For all the talk of leveling and the game never out pacing the character, I still somehow managed to bork my guy. I grinded Smithing and other B level skills up way too high way too fast and gained too many levels. As a result the game was spawning enemies my Nord couldn't handle. I was being friggin two shotted by random enemies in dungeons. In Oblivion/Morrowind talk, I took Acrobatics and Athletics as major skills and then grinded them. I dunno what I was thinking.

I've rolled a mage, this time an Imperial with Legion ties. So far I'm really enjoying it. After playing as a heavy armor two handed specialist, Magic feels like easy mode. Thanks to Alchemy I'm packing about 30 health vials. Fun times.

If you grinded blacksmithing and enchanted/smithed the relevant stuff you should easily come out on top, even without abusing the blacksmithing/alchemy/enchanting loop.

I hope I hit the level cap in TOR before I leave on the 13th so I can go back and finish Skyrim's main quest. I was right near the end I think.

Sadly Skyrim isn't perfect in that department. I went that road, too. With my current character, I took the other way around. I completely ignored blacksmithing / alchemy and most of my enchanting skill came from disenchanting / reloading existing echantments.

Going mostly the combat onehanded / archery road took me up to lvl37. But then I had to push blacksmithing / enchanting agressively, as even Forsworns basically 2-3 shot me. Maybe going down one of the guildquests to the end could have helped in getting better armor, though I doubt it.

Though even after 300 hours, it's stuff like these two the kinky Haelga part 1 and part 2, that keep me going. Or leading 4 bandits with well placed arrows towards a mammoth that beats the hell out of them. ;)

I've been enjoying my Mage named Maximo Aleo. He's about level 10, taking much longer to level but that's because I'm trying really damn hard not to bork him. With my Nord, I was at where I am with this character and six levels higher. All artificially boosted through Smithing.

Skyrim's an amazing game. But at the same time I find it frustrating. For instance, there's a bug that prevents you from marrying Lydia. If you're on a console you're screwed. But with one simple console command on the PC, you can re-enable the option. Lazy bug catching there.

They clearly put in major effort to re-balance Alchemy. It's much harder to get going in that, you level slowly, and at level 20 and with 40 skill in it I'm still not turning much of a profit.

On the other hand, they've made Enchanting more accessible then ever and it totally breaks the economy. Every vendor carries grand soul gems, or better yet, black soul gems and every dungeon has some petty/lesser/common.

So what I've done is I've set myself up a sword that soul traps and fire damages. Since I set ST to one second I got a crazy amount of charges on it. I did the same thing with Lydia. I give her all the petty/common/lesser I find and I keep the Black Soul Gems. As we adventure, she fills all the lower ones, and I use bandits to fill my BSGs.

Even with the lowest gem of petty I can put a turn undead enchantment on an iron dagger and get a profit of 200-300 for a randomly found item. And since I'm farming money using Enchanting, I've gotten my skill really high, which has allowed me to use those BSG and vendor bought Grand to create obscenely powerful magicka related items giving me 350-ish magicka and 100% regeneration.

I just find it funny that they worked so hard to fix one aspect but broke another. Not that my uber death god mage is complaining.

Well, a balanced economy was never a strong point of any TES game. It's also rather hard to do and no matter how hard you make it, with the amount of content in the dungeons / caves department, you're bound to break it sooner or later.

That said, I haven't done much with alchemy so far, but it looks leveling-wise in the same league as in Oblivion for me. Though even that you can break rather easily once you know certain "parts" of the game. Like which 2 ingredients give the most gain or that specific place that nets you 400+ chaurus eggs.

My question would be: isn't that the part where the players roleplaying should come in? For example, I took a self supporter (i.e. never buy that ore / leather / soul gem / potion / whatever that you need right now) role, instead I'll go find / craft it myself. Yes, that breaks the economy too, probably even faster if you really want to - but combined with my explorer role (no fast traveling, only carriages allowed) I play longer to achieve it.

You can level alchemy faster if you have the thief stone activated, rested bonus and making potions that sell for a lot - paralysis, slow, damage magicka regen and damage stamina regen. Add a giant's toe (this has a hidden modifier that increases potion buffs to 300 seconds) and it gives a lot of points on leveling (giant toe is optional however).

The broken thing about crafting in skyrim isn't one profession alone - its combining all of them: blacksmith, enchanting and alchemy - which turns your character into a powerhouse.

That is if you're not doing the resto potion exploit.

I tried heavy roleplaying with my original character. I didn't have the patience anymore to walk everywhere. I love the idea and I watch LP's where people do that and love them, but personally I can't handle it. I'm doing light RPing right now, but nothing like walking everywhere I go or not waiting around. My mage is power hungry but he's not evil. He uses BSG's but only on those who attack him indiscriminately. That's my justification anyway.

