The Elder Scrolls Megathread XX: Might as well be XXX - Games - Facepunch Forum

The Elder Scrolls Megathread XX: Might as well be XXX

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[QUOTE=MrHeadHopper;52788116]I like to tier myself out intentionally, going full iron for a bit and only changing once I get the full set of whatever tier is next. It's kind of shitty cuz I really liked the Iron and Steel armors, but you only get to use them for like 2 hours of ingame time total. In Oblivion you used whatever armor you wanted, iron and such were all generic to start with so transitioning into other stuff was k. But with Skyrim giving you cool nordic designs and then suddenly snatching them away when it comes to Orcish or Ebony tiers --despite them looking cool in their own right-- I dunno, I wish there'd been a way to get ebony iron armor or something.[/QUOTE] You can do some smithing to keep the weapons useful for longer and even then the extra challenge can be nice, with high enough 1 handed you pretty much 1 hit most things anyway

[QUOTE=MrHeadHopper;52788116]I like to tier myself out intentionally, going full iron for a bit and only changing once I get the full set of whatever tier is next. It's kind of shitty cuz I really liked the Iron and Steel armors, but you only get to use them for like 2 hours of ingame time total. In Oblivion you used whatever armor you wanted, iron and such were all generic to start with so transitioning into other stuff was k. But with Skyrim giving you cool nordic designs and then suddenly snatching them away when it comes to Orcish or Ebony tiers --despite them looking cool in their own right-- I dunno, I wish there'd been a way to get ebony iron armor or something.[/QUOTE] In Skyrim you can hit the armor cap with even hide armor, you know.

I think it only makes sense in the universe if iron weapons/armour were to have some magical properties, like how cold iron's supposed to hurt fairies and such, or maybe iron is just better at retaining enchantments than steel, cause otherwise, why would anyone worth their salt build iron weapons and armour rather than steel, Silly corundum idea aside?

Because Iron is easier to find and use than Steel, and as long as it goes stabby stab, it's probably good enough for a large portion of people in-universe. Bandits kind of have to rely on making cheap weaponry because they either steal it or, if they're lucky, they craft it themselves - and most bandits aren't good smiths so the most they can come up with is a sharpened piece of iron. Same reason most of them wear a bunch of shitty fur cobbled together with straps instead of proper armor. And blacksmiths in towns make them because there's obviously a demand among average people who aren't trained and lack the funds to carry more than a tiny little iron dagger as a deterrent in case someone invades their home or tries to attack them or some such bullshit.

Imagine bandits being bandits so that the player has something to kill rather than some realistic goal like to get rich, and being incapable of buying or robbing steel weapons from a town, so instead learning the blacksmithing trade somewhat so they could make iron weapons for themselves, but not using that skill to make an honest living... I'm sorry, but don't try and validate crazy.

The actual problem is that Skyrim handles its weapons weirdly on account of not having a condition system. In Skyrim's gameplay terms, the only meaningful difference an iron sword can have from a steel sword is the amount of damage it does. In reality, a sword made of iron will cut and kill just as well as a sword made of steel, but the steel sword, while lighter, will last much longer and hold its edge better while being significantly more expensive (in medieval terms you are probably looking at about six cheap iron swords to one nice steel blade). If weapons could suffer wear in Skyrim, they would only need a few points' worth of damage difference but the longevity disparity would make up for it. Iron weapons and armor would be more practical in the early game until you save up enough for or smith nice steel stuff. Without adding that third factor for weapons and armor, everything is literally a straight upgrade from the previous item and there's no reason to keep using iron once you have steel or steel once you have elven and so on.

Skyrim guards actually talk about how bandit raids are fewer and further between than they used to, implying they used to be rather common and that perhaps at some point in the past efforts were made to clear up some of the latent threat posed by banditry. And you're implying there aren't any criminals who use their skills to earn an honest living if only as a front for criminal activities, when there are actually several NPCs in Skyrim doing that exact thing. Bandits simply are the criminals who were too dumb, too greedy or too murderous to live in organized society, so they ostracized themselves and lived on their own terms. [editline]18th October 2017[/editline] [QUOTE=Grenadiac;52792416]The actual problem is that Skyrim handles its weapons weirdly on account of not having a condition system. In Skyrim's gameplay terms, the only meaningful difference an iron sword can have from a steel sword is the amount of damage it does. In reality, a sword made of iron will cut and kill just as well as a sword made of steel, but the steel sword, while lighter, will last much longer and hold its edge better while being significantly more expensive (in medieval terms you are probably looking at about six cheap iron swords to one nice steel blade). If weapons could suffer wear in Skyrim, they would only need a few points' worth of damage difference but the longevity disparity would make up for it. Iron weapons and armor would be more practical in the early game until you save up enough for or smith nice steel stuff. Without adding that third factor for weapons and armor, everything literally a straight upgrade from the previous item and there's no reason to keep using iron once you have steel or steel once you have elven and so on.[/QUOTE] I feel like having to regularly maintain your weapons for a damage buff (rather than losing damage and eventually breaking the weapon) with certain materials holding up a sharper edge for longer, would have been a nice system without the annoyance of weapon degradation. Could even have added an interesting dynamic where maces can't be sharped since they're blunt weapons but have a much better raw damage value, meaning they're lower maintenance but can't achieve as much potential damage as swords or axes which can be sharpened for extra damage.

