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cheetah7071 posted:If TESVI does another timeskip I wouldn't be surprised if the last dragonborn is said to have founded an imperial dynasty in some book somewhere They've written themselves into a pretty bad corner with how over-the-top godlike the player character is in Skyrim and I fully expect they'll just come out with some bullshit like he spent the rest of his days chilling with the Greybeards or he just mysteriously disappeared or whatever. They pretty much have to because otherwise it's hard to imagine him NOT conquering the world, having both the power and the innate drive to do so. Tiber Septim was a bush leaguer compared to TLD for the simple reason that he didn't have access to dragon souls in bulk (or at all?) Anyway we should probably save this for a loooong time from now and let the resident lore expert weigh in later  e: Also I thought the title "the last Dragonborn" ascribed by the prophecy in the Book of the Dragonborn (and quoted by Max von Sydow in the trailer IIRC) was really super cool because the first thing to strike me about it was that maybe he's the last Dragonborn because he's going to lose. And, y'know, then the world gets destroyed. Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Jan 13, 2018 |
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Jan 13, 2018 06:21
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Eric the Mauve posted:it pisses me off that you're forced by the script to swear an oath of loyalty to the Emperor/to Ulfric to join either side of the war and it's goddamn ridiculous. You can kinda justify it if you do the civil war stuff very early in the game, but the Last Dragonborn, Consumer of Dragon Souls, Slayer of Alduin, would never ever in a million years swear an oath of lifelong obedience to anyone and it drives me batty. Preach! I remember finishing that questline and being incredibly disappointed. There is one legitimately cool part we're nowhere near and I will discuss when we get there.
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Jan 13, 2018 06:23
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I think skyrim has like..1 and two halves legitimately good quest lines, not counting DLC. The quests in skyrim are generally pretty terrible and the civil war line is only unique in how terrible it is. The way I like to think about it, TES games are about "doing things in a world". Morrowind had an amazing world, Oblivion had really cool things, and skyrim made doing them fun. Shame we can't have multiple of those at the same time.
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Jan 13, 2018 06:27
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cheetah7071 posted:I think skyrim has like..1 and two halves legitimately good quest lines, not counting DLC. The quests in skyrim are generally pretty terrible and the civil war line is only unique in how terrible it is. I'd mostly agree about the major quest lines, but I think a lot of the standalone quests in this game are great and a lot of the mini-quest lines are fantastic. I also am tremendously fond of Skyrim's world, more so than perhaps any other video game setting ever, but that's at least substantially because it happens to be the exact kind of setting that I personally was hoping for for a long time.
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Jan 14, 2018 20:22
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My main complaint is what a staggeringly high percentage of the quests boil down to "go do this dungeon" which is like fine because the dungeons are fun but the quests in Oblivion all had amazing concepts (even if actually playing through them meant playing Oblivion)
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Jan 14, 2018 20:37
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cheetah7071 posted:My main complaint is what a staggeringly high percentage of the quests boil down to "go do this dungeon" which is like fine because the dungeons are fun but the quests in Oblivion all had amazing concepts (even if actually playing through them meant playing Oblivion) Hm. There were a handful of creative quests in Oblivion, but I wouldn't say all that many of them had amazing concepts. For that matter a lot of them were still just 'go to dungeon X and retrieve the legendary Y'. Maybe I just got into a rut of doing effective quests and forgot the good ones though; what kind of quests are you referring to?
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Jan 17, 2018 05:51
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Melth posted:Hm. There were a handful of creative quests in Oblivion, but I wouldn't say all that many of them had amazing concepts. For that matter a lot of them were still just 'go to dungeon X and retrieve the legendary Y'. Maybe I just got into a rut of doing effective quests and forgot the good ones though; what kind of quests are you referring to? I was exaggerating, but off the top of my head, without checking any wikis, Oblivion had: --A closed circle murder mystery, where you're the murderer --A quest to retrieve a ring from a well where an rear end in a top hat wizard enchanted the ring to weight 150 pounds --A quest where you track down another rear end in a top hat wizard who turned himself permanently invisible as a prank --A quest where you trip on LSD and murder the entire contents of a village which you see as sheep --A series of quests to become the champion of the arena I don't really want to spoil anything in Skyrim in a Skyrim LP but I personally felt like even the "go do a dungeon" quests in Oblivion had stronger high concepts. "We need the blood of a divine, so go raid Tiber Septim's crypt to get the armor he wore in life" is a really cool idea, as is "there's a cursed staff which endlessly summons annoying low-level daedra around you, go de-curse it" even if both boil down to just go to a dungeon. In Oblivion it felt to me like the idea for the quest came first and was always foremost, whereas in Skyrim the mechanical execution of the quest was developed first and then a story was wrapped around it. I personally way prefer that style of quest design (though obviously I prefer a marriage of form and function which does happen in some of Skyrim's weirder quests). I can't present my full argument without spoiling way more of Skyrim than I'd care to in this thread so I'll leave it there, and also say that I still think Skyrim is by far the better game, this is just one way (and, imo, the only way) that Oblivion is better,
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Jan 17, 2018 06:56
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Enter a painting and kill psychedelic trolls. Good quest.
