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.
My favorite quick look so far... (Score:5, Funny)
Elder's Scrolls games are timeless experiences for their bugs and exploits as much as for their gameplay. Here's a simply wonderful example:
A beutiful expoit [youtube.com]
Ryan Fenton
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm generally of the opinion that exploits in single player games are only a problem for people who are such gigantic assholes they can't help but fuck themselves over. The game does seem to have its share of legitimate bugs too though, but that's not all that surprising for a game of its scope. The important ones will get worked out in time though, and it's still an impressive game.
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:5, Insightful)
IIRC, Morrowind didn't have monsters that leveled up with you. It had it's own set of leveling issues, like it became impossible to level up any more or increase stats beyond a certain point, but I was able to play and enjoy Morrowind without focusing too much on gaming the leveling system.
With Oblivion, I completely screwed up a few games and wasted many hours by leveling "incorrectly" and running into exactly the problem you described. Plus I generally disliked the idea of leveling up but the monsters kept up with me- why bother leveling up if I'm just going to be running in place?
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Who are you talking to? I just pulled from context you are talking about minecraft, but nobody in this thread seems to be except you?
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:4, Informative)
It's a troll, based on the stupid "Scrolls" (Notch) vs. "Elder Scrolls" (BSW) lawsuit.
Re: (Score:2)
No, but it helps to have a sense of humor... because that whole clusterfuck is quite simply not funny.
Re: (Score:2)
My bad. In my defense, I've been on the Escapist forums recently. I apologize for calling you a troll.
Re: (Score:3)
So, they changed some of the leveling. I haven't played it yet... but, as an example, when you enter a dungeon/cave/area/whatever, as I understand it, your level is "locked." Bad guys are generated/leveled/whatever to match your current level when you *first* enter. If you come back later with +5 levels, the bad guys are still at your original level.
This seems like, on paper, it'd work as a nice little compromise. The bandit cave you enter at level 5 will be a piece of cake if you go back at level 15.
Re: (Score:3)
Morrowind had what they called "leveled lists": when adding creatures to a map, the designer often wouldn't add specific creatures, but rather, lists. For example, an ancestral tomb could contain four enemies from the "s
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: (Score:2)
Exactly. For that reason I always played Oblivion with stealth-focused character classes rather than turning myself into a tank hack-and-slash character. With a high marksman and stealth (plus lots and lots of damage-health poison... gotta get that alchemy skill up early in the game) I could ambush enemies and get lots
Re: (Score:2)
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.
That was not a problem with Morrowind, for two reasons.
First and more obvious - enemy levels don't scale up in Morrowind. If you come back to the starting areas at level 20, you'd still be killing mudcrabs and scamps. On the other hand, you could head straight for the nearby daedric shrine if you wanted. In fact, if you can survive a fight with a bunch of high-level daedra (very tough but possible), you could get a nice set of daedric gear at level 1, which would in turn make the rest of the game that much
Re: (Score:2)
That was my main complaint with Oblivion and I'm glad to say in Skyrim the new leveling system is much better. Every time you level you choose to increase your Magicka, Health or Stamina by 10 points (there's no Dexterity or Strength stats anymore). You also gain 1 perk which you can place into one of the ~20 skill trees.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
I'm generally of the opinion that exploits in single player games are only a problem for people who are such gigantic assholes they can't help but fuck themselves over.
It's not a problem even then. If you enjoy buying books of puzzles, looking up the answers, and writing them in then you'll probably enjoy these 'exploits' too and while it might seem a bit weird to the rest of us there's nothing actually wrong with it. Of course, if you don't enjoy doing that then don't do it.
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:5, Informative)
As much as I love Bethesda games, I won't buy them at launch because they are famous for ridiculous bugs. I also recommend buying them on PC so you can install community bug fixes as well.
Re: (Score:1)
Yep, this exactly. As much as I want to play it, I know from past experience buying it right now is a risky chance to take, and could taint the whole experience.
To confirm this, I at least took a look over at the Bethesda support forum, and it's most certainly all there. Crash to desktop, choppy framerate on extreme hardware, game freezes, sound issues... the list goes on.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:5, Informative)
Every review I've read said they've had crashes and issues on the console versions as well that forced them to reload old saves, as well as quests you couldn't finish.
Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas all have community patches that literally fix hundreds of bugs that were still left unfixed after the final patch (GOTY editions) from Bethesda.
