Luke said:

” I wish I knew this back when I was playing Fallout 3… And it’s DLC’s. And New Vegas. And it’s DLC’s… So many hours cumulatively wasted just clicking pip-boy.”

According to Bethesda update sheets, the F1-F4 shortcuts were not in the first version. I’m not sure if they were in the manual either.

After several stereotypical thief/assassin bosmer builds with an intent of maximizing the “uglyful” face creating factor in Oblivion I actually made an badass looking bosmer (I think) for Skyrim effortlessly. In Skyrim, character creation is horribly simple and even boringly “pop” as the choices are mostly just pretty/gritty/cool and that’s it, folks. Looking at my char was more of an obsessive ritual in Oblivion and even small mistakes and differing in opinion made me want to start over from the starting cave save to do some plastic surgery. In the end I found beauty mods dull too so I simply made as ugly mofos as possible. It worked. Now with Skyrim, nearly everyone seems too “ready”- I really expept this to change with mods quite soon. At least I do not have to look at my char anymore, which seemed too intimate. Skyrim’s “active posing” feels much better.

My skill build went for a thief/balanced/no armor perks with 100 enchant/smithing grindage first just to see the potential and yes, minimal (0, zero, nada) armor perks to keep things interesting (I put difficulty setting to max pretty soon as well) and death remains a huge problem at 51 level as I’m writing (just the way I like it!). I think one build cannot say about the game balance much, but most of the stuff seems balanced and perk system gives a player great freedom to make up own weaknesses and playing styles. Sneaking again levels up far too fast, alchemy is a bit too slow though. Most of the rest is interesting and semi-leveling of enemies works well enough. Fighting may not me mount & blade but a nice step up from oblivion and involving. Shield bashing is a promising concept.

Oblivion levelling system and enemy leveling was absolutely snoozed up, even if a painful character creation was indeed nice and hardcore thing (that they now dropped). Many people want to grow into their visionary hero and Skyrim surely does that very well imho. I was fearing this would not work, but esp at early levels grinding is so fast and choices have to be made all the time which keeps it nearly always fresh. Knowing that only a third or less perks can realistically be selected per build is even better. Modding may make this even more intelligent so I only see potential here. (never played Fallout though)

My secondary build is pale skinned, dark eyed imperial, a bit vampirish looking woman, which I wish to try as a battle mage. We’ll see how it works out, I’m not too confident for being a pure mage because of too-easy-to-exploit but quite essential(?) flesh skill perks. Yet.

I know I’m in minority, but I really like the skill tree screen. With mouse it just works and I like the nice looking minigame of trying to get to see with WASD what a perk X does. :-) Seeing the learned perks fast enough was perhaps the reason for the UI inconvenience. (how would you design it; how to show the learned perks in an info screen?)

By the way, putting item/magic and map to mouse buttons speeds up the UI and playing generally nicely. Even that does not remedy the insanely long list of unused potion though (I’d rather WRITE the name of the potion/poison to use it).

Skyrim’s world may be quite small, but a lot ot it is climbing and dropping so the actual geography seems bigger. Places are geographically interesting and the milieu feels really familiar (I live in Scandinavia and nature is very similar here). Having a snowstorm outside and window open brings the immersion of snowy exploration to a whole new level. :-D
The insane amount of findable places in oblivion is missed though.

Console -> FOW 75 all the way too. We want to see more of the world! ;-=)

LOL. You are much welcome. Although I would rather not impregnate anyone so lightly… :D I have installed the UI mod and it makes my life a lot easier indeed.

This said, a word of warning on the FXAA mod. I tried it and it crashed my game horribly (could not even load the loader). Disinstalling the mod fixed the problem. I would not use it until the next version is issued. There is a lovely and balanced fletching mod I am using here: http://www.curse.com/mods/skyrim/category/skills

It is absolutely unnecessary (as most bandits and draugr drop arrows like it’s gone out of fashion). But I find it a nice little extra immersion point. I also installed a couple of other mods like the better eyes one and the better dragon armor. They are purely cosmetic and haven’t broken anything as far as I can tell.

You are my hero and I would like to bear your offspring.

Can’t resist publishing the following link: http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/pc/elder-scrolls-v/1212918p1.html

I am sure most of you already knew these mods but for me, the one about remapping keys is the best.

@ 3rd Armpit:

What? Fuck. I wish I knew this back when I was playing Fallout 3… And it’s DLC’s. And New Vegas. And it’s DLC’s… So many hours cumulatively wasted just clicking pip-boy.

Luke Maciak wrote:

But yeah, at the very least they let me go directly to it, unlike the Pip-Boy which made everything to be at least 4 clicks away.

Actually you could use the F1 – F4 keys to directly bring up different pages on the pipboy.

@ Luke Maciak:
I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad, I just disable the quest tracking. Sometimes it’s the only lead though…

@ peterix:

Morrowind was like that – no fast travel, no “GPS arrow”. You had to follow the directions. Unfortunately the directions were horrible and useless half of the time. I played that game with a heavily annotated printed map, and would often look map coordinates online for those hard to find places. The quest arrow is not such a bad thing.

Also, I like how they brought back in-world transport. There are dudes with horse driven carts in front of each big city, and you can pay them to take you to adjacent towns which gives you a non-immersion breaking fast transport. :)

It is an amazing game, but feels unfinished in many ways…

Skyrim is a very cold, harsh place. Survival in such conditions should require at least some warm clothes. The game lets my character stand on top of a mountain almost naked and not take frost damage. Breaks my immersion. Female versions of armor that reveal more than they cover in the middle of an icy wasteland break my immersion.

Navigation relies a bit too much on the super GPS/terrible 3d map. I’d love a proper map with no GPS. And proper directions to places! Not ‘go to place X’ without explaining where the place is or how to get there. Yes, I can follow the arrow. No, it doesn’t make me happy – especially when the arrow points into the middle of nowhere I’ve never been to and I have no explainable way of knowing that my goal should even be there. Remember the times when identifying items was part of the game? I want all the little known places start unnamed. I want to be able to ask the NPCs about places and learn their names. I want to make my own marks on the map.

Teleporting with quick travel is too tempting ~_~

It needs more kinds of monsters and a few more dungeon styles. Also devious puzzles. Most of the dungeon puzzles seem to be made for small children.

Anyway, I just finished the main quest as a Nord named Brunhild. She’s a fierce warrior and specializes in one handed weapons, heavy armor, restoration spells, smithing and lockpicking(although with no perk points osed on lockpicking, because they aren’t needed). Most of the game I spent with a sword in right hand, a healing spell ready to cast and mixing some shouts in. No shields. Shields are for cowards and milk drinkers :P