I wonder how far their weapon crafting system will go.
I'd like to think that there will be a level of customization in there too, but I'm not going to put money on it. I do like the sound of "13 types of ore" (but I thought it was 16?).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I hate the way you cling to ignorance and pass it off as innocence
I just can't think of The Elder Scrolls world as one for multiplayer. I feel i got to be THE hero there. Not A hero.
You don't become THE hero until you've beaten all the quests (if you haven't, how can you be THE hero for every NPC in the game?), and everyone looks on supposed heroes differently. I'm sure the Necromancers didn't look on the hero of the Mages Guild the same way as the Mages Guild did.
I was hoping for a really simple multiplayer LAN or limited online option for TES5. No friend lists or GUI or anything like that, just trade, speech, and a turn-off-friendly-fire option. Four or so people in each game. The real appeal is knowing that there's real people out there, somewhere, amid the hundreds of NPC's. That person is infinitely more capable than an NPC, has seen different things, developed his or her character differently, and could make either a powerful ally or a terrifying enemy.
I can't say how happy I am for seventy voice actors. I wanted to vomit after a while of hearing the same (four?) in Oblivion.
edit--
AHA! Children! I hope I can murder them. I hated how they were invincible in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. If not, I'll just mod it, I guess.
How frikkin' cool is that? You can poison your weapons and arrows by dipping them in blood.
I commented on a lot of those features when Azriel posted them, but no one else said anything because that's how things are around here these days.
I only hope all those features are complimented by the length of the game. Cause I find sometimes that games with tons of things to do are actually not that great because the game itself can be rather short. I guess I'm thinking Fable 2 though to be honest. So many features in that game, yet things are so short that all those features were rendered pointless.
What I'm getting at in regards to Skyrim is that, yes, I will spend time doing tons of other stuff in the game besides the main quests. But hopefully after I've done lots of customization of my character and all his gear, I can go on to enjoy how awesome my character is for a good while as I play the campaign too. It's like in F3, once you liked how your character was and everything else in your house and all that, you kind of wanted to then go play the main quests but they felt so short comparatively after having done everything else. I'm not sure if I'm articulating this well enough.
I just can't think of The Elder Scrolls world as one for multiplayer. I feel i got to be THE hero there. Not A hero.
I can't say how happy I am for seventy voice actors. I wanted to vomit after a while of hearing the same (four?) in Oblivion.
As I stated earlier, I think this is a great investment. Hiring more voice actors will make the world feel more alive. I hated how robotic and homogenized everyone seemed in Oblivion and Fallout.
AHA! Children! I hope I can murder them. I hated how they were invincible in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. If not, I'll just mod it, I guess.
I'm a huge advocate of killing children in games. But yeah, Bethesda would rather leave that to the modding community than worry about ESRB ratings and changing the game for release in other countries.
How frikkin' cool is that? You can poison your weapons and arrows by dipping them in blood.
I commented on a lot of those features when Azriel posted them, but no one else said anything because that's how things are around here these days.
I only hope all those features are complimented by the length of the game. Cause I find sometimes that games with tons of things to do are actually not that great because the game itself can be rather short. I guess I'm thinking Fable 2 though to be honest. So many features in that game, yet things are so short that all those features were rendered pointless.
What I'm getting at in regards to Skyrim is that, yes, I will spend time doing tons of other stuff in the game besides the main quests. But hopefully after I've done lots of customization of my character and all his gear, I can go on to enjoy how awesome my character is for a good while as I play the campaign too. It's like in F3, once you liked how your character was and everything else in your house and all that, you kind of wanted to then go play the main quests but they felt so short comparatively after having done everything else. I'm not sure if I'm articulating this well enough.
I can't say how happy I am for seventy voice actors. I wanted to vomit after a while of hearing the same (four?) in Oblivion.
As I stated earlier, I think this is a great investment. Hiring more voice actors will make the world feel more alive. I hated how robotic and homogenized everyone seemed in Oblivion and Fallout.
AHA! Children! I hope I can murder them. I hated how they were invincible in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. If not, I'll just mod it, I guess.
