Skyrim impressions

Im not feel'n it, seems like something out of year 2006. To me, the combat is laughable once again. Weapons for instance feel like your holding a marshmellow (no feel), animations are terrible, especially the general movement (floaty/clunky).

i agree. to me it's just ok.
 
Seems the game is great so far but as stated by some the graphics look dated. Maybe it's time to put gamebryo out to pasture?

They did a pretty good job with the engine in this game imo. Seems to be better optimized.

Can you show me a game with a larger open world that looks better and performs half as well?
 
After I've had some time to play it, I'm quite liking it, which is somewhat of a surprise.

The Good:

OK so my major gripe with Oblivion was that the sneaky assassin type character wasn't really that playable, now with sneaking and bows and the bonuses you can invest in them, you can make that build more viable, now I'm sneaking through dungeons one shotting most of the guys I catch off guard.

My biggest assumption that it would be too barren and boring was pretty much just wrong, there's a lot of the world that just looks the same, the snowy mountaintops go on for what feels like miles and miles, however there's some other nicer locations such as hot springs, marsh, woodland, rolling countryside, it's probably just as diverse as oblivion if not a little more so. The cities also feel a lot more interesting as well.

The voice acting is much better, lots of unique voices make the world feel much more believable.

The quests and story so far seem to be more interesting, the quests vary quite a lot with some funny and interesting ones thrown in to the mix, this it's kind of like how FONV was to FO3, generally feels the writing and thought gone into quests and quest dialogue is just better. I can't speak for the overal main quest arc yet though.

The added crafting stuff both for weapons/armour/jewels/food and apothecary is welcomed, especially since you can gather the MANY apothecary ingredients from around the world, this means there's many different plants you can gather as you walk around, harvesting them is just one click so it's fast and easy. Most importantly it helps make the world feel more full, rich and real.

The Bad:

However most of the issues are back in full force, you have to fix vsync, fix the FOV, fix mouse acceleration then mess about with the cfg tweaks to eneable proper high quality graphics, things they left out of the options etc, AMD cards need a fix adding for crossfire and god knows what else people are tweaking in the ini files.

The engine is just as terrible as it was in oblivion, it's buggy no end, thankfully none of them quest/game breaking (so far!), I've had all of the following

  • Various crashes, quite frequent CTD and crashes with C++ errors.
  • Small default FOV
  • Default mouse acceleration, plus different speed x/y axis with no ability to change in game
  • Forced Vsync causes terrbile latency and frame rates that bomb up and down erratically
  • Lots of places to get stuck in the world if you like to investigate every nook and cranny
  • Doors seem to fling me about
  • Physics objects sometimes randomly go flying all over the place, sometimes loads at once
  • I saw a moose type creature stuck in the sky above a lake at one point
  • NPCs holding invisible equipment/weapons
  • NPCs holding more than 1 piece of equipment in same hand (e.g. wedge of cheese + cup)
  • Get stuck on some ore veins and some wood chopping equipment unable to move (needs a load)
  • Smelting animation/models for some ore veins

The animations still feel stiff an awkward, the first person view animations are often misaligned for dagger kills, the general NPC animations sometimes look good for example they'll rest their feet correctly on uneven steps/ground and other times they'll pull off really awful animations such as running up stairs looks awful, often not synced well with what's happening with the world, for example someone will be in a hurry in the voice audio or be panicing but their model will walk about calmly, often lip syncing for some areas of the text is just not working right.

Repetition and Predictability, it suffers from the same predictability problem that oblivion did, there's a lot of elements in the game that scale with your level and so become predictable, armour and weapons you find scale so you know what you're going to get in treasure chests. So does all of the crafting gear so you know how that's going to scale. Other things such as the gold you find on bodies and other randomly generated loot, you basically can guess with high accuracy what you'll find on every single person in the game.

There's also a lot of repetition, there's basically several different types of dungeons with different themes as it were, you tend to fight the same kind of enemies in them and they all follow the same format with lots of regular peons to kill then a final boss at the end with some treasure behind him and then a handy shortcut back to the start. The same feeling of copy/paste areas in the dungeons starts to creep in once you've done and few, thankfully some of the main story quest areas do have a little more of a unique design.

