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Some screens of Thorron Ulfhowl, my Nord Warrior.

http://imgur.com/a/1XTVr#0

I've been focusing on 1-handed, Block, and Light Armor. Yes, I have found better armor than the Stormclaok Cuirass, but I refuse to wear anything else.

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Jedi Master Tir-Jin Meteos, The Order of 66
PC GAMER - T.J. Hafer

Excellent. I wish I could post a screenshot too.

I have been concentrating on One handed, Heavy armor, destruction and conjuration.

Is a horse worth it? I have been saving to buy my own house.

30 hours in I have enough to buy about 25 of them. So yeah, pretty worth it.

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Jedi Master Tir-Jin Meteos, The Order of 66
PC GAMER - T.J. Hafer

Well what does it gain you by having one?

It's quite a bit faster than sprinting to get across the world map. It's a big deal for me since I never use fast travel.

Granted, you can get an even faster mode of travel if you do the Companions quest line...

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Jedi Master Tir-Jin Meteos, The Order of 66
PC GAMER - T.J. Hafer

I am going to avoid fast travel as well. Will my housecarl be able to keep up? Will my horse die easily? Will I miss things I would see while walking?

I generally travel alone, so I don't know if companions are able to keep up with you while mounted. Horses are actually really tough compared to Oblivion. I've found that mine can be wailed on by two or three enemies at a time, and it will live long enough for me to clean up their friends and come to its aid.
The one place horses do die really easily is from falling damage, so watch out for that.

As far as missing things, I haven't found I miss much. If I'm riding along and see someone or something interesting, I dismount and check it out.

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Jedi Master Tir-Jin Meteos, The Order of 66
PC GAMER - T.J. Hafer

So far, I've traveled almost everywhere with Lydia since having gotten her. As an alchemist-mage more on the tissue-paper side of things than the stone pillar side, it's nice to have her along with me running in with the massive battle axe I gave her and smashing my foes to pieces while I pick them off with arrows or spells from a safer distance.

Lydia, admittedly, doesn't run nearly as fast as I do. When I keep to the main roads, it's not such a problem. I'll run and she'll lag behind, but then I'll find some alchemy ingredients to pick, which gives her time to catch back up to me. When I start climbing mountains, Lydia doesn't much care for keeping up. I jumped in the river and swam down it for awhile catching a large manner of fish and killing some slaughterfish and after about five minutes, I realized Lydia was nowhere to be found. I stopped and moved the the shore and waited for her.

She did not come.

Now, I panicked a bit. She was carrying some epic loot that I'm not strong enough to just lug around all the time.

Thankfully, I've learned that if you ever lose your Companion, and you haven't told him/her to wait somewhere, if you fast-travel to a city, he/she will reappear at your side. I fast-traveled back to the city I was closest to and Lydia was right there, looking at me with her weird, slightly disproving gaze. Still had all my loot and everything. ^.^

I would imagine that if you get onto a horse, it would be even harder for your companion to keep up with you, though. I'm not sure if you can get them onto a horse as well or not.

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One time I lost Lydia in the hall. She was just running into the wall. I ran back past her and then she followed me.

I've gotten her stuck in a couple of traps in various dungeons. I've found that any time you enter a new area though (that is, you watch a loading screen), your companion is with you when you start playing again.

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Huge post I know, feel free to skip whatever parts you want.

I've probably put about 50 hours in so far, and have been neglecting everything else in my life. But I absolutely love it! Definitely in my top 5 games of this generation, maybe even higher than that. Even though I've played it so much, I still feel like I've barely started the game. I've only been to three of the big cities I think, and probably less than a quarter of the map. I did a little for the Companions and some of the main quest, but haven't even touched the other three main guilds yet. Most of my time has been screwing around in the towns talking to people, reading books, learning the crafting and alchemy systems, exploring the environment, completing random favors, and going dungeon diving for phat lootz. I'm going to side with the Empire over the Stormcloaks, but haven't done much for them yet.

