InAComaDial999

The thing that really stands out from previous games is how you get the quests. You don't just get an NPC running up to you and forcing you into dialogue, or have to click on every random stranger to find out what's going on. Here, more often than not you find out about quests because you actually hear people talking about a situation, and then it's up to you to decide whether to go talk to them to investigate further. It's that feeling you get from seeing the world happen around you, and being able to choose whether to get more involved, that makes it feel so natural and immersive.

There are a lot of mods that go beyong simple retexturing. But it will be nice when the CK comes out, to be able to make those into new items instead of just reskinning existing ones. E.g. t the moment I really want the CK so I can make the Dragonhood into a separate item rather than a reskin/remesh of the dragonscale helmet.

I guess. Most non-mountainous areas in the southern half of the map are not really arctic, and Falkreath looks like the Northeast U.S. in early Fall. Medieval cloth isn't especially lightweight, to say nothing of fur, hide, and leather, so I don't really have a problem believing those skimpier outfits in that climate. I agree though that the bikini style fur armor up in the snowy mountains is kind of a stretch.

In the modern world, with mechanized infantry and guns, sure. There were plenty of U.S. women in Iraq who went out on patrol - particularly MPs (Military Police). MPs are not technically "combat arms" and a fair percentage of them are women. They would mount up and go patrol, get into firefights, etc, and acquitted themselves very well. E.g. Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, Silver Star recipient. Even so, doing convoy escort is a far cry from regular infantry, where you spend long hours on foot carrying a hundred pounds of gear, to say nothing of elite infantry like Rangers. While there are women who can do this, the percentage is much smaller than the percentage of men who can do it. Knowing the social problems that occur in co-ed military units, it simply isn't worth causing that much upheaval just for the sake of admitting the few women who really could do the job into those types of units. That might sound unfair, but the military's job is to be an effective fighting force, not a model society. On the other hand, in a world of combat with sword and shield, in real life women simply would not be able to compete whatsoever. The idea of Aela the Huntress using speed and agility to outfight her slower male opponents is 100% myth. The fact is that swords are heavy, armor is heavy, shields are heavy, and moving quickly with that stuff requires brute strength. With modern nutrition, supplements, and a rigorous workout regimen, it's no doubt possible for a small percentage of women to become capable of fighting this way on a regular basis. In a medieval setting, no chance whatsoever. Even the idea of female archers is mostly a myth. It's one thing to shoot at targets or kill a deer with a modern compound bow. An English longbow had a draw weight up to 185 pounds, which is three to four times that of a modern hunting bow. All that being said, we're talking about a fantasy world. You're playing a character who can breathe fire by speaking in Dragon, and there's no reason your svelte female warrior can't be just as strong as a man twice her weight, whether it's because of fantasy physics, dragon genes, or the hand of Talos giving her strength beyond ordinary mortals.

The Legion is the only fighting force in Skyrim with no female footsoldiers. There are female guards in every town, plenty of female Stormcloaks, and female Thalmor warriors. This isn't really new; the same was true in Oblivion and Morrowind.

Game runs pretty much perfectly for me on a i7 920 and HD5870. I run at 1920x1080, 4xAA/8xAF. It suggested "High" originally, that ran fine but I have since increased a bunch of the distance sliders to about half way between High and Ultra. The only mods I use are "No Blocky Faces" and I replaced the Gauldur amulet meshes with those of the Saarthal amulet (same amulet but now doesn't clip). Fraps says I get 60fps most places, dropping to 40 at the top of the Whiterun stairs and some areas of Markarth. No crashes, just the usual quest glitches.

It's almost certainly out of fear that it would break the game on some CPU or other that isn't 100% able to do whatever specific SSE2 operation they use, or does it poorly and makes the game actually run slower than simply using x87 math instructions. When you're writing software that has to run on millions of PCs, you have to cater to the lowest common denominator.

She wears the Fine Raiment. ID 000cee76

I don't understand why people say 1.3.10 broke their games, it did nothing but fix glitches. I suspect most people's problems stem from either modding their ini files (specifically changing the ugridstoload) and corrupt saves due to crash on autosave. The autosave on travel thing is a big problem; what happens is that the game crashes while saving, resulting in a corrupted file; you then load that file, play for a while, and start having problems that are now unfixable. This also happened in Oblivion and FO3, which is why I never use autosave at all. I've got about 210 hours in and I've only ever had 2 CTD's, both during the time I was testing out the 11.11b performance driver from ATI so not really the game's fault.

Currently it's Erik the Slayer, because his cheerful can-do attitude is like a breath of fresh air amongst in these dark times. Well, that, and his dialogue isn't annoying when you talk to him.

Archery is really no good in a stand-up fight until the higher levels, meaning above 20 at least. If you don't use sneak to get the drop on opponents and get at least one huge hit in before they detect you, you're going to die a whole lot.

