Skyrim was 'personally rebalanced' by producer Jeff Gardiner just 2 weeks before launch: 'Well, I hope this is good'
The lesson: don't trust AI simulations.
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So it's his fault that destruction magic sucked.
Noted...
Is this why I always end up a sneak archer?
No, that's human nature. Turns out stealth archer is just the optimal way of approaching combat for maximum efficiency in any game that lets you do it.
Yeah it's quite hard to beat instantly killing the enemy without ever giving them the chance to retaliate in any meaningful way lol
Stealth archer also synergizes with the highest amount of skills in the game. It's the funnest because it makes use of way more systems than being a mage or warrior
Soyboy stealth archer has to slowly sneak around and line up shots one at a time. If spotted, he must hide, or run, until aggro drops and he can start sneaking again.
Chad two-handed weapon user boldly charges in and power attacks anything that moves until all that's left are bloody corpses. When spotted, enemies will rush him, saving him the trouble of having to hunt them down.
Until the game does a secret dice-roll and decides a big enemy has already beheaded you, making you stand there doing nothing while the animation plays. Even if they're almost dead and you're at half health.
While I agree, this falls apart in VR, which is objectively the best way to play. Physical combat lacks any sort of weight, while archery with mods feels insanely satisfying. I wish physical combat felt… good.
Sounds to me like a reason VR is not actually objectively the best way to play.
Sounds like you’ve never played in VR… which is okay. It’s a high barrier to entry. It’s insane, though. I’ve got an index and my mate has a VR treadmill and an index and it’s absolute insanity.
At this point you couldn't pay me to use VR. It has had many years to prove that it is just objectively a gimmick without any sensible way to use it for the majority of games and where you can technically use it the UI just sucks. Meanwhile many other games have proven that you just don't need VR for immersion, its main claim to usefulness.
Some VR games are really great. Skyrim VR is definitively NOT one of those.
But I love flailing my hand around like mad to cheesily get a bunch of hits in quickly!!!
The Thad maniac illusionist sprints and tags every monster in the dungeon with fury, wabbajacks off, and screams at anyone who gets too close. The results are impressive IMO
what do you mean by that?
Early game destruction magic is such a letdown. During my first playthrough I put points into duel wielding fire magic. Enemies would ignore the spire of flame being blown at them and bonk me on the head once for an instant kill.
I tried to do a traveling mage run where I didn't use fast travel. Had to quit two hours in because it was just. Bear. Walk twenty feet. Bear. Walk ten feet. Bear. Turn around to go back to a bed and regain health and mana. Bear. Bears are extremely hard to kill with basic destruction spells.
It makes a little bit of sense. Some dude just spent four hours killing rats in a sewer and suddenly he finds he can throw fire from his hands, he's probably not going to be that good at it.
I feel like when you're spewing fire from your hands the CC should be a level 1 benefit and not a late/mid? game unlock if the damage isn't impressive either.
yeah fair enough.. I think they tried to make melee on par with ranged magic
Magic sucked. Simple as. Destruction magic was weak, expensive to cast, and didn't scale well. Other forms of magic also didn't scale well or were otherwise very situational.
That's what Morrowind is for.
"Wanna be ostensibly a god? Ok! Here, you can levitate and endlessly smoke n'wahs from the heavens. We'll call you Nerevar."
It's so stupid that Morrowind's spell creation system didn't carry on into Oblivion and Skyrim.
True, they'd have been so much better. Though the enchanting hack in Oblivion led to some fun. I don't remember exactly how we used to do it, but you could glitch and artificially inflate your enchant skill and make a bow and set of arrows (that you could dupe glitch later to get more) with like 50,000 combined frost damage, and when you got a hit it would launch the target clear into the sky lol.
Truth be told I didn't care for Skyrim.
What was different in the spellcrafting system from Oblivion to Morrowind?
In Morrowind you could basically make any combo of spells with as strong of a power based on the use type you wanted, as long as you could afford the gold cost (and the mana to actually use it). Oblivion made it super bare bones basic and not nearly as powerful.
Bethesda had a really nice game design in Morrowind. When walking out of Seyda Neen and you see Tarhiel fall out of the sky. When you loot the corpse you find the scrolls of 1000 Acrobatics.
Bethesda is telling the player "Break this game when creating spells".
Conjuration gave you access to a daedric bow with effectively unlimited daedric arrows whenever you wanted. Pretty significant when stealth archery is the natural meta in the game. Plus you can summon things to give you free damage and take aggro. That's useful for any build.
ice storm was pretty devastating, but yeah, a good chop with an axe normally trumped it
Dual-casting 2nd tier lightning could stun-lock Alduin!
Magic damage doesn’t scale based on your magic stat. The only thing that changes is that the spell uses less mana to cast. So the only difference between a level 1 mage and a level 100 mage is that the end game mage can cast the same spells more. But by the end of the game, those spells are only doing small amounts of damage because their damage hasn’t increased as enemies have gotten stronger.
There were a number of mods that fixed that, which I would like to note is not a defense of the game. The one I used was Ordinator, which is a perk overhaul. For the magic skills, it makes it so that the first perk of the tree makes spells scale, up to twice as much damage once you max the skill out. The magic perk trees in that mod also provided a bunch of other nifty abilities. For example Illusion had a perk that added I think 1d20 power to spells such as 'fear', allowing you to try your luck in casting them at targets that are normally out of range.