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Jan 17, 2018 07:25
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Yeah I'm not biggest fan of Oblivion but it had the occasional neat quest. Like if you stay the night in a boat hotel, at the capital city docks, you wake up to find the hotel's been hijacked by bandits.
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Jan 17, 2018 11:03
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So, considering everyone's hating on Oblivion, what did it do so wrong gameplay-wise that it seems to be the "black sheep" of the series? I've never played it, though I've played Morrowind and Skyrim.
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Jan 17, 2018 11:49
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I haven’t played Oblivion either, but I think enemies having far too much hp later on and leveling up often being bad if you’re not optimizing (not unrelated, I think) are the big ones I’ve heard.
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Jan 17, 2018 12:55
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Yeah that was a big issue with it, if you played the game on anything other than easy difficulty, then the enemies in the game would quickly outpace your ability to do any appreciable damage. By the late game, they're all nigh unkillable. On the easiest difficulty, everything's a joke, there isn't any challenge in it at all and it's a miracle if anything can actually manage to kill you. Besides that a lot of areas are just samey and uninteresting, especially 99% of your trips to Oblivion. It was also one of the first games to really offer DLC, the age of expansion packs was coming to an end and Oblivion really pioneered microtransactions for extra content. Unfortunately they really overcharged(horse armor is the most infamous of these), they didn't really bother to seemlessly blend the new content into the game and instead just had a huge pile of messages abruptly being dumped into your inventory at any given point and a lot of it felt like cutting room floor type stuff anyway. Then you've got the classic potato-faced characters, generous use of bloom lighting and the general look of most areas being pretty bland, uninspired and quite samey(there are exceptions to this of course). I'm sure there's other minor gripes that people had, one for me was they were constantly advertising the white-gold tower in the lead up to the game and all I wanted to do was jump off the thing, and you couldn't even get on top of it, so bleh. There were quite a few neat ideas here and there, I feel like it was one of the first games to really have a relatively decent working physics engine in it(those manacles in opening dungeon!), vast distances and you could see all of it from anywhere, and to be fair I did play the hell out of it. But they really stripped back some of the cool things Morrowind had going for it and ultimately it felt like a step backwards more than anything. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Jan 17, 2018 |
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Jan 17, 2018 13:30
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Enemy health was only an issue up until I discovered the insanity of the weakness to magica 100pts/1sec + drain health 100pts/2sec enchantment. Before that, though, there was quite a few situations where I had to lower the difficulty just to not get bored by the HP values. This combo was also pretty good in Morrowind, though it was less necessary then.
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Jan 17, 2018 14:20
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Oblivion was extremely bland yes, but I think it gets an unduly bad rap because people forget about Shivering Isles, which was amazing, and showed that at least Bethesda were receptive to many of the criticisms levied at them, in that they made a visually interesting expansion area, dialogue that when it didn't veer off into monkey cheese (admittedly, this was more often than I'd have liked, but I haven't come to expect much out of Bethesda dialogue) was pretty good, and quests that were more involved or had some kind of twist. And more interesting gear/loot as well. There's a lot to like, I think.
