Be Excellent To Each Other

So far, so good. But the combat is complete bobbins.

3 hours? I wish! It's more like six hours constantly driving around tunnels.

My lovely wife has bought me this for Xmas. I also have Dark Souls on the way though.

Earlier, I acquired the ability to shout "Boosh" at people and watch them fall over.

Now, I knew the boosh was bad, but not that bad.

(So far: Not as good as Dark Souls.)

I became the Champion of Cyrodiil last night, so I expect I shall be starting this sooner rather than later.

Still hasn't turned up

Dark Souls.

(Actually, play Skyrim first, else you'll be constantly troubled by how much better Dark Souls is )

So, I got myself some of this action recently in what has to be the most bonkers quests I've ever come across. Initially it's excellent fun turning enemies into rabbits at the swish of a staff but in dungeons the rabbit just scampers around the room before turning back to whatever you were fighting so the net effect is zero. Also it only needs to fully heal a nearly dead enemy one time before you become very wary of it! Plus I gave up on a recent subquest due to getting my ass kicked so I just assumed it was too high a level for my character. Later I discovered that at some point early on the Wabbajack had fucking silently de-equipped all my armour and put me in fine clothes instead for a laugh.

complete bobbins has been downgraded to just "Really quite shit"

Are you referring to the complete twat on RPS who I told you about?

Probably.

I began to play this today. HOLYFUCKINGSHITTHISISAWESOMEANDIHAVELOVEDEVERYSECONDSOFARANDTHOSEDRAGONSDONOTDROPEASYBUTWAHTISTHISMORESTUFFTODOSHITIAMAHAPPYWORKINGALUMBERMILLALLDAY.

Amazing, purely amazing. I'm a level 5 Orc with a penchant for two handed weapons and 'please' is not in my active vocabulary.

It's amazing.

I got this for Christmas It's reet good, innit? It's becoming my new Fallout 3, in that I will play it until I fall asleep, for days on end and get all OCD about levelling and crafting and all that. I'm so glad it's the holidays and I can, as I haven't got out of bed before 11am all week (ok, 12pm, whatever).

It's a very nice looking game, I'm enjoying walking up mountains just to take in the view. I think I need a horse, though....The road to Invarstead is taking a while and when I look how far I've walked from Whiterun to where I am now, it pales in comparison to how far away some of the other locations are! I keep getting distracted on my travels, naturally. Yesterday I fully intended starting the next main quest I had open to me, then fannied about for around 4 hours just exploring, reading and selling shit, cleared a dungeon or two and did some side quests...The thought of how much there is still to do makes me well excitable

I'm not really getting into the whole spells and enchanting thing, yet and I only had my first go at alchemy yesterday. Although, after deciding to take on a load of apprentice mages, I think I need to work on all of that! I also picked up a disease from somewhere so I need to fix that, dirty little wood elf that I am.

The first dragon I came across didn't really prove that much of a challenge, he was too busy setting fire to the idiots running at him with maces to take much notice of me shooting arrows into his head. Although saying that, I haven't changed the difficulty settings or even looked at them so I hope it's not on easy I've seen two other dragons since then, buy neither of them seemed bothered about coming down for a fight Pussies. Giants are absolute cunts, however.

I'm also finding combat a bit: meh. It's not so bad from far away, with a bow but close quarters is clumsy and a chore, I hope it improves as I level up. The only saving grace is that the NPC are just as spastic. I do love how stupid they are, an arrow blatantly sticking out of their arm, walking right in front of my face and saying "Huh, I thought I heard something. Must be my imagination."

I have this as well. Played a few hours last night. It's shaping up to be as awesome as expected. Except the melee combat which is shite. Dark Souls.

What is the melee combat like compared to Oblivion?

It's improved, but still clumsy.

I find the magic combat entirely uninspiring too. There's little skill involved, more and equation of your damage per second against their ability to punch you in the face. It certainly doesn't leave you feeling like you've learned anything with each battle because the enemies are practically identikit, and success is entirely stat based.

Sneaky arrow bastard ftw!

Feeling Hot! Hot! Hot!

I've managed to take my xbox all the way to Ireland especially to play (possibly finish) Skyrim whilst on hols WITHOUT a controller. And they have a PS3. BuggerBuggerBuggerBuggerBuggerBugger. I'm about 70 hours in, so this is really painful. Might not get time when I get back.

I've been playing Arena (which I've never played) to try and temper the withdrawal, which is really quite interesting. Although if you think the combat was bad in Oblivion, this is far worse. I'm really quite enjoying it, though.

So far
- I've been to Solitude (in Skyrim!),
- walked for miles before googling it to find that the outside of towns is random and goes on forever
- Found the button for the world map after about 3 hours.
- Gone to somewhere in Hammerfell about a thing. Which is cool as for me Hammerfell has always been a thing on the side of the map you can't get to.

Might play it until the end using an online walkthrough, then I was thinking of maybe Daggerfall if my netbook can take it.

I loved Arena.

So the best way to do combat is... to not fight. Mmm.

Although it would stop the problem of waiting for ones sodding MP to regenerate.

Basically the best thing about the game is the world it's in. But it keeps doing its darnedest to pull me out. Such as a couple of days ago when some orc dude came running at me across town to tell me he wasn't feeling sociable and then walked off. Or the endless stock phrases, which even after only a few hours of play are getting tired.

Yep. Combat's poor, AI is poor, world is magnificent.

Sounds like Oblivion and Fallout 3. Quelle surprise.

First bug encountered, and it's stopping any progress on the Civil war quest because the quest giverer isn't offering any questy dialogue. Time to go and look up console commands.