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes3Mod:UMP [uesp.net]
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes4Mod:Unofficial_Oblivion_Patch [uesp.net]
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3808 [fallout3nexus.com]
http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/268603-unofficial-new-vegas-patch/ [thenexusforums.com]
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:4, Informative)
>>all have community patches that literally fix hundreds of bugs
Thousands. In just one game alone.... the Unofficial Oblivion Patch fixes 2,200 bugs when the authors stopped working on it. So people then other took up the banner and kept working on it, because, you know, there were still more bugs to fix. :p
That said, I'm enjoying Skyrim. It has only been crashing about once every 4 hours, which is on the positive end of the bell curve for Bethesda games - Redguard would crash for people with non-Intel processors *off the boat*. You know, the one you start on.
The only in-game bug that bothers me is the fact that NPCs will teleport around some time. You'll be talking to this one dude, and then suddenly another dude is next to him. And then he'll flicker away.
I think a bigger problem is that the game really has been dumbed down from Oblivion... it's a sad trend that we've seen across the board in the RPG industry these days (ME2, DA2, WoW, I'm looking at you...).
Re: (Score:2)
Say some more please. What do you mean by "dumbed down". Are you talking about character interaction? Combat? depth of stats? quests? or perhaps just general world interaction?
d
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Holy crap... it's the Call of Duty RPG.
Don't worry about that arm... it'll grow back in a few minutes.
Bummer. I actually think this degrades games. I liked the old games where when you got injured you'd have to limp back to town and get healed... all the while hoping you don't run into a large sewer rat or something else. It gave the games a bit more excitement IMHO.
d
Re: (Score:3)
>>What do you mean by "dumbed down".
The class system, or lack thereof, mainly. Some perk trees are kinda interesting, some are just plain boring. And there's a lot less skills than before, and no stats at all. It might be because I just finished an epic Oblivion run to warm up for Skyrim, but dammit, I *like* being able to have a speed stat of 100 with 100 athletics, and boost them both through the roof with magic, and run around the world at speed. In Skyrim you just feel like you're running through
Re:Crashes (Score:2)
Crash to desktop, choppy framerate on extreme hardware, game freezes, sound issues... the list goes on.
I played it for a hour or two last night - got to the 1st town. Seemed very Fallout 3ish... only you have to hit R instead of A to Take All - what is up with That?
Had no graphic issues but it crashed to desktop when I opened a chest. Figured it was time to go to bed anyway...
Re: (Score:2)
Its t follow along with their annoying games should be using game pads paradigm that this game is plagued with. Why oh why must a PC release of this game have such a broken keyboard/mouse feel to the game? Disappointed.
PS: Why couldn't they use A for all? Because A means go left since everything was made for gamepads, and left in a container means go back to the root left menu...
Re: (Score:2)
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:4, Informative)
I got rid of the mouse lag by editing the .ini file and turning off mouse acceleration and vertical sync.
I'm not sure which fixed it, but the mouse lag is gone and my framerate is way up, at the expense of a little screen tearing.
The .ini is in your My Documents/Skyrim folder. .ini files, with some settings in each. It's worth searching for a tweak guide.
There are two
Re: (Score:2)
My evidence isn't anecdotal.
There are hundreds and thousands of documented bugs in the final, patched versions of their past 4 games.
Arena and Daggerfall were also legendary for their bugs. I posted links above.
Re: (Score:2)
Bethesda, consistently, produces games that have become my favorites, and I love the Elder Scrolls saga. But there's no denying that their games tend to be incredibly buggy, which is why you have modders fixing those bugs as a labor of love.
Often in Bethesda games, I'll have to search online to find out whether the reason I'm stuck in a quest is because there's actually a real challenge to figuring out the next step, or because there's some bug in the script that you have to work around. It usually turns ou
I recommend months to a year later (Score:5, Insightful)
Reason is again bugs and also mods. They tend to provide top notch mod tools (I don't know if they have with Skyrim, but they have for the games in the past) and there are hard core modders out there. So not only do you get bug fixes, but you get a lot of improvements and changes.
As an example I really didn't like Oblivion as it was done stock. I don't like the way everything levels with your character. Just ruins the feel of the game for me. Well no problem, I'm not the only one and people have changed that. So I can nab a bunch of mods that change it more to my liking, and improve the graphics and so on, and in the end have a game that I just love and have replayed many times.
