LE Turn It Back Into A RPG

[elvinkun]

The controlls are killing me thos, and the mous feels like slug moving around your screen. Only way to fic it so far is to make it overly sensitive, but the fact you can do tripple 360 spin while aiming bow isn't that cool either.

 

To adjust the mouse to Oblivion sensitivity move the setting just above the half-way line on the slider :thumbsup:

 

Anyway, I totally agree with OP although I didn't realise it till I read that post. Something about Skyrim didn't feel like an Elder Scrolls game and I think it's probably the removal of S.P.E.C.I.A.L. I think this is an essential component for this style of RPG as otherwise it ends up feeling like more of an action game. I think greater customisation is needed to make you invest more in your character. Skyrim's graphics are great, but there is simply too much in the world for the designers to have made the level of detail the same as, for example, Call of Duty or Uncharted. Having a faceless character works in those games because you're following a fairly linear path and performing fairly routine actions. In the Elder Scrolls, though, a large part of gameplay (for me at least) has been creating your own hero with custom traits and seeing how they fair in the fantasy world, thus creating a fantasy story centered around your character, not Bethesda's.

 

Having said all that, I've only been playing for about 5 hours so I may be pleasantly suprised later on. :biggrin: Also the game is GREAT!

 

Oh, you don't have the mouse problem, obviously, lucky you. You misunderstood, the problem is that even on max, you have to move the mouse like 50cm on your table to look on the sky and so on. So you actually have to adjust the settings way above maximum out of the game, which works, but also might get a bit too sensitive in certain situations. If I had it just above the middle, it would probably take me 15 minutes to look to right :D

 

And I'm not sure why people are going "Omg the graphics are so ugly, it's the ugliest in 15 years omg" ... I find it to be very nice, especially considering the huge size of the map and the number of details everywhere. And it doesn't even fry your computer along the way.

[maboru]

Everyone here have raised valid points on their personal preferences for game play, that is of course what modding is all about. I too loathed Oblivion's level up system at first, until I got the hang of efficient leveling (5/5/5) after my umpteenth play through! Now I very much enjoy figuring out in advance which SPECIALs I want to raise in advance and what tactics I'll need to employ in order to achieve it. In order to even do that you have to create your character with one primary skill in each SPECIAL category in such a way that you can raise the secondary skills that employ that same SPECIAL and avoid those that don't. In other words; you have to choose your battles wisely! The SPECIAL I miss the most is Luck. In all the previous Beth RPGs they implemented Luck very imaginatively (Wild Wasteland Trait anyone?) and that resulted in very interesting, though subtle, almost random surprises that made the game that much more enjoyable for me.

 

At any rate someone has already started to tackle the Font problem with two more appropriate (to me) replacement fonts. I'd link to it here but the mod page server is presently overloaded and I can't get in! As far as the mouse problems so many people are having I can say that I'm not experiencing any glitches, probably because I use a trackball (again, not to everyone's taste.)

 

Well, back to the game (I'm adjusting to the new leveling system but it's not nearly as challenging for me and seems to go too fast, after level 10 I think I'll load one of the leveling slowerdowners!)

 

[bTW, I saw a retexture mod that included the Battle Map, something I've either missed so far or haven't got to yet, but it looks like that may be an easy port to replace that pretty, but almost useless, game map!]

[kibblesticks]

 

You misunderstood, the problem is that even on max, you have to move the mouse like 50cm on your table to look on the sky and so on.

 

 

 

Ahh that sounds terrible =/ I'm really glad I don't have that problem.

[macole]

I must be the only one in the TES world that played Oblivion without regard to max points per level. I did spend hours determining the SPECIAL and the major skills that I felt closely defined who I was and what I wanted to do, but I didn't intentionaly match them up to get the so called efficient leveling 5/5/5. I think I spent more time getting my birthsign right than the SPECIAL /skills relationship. Once the game started I just went about doing what I did and leveled accordingly. No worries, eventually it all maxed out at the end.

 

I did miss the hours sometimes days I normally spent creating my character. I always thought that the combination of atributes, birthsigns, major and minor skills is what made the TES game unique among the RPG games. Made it something more than Dungeon Siege or Diablo So I guess that SPECIAL feeling is gone but it doesn't mean that Skyrim is not a good possibly great game just that I'll have to get used to soemthing less than what I was hoping for.

[maboru]

I agree that the game is still fun to play albeit in a different way. I still miss what we had in the past and I hope some one can come with a mod that can bring back at least a little more individuality to character creation. I'm just a bit concerned that Beth may take this approach to FO4. There are plenty of good Adventure and FPS franchises out there already but there is only one true RPG franchise (MW, OB, FO3 and FONV). Again, in my opinion, and I hope Beth realizes what a hold they have on that market and go back to mining it even deeper.

[maboru]

Well some decent (to many of us) fonts have been released and some one already has a beta UI overhaul posted and the new NMM is in open beta so now I guess we just sit back and wait for the CK (shortly after the upcoming patch I should think) to be released and see what happens. (And Hope that the Nexus servers can handle all the traffic!)

[eend123]

I'm probably in the minority here but after a few hours of wandering about Skyrim and going all "OOO!...Ahhh!" I realized I felt more invested in the NPCs than in my own PC and that was preventing me from achieving a normal new game addiction. The reason for this is that I felt I didn't so much create a new character as I simply put a new name and face on Drake (or Lara Croft as the case may be.) I miss agonizing over all the character generation choices as in a traditional RPG and having only three pseudo-traits to level up with a perk thrown in makes Skyrim feel more like an Adventure game or a FPS. I know, I know,...wave of the future. However...