Conclusion:

Most of the issues are superficial, however it's really lame they've not managed to address 1/2 the issues that were in oblivion, most fans of the game are going to need to spend a while getting used to tweaking ini files and pissing about before they can fully launch into the game and get an enjoyable experience.

However in the areas most important to RPGs it seems to have done a pretty fine job, I'm enjoying my assassin character, compared to oblivion where it would take 20 arrows to kill something I can assassinate most people in 1 arrow or back stab, providing I remain hidden, it makes my character feel elite in the world, well earned from all the questing.

Question remains, will I burn out the side quests and faffing about before i finish the main story, and will I feel compelled to finish it, where I didn't with oblivion even after about 50 hours of gameplay. We'll have to see!
 
  • Small default FOV
  • Default mouse acceleration, plus different speed x/y axis with no ability to change in game
  • Forced Vsync causes terrbile latency and frame rates that bomb up and down erratically
I'm not defending Bethesda's failures, but all of these are fixable with the INI's.
Honestly as a PC gamer, all of us should expect there will be INI tweaking involved in pretty much any game we play. Especially a game like Skyrim. Just be glad we have the INI's and we can fix the problems ourselves, some games have these issues with no fixes. It literally takes about 5 minutes to solve those issues, so that makes them makes them virtually a non-issue.

They were working with the same hardware now, as they had 5 years ago when they made Oblivion, so I think it's an issue of "there's nothing we can do about it" when it comes to most of the bugs.
The textures though, I don't think there's any excuse for that one (PC version)...
 
After I've had some time to play it, I'm quite liking it, which is somewhat of a surprise.

The Good:

OK so my major gripe with Oblivion was that the sneaky assassin type character wasn't really that playable, now with sneaking and bows and the bonuses you can invest in them, you can make that build more viable, now I'm sneaking through dungeons one shotting most of the guys I catch off guard.

My biggest assumption that it would be too barren and boring was pretty much just wrong, there's a lot of the world that just looks the same, the snowy mountaintops go on for what feels like miles and miles, however there's some other nicer locations such as hot springs, marsh, woodland, rolling countryside, it's probably just as diverse as oblivion if not a little more so. The cities also feel a lot more interesting as well.

The voice acting is much better, lots of unique voices make the world feel much more believable.

The quests and story so far seem to be more interesting, the quests vary quite a lot with some funny and interesting ones thrown in to the mix, this it's kind of like how FONV was to FO3, generally feels the writing and thought gone into quests and quest dialogue is just better. I can't speak for the overal main quest arc yet though.

The added crafting stuff both for weapons/armour/jewels/food and apothecary is welcomed, especially since you can gather the MANY apothecary ingredients from around the world, this means there's many different plants you can gather as you walk around, harvesting them is just one click so it's fast and easy. Most importantly it helps make the world feel more full, rich and real.

The Bad:

However most of the issues are back in full force, you have to fix vsync, fix the FOV, fix mouse acceleration then mess about with the cfg tweaks to eneable proper high quality graphics, things they left out of the options etc, AMD cards need a fix adding for crossfire and god knows what else people are tweaking in the ini files.

The engine is just as terrible as it was in oblivion, it's buggy no end, thankfully none of them quest/game breaking (so far!), I've had all of the following

  • Various crashes, quite frequent CTD and crashes with C++ errors.
  • Small default FOV
  • Default mouse acceleration, plus different speed x/y axis with no ability to change in game
  • Forced Vsync causes terrbile latency and frame rates that bomb up and down erratically
  • Lots of places to get stuck in the world if you like to investigate every nook and cranny
  • Doors seem to fling me about
  • Physics objects sometimes randomly go flying all over the place, sometimes loads at once
  • I saw a moose type creature stuck in the sky above a lake at one point
  • NPCs holding invisible equipment/weapons
  • NPCs holding more than 1 piece of equipment in same hand (e.g. wedge of cheese + cup)
  • Get stuck on some ore veins and some wood chopping equipment unable to move (needs a load)
  • Smelting animation/models for some ore veins

The animations still feel stiff an awkward, the first person view animations are often misaligned for dagger kills, the general NPC animations sometimes look good for example they'll rest their feet correctly on uneven steps/ground and other times they'll pull off really awful animations such as running up stairs looks awful, often not synced well with what's happening with the world, for example someone will be in a hurry in the voice audio or be panicing but their model will walk about calmly, often lip syncing for some areas of the text is just not working right.

