I put up a new page called, “Dead is Dead – Skyrim” so anyone interested in following my misadventures on the slippery slope to an early grave can do so. I’m not hiding spoilers and am trying to be pretty clear on my strategies and reasoning. Anyone who does not wish to be spoiled in a major way should probably steer clear.
It has been a month since the release of TES V: Skyrim and about three weeks since I posted my review. After all of the glowing things I said about Skyrim in my review, it’s going to seem like I’m going to eat those words. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The game remains an awesome game. I still believe that people will be playing it for years to come. Jeremy Soule’s soundtrack still rocks. Todd Howard is still “da man”. None of that changes. I said it was awesome, I meant it.
But as I pointed out, there were several areas where the ball got dropped. These are not game-breaking fumbles, but I think they are the areas that weren’t well implemented. Some are about issues that, had PC gamers been uppermost in the developers heads, might not be issues. The rest are about changes from previous games that just don’t sit well with me. I am not a developer (I don’t even play one on TV). Please keep that in mind. I do not claim any special expertise in the area. My only claim to fame on this topic is that I’ve been messing with the Elder Scrolls for a bit more than 15 years now and it is from an Elder Scrolls perspective that I’m taking issue.
Issue #1: The Inventory: Having just returned from committing mayhem, murder and the occasional wedgie on the denizens of some gods-forsaken hole or other, I step into my cozy little piece of heaven in Whiterun with the sole intention of relieving myself of all of that burdensome loot. Some I will want to sell, some I will want to disenchant, and some I will want to keep until I can figure out what to do with it.
Being borderline OCD on such matters, there is a place for everything and everything must go in its place. Except for figuring out what that place might be. Books are simple. I do have a couple of bookcases, after all. They seem to work the first couple of times I try to use them, but after that? “Pfft!!!” Potions and ingredients are also fairly simple since there is a chest set aside for that purpose. Food items go into their proper place and everything else gets dumped into the trunk upstairs.
Problem #1: the key to place single items into the container and the key to remove everything from the container are THE SAME STINKIN’ KEY!!! The only difference is whether you are looking at the container’s inventory or you are looking at your inventory. As far as I can tell, there is no way to remap this function. One misplaced keystroke and BAM! I’m staggering under a few thousand pounds of junk that couldn’t be sold (I already bartered the local merchants down to their last septim), couldn’t be disenchanted up at Dragonsreach (the court mage is a bit of a snoot, but at least he lets me use his equipment), couldn’t be turned into something else and must, therefore, be stashed for a while. So back to the Inventory screen I go. Uh…. yeah, need to stash those weapons, those arrows, that armor, those ingots… Didn’t I already do that once (twice, three times)? Yep, the pain of a consistently misplaced keystroke. Twenty minutes later, I’ve managed to stash everything again and it’s time to get back to adventuring.
Problem #2: finding my stuff again. Once it’s in the container, getting one particular item back out again is a problem. On the inventory menu, my stuff is conveniently broken down into categories: weapons, armor, food, books, scrolls, potions, etc. The container? Well, it’s just kind of the container. Everything in it is a hodgepodge. About the only logical thing about it is that the stuff most recently put in is at the top of the list. Since I keep pulling everything out (see Problem #1), that means it does get reorganized (frequently), so armor and weapons go in before crafting items like Leather and ingots. There are no categories for the stuff in the container. It’s not even alphabetized. C’mon folks! If you can sort things into categories in my inventory, why can’t you do it in the container? Or at least have the decency to provide one container for each category when I’m decorating my house?
Problem #3: the active area for clicking. This is one place where it’s clear that the PC interface was an afterthought. Consoles don’t use mouse pointers, as far as I know. They just need to scroll down the list until whichever category they’re looking for is highlighted and they’re good. The PC interface has a mouse pointer and there is no indication of which areas are active (clickable) and which areas aren’t. As a general rule, staying to the right of the category name seems to be the workable method, but if you click on an area that isn’t clickable, the inventory screen closes and you have to start over again. This would include clicking on the category name in many cases (especially “MISC”).
Problem #4: reading. There are tons of things to read in Skyrim. Many of the books from as far back as Arena and Daggerfall are still in the game. On a side note, it’s interesting that there are all of these books, but we never see where they come from. There must be a huge printing industry set up somewhere to account for the numbers, but there is nothing to indicate where. Anyway, you’re in your inventory, reading something. You finish and close the item and want to open up another one. No can do. You must go back to the categories, click on “Books” again, and now you can select another item to read. Tedious, unintuitive and generally sloppy.
Issue #2: The <CAPS LOCK> Key: Console gamers probably won’t understand this. PC gamers will undoubtedly commiserate. The <CAPS LOCK> key toggles whether you always run or always walk. While you’re walking, holding <L SHIFT> lets you run; if you’re running, holding <L SHIFT> makes you walk. The problem is that it changes, frequently, at the most inconvenient times and with no warning. So where you were running by default, you’re suddenly walking. Or, if you were walking, you’re suddenly running. The running isn’t so bad, aside from bumping into stuff, unless you’re also sneaking. Running while sneaking is generally a very bad thing. It makes you much easier to detect, which makes the whole sneaking thing kind of pointless in the first place. If <CAPS LOCK> “on” means “run”, then it should always mean “run”. It shouldn’t mean “run or maybe walk, depending on whether you’ve done something, like talk to an NPC or transition to an interior/exterior area, since the last time you tried to move”.
