Elder Scrolls : Skyrim

[Kzach]

Serves me right for believing the hype.

The controls suck and it is NOT the sandbox you're looking for. There is the illusion of a sandbox but in reality there are invisible walls everywhere that lead you by the nose towards each goal. The story is terrible, trite and confusing to say the least. Even though the environment might curtail exploration and lead you in one direction, the story most certainly doesn't, so you're often left wondering, "What the hell am I meant to do now?"

Combat is just awful. You're left blindly flailing at whatever you can manage to keep in front of you for more than a second. Everything moves too fast on the screen to keep accurately hitting. This is one of those disconnects between 'realistic' combat and the physics of a computer generated environment. The simple fact is that people and objects just DO NOT move that fast or that smoothly. This is why I've always hated driving games. In a real car, you feel resistance, you have feedback on where you're going and the effects of your steering. But in driving games there is no resistance or environmental feedback, so you end up oversteering or understeering. The same happens in a game where you're trying to hit someone with a sword but everyone moves as if gravity and friction don't exist.

Meh to the whole game. I'm pissed I spent $60 on it. Fallout New Vegas and Mass Effect are FAR better than this heap of crud.

 

[Janx]

Serves me right for believing the hype.

The controls suck and it is NOT the sandbox you're looking for. There is the illusion of a sandbox but in reality there are invisible walls everywhere that lead you by the nose towards each goal. The story is terrible, trite and confusing to say the least. Even though the environment might curtail exploration and lead you in one direction, the story most certainly doesn't, so you're often left wondering, "What the hell am I meant to do now?"

Combat is just awful. You're left blindly flailing at whatever you can manage to keep in front of you for more than a second. Everything moves too fast on the screen to keep accurately hitting. This is one of those disconnects between 'realistic' combat and the physics of a computer generated environment. The simple fact is that people and objects just DO NOT move that fast or that smoothly. This is why I've always hated driving games. In a real car, you feel resistance, you have feedback on where you're going and the effects of your steering. But in driving games there is no resistance or environmental feedback, so you end up oversteering or understeering. The same happens in a game where you're trying to hit someone with a sword but everyone moves as if gravity and friction don't exist.

Meh to the whole game. I'm pissed I spent $60 on it. Fallout New Vegas and Mass Effect are FAR better than this heap of crud.

I can't say much about youyr comment on controls and fighting. melee is the hardest to do right, because NPC movement puts them out of your view so quickly, and unlike a real fight, you can't sense where they are, causing more flailing.

But my wife likes it and she hates FPS games. She also kicks ass at melee. Sounds like a PEBKAC situation.

As to not-really a sandbox? It's more of a sandbox than other sandbox computer games. You really can sneak and bypass your way through the plots.

I just finished all of HalfLife 2 from the Orange Box.

That's a frickin railroad. The puzzles are clever, but EVERY place is a railroad. Walking through the city to escape, there is only ONE route you can take through it. every other door is locked or blocked.

I can't make you like it. And you do raise valid points.

But I don't think they add up to Skyrim = $60 piece of crap.

 

[Agamon]

Serves me right for believing the hype.

Hype and universal praise are not the same thing.

The controls suck and it is NOT the sandbox you're looking for. There is the illusion of a sandbox but in reality there are invisible walls everywhere that lead you by the nose towards each goal. The story is terrible, trite and confusing to say the least. Even though the environment might curtail exploration and lead you in one direction, the story most certainly doesn't, so you're often left wondering, "What the hell am I meant to do now?"

I'm not sure what to say here. It's not a sandbox, it leads you by the nose? As opposed to what? Fallout? I've played both, I don't see what your getting at. Nothing forced me to go anywhere in either game. The only walls were the real ones. I see something I want to check out, I can.

Combat is just awful. You're left blindly flailing at whatever you can manage to keep in front of you for more than a second. Everything moves too fast on the screen to keep accurately hitting. This is one of those disconnects between 'realistic' combat and the physics of a computer generated environment. The simple fact is that people and objects just DO NOT move that fast or that smoothly. This is why I've always hated driving games. In a real car, you feel resistance, you have feedback on where you're going and the effects of your steering. But in driving games there is no resistance or environmental feedback, so you end up oversteering or understeering. The same happens in a game where you're trying to hit someone with a sword but everyone moves as if gravity and friction don't exist.

So your complaining that a video game doesn't completely simulate real life combat. Sure, that's too bad, but it is a video game.

