GnatGoSplat

Striker, thanks for the tips on the Speechcraft mini-game. I completely understand it now, I think. I've been maxing out my disposition with people even where it doesn't matter, just for practice. I haven't run into Cingor yet, but I'll be sure to play the minigame in reverse when I find him. So far, I'm enjoying Oblivion more than I initially thought I would. Controls are still clunky and NPCs still look ugly, but I'm used to it now. One thing I had noticed, is I felt more lonely in Oblivion, than Skyrim. I always had followers in Skyrim, but in Oblivion they've only been temporary ones for quests. Last night, I decided to download Companion Vilja. What a great mod! It's fun to have her tagging along, making me feel less alone in those dark, creepy Oblivion towers and dark caves. I think her chattiness and accent are quite charming. Now having to close the bazillion Oblivion gates that I've yet to close, seems like less of a chore. She's also very good at distracting the bad guys so I can sneak behind them and hit them with 6x sneak damage. One thing I did notice is the graphics look a little dull and lifeless with HDR off, but with HDR turned on, peoples' faces tend to get badly washed out by even the smallest light source. Is there any way to adjust the HDR?

Yep, you're right, setting up the right joystick as mouse did the trick. I had resisted because I thought it would conflict with the "look" function, but it doesn't seem to. I don't really like it on the right stick, but it doesn't work to make the left stick the mouse. I had done the same thing to the A button the night after I posted. It does work reliably now, though it will auto-close object/corpse inventory after taking something. Not perfect, but I can live with that. The stick multipliers are in oblivion.ini, I think I posted them earlier. My multiplier settings work fairly well, I think. It's playable. The annoying intermittent change in direction gets annoying, but I can live with it. I agree, I think Skyrim is considerably better as well, though I'm enjoying Oblivion as well despite the controller annoyances. I've gotten to the point in Skyrim where I've knocked out all the main quests, most of the side quests, and am not receiving any new quests, so it's nice to start a different game where most of the game is still ahead of me rather than behind me. I've always been a predominantly PC player and have had to play games both ways. The Xbox 360 controller is a fairly new addition for me (within the last 2yrs), and I really like it when a game fully supports it. I really don't understand why most PC players prefer keyboard+mouse. I wish Bethesda had come out with an Oblivion update to provide full Xbox 360 controller support. I didn't mod my Skyrim until recently, I just played it vanilla. I was enjoying it enough that I didn't need mods, but as my quests started dwindling down and I found myself unable to find anyone who would present me with a new quest (other than radiant quests, which get repetitive), I decided to play around with the Creation Kit to make my own NPCs, which is fun. I also made a chicken follower mainly because the idea of it sounded silly, so I wanted to see if it could be done. I also added a mod so I could have all my custom NPCs as followers at the same time. So now I have a small army plus a chicken, but sadly, no quests to complete. They get to stand around and watch me improve my smithing skills. Striker, thanks for the tips on the Speechcraft mini-game. I think I get it, but I guess it takes a lot of practice because I don't seem to be accomplishing anything! So we want the number in the wheel higher, but do we want the bonus number to be higher, or lower? Every time I bribe, that number decreases, so I was thinking maybe if it's lower, that'll take less bribing for the NPC to like me, but I'm doubting it works that way.

