Immortalsinner

I disabled automatic updates after the DRM patch. When 1.2 turned out to be a mess, I felt relieved for my precaution. Then I go to start the game, and what does steam do? START DOWNLOADING THE PATCH. I closed Steam immediately and tried to start my game with my cracked exe (aka the original 1.1 exe that would actually let me play my single player game offline). Too late, the damage had been done. Now I can't even play my game without it being broken. I bought a boxed copy. I shouldn't have to deal with this. Developers can expect more piracy every year as long as they continue to piss on people who actually paid for the game.

Probably because Bethesda thinks leather armor weighs the same as a leather jacket.

Of all the things you can complain about in Skyrim, you pick the levelling system? And hold up the broken systems from Morrowind and Oblivion as better? Please.

Oblivion was absolute trash. The combat was floaty and enemies had massive amounts of HP that they would just heal up. The dungeons were boring and the only loot you could find in them was a few potions, with no unique items unless they were quest related. Only one voice actor for each sex of each race, and every town was the Rainbow Diversity Team with no real difference between the races (I guess this was to help hide how few voice actors there were). The only good thing Oblivion did was the faction quests, which were a lot better than the ones in Morrowind or Oblivion. That first rat quest for the fighter's guild was a funny corruption of an overplayed fantasy trope. Morrowind was my favorite. It had a certain atmosphere that I just can't imagine any new Elder Scrolls game capturing. I don't just mean the setting, which was great. It's hard to explain, but it was a combination of no fast-travel, the way conversations were in text instead of voice acted, and the slow pace that made playing a more peaceful and less grating experience. I absolutely couldn't play Oblivion or Skyrim with the mod to disable NPC greetings. Morrowind also had a lot of other things going for it. The UI was better, the scaling was better, and there was a lot of powerful unlevelled loot to make exploration fun and rewarding. Skyrim was a huge step up from Oblivion and it was a relief to know that Oblivion was just a hiccup from a developer that normally makes great games. The combat is the best in TES series and the dungeon design is amazing as well. Magic is also now more than just colored projectiles. Unfortunately it has some problems that keep it from being as good as Morrowind. One of these problems is the way everything is voice acted, and many of the most verbose characters are also the most irritating. Besides that, the level scaling. It certainly isn't as bad as it was in Oblivion, and I don't even think level scaling is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I believe that it's necessary and that mods attempting to remove level scaling are misguided. It's just a little too aggressive, not in regards to the ways enemies level, which is fine and actually not that different from Morrowind. It's the loot scaling. High-level equipment is way too easy to find. At some point you start finding Daedric armor in every chest and it's a bit unrewarding to know that you got it because you got lucky on a RNG, not because you hunted to the ends of the earth to find it.

This is why I download cracks for all my steam games. It's extremely irritating to be told that Steam is "Good DRM" or that I'm stupid for complaining about needing to be online to play my single player games when there's an offline mode (which requires you to be online to use). I bought the boxed copy of the game, I shouldn't even have to deal with this crap. Pirates don't.

I've seen them pick weapons up off the ground but don't seem to use their own weapon that they already had equipped. You might need to take their weapon and then drop it near the body before you raise them.

But it's pretty much the same creation kit as Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout. Yet somehow it takes them months to release it. I really don't understand what they're working on that's taking so long, especially since they were already using it to, you know, make the game. Also, I doubt that the Steam Workshop thing is about charging for mods. It's about inconveniencing pirates.

All I want is smaller pauldrons so that the women don't all look like football players.

It had better be a joke. I wouldn't have even bought the game if the creation kit hadn't been promised. edit: No, after reading some of the other entries, yeah, it's definitely a joke.

Yes, it's VERY easy. I think that there are probably a good number of players out there who are stacking up armor well above the cap because they don't realize it's even there. I think that smithing high-tier armor is too easy as well. Ideally you should be using smithing mostly for upgrades and not smithing a full suit of Glass the second you hit 70 smithing. I'd like to increase the price of high-tier ingots to several thousand gold each, and make them much harder to find (maybe actually give the player a reason to seek out ore deposits). Dragon armor would be changed to require ebony ingots for smithing, if it doesn't already. I never bothered trying to craft any. I can appreciate the appeal of being able to wear any armor style you want. At the same time, it hurts the thing that I love most about TES games: going in dungeons and finding cool stuff. Finding a new suit of armor at level 50 that has worse stats than the stuff I've been wearing since level 5 kills that. Absolutely. The cap puts a very sudden stop to the progression of the player's defense, but without the cap the player would quickly become unkillable. That wouldn't be an issue if armor increased effective HP linearly, rather than exponentially. The problem as I see it is that there really isn't much better gear to be found. New armors will usually be worse than what you have smithed. The artifacts in this game mostly come in the form of Daedric rewards or masks. Most of the Daedric quest rewards are underwhelming to begin with and either can't be upgraded or can't be upgraded until the smith is at a high level. The only rewards that really felt like suitable artifacts of a Daedric prince were the Spellbreaker and the Ebony Mail, not counting the things like rings and staffs. Then there are the masks, which have good stats, but there are nine of them and you only have one head. I want to add in a bunch of artifacts from previous games and handplace them in some of the more difficult dungeons, but it seems pointless to add the armors in while players are already hitting the armor cap with steel.