So ya my view is hold off unless you have nothing else you wish to play or are just the kind of person who has to have it day one. Wait a bit, and you'll enjoy it that much more when you can mod it up as you desire.
Of course that only applies to the PC version, but then the PC is where these games have their heritage so probably the best platform to play them on.
Re: (Score:3)
My home PC isn't beastly enough to run Skyrim (barely manages Oblivion), so I've picked it up for my Xbox 360 and will play it to death on there until my PC either dies or I get fed up with it and upgrade it sometime in 2012, at which point Skyrim for PC will be exactly what it ought to be. Even as it is right now, Skyrim on 360 is far and away the most awesome game I've played on this console in a long, long time, and possibly ever.
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is actually something acceptable. You can also write in the console and have infinite money, but that won't make your game any more enjoyable. This follows under the same category, in my opinion. you'll only screw yourself out of a great experience if you want to - no one is forcing anything.
And honestly, whoever thought about this, deserves that piece of bread that got stolen. Genius
Re: (Score:2)
Lets be honest, this looks less like a bug and more like an easter egg!
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
"You can also write in the console and have infinite money, but that won't make your game any more enjoyable."
I can assure you that I enjoyed Oblivion much, much more with infinite lock picks and infinite gold than without. It instantly transformed it from a grind to a marvelous world to explore freely. Your point is well taken, but be aware that it doesn't apply universally. You can only speak about yourself when you say things like "doing X won't make the game any more enjoyable".
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
That and dragon *chomp* [youtube.com] make me giggle more than I have any right to. I'll likely pass on getting Skyrim, but with some remorse.
Re: (Score:2)
Damn, that audio is almost as old as the Wilhelm Scream.
Re: (Score:3)
After seeing this bug, I want to play this game even more. How can that be possible?
Re: (Score:3)
That video would have actually convince me to buy the game if I haven't already. It demonstrates the old problem with all "sandbox" games - they have sufficiently many independent components that user can arrange them in a way not easily foreseen, and get some useful result that was not intended by game designers (and make the game much easier, or simply look hilarious). Still, "sandbox" RPGs are much better than linear crap that we're being fed recently, so a game that has flaws like that is a good game in
Re: (Score:2)
The contradiction is amazing. On the one hand, there's the attention to detail such that putting an object on an NPC's head means they can't see. On the other hand, there's no reaction by the NPC to the PC putting an object on their head, and no effort by the NPC to get the object off their head.
Classic Bethesda.
As an added bonus, there's the good old CRPG standby, in which taking a loaf of bread means the NPC is now committed to a fight to the death.
Re: (Score:3)
You stole a SPOON! You will pay with your blood!!!
52-minutes is 'quick-look'? (Score:5, Insightful)
52-minutes is 'quick-look'?? Really?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're doing it wrong.
In Elder Scrolls games, the main quest is the filler.
Re: (Score:2)
In Bethesda games in general, I sometimes feel that the main quest is there for players who demand a rigid structure.
Re:52-minutes is 'quick-look'? (Score:5, Insightful)
When that 52 minutes is much less than 1% of the content? Yeah.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure (Score:2)
I love it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I love it (Score:5, Funny)
there's a nice old lady who says it's so nice to have a visitor. I felt kinda bad after bursting her into flames and robbing her house.
Her mistake. She didn't specify what kind of visitor.
Re: (Score:2)
I've only played through the intro, a bandit camp, and a cave full of bandits, but I definitely agree, so far magic is way more fun than Oblivion. Setting people on fire, or watching lightning arc across their skin is way more satisfying than almost anything in Oblivion. Additionally, more than once, when I've run across multiple enemies, I've shot some fire at them with my left hand, realized I should try to use my sword to level that too, but I kill them with fire before they even make it to me. That's
I am very excited (Score:3)
Back to Morrowind (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Man, that Notch guy works fast! (Score:5, Funny)
I've been looking forward to that latest game from Mojang-- they sure delivered this latest installment of Scrolls quickly!
Oh, wait....
Re: (Score:2)
Now I'm picturing you giving Rupert Murdoch a rimjob. I'm disgusted, yet faintly aroused.
Works on Linux too! (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
any steam related hurdles to jump through?
Re: (Score:2)
That makes me even more tempted to buy it...