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Jan 17, 2018 16:06
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cheetah7071 posted:I was exaggerating, but off the top of my head, without checking any wikis, Oblivion had: Ok yeah most of those are guild quests. I definitely agree that Oblivion had better guild quests than Skyrim. Not even close. Mind you the fighter’s guild quest line still sucked in Oblivion, but it WAS a shade better than the companions. Commander Keene posted:So, considering everyone's hating on Oblivion, what did it do so wrong gameplay-wise that it seems to be the "black sheep" of the series? I've never played it, though I've played Morrowind and Skyrim. I could write a thesis on the extent to which their game design decisions were stupidly wrong, but I’ll keep things to a few major points. 1) Nuisances. It always boggles my mind that game designers continue to put deliberately tedious and annoying mechanics into their games, and Oblivion had TONS of these. Many of them had aggravating circumstances too. a) Armor repairs. To stay at full strength (and you were pitifully weak to begin with) you had to repair your equipment after every. Single. Fight. This meant carrying a vast number of expensive and heavy repair hammers. It was tedious, it was unrealistic, it crippled warriors without applying to mages at all because non-armor clothes were indestructible, it added nothing tactical, and worst of all it was entirely luck-based. b) Fatigue. Your damage was awful to begin with and then this stupid system crippled it down to a tiny fraction of that. People have been rightly complaining about how slow fights were and this made that worse. Every swing you made reduced your damage further. There was no way to mitigate this except the boring, stupid nonsense of standing perfectly still in combat since it regened a little faster that way. Again, this only applies to warriors. c) Individual restore spells/potions for like 12 different attributes, plus diseases, etc. Huge numbers of enemies could indefinitely cripple one or more of your many stats. You needed separate spells/potions/whatever to cure each of these ailments. Adding insult to injury, many parts of the game background mechanics combined all of these spells into one, so it was a deliberate decision to annoy you this way. Again, mainly hurt warriors. d) Luck-based alchemy gathering. Let me just say as a side note that Oblivion DID take out 90% of the horrible, pointless luck mechanics of Morrowind. But it should have taken them all out. e) FTL blocking. AGAIN mainly applies to warriors. Hitting an enemy who was blocking stunned you, but the problem was that the enemy counted as blocking before they’d even begun to visibly raise their shield f) No health regen. Like a lot of these stupid things, this also applies to Morrowind and was there in the name of ‘realism’. Of course you could oh-so-realistically regen your full health bar by waiting an hour, but that was annoying to do every single time. Oh and once again, only really a nuisance to warriors because mages want to be sitting there healing. g) Because a few important skills leveled at horribly slow rates and restoration was one of them. The sheer number of times you had to restore yourself from critical HP to full to level that skill was insane. Horrible amounts of grinding were needed in general h) Scarce arrows. Again, warriors only. Arrows were heavy, expensive at the start, and did such horribly bad damage that you had to carry literally thousands to be able to go on an adventure without worrying about going back to town. Skyrim still kinda has this (and it makes crossbows unusable on high difficulty) but at least they’re weightless. Which brings me to 2) Terrible, terrible balance. a) the game went out of its way to screw everybody but mages again and again. I have completed this game at max difficulty as a pure warrior. It took about a year. I only got hit about once per real-time month but every single fight against a random zombie took about 3 real time minutes of constantly clicking the mouse to swing and occasionally moving to dodge. Both alchemy and magic allow you to trivialize even the highest difficulties though. b) besides that, archery was unusably bad. Your arrows hardly went anywhere, traveled ridiculously slowly, and even if you hit you did tiny damage per shot and fired at a horribly slow speed. Archery was just not functional. I was SO happy the first time I shot an arrow in skyrim and realized I could finally be a viable archer. c) only blade weapons were worth it. Blunt weapons were vastly inferior to blades in every way and then on top of that Bethesda just put virtually no special blunt weapons in the game. Hand to hand was worthless, but honestly I didn’t mind that because punching a demon in spiky plate armor was so stupid it shouldn’t even have been a skill. d) power attacks were horrible. The DPS was simply worse than regular attacks plus they consumed massive amounts of fatigue. There was never a reason to do one except praying for the LUCK-BASED 5% or whatever chance of paralysis once you reached 100 skill level e) blocking was horrible. Mind you it wasn’t strictly worse than dodging like it is in Skyrim, but enemy attacks are occasionally hard to avoid in Skyrim whereas in Oblivion I could beat the entire game without being hit once f) most races were garbage, many crippled your character forever. g) on different races men were arbitrarily better than women or vice versa, which the game didn’t even indicate until you’d already picked and even then didn’t make clear h) most birthsigns were garbage. And just like your race you couldn’t repick these like you can in Skyrim 3) The stat/level system. I won’t go into detail since so many other people already have elsewhere. Let it simply suffice to say that this single core aspect of the game was so terribly done in every possible way as to make the game unplayable in the way it was intended Melth fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Jan 17, 2018 |
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Jan 17, 2018 18:36
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I always hated that being a mage meant chucking magicka potions for every single fight. Granted I mostly played kinda suboptimal but I shouldn't have to do that for every trash enemy. Playing a warrior I just never leveled up past 2, it made the game much less tedious and more fun to play. Oh and you basically HAD to get a level scaling quest reward mod, especially for the incredible Middle Finger of The Mountain spell. 
