xorchan

@Caliente: The new version sounds highly interesting, can't wait for screenshots.

What bothers me about CBBE, currently using the Slim version with fixed AA sizes (which is more like C, really - no options for anything even more subtle/reduced? Eg. a much smaller/flatter posterior would be nice) 1. The stance is highly unnatural, looks like spine is deformed from the side. I'd prefer my women standing up straight. 2. The body seems too small/childish for my characters. It looks like the head of a full grown woman on the body of a teenager. Very uncanny/unsettling. Reverted to vanilla + heavily modified 4uDIK's, it's simply the best at this stage.

As the title suggests, I regularly notice three issues that affect the nexus site's front-end to the IPB forums. Lists such as this one do not display in the comments section. They are simply invisible, as if I had written normal lines instead. The front-end either specifies the wrong encoding to my browser or sends content to the back-end using the wrong encoding. You'll notice that unicode characters posted as-is in the comments section appear as a jumble of special letters when viewed in the IPB forum. When posting a comment via the nexus site, it does not get marked as “read”, so I have to re-read it in the IPB forum to check it off.

There's a reason good nude mods like HGEC come in “non-nude” variants. They're still much nicer, higher detailed body meshes.

Hey, at least Bethesda realized that we want more of the same experience. Other developers miraculously manage to get this wrong. Look at how horrible Dragon Age 2 was and tell me you aren't glad Skyrim didn't get completely dumbed down (even more than it already is, but then again, Oblivion was dumbed down as well).

My problem is with people hopping on the bandwagon too soon. Why not wait until Exnem or another skilled modder makes a proper body mod before releasing over 9000 armor mods for some run of the mill mesh? I don't want it to become the “de facto” standard.

You still don't know what Whiterun gets attacked by. And by the time it gets relevant, it'll be obvious either way, so not much has been spoiled in-game. And too early? Strange, here I was thinking the game was effectively dead now since everybody has started getting bored and stopped playing.

Statements like this kind of piss me off. Mass Effect is a radically different type of RPG with extremly limited freeroam. Even with said freeroam, what you do outside of the major story points has very little carry over or impact. Most of the odd-jobs from ME1 were religated to footnotes on the news, and had no impact on ME2, and the few that did seemed to be broken and play out the same regardless of your earlier choices anyway. Comparing the two is like comparing the A 747 to an F22. Sure, their both planes, but they are radically differnt in their designs. I agree there is too little impact (Though i dread the days of 'N-n-n-n-n-n-n-Nerevarine!') but saying they should work to the same level as in a highly structured, linear game is absolute lunacy. Disagree entirely. There's nothing immediate about Skyrim's design to prevent more lively NPC interactions and events. Hell, Oblivion even had a mod called “Rebuilding Kvatch” where your decisions actually took time to take effect and had world-changing impact. It goes to prove that it's up to modders to add the depth to the game that Bethesda is incapable of providing. The closest thing we got was Whiterun, which was *exactly the same* after the attack, with some minor differences. Skyrim has quests, Skyrim has NPC dialogue and Skyrim has dynamic NPCs and the radiant engine. There's literally nothing preventing it from achieving the same level of interaction as games like Mass Effect, other than the incompetence of Bethesda. They should hire Bioware's writers to write up NPC interaction for them. NPCs in Mass Effect felt real. They were real people with real problems of their own. In Skyrim, NPCs just feel like static assets there to provide you quests and give you leveled amounts of gold. Hell, Bioware games even have NPC dialogue which is dependent on your team composition and/or appearance. For example, taking Legion to Tali's loyalty mission affects NPC dialogue significantly, or putting on sand raider uniforms in KotOR I made them recognize you as friendly. It's these little things that simply make the NPCs of Skyrim feel completely dead and non-dynamic. The whole radiant quest system was more of a slap in the face than anything else, it feels like WoW dailies - unchanging quests that you can grind for no good reason. Sure, Skyrim has other qualities that games such as Mass Effect lacks, for example a wide open world with detail in every corner, but this is in no way mutually exclusive with real NPC interaction. Ps. Skyrim quests are just as linear as Mass Effect. Look at dungeon design, they usually just have one path (the only alternative paths are just short side-paths which lead to some treasure, just like in Mass Effect)

Can't decide on one, general annoyances: The interface. Simply awful. Still waiting for those proper interface mods. Worst offenders are the world map and the inventory. The perk tree is also horrible but you don't need to access that as often. Followers. Game would be better without them altogether. Slow quest NPCs that you have to wait for / follow. I'm on a schedule. Crappy textures, but this can be fixed with mods. Bad dialogue, unemotive characters, shitty one-liners, unchanging world. Look no further than Mass Effect (and other bioware stuff) to see how it's done right. Shitty game engine and patches (each patch brings in more bugs than it fixes) Steam I could go on.

No.

How was that relevant to my post? (You quoted it so I assumed it should be)

Level 40ish paladin, smithing at 100 (very easy), enchanting only at like 50. Crafted a legendary set of dragonplate, without using any fortify smithing effects except for a very weak potion that I made at ~50 alchemy. With the Nord passive, two resist fire enchants and a resist lightning enchant (+ what I get from resistance potions that I pick up along the way), no mage poses a serious threat. Everything else is a joke. I was deliberately trying *not* to abuse the hell out of this game (I have ~1800 bow damage on my archer), but it's still way too easy. Next game I will simply equip clothes on my melee fighters.

