Murdering NPCs that have a high relationship value with you.
There are a few that have that value by default, making it so you don't have to kill your followers or anything. Like, Astrid and everyone in the Sanctuary counts even if you're doing the Destroy the Dark Brotherhood! quest. Some of the people during Namira's quest as well if you've done their personal quests previously.
Heh, the mill owner at one of the mills sent thugs after me because I broke into her house and stole a bucket, so I could break it down into firewood to sell to her to raise disposition so she would let me saw my own logs for a Hearthfire home.
This is entirely because she didn't have a god damn firewood axe anywhere on her property!
I put the thugs down like the bitches they are, and now perhaps I will pay her a less pleasant visit next time. I have no further use for her anyway.
Sending thugs after you is Skyrim's version of small talk.
Playing a true thief character is a lot of fun because you're stealing from so many different people, but you can only have one active thug team after you at a time. So it's a little like Christmas every time the thugs show up, getting to look at the note and see which of the many, many victims sent them this time.
-edit-
Also fun, leave one thug barely alive flopping on the ground and run away, resume career criminal activities. That poor thug will eventually catch up to you again (and they do not, apparently, heal over time) and in the meantime all of the people you robbed are blocked from sending new thugs.
I had one poor thug chase me across Skyrim for almost a week after our first encounter in which his friends died, but not before he was calmed, pickpocketed for all his gear, and then beat to within and inch of his life. He finally found me again and attacked me on the back doorstep to Honeyside, naked, with 5% of his health.
Drunks and Beggars often make good targets, as gaining their favor only requires a small amount of alcohol or gold, and most towns will have at least one of either.
Better beehives! More honey! More honeycombs! Cooking recipes to make mead out of honey!
Most importantly of all, beehives actually respawn.
Seriously Bethesda, you make the strangest design choices.
They don't not respawn on purpose, there's just a single tickmark that is mischecked. I'm 99% certain they are supposed to respawn on the same timer as harvestable plants. This mod just ticks that little box in addition to the other goodies.
I've started this quest a couple times and gotten the blade, but never took it very far to see if the final result was worthwhile. It is a pretty cool little quest overall I think, with a bit of creepiness mixed in, but as is often the case with Bethesda games, the legendary weapon of evil that needed to be hidden away from the world is just a rather ordinary sword that hardly makes a great case for why anyone would succumb to its wiles. :P
ShimshaiFlush with Success!Isle of EmeraldRegistered Userregular
It's kind of a niche item. It's fast for a two-hander, but the damage isn't great. Which is somewhat mitigated by the health absorption, but still there will always be a better or more practical weapon out there.
I think by default it also can't be improved by smithing, but well... mods can fix anything.
One of the things that you can do in SPERG is (with an enchanting perk) modify artifacts at the enchanting table, converting them into alternate versions.
The alternate versions are sometimes just "the same artifact you already had but as your preferred weapon type" but not always.
For example, with an ancient nord bow and Wuthraad (from completion of the Companions questline) you can make the Wuthraad Bow, which just an awesome, awesome bow that doesn't have an enchantment, but has really strong base stats. So much better than a battleaxe you'll never use.
There is just so much to SPERG I haven't even touched yet, it's amazing.
I've been playing with Perkus Maximus lately though, just to see how it is. I think I'm already starting to get tired of it because of how much it changes the numbers on weapons and armor, to the point where anything it misses (because either it's an unsupported mod or just somehow doesn't get changed even though it is part of a supported mod) is utter garbage.
Sending thugs after you is Skyrim's version of small talk.
Playing a true thief character is a lot of fun because you're stealing from so many different people, but you can only have one active thug team after you at a time. So it's a little like Christmas every time the thugs show up, getting to look at the note and see which of the many, many victims sent them this time.
-edit-
Also fun, leave one thug barely alive flopping on the ground and run away, resume career criminal activities. That poor thug will eventually catch up to you again (and they do not, apparently, heal over time) and in the meantime all of the people you robbed are blocked from sending new thugs.
