The Elder Scrolls Return With Skyrim 158
Today marks the release of Skyrim, the fifth installment of Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls series. The game is set about 200 years after the events of Oblivion, at which point the province of Skyrim is embroiled in a civil war, and dragons roam the skies. Early reviews for the game have been largely complimentary — one at Rock, Paper, Shotgun artfully details all the things the reviewer hasn't yet done, despite playing the game for over 30 hours. Quoting: "I seriously worried Skyrim would, for all its talk of lavishness, depth and dragons, continue the transformation into a trudging, consolified action game filled with clunky acting. It does not. It slams on the brakes then reverses at dangerous speed back into Morrowind territory. Some things are lost (e.g. Persuasion is a sadly watered-down, irregular affair now mostly to do with shopping), many things are changed (e.g. recharging magic items can be done anywhere) and it’s certainly not as weird (no flying or Siltstriders), but it truly reclaims that sense of being in another world, rather than a generic soft-focus, over-familiar fantasyscape." An addendum goes into more detail on the specifics. If you're curious how the game looks in action, Giant Bomb has posted a ~52-minute quick-look video with commentary.
Back to Morrowind (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:5, Interesting)
What worries me more is that nobody's yet fully commented on whether they finally fixed the leveling system.
What I mean by that: the way to play Morrowind and Oblivion was to build a "custom" character class designed specifically to AVOID leveling up, with certain major skills deliberately left aside to only be used (hand-to-hand, shield, etc) when you were ready to sit down and level. Otherwise, you'd screw your stats by leveling too fast, too hard, with too many skills left in the dust until you found yourself facing enemies that were far too powerful for you to handle.
The reason Fallout 3 and New Vegas worked so well in the Oblivion engine is that they went with an XP-based leveling system. Players didn't have to worry about avoiding leveling, because you can't avoid leveling. You just play the game, play your character, and enjoy.
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:4, Interesting)
They've all but removed classes. You can gain a boost to one of three classes of skills (Mage, Thief or Fighter) and using them skills them up faster, so if you use magic you get better at it (and level up) and if you use Melee and Armour those level up faster.
Not yet convinced it's the best way, but it's not exploitable in the same way Oblivions was.
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:4, Interesting)
I *Hate* The Elder Scrolls (Score:4, Interesting)
Thanks to the Elder Scrolls being Bethesda's cash cow and major recent experience with RPGs, the revival of Fallout became "Oblivion with guns" rather than a decent sequel. They raped its corpse.
I mean, I still played it twice. There's something to be said for the Elder Scrolls formula. But Fallout 3 is still far behind 1, 2, and Vegas when it comes to having solid plot and characterization rather than relying on a massive, largely empty environment to drive the whole game. I swear to God, Fallout 3 barely had a quest per square mile. That damn aircraft carrier was practically empty.
That's what the Elder Scrolls means to me. The poisoning of decent CRPGs with set-piece driven exploration games.
Re:Rewrite (Score:5, Interesting)
You probably won't believe this, but I did exactly that with Fallout 3: New Vegas.
I wasn't going to play via Steam - because I have several software titles rotting on the shelf due to software activation servers that are no longer available.
So I got a copy from Bittorrent and subsequently mailed Bethesda a money order for the retail price - less the price of the money order fee, which I thought was fair.
I sent it anonymously because I didn't trust Bethesda not to sue me. I did give them a disposable GMail email, but they never replied (though I stopped checking it after a couple months).
Re:Back to Morrowind (Score:0, Interesting)
Sadly, the attack system is still little more than a mouse-click-fest, although dual-wielding is frickin' sweet, and you still start off running incredibly slow. Hopefully they'll release the creation kit soon so modders can get to work on things like a Sprint mod.
That being said, I put in 4 hours on the game last night, slayed my first dragon, and am taking a half-day off work today to continue what I expect to be a 200+ hour journey, if not far more. This game is absolutely beautiful and amazing. My girlfriend, who does little more than sit on the couch and mock my gaming, kept looking over at my screen last night and saying "oooh, that's pretty". Hell, I spent a minute just watching the salmon try to swim upstream.
The only downside I've seen thus far is the menu system was setup for consoles then adjusted for the PC so it takes some getting used to, but after a few hours I was moving through the menus far quicker than I ever did in Morrowind or Oblivion.
Re:Works on Linux too! (Score:5, Interesting)
But this is the first Bethesda game infected with DRM. How do you get around that? You have Steam under wine?
I was amazingly disappointed when I heard it was going to be Steam based. Especially since Fallout 3 and the earlier Elderscrolls had no DRM and just simple copy protection (ie, no need for a DVD in the drive even). I thought they were going to be the last company to go with DRM. What is going on here, is everyone doing this now? I even hint that I don't like Steam on some forums and suddenly I'm being flamed. Not only are they getting fans to accept DRM without question, they're managing to get fans to defend and promote it.
Why would consumers want to promote DRM on games when they're so adamantly against it in music and video? Slashdot is full of anti MPAA/RIAA posts but where are the anti-DRM and anti-Steam posts? Yes, I know Steam is convenient for some people but it could be convenient without the removal of your consumer rights, or only include DRM if you download online, or not default to automatic updates that break your mods, or allow you to run the game without the nanny engine starting first, or not pop up ads when you're done playing. This is insidious stuff and I am honestly baffled why users just take it happily when otherwise they're so skeptical of DRM elsewhere.
Oblivion was broken, but Skyrim is not Oblivion (Score:5, Interesting)
Skyrim is not Oblivion. It is still the Elder Scrolls, but this is a new way to experience it. Oblivion was a flawed game because of the leveling system and the armor/weapon/spell crafting system.
The leveling mechanic in Oblivion was abandoned for Skyrim. Suffice it to say, getting your ass handed to you by some motley crew of bandits while exploring a cave at level one is expected. What the Oblivion devs didn't realize was that having your ass handed to you by that same motley crew at level twenty is fucking frustrating -- what is the point of leveling up if the monsters level up with you? In an RPG, I *like* being able to go back and deliver some leveled-up payback to the monsters of my youth. Not being able to revisit lower levels after gaining enough armor/weapons/magicka to handle them contracted the game down to a series of frustratingly similar encounters.
Crafting, especially spell crafting, is not the same in Skyrim. Being able to customize your armor, weapons, and spells was a cool innovation in the earlier games, and I was pleasantly surprised by how satisfying it was in Morrowind. But Oblivion was a living example of why too much of a good thing is bad. An RPG that allows a level one character to become permanently invisible and craft a spell that can one-shot the final boss is broken, period. The game should be about testing your skills and knowledge of the game world, not resisting the temptation to exploit a design flaw in one of the game's critical subsystems.
So, Skyrim is addressing both of these well-publicized and documented problems. I'm downloading this from Steam as I type this, and am looking forward to playing it through.