Skyrim - Daily Roundup

Dhruin

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A small collection of Skyrim odds and ends.
Pete Hines confirms via a tweet about 16 hours ago as I write that Steam preloads will happen (although it won't be much of a preload at this rate):
It's a go for preload, just isn't available yet. Pinged folks tonight to find out when it gets turned on.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a new trailer while you wait and the Bethblog has a preview of the 656-page strategy guide.
Lastly for the moment, Wired has some comments from Todd Howard that the DLC for Skyrim will be "more substantial":
“We’re not going to be doing a lot of it. Our high-level thinking is that there’ll be not as many [pieces of DLC], but they’ll be bigger and more substantial,” he said. “The goal overall is not necessarily to put out more content, but to make the game better.”
More information.
 
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I think some of the "parameters" of the quests will be randomized, but there will still be "7 times" distinct quest templates. But who knows? given the veracity of ES hype. ;)
 
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Keep in mind that a lot of those are just going to be randomly generated by the radiant quest structure.

I think some of the "parameters" of the quests will be randomized, but there will still be "7 times" distinct quest templates. But who knows? given the veracity of ES hype. ;)

Yes, there are some quests that are more random in nature, but according to Pete Hines, these continue generating indefinitely, as long as you want to continue playing.

My understanding is that the quote about "6-7 the number of FO3 quests" from Pete Hines August bulletproof pixel radio interview was referring to the pre-written quests, some of which have certain parameters, such as the quest giver, the quest reward, other NPCs involved in the quest, etc., determined by the Story Manager when you first enter a new town or exterior cell.
 
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The "7 times" I read came from the game guide blog piece so it sounds consistent. It'll be interesting to see how the guide handles the multiple generated quests as well as the single instanced parametrized ones.
 
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News with 'big numbers' never impresses me. It just increases my skeptisism. Daggerfall had a 'massive' landmass. But was mostly empty. It also had tons of quests. But most were just random and boring. Morrowind had tons of 'dungeons.' But too many of them were uninteresting.

Playing G2 right now (and just finished G1) and more now than ever I'm of the camp that 'meaningful' is the way to go, at least for me. G1 has a very small landmass. But there is 'meaning' built into every nook and cranny. For me, I need the game world to have meaning.

If the game world is going to be 'huge' then it better have lots of reasons to fully explore it because after a few hours, 'eye candy' won't be enough of a motivator, at least for me.

If the game is going to have 7 zillion quests, then I hope they're interesting because if they start to feel like variable swaps after 11th quest, I will lose motivation to play further.

The player base, at least as evidenced by the masses at the official skyrim forums, focus too much on the 'big numbers'... 700 hours of gameplay, 6 million square miles to explore, 100 billion quests, 7 trillion different enemies... it's all boring if it starts to feel generic after a few hours.
 
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The "7 times" I read came from the game guide blog piece so it sounds consistent. It'll be interesting to see how the guide handles the multiple generated quests as well as the single instanced parametrized ones.

That's what the wiki will be great for - crowd sourcing and people digging around in the editor are the best way to get information on their behavior. The official guide will probably cover them but won't be able to cover the eccentricities and oddities that can arise depending on player actions and situation.
 
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News with 'big numbers' never impresses me. .


This is not really a big number. Quite in line with previous TES games. As FO3 had 32 marked quests IIRC, 200-220 quests for Skyrim seems about right.

By comparison, Oblivion had roughly somewhere around 200 and Morrowind GOTY had roughly 400 marked quests (including all the DLC quests), with a single character probably the most you could complete was somewhere around 300 or so.

What I found to be much more impressive was the fact that the game guide mentions 350+ primary locations and 200+ secondary locations for a total of 550. Considering the amount of content in the dungeons in this game it appears to be much larger in scope than both Morrowind and Oblivion. Daggerfall of course was larger but it was procedurally generated.

I watched a video of a guy playing through one enormous and gorgeously designed dwemer dungeon for around 10-11 hours and he actually skipped of a large portion of the content. From the footage I saw of a few other dungeons, none of them seemed to resemble one another and they all seemed to have more interesting content than the dungeons of previous TES games.


If the game is going to have 7 zillion quests, then I hope they're interesting because if they start to feel like variable swaps after 11th quest, I will lose motivation to play further.

I've watched about 20 hours of gameplay videos at this point and I can say the level of the storytelling absolutely rocks. Engaging quests, much more compelling NPCs and factions, etc., compared with previous TES games.
 
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News with 'big numbers' never impresses me. It just increases my skeptisism. Daggerfall had a 'massive' landmass. But was mostly empty. It also had tons of quests. But most were just random and boring. Morrowind had tons of 'dungeons.' But too many of them were uninteresting.

If the game world is going to be 'huge' then it better have lots of reasons to fully explore it because after a few hours, 'eye candy' won't be enough of a motivator, at least for me.

