Relativelybest

So I go into this minor Aelid ruin and start killing the mage cult hanging out there. Walking down a corridor I then suddenly see a bundle of glass arrows right in front of me. They're arranged in a crossing pattern like some kind of star, and they're hanging in mid air with no support. I leave the arrows alone long enough to search the nearest room, but when I return they had vanished. That was wierd.

I'm not too fond of difficult fights againt well-armored opponents who just block and power attack all the time. Honestly, I'd rather fight hordes of weaker opponents all day. I recently went into Miscarcand in an attempt to finally advance the main quest a bit. I was actually kinda pleased to find that the monsters weren't nearly as strong as I had expected; the bitterfish goblins were pathetic and the skeletons and zombies went down pretty easy too. For once I was actually enjoying a dungeon crawl. (Of course, then the King of Miscarcand showed up and was like: You Die Now! But that's a different cup of tea.) But I think my over-all favourite enemy to fight was the Knights of Order. They were straight to the point, reasonably tough, and unlike the Dremora they were naturally intimidating without having to cover themselves in spikes and blood and scary faces. Also they didn't use annoying enchanted weapons all the time, they just ganged up on me and tried to hit me with their really sharp swords a lot. First time I battled them seriously was just after the Addiction quest. I didn't quite understand how to shut down the Obelisk, so they just kept coming four at a time. I think I killed something like 15-20 of them - the ground was strewn with fallen Knights of Order. It was epic.

So, just a thought: Is it a sign of desensitization that we apparently can't find stuff like torture chambers with rotting corpses hanging upside down from the cieling scary without adding a ton of darkness and spooky sounds to improve the atmosphere?

Dammit. Thanks to this thread, I've started to collect all sorts of stuff. o_O My new obsessions are loaves of bread and skulls. I recently walked out of a vampire den with sixty human skulls in my inventory.

A couple of other pet peeves of mine: -Leveled Goblins. Goblins were the first thing I fought in the game, back when I was so weak I'd get killed by the Mythic Dawn if I got between them and the Blades. Now when I'm somewhere between level 40 and 50, I whipe out bandit gangs on my own without breaking a sweat, jump from mountains, towers and tall bridges for fun, get into fistfights with bears, and is the legendary scourge of all daedra. But the damn goblins are still giving me trouble! Why is the empire even worried about the Oblivion invasion when these super-goblins are already here!? -Wonky value of the treasures I find. Specifically, gemstones are all worth the same regardless of size. I have a flawless topaz the size of a man's palm, but it's still worth exactly the same as all other flawless topazes I have. And that's not much: 20 golds. The most valuable one is the Flawless Diamond worth 100 golds, which is still pocket change considering that any random bandit I run into tends to wear armor worth thousands of gold.

Person A: If you want to learn how to use a mace, you should talk to Person C. Except, the only way you get to talk to Person C is if you're a member of the Fighter's Guild. Person B: Person C not bad, but in order to talk to him you have to be a member of the Fighter's Guild. Person A: How about that! Well, if you think about it, for an adventurer's noble steed that's like the ultimate insult!

That was the first thing I did, but it doesn't seem list the unnamed NPC ID's for some reason. I eventually found a list of the regular Oblivion NPC's on a different wiki, but not the Shivering Isles ones. I do have the contruction set, but I haven't been able to get the darn thing to work yet. Sorry to hear, hope it gets better.

Er, I don't think I'd consider having a wastebasket filled to the brim with grape-sized precious stones a "reality check." Quite the contrary, the reason I collect them in Oblivion is because I'm not filthy rich enough to do so in real life. If anything, putting them into the basket is the reality check, because I want to keep them in some kind of container rather then in a pile on the floor. (Speaking of which, I also have an actual in-game wastebasket that I've been filling with crumbled pieces of paper...)

Originally, I horded all the treasure I found in a pile by the altar in the Benerius manor cellar: Jewles, rings, gold nuggets, various silver objects, etc. Now, I put all the jewels I find in a basket in my bedroom in the Skingrad mansion, except for flawed emeralds and flawed sapphires, which I put in a pile on the desk since I thought they ruined the whole "shiny glowing precious stones" impression. I also put all the gold nuggets I find on the desk, and all pearls go into the coffin in the Benerius lich crypt. The jewel basket it almost full now, and sometimes I tip it over and spill it all out on the floor just to look at them.

Where can someone tell me where I can find the base ID's of the Shivering NPC's? I wanted to try to console spawn some Golden Saints/Dark Seducers, mostly to pit them against the Dremora. But as much as I googled I couldn't find their ID's anywhere.

Vanilla-wise, I'd have to say the dreamworld. It did feel kinda nightmarish in a Twin Peaks Red Room kind of way, and the fact that I didn't get to bring my equipment added a feeling of vulnerability.