I don't think so. I've got more than that into my character, and I've experienced exactly two CTDs, both of which happened when I was trying out one of the "performance beta" releases of the Catalyst video drivers, so were almost certainly not caused by the game itself. Other than the well-known quest bugs like Blood on the Ice, the game has been pretty much flawless for me.

Seems like what you want is a game that leads you by the nose and tell you what to do, and the only NPCs you really interact with are ones that are crucial to the quest/mission you are on. Unfortunately, TES games have never been like that. And as everyone else has said, if you're still in Riverwood, you haven't even scratched the surface yet.

The quest lines are too short if you only play the quests that you "have" to play. E.g. you can complete the Companions questline and only do a single radiant quest. IMO the flaw is that they should have required more of them to progress to the next "level" of the quest line. You certainly have the option to do that yourself, though. And in the case of the Companions, you have quite a few more quests to do even after you've become Harbinger, e.g. the ones to .

Of course. The difference is that the Nords are white, so it's acceptable to hate on them for it. That's really all it comes down to.

What an impartial, unbiased assessment of the two sides. :rolleyes:

I agree with what FordPrefect said, and it is a good explanation of why linear games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect can seem so much better written than true sandbox games like Skyrim. But that doesn't really excuse some of the issues with Skyrim people are justifiably complaining about. For example, my character is the Harbinger of the Companions. Yet, I still get guards saying "Oh, now I remember... you're that new member of the Companions. What do you do? Fetch the mead?" On the other hand, sometimes I get guards telling me that they are in awe of me because I'm the Harbinger. There's no reason the dialogue conditions can't include a faction level check so that guards don't insult your rank when you reach Harbinger. That specific mechanism exists in Oblivion and there's no technical reason they couldn't do the same in Skyrim. It's just sloppy coding.

You are absolutely right, but that's because DA and Skyrim are fundamentally different types of games; this is why the premise of your original post is fundamentally wrong. Games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect have epic high-fantasy type storylines, and are not at all open worlds. Regardless of how you play them or the choices you make, they tell basically the same story every time, perhaps from a different point of view or with certain key characters changing. The point of the game is the story, your character is the vehicle through which you experience it. The TES games are completely different from this; they are sandbox games that happen to feature a largely optional "main quest". You can do whatever you want, the point is to play with the world. You can't really compare the two experiences, they aren't designed for remotely the same thing. I personally love the DA and Mass Effect type games, but I basically play through them once and don't play them again for months, if ever. I have a single character that I've played through both Mass Effect games, and I won't play the first game again until I've completed the entire trilogy with this character. On the other hand, I replayed Morrowind, Oblivion, and now Skyrim all the time, constantly creating new characters and rarely doing the same thing twice.

That sounds really fun, actually. One of the letdowns with the game is that after about lvl 40, not much is able to challenge me. My smithing is at 85 and my enchanting at 65, and I hardly see a need to go any higher as it is. There's not much sense of anticipation. On the other hand, it seems that with the mods you are running, the game is a fun challenge again.

The three I want to make are A boat travel service Light Blades armor. I know there is a mod for that now, but it changes all the Blades armor. I want a separate set of light armor for light armor users. A quest to help rebuild Winterhold. Nothing too crazy, the ruined houses would get rebuilt and you'd get the opportunity to own one of them

CBBE is the Skyrim version of Eshme's body. Awful but because it's the only thing out there it's the one everyone supports. Like someone else said earlier it took a long time for Exnem to come along with his body, which really set the standard, although Robert's male and female were the only alternate bodies I ever actually liked in Oblivion. As far as Skyrim, I don't see any need for a replacement body, the male and female bodies are overall excellent. There are details that can be improved, like the feet with the weird toe texture thing happening, but that is already being done.

Using apostrophe's inappropriately.

Oblivion was a great modding platform, I spent more time playing quest mods than I did playing Bethesda content. It was a terrible TES game, looked and felt nothing like Morrowind, it was basically a generic fantasy setting with some TES lore tacked on. Skyrim feels like a true sequel to Morrowind, it has the same aesthetics, the same sort of racial and cultural conflicts, ruins all over the place that feel both alien and yet connected to the world (don't talk to me about the sterile nonsense that was the Ayleid ruins in Oblivion). The game has major flaws but compared to vanilla Oblivion it's leaps ahead.

Least favorite is the leveling. The difficulty felt about right at levels 1-8, then the game became much too hard from about 10-20, at level 20-30 most mobs were too easy but dungeon bosses and bandit leaders were one-shotting me all the time, now at level 30+ it's a total cakewalk and basically nothing can hurt me. Of course I can "fix" this with the difficulty slider but that's a pretty sloppy way to handle it.

What if you disable Crossfire? I'm playing on a i7 920 non overclocked, with a 5870, and I get 60fps almost everywhere on High.