The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
 

Due out in this Nov. Anyone else excited about it?

Long video but pretty cool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic6dKnv3WdU

Here's an early review.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim preview | PC Gamer

Twenty minutes of gameplay:

Chasing The Dragon: 20 Minutes Of Skyrim | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This winter should be pretty easy to get through with the amount of games we have coming, especially Skyrim. Can't wait.

Only upcoming release I genuinely give a damn about.

There's one or two others I'm sure I'll play, this one however I'm sincerely looking forward to.

Am I better off playing this on my new laptop PC, or on a PS3? I know with Oblivion there was a gazillion mods for PC - I kind of liked the ability of that to fix things...but I imagine graphically it's super ridiculously nice and all on a PS3?

With their track record, PC, so the community can fix the bullshit for you.

That's what I was thinking.

But hey, maybe Skyrim will be different? If you can wait a month or whatever for feedback and not be a day one purchaser...... I understand the whole, sit on the couch, big screen.... but if you have the PC for it I just think the PC would be much more satisfying..

That looks........ unreal....

I think I'll pick it up for the ps3 or x360.. I don't have the gaming rig.

I can wait.

I have a brand new laptop, so we'll see I guess.

I didn't play Obilivion much.. is that needed before playing this one, or can one just jump right into this one?

Oblivion isn't necessary at all.

EDIT: I think Skyrim takes place 200 years after Oblivion so outside of lore and stuff that experienced players will get the experience itself will not be hindered.

Thanks!

I never played any of the earlier installments but fell right into Oblivion so you ought to be able to pick up pretty much anywhere & be fine.

That's great news.. although I really didn't get into Obilivion.. hopefully I can get into this one.

So many great games... so little time. :)

Very excited for this game. I've sunk many hours into Morrowind & Oblivion and I'm sure I'll do the same with Skyrim.

Just starting to watch the video now, but had to comment on the first 30-45 seconds. They talk about how every game how they rewrite everything - rendering, graphics, engine, etc. I remember reading a blog (Tobold, I think...) that asked the question why do most companies do that. The point was - I understand the "cool factor" by advertising the latest & greatest. And goodness knows I've had to drop a few dollars over the year to upgrade my graphics card, more memory, new desktop in order to keep up and play the latest.

But one of my questions is "why". Let's say a company rolls out their new "Unbelievable Engine 2.0". Invariably, there will be bugs & performance improvements fixed in subsequent patches. So when they are ready to write the next game in the series, why do they have to create Unbelievable Engine 3.0? This will introduce a new set of bugs & performance issues. Instead, how about coming up with a great story, and then a few minor tweaks to the underlying game engine. Wouldn't that reduce some of the costs of production? Game should also be ready to ship much earlier (thus more sales). More time & energy focused on making the game as enjoyable and bug-free at game launch instead of the expected Day 1/Week 1 patches.

Now that's not to say the game doesn't look phenomenal. Shit, the first minute and the scenery looks amazing... but couldn't they stick with this engine version for Game#6 as well?

I am very much looking forward to this game, had it on preorder since about March.

I'd generally suggest the PC if you have a beast of a machine, Oblivion for Xbox plays so damn poorly in terms of visuals (I am playing through vanilla Oblivion again on Xbox). Hopefully they don't severely gimp the gameplay like they did in Oblivion, so the PC is a safer bet for overall experience because it will be modded by the community if it has too much wrong with it.

That said, I'll be getting it on Xbox (because my gaming machine is broke and I'm too lazy to build/buy one when I already have 4+ other computers).

As for engines, building them is horribly expensive, except for premier games you usually see them being reused. Also highly successful portions of engines (like Havok physics) are often reused even within these 'new' engines.

I think there is a market for the episodic game series that doesn't reveal massive engine upgrades each time but keeps pushing the gameplay/content experience, but the industry in general does not agree, and look no further than the Fallout 3 vs Fallout New Vegas comparisons. From the get go it was put out there as basically an episode like release, a full game's worth of content and more gameplay modifications than the usual expansion pack, but no new engine. Generally it had trouble with people saying it was not different enough from Fallout in every single review.

Most reviewers at least put in 'why break something that was completely awesome in Fallout 3', but it certainly set a negative mood for what I think is one of the best game releases recently (Fallout 3 engine with slightly better gameplay and story).

Of course I hope they follow this model again, we basically got two full Fallout gameplay experiences within a small time period, where as the wait for the inevitable Fallout 4 is no doubt going to be measured in years from this point (I'd guess at least 2). In terms of fun I think that is the best maximization of development effort, but in terms of fanboys silly expectations all of the market noise pushes developers towards constantly reinventing pixel shaders on football players shadows instead of keeping the graphics engine and fixing gameplay or content issues.