I'm a huge advocate of killing children in games. But yeah, Bethesda would rather leave that to the modding community than worry about ESRB ratings and changing the game for release in other countries.
If I can't kill kids, at least make them more shy in games as kids usually tend to me. God I hated the kids in F3. Everyone single one of them was headstrong and spunky. We don't need any of that.
They're claiming a 25-30 hour main quest. I mean not that they would never lie or over embellish but that seems possible. A lot of games are running 30+ hour main story nowadays, and man that pleases me. There for a while we were getting those 10-15 hour plays.
Yeah 70 voice actors compared to Oblivions 14. I saw a interview the other day that claimed 47,000 lines of dialogue.
Children will probably work just like Fallout where you can only knock them out, thank god for mods.
They also said Skyrim won't be as gory as Fallout 3. So there goes dismemberment. Once again hopefully mods fix that. Even Oblivion had a decent dismemberment mod. Deadly Reflexes I think it was. I'm at least hoping for post mortem dismemberment.
I've rarely seen a game feature children though that weren't really really annoying. You can't even knock the kids unconscious in F3. They just run away from you. F1 was awesome this way! I could blow a kid's head off if I wanted to.
If there's as much gore in Oblivion as Skyrim, it will probably satiate me just fine. Gore in a game is nice, but it ain't a dealbreaker by any means.
From what I've seen its a couple notches above Oblivion but not quite fallout level. So I'll be happy with it.
Yeah I'm really hoping in some diversity in kids. Oh man just thought of something. You can't attack kids or kill them or whatever... but a dragon can attack anything. Can I be like the pied piper leading kids to a dragon's nest.
I'd be fine with not even being able to interact with kids. It's so seldom in real life that you'd talk to a kid you don't even know anyway. I think it'd be best if they just shied away from you or ran away from you and cowered if you got near them.
I also really hope that the towns are way more cluttered in Skyrim. It always bugged me how clean and pristine everything looks in Oblivion. Even in Morrowind they managed to get things more right by having stuff lying around all over the place.
I really do have high expectations of this game. I think it's going to be a nice mix of what made Morrowind and Oblivion great.
Everyone single one of them was headstrong and spunky. We don't need any of that.
Hence the killing
@Gore:
I know they didn't confirm vampires or werewolves yet, but I loved this mod that fired when you killed a vampire in Oblivion: It made their body incinerate into gritty particles in this flash of really bright, small white-yellow flames that washed over the body. When it was gone, all that was left was black-charred bones. That was so awesome. I went killing vampires just for that effect.
For Oblivion, I don't mind if it's not excessively gory, because in some circumstances it makes sense. It's actually very difficult to hack off limbs with a sword, especially if there's clothing and armor. To do so requires just the right angle. Otherwise, you'd have to keep hacking at the same spot to dismember someone. There are some cases where I wish they would think more. For instances, when you use a blunt weapon, a skull should cave in a bit. I think they might have done this next bit in FO3 (I forget, it's been a while), but crippling the enemy should make sense in respect to where you hit him. If you shoot an arrow in his right thigh, his right leg should be all shitty and hardly mobile.
With duel-wielding and spell-allotment, this could be part of good strategy. If your enemy has a sword in the left hand but uses magic in the right, disable the right hand and you're golden. If you have high magic resistance but shitty armor (AKA, mage), then do the reverse: disable the left hand with the sword, then throw on some magic shields.
No hence! I couldn't kill them! And it will probably never be a norm in video games again that you can do that. Not with how mainstream video games have become. Even in Fallout 2 you could no longer kill kids.
I know they didn't confirm vampires or werewolves yet
I'm indifferent to this feature. One thing I hated so bad in Oblivion was I decided to become a vampire and I played the game for many hours as such. I liked like shit as a vampire, for one thing. Like an old lady. They should've just made my eyes cataract like they vampires in Morrowind. And so I did the long ass quest to cure myself eventually of being a vampire and after I was cured my face looked all different from the one I spent forever creating. Unforgivable! I was so pissed off. I went from looking like the hot chick I initially created, to a pruny old looking vampire, to a weird masculine looking female. I had to load a really old game just to be the way I first looked and that time around I skipped being a vampire cause of it.
