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March 29, 2024, 07:21:20 AM

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Skyrim Next-Gen Remaster (Nov 2021)

Started by Chedney Honks, August 20, 2021, 06:54:53 AM

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Ferris

Go through your inventory and drop anything that's heavy but with little value. Weapons and armour are usually worth hanging on to, but pots and other misc tat are not.

Poobum

That's why horses are really useful, you can be carry 30 metric tons of armour, horsey won't care and will gallop full pace.

Quote from: Ferris on June 15, 2022, 04:00:09 PMGo through your inventory and drop anything that's heavy but with little value. Weapons and armour are usually worth hanging on to, but pots and other misc tat are not.

She was carrying all kinds of weapons and armour and dragon bones/scales and things (I'm not sure what they're for but they seem like something I might need) so it was all essentials. I really couldn't be arsed dropping my good stuff and picking up the loot to take back and sell, then coming back and hoping my beloved personal weapons were still there, so instead I realised if you draw a bow you go a fraction faster and did that for about half an hour of bleakness.

Ferris

In future, buy/make a "potion of strength" and carry at all times before you go adventuring.

They increase your carrying capacity by XYZ (depends on the quality of the potion) for ~30 seconds which gives you enough time to open the map and fast-travel to the nearest city (which is allowed, for some reason).

No more trudging about for you!

Thanks! Annoyingly I had one of those but thought "30 seconds isn't going to get me far...".

It did really make me appreciate the scenery though, this game is so atmospheric, the ominous fog feels like a winter walk through the brecon beacons and then suddenly the clouds part and you get a bit of glorious sunshine. For years I assumed this game was fantasy of a dungeons and dragons style and so never played it, I had no idea it was so subtle.

Inspector Norse

Pretty sure my Lydia is still lost somewhere in Labyrinthian, where I left her in 2012.

Cerys


KaraokeDragon

Quote from: Ferris on June 15, 2022, 04:00:09 PMGo through your inventory and drop anything that's heavy but with little value. Weapons and armour are usually worth hanging on to, but pots and other misc tat are not.

Further to this, remember that all arrows are always worth their weight in gold since they weigh nothing. IIRC ebony arrows have a value of 16 and I think daedric is something like 18 or 20, which isn't bad considering you can carry as many as you like. The only thing is iron arrows can't be sold for any money at all if your speech skill is at bassline.

Speeching of speak, selling arrows can be a good way to level it - your speech goes up faster not just based on the value of what you're selling, but also how many transactions you sell it in; if I had ~500 arrows to sell I would sell them in clumps af about 30, basically as low an amount as I can select quickly that isn't zero (Probably is easier on PC where you can just click where you want on the slider.)

Just to be extra clear so no one ends up wasting more time than they need to because of me 😂 , you don't have to exit the buy/sell menu and then talk to the vendor each time you sell, I just mean how when you're asked how much you want to sell you keep lowering the amount and then hit sell instead of just selling it all at once.

Obviously you can adjust this depending on how badly you want to level your speech and how much time you can be arsed putting in. If I really wanted to level up my speech I would sell 20 pieces of high value armour 1 at a time.

(I put so many hours into this game in the early and mid 2010's it doesn't bare thinking about)

Ferris

There are a few ways to level up that are varying levels of exploiting shonky game logic, though selling stuff like that is fine I reckon. A bit more exploity is stuff like hold a shield and standing next to a mudcrab to level your block. All the way at the end of the dodgy-exploit-continuum is the total game-breaking stuff that usually involves stacking potions and crafting (though I've gone out of my way to stay ignorant on that stuff, because I quite like some of the grinding away).

Separately - you can make Lydia use a Giant's club as a weapon by unequipping whatever weapons she has then, then using the "pick up" command on a club lying about. For whatever reason, it still triggers as a weapon for followers.

Fucking hell this game is overwhelming, already had a million quests because I refuse to say "maybe another time" and always say "I'll do it" and just got to Riften where in an hour I've already picked up about a million more.

I've already started to work out which are the more repititive ones (there are so many that basically revolve around going to some hideout in a cave and killing the leader or clearing the camp) so it's quite refreshing that this game isn't linear and forces you to go on collectaphons and I can happily skip the "find me 10 firesalts" missions if they seem like a chore, but still...bloody hell.

Dread to think what the quest list will look like once I've gone further afield, it's already making me think of it as my day job and given me an urge to go on 'holiday' where I just roam the land and explore.

