VIDEO The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - 11.11.11

personally my favorite melee weapon is chillrend due to its paralyzing and such. i have it upgraded to do 150 points of damage a swing.

 

Chillrend looks cool, but I found paralyzing kinda pointless because I kill everything in 2 or 3 hits anyway.

 

suppose it depends on the difficulty you're playing on. on expert the paralyzing comes in VERY useful. the only way i kill anything that fast is with my bow pulling a sneak attack, and that results in almost 600 damage. and even that doesn't one shot stuff anymore. go level fifty plus enemies. what i find sad is that i think my girlfriends character, that is about twenty levels below mine, could probably take me in a fight sans paralyzing.

on easy i kill anything in one set of attacks with my dual-wielding character, so if that's the difficulty you're on i can understand. i'm considering starting a master game now honestly.

i also did something very stupid with this character. i started off going for magic, so i only have about 200 or so health at level 55. to say that i'm squishy is something of an understatement. what sucks is that i don't even use magic.

 

I don't even know how to change the difficulty. I'm on whatever is default.

Seriously max sneak, I can walk right up to a Draugr Deathlord and kill it in one hit.

 

oh yea, that's definitely normal difficulty. or adept as they call it. to change it go to settings, then gameplay. there should be a difficulty thing there.

i think i can still get one shot kills if i'm sneaking, using my dark brotherhood armor and a dagger that can do at least 70 damage. because it ends up being times 30, so... it hits damn hard. but yea, normal and expert are completely different worlds.

oh. dragons are still rather deadly on expert, of you wanted them to be more challenging. an ancient one kills me in one shot. every time.

 

I'm not going to change it because I'm never going back to this game, I don't think. Got every achievement except pick 50 pockets and the bounty/jail one. 110 hours, think I've seen enough.

 

in case anybody can relate, i fixed what seemed to be an unfixable bug. The Waking Nightmare quest was hugely bugged on the 360 but i figured it out. if anybody else has had a problem respond to this. If you need a reminder: It is when the guy you follow up to the temple vanishes to the oposite side of the maze, and you have no way to get to him, because he did not magically open the statue in the temple of mara. even when i fixed this bug the first time, he got stuck again on some stairs. bugs!

 

Bah. 110 hours is hardly enough to see even half of what the game offers.

Picking 50 pockets can be challenging if your thief skills aren't up to snuff. Deck yourself with armor and jewelry that can enhance your sneakiness and picking skills. Then try to pick random pockets whenever possible, preferably breaking and entering at night when the homeowners are asleep (if you don't have sneak enhancing armor or apparel, then unequip whatever armor your using - yeah, go nekkid - and sneak around so you'll be more quiet). Save before picking any particular pocket in case your attempt is unsuccesful. Delvin from the Thieves Guild will always offer you pickpocketing extra jobs and they all count for the cheevo, though those picks are usually more challenging. One of the Thieves in the cistern will offer you training in that area if you need it.

The 1,000 bounty in every hold can be time consuming but fun at the same time. Make a save point prior to your attempt. Then just go to each major city and murder any killeable NPC (usually guards and random townfolk). That one murder will automatically generate a bounty of 1,000 gold. Then run. Run your ass off 'til you outrun any guards chasing you and you're able to fast travel elsewhere. Rinse and repeat in each city 'till the cheevo pops up.

Lockpicking your way out of jail isn't too hard either. Save your game. Commit a minor infraction and let the guard take you in. Once inside your cell, save again. Attempt to pick at the lock 'til your succesful, then escape from jail. Once your outside the cheevo will unlock but you'll probably have guards on your case. Just revert to the prior save like if nothing had happened.

 

yea, i was thinking that invidious. not to mention adding mods into the equation a year or so from now, and expansion packs. i think i'll be going back to skyrim for quite some time. probably not as much as i did morrowind, but that was just absurd. i was trying to visit every daedric shrine, dwemer shrine and kill all the zombies. i wasn't even halfway done after doing pretty much every "quest"in the game.

 

Whiterun has the easiest jail to escape from. There is a trapdoor in your cell that leads to some tunnels with your confiscated equipment at the end near the exit.

 

hih. i have rarely gone to jail because i did not want skill fade.

 

Seriously? Would've been nice to know that, because that's the town I chose to do the time in and I decided to escape the hard way.

 

Yup, there are tricks to most of the prisons as detailed on the Elder Scrolls Wiki Jail Break page.

 

I'm not an achievement hunter (there is no Gamerscore on Steam) so I don't actually care how easy they are to do. My character would never murder anyone and get caught or go to jail for no reason.

