Even more Skyrim Coverage from E3

[Nerevar Telvanni]

Let's start out with a handful of new mixed with some old screenshots from the game.

 

[Nerevar Telvanni]

E3 2011: Skyrim trailer analysis....Tom Francis at 08:56pm June 7 2011



Here’s my summary of E3 so far: blah de blah Far Cry 3! de blah Hitman 5! blah SKYRIM. There’s a full stop after Skyrim because that’s when I started humming the theme tune too loudly to hear anything else.

Bethesda showed 7 minutes of in-game stuff while Spike TV asked some rather TV questions of exec Todd Howard. It showed the game in a much more candid way than they have before, including a lot of systems they’ve previously only talked about, so I want to go through and pick apart how it’s all looking. I’ll embed the video below for anyone who hasn’t watched it yet, then my analysis.

{{ SEE THREAD HERE CALLED SKYRIM E3 GAMEPLAY FOR VIDEO }}



1. Scenery


Breaking: Skyrim still looks lovely. Up close the scenery looks pretty angular – I wouldn’t call it a generational leap on from Oblivion – but the vistas are fantastic. I think a mountainous setting was a really good way to make the game’s views exciting. Todd says you can go to the top of that mountain, which is not news, but in Skyrim I want to. Look at it, it’s huge!

Also huge: that compass at the top of the screen. I don’t know if everyone realised how useful the compass was in Oblivion – not just for quests, but to highlight interesting places you happened to stroll near. It was an exploration tool. You can see they’ve kept that feature on this one, and made it harder to miss.



2. Third person


They said the third person view was a step up from Oblivion’s rather stiff one, and now we see it. The new animation system is a generational jump – every muscle shifts with his step. Our player also takes a few sword-swishes in third person – they actually look more natural than they do in first person.

Todd emphasises you can be male or female – he doesn’t mention that you can also be a lizardman or a cat, in case the skittish TV audience becomes confused and frightened.



3. Dual wielding


I love that the way they show off Skyrim’s mix-and-match weapon and magic system is by having the player dual wield a healing spell. Come at me, bandit! Am I gonna heal myself with this hand? Or this hand? Pzeww!

What’s interesting is that when you do equip something like a fire spell in each hand, it’s up to you whether to shoot them off one at a time for more rapid attacks, or do both at once to initiate this special charged-up version. They still haven’t decided what happens if you have different spells in each hand and activate them both at once – I’m still holding out hope for a ridiculously intricate combinatorial spell system.



4. Snow


Whoa. The fact that Skyrim has some snowy bits has, I think, been covered – but this is a proper blizzard. It has that fierce, wild feel that game weather rarely does: you can hardly see.



5. Archery


In the blizzard we find a dungeon, in the dungeon we find bandits, and in the bandits we put arrows. Another thing they’ve talked about without showing publicly: lethal archery. Both shots fired here strike the torso, not the head, and both kill in one hit. These aren’t special arrows, either – a counter in the bottom right says “62 Iron Arrows” remaining.

I’ll be really, really interested to see if they keep this up throughout the game: the ability to take enemies out with sudden strikes from the shadows. Oblivion’s combat got a lot less fun at high levels, because everything had so much health – I hope they stick to the concept they’re showing here throughout Skyrim. Later we see the player character is level 34 at this point, so that’s very promising.

Notice the second bandit doesn’t magically spot the player as soon as it friend dies – in fact, he rather dopily just stands there, alerted but not hunting for an attacker. That might need some tweaking.



6. Combat


Now comes the fighting. Hmm. Magic is definitely sparkier and more responsive than in Oblivion, making it feel like a proper attack. But the proper attacks – with swords and shields – still have that slightly unconvincing feel they had in Oblivion. At one point the player slashes his sizeable sword right across this bandit’s exposed neck, a perfect strike, and there’s no reaction. He just brings up his shield.

I don’t want to kill everyone in one hit, obviously, but there’s something wrong when hitting a guy’s shield staggers him, and cutting his throat has no apparent effect. Oblivion’s combat needed to be more reactive, and what’s shown here is only a marginal improvement, to me.

