The most active this forum is is for Skyrim. Convinces me not to play what seems to be the seminal game of the past few years.

You've all gone mainstream!

Next thing you'll be discussing pop music.

Ah, right.

Anyway, this does seem to be a major achievement, I'll wait til the price reaches my limits. God bless steam, and the crappy $. 

For several days now, I've been meaning to finally visit Solitude, the last one of the big cities I haven't been to. But every time there were some quest-relevant dungeons along the route, or some new locations popped up on the radar where I couldn't resist unlocking them on the map or exploring them. And then suddenly hours have passed and I haven't gotten one bit closer to Solitude. At this rate, my "average playtime 150 hours" joke will actually prove to be true. 

I've got Dragon Scale Armour, a Daedric Warhammer and a Daedric Bow, all legendary. The bow does 60 damage FFS! And yeah - like Shambler said, I essentially got there by making iron daggers and leather gauntlets until i was level 100 

Be sure to raise your base archery perk (it has five stages, each increasing bow damage by 20%). 

Well....it is a fair question to raise. Mainstream games are often bad, and Skyrim is a mainstream game in name, but not in badness. It's not full of super-on-rails linearity, endless scripted bollox, horrible QT events, gimmicky bosses, interruptive cutscenes and horrible claustrophic restrictions. It has it's problems - lots of bugs, bad menu ui, generic story, limited enemy, enemy imbalance, but mainstreamness isn't one.

I think people on here like it because it's got a strong Nordic setting (lots of Northern Europeans on here), straight up Quakey dungeons, proper FPS perspective (once FOV90ed) and proper FPS controls, and reasonably solid gameplay - although you can spend all your time collecting cabbages or crafting The Ultimate Poison Of Rectal Expansion or lvling your uber-bow to 1500 damage (the latter being perhaps the most ridiculous example), it does play reasonably well as an action game - explore around, find things to kill, kill them, gather loot and dick around a bit so you can kill more things quicker (I just wish they had more violent deaths).

So really it's popularity here is not the death of good honest Quakey principles...

Also I have bought plenty of satanic death metal recently I'll have you know!! 

it's black metal btw 

Hmmmm what about Dragged Into Sunlight tho?? Blackened Satanic Doom Death surely?? :P 

That's what I've heard - its why there's no way I can waste the money on it as well. 100+ hour games I just don't have the time to play.

...and the last time I heard a game recommended as strongly was the Witcher, which I found kind of underwhelming. Basically the same mechanics as Zelda from the 90s but done in 3D.

Probably if I bought Skyrim I'd run around for a bit, try stupid stuff (like putting buckets on peoples heads and nicking their stuff) then shut it down and never play again.

Sigh. 

was cool :) 

ijed, does it really matter if you spend 100+ hours on a continuous game or playing arcade or round-based games over and over? 

oh i thought u were talking about archgoat. yea dis is more death. 

With reward at the end of each. In big games you just save your progress when stood in a field or something.

177 hours on isaac... uh, right. 

I do short sessions in Skyrim now. Wander around a bit, find a quest / dungeon, kill everything, get loot, complete quest, sell look, upgrade anything suitable, quit. 

That is after some longer sessions getting used to the game and finding out what I like about it. 

Lets face it. It's pretty fun. The best thing about it is the shouts. These are just a type of magic spell that doesn't require magika. Like rushing 50ft in half a second. Or sending out a blast of cold air which temporarily freezes your opponent solid. You discover new shouts when you enter the nordic dungeons. And there are loads of them. But yeah - it doesn't feel as long as it is, which really just means its immersive, and fun. 

the elder scroll series is one of the few games i can go buy and not feel like i wasted money. i still play oblivion, and i did a quick morrowind playthrough a few months ago too. 

http://teamshambler.blogspot.com/2011/12/skyrim-dungeons-vs-quake-maps.html

Sometimes - especially in Dwemer dungeons - it does feel like exploring custom Quake maps, just with fantasy weapons and less monsters (usually a lot less unfortunately). I think the game works pretty well like that.

I've now got dual enchanted Legendary Ebony everything (can't be arsed making Daedric), dual wield dual enchanted weapons (usually 2x vampire / 1 x stamina steal / 1 x fire damage) that melt through most things without imba sneaking cheating, have had to up the difficulty to Master. Can summon Storm Atronachs and disintegrate targets with lightning spells. Fun. 

glad they brought back dwemer maps. those were great in morrowind. 

Apart from time spent... 

I hope Bethesda is going to make use of the id technology in the future. Bethesda make some wicked sick games (Fallout and Elder Scrolls) but are often plagued by technical shortcomings. id seems to have run out of steam a bit on the story telling aspect of game making. 

I feel like the only guy in the world who is seriously disappointed with Skyrim. From all the hype videos leading up to the game, I expected a pretty big improvement in game play design from Oblivion. It doesn't feel like anything has changed really other than the graphics engine.

The visuals are better technically, there is more detail in game models, but the animations are still pretty terrible from what I've seen. Facial animations are still pretty ugly too. There are some impressive draw distances, but let's face it we've seen impressive draw distances (and prettier worlds) in other games.

The world itself is very bleak, and I hate to say it, but why would you get all this great technology to create a boring, drab, brown, gray and white world? Bal says he thinks it's pretty colorful, but I must not have gotten to that part of the game yet.

I find a lot of 'improvements' are drawbacks - the UI is terrible imo, it's clunky feeling, wastes space, doesn't give me information I want, etc. Maybe I haven't found it yet, but switching weapons and armor is cumbersome. I have to resort to setting things to 'favorite' but haven't yet found a way to set load outs that I can switch between from 1 through 0 like Oblivion.

Quests are still boring and generic so far. The story is boring and generic so far. Something about dragons or whatever.

The concept of shouts makes me think that I'm just some kind of Jedi that found his way to Skyrim, and the hooded robe dudes are just Yoda. I dunno, maybe the shouts get more interesting down the road, but they're really generic and don't feel very cool. They are not very innovative or interesting concepts either.

I initially liked the idea of the constellations being your different tech trees that you can upgrade your character from. In actuality they are clunky and moving through them is really just a waste of time. In Diablo 2 or something similar it would be two quick clicks and that would be it, but now I have to like scroll through some shit and navigate a maze of stars to get to what I want. Hardly a deal breaker, but quickly becomes tedious and a chore.

The crafting and mining and whatnot is boring also. Just bleh.

I dunno, I loved Oblivion, I loved Fallout 3, but this game ... is just so meh to me. I shouldn't say it's bad, but it's just a huge let down from what I was expecting. It feels like a giant expansion pack to Oblivion really, not the innovative experience I was expecting. 

i haven't played it, but i've seen some shots that vondur posted and it appears as though there are some pretty colourful (and amazing!) looking areas. 

has anyone had the problem where sometimes the wrong dialog choice is selected?

I've tried clicking as well as keyboard up/down and w/s with enter, and every so often, it will ignore the option i have highlighted and select the first option.

is there a fix or mod? I've searched, but haven't found anything. This is up there in my list of annoying game bugs because it's just so random. I haven't been able to figure out what exactly causes it to select the wrong option. 

I have the same problem. I think you can usually make the text emphasise if you move the mouse over it a couple of times. But it doesn't always react that way the first time you move the mouse over it. 

the save bug.
That incremental changes save stuff is like tnt.
Play long enough and the game suffers bad of crash hickup.