[QUOTE=Ganerumo;52792424]I feel like having to regularly maintain your weapons for a damage buff (rather than losing damage and eventually breaking the weapon) with certain materials holding up a sharper edge for longer, would have been a nice system without the annoyance of weapon degradation. Could even have added an interesting dynamic where maces can't be sharped since they're blunt weapons but have a much better raw damage value, meaning they're lower maintenance but can't achieve as much potential damage as swords or axes which can be sharpened for extra damage.[/QUOTE] I think you could have both. Repeatedly smashing your sword against shields and other swords should eventually cause it to fail separately of whether or not the blade is sharp. Swords being broken in combat was a very real concern in historic times and while I realize Skyrim isn't exactly a simulator it seems to me you could make certain artifacts more meaningful by making them unbreakable or virtually unbreakable. Plus, there aren't really enough money sinks in Skyrim. Most players are probably loaded by the time they've got a matching set of anything. Having to spend that money maintaining your equipment would help make money more of a mechanic. It'd also add value to training blacksmithing since you wouldn't have to pay someone else to fix your shit.

The problem with weapon durability is that it's not a fun mechanic. It introduces tedious busywork in almost every game it appears in and only acts as a pointless obstacle. Maintaining your weapons and armor should be an extra step with a positive incentive rather than tedium that solely exists for the sake of ill-advised realism.

That's one of the very few things I was glad to be rid of going from Oblivion to Skyrim. I see the need for recharging magic weapons but durability is just a bitch. I hate it in every game where it exists. Especially Diablo 2.

I think it would be really cool if they gave weapons and stuff very different properties rather than just damage and speed, and if most items were good steel and anything better just gets much more expensive. IE Ebony is much heavier, is a lot more capable of hurting someone through armour, allows more powerful enchantments, and you'll suck with it if your strength and stamina is real small. It's basically invincible so you can make it as sharp as you want and not have to worry about edge. Since it's so heavy your skill at utilising heavy armour might suffer Elven is lighter and so doesn't have that punch that ebony does, but it uses less stamina and you're more likely to get a crit with it since you can control the weapon easier and direct it towards unarmoured parts Orcish metals are only slightly lighter than steel, but without risk weapons can be honed to incredible sharpness and the materials are so durable that the stuff can be compared to a steel that's considered better in every conceivable way, with the only tradoff being price. Like, they should really stop with the daedric being a few thousand coins, a daedric weapon should be a national treasure, and a set of ebony armour should be exclusive to the richest, most powerful and lucky individuals, with a tailormade set being about as valuable as a formidable warship. And like, if they focused on making every material interesting, maybe put some effort into special oils and speciality monster-bane poisons, and had real differences between weapons, shit'd get much better. Owing to recent discussions: Humanizing bandits'd be a good idea.

Older games had insanely expensive armor/weapons with certain enemies being only affected by certain types of weapons and it wasn't interesting, it just created a min-max heavy environment in which the only way to thrive was to exploit the shit out of the game at every corner to abuse those material advantages.

RE: armour I just like dressing for cosmetics only. DRAGONS DOGMA I think is a good way of doing it, each armour in that game is good in its own right, but you can still dress for fashion without it effecting your stats too much. Most armour is only ever one or two points better than previous armour In skyrim terms it'd be like iron armour having a defence of 72 points Branded iron having 73 And steel having 74 Steel clearly offers more protection but it's completely negligible and you'll be completely fine still wearing iron It'd only be when you get to something like orcish having 86 where you notice a minor upgrade to your overall defence in the middle of combat. But then it really doesn't matter to me because I'll exclusively wear overpowered Mod armour anyway.

