How does the game hold up? I also put over 60hrs in skyrim but with the release of starfield I keep on wondering how skyrim would fare as a modern release. The world and grafic fidelity can be approximated with mods, like a lot of people do, but I feel like the main gameplay especially combat und the quests are not that well done. The one thing that’s still amazing is the size of the world
I’ve been using Blade and Blunt and it makes the combat system much slower and deadlier, spamming attacks like in vanilla Skyrim will only get you killed.
It’s meant to be paired alongside Adamant, the perk overhaul made by the same person.
I’d say fantastically. I went back to it for a bit last month.
I played the Legendary edition on the Steam Deck. Graphically, I think it’s fine (it’s way better than how I played it on the PS3 originally). The draw distance was always a strength, I think the Legendary edition included some visual upgrades, and being a game so much older than the Deck it runs at max settings 60FPS with no problem, so it looks better than it did on the PS3/360/most PC’s in 2011. I also think games from that era really hold up well because the generational jumps weren’t quite as big- the consoles had HDMI and a lot of games aimed for at least 720p, if not 1080p. Contemporaries like Assassin’s Creed, BioShock, Uncharted, and the Last of Us are all similarly still pretty good looking. Audio quality more or less peaked too, at least for stereo.
There’s also the Anniversary edition, which I have on PS4 but not PC. It looks more modern- tons of fancy lighting effects and upgrades textures. The models and terrain are still a bit low-poly, the animations a bit stiff, but overall I think it’s good.
The combat is simple- it always was, even compared to its contemporaries in 2011. A lot of people just call it bad, but I actually like the game design of Skyrim’s combat. Success or failure largely is just a preparedness check- is your combination of character level, skill level, equipment, buffs, follower, and consumable items good enough to get you through the fight(s)? It’s about resource management and good use of downtime. It’s not about mechanical proficiency or complexity, and I think that can be a good thing. I don’t have to be sober to play Skyrim. I don’t have to dodge and block for 3-5 business days before I get a turn to attack. It’s a power fantasy- ebony great sword go ‘brrr’.
And I think that helps the roleplay too. Mechanically intensive soulslikes can be fun too, but I find they feel fun in a more arcade-y way. Using mechanical proficiency to defeat an enemy your character is underpowered for feels great as a player, but for me that also kind of ruins the immersion and reminds me that it’s a videogame. To apply the same concept to something other than combat- it’s similar to replaying a game where the player has all of the knowledge the character doesn’t - where the best items are, which direction to go, which NPC’s to kill before they betray you, etc. Speed running stuff. Which is great in its own right, just not what I’m always looking for.
Then the quests. There’s a lot of quests, some better than others, but on the whole I would say they’re pretty good. The main quests early on are basically tricking you into visitng all of the major cities and points of interest across the map, introducing you to all of the factions and mechanics. A lot of quests are just “go clear that dungeon, either to kill someone hiding there or get an item”. Which is fine because clearing dungeons is fun- there’s a good variety of enemy types and dungeon themes. There is a LOT of voice acting for it’s time, and it’s mostly pretty good. Not on par with something like Hades, but still good.
The puzzles are notoriously simple, but they function more as a way to change the pace and have downtime in dungeons. They aren’t supposed to be hard.
On the whole, Skyrim probably isn’t (and never was) the deepest game in any one area. Soulslikes have deeper combat. Plenty of games have more intriguing plots and better characters. The lore is strong in the Elder Scrolls, but Skyrim only contributed a small part to what was built by other games. The crafting system is… Okay. There are hundreds of books in-game, but most are only a couple of pages. The leveling system is less complex than Morrowind or Oblivion. Everything is just as deep as it needs to be and no deeper. And that makes everything really intuitive.
You can’t ruin a build with a bad decision. You can’t get screwed by a bad loot drop. You don’t need to min-max to feel powerful. You don’t need to find one activity that gives a lot of XP to farm to build other skills. You can’t kill 100 rats to level up your lockpicking- you just need to pick locks to get better at lockpicking.
I also don’t mess with mods. I tried it out years ago and found it just wasn’t worth the effort of dealing with a mod manager. I find most mods are trying to turn Skyrim into another game. Shit posts like adding Shrek or Thomas the Tank. Adding ridiculous anime swords and big-tiddied women with bikini armor. Re-creating other games like Ocarina of Time or Morrowind in the Skyrim engine. Adding guns. Adding a bunch of fetch quests with whole novels of text and no voice acting. I’m sure there are some decent ones out there (especially visual and UI improvements) but the process of modding is much less convenient than Steam Workshop games. I haven’t seen anything that looks good enough to merit going to a 3rd party website to download stuff and fuss with a mod manager for.
