Monglor

That doesn't actually affect the difficulty of the task at all. Save metadata file has the body and voice options - so that you can just open with your chosen text editor and swap them, it's the easiest thing. Won't it have an effect on the gamestate, there are some gender specific romance options for example.

Have been thinking about this and is there maybe some way to trigger the original character creation menu to run again?

The idea that you could just breeze through multiple attacks with multiple Skyrangers seems off to me. If I have three Skyrangers and can thus confront three attacks, that demands a hell of a lot of troops. Eighteen just to fill the ships. There will be losses, short term through injury, not to mention three times more deaths. A greater number of rookies will have to go into service, much more high end equipment will need to be built, instead of having a single very powerful team you'll have to spread resources much, much thinner. I think it would make the business of putting a combat effective team into the field much harder than it is now. It would also make SHIV units actually useful.

Not tried these out yet but have read these work too: Ken Levine Joe Kelly Otto Zander

There's a group of hidden super soldiers you can dig up. Sure there's a list of them somewhere.

I think this would be a very good change to make. The original game was harder in some respects but you were able to go into missions mob-handed. Sure maybe I'd lose ten guys on my first terror mission, but the job would get done anyway. In the new game you're in a world of trouble after just a couple of losses, particularly in the early game. From a mod perspective I suppose the thing to do would be to go over the maps and just add a bunch of new spawns. Maybe a dozen or so, just in case people wanted to go that high with the numbers.

Glad I searched first, rather than started a new topic. :D Big sea creatures would be brilliant. I don't have a problem with not being able to kill them if they are underwater anyway, I mean not everything has to be killable right? What I'd go for, if I had the skills, would be some sort of really big whale type beast that was very evasive and not aggressive. Just something to look at in the sea. Could swim around with it in the same way you can walk with mammoths, if you could catch up to it.

I'd be very pleased if Bethesda got rid of plates and bowls etc as items that can be collected, just for the hassle caused by accidentally grabbing the crockery instead of intended items.

Have to agree, One of the best RPG series in recent years is the STALKER series, and they don't have levels, or even really many stats at all. Mass Effect 2, an absolutely classic RPG as well, punches well above its weight among third person shooters too. I think it is inevitable that as games writing improves the need, and especially the desire, for complicated numerical systems will fade. That doesn't necessarily mean that I think RPGs need to be twitch games, based on reflexes and skill with the controls, rather I think that the better RPGs let the players play their own game. I think Fallout New Vegas has so far been the best game to pursue this course, because it is so liberated in its design that you practically don't even have to fight to do well. Skyrim, ultimately, you're going to have to do a lot of killing, New Vegas, you can get really far with just a kind word.

I liked Morrowind but it never grabbed me. Oblivion did grab me, but it always had big, clear flaws- they took away much of what made Morrowind great and added many things that were simply not quite ready. Oblivion remains a fantastic game though. With Skyrim I think they've brought back a lot of what Morrowind lost in terms of atmosphere and that sense of adventure, not to mention flying bad guys. Past that though they have taken many of the ideas that Oblivion brought in and polished them up. Combat is better, crafting is better, characters are better realised, the quests are better and bigger etc. The main thing for Skyrim though is the world. I still get blown away by some of the views. It's not just beautifully rendered, which would be a technical issue, it's beautifully designed. They have built for all intents and purposes a beautiful environment. Seriously somebody should hang the world of Skyrim in a gallery.

I'm not a huge fan, because she's not particularly brilliant in hand to hand combat, and is entirely useless at everything else. One bonus I did find for her though is that she'll often get detected long before my stealthy character does, and as enemies head search her they can sometimes move past me completely if I'm hidden, and then they get shanked.

I don't think it's strange to see comparisons. As far as I can tell there are quite a few parallels between Elder Scrolls: Arena and the sort of game that Dungeon Master was, so it could be argued that Elder Scrolls has evolved along the same sort of lines. Morrowind definitely had a lot of the harshness that Dungeon Master had (in terms of being quite unforgiving in many ways, though maybe this could be due to my playing Dungeon Master as a nine year old and not quite being wise to its ways). Must confess I probably wouldn't have made the leap from Dungeon Master to Skyrim though, but then I was playing all the other games along the way. :) Must confess now I'm contemplating some sort of Dungeon Master mod. It probably wouldn't be too hard to build the DM game world in the editor, then just populate it with the nearest applicable monsters, and purple worms.

Bah. In my day, playing STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl with the Redux mod, you were lucky if you could carry much more than a fairly low key weapons and ammo load, much less crazy loots, so I'm not fussed about the weight limits. That said I either have the sidekick carry dragon bones or I join up with a crew that'll give me storage space. Crafting materials and dragon bits do need a place to be stored. But that said, I don't think that's unreasonable. You're an adventurer, not a snail.

Comparing sales to CoD is a bit harsh. Skyrim is a massive reasonably hardcore RPG (in the sense that you're going to need to sink enough time into it to learn a foreign language if you want to get it properly completed). CoD is the annual close quarter FPS event, it's kind of an obligatory game for fans of that genre, who are very numerous. That Skyrim is even selling well is a great achievement for a game of its genre.

http://s3-ak.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/terminal01/2011/7/11/12/enhanced-buzz-5824-1310401115-13.jpg

This. No muss, no fuss, no arrow sticking out of my face.

