Certain events have increased the amount of video of Skyrim gameplay. I watched a bit of gameplay in the Bleak Falls Sanctum and the nearby town, including the first dragon battle. It's an early quest that's been shown in preview footage, but I'll spoiler my thoughts anyway.
Pro:
-People react when you have your weapon drawn in town. On the other hand, they don't seem to comment on you running around naked (although I may have just missed this).
-There's a raise zombie spell that lets you raise corpses. I haven't seen it used on humans, but a zombie elk is still pretty cool
-FUS shout looks good for both unbalancing enemies and annoying the NPCs
-What I've heard of the soundtrack is great
-The two-hand combat system
-There's a favorites menu for switching weapons, shields, magic, and shouts without navigating the main menu
-The creepy conversation zoom is gone
-Dialog is more varied than Oblivion's “click here to listen to quest A, click here to listen to quest B”, although it is still nowhere near as in-depth as Morrowind's.
Con:
-It looks like an Oblivion mod
-Textures are low quality and rather obvious (the higher resolution PC textures might fix this)
-Long load screens (it's the Xbox version, so the PC might be different)
-Town walls were a jarring transition and had few entrances
-Destruction seems to have been reduced to fire/frost/lightning, and I would expect similar reductions in other schools
-There was a third-person slow motion finisher whenever he killed a non-minion enemy with a melee weapon
-The menu command seems to be pause->direction->confirm rather than pause->direction. The streamer commented that he found the interface clunky, even for an Xbox game
-While the dungeon was larger than any I'd encountered in Oblivion, it managed to be even more linear. The path never overlapped and if pressed flat would be a straight line. Their was a back door that could be used to exit after completing it. I suppose that these are a necessity after the removal of recall and intervention, but I find it somewhat illogical that all TES architecture now takes the form of a really long hallway.
-The environments weren't very interesting
-The voice acting was bad
Not-sure-if-want:
-Getting hit by a giant causes your body to go blasting off into the air. It's immersion breaking, but it's also very funny.
These are the impressions I got from watching the game for an hour or two, so I have no idea how indicative it is of the full game.
Also, I don't get the appeal of removing spellmaking to make magic more “magic”. It seems odd that while there are a number of quasi-scientific organizations studying magic for thousands of years with minimal data loss people have lost the ability to relate quantified spell effects to their causes. The lore also suggests that there are supported theories for all schools except mysticism. Using a selection of pre-made spells makes the player feel more like a hedge mage, which is the wizarding equivalent of a script kiddie.
I hope they at least have a good lore explanation for why it's absent, and not an insulting one like Oblivion's environment retcon.
Author
Topic: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Read 1621728 times)