For Oblivion, I don't mind if it's not excessively gory, because in some circumstances it makes sense. It's actually very difficult to hack off limbs with a sword, especially if there's clothing and armor. To do so requires just the right angle. Otherwise, you'd have to keep hacking at the same spot to dismember someone.
Not sure many would get picky over how easily limbs are actually cut off, but...
There are some cases where I wish they would think more. For instances, when you use a blunt weapon, a skull should cave in a bit.
I've stated several times that this was a huge weakness in how fun combat was in Oblivion. You'd just hack or smash at your enemies forever and no visible damage appeared on them until eventually they'd just fall over as if they died of a heart attack or something.
I think they might have done this next bit in FO3 (I forget, it's been a while), but crippling the enemy should make sense in respect to where you hit him. If you shoot an arrow in his right thigh, his right leg should be all shitty and hardly mobile.
They improved on visible damage a bit in F3, but mostly just from limping to showing blood on the face. I have faith they'll improve it even more in Skyrim.
Sorry. I should have said "hence the desire to kill them"*.
Vampirism, and several other things in the game, were (kinda) ruined because of bugginess. I thought it was a great idea. I liked the way it worked with some of the characters, like the Count of Skingrad*, and I thought having to work at finding a cure was fun*, or realistic or something. I think they could have played more on the oppression of the Mage Guild on vampires, though, and done a little more to make them seem less black-and-white evil.
*I detested how he was continually referred to as a powerful wizard, but you never saw him so much as lift a finger to cast a spell. Lame. I had hoped when I started playing that the player could somehow enter into an apprenticeship with him or something.
*It was, however, ridiculous that you couldn't make the cure if you already closed all the Oblivion Gates. It was logical that Blood Grass would be an ingredient, and interesting that you had to go into Oblivion to get it, but come on--vampirism is an "extra" sort of "end-game" thing, anyways, you should be able to find a cure post-invasion. Again, modding fixed this (and the purchasable DLC, the bastards), but that shouldn't always be the case or we're just making excuses over and over.
I felt a lot of what you did in Oblivion felt very canned. Very bottled up. And when it was all over, it stayed all contained. I'm not sure if that makes any sense or not.
And yeah things were very black and white in Oblivion. You didn't have as many choices for good and evil as it may seem. Or at least the choice between good and evil was too obvious.
I love Morrowind for this reason. There are quests where you're trying to find obscure sources of history because they've been banned by the authorities. And you interview all these different people trying to put together an accurate picture of what happened long ago at this famous battle. And the more you learn the more you see that those who were supposedly good were just as selfish and evil as the supposed villain. The only real shame in Morrowind though was that you could not choose to side with Dagoth Ur and kill the Tribunal.
I downloaded this pretty cool mod called Unholy Darkness for Oblivion.
It makes being a vampire actually have pros and cons besides looking like crap.
For example the older you are, and the more you feed, you gain new abilities such as detect life and vampiric speed and higher jumping, some stat boosts too. In return though you will fry to a crisp in the sun, you must avoid it at all costs, the closer to noon the faster you burn. Chapels also do holy damage to you so you burn slowly. I had a quest in a chapel that I had to rush to complete, it made it challenging. Garlic hurts you, especially those large garlic bundles that hang about. You can approach them and use your powers to set them on fire. There are also vampire hunters. If you go on a killing spree for long enough the Imperial Vampire Hunters will be sent out. They hurt, fire damage, and I think silver does more damage to you and they utilize that along with being tougher than the average guard. The longer you go without feeding the weaker you get and you can't use your vampire skills to hide your vampirism with the Shroud of Darkness spell. You had to also sleep near a grave every so often or you'd get a debuff, you could buy a urn of grave dirt though that you could carry with you. Keep on the downlow though for a while and in no time you'll be sprinting through the city streets hopping onto rooftops and ripping the throats out of guards. You could also make up to two thralls. You had to feed on someone three times in a row and then you had to convince them to drink your blood, either by charming them or by their own choice.
