Blackreach is also an amazing dungeon. You'll come accross it in the main quest, although I think there are a couple of other ways in.

I just wrapped up the main quest. As expected, game doesn't end, just keeps going.

I completed the main quest just shy of 100 hours. I don't really think I should play the game anymore at this point...there are more quests to be completed, sure, but I've chewed my way through the gameplay, to the point that there is no more game, just interactive story.

I'll probably come back for DLC, maybe make a new character and play around once some mods have been released? But a big part of gaming for me is the gaming system, the improvement of my own skills, the ability to feel ever more awesome.

Since the crafting skills pretty much obliterate any game difficulty beyond a certain point...they have some really insane interdependencies that means getting all 3 will officially make you beyond godlike...there's no more point, unless I start over. I think I would only start over to do specific faction sidequests during early levels, though, because completing the main quest again would be too similar.

I've had great fun with the game, though as always, wrapping up a game like this makes me feel awfully melancholic about it. A whole lot of the fun is part of the creativity you put in yourself, and I find myself feeling drained when I realize that creativity is now lost. Gone for good. Perhaps the most punishing element of games is how all your hard labor is robbed of any importance once you complete the game.

Anyhoo. Awesome game. So much fun. Highly recommend it.

They don't correspond. You want to maximize your profits, you need to look at value-for-raw materials. I also don't see why they obviously should correspond.

Oh, did any of you notice the massive descrepancy between raw material weight and item weight?

So I can make a daedric bow out of 4 units(pounds?) worth of material, and it weights 16 units? What? Did I just randomly put some gravel inthere?

Also, what is up with the weaponweights? A sword weighing more than a helmet of the same material? What? Weapons are relatively light in the real world, but skyrims are heavier than ornamental weapons....

Balance I guess

If you do just enough of the story early doors to get dragons, you can go off adventuring-exploring-sidequesting until you've had enough, then go back and finish the story? I'd like to do all that extra stuff before completing the story, coz it kinda feels like "the end" when I do complete the story in a game.

Sure. There is an impact on the main story based on whether you're joining the rebellion or the imperial troops, but overall, you should complete your training at high hrothgar, but avoid going to the tavern in riverrun (except for during the very start of the game), to keep the main quest line shut up good while you dilly-dally about in the full world.

Edit:

Actually, I should say that the main quest can easily be distributed accross the entire playthrough. The main questline is quite long, around 10-20 quests depending on whether you sequence break, and it'll initiate a number of sidequests for you along the way. A number of the main quests will impress urgency on the player (just as many quests in the game will), so if that matters to you, you should halt at the point I described above to have the game entirely open.

But be forewarned: The main quest only scales to around level 30 (my estimate) - finish it any later than that, and it may seem really easy (unless you ramp up the difficulty level, in which case...eh...maybe it'll be challenging?)

@ Jaedar
Balance makes just about as much little sense as aesthetics (ie: someone at bethesda thought this was reasonable)

Suit yourself.


Only if the basic gameplay and the overall level design is enjoyable, as I think is the case in Skyrim.

Cheers, I think the option of upping the difficulty after the dilly-dallying might be a plan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKSjZ4s0klM
Stealth is apparently OP

(So yeah, maybe Aemer was right and my build was better than par. trololol Altho I don't have invisibility)

tri-crafting also results in completely broken fights. I one-shot giants and mammoths too, using a bow. Tricrafting caps at around 1000 damage per arrow with a bow, which is 2k if you get your sneak attack bonus., or perhaps as much as 5000 with the right gear.

I think if you limit yourself to a single crafting discipline, you won't suffer this problem...but then you'll be limited to a single crafting discipline. I had way too much fun with the crafting to do that, and I'm not sure I'd even advice other people to avoid it?

But it's a shame. Combat can be very interesting without these two messed up mechanics.

But yeah, it does seem sneak is overpowered as well, to hear Jonas tell it too. The invisibility and muffling obviously make it ridiculous.