Issue #3: Magic: For those who might not have noticed, Skyrim is a Fantasy Role-Playing Game. The “Fantasy” part is what’s important, because that typically means spell-slinging. And there are major problems in this area.
Problem #1: once a spell is in your spellbook, you’re stuck with it. Spells and their effects do not improve as you get better at spell casting. The spell that did 8 points of fire-based damage at the beginning of the game, does 8 points of fire-based damage at the end of the game. The fact that I’ve now got a spell that does 25 points of fire-based damage doesn’t change that. I’m stuck with that 8-point spell forever. There should have been some way to remove spells from your spellbook short of going into the developer’s console, figuring out the unique identifier of the spell and deleting it that way. And gamers have been asking for this since Daggerfall, at least (that means about 15 years). One would think that somewhere in those 15 years, someone at Bethesda might have figured out how to let you delete an outdated spell.
Problem #2: spells don’t change. That 8-point spell from the beginning of the game doesn’t change. On the weapon side of the equation, I’ve got an arrow that does 10 points of damage. If I upgrade my bow, it will do more damage. But if I upgrade my Destruction magic skill, the spell does the exact same thing it did when I could barely cast it. So, no way to upgrade it and no way to delete it. An almost complete waste.
Problem #3: no Spell Maker. The ability to create your own spells with the effects that you want/need has been a staple of the Elder Scrolls since the first game (Arena). There is no Spell Maker in Skyrim. This is one area that made the Elder Scrolls different from any other FRPG on the market and it wasn’t implemented in this version for some reason or other. As a longtime Elder Scrolls fan, this is borderline heresy.
Problem #4: overall weakness of the magic system. Compared to previous games, the magic system just seems weak. I think the root cause of this was the introduction of Shouts and is probably related to the absence of a Spell Maker. Shouts were a major item for the new game and the developers probably consciously decided to give it center stage by toning down the magic system a bit from previous games. If this is truly the case, I understand the reasons and agree with them to a certain extent. But there can be too much (or too little) of a good thing and I think they’ve crossed that line. Perhaps a bit more time with the game might change that opinion, but at a bit more than 200 hours of playing time at this point, I’m not hopeful. This issue was so troubling, that I almost docked the game a half-point over it in my review. I decided not to in the end because of the question about the role of Shouts, but still…
Issue #4: Faction Quests: I’ll be honest about not having completed all of the faction quest lines. Up to this point in time, I’ve completed the Mages Guild quest line, completed the Thieves Guild quest line (minus a couple of upgrades), completed the Companions’ quest line (minus most of their Radiant quests), wiped out the Dark Brotherhood once and moved about two-thirds through their quest line. That’s about it. I consciously stayed out of the fray between the Imperials and Stormcloaks, but eventually sided with the Imperials just to be done with it. There really is so much other stuff to do in the game that staying focused on these things is a bit of a chore. Some might see this as a weakness of the Elder Scrolls games, but I count it as one of their strengths, so am not griping about it.
At any rate, what I’ve seen thus far are fairly weak stories, especially with the Mages Guild. Here’s the gist of it: welcome to the College of Winterhold, young Apprentice. We’re going to send you to a Dwemer ruin where you’ll accidentally uncover a hugely powerful dingus. Find out what that dingus is and does, then retrieve another dingus to deal with the first dingus. Congratulations on doing that, Arch-Mage. Lame to the point of laughable.
There are so many untapped subplots floating around that the failure to take advantage of any of them is almost criminal. Oblivion’s Mages Guild quest line had a marvelous story centering around the conflict between the Mages Guild and the Necromancers and your involvement was crucial to resolving that conflict. There is a similar conflict brewing between the College of Winterhold and the Thalmor, but almost nothing is done with that. Additionally, there are potential quest lines involving your fellow classmates at the college, but there is little aside from a fetch-and-return mission from each of them.
My initial take on the Thieves Guild was along those lines, but the story finally got me and it was hard to set it aside for other quests. In my admittedly subjective view, the Thieves Guild quest lines from both Oblivion and Skyrim are the best faction quest lines. There are lots of untapped stories among the members of the Guild. I’m not sure whether this is being saved for DLC or as hooks for the modders to build on. But I’m willing to forgive that in exchange for the main story, which was well done.
My initial encounter with the Dark Brotherhood was to infiltrate the sanctum and kill them all, which I did (ho, hum!). On my second run through, I joined, although I have not yet completed their quest line. The personalities, I think, are a lot better than Oblivion’s. The quest system works fairly well, but since I haven’t completed it, I don’t know how well their Radiant quests will turn out.
I was NOT thrilled with the Companions. For fear of spoiling, let me just say that it forces your character to do something to complete the quest line that most players would have preferred to be optional. I hit that point and just dropped it the first time through. On the second time through, I completed the main part of their story and still have some of their Radiant quests to go. I am still not thrilled with them, largely because of the choice issue early in the quest line.
Skyrim introduces a new faction, The Bards’ College, but does almost nothing with it. In fact, the three quests that you can get from them have a problem in that you can’t get rid of the quest objects after you finish. My suspicion is that this will be the subject of a future DLC (hopefully at least the subject of a patch), but only time will tell. As of of the 1.3 patch, this had not been fixed, so I’m still toting their quest objects.