[QUOTE=_Maverick_;52793284]RE: armour I just like dressing for cosmetics only. DRAGONS DOGMA I think is a good way of doing it, each armour in that game is good in its own right, but you can still dress for fashion without it effecting your stats too much. Most armour is only ever one or two points better than previous armour In skyrim terms it'd be like iron armour having a defence of 72 points Branded iron having 73 And steel having 74 Steel clearly offers more protection but it's completely negligible and you'll be completely fine still wearing iron It'd only be when you get to something like orcish having 86 where you notice a minor upgrade to your overall defence in the middle of combat. But then it really doesn't matter to me because I'll exclusively wear overpowered Mod armour anyway.[/QUOTE] Dragons dogma's armour system is completely broken and upgrades aren't optional or minor at all because of it.

[QUOTE=_Maverick_;52793284]RE: armour I just like dressing for cosmetics only. DRAGONS DOGMA I think is a good way of doing it, each armour in that game is good in its own right, but you can still dress for fashion without it effecting your stats too much. Most armour is only ever one or two points better than previous armour In skyrim terms it'd be like iron armour having a defence of 72 points Branded iron having 73 And steel having 74 Steel clearly offers more protection but it's completely negligible and you'll be completely fine still wearing iron It'd only be when you get to something like orcish having 86 where you notice a minor upgrade to your overall defence in the middle of combat. But then it really doesn't matter to me because I'll exclusively wear overpowered Mod armour anyway.[/QUOTE] DDDA's defenses were really important at the endgame though, if you minmaxed it was the difference between a hard encounter and a joke I also kinda disliked how the levelups worked but that's something else entirely. It'd be cool to see the game do something like Dragon Age Inquisition, where you have the same armor model but you can craft it out of different crap for better stats and still keep that cool design at hand.

After the first NG+, there's no such thing as a hard encounter in Dragon's Dogma.

[QUOTE=Peon Greenjoy;52781697]Decided to give a small breakdown on texture optimization/compression and why some texture mods actually do plenty of wrong. All of it uses DDS format with new Intel Texture Works plugin. [URL]https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-texture-works-plugin[/URL] - 2048x2048 uncompressed texture will take up 21.3mb of space on HDD. Compressed only 2.66mb. - 4096x4096 uncompressed texture will take up 85.3mb of space on HDD. Compressed 10.6mb. Now this is a single texture without Alpha Channel. So you have Colour texture, Normal Map texture, sometimes Specularity is separate. It quickly bumps up memory usage for one textured object. In the space of one 4K texture you can fit 4 x 2k textures. In 2k texture you can fit 4 x 1k textures and so on. When you create textures you need to take this into consideration two things, do you want one large texture to be loaded or multiple smaller. Having a GFX card with 2GB of VRAM, easily allows you to use many of these 2k textures as long as they're compressed. But once you start using uncompressed textures, you will gradually start to experience stuttering. You are actually spending your resources on nothing but achieving slightly better colours when using no compression. The only downside to compressed textures is that you will get colour artifacting, it's barely making any negative impact as long as you don't modify and re-save same textures and apply compression over and over. Unless all you want is take pretty screenshots in the game, other than that, uncompressed textures have no value. Bethesda is guilty of one thing on Special Edition, they didn't use original uncompressed textures, instead resized them then re-saved them and compressed again. They simply ran a batch operation on all existing textures in Skyrim and upscaled everything while applying sharpen algorithm and re-applying same compression which caused more ugly colour artifacts. This also applies to grass sprites, it's also why it was making so much bad performance impact. Now modders are mostly guilty of using bad texture sizes on insignificant objects or having no compression at all, some modders do it on purpose and let everyone know about it (give optional download links) while some others ignore it. You run these mods and your performance suddenly starts to suffer after merely using few texture replacers. Generally modding textures will also have you do some extra manual work to check if each texture is correctly compressed.[/QUOTE] Compressing normals makes them look like shit and will never not make them look like shit. Very very few companies have gotten or developed a good algorithm for doing this and bethesda is not one of them. The fact they use Object Space instead of tangent actually makes the compression that much worse, which is one of the reasons SSE looks like ass, ironically enough the higher your rez the worse it looks. The reason cabal120 and Zerofrost projects looks as good as they do is because the normal maps were made made in conjunction and in tandem with the diffuse maps, unlike the vanilla assets, in addition to them being very good artists. [editline]19th October 2017[/editline] [QUOTE=Glent;52793317]Dragons dogma's armour system is completely broken and upgrades aren't optional or minor at all because of it.[/QUOTE] Except skill trees and mobility powers account for this rather succinctly, and you can certainly go in literally naked in Bitterblack Isle and completely wreck ass by avoiding damage in the first place or packing healy junk smartly. Dogma successfully used the "golden triangle" of skills, gear and active effects pretty much in classic dnd style without fucking gameplay at all, which is why it's still regarded so highly. The world and story are literally as generic as anime can get, but the mechanics made it all worth it. Bethesda could learn quite a bit from capcom's example in terms of monster mechanics and combat.

