What are you playing?

[Jonas]

I haven't been in jail

I'm pretty impressed by the jails, it seems like every city has its own jail with its own unique means of escape if you so choose. Sadly, escaping jail is pretty underpowered since you remain wanted for obvious reasons. Worth doing just to see how they've implemented the different jailbreaks from city to city

[Phasmatis]

Are you wanted permanently if you commit a crime in Skyrim? I wonder if Bethesda learned from Reneers guard overhaul (I think that's what it was called) where you are only wanted for a number of day depending on the crime, that would make escaping from jail a viable option.

[EER]

The only prison I've been in is in Markarth, and that was for a quest. I have however tried to stop a beheading in Solitude by casting unrelenting force, that didn't work out so well. For the guards of Solitude I mean. Unfortunately some guards are immortal apparently, so I had to yield at some point (and reload).

[gamer0004]

So I fixed tha shadows as well. Now I can finally enjoy Skyrim as it was intended.

[Jonas]

Are you wanted permanently if you commit a crime in Skyrim? I wonder if Bethesda learned from Reneers guard overhaul (I think that's what it was called) where you are only wanted for a number of day depending on the crime, that would make escaping from jail a viable option.

You're wanted permanently until you either go to jail, pay your bounty and hand over all stolen items, or bribe the guards if you're in the Thieves' Guild. However, you're only wanted in the area where you committed your crime, if you're wanted in Windhelm you won't necessarily be wanted in Riften. If you go to jail you can either serve your time (which erases the bounty but resets all current progression towards the next skill levels) or escape (which does neither). If you pay off your bounty and surrender all your stolen items, you can sneak into the jail afterwards and empty out the Evidence chest to get your stuff back.

Also, and I think this is fairly glitchy, it's my understanding that you're supposed to be able to kill off all the witnesses to your crime, and then the bounty will disappear again. This... is a bit unreliable though, and I'm not sure why. At this one farm, I accidentally attacked a guard while fighting a dragon (look, I was aiming for the dragon and the guard just got in my way - totally not my fault). Instead of paying some stupid fine, I just killed him and the other two guards plus the blacksmith who'd seen it all go down. It told me I'd killed the last witness, but the next time I met a guard there was a bounty on my head anyway and I had to bribe him to make it go away. I'm not really sure what's up with that, but in theory it's a pretty cool system.

Of course with my sneak/archery build I can pretty much kill whomever I want in full view of the public without repercussions, I just need to find a far off place to crouch with a sight-line to my target, then they'll be dead in short order and nobody will have any idea where that arrow came from. This has made the Dark Brotherhood quests... slightly unchallenging

I was sent to kill an Argonian treasure hunter diving in ship wrecks on an island off the north coast. I was warned that he would probably seek refuge in the water. I killed him from the coast across the water, put a poisoned arrow right through his mouth from something like 500 meters' distance. When I got back, the Dark Brotherhood guy complimented me on taking on an Argonian in his native environment. Heh.

Another time I had to kill an Imperial in one of the major cities. I decided to wait for him in Windhelm, followed him around when he showed up, then snuck into a dark side alley while he was standing in front of the palace. It was perfect, I had a clear shot at him and nobody could see me. Poisoned arrow directly to the back of the head, he was dead in one shot. Then I snuck through the alley and around the building and came up the other side all "oh my God this man has been shot! WHO would DO such a thing?!", planted some false evidence on his corpse while the guards weren't looking, and made off snickering like a villain.

[DDL]

I totally think we need more screenshots in this thread.

[Jonas]

Your wish is my command.

Here's the argonian I was talking about. Lizard never knew what hit him:
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/7656 ... 1838729624

I outfitted Lydia with a full set of Dragonplate, each piece (plus a ring and an amulet) named after her:
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/7656 ... 815378380/

This guy has been cloned a couple of times after I did a quest for him, not sure what's going on there:
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/7656 ... 798542800/

Not a lot of people even manage to get close to me in a fair fight. Well, as far as I ever let the fights get:
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/7656 ... 991709406/

There's a lot of corpses with arrows sticking out of them lying across Skyrim:
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/7656 ... 460236254/

Or sitting, for that matter:
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/7656 ... 405716258/

I have an unfortunate habit of using print screen to take screenshots, which saves them locally but not to Steam like F12 does. I have a ton of screenshots (most of which depicting corpses with arrows sticking out of them!) on my harddisk, I'll upload the best of them to Steam (and use them for a blog post) when/if I ever finish this playthrough.

[DDL]

ooooo! It's a very pretty game, isn't it?

The dead dude by the altar, the dead dude in the snow, the dead dude sitting by the fire..even with the somewhat morbid theme of "dead dude + X": wow, it looks beautiful.

Also, you have a much more mature naming methodology than I do. I flutter between "scientifically methodical" and "horrendously childish" with anything that lets me add custom names: my fire spells in oblivion were called things like "flameDam01_rad_07_test03", which is awful, but then my giant flaming daedric death mace was called "Doomcock", which is worse.

[Jonas]

"flameDam01_rad_07_test03"

Like a programmer.

"Doomcock"

Like a British programmer.

(Sorry.)

And yeah it's pretty. I think it could get prettier if my PC was even better, it's running on High and not Ultra, but it's very good and I'm quite happy with it.

It gets better actually. I just didn't upload all of the "woah dude landscape" screenshots I've taken. I figured pictures of dead people would be more entertaining.

[AEmer]

The game _is_ very pretty. It performs very well, too.

It has problems and bugs and what have you, and I wish I could get some massively large texture sizes for everything (though my computer couldn't run it....so...), but it's a very pretty game most of the time.

It only takes a second to find something ugly due to the limitations of todays technology, but as you play it, it tends to look great.

There's certainly still room for improvement; enemies could be more varied and animations could certainly be improved, but the biggest thing is probably how solitary the Skyrim playing experience is. There's some quests which include a tiny bit of companion-adventuring, but generally, that's the biggest "hole".

[Hassat Hunter]

Didn't we have a Skyrim topic?
Or was this it... it's hard to tell...

[AEmer]

Didn't we have a Skyrim topic?
Or was this it... it's hard to tell...

We did, but that's 15 pages, which is too big to follow for some peoples temperaments =P

[gamer0004]

Why do people say Skyrim looks great or even gorgeous? It's locations are great, but it's not exactly very advanced in the graphics department...

[EER]

Compared to what I'm playing now, it's pretty good in the graphics department:

[Phasmatis]

In reply to Jonas further up - That's annoying, I've avoided jail so far even though I'm a Mage Assassin/Thief but I've recently finished a quest and now have a 1500 bounty, guess I'll stay away from Solitude from now on, it doesn't matter, it's only the capital of Skyrim.