Anyways the mod made me realize how fun being a Vampire COULD be if they do it right. I'd be excited to see Vampirism and Lycanthropy in Skyrim and working better than in Oblivion.
I just installed Oblivion on my PC last night. Do all of you really like playing this game with your keyboard and mouse? It drives me crazy to do so. I'm researching how I might use my Xbox controller for it but there's lots of different programs for the keyboard/controller emulator, some seemingly better than others. It's not like in F3 where you can just plug in the controller and it magically works already.
I felt a lot of what you did in Oblivion felt very canned. Very bottled up. And when it was all over, it stayed all contained. I'm not sure if that makes any sense or not.
And yeah things were very black and white in Oblivion. You didn't have as many choices for good and evil as it may seem. Or at least the choice between good and evil was too obvious.
I love Morrowind for this reason. There are quests where you're trying to find obscure sources of history because they've been banned by the authorities. And you interview all these different people trying to put together an accurate picture of what happened long ago at this famous battle. And the more you learn the more you see that those who were supposedly good were just as selfish and evil as the supposed villain. The only real shame in Morrowind though was that you could not choose to side with Dagoth Ur and kill the Tribunal.
Yeah, Morrowind was basically about how everyone was an a**hat of some sort or another. I just wish you had more options to call them on it (like you said, siding with Dagoth Ur).
I downloaded this pretty cool mod called Unholy Darkness for Oblivion.
It makes being a vampire actually have pros and cons besides looking like crap.
For example the older you are, and the more you feed, you gain new abilities such as detect life and vampiric speed and higher jumping, some stat boosts too. In return though you will fry to a crisp in the sun, you must avoid it at all costs, the closer to noon the faster you burn. Chapels also do holy damage to you so you burn slowly. I had a quest in a chapel that I had to rush to complete, it made it challenging. Garlic hurts you, especially those large garlic bundles that hang about. You can approach them and use your powers to set them on fire. There are also vampire hunters. If you go on a killing spree for long enough the Imperial Vampire Hunters will be sent out. They hurt, fire damage, and I think silver does more damage to you and they utilize that along with being tougher than the average guard. The longer you go without feeding the weaker you get and you can't use your vampire skills to hide your vampirism with the Shroud of Darkness spell. You had to also sleep near a grave every so often or you'd get a debuff, you could buy a urn of grave dirt though that you could carry with you. Keep on the downlow though for a while and in no time you'll be sprinting through the city streets hopping onto rooftops and ripping the throats out of guards. You could also make up to two thralls. You had to feed on someone three times in a row and then you had to convince them to drink your blood, either by charming them or by their own choice.
Anyways the mod made me realize how fun being a Vampire COULD be if they do it right. I'd be excited to see Vampirism and Lycanthropy in Skyrim and working better than in Oblivion.
That sounds awesome, and how it could seriously change the main game.
Personally, I'd like to see two things. One, I want to see killable guest givers, but doing so does not necessarily end the quest. That goes with avoiding the accidental loss of quest thing (in FO3:NV, you could accidentally kill someone for being an uppity jerk, and then BOOOM, you just lost two or three quests. It makes the game was less interesting to be an evil/psychotic person, because you miss out on so much because you wanted to kill people for disrespecting you).
Two, I would like to see your actions affect the world more. I mean, beside the obvious closing a gate meant the town as not being attacked. I want something akin to what the Assassin's Creed games have been doing. Okay, don't go as insane and let the player own the whole world (or do, but let us call people on it, bribe our ways out of trouble, etc), but I want to see towns get better if I help them out. This kind of thing would be more obvious in the Fallout world, but I would like to be able to actually turn towns like Primm or camps like Forlorn Hope into better places. It could be optional quests for each town, or it could be entirely unmarked quests.
For Primm, it might involve first killing the gangers, then finding a sheriff, then clearing the quarry of Deathclaws, then doing stuff to increase traffic going towards NV. The clearing of the quarry would be a good unmarked quest. First, you could get hints just by knowing the game world (if you know you can help a town, and the towns people complain about not getting enough traffic, look for things stopping traffic). You could also have people mention it off hand (we don't get many people through here because of the DC's up at the quarry, or because it's not safe). Some of these quests could result in continuous income and/or minor jobs (maybe you could set up an armed escort service in primm to help people get to and from the strip).