Repetition and Predictability, it suffers from the same predictability problem that oblivion did, there's a lot of elements in the game that scale with your level and so become predictable, armour and weapons you find scale so you know what you're going to get in treasure chests. So does all of the crafting gear so you know how that's going to scale. Other things such as the gold you find on bodies and other randomly generated loot, you basically can guess with high accuracy what you'll find on every single person in the game.

There's also a lot of repetition, there's basically several different types of dungeons with different themes as it were, you tend to fight the same kind of enemies in them and they all follow the same format with lots of regular peons to kill then a final boss at the end with some treasure behind him and then a handy shortcut back to the start. The same feeling of copy/paste areas in the dungeons starts to creep in once you've done and few, thankfully some of the main story quest areas do have a little more of a unique design.

Conclusion:

Most of the issues are superficial, however it's really lame they've not managed to address 1/2 the issues that were in oblivion, most fans of the game are going to need to spend a while getting used to tweaking ini files and pissing about before they can fully launch into the game and get an enjoyable experience.

However in the areas most important to RPGs it seems to have done a pretty fine job, I'm enjoying my assassin character, compared to oblivion where it would take 20 arrows to kill something I can assassinate most people in 1 arrow or back stab, providing I remain hidden, it makes my character feel elite in the world, well earned from all the questing.

Question remains, will I burn out the side quests and faffing about before i finish the main story, and will I feel compelled to finish it, where I didn't with oblivion even after about 50 hours of gameplay. We'll have to see!

Will have to disagree with you on assassin not being good in oblivion. I beat the same on hard being all assassin with a bow, and had no issues with anything in the game.

But you are right. LOVE the archery perks and sneaking perks (yes im playing an argonian assassin again)

P.S. To fix crossfire download the 11.12 Early beta drivers with cap4, fixed my issues with crossfire and its smooth as silk while playing :)
 
  • Various crashes, quite frequent CTD and crashes with C++ errors.
  • Small default FOV
  • Default mouse acceleration, plus different speed x/y axis with no ability to change in game
  • Forced Vsync causes terrbile latency and frame rates that bomb up and down erratically
  • Lots of places to get stuck in the world if you like to investigate every nook and cranny
  • Doors seem to fling me about
  • Physics objects sometimes randomly go flying all over the place, sometimes loads at once
  • I saw a moose type creature stuck in the sky above a lake at one point
  • NPCs holding invisible equipment/weapons
  • NPCs holding more than 1 piece of equipment in same hand (e.g. wedge of cheese + cup)
  • Get stuck on some ore veins and some wood chopping equipment unable to move (needs a load)
  • Smelting animation/models for some ore veins

  • 22 hours played without a single crash
  • ~ fov 85, wow was that hard to fix
  • The mouse acceleration is extraordinarily minor. I seriously wonder if you people who love to complain about minor things like this have ever played a game where the mouse acceleration was not only impossible to turn off, but really bad.
  • Vsync is again easy to turn off and while it does introduce noticeable floatiness to the controls, is once again not very bad.
  • I have yet to get stuck in the world and it is quite easy to fix it if you do by fast traveling out.
  • Doors fling about? What? They are binary objects; open or closed. No idea what you're talking about.
  • Yes, the physics in the world can go wonky, but this can happen in every game with a physics engine. The fact that it happens in a giant open world game is excusable.
  • Oh no, a minor bug.
  • Oh no, a minor bug.
  • Oh no, a minor bug
  • Have yet to encounter this problem. Seems legitimate. Well, you were bound to have one.
  • ???

I cannot fathom how people expect a game as big as this one to be as polished as something as unambitious as an Uncharted game.
 