Finishing moves look satisfying, but I’d like them to happen because I outmanoeuvred my opponent, rather than steadily wittled an abstract hitpoint counter down.

At one point we see the player’s ‘One Handed’ skill increase – it’s true, all one handed weapons are governed by the same skill now. But there are still weapon-specific talents you can get by choice, in the form of perks.



7. Magic


That sparkier magic is on proud display in the next fight, in many shapes and sizes.

Fire: flame-thrower hands! Skyrim doesn’t limit you to fireballs.
Dragon shout: wow. I don’t know the name for this one, but it’s probably dragontongue for GTFO. It sends your enemies flying. This is what high-level magic should be like.
Turn undead: the player casts an area-of-effect spell that makes all the nearby undead turn and run, so I’m going to guess that’s Turn Undead – an Elder Scrolls mainstay.
Lightning: oh man, zapping zombies as they run from you looks like amazing fun. I love that when it kills them, they’re sent spasming across the room.



8. Mammoths


Mammoths! These lumbering things have a lovely feel to them in-game: they’re trudging along in their own little posse with two giants, clearly heading somewhere in no hurry, and with no ill will toward you. It has a sense I sometimes miss in fantasy games, of being amongst strange and powerful creatures in a context other than combat. Just observing this world.

So naturally the a*****e playing this demo has to whack one with his bladed mace. It’s interesting that the giants are friendly at first: there’s even a prompt to talk to them as the player first walks by. And it’s also interesting that they attack when the mammoth is harmed – they’re obviously good pals.



9. Giant theft


Then a dragon… did that dragon just steal the giant we were fighting? Come back with that! We weren’t done!

Todd says they don’t script the dragons. I have a hard time believing they never script the dragons, since the whole freaking plot’s about dragons, but I guess he means this type of dragon attack. That’s awesome, I hope they pick their victims pretty much at random.

I remember an assassination quest in Oblivion that I mysteriously completed without even finding the victim. When I eventually got to the quest marker to take something from his body, I found a dead horse, a trail of blood, the corpse, and a very angry bear.

If the equivalent experience in Skyrim ends with a well-fed looking dragon, that’s going to be fun.



10. The dragon


I wasn’t really looking forward to meeting these guys, because I almost never like boss fights, and dragons are the most traditional fantasy bosses ever. But I have to say, if this really is all unscripted, that’s a hell of a boss fight.

The lizards themselves look amazing – fluidly animated, flexible, and clearly very free to stomp around and fly. When they walk on their wings, there’s something genuinely frightening about it.

I can still see it being a little awkward to just keep waving a sword at them, if you’ve chosen a melee character, and slaying something that big by attrition feels a bit arbitrary. But at least they’ve created these traditional creatures in a very non-traditional way.



11. The other, bigger dragon


Actually I don’t want to talk about the other, bigger dragon so much as how the player takes it out: a dragon shout that changes the weather to create a thunderstorm. Weather-changing spells were something modders added to Oblivion, it’s nice to see Bethesda catching up. This one seems to focus the storm on the area it was cast: when the player’s down on the ground later, the dragon flies over the tower where he originally cast it and is struck again.

Again, the dragon shouts look like the spectacular stuff that high-level magic should be, but rarely is.

Once the dragon’s down, the player’s melee attack triggers a finishing move in third person. Those are unique to your weapon type, so it’s going to be fun to see how a dagger, for instance, works for dragonslaying.

The demo ends, and a presenter reads out a question from Twitter about whether the ‘fractions’ will return. No, your health is now measured in whole numbers only.

We have a much clearer picture of the game now, and I’m still ridiculously excited and humming the theme-tune near constantly. But I am starting to realise this is more of a continuation of Oblivion – with lots of welcome tweaks – rather than a dramatically different game. The combat sequences here made it seem like the game will feel pretty similar, just slightly more violent.