The civil war presents a couple of interesting boo-boos on Bethesda’s part. Without spoiling any of the story, no matter which side you choose, you’ll be told to clean up any encampments of the other side after the main story is finished. This is a task that you cannot complete because each encampment has one character that continues to be flagged “essential” and cannot be killed. If you’re looking for a way to work on your weapon/armor/blocking skills, just bring lots of healing and go to town on him or let him go to town on you. There is also at least one house that cannot be purchased if the civil war is resolved in favor of the Imperials before you try to buy it because the character that gives you the quest isn’t around afterward.
Issue #5: Crafting: I’m very conflicted on this issue. On the one hand, thanks to equipment degradation, previous games almost required that “Armorer” become a secondary or tertiary skill, regardless of the class chosen. Skyrim removed that degradation, so “Smithing” now becomes a conscious skill choice. You are no longer required to carry around a ton of hammers to maintain your equipment. You find or buy the components and craft whatever weapons or armor you want. You must expend skill perks to craft anything beyond simple Iron or Leather, so it superficially seems to resolve the problem. But on the other hand, the skills seem way overpowered. With a decent enough supply of gold, you can purchase or smelt a ton of Iron Ingots and Leather Strips, craft about 450-500 Iron Daggers and become a master of Smithing. You can then turn around and sell those daggers to get a good start on becoming a master of Speech. Find one cheesy enchanted weapon, destroy it at an Arcane Enchanter to learn the enchantment, and then apply that enchantment to the daggers to get a huge jump on becoming a master of Enchanting, too.
The whole process strikes me as being way too much. This is not a complaint about the system in general, though. I think the concept was well considered. The crafting mods were among the more popular in Fallout 3. The concept was carried a bit farther in Fallout: New Vegas and it was only logical to include it in Skyrim. But the skill progression strikes me as being too much, too fast. This is more of a game balance concern than anything else. I suspect that some of the first mods (the nudie ones are already out) will be attempts to tone this down a bit.
I’m still working on getting my head around Alchemy. So far, I like the concept as it has been used in Skyrim. I’m still trying to work out most of the details so that I can understand how the ingredient effects show up in the finished potions. Skyrim’s system seems more like Morrowind’s than like Oblivion’s. It’s not as over-powered as Smithing and there are no ingredients that boost your Alchemy skill, so creating alchemy-boosters to make even more powerful alchemy-boosters (and so on) isn’t the issue that it was in Morrowind. Using potions does not seem to have any effect on your skill, so Alchemy becomes a truly conscious choice as a skill path. On the whole, I like it. I still find it a bit confusing, but I like it. Most of those same comments could be applied to Enchanting.
Issue #6: Leveling: Another issue where I’m conflicted. On the whole, I rather like the lack of classes in the game. Classes have always struck me as a bit of a box into which you had to shove your character concept. Previous games had your little-used skills count for nothing as far as leveling went, so your focus was on your class skills. This did lead to the condition of players focusing on developing their off-skills and ignoring their class skills in order to gain an advantage in the game. Consider someone, for example, who selected Mage as their class and then spent the majority of the game developing their Armor and Weapon skills and advancing their magical skills only when necessary to level up and gain the attribute bonuses. Having high-level combat skills when your class skills were anything else meant that you used high-level combat skills to deal with low-level creatures, which really unbalanced the game.
Skyrim removes most of this by making all skills count toward leveling. It’s just that the higher-level skills count for more toward the next level than do the skills that you hardly use. Since I’m a big fan of one-handed weapons, my two-handed weapon skill hasn’t progressed much out of the teens because I never use them. Yet when I pick up a skill book that boosts my two-handed weapon skill, it progresses me a bit toward the next level.
Normally this wouldn’t be such a big issue except for the fact that Bethesda uses leveled creature lists. If I’m busily working toward being able to craft a fine set of Glass armor (if I didn’t mention it anywhere else, the Elven and Glass Armors look completely awesome – major kudos to the graphic design team for this), I could very well end up getting my ass handed to me on a silver platter because my combat skills aren’t up to dealing with the higher-level critters that spawn because of the increases in my Smithing skill. It’s a conundrum and one to which I can advocate no workable solution. It goes back to there being no such thing as a perfect game, I guess. It’s another area where I suspect that the modding community will step up to the plate and take a swing. I look forward to seeing what they come up with, but am currently disappointed with the current implementation.
Issue #7: Other Stuff: On the whole, I’m pretty thrilled with the game. The fact that I’ve racked up 220 hours of play time with the game within a month should be testament enough to that. But there are lots of niggling little issues that do detract from the overall experience. Some of them are bugs that should have been caught and patched by now, others are scripting issues that are just flat out annoying. So far I haven’t run into anything that is truly game-breaking. I still think the game is awesome and have hopes that either Bethesda or the modding community will fix some of these issues. I’m not thrillled with the Creation Kit being delayed as long as it has since many of these issues could be resolved through an unofficial patch mod of some kind. We’ll just have to see how that goes once it becomes available, but they are issues that really shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Much to my chagrin, it has been a week since the release of “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” and I am only now sitting down to write my review. Why? Because I’ve been playing it. Among its other sterling qualities, the game is engaging to the point of being almost unputdownable (it’s a word).
Skyrim is the 5th installment in Bethesda Softworks’ “Elder Scrolls” series, the 7th if you include “Battlespire” and “Redguard”. It takes place about 200 years after the events of TES4: Oblivion and is set in the Tamriel’s province of Skyrim. From a gameplay standpoint, Skyrim continues the Elder Scrolls’ skill-based leveling system, incorporates some of the mechanics developed during Bethesda’s ventures into the world of “Fallout 3” and “Fallout: New Vegas”, and brings in a few features created by modders of previous games. Players of previous Elder Scrolls games have found and will find significant changes in the game’s mechanics that they will not like. New players will find a system that is fairly simple to understand and interesting to work with.