I had one poor thug chase me across Skyrim for almost a week after our first encounter in which his friends died, but not before he was calmed, pickpocketed for all his gear, and then beat to within and inch of his life. He finally found me again and attacked me on the back doorstep to Honeyside, naked, with 5% of his health.
Thugs in Skyrim take their trade with implacable seriousness.
Yes I've had some pretty epic low-level battles in Riverwood when the thugs came after me earlier than I had expected. Some trickiness with the bridges and the thugs' vampire-ish dislike for crossing running water let me divide and conquer them.
daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
I first ran into a thug pack in one of the mountain passes with the blowing snow effects. It was a bit of trouble at first, since I was in the middle of nowhere and didn't know who these guys were, where they came from, or why they were after me.
Nowhere near as deadly as the Legion/NCR kill teams that come after you in New Vegas. Those guys were equipped.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Yes I've had some pretty epic low-level battles in Riverwood when the thugs came after me earlier than I had expected. Some trickiness with the bridges and the thugs' vampire-ish dislike for crossing running water let me divide and conquer them.
Yeah, my current game my first encounter with them was in Morthal. I was fairly low level, had good light armor but just an unimproved steel sword and a hunting bow. Two of them were block-happy and one of them had a two-hander with enough reach that dancing in and out was not working. I finally ended up abusing the swampy terrain to split them up and calmly shot them all to death with my bow. Given that each one took about 10 arrows to kill, I'm thinking that if I had tried to tough it out in melee I would have burned through all my potions, all my food, and still wound up running away.
-edit-
The second time I encountered them I still hadn't upgraded my weapons because I was busy with alchemy so I said "fuck it" and used paralyze poisons and murdered them dishonorably.
Is there anything on skyrim nexus that comes close to the lovers labs in terms of letting me capture some of these bandits that surrender rather than murdering them all?
Is there anything on skyrim nexus that comes close to the lovers labs in terms of letting me capture some of these bandits that surrender rather than murdering them all?
Not that I'm aware of. I think it would be a case of "way too many mods needed to accomplish this thing" to install the whole lovers lab framework + the capture/rape mod just to tie up bandits (and not rape them, obviously, because seriously).
Is there anything on skyrim nexus that comes close to the lovers labs in terms of letting me capture some of these bandits that surrender rather than murdering them all?
Not that I'm aware of. I think it would be a case of "way too many mods needed to accomplish this thing" to install the whole lovers lab framework + the capture/rape mod just to tie up bandits (and not rape them, obviously, because seriously).
I'm saving that for the hardcore mode game I will play on the magical computer I will own after I am employed by pixies to bless children with pleasant dreams.
But yeah, some freaking use for handcuffs would be nice.
Organized Bandits is fun, but wandering the northern coast and hearing a thume on the wind, then seeing a group of competent bandits step over the corpse of a high level draugh at the base of the hill with eyes on your purse is exhilarating.
Well there is a mod called Mercy that made it so when enemies do the 'I yield!' thing they don't just go hostile to you again. Looks like it hasn't been updated in forever though, so who knows if it works anymore.
Fight or Fly (silly name) seems to do a similar thing, where enemies will give up when they are losing, allowing you to loot them through conversation. It seems fairly new, and has a good number of endorsements.
So I broke my last game way too quickly with severe alchemy abuse (but it was fun right up until it was boring) so I re-rolled and picked the vampire alternate start.
So I'm in this vampire cave with these two non-hostile vampires, and they have vampire armor, but I was started in peasant clothes.
Two minutes later and I'm walking out of the cave with two different color vampire outfits to chose from.
So I broke my last game way too quickly with severe alchemy abuse (but it was fun right up until it was boring) so I re-rolled and picked the vampire alternate start.
So I'm in this vampire cave with these two non-hostile vampires, and they have vampire armor, but I was started in peasant clothes.
Two minutes later and I'm walking out of the cave with two different color vampire outfits to chose from.
