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cheetah7071 posted:It was painful watching you sell all your flawless garnets after having multiple times ended up starting the quest that requires one and not being able to find any for hours That quest is a pointless pain in the rear end for a non-melee character though Also Dragonborn is cool enough but everything about Dawnguard is pants on head retarded
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Feb 10, 2018 22:56
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Enjoying the longer two parters per week and you're making the game look really interesting, but I'm not a fan of reading the lore books aloud. It reminds me of Youtube LPers who read aloud all the dialogue in RPGs.
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Feb 10, 2018 23:07
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Having skipped over nearly every book despite hundreds of hours of play, I actually enjoy the reading as well as the anecdotes on context. It's interesting that so many of the authors are totally unreliable and contradictory of the lore. Makes me wonder how much of it is intentional character building, vs lazy editing by Bethesda.
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Feb 11, 2018 02:40
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My vote is to thumb through the book at a pace slow enough people can pause and read if they want to, and then in post insert a summary of what the book is about, but don't read every word out loud. It's not really a big deal either way though.
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Feb 11, 2018 02:42
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Personally I don't mind him reading them out. It lets me have the video on in the background so I can just listen.
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Feb 11, 2018 03:15
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I enjoyed listening to the book reading.  Recently I've been playing some Oblivion, which I haven't touched in many years, and it's amazing how much better the guild quests are. Sure exploring isn't exactly fun and the landscape is almost as dull as a wasteland or a desert but bump into a npc and they'll just say something like greetings instead of spouting a few lines of monologue over and over into the air for no reason.
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Feb 11, 2018 12:34
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There are some actually interesting books, and theyve made the effort to make a a lot of thise interesting books skill books. I paused to read Chimarvamidium and I have to say they nailed the sort of casually strung together, mythical story telling of real life.
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Feb 11, 2018 14:14
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Rigged Death Trap posted:There are some actually interesting books, and theyve made the effort to make a a lot of thise interesting books skill books.
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Feb 12, 2018 12:15
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GrayDorian posted:Enjoying the longer two parters per week and you're making the game look really interesting, but I'm not a fan of reading the lore books aloud. It reminds me of Youtube LPers who read aloud all the dialogue in RPGs.
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Feb 12, 2018 21:19
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anilEhilated posted:That's because that one comes from Morrowind. You can really tell that Bethesda decided to drop every remotely competent writer after that. Sort of? I was a die-hard Morrowind fan for many years, but it's not like Morrowind's quests and dialogue are pure digital gold. The magic lies in the setting, which for me managed to be weird and wonderful and interesting in a way that no game had ever done, or has since. And sure, lots of that is done through writing, but I'm drawing a distinction between background and foreground, and my argument is that Bethesda has always been able to write really good background when they try, but they've never been able to do really good foreground ever. I'm just talking about Elder Scrolls games here; I've never liked any aspect of their writing in Fallout 3/4.
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Feb 12, 2018 23:35
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So in the locked room after rescuing Orthorn, did you know the chest contained nothing useful or did you just accidentally skip it?
