Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

anyone been able to lower the drawbridge in the embershard mine? i even cheated and looked at a guide, and it's just like "use the switch to lower the drawbridge". but i...can't...find...the....switch...

NEVERMIND

*turns brightness up on display*

Loving this so far. Perhaps even more than Dark Souls.

i'm loving it too, although i'm a completely overwhelmed with sidequests already! no surprise, i guess, based off of everything i've ever heard about elder scrolls games.

one nitpick: it's a little annoying to not know how much a spell costs (in magika or whatever) before you buy the spell book. for example, i purchased the stoneflesh spell (increases armor), but when i tried to cast it found out that i don't have enough magika to use it, even at max levels.

d'oh!

lol, just hit my first freeze. bethasda, never change.

too tired from baby these days to spend all night playing so i'm crashing now. but good stuff.

4 hours in, I'm feeling seriously ambivalent about this game.

The UI is horrible to use on the PC and the mouse control is dodgy. No paper doll, GoogleTamriel instead of a sensible map an escaped prisoner might buy and stick in her pocket, wretched quest compass and no directions for those who don't want to use it.

NPCs look great, and their dialogue is 100x better than Oblivion even if they *do* talk over each other all the time and constantly blurt out information at you even if you've already talked to them about that thing / are looking the other way / are engaged in conversation with someone else. The sheer amount of dialogue and individual backstory is terrific. The quest writing looks like it's going to be pretty good.

Love the animations for smithing and cooking and so forth - I'm really pleased that they have put cooking in. I'm sad that there's no hardcore mode to make all that tasty food a bit more useful. Can't beleive how they've dumbed down alchemy. And apropos of nothing, why haven't they got bookshelves working?

It's real pretty, and I've always loved the way Beth design the little details, pots, baskets, rugs and shit like that. Armor is boring but at low levels that's cool, I just won't have come across anything exciting yet. The architecture is nice. The shape of the terrain is heaps better than Oblivion. However, having read one review that said the aesthetics and atmosphere harked back to Morrowind, I've been disappointed with what I've seen so far. I've only seen Winterhold and the outside of Solitude, but. I want to be surprised. Mushroom spires and giant shell houses and mysterious rusted machinery: Morrowind was full of things you might not have thought of yourself. Skyrim seems just as one-note as OB, maybe moreso, since the Planes of Oblivion at least had some strangeness to them the first time you saw them.

Has anyone come across anything really spectacular? Fabulous and fantastical? It would give me something to strive for to know that such places exist and I just haven't found them yet. I don't want details just - are they there?

guys what are your character names? its important

My character is named Wink Martindale.

named my lizard dude Apichatpong

my character's name is Arsonal -- same as my char in Obv + Fallout3 + NV. wood elf. mostly been using destruction spells + some sword blows but now i've bumped up archery and sneak so i plan on shifting emphasis soon.

the coolest thing i've seen is SPOILER the dungeon where you get the claw and ultimately the dragonstone SPOILER there's some amazing looking rooms with cascading waterfalls and rivers heading into grates and at one point you step into this room where the water splashes down onto the stones below and when you look up you can see that there isn't a ceiling and just the sky way above you and i thought it was really very pretty.

^yeah, I reached that point late last night and thought it was wicked!

also, i was totally unprepared for the final guy in that dungeon and i basically just danced around the rivers and stones flinging fire at him until he fell to his knees at the foot of a waterfall and i ran forward and administered the final blow with my longsword while water fell around us. that was pretty epic.

unfortunately i also did it out of order so later this guy was like, 'oh hey, i need X from that dungeon' and then i was like, 'oh, this thing?' cause i already had it and he was like, 'oh yeah,' and then achievement popped up and it felt pretty anti-climatic.

Is this worth it if I only want to play in 3rd person?

3rd person much better than oblivion but still not as good as 1st imo. sometimes necessary for when you're backing down long hallways and don't want to get caught in an unexpected dead end

My grumpy Dunmer warrioress is called Zolan. It doesn't suit her. I didn't think I'd wind up keeping my first character, but one advantage of doing away with classes is you can't get the build wrong.

I'm just so bad at 1st person, can't get used to console controllers. Played a ton of quake and it was great with mouse/keyboard, but my skills have not translated.

