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I don't know how familiar most of you are with Skyrim – my guess is probably not very – but it is in some ways the most bizarre game.
I started my latest incarnation from new, level 1, and he seems to have grown very differently from the first one. But one thing is clear – you can earn a very handy living on Skyrim as a potion maker and blacksmith. Forget all this adventuring rubbish, all that gives you to get you up close and uncomfortable to bandits and undead. I never have liked zombies, even when they're called "draugr" and have glowing blue eyes they give me a pain, and the less said the better about vampires.
So basically, while my character can be bribed to help out someone by killing bandits, he'd far rather make armour, jewellery and potions from stuff he's picked up that cost him nothing and sell them for a stonking profit. So from that point of view, it's an odd game. Like real life, but on a screen.
In other news
There is no other news except that I have a taker for my old TV. This is good.
I started my latest incarnation from new, level 1, and he seems to have grown very differently from the first one. But one thing is clear – you can earn a very handy living on Skyrim as a potion maker and blacksmith. Forget all this adventuring rubbish, all that gives you to get you up close and uncomfortable to bandits and undead. I never have liked zombies, even when they're called "draugr" and have glowing blue eyes they give me a pain, and the less said the better about vampires.
So basically, while my character can be bribed to help out someone by killing bandits, he'd far rather make armour, jewellery and potions from stuff he's picked up that cost him nothing and sell them for a stonking profit. So from that point of view, it's an odd game. Like real life, but on a screen.
In other news
There is no other news except that I have a taker for my old TV. This is good.
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Mind, it was also a really easy to way to be completely invulnerable: homemade potions weighed next to nothing, stacked, and took no time to drink, so it was easy to take a pack of 100 restore health potions with you and be utterly unkillable provided no one managed to kill you in one hit, and that was before getting into the exploit that let you make super-powerful potions. I assume they have changed that!
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The worst that can happen to make you vulnerable is to be suddenly disarmed - when you're facing a boss undead with no sword, that's a heart-stopping moment for the player, let alone the character.
It's why I choose to have a spell in one hand and a sword in the other, forget the two handed weapon options, they're just not worth the risk.
The other thing I've noticed about walkthroughs is that they're all about the single expensive artifact guarded by the frost trolls of doom, but there are all these books lying about and they weigh very little and can each be sold for a small sum of useful gp. Likewise your dead enemies armour, once it gets beyond the hide or fur level, which aren't worth the carrying.
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And ha, disarming was not a part of Morrowind - you could get knocked down, but that was relatively avoidable once you'd levelled combat a little. Then again, I know they worked a lot on combat in Oblivion and Skyrim because the Morrowind one was relatively boring (also, invulnerable!).
Yeeaah, sounds like large amounts of a bit of gold here and there are the way to go in Skyrim too. And - I don't know if Skyrim does this, but in Morrowind the "expensive artifact guarded by the frost trolls of doom" route was even more nonsensical: merchants had a set amount of max gold per day. So, you know, it makes remarkably little sense to go for the Daedric Claymore worth 80k gold when there is no merchant in the game that has more than 10k to offer, and *that* one is an Easter egg in the middle of nowhere, and most merchants in town don't go over 1k or so. Why not just go make potions or go pearl-diving or rob a bandit cave or something.
...although I'm still very very bitter about them nuking Vvardenfell, this conversation makes me sad that my computer is so old and laggard that it can't even cope with properly modded-up Morrowind, let alone Skyrim. :(
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I think they've been a bit more careful with the choice of potion ingredients which make up restore health and magicka, not to make them too light. I'm envious at the potion weighing 0.0 pounds, that would be great.
I play Skyrim on a PlayStation; no way my computer could cope with it. The pity of that is that I can't mod the game.
One thing it does do which is useful if you're in a hurry is various methods of fast travel, which Oblivion didn't; I don't know about Morrowind.
There's the ordinary "I've been there before, get me there fast" fast travel, but if you're moving between the major cities you can hire a carriage. This is good because lots of areas of Skyrim don't seem to have roads, or the roads end in open areas of scrub leading nowhere, or (as one does) in a graveyard where you're then attacked by hordes of skeletons.
One of the cities doesn't seem to have a road leading to it, you just push your way through snow covered mountains and hope not to end up falling down a glacier. One of the others I've never found out how to get out without ending up in wasteland being attacked by random necromancers.
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And *nods* that makes sense. I used to carry shitloads of restore health potions with me just because there was no reason not to! And as said this was broken as hell, because whenever I went into combat I'd just swig five of them and then be regenerating half my health bar per second for the next two mminutes or something. Restore magicka was harder, though - there weren't enough cheap, easy-to-find ingredients.
I play Skyrim on a PlayStation; no way my computer could cope with it. The pity of that is that I can't mod the game.
That makes lots of sense, although after Morrowind I would never play a TES game without being able to mods - there are such fantastic ones out there, and a couple which I refuse to play the game without (graphics updater, a mod that gives a ton of NPCs unique dialogue and a mainland mod, forex. Also, some mod that makes mages actually playable.)
One thing it does do which is useful if you're in a hurry is various methods of fast travel, which Oblivion didn't; I don't know about Morrowind.
Ahaha let me babble at you about Morrowind fast travel, because this is something that I know annoyed loads of people and is probably the reason Oblivion fast travel is what it is but is something I actually really enjoy about the game...
Morrowind is kind of the polar opposite of Oblivion, insofar as I understand it: there is no "I've been there before, get me there fast" fast travel at all, but there are a whole legion of restricted options. You have ships for coastal towns, silt striders (like carriages except that they're... giant fleas as tall as houses... yeah) for some of them, a teleportation network between the Mages' Guilds and a teleportation network between ancient fortresses where you have to find the necessary items - and not all towns are hooked up to all of them (in a way that makes in-game sense, too, e.g. there are no Mages' Guilds in the anti-Imperial region, hence no teleportation network, and the new Imperial towns are not hooked up to the traditional silt strider system) so it is a complicated sprawling mess. Here is a map! You *also* have a spell allowing you to teleport to the closest temple for each of the two major religions and a spell that allows you to set one "mark" and teleport back there whenever.
WHICH MEANS that unless you want to have to walk everywhere (which... takes forever...) it is in your best interests to work out how to combine these things in new and interesting ways to get from A to B quickly. I find this pretty cool and fun, and once you have enough practice you really *don't* generally have to walk much unless you are heading to Cave In The Middle Of Fucking Nowhere (but even there the fortress teleportation can help!) In comparison, I find the idea of "get me there fast" fast travel pretty boring, especially because the different types of travel really add to the feel of the game (giant... fleas...)
ETA: I should add that not having to physically go to places is also pretty useful. Like, for funsies I sometimes try to get from the west part of the island to the east part by foot, and it's pretty ridiculous - you either have to cross a trackless wasteland with lava and random atronachs (and then you have the bit with randomly-spawning clannfear and golden saints, wtf?!), or go island-hopping around the coast which takes *forever*. Is amazingly fun, but takes *forever*.