Yeah, I've already noticed that problem. When my character was wearing only bottoms, there was a gap between that and her top. I guess she won't be running around in just a bra! I don't think that's it. The drifting occurs even on level ground within the Imperial kingdom and I can usually make it stop by gently touching the left stick. No couch lounging for me! My wife hogs the couch. ;) I'm actually sitting right in front of the PC at my desk. It's just that I greatly prefer controller gaming. Ah, I did have some success! I've got left and right triggers able to navigate between the stats, inventory, magic, and quests menu. How I did it was in Xpadder, I set left trigger to right mouse (block) + shift + left arrow. Right trigger is set to left mouse (attack) + shift + right arrow. I now have X reliably dropping inventory items as well, I think. I believe I have it set to shift + enter in Xpadder, and configured in the Oblivion joystick menu as draw weapon, so now it draws weapon in normal mode while dropping items in inventory mode. A button works great for selecting items in inventory, but doesn't work reliably for taking items from an object/corpse inventory. It takes maybe 2 or 3 attempts. I usually just stick to the enter key when I need to take something. I'll have to tweak it a bit more in Xpadder. Yeah, Skyrim's UI is definitely controller-optimized. I tried to use those instructions, but they didn't work well for me. I did use that page as a reference on how to map my own controls, it does appear as though most Xbox 360 Oblivion controls do match Skyrim. I used a combination of Oblivion's joystick settings and Xpadder to get fairly passable results. All my controls match the Xbox 360 Oblivion except the following still doesn't work. - Cannot dismiss "Continue" dialog boxes (but all other dialog boxes work, odd how Continue ones are different). - Taking items from objects/corpses using A button is unreliable. - Cannot move around in maps. - Cannot do anything in that speechcraft menu (don't really quite understand how it works anyway). - Cannot lockpick. I still have to use mouse (or keyboard) for those things. Yeah, I had heard the same thing - how with mods, Oblivion looks just as good as Skyrim. From what mods are out there, I think what people may have meant is that with mods, hentai anime girls look just as good in Oblivion as they do in Skyrim. :biggrin: Mine actually doesn't crash too much, but I run a pretty vanilla game. Only mod I have is that HGEC body mod that I installed because a custom race required it (and I removed that custom race because it didn't look as good as advertised). I did have the game freeze on me while loading an area after quick-traveling. The progress bar filled up, but nothing happened. Only happened once though. Yeah, I think Xpadder's dead zone settings have no effect on the sticks in game since the game is reading the sticks directly. I have my dead zone in Xpadder set to 100% and mapped to arrow keys, but that didn't affect the stick function in game. All that did was allow me to move left stick to navigate menus. If Win7 let you set the dead zone, then it would probably work, but the default driver has no such settings. Mine is the same way, just a tiny touch of the stick gets the character slowly drifting. Did you try changing your stick multipliers to 0.5000? I still have drift, but when the character drifts, it's real slow. It's annoying, but I'm not sure anything can be done. I think we'll just have to live with the twitchy movement.

I didn't consider the emperor's last words as a contract, because he didn't complete the ritual. It would have just been a personal favor, and as a professional assassin, I don't do personal favors.

Can't say I've ever done that... well, to game characters anyway, but thanks for the lulz! ;D

I've read many places it's not a good idea to use "placeatme" for named characters, because that creates a duplicate running the same scripts. I don't know why that's bad, but many sites say they don't recommend you use it. You should be using "moveto" to find a missing NPC. This would bring your original Jordis to you: prid A2C95 moveto player Or alternatively, this would bring you to your original Jordis (if you are curious where she is): player.moveto A2C95 If even after doing that, you can't see her, this might work to make her visible. prid A2C95 disable enable

