afa

Civil War has so much potential to be much more. Look at Season Unending, it is tied to the main quest in a pretty reasonable way.

That scene alone convey so much about the directions that could have gone in terms of tone and world setting. The strange alliance and foe between all the factions involve, empire, blades, greybeards, thalmor, stormcloak, Whiterun, and even the Dragonborn all technically have different interests at play.

Again, I won't disagree with criticism on Skyrim's poor quest design and progression, but ultimately it does boils down to each individual's wants and needs from the game and how easy or hard time they want to have access to each of the content. The fact that we are having this discussion is already showing how we are trained by this type of open world game differently than from the typical non sand box games. And yes I agree that it is natural we are seeing the seams and flaws of current generation the longer and more we stare at it. However I honestly don't know if it is a solvable problem at a large scale even with man power and technology.

You can have the most decked out intrinsic narrative with multiple exclusive path and choices, but you would have to expect some common thread between all of them or else you are better off playing a completely different game. And with the hate on Dawnguard and the Civil war I am guessing people are starting to sour on to the "good" vs "bad", A vs B morally grey binary choice. They want interplay between decisions and path divergent which once again we are faced with the question is the interests in the actual choices and outcomes themselves or is the interests purely on knowing the fact that multiple choices exist therefore giving us the illusion of worth, and if that is ok.

This is amplified when you consider these games are long seemingly never ending there are people who might only have one save, one character through out their time with it, and replaying it could means hundreds if not thousand hours of investment.

 

Skyrim forces you to do all the guild quests, it was not only designed to allow you to do it, you pretty much have to, or your char will be gimped and several features of the game won't activate.

 

 

How you might ask? I'll spoiler it since this is going to drag on a bit..

 

Well first up two of the guilds are forced on you durring the main quest (to find Esbern you are directed to speak with Brynjolf, who won't help you unless you join the Thievesguild, and to get the scroll you must speak with Urag at the Collage, but Feralda won't let you pass without force-enducting you into the College). So that's not giving the player much choice there, now is it?

 

Second, you are the Dragonborn, learning shouts is a pretty big deal in the game, but you can never learn them all unless you join and beat every guild's questline, because each of them involves quest-locked dungeons that have wordwalls in them. There is no good reason for this, none of these dungeons HAD to involve a wordwall, they could have put those anywhere else, but no, they made it nessesary to join all the guilds to learn these shouts.

 

And then there's the other unlockables tied to guilds, NPC's not doing their routines untill you join up, Werewolves not spawning in the world unless you become a Companion, and so forth.

 

 

 

Now here's why this is a problem: 

 

Problem 1: They made no effort to justify this. It makes absolutely, positively, no sense what so ever within the games own established narrative and rules that this is possible. The Companions especially, always banging on about honour, how magic is for pussies, and that warrior pride demands they face problems head on, yadda yadda.. why would these people allow a mage/thief/assassin into their guild? It makes no sense at all.

If they were going to make us do all these questlines, then they should have made the effort to tie them togeather, and have it make some semblence of logical sense.

 

Problem 2: Beeing forced to do all these quests also forces the player to play as a jack-of-all-trades non-class, so they can survive these things, or the quests themselves have to be completely gutted to ensure that any class-build can get through them. In Skyrim we got a mix of both. Try getting through the Companions questline som day with a char that has all their perks in stealth and magic... it sucks! Hard! If you set out to play a stealth-mage, then you don't have enough health, most of your perks are rendered worthless by the quest design, and your forced followers will give you crap for trying to use the weapons you've put stats into, the whole thing is just broken (which is why an Arcane-Rogue shoulden't be expected to join the warriors guild in the first place!). But on the flipside, we also have the College-questline, where you can not only join, but become the Archmage whilst having only cast two novice-level spells your entire life, and beating the entire questline relying only on heavy-armor and a war-hammer. This questline is completely and utterly gutted of any meaning, narrative or purpose so that warrior classes can play through it without having to spend their points on magica.

 

 

Bad storries told badly, that's where this leads us.

 

Hey let's have a Thieves guild in the game! But uhh.. we can't really have it's quest involve any theft, because we can't be sure that players joining the guild spend any points in sneak, pickpocket or lockpicking, so uhmm.. let's just have it be a revenge story where the player stabs things a lot.