I'm mostly playing as a Breton battlemage, about level 25 so far. Using swords, light armor, destruction, and restoration magic in combat. My Conjuration and Illusion are also really high because for some reason those skills level up really fast, but I haven't used those too much or put many points into their perk trees. I also have put a few random points into some of the crafting skills, like smithing and enchanting.

One reason I play so slowly is that I'm a total kleptomaniac and have to take everything of value that doesn't weigh too much. I pretty much search every container, and every nook and cranny for loot or valuable stuff. It might be a compulsion, but at least money actually matters in this game, so it's somewhat justified. I haven't even joined the Thieves Guild yet, so I don't have anywhere to sell my stolen stuff. So I have a ton of stuff just waiting in my house to be sold, mostly jewelry, fine clothes, and potions. I should probably get going on the Thieves Guild, haha.


Here are some of the things I really like:
- The dragon fights are absolutely epic, and I love the music.

- So much attention to detail in the world, which is all the more amazing because of how massive the world is.

- Weapon combat (melee and bows) has been slowed down compared to Oblivion, but I think it's better. The weapons feel like they have weight, and each hit hurts more.

- Some of the new skills make more sense, like having One and Two handed weapons instead of Blade and Blunt.

- The leveling system is more intuitive and makes sense. You can really just level your character naturally, and the game works fine. I won't go into the intricacies of leveling in Oblivion, but it was very flawed in many ways. Since there is no downside to leveling up in Skyrim, it sort of encourages power leveling, but it's necessary by any means.

- I love the Perk trees. So much better than just numbers.

- More voice actors! (Though the quality of the acting can be hit or miss).

- Gear in the world doesn't change to match your level. This was my biggest gripe about Oblivion Bandits will still use crappy iron swords when you are level 30, and the rare materials are actually somewhat rare (or take a lot of perks to make).

- Similarly, enemies don't change to match your level, so if a dungeon is too hard at first, you can some back later and kick butt.

- Activities in the world. Many are pointless, like chopping wood, but it adds to the immersion.

- It says when you have cleared a dungeon, and they stay cleared. Also, the dungeons feel more unique and the loot isn't random.

- No Oblivion! As in the Oblivion Gates. Come on, you know you hated them!

- Followers are a nice addition, although they could have been implemented better.

- The items and magic menus are much more manageable, and the favorites menu is awesome.

Some things I didn't like:
- In many ways the NPC interactions felt very shallow. It's better than Oblivion, but not as good as Fallout 3 or NV, and certainly not as good as the Bioware games. There just weren't enough dialogue options for many characters. I know technical restraints and all that, but talking to NPCs and observing the AI is a huge part of the game to me.

- Followers especially suffer from the aforementioned gripe. There are like 50 possible followers, but most of them are just flat characters with only a couple lines of dialogue. I would have preferred it to be more like Fallout, where there are around 8 or so, but each of them had more depth. I never felt like the followers in this game were real people with personalities, or that I had any meaningful relationship with them. I know you can get married in the game, with about 50 potential spouses (of any sex or race lol) and it will disappoint me if the romance system is as shallow as this.

- I'm not entirely sold on the "magic takes up a hand" thing. It works alright for pure mages, who don't need to hold weapons, and for pure warriors or assassins who don't use spells. But if you're doing a hybrid like a battlemage, it makes for more menu management during combat. In Oblivion I could just hotkey up to 8 spells, so I could use my weapons and main spells without having to pause too much. The favorites menu is faster than the main menu in Oblivion, but I feel like I need to use it more often. It also makes some combinations really impractical, like a battlemage who uses a two handed weapon. This was never an issue in Oblivion.

- The graphics can be hit or miss. Overall the world looks really beautiful. But some of the textures up close can look terrible. It's so random, some things look fine, others (like tree stumps or rope) look really ugly. Also, textures can sometimes take a while to pop up, which is annoying.