I think with my current oblivion.ini settings, I have the sticks working as well as they possibly could. The direction is not as smooth and linear as Skyrim, but I think that's as good as it will get considering it seems like there's only 8 fixed directions so if I'm going forward and let the stick move even a little bit off axis, the character will snap to the nearest diagonal direction. Probably no way to improve it and I'm kind of getting used to it. I do still occasionally have drift, where once I stop moving, my character is still moving very slowly. I'm okay with the speed and responsiveness of the sticks now, but I don't have the 360 version so I have nothing to compare to. I do find it odd that everyone else's ini settings don't work for me. I'm running a vanilla game, vanilla drivers, nothing really customized on my machine. I've also confirmed Xpadder has nothing to do with the sticks - all it's doing is letting me use the triggers for block and attack, and ability to use the left stick to navigate up and down menu items. I'm finding it not so bad now, just had to get the feel for things and figure out which weapons work best on which enemies. I've closed the one gate, joined the Blades, leveled up, and started a bunch of quests. Took me almost 6hrs of total playtime to get to this point. Probably what helped me most is to wait 1 hour to refill health between difficult enemies. I did find that, at least at level 2, it seems impossible to kill guards. On one quest, I had to break into a house and I guess I got caught. I tried to kill the one guard who witnessed my crime, but I couldn't even ding his health. Yes, the UI is definitely not controller-friendly. I have the inventory/journal menu set to pop up with the B button like Skyrim, but once that pops up, I have to switch to the mouse to pick up or drop anything. I do have A working to equip, I thought I had X working to drop, but it doesn't seem to. I thought I had A set to pick up items from object/corpse inventories as well, but it only works intermittently. I've got my left stick set to where it also works as arrow keys to navigate the menus which works well to select and exit from dialog with characters, but in the journal, I found no way to move the cursor to that bottom row in order to select between inventory, quests, map, etc. I have to do all that with the mouse, which is very annoying. How do you switch between those on the Xbox 360? Maybe if I knew how you switch between them on the 360, it might give me an idea on a way to make it work using Xpadder. Not being able to move while over-encumbered is definitely annoying. My solution is to only keep the best weapons and use light armor. Hahah, yeah, starting with Shrek describes them perfectly! I think it's probably made worse that in Oblivion, talking to an NPC zooms right into their ugly mugs so I can see every detail or lack thereof. Being zoomed in so close with the ugly, blurry textures, also tends to draw my eyes to their weird head tilts and facial expressions. It seems like the weird twitchy head tilts were thrown in to make them seem more natural, but only having the opposite effect of making them seem very robotic. I can definitely see why they decided not to zoom in on the character in Skyrim. This close-up also makes me notice their necks. There is at least a blurry texture applied to the face and body, but not the neck and it stands out. They look like smooth cylinders. It's probably more noticeable since they have fat necks to begin with. The more I play, the more I get used to it, but then I switch back to Skyrim and really appreciate how much work they put into making Skyrim look good. I don't usually use body mods because they're global and I don't know if I want every female in the game having the body of a sexy porn actress. On the other hand, I'm playing a female character and when I was changing her armor, I noticed, "whoah, she's really packing quite a bod under that armor!" Then I remembered I had installed a custom race (and then uninstalled, since it looked nothing like the heavily Photoshopped pics). It had required HGEC female bodies and I still had the non-nude underwear body installed, so that explains it. I may try some HGEC default replacement armors so she can look good all the time, though it's not really the bodies that bother me so much as the NPC faces. Dunmer and orcs look extra silly in Oblivion (and it doesn't help that orcs are bright cartoon space-alien green). I would love a mod where Oblivion head meshes and textures are replaced with the ones from Skyrim, though I'm guessing it's not possible or it would have already been done.

Thanks, good to know the speed will increase! I did notice my athletics skill would increase the more I run. I played for a few more hours last night, and I think there are 8 distinct directions when using the controller: the primary 4, and then diagonals. I managed to get a more acceptable experience with my controller. For some reason, the commonly-published joystick parameters for the 360 controller don't work for me at all. Maybe it's because I'm using it together with the .xpaddercontroller file posted here: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Controls. Anyhow, the common parameters look like this: (from http://support.2k.com/entries/20022097-playing-oblivion-with-a-controller, and other websites as well) ;X = 1, Y = 2, Z = 3, XRot = 4, YRot = 5, ZRot = 6 iJoystickMoveFrontBack=2 iJoystickMoveLeftRight=1 fJoystickMoveFBMult=2.0000 fJoystickMoveLRMult=2.0000 iJoystickLookUpDown=5 iJoystickLookLeftRight=4 fJoystickLookUDMult=0.7500 fJoystickLookLRMult=0.7500 Not only was the left stick speed reversed (light push runs, far push crawls), but the aiming speed with the right stick was too fast and I had a hard time focusing on enemies. I changed the multipliers to where my ini looks like this: ;X = 1, Y = 2, Z = 3, XRot = 4, YRot = 5, ZRot = 6 iJoystickMoveFrontBack=2 iJoystickMoveLeftRight=1 fJoystickMoveFBMult=0.5000 fJoystickMoveLRMult=0.5000 iJoystickLookUpDown=5 iJoystickLookLeftRight=4 fJoystickLookUDMult=0.3000 fJoystickLookLRMult=0.3000 That fixed the reversed speed problem on the left stick, now it correctly runs when pushed all the way and walks when pushed a little bit. Right stick is also now much better and I can actually hit those scamps with my arrows. However, it could probably stand to be reduced even more as I noticed the aimer is a bit slower in Skyrim, which I am accustomed to. Using Xpadder, I have arrow keys mapped to a full press of the left stick which seems to work great for menus. Unfortunately, I still have the annoyance where if I don't push the stick super straight, my character will intermittently jump to either diagonal direction. I'm not sure if there's anything I can do about that. I also still have to use the mouse to handle inventory, map, and quests, which is annoying. Yeah, I think I pretty much started with all defaults too. A female Nord archer who is definitely scamp bait. It might save me trouble to start over with a dark elf, but I feel like I'm a bit too far in to start over. I found it helps a lot to save after every kill, and wait 1-hour if possible to restore health (really good tip that was mentioned earlier, I probably would have never thought of it). Dremoras were really difficult with the one-handed sword, but went down easily with the steel claymore which I didn't realize I had at first. I managed to close the Kvatch gate, but get killed in short order in the castle at the point where the soldiers quit following and the scamps use magic. I'm stubbornly determined to find a way through it without turning down difficulty though!