KaraokeDragon

Quote from: Ferris on June 17, 2022, 03:45:15 PMThere are a few ways to level up that are varying levels of exploiting shonky game logic, though selling stuff like that is fine I reckon.

Hah I suppose it is cheating a wee bit, especially since speech is the slowest skill to raise if I'm remembering right. I think for me personally I've never minded making it too easy or cheating myself out of a grind, it's more being able to justify whatever I'm doing in a 'would my character actually do this/would it actually happen' kind of way, so for selling stuff it actually feels more realistic to be selling them bit by bit instead of all at once, like you're laying them out on the counter and having them inspected and stuff rather than just dumping loads of stuff in a shop and instantly walking off a few thousand quid richer.

Another example of this, admittedly the most piss-takey exploit I've used (gonna start spoilering these for people who'd rather stay ignorant):
Spoiler alert
That one where you just keep casting 'muffle' to level your illusion. Has to be the cheesiest exploit in the game (that wasn't patched in the first couple of years), but I can justify my character walking around the college of Winterhold casting spells with everyone else,'cause "I'm just practicing magic at magic university mate, perfectly reasonable behaviour." I can't believe they didn't patch that, though.
[close]

Quote from: Ferris on June 17, 2022, 03:45:15 PMSeparately - you can make Lydia use a Giant's club as a weapon by unequipping whatever weapons she has then, then using the "pick up" command on a club lying about. For whatever reason, it still triggers as a weapon for followers.

I think I remember trying that and couldn't get them to pick it up, can't remember what follower I was using though, maybe it doesn't work for all of them.

Ferris

Might have been patched as well.

I use the
Spoiler alert
muffle exploit as well
[close]
with the same justification. Just practicing mate!

oggyraiding

I think I finally understand the appeal of Skyrim now. The flexibility of building the character. I'm a stealthy heavily armoured chap who throws fireballs and sneaks up on people then bashes them with an enchanted mace. I don't have to pick one of the rogue/mage/warrior archetypes, I can mix and match. Also there's not tons of dialogue to wade through - the quest giver talks to me for 20 seconds then I go adventuring. I see why Skyrim is so popular.

Mister Six

Living up to your username, eh? Glad you're enjoying it. I wished at the time that the RPG side of things was more robust, but I can understand the joy of just gadding about and doing what you like, and I know that a more imposing ROG system would impinge on it.

Zetetic

Put like that, it makes me wonder why Ubisoft hasn't tried to exploit the niche more fully - wouldn't take much to nudge Assassin's Creed: Odyssey close to Skyrim. Mostly you'd just need to throw stuff away.

I'm still really loving this game and have explored a decent part of the world and gotten to grips with most things but one thing I'm really struggling with is how to embrace the sandbox element.

I know people say you really have to roleplay it and go in with a character or theme in your head, but to me those two things fall into a couple of camps:

- If you're going for a theme or unique playthrough, like saying "I'm a travelling thief/trader!" it sounds fun from that brief description but in reality I find it's quite boring after a few hours as you ignore the missions and then sneak around houses stealing the same things before flogging it for profit, rinse and repeat. Maybe I've not found a truly engaging concept to explore yet though, but I'm going to try more once I've finished the main game properly.

- Roleplaying as a character type is another thing I see mentioned a lot (I'm a grumpy brute who will kill you if you look at me wrong, on a mission to avenge my race etc.) and that's what I've been doing to an extent, but to make that work you have to either ignore the missions and engage in small talk with townsfolk before killing people as a vendetta, try and do missions in this character mode (which often doesn't work as you're forced into a particular path due to the dialogue options), or only select missions which confirm to your characters path/story which can be limiting and often sparse.

I'm finding the urge to go off-piste is tricky, for example there is a city with a domineering matriarch who runs things, my inclination was to sneak into her place at night and assassinate her and then see if there is a power void in town and how everyone reacts and the effect it has on the missions from there. Unfortunately I tried it and she is invincible, her health will never go to 0, which means you have to play the missions and are back into the decision tree element. I don't know if that's typical or not but it's made me instead just pick quests that look interesting and then go off exploring along the way if I see something interesting, which is the same as I'd do in most open-world games.

Mister Six

Yeah, this is the problem with modern Bethesda RPGs - they're simultaneously very open in terms of what your character can "do" but also very restrictive in terms of actually affecting the world. So you can be the leader of the assassins' and thieves' guilds, the leader of the Champions or whatever those do-gooder warriors are called, and the head wizard at the magical school without the game ever acknowledging how weird that is. Meanwhile, main-quest-depndendent characters can't be killed, and the game will only give you a couple of limited paths to make actual changes to the world.

