerequisite skill level required from the pertinent ability (ex. you can't buy Lockpicking Skill X unless Lockpicking is at 30, etc.).
However, where it really shines isn't even the combat skills, but rather the other stuff. You can grab a pickaxe and mine ore that you find, smithing weapons and armor; you can gather hides and skins from wildlife that you hunt, and turn it into leather, which you can use to craft armor. You can disenchant enchanted items and learn to create those enchantments, and you can cook meals (with various effects) and alchemy potions with TONS of food & ingredients that you can find all over Skyrim. You could live in the wild if you so chose, hunting the wildlife, creating your own armor, food and potions from berries, meat and plants. It's a lot easier to get into and more intuitively done than the other TES games, and a very cool aspect of it.
Regarding the combat skills themselves--it's cool to be able to wield fireballs in one hand and a dagger in the other, to use stealth and to be able to one-shot a hard enemy from stealth with a longbow. However, it doesn't really feel like there's a lot of practical difference between the styles. It may just be me, but stealth doesn't feel like as much of an option as it used to, and heavy armor doesn't seem to make much difference. Enemies don't seem to care if you're using magic or a warhammer; they either die, or they don't, and not much advantage seems to be had with either. That's not to say there aren't differences--you have a magicka (mana) bar that will run out, and melee weapons are restricted to melee range. Somehow, though, even fireballs manage to feel boring.
Stability
Always a big factor in Bethesda games. I encountered very few in-game glitches. Very often when out riding, the game would freeze for about 5-10 seconds, which I am guessing means that the game is loading an enemy or encounter of some kind. This happens often enough to be very frustrating. The game only truly crashed four or five times, which is some kind of record for a TES game. However, then the game did one of those lovely instant-close crashes, and the majority of my save files vanished; the remainder were corrupted and can't be loaded. That kinda ruined the track record, needless to say.
Anyway, there's my take on Skyrim--beautiful, but monotonous. I'd be interested to see what others think after some gameplay, and if anyone knows how to fix corrupted saves, let me know.
I love Nordic themes though, and I'm glad to know there's a third-person camera option as I've never liked first-person.
Anyway, I'm really sorry you lost all that time!! And I think the horse is fat too... it feels like a draft horse instead of a real riding horse. I don't use one because my last one died and I can't afford to keep replacing it! :X PS: I can't wait until ME3 in March! eeee!