Yeah, I'd like to see a progression of a town's economy and population if you are, generally, performing beneficial acts for the town. One of the things I didn't like about Oblivion was that the cities and towns felt stagnant, so anything like that would be much welcomed by me.
And I almost never used vampirism in Oblivion. The annoyances definitely outweighed the initial allure. I hope that, if they do bring back vampirism, they try to make it a lot more involving and, perchance, easier. Like, if you went as far as killing a civilian, you could gather their blood in a bottle and it'd give you three "rations" of blood before you had to feed again. Things like that would make it a lot harder to actually want to be a vampire (for moral reasons), but the benefits of vampirism should definitely be many rather than whatever the fuck we got in Oblivion.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I hate the way you cling to ignorance and pass it off as innocence
I recently watched the gameplay demo from E3 and I think the game looks pretty good on the Xbox. Still I hope to have my new rig up and running before the game comes out, but I suppose if I don't then I'll totally settle for the Xbox version-I don't care.
One cool thing that struck me was when you're walking around and you see more animals and creatures that actually won't attack you unless provoked. It always bugged the shit out of me in Oblivion how I couldn't run for more than 30 seconds without a wolf being on my tail. Or a bear. Or a mountain lion.
What made it even more annoying was the battle music. Speaking of which, I really hate battle music. It does nothing to add tension to the moment when suddenly the music changes to something more dramatic and uptempo. And it's so awkward the way it happened in Oblivion too. You'd be walking to some ambient music and then just suddenly the music would change to a battle song. Then maybe you'd kill a bear in one or two hits and the music would go back to being calm. And then maybe five seconds later you'd run into another wild animal and the music would change again. It just was kinda gay...
I think it'd be just fine to be in battle while hearing the same music you do when you're walking around. They just should make the music more of the middle ground type that isn't quite as soothing and peaceful, but a little more ambiguous in feeling. And just keep the same song playing whether you're fighting or not.
hey man, you can turn the music all the way down. that should fix it. i always turn the music all the way down in games an listen to my own stuff in the background.
except for some real old games were theres no turn the music down option like the old final fantasys.
another thing i think they should fix is the voice actors. all of them have the same voice. like it sounds like theres only about 5 guys doing the voices for everybody. in oblivion i mean.
not sure if anyone else mentioned it since i didnt read this whole post since its long as all hell.
but i'll be getting this game for sure, hope they make the combat more funner also.
Obviously. I can turn the music down. But I like the non-battle music. Regardless, my point more was that it was just awkward how the music changes so abruptly just because an enemy is nearby.
And yes it was mentioned that there'd be like over 70 voice actors which is really, really a good thing.
I'd like to think that there will be a level of customization in there too, but I'm not going to put money on it. I do like the sound of "13 types of ore" (but I thought it was 16?).
I hate the way you cling to ignorance and pass it off as innocence
You don't become THE hero until you've beaten all the quests (if you haven't, how can you be THE hero for every NPC in the game?), and everyone looks on supposed heroes differently. I'm sure the Necromancers didn't look on the hero of the Mages Guild the same way as the Mages Guild did.
I was hoping for a really simple multiplayer LAN or limited online option for TES5. No friend lists or GUI or anything like that, just trade, speech, and a turn-off-friendly-fire option. Four or so people in each game. The real appeal is knowing that there's real people out there, somewhere, amid the hundreds of NPC's. That person is infinitely more capable than an NPC, has seen different things, developed his or her character differently, and could make either a powerful ally or a terrifying enemy.
I can't say how happy I am for seventy voice actors. I wanted to vomit after a while of hearing the same (four?) in Oblivion.
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AHA! Children! I hope I can murder them. I hated how they were invincible in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. If not, I'll just mod it, I guess.
I only hope all those features are complimented by the length of the game. Cause I find sometimes that games with tons of things to do are actually not that great because the game itself can be rather short. I guess I'm thinking Fable 2 though to be honest. So many features in that game, yet things are so short that all those features were rendered pointless.
