The good:

Scenery is amazing, nobody can deny that they haven't felt awe-inspired at some point whilst travelling through the holds.

The score is equally as impressive.

The kill animations, some are verrrrryyy cool. Just did one earlier where a Draugr came out of a coffin, I spin-sliced him and he fell back in it.

The whole Nordic atmosphere. Liking it a lot, just seems like they've put a lot more effort into the culture of Skyrim than they did with Oblivion.

The Bad:

Character creation - been mentioned before but I mean seriously why do all my characters end up looking like William Wallace. I think a second chance to customise your character a last time before you start playing is a must.

The Ugly:

Still get the repetitive npc chatter. If I hear Nazeem ask me if I've been to the cloud district one more time I swear to god...

Arrows in the face.

No dual-wield blocking.

I noticed that too, didn't know how it could be done either but it was why I ended up going one-handed.

Still freezing...Actually, I've had more crashes in the last two days than I did with Wulff's game...

Still silly writing...

Bizzare speech ar$e-ups...

I'm pretty sure there was a quest foul-up but I think that one of the crashes was the result of it, so the quest finished properly on the reload...

On the plus side though...

I'm a lot more accepting of it this time...I know what faults it's got, so I'm playing around them...No Companions (so no werewolf and thus sleep benefits)...No marrying...No MQ...Possibly no house, but I really like the Markath one ...I'm going to see if it was the Forsworn Conspiracy quest that lets loose the raide...ummm...Forsworn around the place...'Cause all I've found so far are Bandits, and I'm happy about that...*Does dance*...

Yes, more accepting... ...

I figured out how to get the hotkeys working.

Favorite your items or spells as usual. If you remapped the change view key (from 1st to 3rd person), you have to use that key to favorite things, not what it says in the game).

Open up your Favorites list. (the default key is Q)
Select the item you want.
Press the hotkey number you want associated with it. You will see the number appear beside the item name.
Done.

Then that's why I've never figured out the hotkeys, I've basically ignored that favorites system.

Thank you, Thank you !! I didn't know how to get them working !!

I have found that the combination of the working hotkeys and SkyUI makes most the interface workable.

However, the Perk selection is still a nightmare. Someone needs to do away with that whole constellation business and just give us a simple list view like in FO3, or a list with an expanding tree just like in Windows Explorer. It could start with just the skill names on the left, then you click on them and it spits out the perks in ever expanding trees, in order that you have to take them.

I'm on a Ps3 and its rather hard to chose the perks :/, You push the analog in one direction it goes to another direction, after a couple of minutes I can finally pick my perk

It is the same way with the mouse on the PC. Whenever I try to zoom in on one skill tree, the darn thing just spins one way and then the other. It is a serious pain in the bollocks.

That whole skill tree screen seemed like a juvenile and pedestrian addition one would not expect in a TES game, whose fan base is one of the (if not the) most intelligent in the industry.

So is it normal for Khajiit to be transparent?

Looks like the AA issues I was having. Got yourself an ATI card? Make sure Adaptive Multi Sample is off in Anti-Aliasing Mode.

Either put it at multi-sample or super sample.

As normal as the 2-3fps on the Ps3


Yes, I'm grumpy

I have an Nvidia card. It just started doing this all of a sudden earlier today. I do have my AA Trasnsparencey set to multisampling. I try supersampling instead.

A warning about the 1.4 patch. Since upgrading today I have twice had lockups in the transition screens when going from one zone to another. I am going back to 1.3, which has never locked up or CTD'd on me. If you keep 1.4. I suggest saving every time you enter or leave a building...

The good: Some gameplay. Story. Some lore is good.

The bad: Faction quests are short. And some lore had been butchered for the sake of gameplay. And the removal of attributes.

The Good: Gameplay, in Oblivion everything felt like it was on ice, Skyrim seems to have more weight to everything. Part of the character creation, finally I can make men look like manly men , The same sex marriages! Overall the whole game allows my creativity for Roleplaying to explode like crazy, I can create many new Rping types that I could not have done in Oblivion.
I love the voices, especially the best voices, and ESPECIALLY the male argonian voice.
Oh and the spells make playing a mage very fun.