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Feb 14, 2018 01:54
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Eric the Mauve posted:Also Dragonborn is cool enough but everything about Dawnguard is pants on head retarded Bran and Sceolang beg to differ
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Feb 14, 2018 07:02
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Eric the Mauve posted:That quest is a pointless pain in the rear end for a non-melee character though Things I like about Dawnguard: 1) The game’s first useful war axe 2) the restoration spells that hurt undead are a fun addition and a time saver since undead are so common 3) A guaranteed amulet of talos location 4) finally a perk tree for werewolves (I still hate being a werewolf but this was a major step in the right direction) 5) dragonbone weapons, which had been conspicuously missing 6) craftable arrows, which had been conspicuously missing 7) some good items/spells available exclusively to each side, so your choice matters 8) Arkngmthamz is a fun dungeon. In general I like the aetherium quest since dwarven ruins are already solid 9) Zephyr is a fun, useful, balanced bow 10) Some of the locations are pretty and unique 11) Hilarious dialog option about using the indestructible Elder Scrolls as armor. We were all thinking it. You’ll note that many of these things are patches for gaping holes in the original release and have nothing to do with what dawnguard is supposed to be about Things I dislike about dawnguard: 1) questline is horribly tedious and padded out and requires absurd amounts of walking back and forth between the exact opposite ends of Skyrim 2) When the boss rightly calls you a hypocrite for working with Serana there’s no “She’s loving next!” dialogue option. 3) Serana 4) You have to do like every quest with Serana 5) Serana says stupid things that flatly contradict lore and the timeline 6) Serana is an arrogant twerp 7) Serana can never be killed 8) Serana can never even be criticized 9) in fact, the dialogue options force you to constantly act like you LIKE Serana. 10) so much annoying railroading 11) your faction choice is ultimately meaningless to the setting even though it should be apocalyptic 12) Volkihar vampires made totally generic, continuing the trend of throwing out all the cool Elder Scrolls vampire lore 13) I hate vampire lords just as much as werewolves. Both defeat the entire point of the game 14) crossbows were a cool idea and a needed addition to a game where ranged is king, but are unusable because (hilariously) the DLC that added arrow crafting and crossbows did NOT add bolt crafting. 15) Elder Scrolls suddenly go from mysterious, time and space shattering cornerstones of the cosmos beyond the understanding of the gods to generic plot coupons that are lying around everywhere 16) Armored trolls and huskies are as dull as other animal followers. The armored trolls don’t even actually get an armor rating! 17) both faction HQs are so remote and inconvenient that you basically HAVE to fast travel to them. 18) vampire court members are really annoying 19) vampire court subplots don’t actually go anywhere 20) even when you rule the vampires you still can’t kill the useless moron courtiers who are openly scheming against you 21) being a vampire made far too easy with all important weaknesses removed 22) vampires now comically easy to spot, making everyone look like an idiot 23) especially the dawnguard, continuing the annoying trend of Elder Scrolls vampire hunters being mind-blowingly bad at vampire hunting 24) Randomized, enormous number of filler sidequests required to get the cool items 25) the soul cairn means all Elder Scrolls protagonists ever have been horrible monsters on the level of Molag Bal himself 26) speaking of which, still no way to stick it to Molag Bal 27) I cannot emphasize enough how tedious the main quest is 28) gargoyles are just... dull to fight 29) random vampire spawns kill useful NPCs without you even knowing it. And are NEVER explained! Literally no part of the volkihar plan is served by brazen attacks in the street! 30) the whole blot out the sun thing is weird on many levels 31) Serana
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Feb 16, 2018 20:01
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I like Serana
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Feb 16, 2018 20:06
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cheetah7071 posted:I like Serana No, you like Laura Bailey. I do too. Shame they wasted her on such a retarded character. Dawnguard (the quest) is very blatantly a movie. It's not a game. It's a movie. You the player have no meaningful input into it whatsoever. You're just a viewer who occasionally pushes buttons. And the thing is, although it was written by video game people and not movie people and thus obviously needs a script rewrite and 30 rounds of polishing, at its core it could be a pretty GOOD movie--the Soul Cairn and (especially) Forgotten Vale are very interesting visual concepts that are made to completely suck in Skyrim because of how ridiculously huge and tedious they are, people love vampire stories, there are a few side characters who are really interesting (a couple of the Dawnguard people, Gelebor), etc. But wedging it into a game whose entire calling card is open world freedom and forcing the player along strictly enforced plot rails is just infuriating, and tenfold more so because everything TLD is forced to do is just very very stupid. (The Thieves Guild questline sucks balls for the same reason but Dawnguard just rips off the knob on the enforced stupidity.) Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Feb 16, 2018 |
