That bothers me too, because I feel the need to check each one and "see" if it is a real container or just a filler for display.

Me too and sadly a large portion of them are not actual containers. It bugs the crap out of me. There are also alot more environment objects that can't be interacted with this time around.

Like shooter games. The first time I saw Halo I was all excited about the number of crates hanging around till I found out they were just display items, lol.

Been playing Skyrim way too much and I like it a lot although there are several minor stuff that I don't like at all;

- The menu and interface, although not a minor issue but a big one, is pretty horrible - you can clearly see it's meant for consoles and not PC.
- The talent trees are filled with useless and uninteresting talents. They should have removed talents like Armsman for example which just increases your damage and just let stuff like that scale with your skills instead of implementing them as talents.
- Wish more objects and light sources projected shadows. The spell Candlelight as a light source looks great on the walls and other surfaces, but it doesn't add a shadow to my character. Some of the light in this game is great but it just seems that some light sources don't give off shadows sort of while others do. Think the whole physics engine could've been better.
- Finishers are cool and I don't mind that much but would've liked it better if it didn't appear as a cut scene and that you could finish people off from a first-person view or third-person view for a bit smoother combat.
- People also mentioned environment clipping and I have to agree on that. Think it's a step back when my character stands above rocks or ankle-deep on solid surfaces.
- And then there's the voice acting, which is great sometimes but the dialect just sounds weird, especially for the guards.
- I also think that some of the player and NPC interactions could use a bit of work when you take on misc. quests and such. At least in certain quests the NPC doesn't really ask for anything and the character is like "Oh, I'll get that for you. I have no problem venturing into a ancient catacomb filled with hordes of Draugr and unknown dangers to get your left sock back." If more of the quests/NPCs tried to involve the character into getting him interested and giving him/her a reason for doing the quest.
- Better view distance and long-range graphics. I run this game with everything on full and although it looks amazing it bothers me a bit that especially trees look really poor in the distance.

Hmm, other than that I can't think of much else but I'm bound to run into more sooner or later.

I pretty much love everything else. The scenery is great and they've managed to add a lot of diversity to the landscape and not just snow everywhere. I like the combat, stamina and how casting works etc. and that every dungeon is uniquely designed - although catacombs may look the same they're all different and that's really something I appreciate especially after playing games like DA2. I also think this has the best character creation menu so far. I'm like level 30 now and still haven't finished Act I on the MQ yet so looking forward to seeing how that story develops.

Regarding finishers: some are first-person and some are third-person. Seems to me Beth couldn't decide which they wanted, so they just did both. I don't really like that, I'd prefer them to be one or the other. And I actually do like the finishers, but I am going to mod at least one set out, likely the third-person restricted finishers while leaving in the first-person ones. Assassinations are the exception, however. If there is a way, I will leave the assassination animations alone. Kills to be savored should be savored, after all.

I agree about the guards, they sound really canned with that obviously fake accent. I'd have preferred it if good ol' Wes did them all again this time, he did a good job with the guard voicing in Oblivion.

Also wish they had finishers for archery/magic. Well, somewhat anyways. The cutscene sometimes jars one out of a rythem if it's an intense fight. Though when you can kill an opponet in one (power) attack and you get a finisher each time it deffinatly has a feel of 'Oh yeah, I'm a baaad mutha F****'.

Come across a few things you can edit in the skyrimprefs.ini file to get sharper shadows and also more shadows for trees and the landscape. Going to test changing the FoV as well to 90-95 to fit my monitor and see how it looks.

Anyone tried out some mods yet? Some improvement mods have been released to make faces a bit smoother and more detailed for example, need to check those out.

Bad: In Skyrim, horses are aggressive. They literally engage other enemies in combat. That is just wrong. That is so incredibly wrong. And this is going to raise my number of horse-deaths to extraordinary levels, resulting in a huge waste of my money. I do not want to have to replace my horse every other play session because my horse reacted to combat exactly the opposite of how he should have.

Horses are passive animals whose first response to battle is to FLEE. Horses do not fight unless cornered, ever, ever, EVER. They will kick you if you kick them, but they NEVER start the kicking unless they have absolutely no other choice. If they smell blood being spilled, their first instinct is to run, not to rush in and join the frenzy.

It gets me so riled up every time I get into a tussle with Bandits and it becomes a battle to preserve the life of my suicidal mount. Why do they even do this? Why can't we just have the NPCs leave the horses be during combat? This just makes the whole problem Oblivion had with horses dying in combat even worse, because now the horses actively seek death and I am literally forced to console-disable them every single battle because of how badly it exacerbates that problem, and because such behavior is so incredibly unnatural and wrong for them.

