Raynil dralas wrote:For example my Khajiit wouldn't talk like that as they have a noticeably different articulation to the other races.
Well, if you're playing on the PC, there is this. It's not perfect, but it's definitely closer to how Khajiit speak. Do keep in mind that it's not race-specific, though, so you'd have to disable it anytime you aren't playing a Khajiit, or all of your characters will speak like Khajiit.
On topic: something that makes me mad is that there only appears to be one breed of dog in Skyrim (Irish wolfhounds). I know there are mods that add other breeds, but the fact that I have to download a mod to do that because Bethesda was lazy irritates me.
I agree about the dogs, same with the children, they all look and sound the same too.
Also annoys me, npc's saying the same one phrase every time you pass. It would be better if they just didnt say anything.
Shopkeepers all having the same lines when u want to barter, its just tedious.
Lack of options, like trying to find out which whiterun guard hired a thug to get me. Another example, things like Ondolemar in Markarth asking me to get proof of a man's Talos worship. I wanted to warn the man that he was under suspicion and to hide his amulet of talos, but it wasnt an option. You could either take the amulet and convict him or leave the quest eternally unfinished.
I find getting stuck in sneak mode whilst in battle extremely maddening.
The biggest pet peeve I have about Skyrim....the player races all have the same vocals for the shouts, grunts, and coming up from breathing underwater.
I had to install a mod so my Argonian doesn't gasp for breath anymore, and I find it very...heckling...that he shouts with a Nord accent. It's nitpicky yes, but it makes me twitch.
Warwolf Dash wrote:The biggest pet peeve I have about Skyrim....the player races all have the same vocals for the shouts, grunts, and coming up from breathing underwater.
I had to install a mod so my Argonian doesn't gasp for breath anymore, and I find it very...heckling...that he shouts with a Nord accent. It's nitpicky yes, but it makes me twitch.
I wish you could make your PC shout with the voice of a Draugr, they sound awesome when they shout.
Raynil dralas wrote:
I wish you could make your PC shout with the voice of a Draugr, they sound awesome when they shout.
That, my good man, would be great for the humanoid races. I do believe they could have just made quieter version of the dragon voices for the Argonians...the Khajiit would take some sound filtering, but it could easily be done...
^^ YES. I would LOVE to shout like a draugr instead of sounding like an 11 year old girl. No offense to 11 yr old girls anywhere, but seriously, the Dovahkiin doesn't sound as bad ass as the draugr!
Dohvakiin2012 wrote:No offense to 11 yr old girls anywhere, but seriously, the Dovahkiin doesn't sound as bad ass as the draugr!
Well, the Dohvakiin isn't a walking dead with blue glowing eyes.
Then again, if he's a vampire, he's a walking dead with orange glowing eyes... Oh well... Anyway, I think the draugr shouts sound way too demonic to come out of the player.
When I started playing Skyrim about 1.5 years ago, a lot of things made me mad, but I guess I have adapted my approach to the game so much that most of those things don't seem relevant anymore.
Something that still makes me mad is trying to place an object where I want it and in the correct orientation. I don't recall it being nearly as difficult in TES4 or FO3 - it wasn't easy, but it was doable. Then TES5 comes around and it's even more difficult to do! With some objects (e.g., Dibella statues), I find it impossible.
The other day I found that my character had somehow acquired a lute in her inventory - a common loot lute. I'm thinking "I don't know where that came from, but OK, you have a lute now. I guess we'll use it as a decoration." Several minutes later I finally had the thing leaning in a corner of Proudspire. But the next time she re-entered Proudspire, the lute was laying on the floor halfway across the room - and it's still there because it's too much trouble to place it again.
I assume Jordis knocked it over because she is a slob - there's food on the floor in the living room where she eats that she won't clean up. That makes me mad, too.
Edit: The day after posting this, I finally got a Dibella statue to stand upright. My character dropped it from her inventory onto the table at the end of the bed in Honeyside - it teetered on the brink of falling over for a moment and then stood properly. Not placed perfectly, but it will have to do.
Guards... they're just stupid.
'Heard about you and your honeyed words'. What are you on about???
'No lollygagging'. I'm just walking past!
'Hey, your that one from the college'. How do you know? Im wearing a full helmet!
Merchants
If I hear (when asking what's for sale) these phrases one more time, I think I might go crazy...
'Oh a bit of this and a bit of that'. Could you be any more specific???
'Some may call this junk -me, I call them treasures'. What kind of sales talk is that?
Marcurio
When asking to trade something with him...
'I am an apprentice wizard, not a pack mule!' Just take my friggin stuff will you!
People in Whiterun...
