Be Excellent To Each Other

Once I've been up the eternal staircase of drudgery to meet the beardy men and learned to shout which I seem to already be able to do anyway, that's me 'unlocked' all the shite I can choose to do in the game, right? Might leave off the main quest at that point, concentrate on getting five grand together for an house, wandering the landscape and trying to reach as many areas as possible in order to fix their level for later when I go back to rinse them. Or, doesn't it work like that anymore?

Has anyone done the quest in the temple in Whiterun?

I've done a couple of things and got basically fuck all for my trouble.

An ode to Lydia.

There's definitely one thing that Bethesda haven't changed from Morrowind and Oblivion that I really wish they had - every bloody time you so much as walk within ten feet of an NPC they have to tell you some snippet of idiotic information. Usually the exact same snippet over and over again, like the stupid kid banging on about her mother's market stall, or the gruff-voiced fool who endlessly witters on about the Stormcloaks. Shut the hell up!

Bloody prices. I loot according to value/weight balance then none of the shops will give me what stuff is apparently worth. How do I make the best of this? My 5 granddaughter for a house is slow to arrive.

You're doing the right thing (the value/weight balance is valid), but your miserable Speech skill means you're getting a terrible rate. It's a straight multiplier on the "true" value of the item. There's nothing you can do quickly; long term you can level your Speech skill and take the perks it offers.

My phone is still missing.

Today I was walking the plains and saw a mammoth - I asked my wife to look at the pretty view and the majestic creature. Another one appeared in mid-air and slowly sank down to ground level. Nearly as funny as the giant who got snagged clipped into a rock and I stood just outside arm's reach firing arrows into his face until he died and I levelled my archery.

How are you posting?

Terrible.

I am absolutely loving this game, but one of the annoyances they haven't fixed is getting you to follow people around when they move at an absolute snail's pace. There a quest up in Dawnstar or whatever it's called where you have to follow a guy to a dungeon, and he takes forever. Very irritating. He also has a ridiculous odd cockney accent.

God yes. Following Delphine reasonably early in the main quest was almost infuriating.

I'm absolutely loving this. I've powered up my archery to the point where almost anything is a one- or two-shot kill, bar trolls and giants etc. so sneaking around the world as a badass assassin is bloody great fun. And I've lost count of the number of dragons I've taken out.

I spent an hour and a half yesterday stumbling around half of Skyrim trying to find The Seven Thousand Steps. Cue much perusal of the map trying to identify seemingly passable routes up the mountain none of which worked. Futher cue a series of hilarious misadventures (such as having it all kick off with an entire Stormcloak camp (including their invincible resurrecting leader) due to a series of perfectly understandable mistakes that any reasonable person could have made. Whilst in the process of fleeing that particular brand of certain death I then accidentally stumbled into a coven of fireball-throwing witches who proved surprisingly dogged in pursuit until I made it halfway up an almost-sheer mountain slope and was able to RAIN DOWN with GREAT VENGEANCE and FURIOUS ANGER with my trusty bow before sneaking back down to loot all the corpses).

Fed up and laden down with second-hand Stormcloak armour and witches' robes (condition: acceptable, some library marks, blood stains and arrow holes) I went back to Ivarsson to flog my stuff.

Playing as a sneaky archer type is on my ToDo list. I've gravitated towards mage in this playthrough.

According to the UESP wiki, there's 250+ perks in total in the game (including the multiple "power up by 20%/40%/60%/etc" ones), levelling up slows down at 50 and you cannot level up beyond 81 (because that's where you end up if all your skills are 100). So there's simply no way to sample all the play styles in one character (unlike Oblivion). You can only get about a quarter of the perks with any given character.

50 perks is a troublesomely low amount. Especially when you have ones like the smithing perks, which you naturally want to be able to max out to make the good stuff.

I got it wrong. I've now totally changed time to correct it.

Note that you don't have to spend your perks immediately on levelling up, of course. You can hold some back until you get some skill minimum level for a perk you want.

Hah, clever little trainer exploit:



(not really a spoiler, no details of the plot or anything)

I can confirm it works a treat. I've got the Archery teacher from the first village trundling around after me at the mo.

It's actually perfectly viable now. In Oblivion it was pointless as all enemies would immediately know where you fired from, but this time you can hide in shadows for a decent amount of the time, evade enemies for long enough for them to give up, and there are many perks to buff both your stealth and archery to an instant degree. I'm looking forward to one at the top of the sneak tree that drops combat when you start sneaking, so enemies have to re-seek out your position again.

I, er, may have left Lydia behind in Shroud Hearth Barrow. Last I saw of her, she had pointedly ignored my order to stay the fuck where she was, and ran through a trapped-up room into a cavern-full of skelingtons. Funnily enough, the skels were no problem for her and she downed them all. Unfortunately, a flight of steps was beyond her powers of reasoning, so I left her there, walking into a wall and grunting a bit.
I hope she's okay.*





*I don't hope she's okay.

She'll reappear. Bad guys can't kill your companions - but you can.

One thing I have found that's annoying (a small thing though) is that the hotkeys are useless for dual-wielding. You can only assign one weapon/spell to left or right on the dpad, which is daft. Let me assign both left and right hand for each hotkey, please.

Just tap the hotkey twice. The first tap equips the left or right hand, depending on if you've bound left or right; but the second tap equips the other hand with the same spell.

I don't want to equip the other hand with the same spell though.

You cab equip a different one to each hand then! Less lt on one and rt on the other, can you not?

Yeah, but you can't assign one pair of weapons (eg, sword and lightning) to left on the d-pad and another pair (eg healing and soul trap) to right on the d-pad. That's what I want to be able to do.

That's one of my biggest complaints so far.

Dark Souls.

Already got it. This is more fun. But they're different games.

It was just a joke about how that's how dark souls works for switching weapons and stuffs.

If Bethesda steal the fighting off dark souls they've got their "generational leap" right there.

Gotcha.

And agreed. The combat mechanics of Dark Souls (at least for melee) are absolutely miles ahead of Skyrim. It feels so weighty, with proper contact. Skyrim is floaty as fuck, but the archery and magic are great.

Skyrim is so good that Saints Row the Third is still on the side sealed.

Dark souls is so good that Skyrim is still in the shop sealed.

Saints row 3 can wait until it's either cheap or someone requests I get it to play with them. I'm imagining the former is more likely.

I said something similar elsewhere, only I replaced "or" with "and".

I'm tempted by Skyrim I have to say, not usually my sort of game but it's calling out for a dabble. Santa list maybe.

*flings Dimrill net*


*bums*

Hooray!

*doesn't get hopes up*

Magnificence!

WTF

Getting my teeth into this now. 27 hours on the clock (although a fair bit of that is time where I leave the game paused and go cook dinner or something). I've visited just two of the Holds and I have almost 20 open quests. So... goddamn... big.

I'm finding the Misc quest UI to be pretty poor, but I guess their goal with that isn't to hold your hand through it, rather have you explore and investigate your way to completing each task.

Oh my God I've just discovered how awesome brew-your-own magic weapons can be. With only a couple of perks in Smithing and one in Enchanting I've made myself an Elven dagger that I can use to backstab for 282 damage. And then set whatever's left of the enemy on fire.

Recepie or it didn't happen!

You know the work I mean - sounds like resser pea. Chrome says it is incorrect but won't help me get it right. HOW DO YOU SPELL IT?

Recipe.

Recist.

What's wrong with it? I think it's fine...

that's just ree siyp. Can't be how you spell resser pea.