What are you playing?

[gamer0004]

Is the world more developed than in Oblivion? And is is more believable, with a real sense of progress? That was my biggest issue with Oblivion, defending the emperor together with his elite bodyguard as a weak level 1 prisoner, liberating Kvatch on your own as a level 3 character &c.

[Jaedar]

Skyrim starts with the player and [NPC] battling through an imperial forces. It's almost believable in a way I suppose.

The UI though, oh god is it horrible. Bethesda has a history of shitty interfaces harking back to oblivion, and further for some people. But skyrim's is the worst one yet, and it is one of the worst I have ever endured, perhaps even the worst, although it has heavy competition from The Force unleashed. I believe it is best illustrated with an example:

Let's say you want to equip a sword in your left hand, and a spell in your right.
Press Tab to enter the menu
press left twice(mouse doesn't work)
Scroll to weapons and press left(again, mouse not work)
Find the weapon you want and right click it to equip in your left hand(keyboard does not work iirc).
Press right 5 times to reach the spell list, and then left click the spell you want to put in your right hand.
Press Tab to finally escape the torment.

Compare this to Morrowind, where it was simply
Press RMB
Select the sword and the spell with LMB
Press RMB

It is so fucking horrible I might ragequit the game entirely just because of it. There is no way anyone ever played this with mouse and keyboard and went: Yeah, this is good, no need to tinker with it. And if someone did I suggest bethesda stop hiring Lobotomized people to do playtesting.

In fact, it is MAJESTICally bad

The worst part is that because the interface isn't broken in a superficial way(such as not displaying enough stuff on the screen), but rather fundamentally, there won't be any day-1 mods that fix it.

Oh and did I mention the game is poorly optimized? Shocking, I know, a console port having poor interface and optimization.

[Jonas]

http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=28

[bobby 55]

http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=28

FEAR THE GUMMY BEAR!

[Phasmatis]

Haha, the bears look like they're about to hug you to death!

[Zaine]

Aww... Who Wants A Hug?

[Dragon]

I should bring back the dragon-horse hack I used on Nehrim... but I doubt this engine supports nif files

[Mr_Cyberpunk]

Let's say you want to equip a sword in your left hand, and a spell in your right.
Press Tab to enter the menu
press left twice(mouse doesn't work)
Scroll to weapons and press left(again, mouse not work)
Find the weapon you want and right click it to equip in your left hand(keyboard does not work iirc).
Press right 5 times to reach the spell list, and then left click the spell you want to put in your right hand.
Press Tab to finally escape the torment.

THIS, the damn weapon/spell/inventory interface is totally broken and doesn't work with a mouse. The UI is easily one of the worst I've used in an RPG, if not the worst and wreaks of console.

This is also easily the most exploitable elder scrolls in the series, there's a lot of things you can do that bypass most of the game-design mechanics, which I call piss poor QA testing because seriously this should be the number one things they should be testing for else the player just assumes its intended to be that way. Thing is even when I thought I wasn't exploiting the game, turned out I was. So yeah not cool, Morrowind and Oblivion had similar problems to, but not to the point of making entire game design mechanics redundant- EG. THE ENTIRE SKILLS SYSTEM, well almost, its enough to totally make the point of grinding and leveling up pointless.

Its buggy, it crashes, and it doesn't look that great. But at least its no where near as bad as Oblivion was, so that's at least something of an improvement. But God of RPGs, this is NOT. You'll get some enjoyment out of the game sure, but the game is piss easy and once you're done leveling, there's little incentive to keep going other than to finish the MQ or grind the infinite "Kill X many creature" missions.

I hope they release the creation kit soon, there are some issues with the controls apparently. It also has mouse acceleration, I can't believe how many developers leave mouse acceleration in the game without at least a toggle in the options. It's an ini tweak for crying out loud. I, as someone who purchased the product, shouldn't have to search through ini files just to make the controls work properly arg!!

This as well. I agree completely.

[gamer0004]

Hm. This doesn't sound very good. Still on the fence about buying it.

[Zaine]

Me too, but I would have been getting the 360 version first as I'm not sure if my pc will run it correctly. If It can I'll wait for the GOTY edition like I did for Oblivion. BTW what kind of exploits are we talking about here? I know the way you could finish the main quest of oblivion very quickly with paintbrushes as I did it too. I had previouslycompleted the main quest the proper way before that, with a level 1 character. It was just too easy. Even beat the arena with a level 1 too.

[gamer0004]

Also, does anyone have a positive experience with Skyrim so far? I mean I really like RPGs and it's been a while since a proper fantasy RPG (that is, not counting Mount & Blade) was released that I really liked. It's been since Morrowind actually. Oblivion was no more than meh, though Shivering Isles was pretty cool. The setting was cool, in any case, the gameplay not so much I thought.

In fact, now I'm thinking about it, the plot of SI was way better than the plot of Oblivion. Players were already experienced when they first entered the Isles so one would expect them to be capable of great deeds. Ignoring that, since players actually visit a completely different realm (which is almost like a dream) it can at least be defended that a level 1 character would be able to kick ass, being a sort of chosen one and all that. Also, the David and Goliath kind of stuff in the beginning, when you need to get past some kind of huge monster, is fairly reasonable. Makes a lot more sense than a weak prisoner protecting the Emperor. That's just silly. A large monster might be defeated by cunning, but I can't make sense of a weak prisoner being as good a fighter as the elite, well armoured bodyguard. And if the is as good as said bodyguard, there is no sense of progress. However, if a player defeats an enemy not by sheer force but rather by cunning, there can be a sense of progress and a player can do awesome stuff right at the beginning.
Still, auto-levelling sucks. It's also weird, as it was never a problem in Morrowind. I can imagine guards levelling somewhat as well, because of the problems in Cyrodill, but not by as much as the player. Also it's extremely weird to have citizens levelling at all.

[Dragon]

If you liked Morrowind but not Oblivion then you should think twice about getting this game.

[shadowblade34]

If you liked Morrowind but not Oblivion then you should think twice about getting this game.

I liked Morrowind, but hated Oblivion, but I like Skyrim. What do you suppose about that?

[Dragon]

If you liked Morrowind but not Oblivion then you should think twice about getting this game.

I liked Morrowind, but hated Oblivion, but I like Skyrim. What do you suppose about that?

I liked Morrowind, but hated Oblivion and can't stand Skyrim. What do you suppose about that?

[gamer0004]

That doesn't mean everybody has the same opinion, obviously... Shadowblade, why didn't you like Oblivion and why do you like Skyrim?