I love the look of the vampire armor, but I think it's kind of stupid that every vampire in the world wears it when you have Dawnguard installed. To me it seems more like the special garb of the Volkihar vampires, not something that every vampire just gets from somewhere just because they're a vampire.
By the way, did the renamer mod help with your container problems?
So I broke my last game way too quickly with severe alchemy abuse (but it was fun right up until it was boring) so I re-rolled and picked the vampire alternate start.
So I'm in this vampire cave with these two non-hostile vampires, and they have vampire armor, but I was started in peasant clothes.
Two minutes later and I'm walking out of the cave with two different color vampire outfits to chose from.
I love the look of the vampire armor, but I think it's kind of stupid that every vampire in the world wears it when you have Dawnguard installed. To me it seems more like the special garb of the Volkihar vampires, not something that every vampire just gets from somewhere just because they're a vampire.
By the way, did the renamer mod help with your container problems?
Yes it did, I should have specifically said that it worked for the static mesh containers! Sorry, I was so busy posting about hilariously renaming the citizens of Riften that I forgot to mention that, yes, it does in fact allow the renaming of static mesh containers in custom houses added by mods. Thanks!
-edit-
The one thing I've found so far that it doesn't work on is doors. I tried to rename the door in the Ragged Flagon that leads deeper into the Ratway (Ratwaay Warrens entrance) "Turn Right!" to remind myself not to accidentally go through it when I was meaning to go into the Cistern (which happens to me ALWAYS but alas, no dice there.
So I broke my last game way too quickly with severe alchemy abuse (but it was fun right up until it was boring) so I re-rolled and picked the vampire alternate start.
So I'm in this vampire cave with these two non-hostile vampires, and they have vampire armor, but I was started in peasant clothes.
Two minutes later and I'm walking out of the cave with two different color vampire outfits to chose from.
I love the look of the vampire armor, but I think it's kind of stupid that every vampire in the world wears it when you have Dawnguard installed. To me it seems more like the special garb of the Volkihar vampires, not something that every vampire just gets from somewhere just because they're a vampire.
By the way, did the renamer mod help with your container problems?
I forgot to mention, if you do use Immersive Armors, not all vampires will wear vampire armor. I see them in it quite often, but also various other light armors from the mod: ringmail, nordic light mail, and redguard mail specifically.
That's true, but I don't really think regular vampires should have it at all. Like I said, I think it should really only be worn by the Volkihar vampires.
One of the things that you can do in SPERG is (with an enchanting perk) modify artifacts at the enchanting table, converting them into alternate versions.
The alternate versions are sometimes just "the same artifact you already had but as your preferred weapon type" but not always.
For example, with an ancient nord bow and Wuthraad (from completion of the Companions questline) you can make the Wuthraad Bow, which just an awesome, awesome bow that doesn't have an enchantment, but has really strong base stats. So much better than a battleaxe you'll never use.
At first I though "man I gotta try that!"
But honestly a legendary dragon bone bow is already so fucking broken that even if it's better that's just gilding the lily.
I could probably just summarize this by saying "If you loved Morrowind and hated Oblivion, buy Skyrim immediately."
Those are some mighty strong words there. I'll bite, but I'll probably just skip a vanilla playthrough and just layer on some QoL mods to start with. Inventory management, later game difficulty stuff, that kinda thing.
Ehh... Skyrim is really good but it's no closer to Morrowind than Oblivion was. It's a refinement of the consolification of the TES series. Depending on what it was you hated about Oblivion, you may hate Skyrim just as much. If you are looking for Morrowind's depth of character building/skills/spells, or the static world that gives no fucks what level you are when you walk into Dungeon Z, or has hand-placed uberloot just waiting to be found by the eagle-eyed or created explorer... well, you'll be disappointed. If you are looking for Morrowind's gorgeous and creative alien fantasy world, you'll be disappointed as you explore Standard Viking Land.