I always find it surprising how some people will find nudity, even implied nudity, to be more offensive than graphic violence. Just one of those things about society I'll never understand. Anyway, how did you make that pic? Was it done in-game with mods, or did you use a separate program?

I have the same problem on my nearly-Vanilla game. It's a common problem. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Louis_Letrush

I've gotten to where I've done just about all there is to do in Skyrim, so I also got Oblivion for PC and am in the same boat. Skyrim worked great with the Xbox 360 controller on PC. Oblivion's support for it is terrible. I tried the keyboard and mouse thing, and I hate it. It's not that I just need to get used to it; I've played through and completed entire games like GTA III and both Bioshocks using keyboard & mouse so I'm plenty accustomed to it. I just hate it, so I'm also trying to get the gamepad to work. So far I have everything almost mapped to where it works like Skyrim (using Xpadder), but unfortunately I still have to use the mouse to drop an item or change between inventory, quests, and map menus. I also can't scroll the map using the controller, I have to use the mouse for that. Like you, I've also noticed movement oddities. For me, my controller left stick seems like the speed works the reverse of the way it should. A light push of the stick and my character seems to run, while a full push of the controller slows down to barely moving. The only solution I found is to set the game to "always run" to where my character moves at the same speed no matter how much I push the stick. It annoyed me that pressing Capslock actually toggles it in Windows as well, so I mapped my controller's LB button to toggle "Always Run". Now the character moves as fast using the left stick as the keyboard in "always run" mode, which actually seems rather slow. Is there a "turbo run" mode, like pressing and holding LB in Skyrim? I also notice the character tends to drift, and changing direction seems quite awkward and not linear. It's as if the game internally only supports 4 directional movements of the character and nothing in between. Does my experience echo yours? Other than that, I've also found Oblivion gameplay to be very difficult compared to Skyrim! I'm just on the 1st quest after escaping the prison. There doesn't seem to be any way for me to get past that Daedra at the lobby of the tower in Oblivion without health potion - which I can't afford. I ended up having to high-tail it out of there, I guess I'll need to go hunting for life potion elsewhere before I try that again. You mentioned not being bothered by the graphics, but I'm actually finding that the NPCs look so horrible compared to Skyrim that it's quite distracting. They're really cartooney and ugly, I'm sure they look bad even by 2006 standards. I'll definitely need to find a mod for this. Only problem I'm finding is a lot of these "better faces" mods don't look anything like the screenshots, which I've come to learn are often highly Photoshopped glamour shots. There ought to be a rule that visual mods require unmodified screenshots right out of the game.

That's exactly what I had to do too. Going through the ground level door doesn't count.

2 ways I can think of. 1. Bring her to you, by going into console (typing ` key, to the left of the 1 key). Type: prid 00013488 moveto player (might just be able to type 00013488.moveto player as well, I haven't tried it that way) 2. Go to her. I prefer this, because when I lose someone, I'm curious where they went. To go to her, go into console, type: player.moveto 00013488

I didn't kill him till after I saw this post. The frenzy potion sounded like a good idea, so I gave it a shot! Nice idea, gotta get more frenzy potion for Heimskr. Also maybe that Blacksmith assistant woman in Windhelm who always says the sight of me makes her sick.