I've been pretty hype for a DDDA sequel or spiritual successor, the game was really fun. It feels like it'd work great with drop in drop out coop having a friend replace your main pawn with their own character or something like that. My only gripe is the Warrior class having the second skill set empty. After FO4 I'm really curious what Bethesda will do for TESVI and if it'll ever compare to how crazy of a life cycle Skyrim has had.

[QUOTE=27X;52795338]The world and story are literally as generic as anime can get, but the mechanics made it all worth it.[/QUOTE] It's not that bad, the whole [sp]senescal cycle, the twist that the dragon is only half the story, and the origin of Bitterblack Isle[/sp] are pretty interesting and well thought-out and interconnected. There's also a bit more world detail in supplimental material which is typical of both Japanese media and RPGs. Presentation and character writing sell Dragon's Dogma world to me, it has very human characters for a video game and while their dialogue is a faux-ye-olde-tymes English. People just like to focus on the Pawn's innane combat dialogue. Now, where DD [I]really[/I] has the edge over Skyrim is the dragon antagonist's relationship with the hero. Grigori appears even less frequently than Alduin, but says so much with so little that it really gives a sense of 'destined eternal nemesis' which Skyrim with all its talk of prophecy doesn't really attempt.

[QUOTE=DiscoInferno;52795502] Now, where DD [I]really[/I] has the edge over Skyrim is the dragon antagonist's relationship with the hero. Grigori appears even less frequently than Alduin, but says so much with so little that it really gives a sense of 'destined eternal nemesis' which Skyrim with all its talk of prophecy doesn't really attempt.[/QUOTE] It's mostly because Grigori made a choice to be who he was. Alduin was just fulfilling his part in the prophecy, and ultimately so was the Dragonborn.

And all of that same stuff was also achieved in Record of Lodoss War, which is almost forty years old is my point. Villains that were three dimensional, and a world somewhat balanced between realism and purist fantasy but with the very tried and true fantime plot elements. The difference between is literally challenge and depth of that challenge. Bethesda became afraid of the failure state, and it shows in spades. As a designer, I understand implicitly why they did this, and it's one of the reasons the game has sold 30M copies, without even considering 64's sales. You can set it on anything but the top two difficulties and literally just pick up any weapon or spell and spam your way to the game's conclusion, and no one ever tells you "no" or "our differences make ________ unavoidable", without giving you an alternate thing/outcome/item that's just as good or better somewhere even close by. There are no stakes, no fates, no consequences, and there's very little learning curve to any of the progression states. You click on things to give yourself the ability to click on other things to make more of the red of the enemy that runs at you full speed disappear in larger chunks faster. That's as deep as Skyrim gets, and while you could say "that was a gen thing, and a date and time thing", that argument is defenestrated sharply because Fallout 4 is also a thing, and other than crafting and then shooting stuff with some completely absurd weapons, you're not really learning to do things or plumbing the depths of a system, again. You're just playing dress up and clicking the red away, hopefully faster than the enemy is doing the same to you. Given sales numbers, there is obvious and strong appeal in that. As a player that is boring as hell. Just bland as fuck. See that mountain? Yeah I can climb it and then what? Did I climb to learn some badass skill that will be completely op to this kind of enemy but then make me vulnerable to this enemy? Am I finally learning that one mage skill that will turn me into a bearded god of death instead of a mewling pin cushion? Am I attempting to lure one of the bad guys with doubts to my cause with super badass lute-fu and sick ultragay bard dance? No, I'm climbing that mountain without climbing gear because bethesda can't stand the thought maybe I should earn craft and buy climbing gear because someone with the reigns made the decision that nothing can require more than ten minutes worth of work to resolve 100% on my favor, including the literal god that opposes my path, and when I get to the top the old guy will give me the magic woobie because I picked the very obvious best response and when he turns to leave and I use the woobie to vaporize him, none of his equally old and powerful cabal buddies will do jack shit about it other to proclaim how awesome at betrayal and woobie-tude I am, instead of say harrying me for the rest of my campaign with crazy ass curse magic and a flood of wizardly shit or the like. Meanwhile in Dargon's Dargma, if I kill a vendor I may lose access to certain things in the game forever because no other vendor has them, and with a click of a switch my godly might is swiftly rendered into "well son that's great or whatever, but I'm gonna now plant this ______ in your buttcheeks with alarming alacrity and strength cause I'm about 10 levels higher than you and you probably shouldn't have a picked a fight yet until you learned some stuff, like dodging, and also I'm a dragon." While you can learn all kinds of tricks and switch to learn and see what you like without much penalty, you're going to have specialize, you're going to have to commit and your stats and skills reflect that permanently. The reason this is even still a discussion at all re TESV is "there are mods for that", because in the vanilla state Skyrim is kind of a play and forget clicky fest [I]at best[/I], and the rewards for clickying all the clicky things is basically more clicking, and very few obstacles in the game are unclickable, because Bethesda has become super risk averse.