Girl who thinks she can fight anyone.
Old lady, 'come to talk to an old woman? Do your good deed for the day?' No, actually im not, you condescending old fart.
Guy who says only one thing, 'you know what's wrong with Skyrim these days? Everyone's obsessed with death'. No they're not, it's just you!
Randomly aggressive 'friends', who say things like...
'Divines smile on you friend', followed by, 'Get away from me!'
I think that's it. I feel cleansed of annoyance now.
Suicidal NPCs who charge a dragon or vampire with a kitchen knife... I had to uninstall Dawnguard until I'm ready to play it because people keep dying from vampire attacks...
I don't have many things that makes me RAGE at Skyrim. The main thing, though, would be NPCs I'm supposed to follow around. They walk a distance, then stop and turn to me. And just stand there. Eventually, they start moving again. Sometimes, though, I have to do a full on running tackle to forcibly shift their position, which usually gets them moving again since they have to re-align themselves to their path.
Picture it now, this shrimpy, scrawny little Breton in clothes leading me somewhere, stopping for some unknown reason, suddenly having a Nord in a full heavy armor set charging at him and colliding at full speed.
K Candyman wrote:what makes me mad is that you can't fight underwater f*cking slaughterfish have a free meal this way!
This. I don't know what bone-headed idea it was to make you unable to fight underwater. Oh the tedious process of luring the fish to the shore if you actually want to kill them.
I recently had a deja vu of Skyrim when playing Dishonored. Dishonored has the freaking hagfish which just keep biting your butt when you are trying to make a sneaky underwater approach and you can't fight them. Well, at least you can possess them but still. Annoying.
The whole "enemies level with you" thing. Yeah, you get better loot, spells, etc., but what's the point if you aren't actually gonna get stronger than the enemy? Most of the time I usually just do a low level game because grinding at higher levels is more trouble than it's worth.
Gamer8199 wrote:The whole "enemies level with you" thing. Yeah, you get better loot, spells, etc., but what's the point if you aren't actually gonna get stronger than the enemy? Most of the time I usually just do a low level game because grinding at higher levels is more trouble than it's worth.
I still prefer the way they did this in Skyrim to the way they did it in Oblivion. In Oblivion, level-appropriate enemies completely replaced the original ones. At least in Skyrim, you'll still encounter regular old bandits/draugr at high levels; they just keep company with plunderers and deathlords. And once you clear a dungeon, said dungeon remains the level you were when you first cleared it, I do believe.
i think Skyrim gets the balance more or less right between oblivion leveling and morrowind leveling
but it is an issue all rpgs have had to deal with because heroes become extremely powerful and enemies need to be challenging
if you had a system like say a GTA5 type character world, where your skills didnt make you godlike but gave you access to more stuff (and that stuff wasn't necessarily things like nuke spells), then you would still have challenge fighting bandits even if you were a lord, but this hasnt been the way fantasy rpgs do things
but your hero's success would depend more on the skill of the player (perhaps) than the stats of the hero, and that doesnt always suit the gamer
Okay, the main reason for a new thread is because I couldn't really decide where this really fit as a bit of a mixed bag of topics from "What did you do today in Skyrim" to "What makes you mad about Skyrim" to "Skyrim characters", etc.
I decided to give my level 48 Breton "battle mage" some R&R and start a new character because she'd basically become insanely overpowered and boring.
I always agonize over character creation but wanted to try something new and go "off the beaten path", plus, I wanted to see what happened if I completed Civil War first without actually interacting with the MQ.
I tried an orc instead. Right out of the gate, after escaping Helgen and emerging from the cave, I didn't even give Ralof the chance to tell me about "Joining the Stormcloaks" in Windhelm.
I immediately took his advice to "split up" and made a break doubling back to Helgen (fast travel) as I had safely stored all the collected loot in the "Warden's chest" just inside the Keep.
Decisions, decisions
This is where it gets ... confusing. So, my character just escapes an Imperial ambush and decides to "split up" with the only other survivor of a dragon attack. Great plan, now what?
First off, where do you go and what do you do? Wander aimlessly? I had this bottle of Black briar Mead that I wanted to give the Jarl of Falkreath, but that is OOC "player knowledge" that my character would have no idea of.
So basically, I "fast travelled" back to Helgen, stashed the rest of my loot and headed off in the direction of the road I came in on.
Now, I need to break off the story for a bit of additional background info, and this is where I get really annoyed at this game. First, you are basically "herded" into the MQ, with no real objectives other than to make it to Riverwood.
What if I don't want to go to Riverwood and speak to your sister, Ralof? Okay, so what else is there to do in this snowball? I decided to go find out. Truth is I really wanted to hit up Falkreath to sell loot on the way to Markarth and the Lover Stone.