I'm definitely not an avid gamer by any account, but, anxiously anticipating this game for some time, I'd like to give my opinion regardless. The last couple of PC games that I put any effort into were Oblivion, Civ 5, and Fallout 3. Aside from that, I barely ever play games any more and I don't even know why I own an Xbox)

I've had almost 0 issues with the ported UI. There are certain aspects that make it noticeable that it seems ported, but in my experience, it has been very intuitive. (This is likely due to the fact that I'm not accustomed to modern/standard PC game UI's.) I've read NUMEROUS posts where people were asking how to do this or that, and frankly I was confused that the controls were that elusive. I figured out hotkeys immediately. Also equipping left and right hand spells, etc. (For instance, with hotkeyed items, SHIFT+# puts the item in your offhand. Just makes sense to me.) It does work well in my opinion but may require adjustment if you're not used to it.

I think the graphics are very good. Sure, it's not photo realistic by any measure, but it is definitely a step up from Oblivion and the maps are much more immersive and life-like. If you stop to inspect any given spot it will look very pixelated, but when normally moving and looking around, it's very captivating. Also, there's a decent variety to the world. The lack of that aspect was one of the primary reasons why I couldn't stick with Fallout 3. The rendering was good, but the sickly monochrome-green was intensely BORING and I threw that game in the recycle bin. I do however like some of the interface design they carried over from FO3 and the similar level/skill system.

I've also been quite happy with the story/gameplay. Side-venture dungeons may be tough or impossible, and when you do finally grind one out, you don't necessarily get some super nasty weapon/armor. Also, unless you're grinding the hell out of your character, it seems you have no choice but to use combined tactics to follow the story. (I didn't feel I was under-leveled at all when I made it to the Grey-beards, but there was NO way I was going to kill that snow troll, so I HAD to sneak/run.) It just keeps it interesting IMO. Yeah, and I advise to save a lot. lol.

/rant

oh, yeah, I did the .ini FOV adjust. Worth tampering with in my opinion. I'm currently using about 100 FOV. Seems a bit high, but works well with my 24" and viewing distance.
Can't wait for all the mods to start rolling in for this title. :)
 
After I've had some time to play it, I'm quite liking it, which is somewhat of a surprise.



Question remains, will I burn out the side quests and faffing about before i finish the main story, and will I feel compelled to finish it, where I didn't with oblivion even after about 50 hours of gameplay. We'll have to see!

You cant burn out the side quests.
 
I will give a more detailed account at a later time, but my impression after 20 hours is that this is possibly the best RPG I've ever played (and I've played a lot of them). They've brought the province of Skyrim to life. I didn't really like Oblivion, but I'm LOVING Skyrim. It's just incredible on so many levels (the actual GAME, without nitpicking).
 
  • 22 hours played without a single crash
  • ~ fov 85, wow was that hard to fix
  • The mouse acceleration is extraordinarily minor. I seriously wonder if you people who love to complain about minor things like this have ever played a game where the mouse acceleration was not only impossible to turn off, but really bad.
  • Vsync is again easy to turn off and while it does introduce noticeable floatiness to the controls, is once again not very bad.
  • I have yet to get stuck in the world and it is quite easy to fix it if you do by fast traveling out.
  • Doors fling about? What? They are binary objects; open or closed. No idea what you're talking about.
  • Yes, the physics in the world can go wonky, but this can happen in every game with a physics engine. The fact that it happens in a giant open world game is excusable.
  • Oh no, a minor bug.
  • Oh no, a minor bug.
  • Oh no, a minor bug
  • Have yet to encounter this problem. Seems legitimate. Well, you were bound to have one.
  • ???

I cannot fathom how people expect a game as big as this one to be as polished as something as unambitious as an Uncharted game.

For me, the words "repeat offender" come to mind. That's how I fathom it.
 