 

And a mages guild! Except we can't really expect every player to invest into magic, so let's just not have magic play any part in the questline. We'll just have the player fight some more Draugr, that'll do!

 

Assassins are cool, so we need those! Except that might require sneak skills... nah we'll just ensure there's no real failure states for getting caught or anything, aslong as the player stabs things dead that'll do.

 

We gotta have a bards college too! Except speech skills.. and it would require effort.. pile on more Draugr!

 

And a warriors guild, of course! Only that would require... ohh sod it, more draugr, more bandits, lets just cram them in there.

 

 

Guild questing! It all boils down to stabbing things, since we can't expect anything more from the player. Enjoy!

 

You are even greedier than me What you are saying is you want to have access to everything without doing any guild quest...or any quest? You want all the shout, all the services guilds provides, all the content that's a decision that you made, but at the same time you want to get all that by not doing anything that you don't want to. While it isn't exactly something I am against, but at the same time I can say I want to do all the quests, I want to get shout without doing the main quest, I want to have a character that can do everything...you get the idea.

And as mentioned by someone earlier you don't have to do all of the guild quests to get through the main quest, isn't showing the player a little bit of what's available for pursuit reasonable?

If we want to put Skyrim, nay, the entire TES/FO series under a microscope and criticize it, I would say that none of them really have a great storyline nor narrative, if you want to say that the storying telling is bad, the quest design are poor, sure I am with you 100%, but at the same time I don't really care about that aspect of these games. For me it is more about the open world the wide variety of options to do different things. Gameplay wise the ability to be a jack of all trade character is the only way to satisfy all those requirements.

 

Can you explain the difference between an artificial sense of satisfaction and a non-artificial one? Because to me something either is satisfying or not. It's the freedom that you speak of that is artificial; a freedom of making empty choices.

 

 

 

From the design perspective, you can either impose certain rules and restrictions that in turn allow you to go more in-depth with the design, or you can go with something more shallow that every kind of character can perform (but not necessarily enjoy). For example, you can design a guild of assassins that is completely open to everyone from a rogue to a knight, or make it so that it fully utilizes certain skills (your ability to deceit, walk in the shadows, poison your victims, kill silently etc.). Why the second one has a bigger potential is obvious: because the designer can focus on making the content more suitable and/or challenging for a certain group of characters, rather than trying to fit there a knight in full plate armor. And it's not even a subject of question which option the player will find more rewarding in terms of his decision to become an assassin. Hence ironically, restrictions may give you a deeper sense of freedom than the lack of thereof. Last but not least, not everyone likes being treated like an idiot who needs to be protected from his own decisions; "Oh, so you decided to go with the barbarian type with two handed axe and fur pants, but now that you think of it, the mages guild is kind of cool? Don't worry bro! You can easily learn a bunch of noob spells and become the archmage because FREEDOM!" Fuck this. Fuck this from the bottom of my heart.

 

For the record, I'm not a fan of Mass Effect. I liked the first game, the second was a bit retarded in the story department, the third one was utter shit (even without the godawful endings).

 

The questions you ask are all valid, however you're barking at the wrong tree. The reason why the player wants to pick the best course of action, is because there is the best curse of action to begin with - the best as in the most rewarding. Game devs tend to implement the retarded black and white morality system, where you can either play Jesus and help everyone, or do something nasty and get less XP, gold, recognition etc. You can conduct a simple thought experiment in your head and think of some cliche quest, in which you can a) help someone, receive 1000 EXP and positive karma or  kill the person, loot his or her corpse for some mid-range items, get 400 XP, see less content and become less popular. Most players will choose a) not only because it's more rewarding, but also because they will get the feeling that this is what the devs expected them to pick - and rightfully so. Now, let's say that when you pick  something different happens: someone notices you were such a mean son of a bitch and has an interesting job offer for the likes of you, or simply by killing the person you can get some very unique item that is unobtainable otherwise. By balancing the content and rewards you can render even a simple choice an interesting dilemma for the player.

 

Access to information. You can always spoil yourself the fun if you want to, even if the game is completely linear. However, there's a subtle difference between watching something on yt and doing it with your very own character that you grow attached to. Besides, one day you may feel like playing a kind hearted knight, some other day you want to be a necromancer and feast upon innocent souls. Everything is a matter of execution; as long as the optional content is good, there's always replay value in it.