Not happy. Not at all.

/rant

(Really needed to get that off my chest)

Good- I like these random encounters

Bad- Wolves attacking me in the middle of my conversation so I have to stop talking so I don't get killed (and of course the person runs away) so I have no idea WTF is going on!

Also bad- Wolves are officially the cliffracers of Skyrim. I can't go more than ten seconds without "AWOOOOOO!!!" and there's a small pack of the disease ridden things.

My bookcases keep disappearing!!!... ...

I own the Markath house, (A Knight of the Nine fan owning Vlindrel hall? Whatever next?... ) Markath being the most bugged city ever - I think - Aaamywho, twice now I've come to load up having saved last in my house and the bookcase, shelves on the other side of the room and the Mannequin have all disappeared...

If I load up the autosave from when I came into the house, they're all still there...But it scared the hell out of me the first time it happened!... ...

Oh, and presumably you should be able to display armour on that mannequin...Nope, it just goes invisible...*Sigh*...

Yeeesss...I started again...With my Argonian - J'Drell...He's level 8 in 3 hours...The kids hate me... ...I think J'Drell is just too cool though personally... ...

Not quite a bad, or an ugly but definatly not a good. More an oddity.

Running with my new one-handed warrior and many of the fatalities seemed wierd. Some started then got interrupted by another one, I think there was at least two cases my opponet was starting a cut scene before I countered with mine. :blinks: Never noticed this on my two-hander so I'm thinking it's limited to one handed weapons paired with a shield. It makes for some dizzying combat moments.

Ugly: A forced update was released today with no other purpose but to add Steam encryption to TESV.exe.

This has caused the Large Address Awareness patch for the game (where you flip a Boolean flag in the EXE to allow the game to use the maximum amount of RAM it is capable of using, 4Gb in Skyrim's case, being a 32bit EXE). This LAA patch was alleviating a lot of stability problems for people and overall improving the game's performance because it was no longer hobbled by the 2Gb RAM limit. But now that Steam encryption has been added, making the LAA tweak will cause Steam to refuse to load the game.

Basically, this is Valve spitting in everyone's faces, as they have now proved to us that DRM takes precedence over a good gaming experience in their eyes.

EDIT: Since this update has arrived, a number of people have developed tools that allow for the LAA patch to be used through Steam. Essentially, it involves flipping the flag AFTER Steam has validated the EXE. This could be considered the official version, as it was developed by the same person who made the LAA tool for Fallout: New Vegas.

Guys keep in mind I'm not on PC.

The good: Dwemer ruins are AWESOME!

You don't have to shoot an arrow at the ground and pick it up you just sheathe your bow.

There's actually a bit of difficulty. I died 7 times within the first hour and a half of playing.

Dragon shouts are fun.

You can now activate things like bookshelves and weapon racks/plaques and put stuff on them.

The bad: Horses are terribly slow even though the animations have been improved. It seems like you run just as fast as the horse and the horses have crappy stamina, meaning they can't run for long.

Some of the AI could use some tweaking.

Lots of clipping.

Forced 3rd person finishers.

The ugly: Fur Bracers. Blegh!

Didn't know that...Cheers... ...



I laughed when my Argonian J'Drell got killed in Helgen 'cause he was watching the Dragon before he went into the keep with Ragulf or whoever it is...It landed, grabbed him and threw him in the air...Oh how we all giggled at that...

Also another good thing: The Radiant Story is quite impressive. I've had thieves run out of bars, they stole candle sticks, gems, basicly petty things someone would fence. Another time I was fighting wolves and a stray dog came up and we became companions But then a Frost Dragon showed up I told my new friend to wait..but the dragon killed me.

I wouldn't say the Bad exactly but...:

A few days after I looted an alchemist's shop of everything of value, I came to town greeted by three hired thugs. Well, not only did the guards just stand there, but I found out that they were sent by the guy I looted. Well, that would be fine and kinda cool and all except for the fact that I hadn't been caught stealing. So how would he know it was me, especially living in Riften, home of the Thieves Guild?

The good: Wrothken was playing my character and noticed that if you use your fire spell on top of water, it boils That's pretty cool!

Ugly: it appears Skyrim's archery has an "arc compensation" auto-aim mechanic in place, which basically means that wherever you are aiming up to a certain specified distance, the game will automatically compensate for the arrow's flight arc to always put the arrow dead-center where you aimed your crosshair. There's why I have been so inaccurate in this game thus far... the game was interfering with my shots by trying to baby me with excessive auto-aim that I was not used to and I don't even need.