I find the HUD to be pretty poorly set up. You have 4 separate bars/timers between health, stamina, magic, and your shout timer, and they go and put them as far away from each other as possible. Seems to be designed for aesthetics rather than usability. Also the manner in which the health meter shows damage is not great either. The health bar slides to its final resting place, so you really don't get instant and clear feedback as to what your health is immediately after getting hit. Fighting multiple things at once only compounds this, as the health bar is constantly shifting around.
 
Anyone else not really very engaged by it? Level 9 so far, going around exploring and picking up jobs and whatnot and... just kind of bored so far. Or not really bored, but not exactly driven to keep playing.
 
Anyone else not really very engaged by it? Level 9 so far, going around exploring and picking up jobs and whatnot and... just kind of bored so far. Or not really bored, but not exactly driven to keep playing.

Not engaging, boring, you name it, that's how I feel.

It's been really hard for me over years past to get into single player RPG games after playing WoW.

While I KNOW Skyrim has way more story and what not, it's that online factor that in comparison to Skyrim, makes me think I wasted $60 on this game.

Oh well, I had a feeling I wouldn't like it, but I thought I would at least give it a try. Too bad it's linked to my Steam account or I'd sell it in a heartbeat.
 
Seems the game is great so far but as stated by some the graphics look dated. Maybe it's time to put gamebryo out to pasture?

I don't understand all the complaining about the graphics. I think the game looks incredible. Sometimes I think most PC gamers are impossible to please. Just because the graphics are not the best, that does not make them bad. Some of the environments are absolutely stunning. Animations are a little clunky, but whatever. The scope of this game is just massive, I'm about 20 hours in right now. Usually that's the mark I hope to meet for a single player only game. I don't feel like I've accomplished hardly anything yet in Skyrim.

I would gladly trade off a few visual quirks for massive amounts of content. People seem to expect the world from these developers... they can't do everything. And really, the way I see it, it's a lot easier for modders to up the visuals than it is to create more content. I'm happy with the way the game works now, and I know its only going to get better.
 
I'm only 5 hours into the game; and at this point only have two 1/2 gripes. The volume has issue on my system (msi sb with realtek); the usage of the tab key for getting out of commands (seem minor but also very unatural compare to 99.99% other games i play) and the ui is a bit wonky (this is really minor but they could do better here).
-
So far no crashes under windows 7 64x (6950) and I think the graphics while not cutting edge are fine.
-
Btw those with crashes or sound issue might want to mention hardware/os just in case there is a pattern.
 
I just finished the main storyline this morning. The most annoying part of the game (at least as of last night) the a game-breaking bug in itwhere I had to use the "move toqt" console command to proceed. Then after that, the NPC is bugged throughout the entire rest of the game so I had to use the console yet again (the "setstage" command this time) to advance the game some because the NPC is question makes the entire game hang up.



Im not feel'n it, seems like something out of year 2006. To me, the combat is laughable once again. Weapons for instance feel like your holding a marshmellow (no feel), animations are terrible, especially the general movement (floaty/clunky). I base this negativity off of playing more resent titles such as Demon's/Dark Souls. After playing those, this game is ancient in both gameplay and graphics (artisticly speaking).


Agreed on all points, but it's not really the dated graphics that bug me the most...it's the damn terrible combat system you mentioned. They are still pretty much relying on the storyline as the selling point of this game, which is fine and all until I remember that The Witcher (2007) kicks the shit out of Skyrim (2011) combat-wise. Skyrim is pretty much a carbon-copy of Morrowind as far as combat goes, and it was bad back then.

It ain't bad, but it ain't all that either.
 
Agreed on all points, but it's not really the dated graphics that bug me the most...it's the damn terrible combat system you mentioned. They are still pretty much relying on the storyline as the selling point of this game, which is fine and all until I remember that The Witcher (2007) kicks the shit out of Skyrim (2011) combat-wise. Skyrim is pretty much a carbon-copy of Morrowind as far as combat goes, and it was bad back then.

It ain't bad, but it ain't all that either.

You REALLY need to replay Morrowind. Skyrim's combat is a few orders of magnitude better than Morrowind's utter shit combat system. Especially the melee.
 