Re: (Score:2)
That makes me even more tempted to buy it...
If you want an excuse not to:
http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/09/28/0211243/Bethesdas-Scrolls-Lawsuit-Going-Ahead [slashdot.org]
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.
Only one problem (Score:5, Informative)
The only problem is the curse of the video game console. The PC user get's crappy menus for the sake XBox/PS players.
Re: (Score:2)
Which with Oblivion and Fallout 3 was fixed by mods very quickly.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, they put a lot of effort in, which i want to reward.
Re:Only one problem (Score:5, Informative)
>>What's wrong with the UI and menus exactly..?
Go to the books menu with a lot of books in your inventory. Use the up and down keys to select books, no problem. Now try clicking on another book when one is selected. Half the time, it will open the original book instead of the one you actually clicked on. Some dialogue boxes have the same problem.
This is the problem with Consolitis - they fucking broke MICE for the PC version.
Re: (Score:2)
>>What's wrong with the UI and menus exactly..?
Go to the books menu with a lot of books in your inventory. Use the up and down keys to select books, no problem. Now try clicking on another book when one is selected. Half the time, it will open the original book instead of the one you actually clicked on. Some dialogue boxes have the same problem.
This is the problem with Consolitis - they fucking broke MICE for the PC version.
This kind of problem is present in a lot of menus and the heart of it is the *sometimes*. Yes, sometimes, clicking an option (A) other than the one you've got selected (B)via scrolling has a roughly 50% chance of activating A and 50% chance of activating B. The safer but much slower method is to scroll to the option you want and then select it by hitting E. ...
Oh, so that's why they needed to defend the name Scrolls from Mojang.
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: (Score:2)
Yeah New Vegas was awesome. 15 minutes into the game and it was obvious it was the true successor to FO1 and 2. The only downside was Vegas itself, possibly a Gamebryo engine limitation, but more likely just lazy developers.
Re: (Score:3)
Far behind Vegas? Vegas was made by Bethesda. U still mad bro?
New Vegas was published by Bethesda. It was written and developed by Obsidian Entertainment, which was founded by several producers, coders, and writers from Fallout 1 and 2. New Vegas was the real sequel; Fallout 3 was the fumbling of an outside studio too afraid to touch the canon, and for good reason.
Saying Bethesda made New Vegas is like saying Random House wrote The Da Vinci Code.
Re: (Score:3)
I played Fallout 3 twice because there was a shadow there. The setting and some of the characters were at least an acceptable tribute to Fallout, they just weren't anything like a sequel. I resented being forced to trudge across the entire DC metro area on foot, not to mention explore miles of almost identical subway tunnels, to get a
Great, but control issues exist on PC (Score:5, Informative)
If you try to play with a gamepad it works great - or as well as a gamepad can work. Like in any fps, you turn slowly and imprecisely compared to mouse control, but that's not so bad.
The mouse is another matter. Mouse behavior throughout the UI is inconsistent. It's learnable, but even then it's not entirely predictable. I tried this a bit last night. In many cases I'd place the cursor over an option and click it, but the click either wouldn't register or would happen away from the cursor. The best solution seems to be to jiggle the cursor a bit and try again.
Mouse acceleration is present but can be disabled in the .ini file. Since few people on gaming forums even know what mouse acceleration is, it gets blamed for all sorts of unrelated things like input lag, but in reality it's not a problem. Cursor lag, however, is a bit of an issue. I need to mess around with triple buffering and non-fullscreen modes to look for potential improvements, but with default settings on my rather overpowered system mouse movement seems to have around a 100ms delay. This is common in modern games because gamepads are rather sloshy and don't make input lag apparent due to their inherent slowness. However, cursor movement in menus is actually quite crisp, which is a big improvement over the majority of modern games. That's a big deal and gives me hope that a well modded and patched PC UI could be very satisfying.
The worst and most bizarre mouse input problem, however, is probably the worst mouse input bug I've ever encountered in any piece of software. The y-axis sensitivity is different from x-axis sensitivity. That's not rare in gamepad-based games, since a major concern is keeping console players from accidentally looking excessively up and down while rotating. That's even fixable in a lot of mouse drivers - I can set my x and y mouse sensitivities separately. However, the problem here is, as far as I know, unsolvable without a real Bethesda patch: the y-axis sensitivity is highly variable. If you move your mouse up 2 cm to look at the ceiling and then move a few meters and do the same thing, you're likely to find that looking at the ceiling now takes a 10 cm move. I've heard that this is because y-axis sensitivity is dependent on framerate, but I think that the dependency must be either nonlinear or more complicated than that.