If you don't like this mechanic and wish to disable it, add these two lines to your Skyrim.INI under [Combat]:

f1PArrowTiltUpAngle=0.0
f3PArrowTiltUpAngle=0.0

That explains why I could not hit a thing when I tried using a bow in the tutorial!

Ooooh... ...That explains that then...It was really starting to piss me off...I loved accounting for distance in Oblivion...The kids thought it was brilliant what I could hit from the other side of a cave and not be discovered...Tried it again with this one...Nope...You'se crap you is...

Cheers for that...

That explains why I couldn't hit anything with a bow in either game!

The Ugly: I played around with a Bosmer archer this weekend. I’m sure this can be fixed on the PC, but she was taller than the Nord boys on the console. Yikes.

I had that trouble with Maxical in Oblivion. Even at 90% she was equal height with most males. If I didn't adjust it she was towering over them. And she was supposed to be shorter than the average Khajiit, lol.

In Skyrim - one of the first things I did was make Maxical 95%. So far I've had no problems with this. I got some screens of her ogling Quaranir and she is shorter than him. (haven't checked them out yet, if they are good I'll post them).

I plan to remove his clothing and check out the goods what he looks like under that robe before deciding to risk messing up my College questline - but so far Maxical is all for it if we can code him into marriage. We'll see how she feels about that after seeing him in his diaper loincloth.

OMG, I hurt myself laughing. No mystery package for Maxical!

I'll be adding that. The compensation doesn't even seem to work all the time either. There are times where I have had to aim above the target to hit it, and other times where I have to aim right at it. It's made archery frustrating at long range.

Lol, well...his robe is clean, just wanted to make sure his flesh was too. I mean - the robe totally obscures everything but his nose and his fingertips.

Let me guess, you found Ange and took her Archery challenge? I lost nearly all the 'practice arrows' trying to get target four before realizing I wasn't getting auto corrected.

The Bad:

The Player character has no head tracking. Makes it hard to get a decent screenshot if they won't even look at the person next to them, feels awkward talking to someone while looking away from them.

Also, the sneak appears to be miscalculated somewhere. When you finally reach 100 and get all those sneak perks - your sneak suddenly seems to be set at zero.

Bad:

Decided to make a Rogue/Hunter-like character (to test out stealth, archery and all that) and since Orcs look so great in Skyrim I went with an Orc female, and is there one thing I hate when it comes to sheathed weapons it's when the weapon(s) isn't properly attached to the body. With Orc female, since their back has such a sway I guess, the bow and the quiver isn't attached anywhere close to their back. Shouldn't be that hard to fix once CK is out though but it looks really dumb at the moment.

Yesterday I had the levitating mammoth, the backwards flying dragon (the kids thought it was hilarious ) and the spinning around glitch...Stood in one place and just kept spinning until it decided to stop...*Shrug*...

On the plus side, now I'm running everywhere, the place really is BEAUTIFUL...

It really is, even with the bad graphics it is beautiful.

I've had Maxical exploring the land first before inciting any dragon activity (and sneaking a lot, trying to keep from fighting creatures as much as possible). She has not even ridden a horse yet, just walking everywhere and getting the feel of things in Skyrim.

She has cleared a few dungeons and taken on a few side quests, just not advanced the main quest at all.

Been testing out some Archery now and I can't say I like it that much, mostly because of the arc of the arrow, both with and without adjustments and that it seems like the arrow disappears once you try hitting stuff from over 200 feet away.
Now, I've managed to kill a bandit from around 190-200 feet with a shot straight to the neck once (tested out with a quick save and it took like 2 tries) but decided to look into the whole thing today. Had some good target practice against outside Whiterun where I managed to bunch together two giants and a mammoth and fired over one hundred arrows from everywhere between 100 and 200 feet. At around "max" distance, nothing hit at all - which really surprised me. As the NPCs reacted as if the arrow went either over them or hit the ground in front of them, but nothing in between. Seriously looked like it went straight through.
Maybe it's just my aim that sucks or I still haven't gotten used to this engine, but it just feels so unnatural and weird at long range. I've played loads of BF2 Bad Company and BF3 as a sniper/recon so I'm pretty familiar to compensate for bullet-drop/gravity and stuff, but that's a totally different, and better engine.

I've had the same thing happen on my archer. She was at concideribly closer range. 10-20 feet and I saw the arrows pass through the Dragonpriest and impact behind him. It happened several times since then as well on differing targets at varied distances. Distances I know I've hit at before. Though I have no proof, I'm thinking there was another 'patch' in the last few weeks or it was something else 1.2 caused.