So long as combat is still fairly quick at high levels, I’m happy with that. Oblivion with most of its niggles fixed, in a frosty new land, is a phenomenal prospect.

 

[Nerevar Telvanni]

E3 2011: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has 70 voice actors, players free to explore from start...Tom Senior at 02:27am June 8 2011



Lead producer on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Craig Lafferty has told CVG that the Skyrim will have 70 different actors voicing all of the parts in the game, compared to just 14 for Oblivion. The variable quality of the voice acting and constantly repeated dialogue was one of the main bugbears for Oblivion players, who will be glad to hear that Skyrim’s 47,000 lines will be shared between a small army. Not having to pay Patrick Stuart and Sean Bean is likely to have helped.

Speaking for CVG, Tim Clark asked Lafferty how Bethesda plan to make more convincing cities for Skyrim. He mentioned that “we had, I think, fourteen voice actors on Oblivion doing all the voices. In this one, we have seventy different actors doing all the different voices, over 47,000 lines, so we work to make that a variety there as well.

“Hand crafted” towns should make Skyrim’s world more interesting to explore, which is useful, because Bethesda expect players to go off on their own. Lafferty said that the main quest could be completely ignored in favour of pure exploration.

“We’re really big on ‘go where you want, play where you want,’” he says. “It’s really apparent when you come out at the very beginning of the game, you can follow the main quest, we want to guide the player along with it. You don’t want to do the main quest, then, totally, it’s one of the main things with the Elder Scrolls series, the freedom of this world.”

Lafferty also confirmed that the main story will take about 30 hours to complete, but hundreds of hours can be spent exploring. We went hands-on with Skyrim today at E3 2011.

 

[Nerevar Telvanni]

E3 2011: Skyrim’s main quest 30 hours long. Additional content “two to three hundred” more...Owen Hill at 02:03am June 8 2011



Bethesda have been discussing the length of Skyrim at E3.

Lead Producer on Skyrim, Craig Lafferty went into detail about how long the upcoming RPG will take for you to complete. Don’t worry – it’s a long, long time.

Talking to Tim Clark, reporting for CVG, he said: “We estimate the main quests take you about 30 hours or so. And the additional content – we haven’t played it all yet – but I’d guess two to three hundred hours of gameplay there.

“That’s one thing we haven’t scaled back on. We keep going bigger crazier. More and more content and dungeons.”

We’ve just gone hands-on with the Elder Scrolls. You can read our trailer analysis here, and grab yourself a nice wallpaper from the newest screenshots.

 

[Nerevar Telvanni]

E3 2011: Skyrim impressions...Graham Smith at 10:50pm June 7 2011



E3 started properly just a couple of hours ago, and the first game I saw was probably the one I’m most looking forward to: Skyrim. The presentation Bethesda is showing behind closed doors is similar to the seven-minute video they released yesterday, and to the one we wrote about in PC Gamer last month.

What we hadn’t seen in action before, though, was horsies. Riding horsies.



When I spoke to Todd Howard in April, he had said that Bethesda weren’t yet sure that our equine friends were going to make it into the game. Horsies in games had come along way since Oblivion, and they wanted to make sure they weren’t just hovering motorcycles with legs.

I can confirm: they are not. The new horsies look great. They have the same new animation system as the player, obviously, which means that in third-person they shift from a trot to a gallop smoothly and beautifully. Also, the one we saw looked oddly chubby.

In Tom’s analysis of that trailer, he rightly questioned Todd Howard’s comment about not scripting the dragon fights. Case in point: the demo began its climax with the same double dragon battle, and even with the same giant-kidnapping. At least some of this must be scripted



On the other hand, the second frosty dragon fight didn’t end nearly as quickly. In the presentation, he kept swooping further away from the player, and even with Storm Call causing rain and lightning to swirl around it, it took a little longer than planned to hit it and bring it down. It was the kind of brilliantly awkward moment you want the developers to experience when they’re demoing a open-world, unscripted game. On the other hand, awwwwkward.

