» Wed May 09, 2012 4:15 pm
As an Oblivion player I really hoped Bethesda will improve bad stuff , but I expected that they will leave that burden on modding community. Well, I only played the initial part And came to first village, but i must say i am pretty much disappointed about many things, especially since Bethesda was rising high hopes with some of their statements.
1. You remember the very first teaser for Skyrim (it was a bit changed after that). That one raised my hair with the music an accents and the voice and the wall full of details and dragon raising out of the wall. Simply great. So i expected to see something similar before game starts. We got zero. Bethesda's logo with 3 secs of sound, dragon picture and game starts, no music, no nothing, only plain Skyrim word on screen, like being cut from white paper. No pompous music, no "give me more" loading screens, just boring 3 screens, not related to teaser at all.
2. Bethesda promised better looking characters and some people described them as nice, but the first time i seen them before game release, they were still ugly, races look very much alike, females have too many male attributes. Making a nice character is still a hard job in Skyrim. There r tones of games with nice characters (humanlike) and with much easier ways to create them. Bethesda has no idea what simple UI is and still forcing us to go forth and back on menus to change nose and hair and head... i gave up on that after 2 minutes. Have you people ever though about having all sliders for all body parts on the same screen with sliders with numbers and not 4 to 10 presets?? Go play Aion and compare those characters with yours.
Luckily we look at characters from the back, so it doesn't really matter how they look like.
3. So much anticipated improved skill and inventory menus are just a joke. Menus are too big, full of wasted space, too much back and forth clicking for simple task. I admit that items in preview window look nice, but when u play the game that doesn't matter. Again i prefer smaller icons from Aion if I have to choose among Aion and Skyrim. Why the hell you think people downloaded DarnUI for Oblivion so many times??
4. The game that starts in a small window with a sound that can't be heard makes a very bad first impression. I think that Bethesda simply can't afford to leave out video menu from settings, leave in console settings info and similar stuff.
5. Field of view is awful (1200x1920 resolution) and zooming range is inadequate and way too slow. In the initial intro scene the executioner with blade that is about to cut my head just falls down , i can only see dragon behind but can't see if dragon does anything to him and i am just guessing why he fell like that. Too much mouse ironing as well to make a 180° turn. (BTW the first prisoners who get s killed has his body leaned way too far over the neck hole). Picking items with mouse is pure torture. First person view is same as in Oblivion and i never liked to see that huge weapon covering a big part of my screen
6. Not being able to see the whole character in inventory screen left me speechless.
7. We are still able to walk down the very steep (way to steep for my taste) terrain and surviving.
8. The game runs smooth for me on ultra (i 720, Radeon 4870 1GB, 6 GB RAM), graphic card is louder than i prefer though (same as in Oblivion).
9. Animations are below expectations. My Redwood woman walks like a monkey, not like woman, or shall i say, she runs like a woman with chronic pain in the back and wornout hips. Like someone else said so far fighting animations are dull, especially compared what other games have shown us.
10. Textures and graphic part is more detailed, which i like, but at the same time (take cave part at the very start) it is almost too detailed (compare animal skins to windows above them in a main house in Riverwood) even in dark areas (i can't describe, but it doesn't look very natural, maybe it's because of shadows...) and all items drop too much shadow on the ground. When a bird is flying over i can see a shadow that is too detailed, compared to shadows in real life.
11. Home buffalo reminds too much of those twoheaded ones from Fallout 3. Maybe i am wrong.
9. Default shadows on ground are jaggy...again.
10. Water textures are greatly improved, but the edge of water is same as in Oblivion, not natural at all, also water in the first cave that runs over stones is a bit weird, u can notice that btw without starring at it for a long time.
I just threw some of mine impressions, it was just the way i expected, looks somewhat nicer, but with plenty of Oblivion and Fallout 3 leftovers, I'd prefer if Bethesda took some more time to make at least extraordinary impression with first 30 secs of loading the game for the first time. If Bethesda cant make a useful UI then to hell with them. People want to play not spend time in menus. UI is simply and plain terrible, at least give us an option to see icons in UI and to click on them..just make something new...
To be honest I was messing with Skyrim for 1 hour, then i left without any regret and with bad taste in my mouth. Now i started it again to find the rest of goods and bads, but it is awful to fight even a lone wolf cause character turns around like snail. Meh, i was sure i'd leave Aion for ever for Skyrim, but I was wrong. Well, i must give Skyrim some more chance anyway...