Meh to the whole game. I'm pissed I spent $60 on it. Fallout New Vegas and Mass Effect are FAR better than this heap of crud.

Fallout uses the same physics engine. And there's no realistic recoil to the shooting either, dammit. lol

But to each their own. Too bad you don't like it, it's a great game if given a chance.

 

[Kzach]

I can't say much about youyr comment on controls and fighting. melee is the hardest to do right, because NPC movement puts them out of your view so quickly, and unlike a real fight, you can't sense where they are, causing more flailing.

The lack of peripheral vision is a big thing too. I think maybe that's one of my weaknesses with real-time combat sims because I have weak frontal vision and rely a lot on peripheral vision for my awareness of my environment so when faced with just one view in a game, I barely know which way is up.

Sounds like a PEBKAC situation.

I don't deny that, I just use it as a reason to not like the game

As to not-really a sandbox? It's more of a sandbox than other sandbox computer games. You really can sneak and bypass your way through the plots.

Really? 'cause so far I've only ever experienced having one route to go through most encounter areas. Sure, from one map area to the next you can go all over the place (although even then there are loads of invisible walls), but it's no more sandbox than Fallout is and given the hype, that's what I expected.

Hype and universal praise are not the same thing.

I think you underestimate the effect of marketing on people's (and your own) psyche. Done well and you can essentially TELL people your product is awesome and they'll do the marketing for you. Doesn't always work because it's not always done well. People rarely, genuinely, think for themselves or form their own opinions based on fact and evidence; it's easier just to borrow someone else's and claim it's an original thought.

Now, I'm not saying you're a sheeple or that you didn't formulate a genuine, objective opinion of the product, mainly because that would get me banned, but try this as an experiment: approach the game as if you'd never heard anything about it and you had simply come along to a console and picked up a controller and started playing. Take away all your excitement and interest and prefabricated knowledge of the game and play it with a clean slate and try to objectively formulate an opinion based on your 'new' experiences.

It's a challenge, to be sure, since there are things you just can't unlearn, but if you can manage it, you'll learn more about the game and yourself and the way the world operates and become more cynical, jaded, bitter and misanthropic: like me.

I see something I want to check out, I can.

I'm glad you used Fallout as an example since they suffer much the same problems, probably because, as you pointed out, they use the same engine.

Try climbing a mountain.

In Fallout New Vegas, for instance, there are TONS of invisible walls that prevent you from going anywhere but where you're intended to go. Not many people run into them simply because not many people explore as extensively as others. There are also tons of graphical walls presented as mountains or boulders or blocked paths or numerous other things to fool you into believing 'that's how things are meant to be'.

This reminds me a lot of World of Warcraft. When it was first brought out, there were entire guilds of explorers who did little else but run around the world finding mountains to climb and forests to delve. And it resulted in them going to all these places where they weren't meant to be able to go. They found glitches in the Matrix that allowed them to see things like the original Ironforge, the airstrip, entire mountain tops without any graphics, forests that just ended in black space, etc. So what did Blizzard do? Put up invisible walls everywhere.

The games have the ILLUSION of being a sandbox because 90% of people don't explore very much and tend to follow roads and logical paths. Go off those paths and suddenly you find that the world is very much designed for you to go in one direction and not another. If you question this, then have a closer look at the fully detailed map overviews and you can SEE the designed lines and roadblocks.

Now, on the whole, I don't have a major problem with this but the fact is that the game was hyped/advertised not to have such blocks and to be extensively explorable. To people who don't challenge that assumption by pushing the boundaries, literally and figuratively, of the gaming environment, this may be true, but to those of us who do, it's just another broken promise.

So your complaining that a video game doesn't completely simulate real life combat. Sure, that's too bad, but it is a video game.

No, actually the opposite.

A video game, IMO, should NOT try to approximate real life combat because inevitably they do it badly.

This is why I like games like Mass Effect or Fallout where you have stylised combat with a pause function. This makes it a GAME rather than an exercise in learning twitch responses and micro movements. This type of gaming is fine in combat oriented games like Call of Duty, but in a roleplaying sandbox game, it's a detraction because you have to be physically able, rather than just mentally.

I fully agree that it's a PEBKAC situation as mentioned earlier. I just disagree that I should have to learn an element of games that I avoid (ie. your Call of Duty's and the like) because I don't enjoy them, in order to play a genre of game that traditionally doesn't have such elements. Fallout, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, etc. all had some sort of turn-based or pausing element.