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Feb 16, 2018 20:46
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I do like Laura Bailey Serana is also the only character in Skyrim I can think of who simultaneously a) has an actual personality, character, motives, and arc, and b) spends more than five minutes with the player. So, by comparison to everybody else in Skyrim, she's amazing Plus, she's a cutie
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Feb 16, 2018 21:01
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A lot of  follow because I'm wound up about it now, you may safely skip this post if you don't give a poo poo about Dawnguard particularly or stupidity in storytelling in general. Just going to write this poo poo out and get it off my mind.1. I actually was OK with not immediately killing Serana at her first appearance. There's some kind of treasure in the crypt the supervampires want real bad, I kill them all and go to great lengths to get it open and it turns out to be... a vampire chick with an Elder Scroll on her back?  But my headcanon about TLB as I play him is that I don't kill vampires for being vampires; I kill them for being assholes, which as it happens almost all of them are. So if this vampire makes no hostile moves toward me I'm willing to talk to her. That's fair enough. I don't even mind agreeing to escort her home, because we still don't know ANYTHING about what the gently caress is going on and we also don't where their base is--she might provide useful information and she'll lead me right to their home base, and I can either end the problem right then and there, or head back to Isran with this very valuable information. As TLB I'm plenty arrogant enough to let her keep the scroll for now; I can always kill her later, after she's shown me her HQ, if I need to. And the possibility instantly occurs to me that she might be a fellow enemy of our enemy.Unfortunately that turns out to be pretty much the last thing I'm forced to do that's justifiable. 2. The way I and Serana are allowed to just stroll into Castle Volkihar, and the way I'm subsequently banished like a conjured summon, is UGH SO loving STUPID. That's a very handy spell for Harkon to have--I wonder why he didn't just spam it when the Dawnguard stormed his castle? I wonder how the hell they even got INTO his castle at all if he didn't want them to. That fucker is an extremely fortified position, so much so that even TLB has no easy way in. It would make WAY WAY WAY more sense for a posted guard to spot Serana and I before we're even out of our rowboat and for us to be met by Harkon and 14 master vampires who tell me to piss off and take Serana inside; unless I'm already at post-Alduin power levels even I probably choose to piss off back to Isran rather than try to kill them all. Alternatively Serana could just say "hey thanks for helping me get back here but you really REALLY don't want to go inside, so bye." Less justifiable though because at that point I probably decide to kill her, take the scroll and Whirlwind Sprint the hell out of Dodge. That could be circumvented by having her reluctantly give up the scroll if you press her to, but that would undermine what happens next. 3. So yeah let's talk about what happens next (I mean in the actual plot, not the 2 hours of pointless filler in between): Serana actually showing up at Fort Dawnguard, with the Scroll, asking for me. I cannot overstate how much THIS MAKES NO SENSE. I can justify *my* deciding not to kill Serana on sight. There is NO justifying ISRAN not deciding to kill her on sight. He absolutely positively 100% would kill her or die trying. Which Serana would, or should, know, which is why if she's not suicidally stupid there's no way in hell she would actually just walk up to Fort Dawnguard and say "hey I'm here to see Eric." I can squint and buy the part where, knowing Dad must be stopped but having no loving idea what to do, she decides to stake everything on trusting me. But if she did that she obviously would just stake Fort Dawnguard out, wait for me to show up and say "pssst!" 