I saw a moose type creature stuck in the sky above a lake at one point

This is because you played with the moose acceleration! :p

I've seen mammoths and deer fall from the sky and die...rabbits run into the lakes and not return... Makes the wilderness a more... intresting place, and without things like this, it wouldn't be a bethesda game! :D
 
The volume has issue on my system (msi sb with realtek);

The audio bug, are you having volume issues and not being able to turn up the volume? Thats whats happeneing with me, so I have to make sure that it's on loud enough before the game starts then turn down the ingame sliders to make it quieter. The eyboard volume buttons don't work with this game at all. :confused:
 
You REALLY need to replay Morrowind. Skyrim's combat is a few orders of magnitude better than Morrowind's utter shit combat system. Especially the melee.

I've played Morrowind through countless times. Just because Skyrim is (slightly) better then Morrowind, Skyrim is still shit when it comes to combat. And the melee? Two Handed: M1 swing, M2 block. Yeah, try doing that for 2 days straight. I had to use a bow for a while just to stay awake during fights.
 
You REALLY need to replay Morrowind. Skyrim's combat is a few orders of magnitude better than Morrowind's utter shit combat system. Especially the melee.

I agree, he should probably replay the witcher while he is at it. Combat is just a click fest in that game. All that you do is click when the icon changes. The combat wasn't The Witcher's high point either.
 
I agree, he should probably replay the witcher while he is at it. Combat is just a click fest in that game. All that you do is click when the icon changes. The combat wasn't The Witcher's high point either.

A click-fest? What Skyrim did you play, because a blind chimp could be taught how to fight melee in Skyrim. At least in The Witcher if you timed it right you'd not only kill the enemy faster, but get to see some cool-ass kills...at least SOME kind of stimulation.



Edit-

My 9 year old son has been playing Skyrim for 2 hours now and he's doing just fine clicking M1 repeatedly, no timing whatsoever.
 
A click-fest? What Skyrim did you play, because a blind chimp could be taught how to fight melee in Skyrim. At least in The Witcher if you timed it right you'd not only kill the enemy faster, but get to see some cool-ass kills...at least SOME kind of stimulation.



Edit-

My 9 year old son has been playing Skyrim for 2 hours now and he's doing just fine clicking M1 repeatedly, no timing whatsoever.

They're both click-fests. Combat in Witcher 1 was not great.
 
They're both click-fests. Combat in Witcher 1 was not great.

Exactly...they are both click-fests, but my point was at least The Witcher (1 or 2) could keep you awake a bit longer. Either way, if they had spent a little more time and worked on the combat it would have been epic.
 
Exactly...they are both click-fests, but my point was at least The Witcher (1 or 2) could keep you awake a bit longer. Either way, if they had spent a little more time and worked on the combat it would have been epic.

I'm sorry but I can't think of a game where the combat is more repetitive than TW1. If you are bored with a two handed sword try magic which unlike TW1 isn't boring or useless. You can dual wield, you can sword and board, you can use a bow and arrow. At least Skyrim gives you choices but at the end of the day this is an rpg.
 
I'm delighted to say that after about 3 hours of game play, I have seen zero issues.

Game looks pretty damn good after a little tweaking. I was surprised the fov command in console worked perfectly.

Combat is sorta lame, like the above says, it's a bit of a click fest. I wish they incorporated dodging and parrying or something along those lines. Since I'm playing Orc my first go around, I'm limited in my choice of combat style.

The menu seems fine to me even though a lot of people are saying it's clumsy and unintuitive. Actually, there is one issue I have seen so far and that is with the favorite selection. It says "F" to favorite, but no matter how hard I spam F it doesn't want to favorite. Anyone else know what the hell is going on here? I'm getting tired of having to go into inventory constantly to switch between weapons.

Level design looks much better than FO3 or F:NV.

Pretty with happy with my purchase so far. I'll be getting a lot of playtime out of this one.
 
Isn't combat always going to be a click-fest when you use the mouse in a game? Sincere question, as I'm a controller person.
 
Played the game for about a half hour and could not stand how bad the game was any longer.

The graphics are crap and everything looks the same. The textures are...ugh. Played with max everything.

The combat system is awful.