But if you're looking for a beautiful open world with an insane amount of content and endless nooks to explore, Skyrim is worth a look.
Skyrim has a hell of a lot going for it and it's a game I have well over 700 hours in. But it's no Morrowind nor even a throwback to Morrowind in any way.
There were a few things that really turned me off of Oblivion. First off, the game felt lazy. The cut and paste dungeons, the big string of repetitive Oblivion Gates, and the general lack of any sort of effort put into the game world were a huge turn off. I don't necessarily want the game to have crazy, alien looking zones, but Oblivion just looked so bland and was not very engaging.
The other big problem was the game was just mechanically broken. I wanted my first character to be an assassin but by moving small swords to strength instead of speed like they used to be in Morrowind they completely ruined that playstyle. You're playing a class that relies on hitting as little as possible in a game where you have to hit as much as possible to level a skill as quickly as possible. In Morrowind it was fine because those weapons were tied to speed which meant that doing all your other rogue stuff meant keeping up your sword abilities was a piece of cake. In Oblivion you had to intentionally play completely wrong because your weapon was now the only skill tied to strength. Magic was also pretty lame in that if you wanted to play a caster you pretty much had to take Int to boost your mana pool so playing funky caster hybrids was out the window. You couldn't play a traditional a bard style character, for instance, without going out of your way to grind int to keep your mana pool up so that you could play the higher level charisma based spells.
The faction quests were also pretty terrible in general in Oblivion. The Dark Brotherhood stuff got closest to being good times but even that fell apart towards the end. I know I'll probably never see Morrowind's political shenanigan stuff again and I accept that (even if that fact does suck donkey balls) but it'd be nice if the quests that are there aren't just incredibly boring and lazy. The plot was pretty derpy too but that's kind of a generally known and accepted statement.
So yeah, that's why I didn't like Oblivion and why I avoided Skyrim. If Skyrim actually fixes those problems then I'll check it out once my backlog clears up a bit. I need to get through Wasteland 2 and DAI before I tackle a new RPG. Now if I could just stop passing out during my off watch hours at work I could get some gaming time in. Stupid human need for sleep. Wish I could replace that with some sort of robot part.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
I was hugely let down by Oblivion after being a big fan of Morrowind, but I love Skyrim. I like it more than Morrowind at this point. I disliked Oblivion for a lot of the reasons you did.
The vanilla leveling system in Skyrim is okay, way better than Oblivion, but if you use something like SPERG, it becomes much better, just due to the perk redesign. Either way, when you level up, you choose whether to raise Health, Magicka, or Stamina regardless of what caused you to level up.
I could probably just summarize this by saying "If you loved Morrowind and hated Oblivion, buy Skyrim immediately."
Those are some mighty strong words there. I'll bite, but I'll probably just skip a vanilla playthrough and just layer on some QoL mods to start with. Inventory management, later game difficulty stuff, that kinda thing.
Ehh... Skyrim is really good but it's no closer to Morrowind than Oblivion was. It's a refinement of the consolification of the TES series. Depending on what it was you hated about Oblivion, you may hate Skyrim just as much. If you are looking for Morrowind's depth of character building/skills/spells, or the static world that gives no fucks what level you are when you walk into Dungeon Z, or has hand-placed uberloot just waiting to be found by the eagle-eyed or created explorer... well, you'll be disappointed. If you are looking for Morrowind's gorgeous and creative alien fantasy world, you'll be disappointed as you explore Standard Viking Land.
But if you're looking for a beautiful open world with an insane amount of content and endless nooks to explore, Skyrim is worth a look.
Skyrim has a hell of a lot going for it and it's a game I have well over 700 hours in. But it's no Morrowind nor even a throwback to Morrowind in any way.
There were a few things that really turned me off of Oblivion. First off, the game felt lazy. The cut and paste dungeons, the big string of repetitive Oblivion Gates, and the general lack of any sort of effort put into the game world were a huge turn off. I don't necessarily want the game to have crazy, alien looking zones, but Oblivion just looked so bland and was not very engaging.