Doesn't crash for me and works fine. I don't know what issue you are having, might be worth investigating since it's definitely not normal. I know Skyrim has problems with some overlays, maybe Steam is causing it? Edit: For reference, system is W7 Ult x86_64, HD4890, game on Ultra+ (full screen), catalyst 11.11c.

Enchanting is the second most powerful tree currently ingame, right after smithing.

Well, every developer has their series that they stick to. Pioneering new intellectual property is a very, very risk maneuver - so risky, that developers will much rather create a sequel to an existing intellectual property based on similar mechanics that have already proven successful. This is why Bethesda is making a modified Oblivion clone (which was originally a modified Morrowind clone), and other developers like IW are making their Modern Warfare clones. It's well within the realm of possibilities for other manufacturers to make a game the scale of Skyrim - it's not a technological barrier, it's simply too risky. The sheer amount of effort and work put into a game of Skyrim demands that the game succeed, or the company can say goodbye. Bethesda has it figured out already, because they tried it out in the previous games (back when game development was still much simpler, especially in the graphics department, and therefore much cheaper and easier to experiment with). But a big hotshot game developer can't just try to create something similar and expect it to work, without directly stealing from Bethesda. And besides, they'd just ruin it either way. You know how they work. They create products geared towards mass consumerism and dumbed down console games, and probably wouldn't make them moddable either. It's bound to fail, thus no game developer would seriously try it.

The problem is, as you mention, that a real sandbox game needs to be online - since the state of our AI technologies is simply so abysmally poor that such a sandbox is practically unimaginable without major revolutions in the field. The only sandbox with true, social dynamics, where you're a part of something major and your actions can have lasting effects are games like EVE Online, which revolves around a primarily player-driven economy. Such things can not be easily incorporated into the “TES Style” - they're inherently MMO. Personally, I'd place a conservative guess at around 20-30 years before such things could begin existing in a single player game.

Yes, and some day we're going to create a perfect replica of the real world, and you will have a virtual job inside a virtual world earning virtual money to spend on virtual things for your virtual house and your virtual family. Or you could just go outside and do the exact same :P

The disposition game in Oblivion was the stupidest thing I've ever seen in an RPG. Go try it, walk up to a random person on the street and start telling them random things and watch how their facial reaction changes as you think about saying something. See if they're in love with you after a nice round of joking/bragging in the correct order. If they are, mission accomplished!... except not. It was simply silly. You can't instantly raise somebody's disposition towards you like that, it takes time. Also, the bribe/persuade options are still there - they even added intimidate so the new system has more options than the old one, once you think about it. The only reason to raise your disposition towards an NPC was for getting through quest dialogs and so on, which is exactly what Persuade/Bribe/Intimidate are used for - and also more realistic. You won't instantly get an NPC to love you, but you can charm your way through a single event. Oh, and about the whole hype with typing to talk to NPCs? Check out this site for a while: http://cleverbot.com/ Come back after 20 minutes and tell me if you still think it's a good idea to be able to type to NPCs. I'll wait.

Err, no. That would be quite silly-looking ingame. Modern destructible environments are almost always done via physics/materials libraries. The real hurdle to implementing this is (aside from the performance) the AI and immersion barriers. But the rest of what you posted is generally accurate. None of these three suggestions make any sense whatsoever.

Err, what? To me it was always painfully obvious which quest was the “Main Quest”. Weren't you paying attention during the introductory sequence?

Wait then why are the Thalmor helping the Imperials?

My Nords and “good” characters all join the Stormcloaks. My elves, thieves, “evil” characters, opportunists etc. all join the Imperials.

The game interface runs on Flash, which includes the quest/location markers on the map afaik, so adding your own should be trivial.

As I've said earlier, i personally think it's best not to increase the enemy HP, but to increase the enemy damage (or rather, decrease the player armor value). I don't want to have to hit a bandit 20 times for him to die, but I sure as hell don't want to be able to stand there and tank all of his hits without even stopping to heal myself.

@Vallen87: I've now played a sneaky thief, a squishy pure mage, a one handed warrior and a Khajit unarmed monk all on Master and I wouldn't call any of them particularly challenging. I'm also not a veteran to the series - I never played Morrowind, and played Oblivion at a low difficulty. Melee chars are basically a joke since you can nearly always dodge. (The hardest to dodge are those dual wielding Redguards, it takes about 5 minutes to kite Kematu around while slowly killing his bodyguards) Oh, and be careful around dual wielding enemies. Fortunately, their animation is very slow so you can generally avoid all of their power attacks. Casters are only a problem at first but very soon you can start stacking resists, if you're playing a Nord and stack 33% fire/lightning resist enchantments you're basically immune to stuff like dragon breath. One advice I have is to go around collecting all the Snowberries you can find, they have Resist Fire, Resist Frost, Resist Lightning *and* Fortify Enchanting on them - after a good stroll around the snowy northern regions you should have a few dozen of them and along with others like purple mountain flower you can make dozens of resist potions. Ice wraith essence is also pretty common if you know where to farm them. Add the Lord stone (25% magic resist) on top of that and you're a walking sponge. Archers are a joke since arrows are so slow you can easily dodge them. Oh and yes, fire damage is good since it's the most mana efficient generally - especially at the beginning of the game you can just cast Flames for a split second to ignite the enemy and recast it whenever he stops burning, the DoT ticks a lot of damage so you can kill an enemy without even losing mana in the best scenarios.