Skyrim is obviously out. You know, unless you’ve been living in a cave. Some of you may have had the privilege of playing it already. I did.
So, from a game design perspective, what is good, and what is bad about Skyrim, in your opinion?
What works, what doesn’t? Please explain why.
I can start: The magic system has improved, along with the whole main/secondary-hand thing. Works out great. A lot better than the oblivion one, where magic was never your primary weapon.
Bad thing though, I feel, is that you’re still not able to see where you have what equipped. Instead, you have a list. This is confusing, because you don’t know what’s going to go where. Is a scarf interfering with a helm? How many rings can I have on? Who knows!
I do enjoy the constellation-thing now, so you’re certain what you’re leveling up, and what’s going to happen. Definitely better than just “Luck affects everything you do.”
Well I’ve never played any of these games before so this is my first one
I actually found lots of glitches but none of them hurt the game:
-Using the forgery, the stick was backwards and was not pointing in the fire, but just in a angled way.
-I saw LOTS of lighting issues and visual glitches :S
I really liked how you could just pick up almost everything and the hugeness of the world was just mind-blowing!
Let me know if they fixed the following two things I hated about Oblivion:
Automatically scaling up monster encounters to match your current level. What’s the point of even leveling up? This had the nasty side-effect that if you leveled up too fast or incorrectly, you were outclassed at your encounters.
Related to this behaviour, I also managed to defeat the arena and the final boss in it when I was level 3. Coming from a traditional RPG background, I thought that was silly.
The ability to see the entire map and teleport instantly to all the cities even when just starting. This took away the joy of exploring and discovery.
I’m currently only level 7, and I have seen no weird scaling of monsters or items around me. From level one, I could persuade mammuts and get killed horribly. Also, giants and other stuff I had no chance at.
Leveling up now gives you the option to unluck a perk in a skill. That may be: 25% harder to detect when sneaking.It does require you to have the skill in sneaking though. It also allows you improve either magic, health, or stamina.
You can not fast travel, unless you’ve discovered the location and that goes for everything. Even the capital. However, for a small amount of coins you can hire a man to drive you there, by horse-wagon.
At level 1, it it too dangerous to travel the roads by foot due to bandits and wolfes. This I like. Either stay in your small town, and level up - or help some people and earn the money to travel.
Bethesda’s RPG’s are known for having these huge worlds, and every container can be opened and items within gives the world a bit of realism.
You can litterally kill someone, and take their housekey, and rob them. You can also follow people around to see their daily schedules, and rob them when they’re out 8)
As for graphical glitches; I’ve seen loads too. The shadows are completely crap. They jump around like crazy.
I’ve set my shadows to high, and the rest to medium just to minimize all the reflection and depthness shader-magic, so I see only geometry and textures. A little bit of shaders too, but not much. I like it better this way.
Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul fixed the level scaling problems in Oblivion and a load of other problems with it. I’ll give Skyrim a year for it to get the same treatment. Just the way it is with Bethesda games.
Dark Souls is fantastic. Game of the year for me. And in a year where we had Infamous 2 and Portal 2 that’s saying a lot.
By contrast, I can’t stand Bethesda’s RPGs. They’re always full of bugs, control like arse, the writing and voice acting are always terrible, and the game design makes so many fundamental mistakes I find it amazing anyone likes them. Oh and they look superficially pretty until anything moves and their wonky animation system kicks in and it all looks laughably amateur.
Regarding 1, I’ve heard they changed it some. In Oblivion everything leveled up, but I read that there are places that have low-level mobs, so bandits will eventually be a joke but I think main quest line events will scale up.
Have you played Skyrim? Writing, voice-acting, animations and game design has improved. It now looks horribly artificially good. I turned graphics down, and now it’s great. Still lot’s of issues, but gameplay is less of a mess now since Oblivion.
The scaling works fine. Way better than in oblivion. Only dragons and some quests scale with the actual player level. Though dragons were still easy to beat.
What is bad? Those glitches in animation and positioning actors. How comes a npc can sleep in their furniture? Or some imprisoned npc is out of it when you walk around the corner and he is trying to get back into it while looking weirdly at you…
What pretty good is, is this “just this one more item, one more dungeon” feeling you have while playing it. I constantly overslept the last few days due to excessive skyrim playing what caused missing sleep hours.