The Bad: The other part of the character creation, It's rather hard to see the eye color even on a HD tv, they could have let us zoom in at least! What no option to change the character before we exit the tutorial cave?!
Also all the Nord/Imperial/breton Females look the same.
It feels like the game is trying to force me to be the dragonborn and that sucks. :/
The lack of a spell creation system.

The Ugly: The fact that I'm on a Ps3, the fact that they assured us that they will be the same, yet when we got the game it was freaking broken, then the guy from FONV had the nerve to say that it was the Ps3's fault, that really struck a nerve because Oblivion was ported by another company and it worked fine, hardly any noticeable lag, It has never crashed on me once, ect ect.
I wanted to go up to the guy and tell him, Just because you suck at coding does not mean it's the systems fault, followed by a couple of hits with a chair.

I've heard there is a way to zoom using a controller, it involves pushing one of the thumb sticks in while manipulating another. Try experimenting.

You can do that during character creation? I know you can do that when your already out and stuff.

I'll check later, I'm to sleepy right now t-t

I misread, didn't see that you were talking specifically about character creation. I don't think you can.

I am not sure if this was mentioned before. I just found out the other night. Magicka only regenerates at 33% the normal rate while in combat, and none at all while using spells. In Oblivion the latter would not have been a big deal, since it only took a second to cast a spell. But Skyrim has many spells that you have to keep the button pushed, like the starting healing and flames spells. It makes the ward spells useless, as using one for just a few seconds completely drains your magicka, and you cannot get any of it back.

So if your pure mages are getting their butts kicked, now you know why. One of the first things I did with the Creation Kit was make a small mod that makes magicka regenerate how it should, at the full rate all the time.

The Good: too much stuff to mention. I don't have time to type it all right now.

The Bad: I miss all the numbers! The Attributes system. I grew up with numbers and stats, I'm old-fashioned in this regard and proud of it.

Skyrim's Favorite's system is also bad, in comparison with Oblivion's hotkeys. I only get 2 hotkeys in Skyrim, but had 8 in Oblivion. Therefore, gaming in Skyrim is unfortunately clunky, especially if I need to pull up a lot of spells (or whatever is Favorited). One thing Oblivion has over Skyrim is that gameplay is interrupted less often since 8 hotkeys can be assigned and used at will.

The Ugly: pretty much everyone in Skyrim is rather ugly. And I'm finding it difficult to make good-looking females especially.

Males, however? It's okay if they're ugly! Most of the men in Skyrim look like actual men. Cyrodiil's men (with their lack of facial hair) are more doll-like

You can have 8 hotkeys. I do. I could not play this game without them. Here is how:

Favorite your items or spells as usual. If you remapped the change view key (from 1st to 3rd person), you have to use that key to favorite things, not what it says in the game).

Open up your Favorites list. (the default key is Q)
Select the item you want.
Press the hotkey number you want associated with it. You will see the number appear beside the item name.
Done.

Renee is on the PS3.

I thought it worked the same on all platforms?

Console players are stuck with a meager 2 hotkeys + favorite system.

Wow, that bites.

Indeed.

I just use the favourite system, I never knew there were hotkeys on the PS3... ...Blimey...

Yea, there are. Left and right, that's all we get. There are basically 4 extra positions which go unused on the PS3's controller, and (I'm assuming) Xbox's controller as well.

Depending on the character, I'll hotkey what I consider the most important stuff. Crystal Beth's left is her Fire spell, and right is healing. Healing (Or healing potions) is always right with all my characters, in Sky and Oblivion. That right hotkey has saved my DiD characters more times than Donald Trump has fired interns. Lol.

Is it like that in Oblivion too? I always thought the consoles had the same number of hotkeys as the computer versions.

Oblivion was like Fallout 3 with hotkeys. You had 8 of them corresponding to directional arrows below/above the left thumbstick.

So they had 8, and purposely chose to reduce it to 2 for consoles? Wow, talk about being A-holes.