I'm male, but for 3rd person games, I usually always play a female character when given a choice. Partly for all the reasons that have already been stated, some were right on the money. I do prefer to stare at female characters all day than male. I am attracted to females so I do prefer to play what I'm attracted to. I do like to admire my attractive female character, dress her up in sexy outfits, make her prettier with make-up, make her more attractive. Like a Barbie. I suppose she is my virtual dolly, and I'm not ashamed to admit it! I suppose I do enjoy when an attractive female character is under my complete control, though I don't think this is a "twisted social paradigm" or anything that came from the media. Some games, like SR3, you can make the female very attractive and it has good boob physics so I like seeing her run around with her jiggly bits jiggling in tight-fitting outfits. I don't think that makes me pervy, I think that just makes me normal. Those aren't the only reasons though. Part of it is also because I like a strong female character. I don't think women should be tied down to gender roles. I like seeing a woman kick ass, not just in games, but in real life too, and I don't mean physically kicking ass, but I like to see women kick ass in their jobs, careers, science, math, and other typically male-centric roles. I love my workplace because we have an unusually high proportion of women in IT compared to other employers, and they are just as skilled programmers, if not more skilled, than many of their male counterparts. Even the department coordinator is a very capable woman who I respect very much. My wife started out doing clerical work, nothing more than a high school education, but went to college as an adult student, graduated c** laude, and worked her way up from support to QA at a software company. She has had to deal with a lot of sexism in IT, but managed to rise above it, and I'm very proud of her and admire her very much! So in gaming, I like a strong female character, who is kicking ass and rising through the ranks. All that said, in Skyrim I'm actually playing a male character. Partly because I play in 1st person view so I hardly ever see him, I knew he'd have female followers for me to enjoy anyway, and because I knew beforehand that there is marriage in the game and I wanted my character to marry a woman. It didn't occur to me at the time to use a female character and have her be lesbian. If I were to start over, I would probably go that route because I have no problem with gay relationships whatsoever.

Hahah, well, not really going through anything in real life, it's all good at the moment. Just that I'm in my 30s and married - friends all moved away, wife loves watching TV, so I have to find stuff to keep myself entertained so I got into gaming. I do play other games, started Saints Row Third after I started Skyrim, loved the game, but blew threw it super fast and went back to Skyrim. I did start LA Noire, love the graphics on it, but just not really getting into it and I'm sure I'll blow through it really quick too. I've heard good things about Mass Effect 3, but I did wonder if I should start with Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 in order to really appreciate 3. Don't know if I'd really care for CoD or BF3. I have CoD for Android on my phone and only played it for a few days. I think I get bored if there's not a good story line. I'm looking forward to GTA V as well, loved GTA IV and EFLC, but I usually blow through GTA games pretty quick - except I still haven't beat GTA III, it got way too difficult. Don't know what Diablo 3 is like, but I've heard a lot of hype so will probably have to check it out. So yeah, I don't limit myself to Skyrim, but right now I still enjoy it even though all the main quests are done. I think like Ironman5000, I also like to find everything and explore every place possible. I'll usually try to get 100% completion on a game even if part of it means doing something stupid like hunting and killing pigeons. That's another thing I like about Skyrim - it doesn't have a progress gauge, so I have no idea if there are more quests to be found or not which encourages me to keep hunting for them. Even last night before bed, I found a quest with Barbas the talking dog.

You can also pickpocket people to get lockpicks. It seems every single named character has at least one lockpick. I think I got over a hundred of them that way, when I was working up my pickpocketing skill.

I've been playing since middle of February. I still play, quite simply because, "I have nothing better to do." After all, it's way more fun than real life, at least it is for me. I can only stand watching TV or trolling forums for so long. I'm at level 51 now, and already played through every major quest, and almost every minor quest. I have nothing left to do, but to build up the skills I haven't maxed up to 100, find every spell, every word of power, and hope that in my scavenger hunts to find everything the game has to offer, I'll stumble upon a new minor quest I didn't know about. That may sound rather boring, but I'm used to playing Sims games where the game gets very boring unless I've set a specific goal to accomplish. Skill building is at least a lot more entertaining/interactive in Skyrim than Sims! When I'm through with this character, I'll probably start a new one just to go down a different path on the civil war quest to see what that's like. I probably won't bother repeating the other quests. I have played other games, but most, once I've gotten through the story, there's just no more reason to play it any more. Skyrim at least keeps me interested because you never know who or what might trigger a quest. I do wish like Sims, there were expansion packs or DLCs with all new quests and characters. Not sure what I'll do when Skyrim gets to where it's more boring than real life. Maybe buy Oblivion, I hear good things about it, some people even say it was better than Skyrim. Only concern I have is I wonder if I can get used to its worse graphics after becoming accustomed to Skyrim's fantastic graphics.