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Jan 17, 2018 19:35
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Next episode is a turning point in Hjalti’s build as I rack up several important power ups: Days 8-9 Driften Through Riften Melth fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Jan 17, 2018 |
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Jan 17, 2018 20:03
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The best part of oblivion was making a 1 damage fireball spell with insane radius so you could cast it in a room, piss everyone off, and send every physics object in sight flying everywhere. Skyrim needs a mod to do that*. A- *I think
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Jan 17, 2018 21:12
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For clearing tables you can just FUS ROH DAH! Also that video is a tad too long. It's a freaking movie.
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Jan 17, 2018 22:15
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Yeah I agree that if the natural ending point is after 83 minutes, splitting it into two episodes is better, even if you release them both in the same week. I do hope you do the Dark Brotherhood questline. By far the best non-DLC quest chain imo (though both DLC stories are way better than anything in vanilla Skyrim).
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Jan 17, 2018 22:38
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Not being able to repick your birthsigns is fine - it makes sense. How can you just arbitrarily change your date of birth? However, them being mostly trash is not, even in the older TES games most were just unworkable trash. I'm fine with a lot of the older rules, such as no healing naturally (though a very slow natural heal would be preferred), but it should apply to Magicka too so it wasn't simply flat out MILES away the better option. Playing games like Baldur's Gate and other oldschool RPGs (big fan of D&D Basic and 2e) means I'm used to slow healing and treating resources like they are very valuable and hard to replace. However, Oblivion really didn't do that, it was just irritating mechanics all over. Lockpicking, conversation wheels, fatigue damage reduction, enemies scaling faster than you unless you play pretty much perfect, enemy GEAR scaling to the point of ridiculousness (bandits in obsidian ugh), all just horrible horrible ways to keep the game 'challenging' that instead make it dull and painful. Thankfully, with the wonderful world of modding, you can tailor the game to suit you pretty well!
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Jan 17, 2018 22:41
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Mandatory when talking about Cliff Racers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4rXsrZRchQ There are also mods to add them to Skyrim, because why wouldn't you? 
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Jan 17, 2018 22:55
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Chronische posted:I'm fine with a lot of the older rules, such as no healing naturally, but it should apply to Magicka too. Playing under the Atronach stone was like a totally different game! A really aggravating one. So ok, almost totally different. Poil posted:Also that video is a tad too long. It's a freaking movie. Alright, I can think about breaking up some of the longer ones in the future. Though to do that efficiently I need some kind of free program which can losslessly split a video into two files without massively ballooning the file size as my current program would. Any recommendations?
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Jan 18, 2018 03:38
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I think the length was fine, but maybe consider 45 minute caps? That, already, is pretty long. You had a good spot to stop on resting at the forge, at least, so maybe just do single days? I wish Atronach was as gloriously broken as it was in the older games. Ah, well! Nothing really is as strong as the magic of the older games.
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Jan 18, 2018 06:20
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Melth posted:Playing under the Atronach stone was like a totally different game! A really aggravating one. So ok, almost totally different. avisynth. You'll have to learn a little scripting but it's quite good and doesnt have the sheer amounts of cruft most video editors have. youll have to re encode the output afterwards which requires another program, however. Theres a good write up in the tech fort iirc. Rigged Death Trap fucked around with this message at 09:07 on Jan 18, 2018 |
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Jan 18, 2018 08:58
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Fun fact: if you want to play as a conjuration mage in Vanilla Skyrim without the unofficial patch, the atronach stone is a bad idea because you will literally absorb the Magicka from your own spell and your summon will whiff. Also I really like your explanations on what's optimal play and choices in Skyrim. I'm interested in hearing what the best race for a stealthy archer type build is. Also what's the justification for flesh spells being useless? I figure it's possible to cast them just for if you get jumped in a cave or something? Is it better just to wear real armour as a mage instead?
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Jan 19, 2018 04:08
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I appreciated the discussion of the races (and why they're almost all terrible). Poor Khajit.
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Jan 19, 2018 04:26
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Rigged Death Trap posted:avisynth. You'll have to learn a little scripting but it's quite good and doesnt have the sheer amounts of cruft most video editors have. Any simpler alternatives since I really only need this one bit of functionality of splitting one movie into two shorter clips? MinistryofLard posted:Fun fact: if you want to play as a conjuration mage in Vanilla Skyrim without the unofficial patch, the atronach stone is a bad idea because you will literally absorb the Magicka from your own spell and your summon will whiff. That summon absorb thing has been a stupid bug for 2 games now. And for all 3 games with birthsigns/standing stones it's been an exploity benefit because you can actually refuel your mana with it. For a stealthy archer, be a Breton or a Nord. Seriously, no other races are ever worth considering (except High Elves for the purest of pure mages). Stealth is trivial to raise to undetectable power with just a few dozen sneak attacks, so you don't care about racial bonuses there at all. Archery IS a bit slow to raise, but even a +10 Bosmer racial skill bonus will only take a few levels for you to catch up to. Slightly increased early game hassle in exchange for massively useful magic defenses or god mode 1/day powers is a very good trade. As for XFlesh being worthless, it's a matter of math. I'll get into all the calculations and nitty-gritty mechanics in a future video!