I don't think blacksmithing is a warrior skill per se, it's more of a civilian skill. I'd have said the four skills for a warrior would be two handed, one handed, block and heavy armour. I think if you specialise in just a two hander or just a weapon and shield you might not die in battle but you might well die of boredom. Or maybe go two handed weapon and archery. I think you could put together a reasonable pure civilian character too. Alchemy, speech, blacksmith, enchantment. Now that would be difficult to play. Overall I don't think the game likes pure classes, because pure classes are very much niche operators and they are quite unrealistic within the framework of the game. I mean sure a warrior might be at home on the battlefield, but you're not going into battle, you're going up a mountain or into a dungeon or whatever. And a pure mage might be great at doing research in the college, but of course he's compromised when he's up close and personal with a bunch of tooled up brigands. The rogue has the potential for versatility, as a class in gaming terms it always has done, but that said if you did play it 'pure' you're going to lose any fight that accidentally becomes fair.

There were a few reasonably successful deeper darkness mods for Fallout, so I'd expect that Skyrim will get darker nights and darker dungeons soon. I agree though it is very light. I can see why it's light at night outdoors, because of the snow and the usually clear skies and bright stars and moonlight, but inside dungeons underground ought to be total darkness. Light spells and torches ought to be necessary for working underground.

Most of the game size is textures. If it needs a lot of textures, big game. If not, well here we are. I'd expect if and when a fully redone high resolution texture pack comes out for Skyrim it'll easily be bigger than the entire game is currently. Most of the really cool stuff going on in Skyrim won't take much hard disk space to actually make happen.

I think Skyrim is just a very, very well made game. It had to be, to work on the consoles. And sure PC gamers hiss and rage about console ports but personally I'm happy to see the discipline it's brought regarding system requirements. You look at PC exclusives like Arma 2 or The Witcher 2, you need a supercomputer. Because Skyrim was aimed squarely at a fixed, and somewhat antiquated, console platform us PC users get a game that runs like a dream and leaves plenty of scope for modding.

I hate to break it to folks, but if you approach a single player game with intent to game the system in order to get the most power as quickly as possible then, yes, you may become over powered and yes, you might well break the balance of the game. The game allows for a great many different styles of play, but if your style is to ramraid your way to the most powerful equipment in just a few hours, well, you've only got yourself to blame if the game is less fun as a result. A game like Skyrim, which offers all sorts of freedom, is not going to be very difficult to 'beat'. But beating a game isn't always the most fun way to play it. That said I do think that the blacksmithing system, while fine for that exploratory first play through, is in need of work. It feels like something out of an MMO at the moment, because it's in effect a money sink. Really you should be making money as a blacksmith, not losing it. There's something fundamentally out of whack with that dynamic. The game also misses item condition levels. I didn't miss them at first, but I think as you go through the game having invincible equipment does affect the long term balance of items.

Wow thanks, that ought to see me all right. :D

More space, less stuff. Well, same amount of stuff, more space. There ought to be a sense of wilderness, of wandering. The big things for me though that really kind of damage the idea of space in a medieval fantasy setting are maps and lights. The perfect GPS system you have in Oblivion, and most games, really makes the world feel tiny and manageable. Maybe it's a bit too hardcore, but I'd love there to be a version of the game where you have to navigate manually. I've had to do this in Arma 2 a few times and it's really challenging and adds to the atmosphere. Reading the map, looking for landmarks, looking at a compass, finding your way. When you add that element to game play the world feels a lot bigger. Really when you're just essentially moving in direct lines between accurately placed map pointers, does it even really matter how big the world is? Dare I say it, it'd be nice to have a game where you can actually get lost. Darkness is also something that games in this setting miss. If nights were properly dark, as in pitch dark as they should be on a moonless or overcast night, and if caves and dungeons too were absolutely unlit, then the world would feel bigger again, because your area of awareness would shrink. Caves and underground locations wouldn't just be places you pop into for a look, they'd be foreboding, they'd be unwelcoming. Plus if there was a constant pressure to get to where you wanted to get before nightfall, that'd be cool too. Especially if you didn't have, as mentioned above, a perfect GPS and a map that knew exactly where you were.

Hi folks, I hope this isn't a monstrous breech of forum rules or something, but I wanted to start a new Oblivion mod build and play it through before Skyrim turns up, and I was wondering if I could get a few pointers. I've modded Oblivion pretty thoroughly in the past, then modded Fallout 3 and now have a big modded New Vegas game on the go, so I'm pretty confident with modding in general, but it's been a good few years since I put a successful build of Oblivion together and I was wondering what the best mods are to go for, if any new tools or big packs have appeared lately, and if so have things changed much? My traditional big three of mods that I'd start out with are: Obscuro Overhaul Mart's Monsters Francesco's Wossname And I normally bung Qarl's texture pack on. But that said last time I put a game together it was about three years ago, maybe more, so all kinds of things might be around now. I've looked at the top mod lists, but I've found these to be a bit of a mixed bag in terms of reliability. I tried Deadly Reflex way back when too, but it didn't really grab me, has it improved much since the last couple of builds? Lastly, I'm probably going to build a female rogue/light fighter kind of character, are there any good mod packs that spring to mind for that sort of build? Any help much appreciated. I'm feeling a bit like a newb again at the moment. :D

I'm getting a similar problem with Goodsprings and the bar there specifically. Just started a new game too. Can't say for sure what mods I have in common with the list above yet, (that'd take a while and some cross referencing to give a precise answer) but I recognise a few. My install was working fine until I started messing with it today. Main things I added we the big texture pack and the EVE graphics mod. My hunch is that it's graphics or something, but my hunch is an idiot.