What I would change about Skyrim

[mojodajojo]

First of all: I enjoy Skyrim immensely. I think I planned on disliking it somewhere deep down. I knew it was gonna be streamlined, and yes the rpg elements are dumbed down way too much for my tastes. However, it's still fun as hell. I enjoy it a lot more than Oblivion. It's not Morrowind but I feel like I'm in a world instead of playing a game. I had that in Morrowind and I've missed it. Also, I love melee combat in Skyrim; It's engaging without making my little brain cell hurt too much.

 

 

What would I change about Skyrim?

 

1. I miss spellmaking. (Morrowind & Oblivion)

 

2. I miss paying off my bounty through the thieve's guild. (Morrowind & Oblivion)

 

3. I miss acrobatics. (Morrowind & Oblivion)

 

4. I miss real time lockpicking. (Morrowind)

 

5. I miss weapon/armor repair. (Morrowind & Oblivion.)

 

On a sidenote:

 

I'm surprised at RedRayvn's opinion of the Creation Kit. I pretty much buy Bethesda games for their dev. kits. They are absolutely amazing, and I entertained myself with Oblivion almost solely by using the Construction Kit.

[Perraine]

"What I would change about Skyrim?"

 

Long rant short; Bethesta.

 

This says it all. Bethesda are good at building worlds, everything else they do its half arsed and phoned in. With New Vegas Obsidian showed them exactly how it should be done, it's a shame they didn't take any of that onboard and instead opted to yet again create a pretty but vacuous hiking simulator.

 

^ This ... :thumbsup:

 

And Skyrim isn't really any prettier or better than New Vegas in any significant way, at least not without (you guessed it, user created bug fixes and mods) and even then it's STILL behind the times ... Have a look what Crytek have created with CryEngine 3 (search on youtube) now THAT is pretty!

[thompsonar]

@mojodajojo

 

Yup, I miss all that stuff too. If they were going to take so much out they should have put much much more in. Another thing I miss from the Morrowind days, separate equip slots for legs, chest, robe. Why can't I wear a robe over my armor or clothes under my armor? I don't want to just equip a suit of armor with one click, I want to equip each piece. One thing with this that I don't miss (that many people seem to) is the "doll" in the inventory that you actually had to drag equipment on to. Don't miss that at all. I can just as easily look at myself in third person if I want to see how I look.

 

The thing with rings bothers me too. Why take one away? I could always justify that having more than one on each hand would cause some sort of magical disaster and either cancel the effect out or make me explode, but being able to only wear one... I just don't get it.

[BlackCompany]

"What I would change about Skyrim?"

 

Long rant short; Bethesta.

 

This says it all. Bethesda are good at building worlds, everything else they do its half arsed and phoned in. With New Vegas Obsidian showed them exactly how it should be done, it's a shame they didn't take any of that onboard and instead opted to yet again create a pretty but vacuous hiking simulator.

 

^ This ... :thumbsup:

 

And Skyrim isn't really any prettier or better than New Vegas in any significant way, at least not without (you guessed it, user created bug fixes and mods) and even then it's STILL behind the times ... Have a look what Crytek have created with CryEngine 3 (search on youtube) now THAT is pretty!

 

 

^Exactly this. All of it.

 

And the worst part is...since Beth have yet another engine that is lagging behind the times and the tech, when they begin work on their next TES game, they will once more need a new engine. And will once more need to spend half their development cycle desperately trying to learn their new engine. And once again, their game will suffer for this fact.

 

Bethesda needs to get a new engine. Like, yesterday. Frankly, I recommend you make IdTech5 work for you. Its gorgeous, it runs well, it has good physics. Rage was basically a Bethesda RPG in a smaller world. If not IdTech5, since you own it, pull it apart and build something based off of it, instead of Gamebryo (which is still present under the hood of Creation.) (Playgamebryoanimation script command, anyone?)

 

so yeah...two things I would change about my next open world RPG experience?

 

1. Gamebryo (gone)

2. Bethesda (gone as developer)

[PsxMeUP]

How in the fack can a game win any "of the year" awards when there's still 8 months left in the year??? :rolleyes:

[thompsonar]

How in the fack can a game win any "of the year" awards when there's still 8 months left in the year??? :rolleyes:

 

I don't really keep up with this stuff as I really don't play all that many games any more. But wouldn't have won for 2011 when it was released?

[RedRavyn]

Hey, mojodajojo! I don't think we've ever corresponded, but I always followed you on the Oblivion part of this site when I was still playing that game. I respect your opinions, but I also listen to other people -- especially those whose opinions on something are divided, because this indicates someone who knows the subject at hand thoroughly enough to see both sides of an issue.

 

I like to think I'm one of those. I'll give credit where credit's due, but I also won't hesitate to criticize when that is in order -- sometimes in the same sentence, even. My "opinion" of the CK for Skyrim isn't based upon personal use of it. I have it, but I'm not yet ready to delve into actually using it, because the first mod I have in mind will involve some scripting, and I haven't studied Papyrus, yet. At the moment, I'm content to play the game and watch what other people are creating.