They should have done it like Fallout New Vegas. There were 7 hotkeys and then 'up' had a special function. 'Up' should have been favorites and the other 7 should have been hotkeys.

It's one of the main things I dislike about Skyrim. Lack of spellcreating? I can live with that. there are lots of things like this that I'm not missing in Skyrim because I can roleplay around them, or I simply never used them much in the first place.

But less hotkeys? That's a functional issue, affecting the actual mechanics of gameplay. It blows not having extra hotkeys, makes gameplay clunkier. I can see why Bethesda did it, though. I am open-minded enough to see why they changed this. People complained about not having enough choices in Oblivion. With the new Favorites system, we can have all the choices on-hand we want, we're not limited to just 8. Problem is, they gutted several hotkeys to get this system to work. Apparently.

I'd rather have less favorites on-hand, and have Oblivion's system of 8 hotkeys at all times.

Bloody quests ar$ing up...

First, Roerek completely refuses to sell me Vlindrel Hall in Markath...Not once, despite the Jarl saying I can be Thane at that point...

And now, the dude who marries peoples in Riften has disappeared...

Oh, and my wife's game still freezes, despite this latest update that apparently fixes everything...

*Sigh*...

The wife probably needs to start a new game. If she is playing off of saves that are corrupted/glitched, then those issues are most likely going to follow her, no matter what version the game files are.

I've got a ton of broken quests where characters ask you to find something for them and when you do it is a quest item...except when I actually take it to them the dialogue option isn't there to actually turn the item in so I'm stuck with it.

The worst part? They each have weight and I've collected up quite a few of them so I'm constantly forced to carry like 20 lbs of literal junk in my inventory.

That said, Skyrim is one of the least glitchy games that Bethsoft has ever released.

Skyrim's unescessary removal of things that could of been used. Seriously, they removed "Night eye". Why would you even do such a thing?

Huh? I use night eye all the time!

I am disappointed that short swords aren't in the game.

That is because you are playing a Khajiit, and get it as a racial power. So far as I know, that is the only way to get the spell.

King Coin: Khajiit gets night eye. Vampires gets Vampiric vision. According to the Construction Set, werewolves were suppose to get Night Eye too, but it was removed. Everytime I walk into a dungeon, my Imperial has to use a torch . It's totally anti-immersive.

My cousin (on the Xbox) was b!tching about having to constantly cast night eye as a spell. I'm going to look in the CK now for it.

EDIT: Weird... I'm going to have to talk to my cousin. As far as I can tell, it isn't a magic effect.

Um...Speaking as an heretical nermal here...Couldn't you just turn the brightness up?...

This is what we like to call, an solution... ...

...

It. Ruins. The. Immersion.

You think a person walking in a dark cave would just shrug and tune on the brightness level of their surroundings? I'm a big Rper, so this is not a solution. I'm more annoyed about Bethesda not adding that ability to something that would need it.

It. Is. A. Game.

Nothing is ever just a game, lol.

I found the dungeons almost too well lit in Skyrim, I never needed to use the night-eye and had to constantly in dungeons in Oblivion.

They are too well lit IMO. Before installing mods, nighteye wasn't needed. Now that I've found a lighting mod that I like, nighteye is useful again.


I'm not against McB's solution to the nighteye problem either. Sounds good to me lol. I'm really surprised that nighteye isn't a spell. What the heck?

That's another huge bad for me...Where the hell did all of the spells go?...

What, Winterhold doesn't have all of the spells that Cyrodiil has?...Or was it all you Immersion (cliched now btw) people who complained that the feather/fortify strength spells made it too easy?...

I used them all the time...I enchanted (another thing that's c*cked up like the non seperate armour, which was a lot of fun to combine looks with) my entire armour with strength...That was massive fun...Loved it...

This is another place where the "Story" is completely screwed...There's noone in 200 years that remembers Ease Burden as a spell to teach?...Really?...Nooo...Methinks that was for the...True gamers...

Maybe for you. But some of us put efforts into our own playstyles. We like to play the GAME in our own different ways. I like to RP, some people like to hack and slash and whatnot. Got a problem?