[QUOTE=27X;52795338]Compressing normals makes them look like shit and will never not make them look like shit. Very very few companies have gotten or developed a good algorithm for doing this and bethesda is not one of them. The fact they use Object Space instead of tangent actually makes the compression that much worse, which is one of the reasons SSE looks like ass, ironically enough the higher your rez the worse it looks. The reason cabal120 and Zerofrost projects looks as good as they do is because the normal maps were made made in conjunction and in tandem with the diffuse maps, unlike the vanilla assets, in addition to them being very good artists. [/QUOTE] It doen't look shit with new compression plugin I just linked. There are new compression methods and there are old, aka DXT5, which is old mostly for DX9. The new compression method uses BC and it's DX11, BC is not supported by NifSkope so you can't see textures on models at the moment, it needs to be updated to support it. Bethesda used BC on Fallout 4. Also Object Space is only used on character models, Tangent Space is used on everything else.

[QUOTE=MrHeadHopper;52795605]It's mostly because Grigori made a choice to be who he was. Alduin was just fulfilling his part in the prophecy, and ultimately so was the Dragonborn.[/QUOTE] [sp]Grigori had no more choice than Alduin. It's Grigori's purpose to choose an Arisen to slay him and attempt to ascend to godhood. Losing to the Senescal means you lose your will and become their dragon puppet to continue the cycle. It's explained in-game and in Bitterblack Isle.[/sp]

I wish there was good DDDA armour in skyrim

does anyone play eso or is it dead still

[QUOTE=27X;52795338][editline]19th October 2017[/editline] Except skill trees and mobility powers account for this rather succinctly, and you can certainly go in literally naked in Bitterblack Isle and completely wreck ass by avoiding damage in the first place or packing healy junk smartly. Dogma successfully used the "golden triangle" of skills, gear and active effects pretty much in classic dnd style without fucking gameplay at all, which is why it's still regarded so highly. The world and story are literally as generic as anime can get, but the mechanics made it all worth it. Bethesda could learn quite a bit from capcom's example in terms of monster mechanics and combat.[/QUOTE] Just because you can compensate for something doesn't mean it isn't broken, though. Similar to saying that you can just not get hit in Skyrim so wear whatever you want. This is only talking about the armour system, not the rest of the game.

[QUOTE=_Maverick_;52795755]I wish there was good DDDA armour in skyrim[/QUOTE] Isn't DDDA's armor mostly textures on your body model, with the only actual unique models being parts like helms, shoulderpads, etc?

I've tried to see if I can optimize grass even more, so I remapped grass model uvs onto one sprite sheet and dropped resolution to 1k, along with low res particle textures it gives the best possible frames in the game. However this grass tweak is extreme and doesn't offer that much of a performance gain difference. Mostly it's particle effects having impact. If you use TAA you don't really lose any visual quality because this AA is blurring the image anyway.

[QUOTE=Glent;52795932]Just because you can compensate for something doesn't mean it isn't broken, though. Similar to saying that you can just not get hit in Skyrim so wear whatever you want. This is only talking about the armour system, not the rest of the game.[/QUOTE] Except you're arbitrarily ignoring motion mechanics and states that don't exist in Skyrim and the fact that there is no armor in DDDA that does 85% mitigation to all damage sources, and that's not even covering non armor accessories and ward/bound states, which are permanent in Skyrim and extremely temporary in Dogma aside from L3 Bitter trinkets, which you cannot craft, temper or upgrade, and have to "finish" the game to get at all as a reliable drop.

[QUOTE=MrHeadHopper;52796317]Isn't DDDA's armor mostly textures on your body model, with the only actual unique models being parts like helms, shoulderpads, etc?[/QUOTE] I mean, for stockings, shirts and stuff yeah. Actual armor? [t]https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/dragonsdogma/images/8/8d/Chaos-004.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/350?cb=20151016065820[/t] No.

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