Er, my wood elf is called Jim.

i'm a Redguard sort of warrior/mage hybrid called Valdiev. This game has so many possibilities that it's kind of frustrating for me to play through, because I know I probably won't have the time to come back for a second round with a different character build. Hell, I barely have time to do this first round! I've never played an Elder Scrolls game, so I went with something that lets me try out both melee and mage stuff roughly equally. I've usually got a weapon in the right hand and a spell on the left. Hope this doesn't come back to bite me later, because I'm basically rarely using a shield and only occasionally doing archery.

also, i feel like a dumbass because i received an enchanted two-handed weapon that i thought of as pretty useless (since i'm focusing on one-handed skills), and i sold it off for pretty cheap. only later did i realize i could have disenchanted it! d'oh!

which reminds me, i know that the speech skill affects the prices you receive for bartering goods, but is there any effect from who you talk to? i mean, if you offer up a pretty good item to some faceless trader in a tiny town, vs. a well-known shop that specializes in the category in a big city, would you get a different price? trying to figure out if it's a huge mistake to just sell off stuff in the first town i reach, or if i should hoard it until i get to a better location.

Sell it, I think. You get pretty overburdened fairly quickly. I've had to leave lots of loot behind. (I yearn for the days of Daggerfall when you could buy a horse and wagon and load up your wagon w/ stuff to sell after every expedition.)

My character's name is Omaen and she is a redguard.

"DIE SO I CAN TAKE YOUR STUFF"

btw I am Clive, an Imperial

did not end up buying this today mainly because target ran out and i hate best buy and they didnt have any deals anyway

also, i was totally unprepared for the final guy in that dungeon and i basically just danced around the rivers and stones flinging fire at him until he fell to his knees at the foot of a waterfall and i ran forward and administered the final blow with my longsword while water fell around us. that was pretty epic.

― Mordy, Saturday, 12 November 2011 16:06 (Yesterday)

this is the coolest shit I have ever heard.

i ran into a village of giants on my way to the location where you're supposed to talk to the greybeards (7000 stairs). thought i was doing well, and then some giant hit me and i flew hundreds of feet up in the air? i'm not sure if it was a glitch or not, but after 7-8 seconds into my ascent to the sun, it went back to the loading screen to restart me.

no, i think that is for real (not a glitch). it's been mentioned all over the interwebs.

next time i play i plan on taking the route on the OTHER side of the mountain!

the problem with these games for me is all the character customization - how am I supposed to CHOOSE

this one kinda lets you ease into it since you don't have to pick anything to start (except race)

the climb to the monastery is WOW

Just started this as a redguard called Claude. Are you all joining the imperial legion or the stormcloaks?

haven't started those quests yet, but planning on stormcloak, i suppose.

lol hrothgar references. this game is just one huge geat homage, isn't it

I was all set to side with the rebels (underdog radicals generally appeal to me) when I realized that they're basically nativists...

It is a testament to this game's awesomeness that I am irritated at having to turn it off and go to the bar for football. Fucking saints, why can't they have a bye this week?

Crunchy the nord relies mostly on war axes, FLAMETHROWER HAND and zombie raising.

i turned up the difficulty by one level. average fights are better now but dragons just destroy me.

also some of the npcs are bugged. I snuck into the alchemists shop and she kept welcoming me to buy things while she slept. I stole all her shit.

how do i get fireball-hand other than the scrolls? do i have to go to magic school city?

this is just sitting there begging me to play it :////

ive already decide im gonna play a pure caster for the first time

i'd love to try a pure caster but i just love archery too much

this is pretty amazing so far; in the dungeon that mordy mentions i made that magic transition from playing a video game pushing a sprite around on a digital map to YOU ARE DEEP WITHIN THE BOWELS OF THE ANCIENT EARTH WHEN THE VIKING ZOMBIE PULLS ITSELF SLOWLY FROM ITS MOULDERING CRYPT, EYES AGLAZE WITH INFERNAL LIFE, JAW AGAPE WITH A HATEFUL SNEER, RUSHING TOWARD YOU SWORD OUTSTRETCHED roll for initiative

i just killed a solid hour reorganizing my inventory. you can micromanage the shit out of this game if you want to.

and it's fun to micromanage btw! very good ui!

is there a way to change the order of items in the inventory? for example, can you lump all of your shields together, all of your boots together, etc?

it auto-orders your equipment into like weaponry / apparel / books / ingredients / scrolls / misc, but you can't reorder it by like boots or shields (at least not that i've seen so far)

The start of the Dark Brotherhood stuff is fun

guess who just figured out there's a sprint button?