4. By the way this is the point at which Serana should be turning over her Elder Scroll to the Dawnguard or at least to me personally. There's no way I, and DEFINITELY no way Isran, would allow her to keep it beyond this point. "You say you're with us? Okay then, the Scroll please." She DOES leave it behind with the Dawnguard after the whole stupid Moth Priest thing a few minutes later so there's no reason she wouldn't do so now. 5. Serana was entombed for at least 300 years (she's never heard of Tiber Septim so it's at least that long), during which Harkon was (as the script reminds us every five minutes) ABSOLUTELY OBSESSED with finding her and Valerica because his prophecy is stalled without them. I find it very hard to believe that Harkon is so much of a moron that in THREE HUNDRED loving YEARS it never occurred to him to personally very carefully search the part of the castle where Valerica spent all her time. Where he would have found the same journal I did and come to the same conclusion Serana did. Which, okay, there's nothing he can do about it until he finds Serana, but once Serana betrays him and takes off to the Dawnguard with her Scroll you'd drat well expect to either (a) find that garden and connected castle wing very heavily guarded, or (b) find Harkon hidden in Valerica's alchemy lab waiting to kill me the instant Serana opens the Soul Cairn portal. Because Harkon would definitely have brains enough to surmise that sooner or later Serana is probably going to try to get in there. 6. Melth already hit on this point but there's no loving reason the Soul Cairn has to be the eternal prison of every soul that was ever trapped. It can just be for the souls of idiot necromancers who thought they were putting one over on the Ideal Masters. It would make no practical difference whatsoever. 7. I have zero interest in being made a vampire and it really pisses me off to trust Serana to loving SOUL TRAP ME to get into the Soul Cairn. Because I don't. I mean I'm impressed she had the metaphorical balls to flee her insane father and seek refuge with loving vampire hunters, but I still don't 100% know what her plans are and this is my goddamn soul we're talking about here. Worse, there's no reason Serana can't just go get the drat scroll from the drat Cairn herself while I chill out and wait for her to return. She can (and does, if you just hang back and watch) kill everything in there by herself including the dragon, especially if you kit her out with high end armor and maybe a few high end staves first. "But but I'm scared to go in by myself, won't you keep me company?" doesn't feel in character for her and falls well short of convincing me to LET HER SOUL TRAP me to boot. 8. What in the Nine Hells were the devs thinking when they decided "hey, you know what would be cool? In between the atmospheric but horrendously overlong dungeon and the other atmospheric but horrendously overlong dungeon, why don't we put like four loving hours of dull caves full of hundreds of harmless but annoying Falmer? That would be awesome, right?" There's more but my fingers are getting tired now. You get the idea. Ugh, Dawnguard. Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Feb 16, 2018 |
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Feb 16, 2018 21:24
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I always do the vampire side which is significantly less dumb so that probably colors my perceptions
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Feb 16, 2018 21:41
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I'll add to the list of Dawnguard complaints by being an entitled prick and claiming THE loving CROSSBOWS SHOULD HAVE BEEN IN THE BASE GAME. Seriously, there is a lot of moves between Morrowind and Oblivion/Skyrim that I utterly despise but one of the worst has got to be the reduction of ranged combat to bows. Crossbows were weak, sure, but they had a lot of flavor... ...And that's not mentioning my beloved throwing weapons which were incredibly fun in Morrowind where you could just get dead drunk on Sujamma and turn into a drunken whirlwind of spinning death-slicers. So Dawnguard managed to do something amazing: add content that should have been present in the base game, advertise it as a feature and at the same time make it completely worthless as an option because why the gently caress can't you make custom bolts.
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Feb 16, 2018 21:43
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cheetah7071 posted:I always do the vampire side which is significantly less dumb so that probably colors my perceptions Yeah you're definitely expected to do the vampire side. I did it only once and must disagree, even though it doesn't have the 2-3 crescendos of incredible stupidity the Dawnguard side does it's pretty amazingly retarded all the way down too.
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Feb 16, 2018 21:54
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Dawnguard only makes sense if you assume that Serana just used Vampiric Seduction on the Last Dragonborn and Isran. Also you can craft bolts if I remember correctly, you just can only do it at Gunnar's forge in Fort Dawnguard for some reason, and you need to have joined the Dawnguard as well.
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Feb 16, 2018 22:17
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Oh and another one I can't let slide: later in the questline it's made explicitly clear that Serana agreed with Valerica's plan to entomb Serana in dreamless sleep possibly forever for the specific purpose of making sure Harkon never finds her or the Scroll she's carrying. What's the very first thing she does, nay demands I help her do, when she's unsealed? GO DIRECTLY TO HARKON. DO NOT PASS GO. DO NOT COLLECT 200 SEPTIMS. 