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Jan 19, 2018 06:25
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MinistryofLard posted:I'm interested in hearing what the best race for a stealthy archer type build is. 
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Jan 20, 2018 09:09
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MinistryofLard posted:Fun fact: if you want to play as a conjuration mage in Vanilla Skyrim without the unofficial patch, the atronach stone is a bad idea because you will literally absorb the Magicka from your own spell and your summon will whiff. Oh my god is that why it takes 30 tries to summon anything? I quit using summons in my playthrough for just that reason.
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Jan 20, 2018 18:23
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I am glad we did not do the thieves guild quest, literally everything about the thieves guild is awful. I think my favorite Maven Black-Briar moment was when I, the head of the Dark Brotherhood, was threatened by Maven threatening to contact her friends in...the Dark Brotherhood. Unfortunately the game offers you no opportunity to just murder her and improve Riften.
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Jan 20, 2018 18:36
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I enjoyed the breakdown of the races - would be interesting to hear something similar on the standing stones, or one handed vs two handed, light vs heavy armor and such
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Jan 20, 2018 23:13
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Well, a stealth archer prefers light armor, and
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Jan 20, 2018 23:16
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Awesome. GrayDorian posted:I enjoyed the breakdown of the races - would be interesting to hear something similar on the standing stones, or one handed vs two handed, light vs heavy armor and such I can certainly give one for the standing stones. I think I'll save 1H vs 2H and light vs heavy for a warrior playthrough though.
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Jan 20, 2018 23:17
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Sounds good, digging the long videos
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Jan 20, 2018 23:21
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Skippy Granola posted:Oh my god is that why it takes 30 tries to summon anything? I quit using summons in my playthrough for just that reason. yeah. Turns out it's a difficult thing to fix completely, too. Staff summons can't be fixed at all, because you can't set the "no absorb/reflect" flag on. Any mod or DLC-added summons also have to be fixed manually by setting that flag on in the creation kit. There may be a more elegant, SKSE-based global solution to it, but I couldn't figure it out. It's really annoying if you have the Atronach stone and the Atronach perk(from Alteration). I love using both because pretty much anything that isn't a hammer bashing your skull is considered magic, so you become pretty much spell-poison-trap-dragonfire invulnerable with 80% absorption(along with the magicka gain!) but if you don't have the fix you're pretty much denied Conjuration as an option.
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Jan 21, 2018 00:26
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So I'm working on episode 10 (9 is already uploaded so it's not going to change). Episode 10 is 1 hour 13 minutes long. Since some people wanted shorter episodes I've been thinking about where I could split it, but there's not a particularly natural middle spot to switch. The closest there is to a natural midpoint is 31 minutes in when I've cleared the first section of a dungeon. I guess I could dub in some ending comments for that section and some beginning ones for the next one and leave Hjalti in the middle of a dungeon for a week, but before I do that I think I'm still honestly puzzled why people would prefer shorter episodes. Why not just stop watching at a convenient point oneself and continue when one has time?
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Jan 21, 2018 05:27
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Because Youtube doesn't always remember where you left off and it's annoying trying to find your place later, would be my guess. I'm fine with longer episodes myself. NO ONE is clamoring for one shorter episode a week though! I think everyone would be perfectly happy if you simultaneously released two shorter episodes, or did one on Wednesday and one on Saturday or whatever.
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Jan 21, 2018 05:40
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I like the long episodes myself, though I see why other people wouldn't. If you split them up just upload both at the same time. Your viewers can either watch both or split up their watching depending on their preference.
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Jan 21, 2018 06:00
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Honestly I just prefer it when the video creator finds that natural breaking point for shorter viewing sessions for me so I don't have to worry about where the best point to pause is. It isn't a big deal and it won't make me quit the LP or anything. Though I'll agree that If 60-80 minutes is the amount of content that a reasonable workflow produces for you, then I wouldn't change that. If splitting it into two 30-40 minute episodes per week is easy, do it, but if it's a gigantic pain just don't worry about it.
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Jan 21, 2018 06:11
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