 

It is artificial because Skyrim already let player pick seemingly contradictory choices, that is set in stone, you have the ability to pick to do something or not to do something to fit whatever narrative you want to create, but you can't get the thought of always being able to go back and pick up the other route out of your head, you feel that it devalue your "empty choice", you want the game to step in and effectively cut out part of the game for you to feel vindicated.

That's the precisely the problem with choices in games sometimes it is created to make the player feel like they did something of value, it devolved into something of a gimmick. Some games handle it better than others, and quite frankly I don't have enough faith in Bethesda to it pull off well.

I feel like Mass Effect did it ok, Walking Dead is basically pick between the shitty choices and see how it plays out worse than you thought it would which might or might not work for depending on what the player is after.

Funny enough base on what I have seen, what player wants from TES/FO games are often contradictory. They want a good story and narrative, but these are things that linear game excel at because they have typically have more control on pacing, progression, and characters. Yet god help us if dev puts a lid on open world exploration, take control of who the main character is stint character progression and focus player down a particular path.

Don't usually double post, but I feel like the PC vs console discussion have gone on for too long...as society not as in LL alone

The console's low cost, simple, and static model has always been attractive for consumer and developer. But ever since the PS1 era there were stories of what exactly is the end game of console? Hardware improves year after year and PC is always at the forefront. The theoretical answer was they have to eventually match one another. It is less about one kills off the other because by then the difference between the two should be slight. We are already seeing console using "very PC like hardware", and PC standardizing as oppose to the impenetrable wild west it once was.

It is interesting to see how the path is being walked however. Phones and mobile is also an eventual process everyone is working to get their hardware faster, at worst you will see a stagnate of improvement, you can't see what you have never seen, but can't unseen what you have saw.

Look at things like steam box, nvidia shield, Alienware Alpha...as unattractive and questionable they are at its current state it isn't difficult to see these concept takes off in a few years.

Intel hard push in iGPU and current roadblock with CPU is also interesting development for better or worse.

VR is another thing that could push things one way or another.

Oh wait this is a thread about FO4...

Man I wonder if it will have DX12 support, some bits and pieces of info shows AMD cards are performing quite well with DX12.

 

Such is the way of things, you can't have it both ways. At the very least for the no requirement route the player can pick to do or not do a particular quest line without restriction. Replayability is also hamper when player has to do the same thing over and over again for the non selective parts.

 

Why not? It seems to me that if if they were to add a simple difficulty menu, then limitations like this would be exactly the sort of thing players could be allowed to toggle on or off. That would be a nice way of doing it.

 

Well yes, you can have a toggle, but is it really worth it? Again the player always have the choice to not do something. You are giving that up when you flip that switch.

 

 

At the very least for the no requirement route the player can pick to do or not do a particular quest line without restriction. Replayability is also hamper when player has to do the same thing over and over again for the non selective parts.

No restriction = no weight to your actions = no fun.

 

Nobody forces you to replay a game in order to check alternate paths/factions/guilds. Yet people do that since the beginning of additional content, which is the very reason why it started to exist - to increase replayability value. Back in the 90's people would play the shit out of games like, say, Resident Evil 2 just to check every variation of the scenario and unlock every item there was to unlock. This is still the case today with e.g. Mass Effect; people replay these games just to experience different outcomes and responses, no matter how minor they tend to be, because it's cool to have a choice. Even cooler when a game embraces the fact you're playing a certain character and a thief is treated like a thief rather than a law officer because you can be both at the same time and without requirements. A world without consequences is a world of shallowness.

 

No body forces you to have to play through all the guild quest in one character either.

You are asking for the game to impose restriction to somehow satisfy the player's own narrative, you are trading in freedom of the player for an artificial sense of satisfaction. It might work if the game is tighter when it comes to narrative/story/characters, but I don't think the TES/FO series are that kind of games. This is especially troubling when you consider that you actually want to see all the content, but need to reroll a new character to do so.

Also Skyrim already has a few of those Civil war, Dawnguard, join/kill dark brotherhood...which for some reason people seems to hate.

Replayability is...well games are different now, how they are play, access to information has changed also. Funny you bring up Mass Effect, that is actually the game that got me thinking about choices in games and if they matter or should they matter. First of all I love Mass Effect I would say I like it more than most even for all the flak it had about the ending.