This is one of my first "gripes" and chief criticisms. What was the point of changing the "birth signs" that you could pick at the start of the game in Morrowind for your character, which helped to define your character and stayed with them, to "Standing Stones" that you had to "adventure" around, "explore", find and locate to be able to access or use?
I guess I can kinda see it from the standpoint of trying to encourage different forms and styles of role-play, but it's more trouble than it's worth to be limited in such a fashion that you have to actually advance and progress the MQ to "discover" and "unlock" all these "abilities" that were originally initially available from the start of the game and character creation.
You don't even come across the "Guardian Stones" unless to follow your chosen "companion" to Riverwood after "Unbound" and escaping Helgen, and even then, you are forced to "choose" a "path", a rather predefined and limited one at that of either "Mage", "Thief" or "Warrior", and you get an "Atta boy" and a pat on the back if you choose "Warrior", while getting a backhanded "meh" reaction from your "compatriot", if you choose anything else.
Wth?
Why wouldn't they give you access to the Lover Stone first and give you a flat bonus to all XP and then give you the option to "specialize" later? All this really does is put the player in a position to have to "invent" some lame "excuse" or "story" of why their character would head off in some other "random" direction and "stumble" across the Standing Stone they really wanted for their character in the first place.
This is precisely the position I'm put in right out of the gate. If that weren't bad enough, as I'm considering all this, another realization slowly crept up and dawned on me that was almost enough to make me rage quit playing Skyrim altogether when I fully realized just how broken the game was.
First, the different races and different abilities have different strengths and weaknesses that some of the Standing Stones complement better than others. Take my orc for instance. They are "supposed" to disdain the use of magic as much, if not more than, Nords.
Traditionally speaking, the Norse, whom the Nords of Skyrim are modeled after, have a much more "mystic" connection to magic than even the orcs, which is seen portrayed in their prolific use of enchantments and enchanted weapons like "Wuuthrad" (or Mjolnir).
Hence, why do orcs have a bonus to both Smithing and Enchantment? The Smithing and Enchanting skill bonuses would have been more appropriate for the Nords, while the orcs should have had Smithing, they should have been able to create unenchanted weapons and armor that rivaled enchanted ones.
In other words, perhaps it would have been more appropriate to make the orcs the only race capable of Smithing to "Legendary", and capped all the other "Enchanting" races to "Flawless", etc. In other words, orcs would be the only race able to "perk" Smithing, or at least make their racial armor and weapons more effective for their race, just like elves would be better to use Elven, etc.
Anyway, end of that rant, but back to the subject of orcs and magic. I had suddenly realized just how broken Skyrim was and I wanted to test it out. I had just suddenly realized I could effectively break the game with only three skills as I was considering my perks and specialization options.
Those three skills are Destruction, Restoration and Enchanting. I could effectively use an old Oblivion trick to keep my character "competitive" simply by never actually leveling and keeping him at first level indefinitely while building and bulking up those three base skills.
Once my Enchanting got to 100, I could level and perk it up, specializing in enchanted weapons and armor with two effects of Fortify Destruction and Fortify Restoration that would reduce my casting cost in both schools of magic to zero. I could dump all my attribute bonuses into Health, leave my Magicka and Stamina at base 100 and never spend a single point of Magicka on any spell from either school.
This would allow me to "spam" the most powerful healing, protective Wards and Destruction spells indefinitely. All this dawned on me as I was considering fighting styles for my orc since he had tremendous melee potential with Berserker Rage, but no magic protection to speak of. So, why wouldn't an orc use magic?
In Morrowind, we had Sharn Gra-Muzgob. In Oblivion, for an "off-color" mage we got Trayvond the Redguard, and in Skyrim, we get Onmund. Oh, and orc "wise women" certainly use magic (another misattributed "rip-off" of Norse culture and their female "seers" who used runes, which again, why not give credit where credit is due? to close to Morrowind's "Ashlander" tribes? How is making it the orcs in Skyrim any better?
I really had two things I wanted to test. First, what would happen if I did the Civil War first, right out of the gate, and second, I wanted to test the possibility of playing using just those three skills and see if it really was feasible, or even plausible after realizing that it was at least possible?
So anyway, back to the story. So now I have this orc mage armed with his starting spells of Flames and Healing, one in each hand stashing loot in Helgen and heading out the same gate and road he had just "fast traveled" in on.
I get up the path and stumble across a scene I'd never seen before on this road. Just before where the Falkreath Stormcloak camp is usually set up just off the road, there's no camp, but a wrecked Khajiit caravan just before a sign post.