Thanks to completing the Thieves' Guild questline, I have a daily power to turn invisible for a minute. I'm also carrying around a bunch of invisibility potions, but to be honest I don't use either because I have so much sneak nobody ever sees me coming anyway. And with Archery over 70 and a really powerful enchanted bow, I don't even need to get close to the enemies to backstab them, my ranged sneak attacks are (as I've repeated a couple of times) almost always one-hit kills.

I have Azura's Star and I have a bow I made myself (called Bite of the Succubus, though I immediately realised it should've been called Kiss of the Succubus) enchanted with Soul Trap so if any of my magical weapons are running out of juice I can just sneak around and one-hit kill mid- to high-level enemies with that to trap their souls for recharging my items.

It wouldn't be a proper RPG if you couldn't create some ridiculously overpowered builds

Hahah, overpowered builds aren't a feature, they are a bug.

But in this case, they aren't. They're more like an acceptable tradeoff.

Bethesda has allowed ridiculous, overpowering concepts in their elder scrolls games for a long time, harkening back to the alchemy-abuse you could do in Morrowind (and maybe daggerfall too?). It's not by choice, but it's by side-effect of many of the other things they do choose to make.

I know this, so when I say it's a shame, it's like saying it's a shame everybody can't be among the top 1% earners of their respective countries.

In my observation, the game couldn't exist as it does without overpowered builds. That's not meant to be truth via technicallity (any change of the game would obviously make it exist differently, therefore not as it currently does), it's meant to say "yeah, you could make the crafting skills have much less effect on eachother, introduce caps, and generally reduce the viability of them, but you really shouldn't, because that would have worse effects than the possibility of OP builds"...

I do think that there can be a happy middle ground, but I don't expect it's easy to find. No doubt, modification masters will make it work perfectly in 3-5 years, a delay bethesda (and we) couldn't have lived with.

Well... yes and no, you know? I was joking of course, but there's a kernel of truth to the idea that being able to make overpowered builds is a good thing, and not just because it's a necessary tradeoff on all the cool shit you can do in Elder Scrolls games. There's a sort of autistic pleasure in identifying a combination of skills and abilities that just work together in a really powerful way, and then using that synergy to completely destroy all challenge in the game. Making a good build means playing the system, and you're overpowered because you were good at that - having an OP character is your reward for making excellent character progression choices.

I will say it's probably a fair bit too easy to make those OP builds in Skyrim though. I think in traditional RPGs, the ability to build those OP characters tended to be outweighed by the ability to screw yourself over with shitty builds, which could be very frustrating - in Skyrim, it's really hard to create a significantly underpowered build, but it's still quite possible to make an OP one.

And you are also of course completely correct in that it's a trade-off for all the freedom and power they give the player.

Overpowered: Something that is too powerful.
So per that definition, being able to make overpowered characters is a bad thing.

Of course, the skill system should be well made enough that builds can have varying power levels, even though I would say that in a perfect game(tm) all the skills would be equally and very useful. I don't think this holds for skyrim where roughly one third of the skills seem to be considered overpowered.

You're implying a parameter there. It's too good for what? A reasonable definition of "over" in that term could just mean it's powered above what the enemies are balanced to account for. That might mean the game will be easier than intended, but developer intentions obviously don't necessarily match every player's wishes.

"Over" in overpowered could also be subjective. Something could be overpowered to you, while to somebody else it creates exactly the right dynamic.

In short, your "definition" is less definitive than it might be.

I also disagree that fully balancing all builds against each other is necessarily the ideal thing to strive for. Especially not in a singleplayer game. In fact I would've expected to find you arguing for the opposite: that if you can't make poor choices in character creation, what's the point of having a character development system at all? I won't champion that argument myself, as I enjoy games where all character builds are viable, as long as it forces you to adapt your play style to your character build and maybe even miss out on certain content while gaining access to other content. But that's not to say making a game out of character creation isn't a completely viable design pattern.

I remember a few years ago in Morrowind, I decided to take on the guards and ended up wiping out the whole population of Seyda Neen, and a few other places. (Don't quite remember all the details but i'm pretty sure that I could say that I was overpowered.)

For my view, I find overpowered things to be acceptable based on the views of the player and that it isn't easy to obtain from the very start. In some situations, an overpowered item can be very useful to someone who finds a certain part difficult.