That's unlucky. I'm on my second character now, and at level 32 I've already found four pairs of ebony boots and an ebony armor. The commonness of high-level armors is only half the problem, though. There isn't much excitement in finding it when you've already smithed your low-tier armor up until it's better than anything you can loot. The defensive values of high-tier armor needs to be upped, but of course you can't really get away with that because of the DR cap. I think that reworking the way armor works is going to be a prerequisite to any attempt to balance smithing. I can't speak much to how things worked in Oblivion, since I never got far without the overhaul mods and wore the DB robes for most of the game. I disagree. That's completely contrary to the point of leveling up. Players want to feel like they're getting stronger as they make an investment in their character, not weaker.

All I want is for the Wooden Mask to work anywhere.

Thanks for the graphs Jimhsu. I absolutely could not remember how to make those last night. Also I'm glad to hear that this will be easy to fix. My original plan was to make the loot system more like Morrowind. Ebony, glass and daedric armors would be made much, much rarer than they are now. As it is you start finding them in chests on the bottom of every lake and at the end of every pathetic bandit cave. In Morrowind, high-level armors were extremely rare and expensive, and assembling a complete set of Daedric armor was a monumental task. The problem is that their defensive value in Skyrim doesn't justify making them particularly rare. Firstly, this is because AR barely increases from armor to armor. Daedric only has twice the AR of Iron, while it was 8x higher in Morrowind. Secondly, you're able to hit the armor cap with just steel armor and a high smithing skill. Making the effective HP curve linear would also lessen the overpoweredness of smithing, since the marginal points of armor added on by the smith wouldn't be more useful than the intrinsic value of the armor itself. I agree with Jimhsu on late-game balance. If the player becoming a walking god of death by the end of the game it really doesn't concern me. That's part of the appeal of TES. What I have seen is a number of players complaining that they still didn't really feel strong by the end of the game because of the scaling. If you're forced to use thing like potions and spells to keep yourself alive in fights where you didn't have to before, you'll start to feel like you're actually getting weaker.

While planning a mod to increase the differences between the different armor tiers, I discovered that Skyrim's armor system is completely screwy. For every 100 armor, you gain 12.5% damage resistance. You get a free 100 hidden armor rating just for wearing a full set of armor. A warrior wearing a full set of mediocre armor has 100 worn armor rating, and 100 hidden armor, for a damage resistance of 25%. If it takes an enemy 10 hits to kill a completely unarmored mage, it will take 13.3 hits to kill the warrior in full armor. That 200 points of armor hardly makes much of a difference. The fully armored character only has effective health 33% higher than the unarmored character. However, compare somebody with the maximum damage reduction of 80% to somebody with 200 points less armor, or 55%. It will take 22.22 hits to kill the character with 55% damage resistance. It takes 50 hits to kill the character with 80% damage resistance, meaning that he now has 500% more effective hp than an unarmored character, and more than 200% more than a character with 200 points less armor. Keep in mind that the increase in effective health from 0 to 200 armor was only 33%. Every marginal point of armor becomes increasingly valuable, until you hit the damage cap of 80% (567 armor). Then, each marginal point of armor becomes worthless. This is broken, and there's no excuse for this when Bethesda had a far better system in Morrowind. In Morrowind, armor increased your effective HP linearly. The equation was (Damage * Damage) / (Damage + Opponent Armor Rating). This would increase your effective health gain linearly, and we wouldn't have the huge bulge in the effectiveness of armor at high levels that we do now. Assume again a character with 0 AR who takes 10 hits to be killed. Morrowind's system is a little more involved so we'll also say that this character has 100 hp and is being attacked by an enemy doing 10 damage. If we put this character in a suit of iron armor for an AR of 10, they now take 20 hits to kill for an effective HP of 200. In a suit of Dwarven armor with an AR of 20, they take 30 hits to kill. This changes depending on the damage of the weapon being used. While all weapons with equal dps will do the same damage against unarmored opponents, high burst damage weapons are most effective against opponents in heavy armor. Imagine a slow, powerful attack with a hammer against a suit of armor versus wildly swiping at it with daggers. This will give more of an incentive to use sneak attacks and power attacks against heavily armored opponents. tldr Skyrim's armor system is messed up so that effective HP barely increases so little from 0 to 300 worn AR that even mediocre +health enchantments are more effective, skyrockets between 301 and 567 worn AR, and then falls off completely. It should be fixed so that every point of armor increases effective HP linearly like in Morrowind. Will it be possible to fix this with the creation kit? Oblivion used a similar formula. Was it ever fixed?