Hmm, that could be. I think I got my long-range bandit kill before 1.2 although I must admit I don't really remember.

It seems Skyrim is rather forceful about you joining the College of Winterhold. In order to complete the Main Quest, for instance, you need to join the College, and there is also a major side-quest in the game that requires College membership to complete. Kinda puts a damper on the roleplaying when you are trying to do certain quests a certain way and then you are forced outside of your character's expertise just to continue things. My Bosmer is an archer, always will be. He rarely uses magic, most of the time Alchemy suits his needs just fine. But so far, I count two quests (one Main, one Side) that forced membership to the College of Winterhold on me. And now that the quest has kicked into gear, it just seems wrong to ignore it.

But I don't care. I've got what I wanted, so the College can go spin. My Guild is the Thieves Guild, and I have no intention of being a member of any other any longer than absolutely necessary to suit my needs.

Indeed. This is something I found very disappointing with Skyrim actually, not only having certain things forced on you but the fact that there's very few choices in this game to really define your characters personality. Wish there was more depth to this game.

Edit: Finally got the arrow adjustments in the .ini file to work and after clearing out the bandits in the fort outside Whiterun I tested a bit with the training dummies they have on the walls. Things got a lot easier now with a more natural arrow arc and once I got "calibrated" I didn't have too much difficulties hitting static targets at what I'd say is about 300 feet. Why Bethesda even implemented that "arc compensation" as you called it Thomas is beyond me.

It's not all, actually. Even without the arc compensation, there's still a sort of target tracking auto-aim in play, too, because I have noticed my arrows flying off-crosshair trying to hit a target I wasn't actually aiming for.

Why Bethesda didn't give the PC users options to remove auto aim I will never know. We use more precise controls than the consoles, we don't need auto-aim. The above will likely need mods to fix.

The Creepy: Post-Daedric quest glitch? (Location Spoiler!)



And about the archery thing... I was going to test out an archer-like character, but I can't do it. Even though I never played an archer ever, it just aimed wrong for me. :/

Anyone tried the Civil War quests yet?...My son was going well with them, but he tried to deliver a message to Whiterun, and he found he couldn't because you had to tell the Jarl about the Dragon first, which - presumably - sets off the entire MQ...He didn't want to do that, and he got upset about it...

Like you said, surely we can decide when or if we want to do something...Does make it seem more like a game than Oblivion did...You know what I mean?...Oblivion you could choose when to do the MQ...Skyrim forces the choice...

Nope, Bethesda still didn't learn.

I thought we went over this twelve gazillion times. Random road encounters in uber-gear = crappy leveling.

I put a thread in the brand new section about postponing the MQ and still having access to Whiterun, but it's just my experience. Hopefully some others will lend their advice.

And, new section! Woo hoo!

Tell your son that the dragons are not set off till you go to Bleak Falls Barrow. I also had to tell the Jarl of Whiterun about the dragons - and he immediately gives you the mission to go to Bleak Falls Barrow.

Tell your son to go into his quests and unclick that Bleak Falls Barrow quest as the active quest. Click on any other quest to set them as active - then just stay away from Bleak Falls Barrow.

I did that (thanks to King Coin's warning about it) and there has not been a single dragon in my game yet.

Recently I "discovered" Bleak Falls Barrow by accident - scared me to death! I didn't go inside - in fact I ran away from it like a banshee immediately after I realized what it was. I was debating reloading a previous save.

If I saw a dragon I was going to load a previous save, but thank goodness it didn't trigger the dragons. Going inside Bleak Falls Barrow triggers the dragons - but to be on the safe side I wouldn't even go near it if I was him.

Ah...Yes, trouble is...All of us have been through BFB and got the Dragonstone..."Daddy looked cool doing it so so shall we!!"... ...

Oh wait, so long as he avoids the Wizard he might be fine...I'll see what he can do...

Cheers for that though... ...



Edit!!!...Ooooh the wife found something really funny...And it's something that only the wife would find... ...She married Farkus of the Companions...He's now following her...Well, you would... ...Aaamywho...She was sneaking one day and she saw that he was too...So - as you do - she went to kiss him...*Shrug*...Trouble is, she went right through his face so she could see out the back of him...Talk about getting into his head!!...It's pretty horrible, 'cause the mouth is seperate too...So you get face, then mouth/teeth, then the back of his brainpan/hair and out the other side...Eww!!!... ...

Knowing any answer I give would be rife with dherty in-you-end-oh; I refuse to comment this !!!