I'm thinking of switching to a gamepad, but then combat is slower paced and it's more difficult to handle groups of opponents by darting between and around them mouse style.
Re:Great, but control issues exist on PC (Score:5, Informative)
fixed for you already:
add the following keys to SkyrimPrefs.ini in your My Games dir
fMouseHeadingYScale=0.0100
fMouseHeadingXScale=0.0200
Re: (Score:2)
Edit an ini file?! In 2011?
And people wonder why consoles are on the rise.
Re: (Score:2)
I *really* hate gamepads for these kinds of games, but Skyrim is the first one where I made the switch. It's still aggravating sometimes, but for the most part -- especially walking around and watching the scenery, which I seem to do a lot of --, it's fine. Combat is more difficult and shooting arrows in particular is MUCH more difficult, I'm sure it's "costing" me an entire difficulty level at least. It's sometimes frustrating when you die and it feels like the controls are part of the reason. But I try to
More Reviews (Score:2)
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.
"consolified" (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Interestingly, at this time of year, I get the same feeling walking out to my car in the morning! Convenient!
Just turn off your heater for the full immersion experience.
I am not responsible for any damage related to broken pipes, hypothermia, or frostbite.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
With my settings (and when logged out of Slashdot) the post time does, in fact, show up as 11:11.
I'm wondering if he remembered to post at 11.1-bar seconds of that minute for good measure. (Also I posted this when there were already 11 comments.)
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Informative)
I've seen several trustworthy people (have yet to get my activation code to verify this) that said that the main executable TESV.EXE is not tied to the Steam client; only the launcher is.
So, briefly, until they very possibly patch that out, once installed it can be run stand-alone with no Steam client, so no DRM.
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Informative)
They probably won't patch it out. Fallout 3 and New Vegas could both be run sans-protection via bypassing the launcher as well. They knew well, but decided that third-party script extenders [silverlock.org] for modders and such were worth the 'risk'. I find this encouraging.
Re: (Score:2)
This is phenomenal, because the Steam version of Oblivion was tied to the Steam client and required Valve's assistance to get it working with the script extender. It was using the basic Steam wrapper. There were worries that Skyrim would be using the new Valve CEG encryption, which would have probably, nixed a script extender completely but Bethesda's VP confirmed otherwise.
This is much better than expected!
Re: (Score:2)
Presumably, the set of people interested in extensively using mods and script extenders are also the set of people who are willing and able to download a pirated version of the game.
So they just figure, "Let's just keep our fans happy."
Re: (Score:2)
I hope you meant to say "willing to download a crack", and are not implying some correlation between modding and piracy.
Re: (Score:2)
You probably won't ever see this, but I had someone verify, and Fallout 3 (GFWL) is like this, but New Vegas (SteamWorks) is not. If you launch New Vegas' main EXE, it launches the Steam client as would be expected. So Skyrim is definitely special, and I won't be surprised if they "despecial" it soon.
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm. Odd.
Yet I do know that the steamworks New Vegas is not encrypted. Or, if it was, they worked with the FOSE guys to allow them to build the New Vegas version. I cannot remember which.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Considering that the last couple of Bethesda games have required Games For Windows Live, Steam is a positively fantastic change.
Re:Rewrite (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
No resale value.
Can't install without steam.
Pirates get the following:
Free game
Able to install anytime, anywhere
Updates when they want to update
No internet connection needed to play.
Re:Rewrite (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, it means that if you're going to spend more than a handful of days anywhere without internet access, you can't actually play it. Well, not if you pay for it anyway - pirates don't have to worry about this.
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: (Score:2)
LOL!
Bash Microsoft, you're Insightful.
Bash a game publisher with TEH KEWL GAMEZ and you're Troll.
Re: (Score:2)
people like you are exactly the reason more and more games are getting locked down.
Actually, the irony of it is that, if he does what he says, it's just more proof that the locking down obsession still doesn't work.
I wish I could say the Steam DRM was why I was giving this one a pass. In truth, that's Oblivion's fault.
OTOH, if I have to pass on Torchlight 2 because of stupid DRM, I am gonna be one cranky old bastard...