Well the landmass is around the same size as Oblivion; it is at least more densely populated with things to do. Watching some of the streamed game-play I do think that most of the quests are written with more individual care and thought; I'm sure the larger teams assigned to tasks helps since in Oblivion some major tasks were assigned to as few as a single person.

That is not to say that procedurally generated events and miscellaneous quests are necessarily Pulitzer-worthy but the few of those I witnessed appear to be meant to make trekking about feel more perilous and eventful. Even for those not significantly into the exploration aspect of Elder Scrolls games will find reason to enjoy walking from one city to another rather than using the carriages (at least for the first time or two.)
 
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That's what the wiki will be great for - crowd sourcing and people digging around in the editor are the best way to get information on their behavior. The official guide will probably cover them but won't be able to cover the eccentricities and oddities that can arise depending on player actions and situation.

And the bugs (that of course, don't exist per the "officious" guide), which I am buying anyway.... ;) What a sucker...
 
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News with 'big numbers' never impresses me. It just increases my skeptisism. Daggerfall had a 'massive' landmass. But was mostly empty. It also had tons of quests. But most were just random and boring. Morrowind had tons of 'dungeons.' But too many of them were uninteresting.

This^.

I don't care about different parameters and "templates", I prefer more meaningful hand-crafted sidequests. I also don't care how interesting these quests look in gameplay videos, we're not really going to know until we've actually played the game ourselves.

The way some people are hyping this game, I would almost swear they've been planted by Bethesda. ;)
 
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Well, sounds like there is a lot of game there, with a very large landmass. Nice that it is going away from islands that a lot of other games have been using lately.
 
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Well I think the quests were improved from Oblivion to FO3. Let's hope the trend continues; it sounds like they tried to address it, but ya know what they say…

I sunk innumerable hours in Morrowind+ expansions, Oblivion+DLC/expansions, and FO3+DLC. And quite a few hours in Daggerfall before a game breaking bug hit me.

Not sure if more of the same for a 4th/5th time will be enough to engage that sort of time commitment. Certainly taking a chance on pre-ordering, but the size of the game guide is encouraging. I hope there is truly significant uniqueness and back story in EACH dungeon / location (and not just different colors). It sounds like they spent more resources at it, at least, which is encouraging.
 
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The way some people are hyping this game, I would almost swear they've been planted by Bethesda. ;)

There are different levels expectation at work here as usual. This is a blockbuster release of a game in a play style that I really like - doesn't happen often. But it's just a game at the end of the day, not a lifestyle. If I get 20-30 hours of solid fun out of it I'll be happy.

I'm highly dubious about these auto generated quests - computers are dumb. I want Gothic-esque hand crafting, but I know we ain't getting that. It'll be like Oblivion where I was amazed for 10 hours and getting bored by 20.

But that's fine, I enjoyed it while it lasted.
 
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For those of you that are very hopeful about Skyrim, I certainly hope you are right!

While I've enjoyed the TES series (heck, I've finished every single one of them including Arena) - all the games in the series so far have had this undefinable 'something' missing from them. That 'something' is what keeps me from really going off and exploring like the developers seem to want to encourage.

At the time, Oblivion seemed graphically beautiful to me. But I'm not hard to impress when it comes to graphics. I come from the generation that got excited about adds like this (Dracula for Colecovision, it was never actually released, but I peed my pants when I saw an ad for it in a game magazine, because the graphics were 'insane').

But because, for me, it started to feel like nothing really mattered in terms of exploring nooks and crannies of Oblivion, other than to see 'eye candy' I tended to just stick to where I needed to go for quests.
 
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While I've enjoyed the TES series (heck, I've finished every single one of them including Arena) - all the games in the series so far have had this undefinable 'something' missing from them. That 'something' is what keeps me from really going off and exploring like the developers seem to want to encourage.

I agree with this paragraph entirely (which is a rare thing for me). I have finished every TES game but never ever replayed one which is unusual for me because I replay almost every other RPG I enjoy.
 
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I rarely replay anything so that metric means next to nothing to me.

I didn't get engaged until I started reading all those books in Morrowind. Then my imagination took off once filled with all the lore. That rubbed of on Oblivion a bit. I don't think Skyrim will benefit from my previous runs. Skyrim needs to do something LARGE, new and refreshing from a lore point of view.
 
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I think what has always been missing for me (and I've finished them all too) is the sense of real consequences. I head up the Mage Guild, but so what? Someone still charges me to learn something and I don't teach anyone anything; it's an empty title!! I also head up several other guilds, etc, ALL meaningless titles!!
 
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Offcorse its importend that game is intresting and im not as negative about TES then theMadGamer but for me its even more importend the difficulty will it be hard enough and complex enough to set my teeth in this game? Thats my MAIN concern about Skyrim, i realy hope its not to easy like Oblivion and Fallout3. We know soon enough if it hold up to my standards:)
 
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