Some people will have no problem using the UI, I had no problem myself and it is a matter of preference. With that said I hate the UI. Given the option I will always take mouse over keyboard because hmm....maybe every single RPG game I have played on the PC up until Skyrim allowed me to do so? Gee............

After all that I can not fathom how this game is fetching such high reviews and more disturbingly user reviews on the _PC_ platform. I can see this level of acceptance on a console but on a PC it is down right disturbing.
 
For me, the words "repeat offender" come to mind. That's how I fathom it.

Yeah I mean a lot of this stuff was an issue with oblivion and its here again, sure like some people say, you can fix some of it in the ini files but why do we have to do that, why can't they just put a damn option in the advanced options menu, it's not hard a junior programmer could do it in a few minutes.

Overall it seems enjoyable, but it's enjoyable despite a load of issues which is a shame but it's just about the best way to frame it.

Will have to disagree with you on assassin not being good in oblivion. I beat the same on hard being all assassin with a bow, and had no issues with anything in the game.

The game wasnt unbeatable by any stretch but even leveling purely in bow and sneaking things were still taking a real pasting with arrows to drop, the whole point of assassins are they're professional killers of the night, they hide in shadows and whatnot, in oblivion you got your crit arrow off and then they'd spot you almost immediately and then from that point on yuo were simply back peddling and firing arrows while being beaten on.

In Skyrim you can actually be an assassin, you can get the skills you need to 1 shot most of the enemies providing you stay in sneak mode, it starts off hard because you're crap in all those things, but it gets way easier around level 20 once those skills are getting better.

Im nearly level 30 now with sneak and archery both nearing level 80 and i feel like an actual badass for once, much better than oblivion.
 
Isn't combat always going to be a click-fest when you use the mouse in a game? Sincere question, as I'm a controller person.

While most game don't offer anything beyond an attack/block control scheme, with all these buttons I have from the KB/M you would think some game would come along that takes advantage of the fact. I want to see some parry action when I time my block carefully, or a quick sidestep if I move in the right direction at the right time.

Perhaps I'm expecting too much, but I have been keeping myself engaged by switching back and forth between magic, two handed, and bow attacks.
 
Oblivion had dodges/rolls if you jumped while blocking and your acrobatics skill was over 75 (?). Not sure how that's implemented anymore.

Waiting for a few combat mods to come out, I really enjoyed the "timed block" mod for oblivion that made your shield block more effective if you blocked right as the enemy swung as opposed to holding the button down constantly. I don't actually have skyrim yet so I don't know if shield bashing is in the game either.
 
Those of you complaining about a click fest, what difficulty are you playing on? I set it to "expert" and if I run in wildly swinging, I get killed pretty damn fast. So unless I just suck, I recommend playing on a higher difficulty.

I was worried about the game after reading peoples' first impressions, but I think a lot of it is exaggerated. Yes, it's very easy to find fault with the game, particularly in the UI and low resolution textures. The default FOV is terrible as well, but easily changed.

It's a great game with some issues that are, unfortunately, characteristic of Bethesda.
 
I want to see some parry action when I time my block carefully, or a quick sidestep if I move in the right direction at the right time.

Perhaps I'm expecting too much, but I have been keeping myself engaged by switching back and forth between magic, two handed, and bow attacks.

I'm with you, I can't think of any reason not to put in parry/dodge, etc...I'm loving this game so far, but I was immediately struck by how similar the combat and virtually everything else is to Oblivion. Only substantive change to combat is the addition of dual wielding and doubling up on the same spells in both hands. It's been 5 years...I guess I expected more than subtle improvements.
 
Am surprised they don't implement a directional blocking system similar to Mount&Blade, wouldn't take much and it would introduce a better give/take flow for melee.
 
I'm with you, I can't think of any reason not to put in parry/dodge, etc...I'm loving this game so far, but I was immediately struck by how similar the combat and virtually everything else is to Oblivion. Only substantive change to combat is the addition of dual wielding and doubling up on the same spells in both hands. It's been 5 years...I guess I expected more than subtle improvements.

The game was rushed to meet the November deadline.
 
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