What I'm getting at in regards to Skyrim is that, yes, I will spend time doing tons of other stuff in the game besides the main quests. But hopefully after I've done lots of customization of my character and all his gear, I can go on to enjoy how awesome my character is for a good while as I play the campaign too. It's like in F3, once you liked how your character was and everything else in your house and all that, you kind of wanted to then go play the main quests but they felt so short comparatively after having done everything else. I'm not sure if I'm articulating this well enough.
As I stated earlier, I think this is a great investment. Hiring more voice actors will make the world feel more alive. I hated how robotic and homogenized everyone seemed in Oblivion and Fallout.
I'm a huge advocate of killing children in games. But yeah, Bethesda would rather leave that to the modding community than worry about ESRB ratings and changing the game for release in other countries.
Siaynoq's Playthroughs
I only hope all those features are complimented by the length of the game. Cause I find sometimes that games with tons of things to do are actually not that great because the game itself can be rather short. I guess I'm thinking Fable 2 though to be honest. So many features in that game, yet things are so short that all those features were rendered pointless.
What I'm getting at in regards to Skyrim is that, yes, I will spend time doing tons of other stuff in the game besides the main quests. But hopefully after I've done lots of customization of my character and all his gear, I can go on to enjoy how awesome my character is for a good while as I play the campaign too. It's like in F3, once you liked how your character was and everything else in your house and all that, you kind of wanted to then go play the main quests but they felt so short comparatively after having done everything else. I'm not sure if I'm articulating this well enough.
As I stated earlier, I think this is a great investment. Hiring more voice actors will make the world feel more alive. I hated how robotic and homogenized everyone seemed in Oblivion and Fallout.
I'm a huge advocate of killing children in games. But yeah, Bethesda would rather leave that to the modding community than worry about ESRB ratings and changing the game for release in other countries.
If I can't kill kids, at least make them more shy in games as kids usually tend to me. God I hated the kids in F3. Everyone single one of them was headstrong and spunky. We don't need any of that.
Siaynoq's Playthroughs
They're claiming a 25-30 hour main quest. I mean not that they would never lie or over embellish but that seems possible. A lot of games are running 30+ hour main story nowadays, and man that pleases me. There for a while we were getting those 10-15 hour plays.
Yeah 70 voice actors compared to Oblivions 14. I saw a interview the other day that claimed 47,000 lines of dialogue.
Children will probably work just like Fallout where you can only knock them out, thank god for mods.
They also said Skyrim won't be as gory as Fallout 3. So there goes dismemberment. Once again hopefully mods fix that. Even Oblivion had a decent dismemberment mod. Deadly Reflexes I think it was. I'm at least hoping for post mortem dismemberment.
I've rarely seen a game feature children though that weren't really really annoying. You can't even knock the kids unconscious in F3. They just run away from you. F1 was awesome this way! I could blow a kid's head off if I wanted to.
If there's as much gore in Oblivion as Skyrim, it will probably satiate me just fine. Gore in a game is nice, but it ain't a dealbreaker by any means.
Siaynoq's Playthroughs
Yeah I'm really hoping in some diversity in kids. Oh man just thought of something. You can't attack kids or kill them or whatever... but a dragon can attack anything. Can I be like the pied piper leading kids to a dragon's nest.
I also really hope that the towns are way more cluttered in Skyrim. It always bugged me how clean and pristine everything looks in Oblivion. Even in Morrowind they managed to get things more right by having stuff lying around all over the place.
I really do have high expectations of this game. I think it's going to be a nice mix of what made Morrowind and Oblivion great.
Siaynoq's Playthroughs
Hence the killing
@Gore:
I know they didn't confirm vampires or werewolves yet, but I loved this mod that fired when you killed a vampire in Oblivion: It made their body incinerate into gritty particles in this flash of really bright, small white-yellow flames that washed over the body. When it was gone, all that was left was black-charred bones. That was so awesome. I went killing vampires just for that effect.