Overall though, what I saw was the same as what you’ve already seen, and my thoughts are the same as Tom’s: SKYRIM.

 

[Nerevar Telvanni]

E3 2011: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim -- Dragon BornThere are some big beasts flying around Skyrim. You're going to kill all of them.

Dragons have never really been done right in video games. But Skyrim developer Bethesda has pulled off what others thought impossible. Dragon battles are intense, challenging, and rewarding.

You are dragon born. The creatures of Skyrim should fear you. The dragons that have recently returned to terrorize the citizens should flee from you. But they will test themselves against you and, most assuredly, you will win. Because you have skill with weapons, powerful magic, and the gift to speak the dragon language to perform devastating shouts. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim gives you immense power, enough to destroy every dragon you come across.

Dragons serve as roaming boss battles and there may be dozens throughout Skyrim's story. They aren't just an extra creature in a world full of trolls, skeletons, and mammoths; dragons are the core of Skyrim's story. After all, you are dragon born. Your destiny is tied to theirs.

Bethesda has created multiple avenues to upgrade your character in Skyrim, which should introduce an incredible level of diversity. Standing stones are found throughout the world, each offering a choice of power – you can activate the Warrior Stone for an advantage in hand-to-hand combat, for example. Your hero's skills improve based on how you play. Every kill with a one-handed sword improves your one-handed sword skill. Each experience level gained nets you one of 280 perks. And, most importantly, there are shouts. To take down dragons, you'll have to speak in a language they understand.

The language of dragons -- these shouts -- are hidden throughout Skyrim, often carved into stone in the various dungeons of the world. Each dragon shout is formed by three words, each learned separately. The more words you know in a shout, stronger the effect. Knowing all three words of the shout can be immensely powerful. Discovering a word isn't enough. You still have to unlock its power in order to shout it. The key to unlocking the power of these words is in taking the lives of dragons.

You absorb the soul of every dragon you slay. One soul is strong enough to empower one word from any shout you've uncovered. Will you increase the potency of Fire Breath? Or Slow Time? Maybe you prefer the tornado style of Whirlwind Spirit. Just remember that this is the language of dragons, meaning that whatever you can shout, a dragon in Skyrim can shout right back at you. Good thing dragons can't hold battle axes or you might be in trouble.

Though certain dragons may patrol a certain area, all are unscripted. The dragons' artificial intelligence is designed to utilize their strengths both in the air and on the ground, and battles can play out differently depending on how they're approached. And some dragons are bigger, fiercer, and tougher than others. So kill the weaker ones first before tackling something as strong as a Frost Dragon.

Coming out of a dungeon where you'd just destroyed a giant spider, it might be easy to take a Frost Dragon lightly. That would be a mistake. Dragons are meant to require your full resources to defeat. The tough part about this particular dragon? He waited until right after the defeat of a smaller fire-breathing dragon (who was still large enough to toss a giant several hundred yards) before attacking.

Fortunately, you have learned all three words to the Storm Call spell. Atop a stone watchtower, with the Frost Dragon circling overhead, our hero shouts Storm Call. The lesser version might be a lightning bolt or something equally efficient, but unspectacular. The full shout brings black clouds across the valley. A heavy rain falls, followed by numerous lightning strikes, which batter the Frost Dragon. It crashes to the ground, the body burning away as its soul is absorbed by Skyrim's savior. And one less dragon is one more word in a shout learned.

 

[Nerevar Telvanni]

The Argonian

What worries me is that there's no footage of the player character in a town.

Please Bethsoft, don't tell me NPCs are just bumbling around town like in Oblivion. Everything else is just an orgasm. D:

They have indeed shown some NPC interaction with the player. Points to this post and this one. It just the person who did the trailer breakdown didn't included that part from the gameplay trailer.

 

[Nerevar Telvanni]

My friend was joking the other day that the graphics for Skyrim looked like they might melt the 360 down. I was almost included to agree with him, Skyrim is just so much more textured that Oblivion ever was.