saintjimmyz

I would clump together factions into groups that fit your character. With the complete lack of content Skyrim has, I only need three to cover everything I would want to do, and to be honest I doubt I will follow through with the third one, as I am not that interested in that style of play: 1) Nord male warrior, using at first a pair of swords but moving onto two handed axes, heavy armour. This is my 'canon' dovahkiin; even though there is no strict canon dovahkiin yet, this was the one I felt was closer to the true dovakiin than a argonian archer. No offense to argonian archers, of course. I ran the main questline, the companions and the stormcloaks parallel to each other, which I felt was very rewarding as it stretched out my advancement greatly. The main driving motive in making decisions was 'What would be best for Skyrim?' This wasnt just 'side with the nords', this was what I felt would msot benefit the native people and the land best. This did involve me actively seeking out and killing Thalmor, as well as siding with the Stormcloaks in the war. I was very much a crude blunt instrument, much like your archetype warrior, although I did smith - but a zero tolerance for alchemy or enchantments. 2) Altmer female 'battlemage' - destruction and restoration, a fair amount of enchantment and alteration, light armour and 1h for those 'ah feck out of magica, the dude has 3 hp, Ill just poke him with a stick before he kills me' moments. This was harder, mainly due to the underpowered magc system, and I never got past level 25, as I knew that I was not going to get any more powerful, and was struggling with the spawns at that level. This character was essentially an unofficial Thalmor, and I trained her up in the wild for the first few levels, then went and did the Mages Guild, really stretching out the missions and training up between them. Once the Mages Guild was done I blitzkreiged the Imperial Line, and called it a day. The overriding motives lean towards Imperial/Thalmor, but with a bit more cruelty and greed involved. Ill probably revist this character/this character type once mods with an alternative magic system are released. 3) A theoretical third character type. I say theoretical because Ive gotten a few characters with this sort of rough build up to level 5 or so, before scratching it and starting afresh. Its a stealthy character, using archery, 1h and light armour, as well as a few stealth/theft skills thrown in, who will do both the Thieves Guild and the Dark Brotherhood simultaneously. I am unsure about the race/gender yet, as Ive tried a few things like female nords (essentially a forsworn) and male/female bosmer, but they are ending up far too similar in appearance and style to 2) (apart from the magic, of course) so I get bogged down and stall. Not sure what Ill do, but that would be the third character I need to complete the lot. I think Ive done 90% of random side quests with 1) or 2), so thats not too much of an issue. The overriding motive here would be personal gain, as well as personal gratification - I kill people/steal stuff simply because I can.

To be honest, Mehrunes is not an antagonist, he is just a boss at the end. He features in almost none of the rest of the game, and antagonist implies he actually take spart in the plit. Alduin isnt much better, but at least you see him before the final battle.

Thats how they did all of the vocals. Need a unique female nord accent? "Get Sarah the receptionist over here, she is a 5th generation Russian immigrant."

Yes, it is worth buying. Does it live up to all the hype? Not quite. Even so, there are only a handful of games that can compete with Skyrim, and many people think that desptie its flaws it is still head and shoulders above anything else avaliable at the minute. I got it on the PC for £25, that was pretty much standard UK price for PC. Thats about $35/$40 I think, so whoever bought it for $70 got royally screwed. Even on consoles it was only £35, $55 ish I think.

Levelled loot. The introduction of levelled loot in Oblivion killed the game for me, and it is barely better here. In Morrowind, Dwemer weapons, ie weapons belonging to a lost civilisation, were fairly rare, and aside from a few important characters the only way to find them was to explore Dwemer ruins. Ebony and Glass were both made from incredibly rare and expensive materials, and so only a handful of sets exist in the game. Daedric armour and weapons are part Daedra, when you wear them you a essentially wearing a minor Daedra. Super rare. There are only one, maybe two or three pieces of each type in existance. This is how it should be. In Oblivion and Skyrim, when you start off, no one has these pieces of equipment. No one. A little Dwemer is found placed in ruins, but that is it. Suddenly you hit a magic level, and all this super rare equipment is suddenly found on the corpses of dead bandits, in chests left in burial tombs, everywhere you look. WTF? Its so hard to get immersed in such otherwise great games when the immersion is shattered every time you look in chests or enter combat if at a high level. I find myself redoing the first dozen levels of a character just so I can experience a game that makes sense. Bandits are poor. Therefore they wear awful gear. At the very least, bandits now wear fur and iron armour, and 'only' their weapons are stupidly rare. Shame the same principle didnt apply to wandering mercs, of course...