For Oblivion, I don't mind if it's not excessively gory, because in some circumstances it makes sense. It's actually very difficult to hack off limbs with a sword, especially if there's clothing and armor. To do so requires just the right angle. Otherwise, you'd have to keep hacking at the same spot to dismember someone. There are some cases where I wish they would think more. For instances, when you use a blunt weapon, a skull should cave in a bit. I think they might have done this next bit in FO3 (I forget, it's been a while), but crippling the enemy should make sense in respect to where you hit him. If you shoot an arrow in his right thigh, his right leg should be all shitty and hardly mobile.
With duel-wielding and spell-allotment, this could be part of good strategy. If your enemy has a sword in the left hand but uses magic in the right, disable the right hand and you're golden. If you have high magic resistance but shitty armor (AKA, mage), then do the reverse: disable the left hand with the sword, then throw on some magic shields.
I'm indifferent to this feature. One thing I hated so bad in Oblivion was I decided to become a vampire and I played the game for many hours as such. I liked like shit as a vampire, for one thing. Like an old lady. They should've just made my eyes cataract like they vampires in Morrowind. And so I did the long ass quest to cure myself eventually of being a vampire and after I was cured my face looked all different from the one I spent forever creating. Unforgivable! I was so pissed off. I went from looking like the hot chick I initially created, to a pruny old looking vampire, to a weird masculine looking female. I had to load a really old game just to be the way I first looked and that time around I skipped being a vampire cause of it.
Not sure many would get picky over how easily limbs are actually cut off, but...
I've stated several times that this was a huge weakness in how fun combat was in Oblivion. You'd just hack or smash at your enemies forever and no visible damage appeared on them until eventually they'd just fall over as if they died of a heart attack or something.
They improved on visible damage a bit in F3, but mostly just from limping to showing blood on the face. I have faith they'll improve it even more in Skyrim.
Siaynoq's Playthroughs
Vampirism, and several other things in the game, were (kinda) ruined because of bugginess. I thought it was a great idea. I liked the way it worked with some of the characters, like the Count of Skingrad*, and I thought having to work at finding a cure was fun*, or realistic or something. I think they could have played more on the oppression of the Mage Guild on vampires, though, and done a little more to make them seem less black-and-white evil.
*I detested how he was continually referred to as a powerful wizard, but you never saw him so much as lift a finger to cast a spell. Lame. I had hoped when I started playing that the player could somehow enter into an apprenticeship with him or something.
*It was, however, ridiculous that you couldn't make the cure if you already closed all the Oblivion Gates. It was logical that Blood Grass would be an ingredient, and interesting that you had to go into Oblivion to get it, but come on--vampirism is an "extra" sort of "end-game" thing, anyways, you should be able to find a cure post-invasion. Again, modding fixed this (and the purchasable DLC, the bastards), but that shouldn't always be the case or we're just making excuses over and over.
And yeah things were very black and white in Oblivion. You didn't have as many choices for good and evil as it may seem. Or at least the choice between good and evil was too obvious.
I love Morrowind for this reason. There are quests where you're trying to find obscure sources of history because they've been banned by the authorities. And you interview all these different people trying to put together an accurate picture of what happened long ago at this famous battle. And the more you learn the more you see that those who were supposedly good were just as selfish and evil as the supposed villain. The only real shame in Morrowind though was that you could not choose to side with Dagoth Ur and kill the Tribunal.
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It makes being a vampire actually have pros and cons besides looking like crap.
For example the older you are, and the more you feed, you gain new abilities such as detect life and vampiric speed and higher jumping, some stat boosts too. In return though you will fry to a crisp in the sun, you must avoid it at all costs, the closer to noon the faster you burn. Chapels also do holy damage to you so you burn slowly. I had a quest in a chapel that I had to rush to complete, it made it challenging. Garlic hurts you, especially those large garlic bundles that hang about. You can approach them and use your powers to set them on fire. There are also vampire hunters. If you go on a killing spree for long enough the Imperial Vampire Hunters will be sent out. They hurt, fire damage, and I think silver does more damage to you and they utilize that along with being tougher than the average guard. The longer you go without feeding the weaker you get and you can't use your vampire skills to hide your vampirism with the Shroud of Darkness spell. You had to also sleep near a grave every so often or you'd get a debuff, you could buy a urn of grave dirt though that you could carry with you. Keep on the downlow though for a while and in no time you'll be sprinting through the city streets hopping onto rooftops and ripping the throats out of guards. You could also make up to two thralls. You had to feed on someone three times in a row and then you had to convince them to drink your blood, either by charming them or by their own choice.