 

What I'd like to see (once the CS is released) is a mod that actually allows you to create a character (like in the olden days!) rather than letting the game create the character. Doing this while maintaining game balance would probably be a bear with the new layout but with a lot of modder and player input it may be achievable. Putting S.P.E.C.I.A.L. back in is probably not an option but something along those lines may be able to be implemented.

 

And those new fonts! After all the truly excellent work Beth did in creating an unbelievably good hard, dirty, gritty, warts and all Dark Age world and then tabbing out to the computer screen of the Starship Enterprise is simply too incongruous for me! I'd like to see the fonts (if not the layout) ported over from Oblivion or for those artistically inclined maybe even a whole new set. Other than that I've adjusted to the WASD UI (like in the Olden Days before computer mouses!) but it's probably easier for me with the G-13 gameboard.

 

And another thing! I want my HUD back! While gaming, I don't so much feel like I AM the character rather that I'm driving the character and when I drive I like to see my dashboard.

 

Again, I'm just speaking for myself and possibly some other old school gamers and now that I'm comfortable with TESEdit and Wrye Bash maybe I can find the time to take on the CS and mess around with these ideas myself but it would certainly be better if some talented individual would make a go of it first.

 

Thanks.

 

Thanks dude, you've just explained how i feel about the game. Couldn't really put my finger on it until now.

 

Sure it's a very very good game and the level system in Oblivion wasn't the best one either, but there are just some details preventing Skyrim to make you forget Oblivion completely. It's the lack of customization and besides that it's not a nameless character. You are not yourself and become someone during the story, in fact you've already got a name just after the start of the game, you are the dragonborn. And it''s not only the character, the world itself doesn't give you a choice either. No thinking about where to live because it's all rough and white, Whiterun comes closest to being a nice place. It just doesn't suck me into the game as in experiencing the adventure. Its a very good game really, but it keeps feeling as a game, where i am controlling a character someone else developed. Like playing Zelda, a superb game, but it's not you/your character, it's Link.

 

All that makes me not really want to RPG but just want to know how the story goes on, how the next cutscene looks etc, like in an adventure game. Also, despite of the dragons Skyrim lacks the epicness of Oblivion. For a big part this is caused because no one really seems to care about it, they just seem to be to busy with little matters as which family is better, or just hating Stormcloaks. Only when there's been a recent dragon attack near a town there is a change a guard will refer to the fight. The world just doesn't come together in one big shared problem for al npc's which together with the earlier complains prevents the game from 'coming to life'. The presence of dragons doesn't fix this, since they're to easy to defeat and don't really intervene in the story and the environment, they're just random creatures you can walk into.

[Selvec]

I'll put it down as a baseline. Skyrim is more like Fallout: New Vegas then it is like Oblivion or Morrowind. The game pretty much is based completely on Fallout: New Vegas. Not a bad thing if your into Fallout: New Vegas, but bad if you were expecting a more RPG feel, or a return to a more hardcore RPG style of Morrowind. Don't get me wrong, that doesn't make this a bad game. What it does mean is the game is very streamlined, and yes that is because of the console market. No I'm not bashing consoles, just stating the facts. Another point is that the games radiant story engine only really develops stories around killing. Go here and kill that. Kill this and save the person. Go with this person and kill that. Oblivion was far more varied in its quests of this nature, and Morrowind was even more so.

 

I like Skyrim. I'm not sure I'm really ready 100% to compare it to Oblivion. Not till it gets a few expansion packs, 10 or so DLC's, and a s*** load of mods that pretty much correct every single issue the game has. My opinion of oblivion and morrowind are far to coloured by the presence of excellent mods such as FCOM and OOO to make a fair comparison of the two games, and its likely this is the case for many other who are posting on a modding forum.

[eend123]

My opinion of oblivion and morrowind are far to coloured by the presence of excellent mods such as FCOM and OOO to make a fair comparison of the two games, and its likely this is the case for many other who are posting on a modding forum.

 

Ofcourse do mods have some influence on the experience, so I tried to keep my complains limitted to the main quest. I played Oblivion twice, the first time was back in 2008. I never heard about mods so I only played the vanilla main quest, the guild quests and did some character development, kept me busy for several weeks. I remember the first two weeks or so fell in my holiday and the first thing on my mind when I woke up was Oblivion.

 

A year ago I installed Oblivion again on my new computer and played a new game for the second time, and it's been only 4 months ago I discovered tesnexus and the game got it's third life.

 

So after all I don't think it's just because of the mods...

Edited November 16, 2011 by eend123

[maboru]

Mods do of course make re-playability shine as well as put more money into Beth's bank as a result through continuing game sales long after initial release. Heck, there are still mods being released for Morrowind so I'm not the only person still playing that game too!

 

One of the biggest complaints about franchise games is that they become "stale" (much like movie franchises and long running TV series) because they tend to lack further creativity and lackluster story arcs. That's probably why Beth made these changes to the TES franchise and judging by the sale figures and server problems resulting from so many people hitting Skyrim sites, they have been quite successful (even taking into account that much of that traffic is from people who are having trouble getting the game to even work!)

 

Back to my original request though, I really don't see an easy way to re-implement SPECIAL while maintaining game mechanics but there may be a way to add some character customization beyond choosing a Race. The Guardian Stones in the game are basically the old Class choices from previous games and the ability to change which one you use throughout the game is an interesting idea (and there's already a mod that allows you to have more than one active at a time). However, for me at least, I always chose "Custom Class" in the past and created my own specialties with my own Class Title. Perhaps there is a way to add that to the character creation menu at the start of the game. Some talented individual may even be able to script it with voice files. Instead of the Imperial Officer just asking for your name he could also ask you for your Class. Of course slowing down the leveling system would have to be implemented as well in order to maintain balance and there's already a couple of mods that do that.

 

Worth some consideration at least?