Annoying. Dark Souls never stopped me from progressing by being buggy.

A small amount of console twiddling fixed the quest.

However, a different command caught my eye. So I ran around making entire towns really quite undressed. And female.

I liked the combat in fallout 3, the VATS thing was great.

The problem was the non VATS combat. That was poor, so it meant if you fancy out of cats points, you ended up either hiding from shooty men or doing your best Benny Hill impression with some men who desired to punch you in the face.

Much like being a mage in skyrim, but the recharging is a bit quicker.

VATS and the generally ranged nature of the weapons in Fallout 3 much improved the combat for me as well; I don't think I ever had a fight without using VATS.

Skyrim continues to be a wildly variable experience for me. Yesterday I spent a day (a) sneaking around the rat runs in Riften fucking people up and taking their shit and then (b) doing the first part of the Forbidden Legend quest in Folgunthur barrow which got me loads of loot and was excellent fun. So, a good day all in. The previous time though saw me spend ages getting part the way through three separate dungeons only to get to a point in all of them where I just wasn't hard enough to take on the later enemies and was getting resoundingly humped. That kind of experience leaves me feeling like I've just wasted a shitload of time and effort and I can't face the game again for a couple of days.

Skyrim: when it's good it's great; but when it's shit it's awful.

I have to agree with the above. It's still shaping up to be great, and it'll no doubt give me 100 hours of gameplay, but yeah. Also, hate to say it, but there ain't no complaining in the Dark Souls thread. It's all good, baby!

Indeed. I'd probably be much less negative had I not just finished probably the most enthralling game I've ever played.

No. Not Space Marine. I'm trying to pretend I never played that.

I can't bring myself to visit my house in Whiterun any more, it just is't the same without Lydia there to greet me with her "honour to you my Thane". If only she hadn't hurled herself in front of my Fire Breath shout in that dank and dingy grotto...

Also, have any of you run across the little inn which is run by a little boy? His stern hectoring about my conduct amused me muchly.

This is one of the reasons I haven't bothered with a follower, in the quests where you have to have someone with you, they're a right pain in the arse. Especially in the dungeons, wandering in front of my arrows etc. setting off traps, being a general dick. Put me right off taking Lydia on. I can forgive Farkas because he's hot and dumb, he also totally wants a piece, he was a lot less judgemental than everyone else when I was running around in my underwear the other day.

my lydia died from an ice thing
And I got ripped off on a dive of a house in whiterun. Loving this however!

Have to agree it's a pain with the followers. I've been practicing my blacksmithing. I can improve the awesome crap weapons. As such I've given all my good weapons to my sidekick. I haven't been able to work out how to improve armour yet though so he's just got the next best stuff I can find. I also have half magic / half one handed attack which so far means most battles have been ok. Hand to hand I would normally use to see the finishing move (VATS stylee bloody death) but most the battles are magic as it's kinda nice to flame thrower someone to death.

It's the workbench you need for improving armour.

And as mentioned before I think, make a million iron daggers to get skilled up

It's quite irritating that the little smithy in Whiterun is the only place that has everything you need for smithing. I.e. a forge, leather stretchy thing, workbench and smelter. Shor's Stone comes close but the smelter's a minute's walk away or so.

My current winge is smithing; specifically the fact that you need to be fucking level 60 in smithing before you can even buy the perk that allows you to smith enchanted objects. Why is that a problem? Because it forces you to choose between enchanting your gear or being able to improve it through smithing; but you can't do both! The worst of it being that if you enchant all your gear before realising this then you can't choose to unenchant it so you can smith the stats up. You either need to ditch that gear entirely and get new shit or wait for the enchantment to run out which takes ages. So you've got no choice but to grind smithing with shite you're not actually interested in while the core stats of your own gear remain unchanged for ages just to get close to the point when you can finally make improvements to your own preferred gear again. Well, that or just never enchant it in the first place but then you're missing out on the massive extra damage stats you can get from doing so which seems like a bit of a pisser.

I know, I know, that's just the way the game's designed and you need to make a choice and go with it. It just seems counter-intuitive to actually easily allow you to do both things (smithing and enchanting) on separate items but never to mix the two until you've levelled really far up. So for your main gear you really do need to pick one of the two ways of improving it and disregard the other way almost entirely. Of course you still want to level up the other skill just to keep it on a par while you wait for that magical time you can start mixing the two, so you're left with no option but to grind one of the two needlessly rather than levelling it up by, y'know, actually using it properly, which is poor.

I have screenshots. Horrific, terrifying screenshots. (I'll grant you, you can't do this in Dark Souls. Or anything quite this disturbing)

That is hideous...

Should I ask Mrs Kov to get me this for my birthday...

Are these two things related?

If you liked oblivion, yes.
If you liked fallout 3,maybe.
If you have bad luck with game breaking bugs, not now.
If you like manly games, Dark souls.

I guess I'll be starting soon now that I'm nearing the end of Dark Souls.

So it's still quite buggy and broken then?

Depends on your luck. So far I've only had one serious one (pc version)

I don't think I've experienced one bug in 70 hours. Still, it's a Bethesda game, so it's likely the bugs are there.

I haven't really found it to be, yet. It's crashed twice so far on the loading screen but the xbox had been on for....many hours....both times, I'm not sure I'd blame the game for it.

Alberto says he's played 150hrs(!) and hasn't particularly moaned about it being buggy. He is a massive twat with a high crap-game threshold, though.

Maybe the 360 version is stablererer?

Still looking forward to exploring the 'Rim'. Not read the thread for fear of spoilz, plus as the Champion of Cyrodiil I won't need any help anyways.

I'm the new Champion of Cyrodiil, I'll have you know.