 

[Janx]

well, [MENTION=56189]Kzach[/MENTION], this should be a good conversation based on your last response.

On FPS melee, you clarification sounds like the source of the problem. In FPS, I track movement very well, spotting it on the left or right edge and predicting its location. As a result. I can zoom past an area, then crank back and start shooting the NPC, only having to correct for aim.

My wife, sort of like you, can get flustered struggling to figure out where the attack is coming from, turning the OPPOSITE direction of the attack, soley because she didn't notice the NPC as a small blip. I've watched it happen, and even said, dragon on your right, and she'll turn left, and then by then the dragon has closed in and is doing pain.

In ranged combat, distances are such that almost everything you need to see starts off in front of you and can be kept in front of you (backing up or circle strafe).

In melee combat, because the enemy is right there, a simple 5' step to the right or left and they are beside you and offscreen. The effect is basically amplified, due to the proximity.

Since Fallout is mostly gun-based, it is thus easier. melee based FPS games have always struggled with this.

On Sandbox play:
out doors, you can go darn near everywhere. I've climbed just about every mountain in Cyrrodil, and hit quite a few in Skyrim. This typically means you can approach enemy forts & camps from above, which lets you snipe out most of the troops before you do final mop-up and treasure grab. Can't do that in HalfLife or Halo.

In doors, it does depend on the dungeon or fort. In halflife, it was terrible. I swear the Combine personally locked every door EXCEPT the route the resistance would need. In ElderScrolls, it is not that bad, though the natural shape of the dungeons, ultimately forms a line with some loop backs.

That said, there's usually room for different approaches. You can stealth your way in and backstab everything, one enemy at a time. Or brute force it.

Some number of quests give you the option to betray or change sides.

I guess this aspect might depend on what you mean by sandbox.

While a dungeon is often held as the example of a microcosm sandbox, I see it the opposite.

it is inherently a place where what you will do next is predictable, as is where you will go next.

You will either advance or retreat.
If you advance, the enemies are hostile and you will probably kill them.
the fact that you can do it quietly or loudly is a matter of preference.
because NOT fighting them is boring, it is irrelevant. It's not a choice you will write home about.

Now being able to parley with enemies, pay them off, bribe them, that would add some choice. But otherwise, I don't think any game with a dungeon is going to really expand on a DungeonCrawl yet.


So, I could agree that a dungeon crawl in most games is not really a sandbox.
But within the scope of Skyrim vs. most other video games, your viable choices are far greater. Heck, Super Mario Bros, you can't even go backwards.

 

[Agamon]

I think you underestimate the effect of marketing on people's (and your own) psyche.

What? I didn't expect a lot from this game, personally. I thought it'd be good, but I thought Portal 2 and Arkham City would be better games this year. Then I turned it on and played it almost non-stop for two days, something I haven't done with a video game for decades.

I suppose I did that because I was a hype-machine zombie, a prescient one, too, as I hadn't read anything on it yet...it's okay to not like a game that is universally liked, but you don't have to make up stuff about how everyone else is crazy or dumb to justify it.

It's a challenge, to be sure, since there are things you just can't unlearn, but if you can manage it, you'll learn more about the game and yourself and the way the world operates and become more cynical, jaded, bitter and misanthropic: like me.

Okay, after that, the above makes more sense now.

I'm glad you used Fallout as an example since they suffer much the same problems, probably because, as you pointed out, they use the same engine.

Try climbing a mountain.

Tough, but not impossible. Reminds me of Mass Effect 1, with enough determination, you really can go anywhere.

..stuff about F:NV and WoW...

I'll take your word for it, haven't played those.

The games have the ILLUSION of being a sandbox because 90% of people don't explore very much and tend to follow roads and logical paths. Go off those paths and suddenly you find that the world is very much designed for you to go in one direction and not another. If you question this, then have a closer look at the fully detailed map overviews and you can SEE the designed lines and roadblocks.

Now, on the whole, I don't have a major problem with this but the fact is that the game was hyped/advertised not to have such blocks and to be extensively explorable. To people who don't challenge that assumption by pushing the boundaries, literally and figuratively, of the gaming environment, this may be true, but to those of us who do, it's just another broken promise.