Some will undoubtedly want to burn me as a heretic for it, but I am NOT going to rate this game as I might review a stand-alone game. Skyrim is a part of a series and it needs to be reviewed as such. I am taking this approach in light of the almost perfect reviews the game has received from the media. From my perspective, there is no such thing as a perfect game. How a reviewer can slam Skyrim for a “half-done inventory system” (a harsh, but reasonable assessment) and then give it a perfect 100 is beyond my comprehension.
The basics are easy enough. Skyrim presents an engrossing story within a beautifully rendered world. I am not playing on a high-end machine and am still blown away by the graphic quality of the game. My wife is constantly having to pull me away from the game (makes me wonder how many divorces will get blamed on Skyrim) and in many cases, it’s “give me a couple of minutes and I’ll be right there”. Those couple of minutes seem to turn into ten or fifteen minutes pretty consistently. Artistically, the world is consistent, stays within its boundaries (no “Mothership Zeta” material here), and is rendered with excruciating attention to detail. Jeremy Soule’s music is awesome and could stand on its own as a fine composition. All told, this is an awesome game that will stand quite well on its own and as part of the Elder Scrolls series. It has issues, however.
From the outset, the game seemed a bit off. In a number of pre-release interviews, Todd Howard said that you would begin as a prisoner being led to your execution. This is a fairly consistent theme in all of the Elder Scrolls games. You started in a prison cell in “Arena”, you get shipwrecked and stuck in a cave in “Daggerfall”, you start on a prison ship in “Morrowind”, and as a prisoner in a dungeon again in “Oblivion”. I’m not sure that the execution part was particularly necessary to the story and it seemed somewhat over-the-top. To be fair, the need to get those dragons into the story quickly pretty much necessitated an outdoor environment for the start, but I think the last-rites-and-head-on-the-block bit was a bit much. To crown the whole episode, if you choose to escape with the Imperials, you’ll be told, essentially, “we’re really a bunch of nice guys and hope you won’t hold that whole head-chopping thing against us.” And, as with the other Elder Scrolls games, you’re pretty much on your own from that point.
This is the point where the Elder Scrolls games truly shine and Skyrim is no exception. You really are on your own. You may choose to follow up on the few things you were told at the outset or you can run off and do your own thing. I chose to mostly do my own thing and have been doing it for the past 83 hours of playing, if Steam is to be believed. Here’s where we get into the places where Bethesda dropped the ball.
The user interface is interesting. It’s not terribly complicated, but it is obviously a port from a console. As such, it does not take serious advantage of the capabilities of a mouse and keyboard. My suspicion is that the first mods released after the Creation Kit becomes available (we’re still waiting on that – another disappointment) will be changes to the user interface. One of the major annoyances in the inventory system, for example, is the clickable area in the categories. Bethesda provided no indicator of where the user needed to click to select a category. Being rather used to radio buttons and checkboxes on the web, my inclination is to either click on the category or just to the left of the category. Those areas are not clickable and it just closes the inventory. The proper area is to the right, but there’s just blank space over there. An icon or “click here” indicator of some sort would have been nice. At the same time, the default key for placing things into a container and removing everything from the container are the same. I cannot count the number of times that I tried to put something into a container and ended up staggering under the load from accidentally putting everything into my inventory. This is yet another place where the development team’s console port comes back to bite the PC player. Bad devs – no Cheetos for you. These are not major issues, but they are annoying enough to detract from the game.
From a graphics standpoint, the game really shines, but there are a few issues in there, too. I have only experienced an unexpected crash to the desktop in a couple of places, so Bethesda has put a major focus on stability. But it should not be a case of there being only a couple of places; there shouldn’t be any at all. The game also has a tendency to stutter/hang for very brief periods, usually a fraction of a second, but sometimes as much as one or two seconds. Keep in mind that I am not on a high-end machine by current standards, but I’m well in excess of the minimum specs. I will grant that the almost infinite number of hardware/software permutations on the PC platform makes it impossible to predict what any given PC’s environment will be. But this seems to be a problem across enough systems that a ball got dropped somewhere along the line. This is something that should have been caught and dealt with in quality control before release. For the places where a crash to desktop happens, there are alternate routes to the destination, so it’s not complete game-breaker, but it’s disturbing enough to warrant the wagging finger.
In the area of gameplay, Bethesda revamped their skill-based leveling system. This represents a major change from past games. Your character only has three attributes: Magicka, Health, and Stamina. In previous games, these three were derived from your character’s other attributes (Strength, Intelligence, Willpower, Endurance, etc.). I think I understand the reasoning behind the change and am pretty much in agreement with it. I’ve always viewed classes as being like a box that you were expected to keep your character within. By removing the attributes and classes of previous games, you are free to develop your character along whatever lines you like rather than along the lines your class requires. This is very much in keeping with Bethesda’s “be who you want to be” approach to gaming. While the the navigation of the user interface for the perk system could use some work (we’re back to the clickable and not clickable thing), it’s well conceived, visually appealing and generally well-implemented.