With this character I've only used Alchemy and Enchanting and with Alchemy I've been pretty indiscriminate with what I make. Haven't used any exploits either. The only things I've done is use a few console commands to fix idiotically simple bugs.

Ok, sorry to necro this, but it's the general dumping ground for Skyrim views, and I promised in another thread that I'd provide my opinion. It's almost certainly all been said before but I can't be bothered to read 20 pages of posts, if this sounds like you've heard it before, feel free to ignore me.

My opinion: Skyrim is average at best. I will base this argument on the things that Skyrim provides as I see it. I fully expect to get responses as to other things that it offers, however please explain why these things are above average compared to other titles.

Combat:

This is apparently improved from Oblivion, though apart from tinkering with the damage amounts, and speed I don't really see how. I went through the entire game using Power attack, Power attack, Restoration, Power attack etc. Perhaps there are other strategies, but they didn't jump out. Certainly distance isn't one of them, as you start backing off, but the strike hits you anyway despite being about 4 metres away.

There are so many better examples of a combat system, that could easily be integrated into an Elder scrolls game. Severance: Blade of darkness springs to mind. That game is really old, but still puts Skyrim to shame for a combat system. Die By The Sword was a flawed system, but was at least trying something more than the mundane.

I don't see how skyrim combat can be described as anything above average when it is as involved as pressing a button either for a long time, or a short time. There may be some nuances, but it really doesn't distinguish itself in this regard. They could have included dodging, counter attacking, or just more options.

So if you want a game with good combat, Skyrim is unfortunatey just average.

Stealth:

The bar here has been set pretty high by Thief, and so Skyrim has quite happily limbo'd it. You have a stealth button, and people may or may not see you because of it. No indication as to how visible or noisy you are being, and I really couldn't see any strategy towards staying hidden. Most encounters involved crossing a huge highly lit area, and if you did manage to creep up on one person, the act of 'taking them out' would alert every one else. It was the same in Oblivion, but they've really had time to sort this out. I can't believe anyone could describe this implementation of stealth as anything beyond average.

Magic:

No spell making now, just a few really obvious spells. They take ages to train, are basically just a damage or heal effect, and don't even look that good. You can summon an atronach, freeze someone, or make a light, but to be honest I think magic is a step back from Oblivion, and probably on a par with Daggerfall. I wouldn't even class this implementation of magic as average.

Better implementations: All other modern roleplaying games, and most older ones.

Atmosphere:

Such a general word. I'm told London has so much atmosphere, but I don't enjoy breathing it. Skyrim on the other hand initially impresses in this regard. It's huge, it has incredibly detailed graphics, and it generally looks great. That doesn't take long to wear off. Perhaps this is because we're spoiled by all the great looking games out there, but I think I found as much mood in Terraria as Skyrim. There are randomly placed wolves, bears and cats that will attack you, the odd bandit, perhaps a spriggan. That's about it, you walk around in bad weather, with people saying the same things to you. It's not bad, in fact in this respect I'd say it was above average, but after a few hours you just walk past all those people before they've finished speaking.

The more specific cases of 'involvement' such as characters on quests etc. I unfortunately suffered a bug where character speech was incredibly low volume, which didn't help. However even with the volume up massively it didn't seem that involved. Some guy saying "yeah, I used to be a priest for the evil guys, but now I'm a good guy, lets go kill some people". There was nothing to stand out in the whole immersive world thing. I was completely emmersed (is that a word, I'm coining it if not).

Quests:

There are only fetch quests. Nothing else. No big decisions, no investigation, it is simply go to this place, kill the people there, collect item, return it. It is less sophisticated than World of Warcraft. Way below average.


I think that will do for now. I would ask people (as I put a fair bit of time into Skyrim, and would like to get something out of it). What is above average about it? Where would you say, "Oh if you want a good implementation of ??? then look at how skyrim did it"?

I think a lot of it is that it has all these elements inside a single game. Severance was mostly about combat. Thief was mostly about stealth. Skyrim has both of these and lets you do them in a big world you can go anywhere in.

I get that, but firstly I feel that, given those games are really old, they could have done it all better. Secondly, I don't play a game to do everything, I play a game to do something well. If I wanted to do everything I'd go outside and actually experience life (not going to happen).

Not an argument at all, I just felt I needed to justify my statement in the other thread. Feel free to counter my points, I don't get offended by constructive debate.

You don't mind? I'm not mad at you, far from it, I just have that Omigosh-he's-missing-the-awesome downer feeling you get when someone can't 'get' one of your favorite games. Y'know what I mean?