The dungeons were manually made in Skyrim and while if you do nothing but draugr tombs back to back they'll blend into each other, there's generally a mix of longer dungeons, really short ones (bear caves for example), and much more texture to the world. As an example, a few months ago I discovered that at night a ghost horseman rides from somewhere and follows a path that ends at its grave. It isn't tied to any quest, it's just there.
The other big problem was the game was just mechanically broken. I wanted my first character to be an assassin but by moving small swords to strength instead of speed like they used to be in Morrowind they completely ruined that playstyle. You're playing a class that relies on hitting as little as possible in a game where you have to hit as much as possible to level a skill as quickly as possible. In Morrowind it was fine because those weapons were tied to speed which meant that doing all your other rogue stuff meant keeping up your sword abilities was a piece of cake. In Oblivion you had to intentionally play completely wrong because your weapon was now the only skill tied to strength. Magic was also pretty lame in that if you wanted to play a caster you pretty much had to take Int to boost your mana pool so playing funky caster hybrids was out the window. You couldn't play a traditional a bard style character, for instance, without going out of your way to grind int to keep your mana pool up so that you could play the higher level charisma based spells.
While it's not perfect, they did get rid of the attribute system. You pump up your choice of health, stamina (which also affects weight limit), or mana per level and then choose a perk that boosts a skill in some way. A glass cannon spellsword, sword and board heavy armor fighter, and stealth character all can theoretically progress their one handed skill at the same rate. I'm pretty sure skill increases tie into how much damage you do not how many hits for weapon skills too.
The faction quests were also pretty terrible in general in Oblivion. The Dark Brotherhood stuff got closest to being good times but even that fell apart towards the end. I know I'll probably never see Morrowind's political shenanigan stuff again and I accept that (even if that fact does suck donkey balls) but it'd be nice if the quests that are there aren't just incredibly boring and lazy. The plot was pretty derpy too but that's kind of a generally known and accepted statement.
The faction quests are still hit and miss. We debate some of them here all the time. They have more flavor and lore to them but some of the silly things still linger.
I did actually feel like a thief during the related guild's quests and activities though. That's something I couldn't always say for Oblivion.
NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
Morrowind was amazing back in the day, but trying to go back to it after having experienced Oblivion/Skyrim...
The mechanics haven't aged particularly well. For all the neat stuff the later games trimmed out, they also changed some stuff for the better.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
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My house is almost complete, will I still be able to adventure with my steward?
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
There are a few that have that value by default, making it so you don't have to kill your followers or anything. Like, Astrid and everyone in the Sanctuary counts even if you're doing the Destroy the Dark Brotherhood! quest. Some of the people during Namira's quest as well if you've done their personal quests previously.
This is entirely because she didn't have a god damn firewood axe anywhere on her property!
I put the thugs down like the bitches they are, and now perhaps I will pay her a less pleasant visit next time. I have no further use for her anyway.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
Day 2 - murder
Playing a true thief character is a lot of fun because you're stealing from so many different people, but you can only have one active thug team after you at a time. So it's a little like Christmas every time the thugs show up, getting to look at the note and see which of the many, many victims sent them this time.
-edit-
Also fun, leave one thug barely alive flopping on the ground and run away, resume career criminal activities. That poor thug will eventually catch up to you again (and they do not, apparently, heal over time) and in the meantime all of the people you robbed are blocked from sending new thugs.
I had one poor thug chase me across Skyrim for almost a week after our first encounter in which his friends died, but not before he was calmed, pickpocketed for all his gear, and then beat to within and inch of his life. He finally found me again and attacked me on the back doorstep to Honeyside, naked, with 5% of his health.
When they start using friendly dialogue toward you, that should be good enough to work.
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Ebony_Blade
That's just too evil for me.
Better beehives! More honey! More honeycombs! Cooking recipes to make mead out of honey!
Most importantly of all, beehives actually respawn.