NPCs also received a major overhaul. They look like real people and generally behave like real people. In their interactions, there are no more involuntary close-ups and the vast majority do not look like they have been beaten with an ugly stick. Overall, I give the development team a huge thumbs-up for the improvements in this area. Just for gravy, the voicing was done by about 70 actors, so there is a great deal of vocal variety to enjoy. The actors did a marvelous job and even the most jaded gamer should be impressed.
From Morrowind, Oblivion and the two Fallout games, the fan community fell in love with the idea of companions and followers, mostly through fan-created mods. The Skyrim developers took this concept to heart, it seems. Skyrim has approximately three dozen NPCs who can be recruited as followers and/or companions. Going one step farther, a couple dozen of those are potentially marriageable. Yes, you can set up housekeeping and enjoy connubial bliss. The why of it escapes me, though. Aside from getting an occasional home-cooked meal and a few septims, having a spouse doesn’t seem to fulfill any useful non-roleplaying purpose. But many of the fans are enjoying the idea, so I’m not going to second guess the development team.
Since Daggerfall, the fan community has been begging for dragons. Skyrim gives it to them, in spades. The main quest line revolves around the return of the dragons and you will fight many in your adventures. While a couple of them are friendly, they are not capable of being companions or mounts. The vast majority of players will not find this a problem and major kudos to the team for a job well done. Their appearances are not frequent enough to turn them into a running gag, nor are they rare enough to be a surprising encounter. The team has managed a good balance with them and I’ve enjoyed every encounter, even when I came out on the losing end of it.
Dragons are extremely well-rendered, but their AI seems a bit weak at times. I watched one come out on the losing end of a fight with three Snowy Sabre Cats. The final tally was one dead cat, one dead dragon and two cats weakened to the point where my low-level character was able to dispose of them fairly easily. I’m not sure if this is an indication of an underpowered dragon or overpowered cats. Perhaps both. At any rate, dragon interactions are a shining point of the game. Leaving aside the Sabre Cat incident, dragons are not wimpy opponents. In a one-on-one encounter, even with a fairly high-level character, my inclination is to head for cover and take them out at range or else to run for help. They are, indeed, a force to be reckoned with.
Crafting is another area in which Skyrim has far exceeded previous games. Crafting has long been a part of the Elder Scrolls through the Alchemy and Enchanting skills. Both were improved in Morrowind and Oblivion, but Skyrim adds Smithing, Tanning, Smelting and Cooking to the mix for a completely enthralling experience. It would not be too far off to claim that a player could easily spend an entire game using adventuring and and exploring only as a means of gaining the raw materials necessary to do crafting. In some ways, crafting was so well implemented that it can completely overpower the game, but most players will find it to be a worthwhile adjunct rather than a game breaker. I strongly suspect this will be toned down by the modding community, but console players will just have to be cautious in its use (or not – it’s your game).
There are so many other areas of the game to explore that it would almost take a book to address them. Wait. It did take a book – “The Prima Official Game Guide,” weighing in at a bit over 650 pages. But this isn’t a help and how-to article, so I’ll just have to wrap it up by saying that Bethesda has turned out another excellent game. It has its weak points, but they are completely overshadowed by its strengths. Players who are new to the series will find little to get in the way of having an excellent romp through a virtual world. Veteran Elder Scrolls players will find much to complain about as far as changes, but will still be playing it in the years to come. This is definitely not a one-off adventure game.
At $60 (retail) for the PC version, it’s a tad pricier than most other games on the market, but well worth it. You must install Valve’s “Steam” client to play, just as with “Fallout: New Vegas”. Some will see this as a problem, but DRM is a fact of life in today’s world. Steam is a bit less intrusive than other systems, so I don’t count it as a minus for Skyrim. Anyone who is into the “swords and sorcery” side of gaming will want to add Skyrim to their collection and will be coming back to it again and again and again.
I just noticed that I hadn’t posted anything in over two months. I have not stopped gaming. Far from it. Prior to the release of Skyrim, I decided to do another complete replay of DX: HR. There is still one achievement eluding me (I keep overlooking one silly book), but played through on all difficult levels, including one complete Ghost run. I did not pick up the “Missing Link” DLC. It’s on my list of things to do, but its release conflicted with a couple of other things and I didn’t have the time to dedicate to it.
I picked up the “Lonesome Road” DLC for Fallout: New Vegas. It was disappointing, which is why I have not written a review of it. I’ll get around to it eventually, but while I have things to say about it, I’m in the position of not being able to say much that’s nice. I’d recommend it only for those who are interested in playing the complete game, but not as a DLC in and of itself.
While waiting for the release of Skyrim, I tried (and failed) to finish a complete play through of New Vegas with all of the DLCs, but was still working on “Old World Blues” when the 11th rolled around.
Since then I’ve been diligently playing Skyrim. I’m working on my Skyrim review and will get that up in the next day or two.
In the meantime, happy gaming to all.
If you’ve been reading forum postings at Steam or possibly the Deus Ex Wiki you’ve seen a few of my tidbits here and there. After two weeks of trying to get a feel for the game, I finally finished the first boss battle and have moved on through Hengsha and Montreal and am now back in Detroit. Along the way, I’ve picked up a few things that seem worth passing on and this is probably as good of a place as any to do it. I don’t think any of this is earth-shattering new stuff and is probably available from other sources, but a long weekend is as good a time as any to take a break from gaming, maintenance, and other daily life things and put it down on “paper”.