At this point, I'm glad I decided to travel light because my character is set upon by four bandits from the nearby wooded hills. Several flaming bandits later, a mace to the skull put them out of their misery after Ragnarok's magicka reserves were depleted. Yes, I named my orc "Ragnarok". It seemed fitting since I strongly suspected I was about to break Skyrim for a second time with even less effort than the first time with my Breton battle mage, which I would like to add was entirely unintentional.
I looted the bandits and the Khajiit corpses, along with the caravan containing two dead horses, a chest and a Speech skill book. I headed up to the sign post to see where I was headed (Ivarstead, Riften) because, well, because that's what my character would do (I was actually looking for any sign of the Stormcloak camp that's usually there).
Spotted what looked like may be a cave, where two wolves attack after they apparently just killed some lost random wandering NPC. By this time the old backpack is getting particularly heavy so I decide to head back to the caravan to stash what I want to keep in the chest before heading back to Helgen to stash this haul with the rest of my loot.
Three more bandits appear out of nowhere and attack, and get the same treatment as their four predecessors. Seven Khajiit and seven bandits later, I have a decent selection of armor and weapons to choose from. I stash the excess in the chest and decide to have one last look around the area and scout it out for anymore unexpected surprises.
I head back to the "wolf den" just off the road and up the hill from the nearby sign post and round the bend to the back of it see some Nord standing under a tree named "Stormcloak Quartermaster" (right about where their camp usually is), and open for business 24 hours. How convenient.
I sell off everything I don't want or need and head (fast travel) back to Helgen to grab the rest of the armor, weapons and other equipment that I managed to collect. I grab everything I can carry and another couple short dashes up the road (it takes a couple trips) unloads almost everything to the tune of over 1k gold (septims?). He also has the added benefit of giving my character the "Join the Stormcloaks" dialogue and quest.
This is now turning into a book, so let me try to summarize this and wrap this up in as a few words as possible. I have alternatively taken this route on several occasions with many different characters.
My orc ended up at Windhelm after I took an alternate path where I realized that the Atronach Stone was much more appropriate for an orc as far as magical defense is concerned. He went on to the College of Winterhold and completed Saarthal beating the final boss with relative ease for a still first level character using the Atronach Stone power and Berserker Rage, he was basically able to shrug off both magical and physical attacks and do massive damage in return.
At this point, still wasn't happy with the character after listening to Onmund complaining about being the only Nord at the College. A character with innate magical defense like the Nord doesn't need the Atronach Stone (as much).
Bottom line is that I've tried several iterations of different characters from Orc to Nord to Altmer, but I keep gravitating back to Breton with their racial bonus and racial ability basically eliminates the need for either the Lord or the Atronach Stone. "An Explorer's Guide to Skyrim" has become a basic staple in my reading diet as it puts map markers right where I want my character in all cases starting out.
The Lover Stone outside Markarth for a flat 15% bonus to skills across the board. The Shadow Stone outside Riften where my character can pick up both an Amulet and shrine blessing of Zenithar that adds 20% to Barter on top of the 10% from the Haggling perk I usually take at second level for a total of +30% Barter on top of the Gift of Charity I usually get dealing inside any given city.
Unfortunately, this book is only found in a few select locations, one being Whiterun and the other in The Arcanaeum at the College of Winterhold, which is usually one of my first available stops anyway for a mage. The back road from Ivarstead takes you to the South Gate of Riften with a nice guard directing you to the North Gate to which there is no direct or easy (road) access short of a swim or skirting the wall (sigh).
Bypassing Riften and taking the same road on to Windhelm yields much better results, taking you directly to the north gate, but without any access to the Shadow Stone without the same options or going through the city. I guess what I'm really trying to say is that I'm really just ... several words come to mind. Aggravated, Frustrated.
I don't want to get a debate started because as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing to debate. I play games for the challenge they afford. I enjoy that, or did. I'm from the old school of "pen-and-paper" role-playing where you got to match wits with another person.
One might expect for an entire company of game developers to be able to produce something uniquely challenging, but it just seems that in attempting to add "complexity" and "depth", all they really succeeded in doing was making things more convoluted, along with the fact that it's gotten easier to break the games instead of harder.
I like playing games to figure out the intricacies and the nuances, but they seem to be less intricate and nuanced than before. I guess the bottom line is that I'm just disappointed. Again, if you want to argue the point, then save your time and don't respond because I'm not going to argue the point.
Older games encouraged you to role-play and problem-solve and you usually had to do it with next to nothing to work with. If you found even one magic item, you were a force to be reckoned with and what we see now is stuff just being thrown at you. We used to call those types of games "Monty Haul" games because there was never any real challenge to them. The game master (DM/GM) would set up some "problem" and then just hand the character a "solution" (deus ex machina).