Anyways the mod made me realize how fun being a Vampire COULD be if they do it right. I'd be excited to see Vampirism and Lycanthropy in Skyrim and working better than in Oblivion.
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Yeah, Morrowind was basically about how everyone was an a**hat of some sort or another. I just wish you had more options to call them on it (like you said, siding with Dagoth Ur).
That sounds awesome, and how it could seriously change the main game.
Personally, I'd like to see two things. One, I want to see killable guest givers, but doing so does not necessarily end the quest. That goes with avoiding the accidental loss of quest thing (in FO3:NV, you could accidentally kill someone for being an uppity jerk, and then BOOOM, you just lost two or three quests. It makes the game was less interesting to be an evil/psychotic person, because you miss out on so much because you wanted to kill people for disrespecting you).
Two, I would like to see your actions affect the world more. I mean, beside the obvious closing a gate meant the town as not being attacked. I want something akin to what the Assassin's Creed games have been doing. Okay, don't go as insane and let the player own the whole world (or do, but let us call people on it, bribe our ways out of trouble, etc), but I want to see towns get better if I help them out. This kind of thing would be more obvious in the Fallout world, but I would like to be able to actually turn towns like Primm or camps like Forlorn Hope into better places. It could be optional quests for each town, or it could be entirely unmarked quests.
For Primm, it might involve first killing the gangers, then finding a sheriff, then clearing the quarry of Deathclaws, then doing stuff to increase traffic going towards NV. The clearing of the quarry would be a good unmarked quest. First, you could get hints just by knowing the game world (if you know you can help a town, and the towns people complain about not getting enough traffic, look for things stopping traffic). You could also have people mention it off hand (we don't get many people through here because of the DC's up at the quarry, or because it's not safe). Some of these quests could result in continuous income and/or minor jobs (maybe you could set up an armed escort service in primm to help people get to and from the strip).
And I almost never used vampirism in Oblivion. The annoyances definitely outweighed the initial allure. I hope that, if they do bring back vampirism, they try to make it a lot more involving and, perchance, easier. Like, if you went as far as killing a civilian, you could gather their blood in a bottle and it'd give you three "rations" of blood before you had to feed again. Things like that would make it a lot harder to actually want to be a vampire (for moral reasons), but the benefits of vampirism should definitely be many rather than whatever the fuck we got in Oblivion.
I hate the way you cling to ignorance and pass it off as innocence
One cool thing that struck me was when you're walking around and you see more animals and creatures that actually won't attack you unless provoked. It always bugged the shit out of me in Oblivion how I couldn't run for more than 30 seconds without a wolf being on my tail. Or a bear. Or a mountain lion.
What made it even more annoying was the battle music. Speaking of which, I really hate battle music. It does nothing to add tension to the moment when suddenly the music changes to something more dramatic and uptempo. And it's so awkward the way it happened in Oblivion too. You'd be walking to some ambient music and then just suddenly the music would change to a battle song. Then maybe you'd kill a bear in one or two hits and the music would go back to being calm. And then maybe five seconds later you'd run into another wild animal and the music would change again. It just was kinda gay...
I think it'd be just fine to be in battle while hearing the same music you do when you're walking around. They just should make the music more of the middle ground type that isn't quite as soothing and peaceful, but a little more ambiguous in feeling. And just keep the same song playing whether you're fighting or not.
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except for some real old games were theres no turn the music down option like the old final fantasys.
another thing i think they should fix is the voice actors. all of them have the same voice. like it sounds like theres only about 5 guys doing the voices for everybody. in oblivion i mean.
not sure if anyone else mentioned it since i didnt read this whole post since its long as all hell.
but i'll be getting this game for sure, hope they make the combat more funner also.
And yes it was mentioned that there'd be like over 70 voice actors which is really, really a good thing.
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