I think it also has a tighter narrative, story, and characters than TES/FO, not necessarily means a better game (although I do like it more), but I think it earns and in fact it should let mutually exclusive decisions play out accordingly since it has the story telling chops to go after that.

But if you consider choices...what exactly are you doing when you make that choice? What exactly are you doing when you make one choice but at the same time want to see what happens in the other choice? What do you do to rectify that? Replay the game? sure but how many times? How many choices are there in a game? How many inter linked decisions are there because we have graduated from A or B decisions. Plus how does the game "reward" you for making that decisions? "I saved this guy from the first game, now he sent me an email in the second" Is that really a choice? is that really of importance? If you didn't save that guy and not gotten his email would you have noticed? How did you know you missed his email?

Which brings us to access of information in 2015. The "easy" thing to do is to google mass effect wiki and have a full list of choices, conditions, and outcome that you can view at a glance, now you know exactly what to do to see everything. Are you using this info to make the "correct" choices and get the outcome you want? or do you use it to plan your playthroughs to see everything? But is that really what choices in a game is? Following a guide that tells you exactly what to do? Are you really the one making the choices anymore? Also if all you want is to see a scene/dialog plays out there's Youtube. Now are we even playing a game? Is there a reason to play it anymore?

If all the player really wants is to see everything then why not make it so the player can see everything without jumping through a bunch of hoops? What are these choices all about? a gimmick? What exactly about "knowing there is another path, but I didn't take it but still want to see it" makes it satisfying? Mass Effect has a gimmick with a lot of the mutually exclusive choices where you can "get" the best of both worlds, but you need to meet some requirements, but is that really a choice or is it just another layer of gameplay where it rewards the player with the "best" choice for doing well or in its case you played (bought) the first two games and did something in those game correctly also.

Ass to ass...ass to ass.

This is the end of Skooma Whore!

That's effectively 65% resistance not sure if it is physical only or magic also. Also only works against male and not female and creatures. Divide it back up against 50/50 split of humanoid that's 32.5% resistance.

Full set of iron with shield gives about 25% at starting level stat without perks.

Vanilla cap is 80% for physical, 85% for magic, and 98% with individual fire/ice/shock.

 

All that stuff about "Morrowind" does "right" could easily be consider a limitation to the player. Joining one guild prevent joining of another, skill requirements, and house faction could very well be seen as blockade. It prevents the player from doing everything that he/she wants.

 

No limits to what the player can do renders any challenge or sense of accomplishment non existent; where there is no punishment for failure, there can be no reward for success. Replayability is also much lesser when everything is doable with a single character that can be both a murderer and a paladin, a mage and a fighter etc. Besides it makes no sense.

 

Such is the way of things, you can't have it both ways. At the very least for the no requirement route the player can pick to do or not do a particular quest line without restriction. Replayability is also hamper when player has to do the same thing over and over again for the non selective parts.

Being a creeper it said his last activity is today.

I thought Diablo is very much an action rpg...

All that stuff about "Morrowind" does "right" could easily be consider a limitation to the player. Joining one guild prevent joining of another, skill requirements, and house faction could very well be seen as blockade. It prevents the player from doing everything that he/she wants.

The whole "moar skillz" is quite frankly just stacking numbers on top of each other just for the sake of having it. If you want to use a sword you want to use a sword, the fact that separated skills only means your character will in turn suck at using anything besides a sword is pointless. The whole more and more mentality in a way is causing the current gaming world chasing after more bombast and make it bigger and bigger with no realization of what is actually needed.

Oblivion level list system is actually not "easy", it is fucked, but I would say if you don't know what you are doing it is the hardest of all three recent TES game. Part of it has to do with the way old TES level up your character (which part of it I absolutely hate) Oblivion makes it so if you have weak level ups you end up not able to match equal level enemies and equal level enemies are everywhere. Morrowind sort of let you slide as long as your keep leveling up you will get through the easy areas, but if you are at max level and still have shit stats then you are pretty much fucked. Skyrim was treading close to that but legendary patch sort of band-aid it with an imperfect, but workable solution.

Cycling through inventory model in crafting or in inventory could become problematic.