Played a little Skyrim recently.

The Good:

*A return of the True Lore.. I've said it many a-times, OB wasn't loreful....Skyrim is.

*Voice Acting The acknowledgment that I'm nude is back! Polar Bear Club in this case. Mostly good, there is some bad...

*Character LooksI'm actually impressed with the Dunmer in this one! The High Elves are...evil looking...and the Bosmer don't suck anymore...though they are offputting.

*AI Much improved.

*Smithing Well, it gets a little TOO reliant there in the end, but at last we have a solution to the Bandits richer than most Nobleman.

*Daedric Quests Niiiiiiicccceeeelly Done! It even hit me in some unexpected ways there.

Quest Writing Well done!

The Bad

*Holy Cut Content Batman!! I can achieve leadership of a Guild in under Five Quests? Wow!

*Wheres my Attributes? My stamina doesn't determine my Carrying Capacity!!!

*Perks? Really? If you're going to rip off your own game Bethesda, at least throw in a Barber!!

*Main Quest....really? I mean really? I can beat the whole game at level seven, with some shouting, and what has to be one of worst ending sequences I've experienced...the 10% of the Terrible voice acting is here...and the most useless 'Shout' given is the trick too defeating Alduin?...its literally better to never start the main quest.....

*The Dark Brotherhood.....Lucien just went from Epic to Epic-ally Annoying..

The Ugly

*With a certain pair of gloves, and one perk, Stealth has officially surpassed Mages in the Overpowered department...

*Released in Tradition as buggy as all hell. A la Daggerfall.

Overall: I actually like Skyrim, the races are well done, the Questing and the Voice-acting was better this time around, I can actually immerse myself in the game, despite the fact that its a dumbed down version of Oblivion, I guess you are sort of left with the challenge of deciding what perks to take.

*The fact that I read about the Thu'um almost ten years ago, and came across it in this game was actually...a pleasant surprise.

So basically, its okay...all the Dragons get a little annoying after a while...

*Disclaimer: This was made in the spirit of a Sports Talk Radio DJ, all is just opinion and a great deal is meant for lols.

EDIT- Toned the apparent meaness down a bit from the next comment from a well written gentleman. I realize that if we were sitting around a table talking, my tones and inflections would not come across as mean as text on a screen does, and reading over I can see where he was coming from.

Oblivion was still bad though

Right, I'm getting that you don't like Oblivion, but please stop shouting opinion out as fact...

Have you played Brink fercryingoutloud?...Now there's an awful game...Aaand yet I've read reviews that say it's brilliant...

Oblivion is still one of the top 10 must have X-Box games...

And I dare say most of the people here have spent a goodly amount of time playing a game with an amount of cr*pness that seems to have passed us all by...

Aaand indeed the four of us in this house have nearly a 1000 hours between us playing a game that we thought was brilliant...

Oh, and I personally think that the fact that you can't tell the Daedric Princes to C*CK OFF!! in any of the quests is stupid...And I almost cried with joy when I discovered that you can kill the Dark Brotherhood from the off...Oh hell yeah...

It's just an opinion...

I was happy to read what you said...Then I got bored with the Oblivion hate...I loved it...So basically I'm pretty sure you insulted my taste... ...

Sorry I should have added the disclaimer prior: I too individually have over 1000 hours in OB. I don't necessarily have as much hate for it as is presented, though I do have strong opinions over the non-Jungleness of Cyrodiil and the Mudcrab speech.

Even Morrowind could present a similar conundrum to those who loved Arena. And while it isn't fair to compare one game to another, I had just gotten off a Zero Punctuation binge, and a partner listening to Sports Talk radio for 12 hours.

I actually liked the elimination thingy in it too. And in some of the quests you actually can tell the Princes to shove off.

And I've never put down another persons love of Oblivion, if they enjoy it, I have no place to tell them otherwise, and it has spawned some awesome fanfic, so it can't be all bad.

Sooo if I insulted anyone, sorry, that wasn't the intention, it was just for laughs and I hope folks here have enough sense of humor to see it for what it is.

Fair dues and fair enough... ...Now I know... ...

Edit....Zero Punctuation Binge...Qu'est ce?...

And cheers for the thing about the Deadric shove off...I have tried to avoid as many as poss...And the ones I did, or re-loaded the earlier save I couldn't get out of...

Manly hugs?... ...

Bring it in! *hugs* And there's the love!

Oh and Zero Punctuation is this: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation

He was uncharacteristically kind to Skyrim.

and the end: LOL

I am lolling my F**king ar$e off...Oh thank you for that... ...