Also, I find vanilla Skyrim is pretty stable and bugs are rare. Some of that is from things being patched over time, but also I think Skyrim just received an unearned reputation upon release. The rag doll physics cause a lot of chaos, but I don’t know that I’d call that a bug. There’s the occasional clipping. Even back on the PS3 where I first played it, I’d say 80% of issues were solved by reloading the area I was in, with another 19% solved by restarting the game. There were some interesting exploits (Fortify Restoration potions used to be broken, there are still item dup’ing exploits with merchants, you can access the hidden “chests” that the game uses for storing merchant inventory in the overworld, etc) but I find most of them are things you really need to go out of your way to find, and actually can make the game more fun if that’s what you’re going for.
Man what an incredible answer. Thank you for taking your time and writing all of that out. Some of your points especially the Roleplaying points and mods turning skyrim into something different made me realise it just maybe not my cup of tea. I’ll propably try out Avowed when it releases because I love the premise of a more colorful Skyrim with really good writing and world building (not to take anything away from skyrim, I just enjoyed the lore in Pillars way more than skyrim)
It holds up pretty well for what elder scrolls is. It’s still a fun world to run around and do things. Especially with mods. If you use something like ordinator to change the perk trees it’s a very different experience, especially for magic.
(The original calvin and hobbes comic is about the dad explaining how a point on the outside edge of a record travels farther, but still completes the same number of rotations as an inner point)
Rather than playing the game, I spend way more time looking at how lit the build is going to be in POB, and then even more wasting all my currency crafting gear to try and make it work.
Menus all the way… unless you’re doing Pillars of Arun, of course.
I’ve never played the franchise besides messing around in multiplayer with my Sister in Halo 3.
A friend and me picked it up on the Steam Sale last December and decided to work our way through Legendary mode despite me having never played a game and him only having played on Normal. It has been an experience to be sure. I still have to go back to CE because I accidentally played with Anti Cheat off and didn’t get the achievements
I’ve been playing on Steam Deck. From what I can tell everyone says it runs at a stable 40 FPS. But my game has been running like shit for some reason. I’m wondering if it’s because I have it on the SD card so the speeds are slowing it down since it’s one of those games that are so dependent on SSD read speeds
I’ve always hated it and thought it was a stupid untuitive mechanic that didn’t map to anything in real life. It also looks equally stupid in multiplayer when you see player character models spasm their way up a ledge during a crouch jump. It’s an old school mechanic that I am glad is going out of fashion due to better vault controls.
like a simulation of pulling your legs up in real life.
You don’t pull your legs up in real life though, you use your hands to vault onto something. You can’t just swap stances in mid air without holding onto anything. Even if you were talking about box jumps, like the kinds you normally do at a gym, it still isn’t anything remotely like a crouch jump. Also anyone doing a box jump in an actual combat situation just looks goofy.
Any time a game explicitly has a tutorial for crouch jump, my immersion is completely broken. I am instantly reminded that it is a game.
The highest standing jump world record looks almost exactly like a crouch jump, except they start the jump crouched, uncrouch, then end up crouched again, so I don’t think it’s fair to say there’s no real world equivalent.
Debatable. Half-Life’s early development was a hot mess until they started building around how things actually worked. Like, they had the soldier AI, and it completely fell apart outside of some corridor-heavy environments… so they remade all the soldier encounters to take place in hallways and crate mazes.
The crouch jump was almost certainly an accidental invention. But its inclusion in the game was surely devs going ‘this is neat, let’s make it a whole thing.’
It’s something I’m glad it is not longer being used anymore and run+jump or long press jump or double jump are used instead. It was a pain to pull the move on a keyboard, at least for me.
I always saw it as a quirk of the way the game is programmed (they didn’t bother disabling crouching while mid-air) that they just ended up somewhat legitimising by teaching it in the tutorial. AFAIK you only have to use this once or twice in the entire game, and don’t recall it ever being useful when not forced (maybe except for climbing where you shouldn’t to sequence break).
It’s not part of the core gameplay. You learn in in the tutorial, forget about it, get stuck in the middle of the game, remember this is a thing, use it once and then forget about it again.
At least that’s how I remember it. It’s been a while since I played HL1.
That’s not the kind of crouch-jump that’s being discussed here. In source games you can crouch while you’re in the air and it allows you to reach slightly higher ledges. It’s got nothing to do with the long jump upgrade.
Like all game mechanics, it can be implemented in a clumsy way, or as part of a rewarding movement system.
I think that skeuomorphism in games is a decent accessibility feature for people just getting into games, but also video games have been a cultural staple for decades, so it’s not really that necessary that games mimic real movement anymore.
I don’t have a good crouch-jump example, but games like Quake have taken jump movement tech to a crazy level, originally intended or not.
Quake movement raises the ceiling for sure, I saw a graph once showing the optimal angles for bunnyhopping and it seems crazy precise.
Accessibility is always a concern, which is why I’m glad Black Mesa introduced an auto-crouchjump option for those that want or need it, but generally I think it is a good thing when the range of things a player can do is expanded.
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