I'm sure there are another 110 hours worth of locations I could visit...but why? I doubt I'm going to see anything I haven't seen before. I don't need gold, in fact I don't need anything. I'm already the most powerful man in Skyrim. 'Diversity of experience' is not Skyrim's strong points IMHO, the quests are all 'clear this dungeon to find and/or kill X'. The quests are over within minutes and there's only so many Nordic tombs I can visit before I get a 'seen it before' vibe.

I found it pretty, and generally fun but ultimately unsatisfying and I doubt I'll ever feel a need to replay it.

 

i'd take a look at the mods in about a year marcus, you may find something that sparks your interest. there will likely be some pretty epic stuff coming out. also the expansions might be worth it.

 

Even if the DLC is "only" Fallout 3 quality it will be worth the price of admission.

 

well, based on what they said about it it's going to be more like shivering isles type expansions than fallout 3. least according to todd howard a few months ago. so... i hold out a fair amount of hope there. shivering isles was bigger than most other RPGs on its own for pete's sake. if they do a couple of those it's be pretty awesome. kinda like what they did with morrowind actually, two very large expansions. heck my brother spent his first i think forty levels in solstheim because he liked the place so much. i still can't figure out how he survived up there at level three though.

 

In a way, I can understand where you're coming from, MarcusP2, since it just hit me last night. I decided to do a second playthrough simply because I botched the Oblivion Walker achievement the first time around. I steamrolled through the game just to get all the artifacts and by the time I was done, I had a considerable arsenal at my disposal if I chose to do all the major storyquests (yeah, killing Alduin with a few lucky swipes from Mehrune's Razor is LOL worthy). So once I was done with some of the main questlines again (save for the Civil War since I found the outcome of it to be pretty damn anticlimactic), there came a point soon after in which all you can do afterwards is loot dungeons to make off with the rare artifact and some gold; smith awesome armor to sell for more gold; or do miscellaneous like robbing or murdering a nameless **** for, again, the sake of gold. Skyrim is still fun, yeah, but when all the major story quests are done and you're only left with Radiant/misc. stuff to do, things can get a bit boring. I was almost tempted to trade the game in in favor of just a few more cents towards ME3, but that'd probably be a bonehead move if Skyrim DLC eventually rears its head. And, honestly, 300 hrs. in and there are still places and people I've yet to see.

 

I found it pretty, and generally fun but ultimately unsatisfying and I doubt I'll ever feel a need to replay it.

can't really relate to this post. Role playing must not be your strong suit. I have already created like 6 characters and find them all interesting. I would understand not wanting to do the main quest over and over, but there is so much to explore and see.

 

Role playing not my strong suit? I've spent 300 hours playing Baldur's Gate 2. This game just doesn't speak to me. And like I said..to me, 'so much to do and see' is 'so many similar ruins with a Draugr Deathlord at the end to see'.

 

It's hard to argue with this. I'm sick to death of Draugrs, especially the steroid abusing kind you find once you're past lvl. 25. They and Falmers really kill any fun whatsoever in dungeon crawling Nord/Dwemer ruins.

 

i understand that their is repetition. But there is much more to the game than dungeon hunting. There is some real interesting quests, like doing the Mara quests, or just going around doing unpredictable things, and seeing what happens. Also the Daedric quests can be interesting.

I guess i have a higher threshold for repetition. I must have beat both KOTOR's 10 or 12 times a piece.

 

Mara quests? Only Mara quest I'm aware of is getting married..

As for the Deadric quests, I'll admit I felt a little guilty about undertaking them all, since a few of them were pretty damn vile (Molog Bal's, Boethia's, Namira's and Vaermina's are the worst offenders if you followed them through to get the desired artifact). If you wanna play heroic throughout you might not be inclined to undertake them at all. Azura's, Meridia's, Malacath's, Sanguine's, Perite's, Hercine's and Shoegorath's might not make you feel too bad about once you're done with them and the weapons you get are pretty useful.

Playing both KOTOR's 10 times? That's too damn much IMO. The most I managed with KOTOR was 3 times before I snoozed off mid playthough, twice only with KOTOR2 (it's level of incompleteness wouldn't let me enjoy that game the way I probably should have).

 

Been finishing a mix of misc and optional quests.

Most annoying was the Companions one where I had to rescue Hulda from a load of vampires - easy enough. But escorting the macho, super-suicidal idiot back to Whiterun? There's a reason escort missions are loathed - the target is invariably an idiot: Tries to fight everything that moves? Check. Walks into your weapon swing/line of fire? Check.

Fortunately, there was some cool stuff in there too like a dragon attack in Solitude!

 

Once you rescue somebody out of a dungeon/lair/fort or whatever -- and, of course, if there are no threats once you're in the open -- just fast travel to your destination. The VIP will have fast travelled with you and that way you can avoid his/her untimely death if he/she decides to fight a bear "barehanded".