Mega-Credits: there are two weapons dealers available to you in Detroit. One is in the gas station near the L.I.M.B. clinic and the other is in a third-floor apartment near the basketball court. If you’re playing a “Ghost” walkthrough, this won’t be too helpful since you won’t be collecting many weapons except for those that are laying around. But for the rest, almost every opponent (except Barrett and most civilians) will drop weapons when you take them down. If you pick up those weapons and already have one of the same kind in your inventory, you’ll get some ammo. If you don’t and have space, then the weapon will be added to your inventory. If you’re doing a combat-oriented playthrough you might need that ammo, but most players probably don’t.
Those weapons are worth some creds, folks: anywhere from 750 for a Shotgun, down to 120 or so for a 10mm. Rather than picking up the weapon, leave them until later and sell them. It will involve a lot of running back and forth and it does kind of break story immersion, but you’ll never be hurting for credits if you do. I’d recommend stashing one of each type of weapon at your apartment, but the rest are for selling. Granted, there are some areas where you do not have access to a dealer and you don’t have any other choice than to pick up the 10mm pistol and get one crummy round of ammo, but for those areas where you can, do so.
The ammo is also worth credits, but I’ve noticed that it’s a diminishing returns situation. The more ammo you sell, the lower the price goes. You could always stash it, I suppose, but if it’s for a weapon that you don’t plan on using much, even 5 credits is more than you had before.
Derelict Row Ballers: Detective Alexander will have a “Cloak and Daggers” quest for you if you talk to her (she’ll call you by name as you pass her, so she’s kind of hard to miss). Part of the quest involves finding a weapons stash in their territory, but you need to find it without being spotted. If you’re not good at sneaking or lack the patience, you’ll blow that part of her quest pretty quickly. However, the “being spotted” trigger is only operational while that quest is running. If you simply wander into Derelict Row and take out the Ballers BEFORE talking to her, then getting to the weapons stash will simply be a matter of going there and clicking on it because there won’t be anyone left to see you. OK, it’s not proper role-playing, but it works and is worth an extra 500 XPs for the “Ghost”.
Earning Achievements: there are mutually exclusive achievements for many of the side quests. For example, you cannot both keep Megan’s bracelet and give it to her mother; you cannot both accept O’Malley’s bribe and arrest him. The solution is called a saved game. Save your game before completing a side quest. Take one choice to get the achievement, then reload, take the other and keep rolling. Alternatively, you could play through the game again and simply take the other choices, but my memory being the shoddy thing that it is, I’d probably overlook something and spend the rest of the decade trying to remember where it was that I dropped the ball.
Get All of Those XPs (Part I): for those who do not want to spend Praxis points on upgrading your hacking skills, you’re missing out on a boatload of XPs. For example, at Milwaukee Junction you’ll have to pass through a room that has about 10 desktop computers in it. They’re all level 1 security, so they’re hackable even by those who do not upgrade. Most of the passwords are on pocket secretaries in opponent inventories or laying around elsewhere, but why bother? After clearing the room (I assume you’re not playing Ghost-style), just hack them all for an extra 250 or so XPs. The same goes in Montreal, but those are all Level 2 and Level 3 hacks and worth more XPs. Hack those wall panels. Hack those safes. If it’s electronic, hack it. I don’t have any hard numbers to back it up, but it takes 20,000 XP to take your hacking up to Level 5, but I’d bet that there are more than that many XPs available through hacking so it’s a long-run win.
Get All of Those XPs (Part II): explore everything. Go everywhere that you can go. There are air ducts, ladders, boxes to stack and climb, you name it. You get XPs for finding most of these routes and hidden locations. Don’t leave them unclaimed. Nothing says that you have to do it immediately, but after clearing an area, go explore before moving to the next.
I’ve Got a Name: talk to everyone. There are a lot of NPCs out there. Most are generic names, like “Civilian,” “Police Officer,” or “Punk” and they probably don’t have much in the way of useful information. But people with names almost always have something useful. Talk to them. For example, Leticia is digging around in a trashcan on a corner. For the cost of four Beers (you don’t have to give them all at once), she’ll give you an access code. For the some credits she’ll give you other information. But you won’t get it if you don’t talk to her and pay attention to the dialogue options.
Quick-Save Often: I do not know if this is available on the consoles, but <F5> is the default hotkey for a quick-save on the PC. Use it. Don’t rely on it exclusively (I believe the PC supports 99 regular save slots), but use it often. I use it frequently when I’m trying something that is likely to backfire on me. Again, it’s not strict role-playing, but it WILL save your bacon often enough to make it worth your while.
Hack FTW: in addition to my previous comments about hacking, I stumbled on a little useful tidbit in the hacking mini-game. Those little diagnostic subroutines work just like nodes and can be captured. When you capture them, the hack is complete and you get all of the goodies stashed in data stores, whether you captured them or not. So in those situations where you can get to it easily, capture them. I’m still working on getting a complete verify on the goodies part, but completing the hack is definitely the case.
To get off my soapbox about Steam and back onto something a bit more constructive, “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” is out and it’s a winner.
My rig: AMD quad-core 3.4GHz (per core) CPU, 6GB dual channel DDR3 RAM, dual GeForce 9800GTs (275.33 driver package), ASUS mobo with n750 chipset, standard integrated sound. This is the hardware bed for 32-bit Vista, which means I’ve only got 4GB of RAM to work with (the dual channel was on sale and 6GB was cheaper than the same stuff in a 4GB pack).