Seriously Bethesda, you make the strangest design choices.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
They don't not respawn on purpose, there's just a single tickmark that is mischecked. I'm 99% certain they are supposed to respawn on the same timer as harvestable plants. This mod just ticks that little box in addition to the other goodies.
I've started this quest a couple times and gotten the blade, but never took it very far to see if the final result was worthwhile. It is a pretty cool little quest overall I think, with a bit of creepiness mixed in, but as is often the case with Bethesda games, the legendary weapon of evil that needed to be hidden away from the world is just a rather ordinary sword that hardly makes a great case for why anyone would succumb to its wiles. :P
I think by default it also can't be improved by smithing, but well... mods can fix anything.
The alternate versions are sometimes just "the same artifact you already had but as your preferred weapon type" but not always.
For example, with an ancient nord bow and Wuthraad (from completion of the Companions questline) you can make the Wuthraad Bow, which just an awesome, awesome bow that doesn't have an enchantment, but has really strong base stats. So much better than a battleaxe you'll never use.
I've been playing with Perkus Maximus lately though, just to see how it is. I think I'm already starting to get tired of it because of how much it changes the numbers on weapons and armor, to the point where anything it misses (because either it's an unsupported mod or just somehow doesn't get changed even though it is part of a supported mod) is utter garbage.
Thugs in Skyrim take their trade with implacable seriousness.
So it's more like a reward for stealing...
Steam (Ansatz) || GW2 officer (Ansatz.6498)
At lower levels with a difficulty setting of expert or above the thugs can very easily kill you with that good gear, so it's a double-edged sword.
But indeed, the rewards for killing them can be great indeed.
It's gear that's mostly not useful for stealth characters though, aka the ones most likely to have thugs sent after them.
Now if the stealth character is also a vampire, it can be like a surprise meals on wheels delivery.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Nowhere near as deadly as the Legion/NCR kill teams that come after you in New Vegas. Those guys were equipped.
Yeah, my current game my first encounter with them was in Morthal. I was fairly low level, had good light armor but just an unimproved steel sword and a hunting bow. Two of them were block-happy and one of them had a two-hander with enough reach that dancing in and out was not working. I finally ended up abusing the swampy terrain to split them up and calmly shot them all to death with my bow. Given that each one took about 10 arrows to kill, I'm thinking that if I had tried to tough it out in melee I would have burned through all my potions, all my food, and still wound up running away.
-edit-
The second time I encountered them I still hadn't upgraded my weapons because I was busy with alchemy so I said "fuck it" and used paralyze poisons and murdered them dishonorably.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Not that I'm aware of. I think it would be a case of "way too many mods needed to accomplish this thing" to install the whole lovers lab framework + the capture/rape mod just to tie up bandits (and not rape them, obviously, because seriously).
I'm saving that for the hardcore mode game I will play on the magical computer I will own after I am employed by pixies to bless children with pleasant dreams.
But yeah, some freaking use for handcuffs would be nice.
Organized Bandits is fun, but wandering the northern coast and hearing a thume on the wind, then seeing a group of competent bandits step over the corpse of a high level draugh at the base of the hill with eyes on your purse is exhilarating.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Fight or Fly (silly name) seems to do a similar thing, where enemies will give up when they are losing, allowing you to loot them through conversation. It seems fairly new, and has a good number of endorsements.
So I'm in this vampire cave with these two non-hostile vampires, and they have vampire armor, but I was started in peasant clothes.
Two minutes later and I'm walking out of the cave with two different color vampire outfits to chose from.
I love the look of the vampire armor, but I think it's kind of stupid that every vampire in the world wears it when you have Dawnguard installed. To me it seems more like the special garb of the Volkihar vampires, not something that every vampire just gets from somewhere just because they're a vampire.
By the way, did the renamer mod help with your container problems?
Yes it did, I should have specifically said that it worked for the static mesh containers! Sorry, I was so busy posting about hilariously renaming the citizens of Riften that I forgot to mention that, yes, it does in fact allow the renaming of static mesh containers in custom houses added by mods. Thanks!
