Early Look At The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 210
Bethesda plans to launch their newest Elder Scrolls game, Skyrim, in November, and they've finally started to take the wraps off the game. A preview at Eurogamer provides some information about the game's combat, the UI, and exploration of the game world. Quoting:
"RPGs send you into menus more than almost any other game genre, so it's weird that more thought doesn't go into inventory design, but as I play around with powers, weapons and items to lighten my load it becomes clear that Skyrim is a welcome exception. Its nested menus are accessed almost as smoothly as iPad page swipes, and navigating them is quick and clean. You can set favorites, equip items to either hand, and examine things in detail. More than once during my brief hands-on I have to rotate an object to look for a clue to a puzzle, or read a document, and it's all done without going to a different screen or do anything more complex than wiggling sticks and hitting a face button. It's easy to imagine that a system like this in Oblivion or Fallout could have shaved hours off the average player's actual game-time. As it is, it saves valuable seconds in my hands-on, and seconds are my currency today, so thank you to whomever at Bethesda designed the inventory."
Re:Question about DRM (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Stick!? Face button!? (Score:2, Informative)
Here's a good test. Try using your joystick to control your computer. You can do it, it's not difficult to setup. Now try and click on the icons with your joystick. Now try again with your mouse. See the difference? Can you see why nobody uses a joystick to navigate the desktop? Now imagine all the icons are people's heads and you're in a FPS. Can you see how a mouse makes things a little easier? No? I didn't think you would. But I'll make an attempt to convince you anyway, having actually played PC vs. console for a while.
Shadowrun [gamestop.com] was a cross platform game, you could play X-box vs. PC. I bought the game specifically so I could fight console gamers, whom I felt has stole all the gaming licences from PC, it was personal for me. I come from the old school quake 1 clans, hook+rockets and later hook+rail guns, and even later hook+tau or tau+whatever [youtube.com]. Lots of hooks and flying through the air anyway. The thing is, I already knew that the things that I regularly do with my mouse/keyboard would seem like magic to a console guy, so I knew it would be a turkey shoot to play Shadowrun.
I was not disappointed. You could tell the PC players from the console players right away just by looking at the way they move. Console guys would always move on one axis at a time (x then y) , rarely daring to move both up and left at the same time, by comparison, mouse users always moved in the most natural way possible. Console gamers would take forever to turn around, so I guess they made a '180' button because sometimes they would spontaneously spin around, but that never helped them, they always came out disoriented and were toast after I finished laughing and finally pushed the head shot button. Console gamers would just get their asses handed to them all day long. They would also always use a power up that gave you 'aim assist' basically, but caused a visible laser to emit from their weapon. Just having the laser power up made you a likely console user, it made it so you would see the guy coming, and it gave them an aim that was only slightly better than using a joystick. After a while, it just felt too much like I was cheating so I stopped playing.
Nobody blames aim assist. In fact, the more cannon fodder that keeps it turned on the better. Any (serious) person who used a mouse would never turn it on because it would totally ruin their game. You see, people who use a mouse shoot people like you in the head all day long, aim assist will 'snap' to the chest and ruin the head shot. You think you're a match for a mouse user, but you've never played against a mouse user. I have, I beat all console gamers without even trying. Your control surface for FPS is a total joke. The only thing you should be doing with joysticks is playing "bionic commando" or maybe an airplane game, but you'd probably be better off buying a real joystick (MS FFB2) to fly and I personally like the D-Pad more for games like bionic commando. Just ask yourself if you can tau jump do a 163'/37' turn, tau jump, do a 27'/47' turn and shoot a crossbow at a 4pxX4px head in 1920x1080. Because that shit is par for the course if you want to play mouse users. I only wish I could see the frustrated console gamers trying to play