I know if I ever get this indie developer thing off the ground that I'll be reusing my engine constantly to try and deliver more games out there. But I'm in the special situation of being unable to compete on graphics engine in the first place, for me I need to focus on content/gameplay or else I will not release until 2020.

Now having said that, the demo videos were awesome. It just compelled me to pre-order. I love that magic ability to identify the enemies ahead, and then he switched to his longbow to kill them. Clairvoyance spell was also totally cool.

Hmmm... Steam no longer giving 10% discount for preorder. But looks like D2D is.

They did reuse the previous engine a few times. The Fallout games use the same engine that was built for Oblivion. And Oblivion was released 5 1/2 years ago.

Eventually you do have to update/rebuild your engine to take advantage of new technology. Every 5-6 years seems about right.

The videos look great - the only thing that annoyed me in Oblivion was the monsters leveling up with your character, so no matter how good you became a Goblin was still a tough fight.....I much prefered Morrowind, where you learnt to avoid the tough monsters until you were good enough.

I hope that they don't do the same with Skyrim as it took a lot of the fun out of Oblivion for me until I found Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul Mod.

No matter what Skyrim is a definite purchase for me.

I probably lean the other way, since it adds to the open world aspect of the game by not forcing/funneling you into certain areas as you avoid this/that/the other.

I'm with CAsterling. I hate getting more powerful just to keep up, not actually get any better. I gave up on Baseball Superstars on my Android phone for the same reason.

When the alternative is a game that inevitably becomes way too easy towards the end, I don't mind levelling. It also gives you an incentive to specialize your character and really think about where you are putting your points and which skills you are working on.

And like Jon says, it actually helps with the open endedness of the game and allows you to do interesting stuff at the beginning rather than having to either stick to the main plot or find things to do that won't get you killed in a matter of seconds

That's where some of the big mods really stood out (I'm thinking specifically of OOO and Francesco(?) here.) They were like, "Hey, so let's have monster tables. Rats can level with you from 1-4, but can never go any higher than 4. When you're Lvl 100 and run into a rat, it will be level 4."

Which is so obvious, you sort of wonder why the Bethesda folks didn't think of it.

That said, I've never played a game of vanilla Oblivion. I don't even know what it's like out of the box. My kids played it on the 360 that way...and it's like we're talking about different games about 3/4 of the time unless we're just referring to original quest lines.

I'd prefer a system (for an open-world game) that didn't really have levels. Not exactly sure how that would work, but if you're just going to have the rest of the world level with the player, than you might as well not have levels at all and try to create a new skills/abilities system.

And the biggest issue with the world-levels-with-you system is that the loot levels with you too, so every time I looted in Oblivion as a level 20 something, I get tons a great magical loot. Money was not an issue at all after that.

I played in on the 360 and TBH I don't rank it as anywhere near my favorite RPGs of this generation even. The whole world levels with you concept was so poor that it completely ruined that game for me. I seriously was leveling non combat skills and making my enemies tougher in the process. By the time I figured out what the hell I was doing I was in spots that were nearly impossible to get through and had already invested too many hours to consider a restart.

I thought I read that they learned from that and dropped the world leveling thing for Skyrim. Please tell me I actually read that somewhere and they aren't doing that again.

Developer quote from April 2011
“The levelling system is very much like Fallout 3. There were definitely moments in Oblivion were it was a rollercoaster of pain because the world levelled faster than you.”

Community manager quote from August 2011
n Elder Scrolls V, enemies will scale with your character as you progress throughout the game. A community manager from Bethesda recently touched on the subject to members over at the Elder Scrolls V forum:

“Since people are asking, wanted to briefly touch on level scaling. All our games have had some amount of randomness/leveling based on player level. Skyrim’s is similar to Fallout 3’s, not Oblivion’s,”

Based on those quotes (and my own experience with F3) they've changed the way it works but in the opposite direction of what you wanted. I agree with the first quote, there were times in Oblivion where the level tiers left you at a big disadvantage (which is why I consciously slowplayed / slow leveled) whereas with Fallout 3 combat was rarely a challenge once you managed to get past the initial no gear/no caps stage.

So far - D2D is still only one I found that is offering 10% off. Other than absurd $150 collector's edition, I don't see any other specials (retailer-specific exclusives, etc.). Where are you pre-purchasing from?

This is still the game I'm most looking forward to this year. I hope I'll have time to give it a lot of play...work's going to start going a little crazy..