It has been about 11 years since Deus Ex was released. Almost every “Top 25/50/100 Games” list for PC that I’ve read/seen has included it. By today’s standards its graphics are dated with really low poly counts, but they were more than decent for the time. What set it apart, I think, from the rest of the pack was an outstanding story with multiple ways to complete it.
The game world wasn’t completely open-ended, but it was close enough that you couldn’t call it a corridor-shooter and, although the story was linear, the developers provided multiple ways to approach and solve almost every situation you encountered. If you were a run-and-gun player, you could do that. If you were a ghost’s shadow stealth player, you could do that, too. Or you could mix and match. Or you could cheat your way through if you were so inclined (and see the not-so-subtle “Cheats Enabled” logo on every saved game). The game relied on a combination of cybernetic augmentations and skills to get you through, so you had to pick and choose very carefully.
Its sequel (“Deus Ex: Invisible War”) was less than fondly received by the fan-base upon its release in 2005. I’m being tactful about that because on many forums, one of the quickest ways to start a flame war is to say that you liked “Invisible War.” Leaving that aside, Invisible War tried to keep the things that made DX great, but the developers didn’t pull it off as well. The setting didn’t feel as open as DX’s. The story was more obviously linear and much more “out there” in a sci-fi sense. There were still multiple endings, but they were mostly unsatisfying endings. And, to add insult to injury (so to speak), the developers opted for an interface and gameplay that felt more like a console (the less said about the PS2 port of DX, the better – it really sucked).
So with great fan anticipation, “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” was announced in 2007 and released this past Tuesday. The major theme in fan discussions had been whether it would be more like the original or more like the sequel. I’m happy to be able to report that this is much more like the original.
The overriding story question revolves around the development of cybernetic augmentations to enhance human abilities. The answer to that question from a story standpoint is that this must be allowed to happen so that the original Deus Ex can happen (Human Revolution is a prequel, after all). I think the deeper question, and the one which each player must work out for themselves, is whether these augmentations will create a world in which there are two species of humans, normal and augmented, and whether one is or should be superior to the other in political, social and economic terms.
Like both of the other games, you will play a predetermined character, Adam Jensen. Jensen is a former member of Detroit’s SWAT team. He left the force after an incident resulting in the death of a 15-year-old and is now the chief of security for Sarif Industries, a leader in the development of the augmentations so central to the story. Jensen begins the game with normal human abilities. After an attack on a Sarif research facility leaves him maimed and crippled, he is involuntarily augmented at the order of his boss, David Sarif. Surprisingly, you do not have the ability to be anything other than a white male with a set appearance. The other two DX games gave you a little flexibility in this area (IW even let you play as a female character), but HR does not. This is, in part, why Gameplay receives only a "Very Good” mark. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but in my mind it violates the concept of player choice. It probably costs an arm-and-a-leg (which Sarif kindly replaced for you) to do the main character dialogs multiple times with different voice actors, so it’s understandable, but still…
DXHR went back to the original’s inventory and hotkey system where you have a set amount of inventory space and can carry whatever you’d like as long as it fits within that space. Some items stack quite nicely, while other items (like grenades) don’t. This moves your choice of what to carry and what to leave behind a bit higher on the priority list, so don’t walk into this thinking you can just pick up any loot. You must decide what’s going to be useful and what isn’t. It’s more realistic, but can be a huge frustration at times.
Like “Invisible War”, the skills system of the original has been scrapped in favor of doing everything through your augmentations. There are about 65 augmentations available for you to use. You install or upgrade your augmentations through Praxis kits/points. Each augmentation costs either 1 or 2 Praxis points. There will be 2 Praxis kits available for purchase through LIMB clinics in each of the five city hubs, 6 or 7 that you can pick up as loot or receive as a quest reward and the remainder are earned through XPs (1 Praxis per 5000 XPs). Depending upon your playing style and approach, you may or may not be able to install and fully upgrade all of the augmentations you want. For example, you will not be able to hack Level 5 computers until you have expended the Praxis points to be able to hack Level 2, 3, and 4 computers first (Level 1 hacking is part of your basic kit). Consequently, you’ll want to maximize your XP gains whenever possible, so always look for solutions that do not involve a frontal assault.
As a gameplay tip, keep in mind that picking up a weapon that you already have in your inventory will scrap the weapon and add a few rounds of ammo. A Combat Rifle, for example, can be sold in a city hub for a nice chunk of credits. You’ll need to decide whether the immediate gain of a few rounds of ammo is worth the 630 credits you could get for the weapon if you were to wait until you’ve finished the mission to carry it to the dealer. Be sure to stash your regular weapons first and gather loot AFTER you have completely cleared an area. It might take several trips, but it will maximize your credit gains.
As a second gameplay tip, DXHR rewards stealth more than it rewards frontal assaults. In some cases this can be double or triple the XPs. Consequently, you should take the time to scout out the area as much as possible to find those hidden routes (like ventilation shafts hiding behind boxes and movable crates), use non-lethal means whenever possible and always avoid detection. There is even an achievement for completing the game without killing anyone other than bosses.
Which leads me to the second (and biggest) gameplay problem: the bosses. Even if you find yourself agreeing with their goals and positions, you MUST kill these folks. To my way of thinking, if the developers are going to present you with a morally ambiguous situation and allow you to choose your position, then they need to allow you the freedom to support whichever side you wish. I will grant that this makes the story progression much more complicated and would probably exponentially increase the amount of code needed to make it work, but it strikes me as wrong to say “choose your outcome, except here, here and here where we will choose for you”. I suspect that most players will not have a problem with this approach, but it does kind of grate on me. But it’s my review, so I get to say what I like and don’t like and you can take it for what it’s worth.