You dont even have to do that. Just head down to the sewers and find esbern, I never spoke to brynjolf at all.

OP: Resetting the 'death' timer is never pointless. You are saving the world. The world will end eventually, even if it is billions of years in the future when the earth (or 'nirn') crashes into the sun. You can never pernamentally save the world. Does that make preventing the apocalypse pointless? Of course it doesnt. With regards to the second point: Why is it that so many people treat the 'racism' of the stormcloaks as a cardinal sin? The Thalmor and the Empire working with them have on a regular basis imprisoned, tortured and executed people, just because they are suspected Talos worshippers. Yet people overlook this and say 'OMFG TEH STOARMCLOKS SED TEH N WORD!!!11!!' Racism is an incredibly minor flaw in the circumstances. In modern western society, where people are not dragged from their homes and executed on a regular basis, people start to focus on such petty wrongs such as racism and sexism. Skyrim is not like that. People fight to save their own lives, to save the lives of those they love. They do not fight to stop the marginalisation of the dunmer community in Windhelm, its a minor issue. A third option in the civil war should be focused against the Thalmor, it should not be this politically correct saint who turns the world into a happy place where little children can freely skip through meadows filled with flowers.

You will spend hours on the game not seeing one at all, and then youll suddenly hit level 27 and have more glass daggers than you know what to do with. Yet another reason why I hate levelled lists.

Being in offline mode does not stop the huge drain on your system resources. Using that analogy I used earlier, all offline mode does is stop the thug from checking your documents every time you sneeze, it doesnt get rid of the huge dead weight sitting in your car for no purpose.

love that :) he missed one thing though, that fat useless security guard won't prevent that car from getting stolen right off the lot...he ends up bound, blind-folded, gagged and tossed in the trunk by thieves who never have to deal with him again. while people who actually bought the car have to deal with everything quoted. He also steals your perfectly good car, including all the chocolates and loose change you keep in the glove compartment, and replaces it with a newer model without asking you, regardless of what state the new model is in.

You are the dragonborn, not the krakenborn.

First 15 levels, you need at least 10 of them to go for health. After that, you can let stamina catch up fairly easily. It really depends what level you are going to, as my warrior doesnt use magic or alchemy, I was sort of 'capped' in my mid 30s as all my skills that I actually use were maxed out. In my opinion stamina regen is far more important than max stamina, so I got to 200/250 stamina then maxed out health from then on.

A moderator from another forum summed it up brilliantly: "Skyrim is like a car, and Steam is a 5'8" 350lb security guard that sits in the back seat making sure that you don't drive anywhere you aren't supposed to and checks your drivers license and registration every time you get into the car to make sure you didn't steal it. He also occupies the entire back seat so you can't take your friends anywhere, and his extra 350 lbs causes your gas mileage to drop like a rock. Oh.. and he doesn't contribute ANYTHING to the reason why you bought the car in the first place, and he's certainly not in the car to protect YOU (the dealership that sold you the car will, in fact, argue that you never purchased the car, are merely leasing it, and the fat security guard is there to ensure your compliance with the terms of the lease)." Steam contributes NOTHING. NOTHING. Instead it just slows down everything, and is a royal pain in the arse. Steam is a parasite that needs eradicating fast, but unfortunately it is also a parasite that pays developers to force customers into installing its crap.

The whole business with the thalmor has been stated before, but to all you empire asslickers, remember this: the white-gold concordat was signed 26 years before the events of Skyrim. That means the empire has sat there and allowed those high elf witches run their empire for a whole generation, without showing any real signs of fighting back. The whole 'we had to sign to end the war, we are rebuilding to overthrow the thalmor' argument is utterly redundant, if the empire was going to fight back against the thalmor they would have done so years ago. As such, its clear that the empire intends to lay down and take it from the thalmor indefinately. Such an empire has lost any real right to rule in my opinion, and as such the stormcloaks are the logical option. The choice is pro-thalmor or anti-thalmor, and if you are anti-thalmor then the stormcloaks is the only logical option.

Here in the UK we have age ratings similar to the movie age rating system - 8+, 12+, 15+/16+ and 18+. Having a nude option instantly knocks Skyrim up a category to 18+, which will dent sales, for an incredibly minor benefit to a small number of users. I have no problem with people having nude mods, I have used some myself, but IMO it should stay out of the vanilla game both to keep the rating low, and to prevent the game being banned in some countries. Nudity may well get the game banned or censored in some countries, depending on their individual rules, and it is just not worth the hassle for the developers.