The psychic guards who know you are a criminal on sight, those I can live with. What I don't understand is this: When I steal a horse in the dead of night, why is it that not only do every npc in the world know it's not my horse, but also assume it's theirs? Me: *steals horse from Chestnut Handy Stables, rides to Chorrol, do my business, and then mount my stolen horse again* Random NPC: STOP! THIEF! Guard: What seems to be the problem, ma'm? Random NPC: That adventurer is stealing my horse! Guard: Is it really your horse? Random NPC: It's not her horse, so it has to be mine! Guard: That's a perfectly logical argument! Stop, lawbreaker! Me: *groan* Honestly, I would be satisfied if I could just once, you know, run into a gang of elves who all wear elf armor and use elf weapons, even if my level demands that everyone wear a random mix of Glass and Daedric. What gets me with the races is not that they all get along, but that they have no cultural identity or communities of their own. (With the one strange exception of the all-khajiit Borderwatch.) I think having this perfectly integrated society of races who all live side by side, with all cultural differences implied at best, defeats the purpouse of having these different races to begin with. The only differances between an orc and a high elf is that one is huge, green, has tusks and is -for some reason- less scary to look at. This happened to me during the Kvatch battle. The best part was going to sleep and be woken up by a creepy guy in black who congratulated me on my cold-blooded murder and invited me to join his secret brotherhood of cold-blooded murderers.

A key difference would be that the stuff Three Dog said was, you know, actually true. Biased, yes. But true. Eden out-right claimed that the Enclave created Project Purity and that James, Li and the BoS tried to steal it from them. So, yeah. Yeah, those ghouls are horrid, aren't they? Seriously, I cannot express how much statements like that frighten me.

Or you didn't listen closely enough on Three Dog? The guy did call the Enclave out on their BS several times. For that matter, I've never played the previous Fallout games either and I figured out the Enclave were the bad guys just by listening to Eden's broadcasts a few times, since I recognise obvious propaganda when I hear it. Plus, Eden was voiced by freaking Malcolm McDowell. I don't think I've ever seen or heard him play anything but baddies.

Me, I never seriously thought the virus Eden gave me wouldn't cause more damage then it fixed (I mean, come on, it was made by the Enclave for crying out loud) so I never actually considered using it in the first place.

So, I went to Rivet City to finish up Those!, only to find that as soon as I get close to the hotel, the robot receptionist, Mr Buckingham, went instantly hostile seemingly for no reason and tried to kill me with his flame thrower while everyone near ran screaming for their lives! The first time I shot him dead, but then everyone else turned hostile as well. On my second try the same thing happened so I had to use the Kill command to put an end to his rampage. Also, I was just at the Citadel to check up on Dr Li, and saw her walk up to a toilet bowl, stick her hand into it, and then turning around and walking away from again. She didn't put anything in, so I had to assume she took something out instead, though what exactly I'd rather not think about. o.O Incidentally, someone had decorated said toilet bowl with a box of sugar bombs, a milk bottle and two metal spoons. Somehow that just made Li's behavior more disturbing...

It's an impressive retex, though I would rather have gone with the regular Enclave Armor. It has more samurai-like pauldrons, whereas the Tesla Armor's pauldrons are very western-looking.

I know! That's why it's so weird.

Or, you do what most people do: don't finish the main quest until you feel like you're done. No one says you have to rush through the whole main storyline right away, not when there's a whole lot of side-quests to explore on the side. That's how RPG's tend to work. Heck, most of the Japanese ones are designed entirely around that principle. Thing is, the game still needs an ending. If you could go through Take It Back like any other quest you get a game that doesn't have an ending at all, so there'd be no sense of closure. You'd just keep roaming the DC Wasteland forever. The exact same thing applies to Broken Steel. For this to make any sense, the ending for Broken Steel is going to have to be the real ending for Fallout 3, won't it? And once you get there, you'll still have a lot of world to explore. Because we aren't gaining extra time to spend on exploring and side-questing, we're gaining more main storyline to delay if we want to do all those things.

Me, I can accept a bittersweet ending -I won't like it, but I can accept it- and I guess that thematically it worked well with James' very similar death, the importance of personal sacrifice and all that. But I can't accept bad writing. The ending for the main storyline in Fallout 3 was very forced. Case in point, you have the option of bringing one of three companions who are all more or less immune to radiation (Fawkes, Charon and Sergeant RL-3) but non of them can be convinced to go into the chamber and punch the code in. That's not just a disappointing ending, that's plain bad writing. Not to mention, the fact that Bethesda has apparently decided to retcon the whole thing shows A) a major lack of foresight on their part and B) that they didn't feel that strongly about the ending to begin with.

Yeah, I was surprised when I found the place too. I guess it's just easy to miss.

Isn't increased spawns one of the features of Mart's Mutant Mod, though?

I just recalled, while exploring the western and northern edges of the Wasteland map, I came across a remote camp where a man, a woman and their dog had set up a tent and a fire. They weren't hostile but had nothing in particular to say. Curiously, I could kill either one of them, or the dog, and the survivor wouldn't care, save for a brief "Better her then me!" comment. Talk about cold. o.O

Once I was attacked by two Deathclaws outside the Regulator HQ. I killed one of them but then the other one jumped up in the air and... never came down. It flew straight up and vanished into the sky. It still showed up on my radar and everything, I just couldn't see it. After leaving the area and then returning, it had returned to ground level again. But the absolutely weirdest thing I've ever seen was when I shot a raider female and something apparently went wrong with her ragdoll effect. As she fell to the ground, her body was drawn out into a long, multi-segmented line that started flying through the air will spinning wildly in every direction. It kinda looked like a large flying scribble. She kept flying around, sometimes moving outside of my visual range and then returning. I couldn't get close enough to loot her and she wouldn't go away. It was pretty freaky.

Want. Want badly. o.O