Fun Stuff > CLIKC

Elder Scrolls V

<< < (61/106) > >>

snalin:
Depends on how high a hit your pc budget is going to take, I guess. I bought a brand new pc just after Skyrim, and while it was expensive as fuck, ultra graphics looks really good. But I played for a while on the old pc, and that ran Skyrim on medium, which is still good looking, and that pc was midrange price a bit over a year ago. I'd go to this site to check what to expect - the other specs than graphics cards is at the bottom of the page. If a pc that's within your budget range looks like it will reasonably run stuff at medium-high settings, I'd say go for it.

LTK:
You can also look at the PC Gamer rig for some good value components, but only if your budget is roughly similar to theirs. I could use a graphics card upgrade, but there's no way I'm spending €220 on one when the one I have cost €80 back then. A 1GB version is affordable, but since I already have that much VRAM there wouldn't be much point in buying one with just as much.

Wait, I forgot I was going to elaborate on the Imperial-Stormcloak conflict. It's easily summarized though: Ulfric Stormcloak is a giant dick. Took me a while to come to that conclusion, but he is. This is why:

(click to show/hide)
* Jarl Elisif, King Torygg's widow, explains that the High King was very sympathetic towards Ulfric and his call for independence. But Ulfric killed Torygg because he needed someone to serve as a symbol for the Empire, and defeat this symbol to make him look powerful. These are Elisif's words, and I choose to believe her. Also, if Ulfric wanted to be High King, Torygg was simply in the way.
* It wouldn't have been as bad if it had been a fair duel, but Ulfric had an immediate advantage over Torygg because of the Voice. He didn't stand a chance. And if we believe the legends that the Nords were punished by the gods for using their Voice to shout everyone else out of town, then this sets a bad precedent.
* Then there's the book The Bear of Markarth: The Crimes of Ulfric Stormcloak. This describes how the Breton Forsworn, natives of Skyrim before the Nords, took advantage of the Empire-Dominion war taking resources away from Skyrim to retake Markarth and the Reach. They quickly established law and order in the hold, and negotiations for a peace treaty with the Empire were already underway. But Ulfric didn't stand for that. He took his men and raided Markarth, killing everyone who didn't immediately join the fight against the Forsworn. Never mind that this is a heinous war crime, this is the exact same situation that the Nords find themselves in now: A wronged people seeking to take what was taken from them. In a stunning display of hypocrisy, he massacres a group of foreigners, and two decades later, tries to get away with the very same thing he killed them for.
I don't know about you, but I definitely don't want that guy as king. Ulfric Stormcloak can get sucked by a slaughterfish.

satsugaikaze:
So uh after about 148 hours into this game I can safely say that there's something missing from this game that doesn't quite give it the same sort of quality that I initially had it staked out to be. I'm finding the NPCs to be pretty boring garbage. Every now and then there's some fun interesting quest here and there, or some random encounter that makes me laugh a bit, but at the same time it's difficult for me to remember any particularly memorable characters in the game.

I never played enough of Oblivion to make a qualitative judgement comparing the two, but what I have played quite extensively are both Gamebryo-era Fallout games, and I can probably count the number of NPCs I remember for each game on more than one hand - which is more than can be said for Skyrim. The biggest disappointment to me are probably the followers/companions; at most there's one quest that requires you to fetch an item or talk to someone about something, or kill something else, and then you have some dude who follows you wherever the hell you want. The most interesting companions I think I've gotten so far is the random woman (I can't even remember her fucking name) in the Whiterun tavern who you have to beat up in a fistfight before you could recruit her, and Mjoll the Lioness - simply because there was backstory, something to attach a personality to the character.
On that note, the first follower you get from the main quest, Lydia, is a goddamn doormat with as much meaning as a two-by-four plank. Not to trivialise her voice actor's efforts, though. At least she tried. But, you know, in the Fallout games there's a sense of companionship where you're travelling and maybe the dude in your 3-man party brings up something and goes "heyy remember when I told you about X, and I really didn't like Y? Well, have a quest Z".

This is something Bioware does much better: character development. I was initially thinking of saying that Bethesda's writers lack the talent, but Fallout 3 sure as hell proves that hypothesis wrong. It just feels missing from Skyrim in particular. It makes me a sadpanda.

Addendum: I guess you could argue that they made this a purposeful design choice, and that the proper mindset to play it in is just to project whatever you want onto the characters. I suppose in that context there's a method to the madness, but at the same time I don't personally think a gargantuan investment into a mahoosive digital sandbox for you to splash around in and smack some wooden dolls together resonates with a large portion of players who do just want a fleshed-out, character-rich world. But now I'm just arguing with myself  :mrgreen:

Cire27:
I don't know if I like the fact that the Stormcloaks are a kind of trap for people first getting into the game.  I personally leaned towards them until I did some book reading and now the Imperials seem an outright better choice.  There are no redeeming qualities about the Stormcloaks besides the initial "FUCK YEAH FOR THE NORDS!"

snalin:
Depends on how much you come to hate the Dominion. I'm not sure if it's a flaw on Bethesda's side that they've made a civil war where I'm not seeing any redeeming qualities for any of the sides, other than "they don't murder people for the same bigoted reasons that the other group does". I think what made me go with the Stormcloacks in the end was talking to that Dominion guy that's patrolling the throne room in Markarth looking for Talos worshipers (We want to show the world the superiority of Mer over Men), and then seeing the legion bring a dominion representative to the peace talks later in the main quest. If they bring a group that's actively, outspoken racist towards Nords to a meeting about the future of the province of the Nords, they pretty much don't even think themselves that they are doing what's best for the Nords.

On the NPC issue, yeah, there's definitely something lacking on that track. The way characters acted in that game was so horrible that you instantly stopped living in the world every time two NPCs talked to each other, and half the times you talked to them. I can still only remember details about three characters from that game - the adoring fan, because he was so irritating that you wanted to take him to a cliff and push him off, the leader of the thieves guild and the orc that you fight at the end of the arena, both because their back stories were pretty cool (and sad). Compared to that, I've noticed a lot more characters and their stories in Skyrim, but nothing is close to Fallout 3 or NV, where I remember a lot of people. The Skyrim companions were definitely less interesting, but I think that's an active choice - Fallout 3's story was about the people in the wasteland, while Skyrim's story is about, well, Skyrim.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page