Certain skills level up too fast or too slow. This is less of a problem than Oblivion, but still a problem. For example, I use Destruction and Restoration all the time, but my skill in Conjuration is way higher, which I rarely use. Speech also goes up really slow.

- A few random AI glitches (which always seem to plague Bethesda games). Hopefully they will be patched.

- While enemies not leveling with you is usually a good thing, it can cause problems too. Like it seems I'll either totally wipe the floor with a group or enemies, or get one hit killed by them, and it's hard to tell which group I'm running into. Finding a nice challenge groove can be difficult.

- The "Radiant world" is a cool idea, but sometimes the stuff it does doesn't make sense, and you can tell it's because it's random. For example, a group of hired thugs comes to beat me up. One of them has a note saying they were hired by someone because I stole from them. Not only did I not get caught stealing, the alleged hirer was the little boy in Riverwood. A ten year old farm kid really has connections with mercenaries that want to break my legs? Come on.

I know, right?! I'm less than a third of the way into the main quest, a little over halfway on Companions, and less than half on Civil War, and I already feel like I've been playing forever...


You have become "Hated" with the AsaTJ Faction.


Same here
I went to a big launch party the night after launch where we had 5 people playing on 2 PCs and 2 360s (one PC was being traded off between two people), and I had a fully-upgraded house with almost 20K gold to spare by the end of the night. Everyone was like, "Daaaaamn, dude!" (Except they didn't say that exactly, because I don't hang out with Frat Bros from the early 2000s.)


Not on PC.


That's intentional. You're expected to throw several fireballs per fight, but you'll probably only summon your minion once. The rate they level up is scaled to fit how often you will actually cast a spell.


I've noticed this, too. But in most cases where a room/dungeon/boss is too hard, I can just wolf out and slaughter them. XD
Seriously, beast form is soooo OP....

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Jedi Master Tir-Jin Meteos, The Order of 66
PC GAMER - T.J. Hafer

Further information on the carrying capacity issue: The Steed Stone. This thing jacks your carry limit by 100 pounds as well as removes the speed restriction for wearing armor. Not sure how useful the second part it really (I've been wearing heavy armor the entire game and I can't say that I've felt I've been moving too slowly), but the first part is a nice little boost (especially now that I've got my smithing skill to the point where I can craft dwarven weapons and armor... damn but is that dwemer metal heavy ). Not sure yet how useful this particular blessing is in comparison to some of the other ones, but worth looking into if you really want that extra capacity (and it's kind of nice looking at my menu and not seeing my armor taking up half of it).

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There are perks for both light and heavy armor that make the armor weightless and not slow you down. I think they're pretty advanced perks so you can't them until higher levels. The Steed Stone might be a good replacement until then. It's cool you can switch your birthsign perk at any point if you want to switch your playstyle.

The extra 100 carrying capacity is nice. For me, it would probably be just an excuse to haul around more stuff. I really need to clean out my inventory and travel lighter, lol. Somehow I think I can manage without 200+ potions. I've tried out bound weapons, and they're actually pretty effective, especially if you get the perk that makes them better. They're not quite as good as the best stuff you can make yourself with maxed out smithing and enchantment, but if you don't want to invest in those trees, bound weapons are really good. They don't weigh anything either, which is nice.

I wear light armor so the weight or speed isn't too much of an issue. I'm using the Apprentice sign lately. I used the Mage one for a while, but thought it would be better to actually have a gameplay benefit rather than just leveling up faster.