 

I did quite a bit of private modding for my game and a friend's game in Oblivion. I hated the CK, there, from the outset. It had a funky interface, which wasn't even consistent from one module to the next, whoever organized objects in the menus had obviously been drinking (or worse), and it was, just generally, user-vicious (as I already mentioned). It was subject to periodic crashes, and I even experienced the packing issue which corrupts ESPs on a number of occasions. I still used it and learned to deal with its shortcomings and idiosyncrasies.

 

I've heard, as I mentioned, that the Skyrim CK has retained virtually all the documented bugs in the Oblivion CK. If it still has the same wonky interface, then I'll probably feel right at home when I start modding, again. For me, learning the CK for Oblivion was a long, up-hill battle -- not so much because I didn't have the skills to do it, but because the tool was simply not intuitively designed, and was clearly a quilt-work of separate projects, all stitched together with tape, glue, and prayers. I have experience programming. That's not the way you do things if you want to come across as a professional programmer, and the CK appears to have been hacked together by a team of amateurs that they dragged off the street and paid minimum wages.

 

That said, you can do some amazing things with the Oblivion CK, especially when you pair it up with some third-party software that does some of its functions better. I suspect the same thing is true of the Skyrim CK. It's still not an excuse for shoddy programming, which seems to be the primary agenda at Bethesda since the release of Morrowind.

 

How in the fack can a game win any "of the year" awards when there's still 8 months left in the year??? :rolleyes:

 

Politics. Enough said.

[BlackCompany]

Honestly, Red, the Skyrim CK is better. Objects are a little better organized. Granted, still not perfect and some things are not where you expect them. But organization is far better.

 

Also, the number of things one can do without scripting has increased dramatically. Conditions on spells, effects and enchantments do not require scripting. Sort of like Fallout now. There are "dummy" objects you can place in a cell - dummy weapons, armors, potions and books. Then check "respawn" on then and link them to a leveled list for random, loose loot in dungeons and other locations. Nice touch there.

 

also, templates. Good lord, templates. I overhauled all the enemy actors in Oblivion. Over a course of days, with numerous crashes when the CK ran out of memory. Did the same in Skyrim....in minutes. Because actors, like weapons and armor, use Templates. Add a perk or ability to a template actor and all the actors using that template get it. Want Two Hand swords to do more damage? Change the Iron Greatsword and every Iron Greatsword in the game gets the change - even enchanted ones, since they use the original as a template.

 

Keywords are also pretty powerful. I added swords to the Bleeding Damage perk for melee. One of the conditions I used to include swords and axes with the Keyword: ArmormaterialDragonbone/Dragonscale. This means my perk changes will automatically work with any mod-added Weapons using these items, so long as their mod authors remember to give the weapons proper keywords.

 

Last night I found out each attack animation for each race can be given different stagger ratings. This is why power attacks always stagger. Funny thing, this could have lent a ton of impact to regular attacks, as well, but Bethesda chose not to do this, for some reason.

 

The CK is an example of many things done right. Unfortunately, this didn't transfer into the game.

[PsxMeUP]

How in the fack can a game win any "of the year" awards when there's still 8 months left in the year??? :rolleyes:

 

I don't really keep up with this stuff as I really don't play all that many games any more. But wouldn't have won for 2011 when it was released?

 

Oh ya... Kinda forgot I didn't buy it when it came out on 11/11/11. :tongue:

[Perraine]

GOTY ? What a load of &%#$@ ... If ..."Respected Game Reviewer X" wants to be invited to a studio and get pre-release copies of games so as to be "The First to Review Game X" (and of course get that 'game studio x' coffee cup for their table) then they have to say nice things about the games they review, it's THAT simple, as posted previously it's politics ... Almost every review I have read/seen has said the same things, many mirrored here as well, but they always put a good score on the end and stop short of saying it's a buggy piece of #$%@ that's only barely playable sometimes and is obviously STILL unfinished ...

 

And really who cares if the game map is so large, with the so called and often sprouted "open game world" ? What possible advantage does that give me? Crysis for instance has some pretty large maps, certainly large enough for me to feel like it was an open world, and my actions in one part of the map actually had an effect on another part, so where is the advantage to a single world map? When it's almost completely empty? You can run for miles with only the occasional rabbit to slow you down, but it forces the game to have huge amounts of data loaded into memory resulting in constant cashes, and then have loading screens in other areas for no reason? (Jorrvaskr is a perfect example, why the loading screen to the living quarters?) It's just laziness pure and simple! Why is it that the game can remember (or is stupidly forced to record) the location of a sword that was dropped by a bandit I killed when I was lvl3, now that I'm 3/4 of the way through the game and lvl 61 and it's been weeks/months in game time, but it can't remember that I'm now the Full member of the companions? If one more guard asks me if I fetch the mead, I'm gonna go on a rampage I swear!

 

Yes the game COULD be utterly fantastic, but in it's present state? Not even close!