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Feb 16, 2018 22:33
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Melth posted:25) the soul cairn means all Elder Scrolls protagonists ever have been horrible monsters on the level of Molag Bal himself I thought souls only end up in the Soul Cairn if whoever trapped the soul sells it to the Ideal Masters? Even if all soul trapped black souls go there I doubt white souls do, so I don't see the problem. I'd assume anyone using black soul gems would know they're a monster. Eric the Mauve posted:Oh and another one I can't let slide: later in the questline it's made explicitly clear that Serana agreed with Valerica's plan to entomb Serana in dreamless sleep possibly forever for the specific purpose of making sure Harkon never finds her or the Scroll she's carrying. Wow I never paid enough attention to the Dawnguard quest line to realize just how stupid it is. e: Apparently the only source for all trapped souls going to the Soul Cairn after being used is Serana saying that's a theory that Valerica had. I'm comfortable assuming Serana's just an idiot who's wrong about everything. Apparently you go to the Soul Cairn in Battlespire without doing any partial soul trap too, along with a bunch of other battlemages. Staltran fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Feb 17, 2018 |
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Feb 17, 2018 00:18
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Staltran posted:I thought souls only end up in the Soul Cairn if whoever trapped the soul sells it to the Ideal Masters? Even if all soul trapped black souls go there I doubt white souls do, so I don't see the problem. I'd assume anyone using black soul gems would know they're a monster. There's a horse in there at least iirc
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Feb 17, 2018 00:19
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cheetah7071 posted:There's a horse in there at least iirc A truly wicked soul traded with the Ideal Masters for the secrets of lichdom, obviously.
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Feb 17, 2018 02:13
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As far as I can recollect, there’s no distinction made that only black soul gems send victims to the soul cairn. True we don’t see a bunch of animals around but I think that was developer laziness. All the people there were trapped with black soul gems of course but that’s because only black soul gems work on people, not because white soul gems don’t send victims there.
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Feb 17, 2018 02:43
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Saint Jiub, Cliff Racer Exterminator was a nice callback, but that can't save DLC on it's own.
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Feb 17, 2018 06:05
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I like Dawnguard. All of it.... except Darkfall. That place goes on way too long. Everything else is cool. I also never had the 'no bolt crafting' problem as by the time I got around to getting any of the dlc I just got all of it at once.
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Feb 17, 2018 09:18
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Ah, The Forgotten Vale. The end has steep cliffs with winding paths. No railings. Crisscrossed by rickety bridges. No railings. Being fired at by snipers with pinpoint bow accuracy. All enemies there are blind.
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Feb 17, 2018 09:58
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The dumbest thing about the vampire side of Dawnguard is near the end when you get Auriel's Bow. Serana asks what you're going to do with it and you have the option to say you're going to give it to Harkon. Say so and Serana's reaction is something along the lines of "no don't, he'll kill you." It just makes no sense to assume that Harkon will kill my character. I've been his loyal servant up to that point, working diligently to fulfill the prophecy to blot out the sun. He doesn't even kill the dumbass courtiers who openly plot to usurp him, why would he kill me when I've been nothing but loyal and have proven myself to be the only vampire who can get poo poo done. Of course he does try to kill you if you give him the bow, same as if you don't, but it just doesn't make sense. Giving Harkon the bow to complete the prophecy should be the end goal of the vampire questline, though choosing to betray him to take over Castle Volkihar would be a sensible enough alternate ending.