So, I kinda liked Morrowind, but never did get as into it as I did other RPGs like Baldur's Gate, Fallout, Planescape: Torment, and so on. I only played a little bit of Oblivion, got bored with it really quick. So until a couple of months ago, the release of Skyrim didn't matter to me at all. But then I came across videos showing actual gameplay, and my mind was blown. Dual-weilding spells? Going sword/spell, and having it work smooth and intuitively? Awesome landscapes just begging to be explored? And then they released the system requirements, and to my shock and awe, my laptop does meet the minimum requirements. This is the same laptop that will stutter something awful during the largest battles of Dragon Age: Origins (making the Deep Roads a miserable place to be for me, and the Denerim siege... ugh... completely unplayable in fullscreen, and even in the smallest window possible and with everything set to the lowest of qualities, it's still not running very smooth). It does, however, run the new Fallout games fine enough and Oblivion as well, so I decided to take a chance on Skyrim, figuring that if the quality of gameplay isn't good enough on this laptop, I'll still have it ready to play when I upgrade to a better one.

Now, I've stuck to low quality graphics so far, because I'm afraid anything higher will make the game damn-near unplayable, but honestly, it still looks incredibly pretty most of the time, and the performance is no worse than New Vegas (and with fewer bugs, too!). There will be spoilers below, so beware:

My first character is a Nord, and a true son of Skyrim, gladly working with the Stormcloaks to throw out our Imperial oppressors. I'm focused mainly on One-Handed weapons and Destruction magic, and so far, I'm loving playing as a spell-sword. Initially, that was what I was planning on playing as for the entire game, but then I came to Riften on a sidequest, was discovered by the Thieves' Guild, and one thing lead to another. Now, I've got a Pickpocket skill of 100 (this is incredibly easy to advance in, by the way - every few items I took got me a skill increase, just about), and with the highest-ranked perks in that tree, that means crouching down in front of people and stealing their freakin' clothes and weapons without them noticing a thing! I used to only steal things that either A) I could use, like potions or gear better than what I currently had, or B) low-weight, high-value things like jewelry and gems to bring to my fence. Now, quite a lot of townsfolk across the land are wandering the streets in their smallclothes, thankful for the 50% resistance to cold that Nords get. ;-)

I've also become the leader of the Dark Brotherhood, and really enjoyed their quest... right up until you become the leader and move to the Dawnstar Sanctuary, that is. The quest to assassinate the Emperor? Awesome! The quest to meet 'Disgraced Bard' who wanted 'Abrasive Hunter' killed, though? Terribly generic - apparently when you finish the main DB plot, you only get generic assassination-missions like this to kill non-named NPCs for other non-named NPCs. So I decided to go deal with the Civil War instead, and after a few hours (or at least it felt like it at the time ), Skyrim has been united under the banners of Jarl Ulfric Stormcloak, the impact of which was... eh, not as great as I'd hoped. Assaulting fortresses full of Imperial troops one after another with little variety really can't compare to, say, the assault on Whiterun. At least the final battle of Solitude was interesting, but once it was done, it seemed like it was back to business as usual for everyone, with only the passing remark by guards and townsmen to remind me it had happened. Still, for my Nord warrior, that was a proud moment, and I enjoyed i t quite a bit.

So far, the magic of the game rarely extends from exploration and finding random things to the actual quests themselves, which is a shame. I like quests, I like a good, coherent story that draws me in, and while some quests in Skyrim definitely do this (see: the Companions), there's too many that feel like generic fetch-quests with no impact and relevance to anything else in the game whatsoever. And really, you need the Dragonborn, hero of destiny and legends, to deliver your mail for you? I have couriers run up to me with letters all the time, maybe you should try hiring them next time, yeah?

So, I can't really say it's the perfect RPG. It's not a 10/10. But it's incredibly fun, vast, with so much to see and do that I'm sure I'll be playing this in a year from now and still not being anywhere near done with this fine title. I can't decide if I like this game more than I did Dragon Age: Origins or not - it depends on if I'm in the mood for a huge, open world to explore or a well-told story with some incredibly deep and well-written NPCs that make me care about them in ways Skyrim's companions never do. Skyrim certainly feels more epic, though, and taking down a dragon feels more awesome than in any other game I've played. So it's no 10/10. It is, however, a solid 9.5/10. And I absolutely love it, despite the flaws.

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