Okay, maybe I shouldn't be taking your word for anything after all. You don't like the game, so I assume you haven't played it too much? Because this is pretty much all false. Yes, there roads. Of course there are roads, it's civilised. It would be weird if there weren't any. But you can go off-road. In fact, I ignored them a lot, myself. But when I did follow them, it was clear that, just by following roads, I could go to any location I wanted to (a couple notable exceptions, but it sure isn't prevalent).

Sounds like you'd only be happy with a featureless plain that let you literally walk anywhere. There'd be no where to go, but heck, you'd get there.

No, actually the opposite.

A video game, IMO, should NOT try to approximate real life combat because inevitably they do it badly.

This is why I like games like Mass Effect or Fallout where you have stylised combat with a pause function. This makes it a GAME rather than an exercise in learning twitch responses and micro movements. This type of gaming is fine in combat oriented games like Call of Duty, but in a roleplaying sandbox game, it's a detraction because you have to be physically able, rather than just mentally.

I fully agree that it's a PEBKAC situation as mentioned earlier. I just disagree that I should have to learn an element of games that I avoid (ie. your Call of Duty's and the like) because I don't enjoy them, in order to play a genre of game that traditionally doesn't have such elements. Fallout, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, etc. all had some sort of turn-based or pausing element.

Ah, so it's not turn-based, I see. Yeah, that I can see that being annoying if that's what you prefer. It does let you pause to change weapons/spells, drink potions, use scrolls, etc, but it doesn't let you "target", so that is something to get used to. Elder Scrolls has always been a real time combat game, so it's tough to expect to not be that in Skyrim.

 

[Agamon]

Also, there are a number of quests where it seems like the game wants you to do a certain thing. I thought, "What if I did this instead?" And, what do you know, the game not only allowed it, but acknowledged it. Saving people you are supposed to kill or vice versa, keeping something you're supposed to fetch, etc. And that's just the "invisible open-ness", a lot of quests give you the option of talking, sneaking past, or killing NPCs. All of them? No, side quests are generated by an algorithm, so that would be tough to randomly generate. But the quests are incredibly complex, to the point that it's hard to believe.

It's like being upset that the universe isn't big enough. Possible, I guess, but not very logical.

 

[Janx]

Ah, so it's not turn-based, I see. Yeah, that I can see that being annoying if that's what you prefer. It does let you pause to change weapons/spells, drink potions, use scrolls, etc, but it doesn't let you "target", so that is something to get used to. Elder Scrolls has always been a real time combat game, so it's tough to expect to not be that in Skyrim.

Good point, And on that note, when some folks in other threads talk about RPG immersion, pausing the game is a big killer for me.

As part of my mutant ability to track off-screen targets that i only saw a glimpse of, I'm pretty immersed in the environment. So that I can get startled when a monster jumps at me (because I was not aware it existed).

Pausing the game constantly would wreck that immersion.

Heck, it bugs the stuffing out of me when I watch my wife play. She hits search on every body she kills, the moment the cross-hairs toggle to "dead body you can search"

this totally kills the feeling of fluid combat, and interferes with my NPC tracking ability in the environment.

I don't even like the interruption when they do the kill-shot cam.

I also hate 3PS view mode, where you see your own character. I do not want a % of my vision obscured by my PC's ass the entire time.

Clearly a difference in preference. But I suspect my preference mirrors what some folks like [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION] refers to as wrecking immersion in a TTRPG.

 

[Kzach]

Janx, you mentioned playing this game with your wife; do you play at the same time, using the same screen? If so, how do you do that? Does it just require two controllers or do you have to network two Xbox's? Is it one of those Xbox Live Gold things?

 

[Kzach]

So, now that I've spent more than five minutes playing it, I quite like it.

I had to adjust the speed of turning down a fair bit but I'm fairly comfortable with it now. I've tried out a spellcaster which is fun but a bit slow, an archer-sneak which has potential but I think requires a much more skilled player than I, a sword and board fighter which is kinda meh but could be good with more practice as I like the idea of hiding behind a shield until the exact right moment to do a power attack, and finally my favourite one so far which just hit 7th-level, my two-hand hammer wielding orc beserker smith. I love the fact that he kills almost anything in one hit. I charged the big spider and smacked it right between the seventh and eighth eye and almost killed it with that one blow.

Companions are a bit useless, although I ended up with Sven instead of the archer, which I would've preferred. I told him to wait whilst I undid a trap and he disappeared. Wonder if he'll be back at the village with all my gear...