Strange that you can't get the XBOX 360 controller working right on PC. Mine works fine, it's pretty much plug & play. I had also ended up in this null space week before last when I went to Skuldafn and discovered I was ill prepared for the draugr swarm that awaited me. With no ability to fast travel, I successfully managed to climb over the mountain, only to discover this null space. I made a beeline for the monolith. PC version didn't seem to have any outline of windows or lights. After walking through it, I ended up running towards the horizon because it sort of looked like more mountains, although it wasn't. Just low clouds, I think. I never came across any platforms or deep spots, it stayed knee deep for me the whole way. I did see the dragon overhead at one point, but he never came down close enough for me to shoot him. My guess is this place exists because maybe the world has multiple different layers, all about the same size. They put Skuldafn on its own layer so you can't find it on your own, but since each layer is the same size, that's why there's just endless nothingness. Kind of like how caves and dungeons are on a different layer.

Mercer Frey is essential so no big deal if he gets in the way, you can't kill him. He doesn't really seem to get in the way much, either. He's only equipped with a sword and a dagger (and dual-wields them), so he prefers up close combat and he's very fast and aggressive. He can easily keep an enemy distracted, making it easy to launch spells and arrows at the enemy from a distance. He's almost TOO good, he often has weaker enemies dead before I can even get my weapons unsheathed. Sometimes he'll disappear because he's gone into another room, killing enemies before I've even seen them. I'll then mosey on into where he was, and find 3 or 4 draugr already laying dead on the ground. He also doesn't seem to affect stealth. I've never had sneak or pickpocket fail with him around. Give him a shot, I don't think he's like any other ordinary follower and if you want rid of him, just get through Snow Veil Sanctum. I've pretty much finished every major quest line with him, and have now started his quest and will have to fight him. If the way he fights is any indication, I have a feeling it's not going to end well for me. I've already worked up my Conjuration to 100, gotten the Twin Souls perk, and gotten the Dead Thralls spell in preparation!

I thought the face looks a lot like Nicki Minaj. http://melyric.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/600full-nicki-minaj.png Calling that "armor" is a stretch. It doesn't look lore friendly to me. I haven't found any techno rave clubs in Skyrim so far. Looks more like it belongs in Saints Row: The Third.

Nope, I didn't kill him. Business is business. How would it look if a hired assassin starts killing off the clientele? It would obviously be bad for business. He certainly came across as sleazy, but isn't everyone who'd hire a hitman a bit sleazy? I did pickpocket him for his gold and jewels though.

If you just need a little help, go through the Thieves Guild quest up to the point where you meet Mercer Frey at Snow Veil Sanctum, then don't go in. He'll follow you around, and he's a very strong follower. For some reason, Mercer wouldn't unlock the door at Snow Veil, so I was stuck with him, but turned out he's quite an asset. Sometimes he makes things a little too easy, but I prefer using him over cheaty console commands or turning down difficulty.

Did you already help 5 citizens of the town? You didn't mention that.

I just completed the main quest day before yesterday after months of completing all the other quests. I liked having Delphine and Esbern as followers since I suck at fights and needed all the help I could get. I didn't kill Paarthurnax. Just didn't seem right, after all the help he gave in defeating Alduin. According to the wikis, I'd already completed all their quests anyway. Only loss is they won't send me on any more dragon battles with the Blades any more, but no biggie, those dragons have a way of finding me without me having to seek them out. I did think they really should have added another quest to convince Esbern and Delphine that sparing Paarthurnax was the right decision. Or at least just a Persuade option that's accessible after Alduin dies. After all we'd been through together, all the Draugrs, Foresworn, and bandits we'd slaughtered together, all the cave dungeons we explored together, the least they could do is hear me out! Esbern was alright, but I never really cared for Delphine anyway. She was rather self-rightous, attacking me any time she caught me committing even minor crimes. I mean, seriously, I'm the freakin' Dragonborn, savior of all man-kind, and you're gonna attack me for stealing a piece of bread? At least Esbern would always come to my defense anytime Delphine went psycho.