/tk

It's sorta sad that I'm disappointed that I'll be overseas on holiday when this is released!

I prefer the Fallout leveling system over Oblivion, and prefer no leveling with player over both. There is a thrill in being a little outmatched and having to use your wits to overcome your statistical disadvantages.

Geographic difficulty allows you to seek out challenges higher than some designers growth curve says is comfortable. It also allows for tying story with challenge, if I am waltzing into the Enclave base I want lots of high tech loot and high level 'trained' soldiers coming after me, and not have it nerfed because I raced over at level 3.

For the casual player though the scaled difficulty in open world RPGs is a feature that is going to stick around. The average player is not going to reflect on how they play the game and how that relates to difficulty, they are going to push through and if it feels too easy they complain, if it feels too hard they complain. So the race towards mediocre will push towards scaling with the player to try and keep everything within a range of meh difficulty (with the difficulty slider being the boring old damage multiplier which to me is just annoying, I don't want to lose because it takes 20 shots instead of 10 to kill a bad guy, I want to lose because I screwed up or the enemy did something interesting).

All that said, I think the game will be great fun, particularly if they are closer to Fallout than Oblivion. I still enjoy vanilla Oblivion (which I'm playing now) despite the scaled leveling pissing me off constantly (it does get borderline unplayable, not from too hard/too easy but from the blandness of the experience, particularly loot scaling). As mostly a content tourist I like differing difficulty levels as I explore, the too easy sections and the too hard actually complement my experience... although i wish it leaned towards too hard more since RPGs give the great mechanism of leveling/gearing up so you can always balance the playing field if you want to.

Good news, Skyrim takes about 30 times as long to beat as Morrowind (at least when going by current speed run records).

Skyrim can be beaten in just over two hours (if you're a developer) | Joystiq

I have never played any of the Elder Scrolls agames, but I loved both "Fallout 3" and "Fallout: New Vegas", so I am going to pick this one up.

Looking forward to it.

Hopefully, I will finish BioShock (the first one) before this comes out.

Almost here.

I took the wrong week off.. :)

Oh well, at least MW3 is coming out this week.

Preordered Skyrim and really looking forward to it, though with my luck I'm pretty sure I'll end up getting a Dota 2 beta key on the 11th too.

I think Mrs. Leafs is more excited about this than our wedding day.

yeah, a friend of mine is scheduling a vacation around it and will be picking it up at midnight. good for him, I guess.

I liked but never managed to finish either Morrowind or Oblivion. I'll get this at some point...but can wait until the price drops.

You're not alone in that, I've read of people playing hundreds of hours without really touching the main story.

Tuesday is Modern Warfare 3 Day. Then Friday will begin Skyrim Weekend. Don't think I've looked forward to two games more than these two all year. Gonna be a good week.

That's me. I don't think I ever got more than one or two steps into the Oblivion main quest line. Mostly just traveled around doing all of the side quests and still put in 100+ hours into it.

Same here ... except that my son & I are both stuck traveling for the football webcast Friday (with a 2a-3a Saturday return likely) so we'll be delayed until at least Saturday morning.

Change this to Friday and next Tuesday for Assassins Creed and you got me described well enough.

I need to get as much work done this week as possible so I can dedicate this weekend to Skyrim. I for some reason thought it came out next Tuesday so I would have been pissed if I procrastinated all week and saved work for the weekend.

It's been a long time since I've been this excited about a game coming out.

preordered on the PC. I've passed up lots and lots of A+ titles so I could spend my time with Skyrim and Football Manager 12. Add in a couple of Wolverine titles I want to pick up soon and that will be it til the Christmastime Steam sales. I figure I'll pick up some games I've really wanted around that time. (Deus Ex and Witcher 2 will be high up on the list for discounted titles when those holiday deals roll around)

For me it's working my way through Uncharted 3 after it came out on the 1st, Skyrim on the 11th, and Arkham City on the 22nd.

You speak the truth here!

I'm going to run through MW2 again in preparation.. you know, to get my mad skillz up to par!

Morrowind was one of the worst games I had ever played (horrible, ugly, empty world) yet I went ahead and played Oblivion. I can't say that it was worse but it certainly was in the bottom 10 of all games played. I think I learned my lesson and will leave Elder Scrolls to those that think that is something worth playing.

I can't fathom that reaction to it, but then again there are other things in life I can't comprehend in the slightest (camping, for example) so that's fine.

At least you're smart enough to know what doesn't appeal to you & keep your money in your pocket rather than buying it just because everyone else does.