New to the series is an active cover system, allowing you to scrunch up against walls, boxes, crates and other objects in order to remain unseen and/or protected. You must actively use cover, as opposed to games like “Mass Effect” which kind of put you into cover even when you don’t want to be. Hopping from cover to cover or navigating around it is very simple and straightforward. It works very well. Keep in mind that the game also include destructible environment, so you probably don’t want to be hiding behind cardboard boxes while the bad guys are trying to pump you full of lead. It makes stealth and combat much more interesting and I’m fairly sure you’ll enjoy it.
In summary, Deus Ex is pretty much back with a vengeance. Graphically and story-wise the world works as a unified whole and will suck you in with true Deus Ex style. NPC interactions are believable and well done, keeping in mind that the voice acting can be a bit off in places. The soundtrack is outstandingly well-done, even through my cheap-ass speakers. Player controls are fairly uncomplicated and the inventory system should please even the most die-hard DX fam. The new cover system works very well, making this much more of a stealth and strategy game than the first two. If you’re one of those “gotta get every achievement” folks, you’ll need to play through at least twice, but this is a game you’ll want to come back to a few times just to see how you might have done something differently. I do not have a console version, but am given to understand that there is a 20-save limit. This is not the case with the PC version, so save take advantage of the capability.
Final assessment: Get it; you’ll like it.
Taking a total of about 10 days, the Steam support people finally got around to sending me an answer to my question about needing to restore my games. Unfortunately, their answer did not address the question that I asked. And, to be honest, I just got tired of waiting on them and started downloading the games again. Well, between bouts of playing “Deus Ex Human Revolution”, anyway. By this point in time, I still have two regular games left to go, plus a couple of multi-player add-ons for “Crysis” that I don’t have much intention of playing, anyway, so the practical effect of their delay was about nil.
For those interested in dealing with Steam installations, here’s the process I have been following:
Steam’s method of moving its stuff to a different location is to copy steam.exe and the \steamapps folder to the new location. The first time you run Steam from the new location, it will download the remainder of Steam, any game updates it thinks it needs and all future games will go into the \steamapps folder. There’s a step-by-step guide at the Steam support site, but that’s the gist of it.
And we also now know that you can probably resolve the problem yourself and be back to playing your games in the time it takes Steam to respond (if you can call it that) to a support question.
Don’t get me wrong on this. I’m all for developers making sure that people pay for their games. I also haven’t had any major issues with Steam aside from this one incident and a question about their download speeds. They never answered my last question on the speed issue, but by the time I got around to asking it, I had pretty much figured out the answer and was just looking for confirmation of my conclusion. All things considered, I’m not THAT bent out of shape with Steam. When their client works (and it does work), it works well. But when they leave you hanging, they really leave you hanging.
Just as a quick update, I am now into the fifth day waiting for Steam to respond with anything other than an automated email to my question about dealing with missing executables. Not even so much as a “nope, you’ll need to re-download those puppies”. When I said they were slow, I wasn’t kidding.
For the record, their automated response was: “Thank you for submitting your question to our staff. We will respond to your question by email.”
Still in the process of re-downloading my Steam games. Steam does have a backup functionality and will allow you to save your game files elsewhere, so once everything is back in place, I will give that a try.
My other digital distributions are a bit more problematic. Since Vista will not backup executables, but will backup .zips, I’m thinking that a prudent course would be to just take all of those games and copy them off onto a backup drive (executable setup package or not) in their own little folder rather than leave them to the tender mercies of Vista.
To hell with additions. After all of this, I’m about ready to board up the door of the doghouse and maybe stick a few prox mines under it.
Just to add fuel to the Steam fire, I’ve begun downloading the games that I was not able to recover from my so-called “backup” (it’s going to take quite a while before Microsoft is out of the doghouse from that one, if ever). There must be something wrong with either Steam’s client or its servers and I’m not sure which. I managed to pull all eight gigs of my Direct2Drive games, using their Download Manager, over the course of about five or six hours from Direct2Drive. I started downloading “Fallout: New Vegas” from Steam before I left the house this morning and it’s still going about five hours later.
I bought the retail game, which came on one DVD. The last time I checked, regular DVDs hold about 4.7 GB of data. Tossing in the latest patch and the three released DLCs, I’ll be generous and call it about 8GB of data. The Steam client is showing my download speed as about 290KBps, which is about the same speed that I was showing on D2D’s client. One would think that comparable amounts of data being transferred at comparable speeds would equal a comparable download time. Not so. About five hours into the download, I’m still less than 40% done on Steam, while D2D’s downloads were either close to or completely finished in the same amount of time.
I can only reach two conclusions on this. First, someone is lying about their download speed. Either D2D is radically understating theirs (possible, but not likely since I use DSL, which has an upper limit) or Steam is radically overstating theirs. The second possibility is that Steam’s package size is about double the retail package size. In other words, the DVD’s installer package is less than half the size of the digital distribution installer package. This is probable as D2D is showing the basic FONV download as 6.8GB, so Steam’s would need to be at least that size, plus the patch and DLCs.
It is, of course, possible that both are true (lying about speed and a REALLY big package), in which case Steam is about to join Microsoft and I’ll need to build an addition to my doghouse.
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