Ok, so after 4 or so hours and a dungeon....
1. Most stable game by Bethesda EVAR.
2. Best looking game by Bethesda, probably.
3. Gameplay mechanics all around are a disappointment, imo. The world may be filled out and interesting, but in terms of mechanics its borderline RPG lite. I don't care how many spells there are, or shouts, or how fancy the skill trees
look. The talents are BORING and basically add
nothing novel to the game. In some cases, the talents allow you get BACK to the level of depth Oblivion had. And considering we're talking vanilla Oblivion, that ain't much. The top of the Enchanting Tree lets me make an item with two traits? Ohgeewhythankyoubestdevelopersever. Considering how fucking cool the skill page looks, you'd think they could have put the effort into the skills themselves.
4. Game is frustratingly unoptimized for keyboard and mouse. Spent the first 30 minutes trying to figure out why "R" wouldn't drop something, only to realize its because the game doesn't recognize commands mapped to the mouse when in menus. I.e. I had no drop key when sheath was assigned to my mouse. The favorites thing ALMOST works as a compromise, except it only can be closed by tab/q....on the opposite side of the keyboard from where the arrow keys are. And yet, does the lockpicking mini-game remap to the arrow keys? NO! Unintuitive doesn't even come close to describing it.
5. Their rationale on some stuff is just stupid. So, with a 1-handed weapon, you can only block if a) it's in your right hand and b) your left hand is open. If you have the weapon in your left hand and your right is open, your right hand is a punch. ONE more button and we could have had blocks all around and even blocking with dual-wielding. Instead we have this goofy system that implies you get to play it exactly how you want, when in fact, it's quite specific on what you can do.
6. I'm getting the sinking impression the game is not only easier than Oblivion, it may be shorter. I mean, consider the # of armors, the fact they can only all have one enchant for the vast majority of play time, and "improving" them literally just bumps
damage or armor rating. While there may be plenty of quests to do, the stuff under-pinning it seems....trivial, at least to a hardcore gamer.
7. Serious time and effort went into making dungeon areas visually stimulating and varied, a big plus over FO3 and Oblivion.
Don't get me wrong. I'm enjoying myself, when I let go of caring about any of it. Game looks marvelous and I haven't even fought dragons. Just been tooling around in my own fashion as normal in Beth games. But I kind of worry that maybe this game isn't going to benefit from modding as much as past Beth games, because everything in it seems so......rigid. From the menu systems to the way items are categorized and everything....I dunno. This almost doesn't feel like an Elder Scrolls game to me. It feels like some weird realistic God of War set in an open world. Everything about it screams "self-contained RPG hack 'n slash", except the world and the lore. And I have to laugh at the absurd amounts of testosterone this game is putting out. I'm sneaking along in the dead of night stalking this thing, and then out of the blue I hear "DUH.....DUDUDUH!" as my sneak skill goes up then I gain a level. Like there's this horde of Norse berzerkers following you around just waiting for you to succeed so they can chant like MEN! The theme is almost a parody, they lay it on that thick.
Anyways, other than some of the frustration and more than a few moments of genuine sadness at how simple some of it comes across, I'm generally blown away by how it looks and how well it runs. Combat *could* be exciting at the adept level, but the fast regenerating health, the oodles of no-limits potions, the crap load of mana you have that lets you just torch anything that pisses you off.......kind of sucks the intensity out of it. Then again, when you're going to die, you seem to die really, really fast. So maybe they wanted you living on the edge of spamming potions.
There's a lot of cool stuff going on in the game (that I obviously haven't gotten to yet), I just can't shake the feeling it came at the cost of quite a bit. I'm hoping all the dynamic questing and stuff makes up for it. But I have the feeling I'm going to be OP and the character-building aspect of it is going to top out even faster than Oblivion.
And now for some eye candy of my own:
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Topic: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Read 1624140 times)