Microsoft worked hard to separate the xbox from the PC, they went after specifically not letting keyboard and mouse to work with the XBox for games. Although with the whole "last console" thing I wonder how that'll actually play out.

Some minimal level mob in Skyrim prevent you from skipping ahead too easily. Frost Trolls and bears are some commonly fix spawn that sort of acts as a gate to progress (High Hrothgar is a good example). But a good part of the areas near town aren't too difficult at level 1. Wolves, Forsworn, Bandits all have level 1 variants. Falmers and Dwarven are higher.

There's one Frost troll near Dawnstar, but pretty avoidable.

NPC schedule is still present in Skyrim. NPCs sets up shop, hang around town in the day time, go to inns at night, and then return to house or inn for bed time. There are some exceptions however. You can argue that the Civil war musical chair with yarl and their steward is also part of it. There's also the burning festival in Solitude plus Khajiit caravan across different hold.

I thought they already came out and said the CK will be a PC only thing. The only difference is that they will try to let console user use mods created on the PC.

Depends on what you mean by work.

From the looks of things you can probably run the 1600Hz ram in 1333 mod (set it in bios), you aren't taking full advantage of it but it should work.

You can try to OC it even further to 1600Hz, but millage will likely vary.

Just make sure you are using the blue slots for the DDR3 ram.

The Cleared status. There's a good chance that the place you want to return to isn't cleared. As for the locked chest issue...I am a dirty cheater and use Lockpick Pro!

That game is a console seller in Japan.

I have played Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. And I still have no idea what the fuck is going on in the "lore".

Each game pretty much follows its own lead up to its own conflict and its own results.

At best you have them referencing each other slightly, the biggest continuation of what happened is probably Morrowind to Skyrim:Dragonborn, but that's still not all that important lore wise... and to be honest it sort of makes it even weirder.

The end of Oblivion does sort of serve to lead into the state of the world at the start of Skyrim, but they are hundreds of years apart and much of the build up is added in as brand new "lore" that was created for Skyrim.

It is not bad necessarily, but rather I have a hard time believing that it was all planned from the start and not just some contrive and retconning of ideas to keep the series going.

Consider the number of people that were willing to use the beta and in the fast ring....lots?

It is the only one that has minimal limbs size increase with medium breasts increase.

Still phones in, but nothing of value is sent base on the article.

OS connected to the internet and MS server isn't surprising in this day and age.

W7 will run out eventually, and I highly doubt waiting it out will be a good solution, I don't see how the next iteration will be any better.

Also, screw UNPB. Go with UNP Top Model (also available in UUNP) It's the real best UNP body type.

 

 /me runs away before people start arguing about body types

Yep!

but the least armor conversion...the struggle is real

Too many NPCs in a location will simply crash the game, it has nothing to do with Defeat. Be it CPU, RAM, or game limitation. You can do placeatme command and rack up the NPC count nearby and the game will crash.

Accomplishment after hours or days of frustrations is nothing more than sigh of relieve for "well I never have to do that shit over again"

Lost of everything by the end of the game is a ground that isn't that well worn, rarely revered, and often somewhat controversial. We would like to think games are beyond the point of fairy tale happy endings, but when we are serve a raw deal there's a notion of so the player/characters did all that for naught.

And modern favorites like Dark souls and Bloodborne are quite heavy handed when it comes to asking the player fill in the gaps.

I am satisfy with 40 to 50 fps or so, 30 is too low for Skyrim, the controls and mouse is just now where it needs to be.

I care about light and color, abhor ENBs that are too dark and too much "red" in torched/fire lit areas.

Don't really care about DoF, but would like AA, don't care much for shadows either.

I still don't understand why my indoor fps is always worse than my outdoor unlike what it seems like everyone is experiencing.

Outdoor I can hit 40s with ENB no problem, but indoor it is good if I can even manage 30.

I have some success with tinkering around with shadow, but the only thing that seems to work is decreasing the shadow distance, which lead to some very weird behavior, in large indoor areas I can clearly see there's a circle of light from current location that travels with the PC, and anything beyond it is darker. I also don't know how Solstheim is suppose to look anymore the waters is dark and the land is sort of saturated, but then again I guess it is suppose to look ashy and grey?

Take a look at Devious Surrender

Or Defeat + Devious Capture