It's why Fallout 4 was such a disappointment after Obsidian showed in New Vegas that you could absolutely do a reactive, plausible, detailed world in a 3D setting. F4 at least has a few mutually exclusive factions, but there's basically no reason not to just do every quest available to you and become proficient at absolutely every skill.

king_tubby

I've restarted and I'm just playing mods and CC and ignoring the main quests. Mainly because I want to play Legacy of the Dragonborn and collect everything for the museum cos I'm a nerd.

Anyone done Beyond Reach which takes you to High Rock? I've seen good reviews.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/48467

Ferris

I don't think I've ever intentionally "role-played" in skyrim tbh. I just go about doing whatever I fancy; typically I go for a walk, see a load of stuff and interact with it, then carry on.

Probably speaks to my paucity of imagination than anything else tbh.

shoulders

Morrowind approach works just as well in Skyrim. Start with strong personality and stealth skills.

You start weak as fuck so stay out of fights, steal stuff and pawn it for better armour and effective weapons, use the dough to train up, then transition to whatever you want to be.

There's a huge advantage to stealth attacks anyway so it's not like training to a high level in that is a waste of time. Being unseen is one of the most effective ways of acing missions.

Skyrim also has a tedious but effective way to quickly become a competent adventurer by exploiting smithing and enchanting. Alchemy is not as enormous an exploit but still a way to rinse coin out of every trader.

king_tubby

I've got Inigo and Lucien on the go now. Oh those guys.

king_tubby

Inigo just asked Nazeem if he enjoyed having teeth, and if so maybe STFU (I paraphrase).

I did a laugh out loud.

Cerys


Ferris

@Cerys have the docs approved you for regular Skyrim playing? Good for any recovery I reckon.

Cerys

My eyesight is all squibbly, so I'm steering clear of Mundus for the time being.  Turn-based is the least frustrating right now.  I'm depending on Tales of Tamriel here to maintain my sanity.

Feed me, my henchlings.  Feed me!

Wish enemies didn't level up with you in this, I love getting initially battered by enemies in games and then going out into the world and learning skills and building better weapons before wreaking my revenge.

Instead I've spent agessss in the wilds of Skyrim improving my arching up to level 93 and then gone into another cave to be faced with yet more draugr guys who take 2/3 critical arrow strikes to kill, which is actually more than it took me at the beginning of the game when I was regularly one-shot killing them. I think MGSV was clever about this, with them reacting to you using the same techniques by radio-ing in for gear to fight it (like guards wearing helmets if you snipe people too often), but in a roleplaying game like this I always find this kind of thing frustrating.

Obviously there's a thin line between doing something like that and not making your character overpowered and going through the main quests without a challenge, but I think if they just restricted the levelling up to special characters and bosses it would work well while letting you tear through caves sweeping aside bandits with ease.

Mister Six

Do enemies level up with you? I remember by the end I was sneak-shotting giants like it was nothing. There was some setpiece boss where a bunch of bones turned into a dragon, and I hit it and killed it in one shot while I was still crouching. Although I was also upgrading my weapons and arrows a fair bit, so maybe that helped?

Quote from: Mister Six on September 06, 2022, 04:00:59 PMDo enemies level up with you? I remember by the end I was sneak-shotting giants like it was nothing. There was some setpiece boss where a bunch of bones turned into a dragon, and I hit it and killed it in one shot while I was still crouching. Although I was also upgrading my weapons and arrows a fair bit, so maybe that helped?

They definitely do if you're not doing a quest and exploring random bases and things which is what I've been spending most of my time doing, or if not just scaling they throw in a lot more of the tougher enemies. Guessing I need to upgrade my stuff more to keep the advantage, I just found it annoying as it breaks the immersion a bit for me.

Ferris

They level up with you but people usually min-max their build to the point that a baddie of equal level still gets absolutely mullered when you do The One Thing You've Levelled Up.

Typically it's stealth archery (3x sneak bonus with a good bow that sets baddies on fire and a few charmed bits of armour), but whatever your forte is you can you usually smash your enemies to bits as required.

Mister Six

Yeah, I was le stealth arrow man, although that's more due to me preferring that play style over any conscious min-maxing, which I never do. So I'm glad I kind of got it right first time!