I played Morrowind for about ten years dabbling and playing around with different ways to overcome much higher level "obstacles". Using the same basic things, I beat Oblivion in about a year after playing around with it for several months and learning the differences. Now, using those same talents and techniques in Skyrim, I inadvertently broke the game in just a few short months without even meaning to.
The worst part of it all was the realization that after all the convoluted diversions are brushed and swept aside, there's really only a couple basic "problem solving" skills or techniques to Skyrim, and those amount to the liberal application of either weapon, in the form of ax, blunt or sword, or spell, in the form of fire, frost or shock.
"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed."
Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech at Dartmouth College (14 June 1953)
To address your issue with The Lover Stone... Yes, it gives you a flat 15% bonus to how quickly all of your skills level up. But it's the same bonus that's granted by Lover's Comfort, so you no longer get your Well-Rested bonus if you use The Lover Stone. I would rather have eight or so skills level more quickly than others and get my 20% to all skills on top of that, personally.
yeah, but the beauty of the Lover Stone is that's it's a no-brainer that takes all the guesswork out of the "Resting" Bonuses. Look at it this way, first, for Lover's Comfort, you have to marry, which can be a real hassle in and of itself.
So basically, you have your 20% skill bonus to one group of skills.
Then you have your 8 hour Resting bonuses that are one of three possible.
Rested: 5% bonus for sleeping in any bed.
Well Rested: 10% bonus for sleeping in any bed you "own", meaning ones you purchased for the night at an inn or your own home.
Lover's Comfort: 15% bonus and requires a follower spouse, which limits your follower selections and requires constant resting to keep active.
So, with the Guardian Stones, you can have anywhere from 20% (no Resting bonus) to 35% (Lover's Comfort) to ONE "school" of skills (combat, magic, stealth) and anywhere from 0% (no Resting bonus) to 15% (Lover's Comfort) for all others, but again, this requires almost constant maintenance, and if you're a werewolf or vampire, you get NO resting bonuses regardless so the Guardian Stones or the Lover's Stone is the ONLY way to get any bonus xp.
Now, between 20% to roughly 1/3 of your skills to 15% to ALL of them, I personally think that 5% difference is well worth the trade off between 1/3 skills getting a bonus and getting a constant, maintenance-free bonus and boost to all skills all the time, hassle and worry free. No maintenance. Considering I like using such a wide array of skills from speech to enchanting and spell casting, to smithing and other combat skills, it's well worth the constant maintenance free bonus when I'm out adventuring and there's no bedrolls in sight, or I join the Companions, etc.
"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed."
Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech at Dartmouth College (14 June 1953)
godsmack wrote:
This is one of my first "gripes" and chief criticisms. What was the point of changing the "birth signs" that you could pick at the start of the game in Morrowind for your character, which helped to define your character and stayed with them, to "Standing Stones" that you had to "adventure" around, "explore", find and locate to be able to access or use?
The point is that players now can't make the "wrong" choice that they have to deal with for the rest of their character's life. It's the same reason why conversation options either lead to the same response/result or won't work at all, so there's only one correct option. It's why they added a feature to get all your perk points back. It's why there aren't really any differences between the races... They know some people would get upset if they made a choice that had certain consequences attached to them. God forbid if they had to start over and try again. So they made it that Skyrim gives you a pretty good illusion of having choices. But without consequences, choices don't really matter.
Gamer8199 wrote:The whole "enemies level with you" thing. Yeah, you get better loot, spells, etc., but what's the point if you aren't actually gonna get stronger than the enemy? Most of the time I usually just do a low level game because grinding at higher levels is more trouble than it's worth.
I still prefer the way they did this in Skyrim to the way they did it in Oblivion. In Oblivion, level-appropriate enemies completely replaced the original ones. At least in Skyrim, you'll still encounter regular old bandits/draugr at high levels; they just keep company with plunderers and deathlords. And once you clear a dungeon, said dungeon remains the level you were when you first cleared it, I do believe.
Skyrim leveling is indeed better.
but on the dungeon you're wrong.. the dungeon stays the level you first enter it in. so when it's too hard for you to clear it you can train outside the dungeon and the creature's don't get way stronger than you.
F.E. when you enter something at lvl 1 but you can't handle the bandits inside you go train somewhere til you are lvl 3 and when you return it is more easy.
Once you've cleared it I'm not sure if it stays the same lvl in wich you've cleared it.
Could you imagine what I would do if I could do all I can? - Sun Tzu