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Feb 17, 2018 17:09
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Mountaineer posted:The dumbest thing about the vampire side of Dawnguard is near the end when you get Auriel's Bow. Serana asks what you're going to do with it and you have the option to say you're going to give it to Harkon. Say so and Serana's reaction is something along the lines of "no don't, he'll kill you." It just makes no sense to assume that Harkon will kill my character. I've been his loyal servant up to that point, working diligently to fulfill the prophecy to blot out the sun. He doesn't even kill the dumbass courtiers who openly plot to usurp him, why would he kill me when I've been nothing but loyal and have proven myself to be the only vampire who can get poo poo done. Of course he does try to kill you if you give him the bow, same as if you don't, but it just doesn't make sense. Giving Harkon the bow to complete the prophecy should be the end goal of the vampire questline, though choosing to betray him to take over Castle Volkihar would be a sensible enough alternate ending. None of the motives of any characters on the vampire side make any sense whatsoever. Including your own. Episode 12 is out after 3 separate re-uploads to fix minor problems I should have seen before! Day 14 Hjalted Streams Camp Melth fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Feb 17, 2018 |
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Feb 17, 2018 20:46
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Dawnguard's horrible plot is so transparently a means of transporting the player from setpiece to setpiece that I don't know why they even bothered. I like the individual setpieces and I think vampire lord stuff is pretty neat but I'm 95% sure they wrote the plot of dawnguard in post Also I feel like being able to just wander into the cave and find Serana instead of going through the dawnguard base first would be a better way of handling the opening bit, wouldn't help most of the rest of the plot though e: Hjalted Streams Camp is a good title for a video, that's my input here
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Feb 17, 2018 21:31
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The swamp can be dangerous if you run into packs of spiders or underground poison bugs roaming around.
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Feb 17, 2018 23:50
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In all my ranting I missed the single stupidest conceit of the entire Dawnguard side of the questline: the fact that NONE OF IT IS NECESSARY WHATSOEVER. You go to all the trouble to slog through the Soul Cairn and the endless Falmer cave and the Forgotten Vale to get a bow YOU DON'T NEED. The Dawnguard's goals have nothing to do with acquring Auriel's Bow; their goal, the thing that successfully ends the existential threat, is to kill Harkon, which is exactly what they do AFTER you get the drat bow. Yes, they tossed in some bullshit about needing Auriel's Bow to kill Harkon, but it's bullshit and just makes it even more of an intellectual insult to the player. That's what makes it really obvious the writers intend you to play the vampire side and the Dawnguard side is a carelessly tacked on paint job.
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Feb 18, 2018 01:20
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Poil posted:The swamp can be dangerous if you run into packs of spiders or underground poison bugs roaming around. It's a lot more dangerous in Requiem certainly. Charus are deadly as hell in Requiem, but there's also trolls and a few other things lurking about. Requiem 2.0 came out recently, though annoyingly the Arcana mod is not supported with it any longer so it's harder to tweak to your liking. Still is a lot of fun, far moreso than vanilla and vanilla mods are to me. Watching you horde all these potions makes me sad when most of them are going to be COMPLETELY phased out of usefulness by the time you might start actually using any.
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Feb 18, 2018 01:23
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Eric the Mauve posted:That's what makes it really obvious the writers intend you to play the vampire side and the Dawnguard side is a carelessly tacked on paint job. For gently caress's sake the DLC's even named Dawnguard yet the actual Dawnguard faction questline and items are just kinda 
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Feb 18, 2018 01:25
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At least the Dawnguard has more interesting characters than the vampire faction, and a much cooler base.
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Feb 18, 2018 01:34
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Morthal is actually one of my favourite holds in Skyrim and it's mostly because the Jarl is great. The major quest in the hold is pretty cool and atmospheric as well.
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Feb 18, 2018 04:51
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I got in a silly pointless discussion with someone recently about how old the various Jarls are (started around the question of Ulfric, who has to be at least 50-55 or so since he was imprisoned/tortured by the Thalmor 30 years before the game begins) and it occurred to us that, even though I always thought of Idgrod Ravencrone as being like 65, she has a son who is about 8, she can't be more than about 50 tops. She's definitely younger than Ulfric and might be younger than Laila Law-giver (whose younger son is at least 16 or so as he appears as an adult ingame.) Idgrod's seen some poo poo, is what I'm saying. As far as I know there is no canon age for any major character in Skyrim, but maybe I missed something.
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Feb 18, 2018 05:13
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Are you going to get a weapon at any point, for those rare occasions when you run out of magicka without a levelup in the tank, or is melee just too unpredictable?
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Feb 18, 2018 05:17
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