-edit-
The one thing I've found so far that it doesn't work on is doors. I tried to rename the door in the Ragged Flagon that leads deeper into the Ratway (Ratwaay Warrens entrance) "Turn Right!" to remind myself not to accidentally go through it when I was meaning to go into the Cistern (which happens to me ALWAYS but alas, no dice there.
I forgot to mention, if you do use Immersive Armors, not all vampires will wear vampire armor. I see them in it quite often, but also various other light armors from the mod: ringmail, nordic light mail, and redguard mail specifically.
At first I though "man I gotta try that!"
But honestly a legendary dragon bone bow is already so fucking broken that even if it's better that's just gilding the lily.
There were a few things that really turned me off of Oblivion. First off, the game felt lazy. The cut and paste dungeons, the big string of repetitive Oblivion Gates, and the general lack of any sort of effort put into the game world were a huge turn off. I don't necessarily want the game to have crazy, alien looking zones, but Oblivion just looked so bland and was not very engaging.
The other big problem was the game was just mechanically broken. I wanted my first character to be an assassin but by moving small swords to strength instead of speed like they used to be in Morrowind they completely ruined that playstyle. You're playing a class that relies on hitting as little as possible in a game where you have to hit as much as possible to level a skill as quickly as possible. In Morrowind it was fine because those weapons were tied to speed which meant that doing all your other rogue stuff meant keeping up your sword abilities was a piece of cake. In Oblivion you had to intentionally play completely wrong because your weapon was now the only skill tied to strength. Magic was also pretty lame in that if you wanted to play a caster you pretty much had to take Int to boost your mana pool so playing funky caster hybrids was out the window. You couldn't play a traditional a bard style character, for instance, without going out of your way to grind int to keep your mana pool up so that you could play the higher level charisma based spells.
The faction quests were also pretty terrible in general in Oblivion. The Dark Brotherhood stuff got closest to being good times but even that fell apart towards the end. I know I'll probably never see Morrowind's political shenanigan stuff again and I accept that (even if that fact does suck donkey balls) but it'd be nice if the quests that are there aren't just incredibly boring and lazy. The plot was pretty derpy too but that's kind of a generally known and accepted statement.
So yeah, that's why I didn't like Oblivion and why I avoided Skyrim. If Skyrim actually fixes those problems then I'll check it out once my backlog clears up a bit. I need to get through Wasteland 2 and DAI before I tackle a new RPG. Now if I could just stop passing out during my off watch hours at work I could get some gaming time in. Stupid human need for sleep. Wish I could replace that with some sort of robot part.
The vanilla leveling system in Skyrim is okay, way better than Oblivion, but if you use something like SPERG, it becomes much better, just due to the perk redesign. Either way, when you level up, you choose whether to raise Health, Magicka, or Stamina regardless of what caused you to level up.
The dungeons were manually made in Skyrim and while if you do nothing but draugr tombs back to back they'll blend into each other, there's generally a mix of longer dungeons, really short ones (bear caves for example), and much more texture to the world. As an example, a few months ago I discovered that at night a ghost horseman rides from somewhere and follows a path that ends at its grave. It isn't tied to any quest, it's just there.
While it's not perfect, they did get rid of the attribute system. You pump up your choice of health, stamina (which also affects weight limit), or mana per level and then choose a perk that boosts a skill in some way. A glass cannon spellsword, sword and board heavy armor fighter, and stealth character all can theoretically progress their one handed skill at the same rate. I'm pretty sure skill increases tie into how much damage you do not how many hits for weapon skills too.
The faction quests are still hit and miss. We debate some of them here all the time. They have more flavor and lore to them but some of the silly things still linger.
I did actually feel like a thief during the related guild's quests and activities though. That's something I couldn't always say for Oblivion.
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The mechanics haven't aged particularly well. For all the neat stuff the later games trimmed out, they also changed some stuff for the better.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt