Kratos vs the Dragonborn (Skyrim)

[Cody]

Do we get to count Bethesda glitching as feats? If so, Dovahkiin has taken hits from guys who can knock people into low Earth orbit.

I think, we should have a rule that bans rumbles featuring the ES main chars due to their heavy use of game mechanics and lack of quantifiable feats.

[The Transient Guest]

Eh, it's not that different than any other game and it's no limit fallacies.

All it takes is someone like me or big to come in and bring up the ridiculous high end exploit stuff, ie invulnerable dovah and golden fleece kratos, to get a topic going wonky.

I'm all for case by case examples in this kinda stuff. We kinda sorta know the power range for these series and as long we're not author avataring it then staying within that psuedo established range, to my notion, should be easy for debaters that aren't here to bring up random, unneeded, and sometimes totally illogical ideas about the fights.
I mean, really who would come in and start bringing up non sequitur style stuff?

[BitVyper]

I was joking.

[The Transient Guest]

No you weren't, if you were joking it would have gone like this.

Hey tranny, what do you do to an elephant with three balls?

First you make sure no one's looking.....

Nah man, you walk him and pitch to the rhino.

And Bit, your post looked nothing like that.

[The Transient Guest]

Edit for double posting reasons.

[BitVyper]

That's not a joke, that's an argument in favour of late-late-late-late term abortion.

[The Transient Guest]

That's not a joke, that's an argument in favour of late-late-late-late term abortion.

Your face is an argument for post term abortions.

....Did I just threaten to kill you?

Hm.


But I am pretty sure that cheats vs cheats not withstanding, Kratos takes this.

Right?

[Cody]

Your face is an argument for post term abortions.

....Did I just threaten to kill you?

Hm.


But I am pretty sure that cheats vs cheats not withstanding, Kratos takes this.

Right?

Using the DB that the op gave us? Yes.

[big_adventure]

But I am pretty sure that cheats vs cheats not withstanding, Kratos takes this.

Right?

Sounds about right to me - so-called artifacts are much less cool than even non-looped/glitched stuff you can make yourself.

[Holy Spirit]

I've never played skyrim

You should give it a shot.


Learning curve is pretty steep but once you get used to it, it's fun. Major time killer though.

[BitVyper]

Honestly, I found it incredibly dull. The characters are just totally uninteresting, and the lack of narrative freedom kinda kills the plot and exploration for me. Too many characters set as essential, too many things you can't do, no good reasons not to be able to do them - this stuff just kills a game like Skyrim for me. The Thieves' Guild quest was especially bad. Some of the exploration was alright, but mostly it felt like wandering around with the most boring people alive. Then it's Bethesda so it's glitchy as hell too.

The dragon fights were alright, but they're so frequent that they get old fast, and all the dragons follow essentially the same pattern, so after a few fights, they're just a nuisance. Also the enemy AI is so blindingly awful it totally breaks immersion because it's just so hilariously easy to abuse. I attacked some elven fortress at low level by just standing at the edge of their aggro range and shooting arrows at them. They would run out to attack me and then just suddenly turn around and walk back. This means I can never try to win via tactics against a more powerful opponent, because as soon as you try anything nonstandard, the AI just falls apart and can't deal with it.

[big_adventure]

Honestly, I found it incredibly dull.

...snipped...

Anyway, to be fair, this is the trouble with almost all fully open-world games. There is always some stuff you can't do. Not every NPC can be interesting (and most of them aren't). What we call enemy AI is just a list of crap they can do depending on circumstances. It's relatively easy to program an AI in an on-rails shooter - first, each enemy has one choice - shoot. Second, they either typically spawn already agro'd, or you can only approach from one direction in any case, so it's not a question on how they react to detection in unknown environments from unknown angles. Third, agro is meant to be permanent in those kinds of games, so enemies don't lose it - if you can't handle a fight, you just respawn 30 seconds earlier at the last auto-checkpoint, there isn't a run-away-and-avoid-that-area for the next 5 levels mechanic. If you don't advance, you don't do anything. Fourth, and this touches a bit on some earlier points as well, in a shooter, you arrive on each fight from the same, predictable direction. So programming "AI" simply requires mapping a finite set of circumstances into each fight setup. If PC with sniper is behind BOX 2 in scene R, with monster closet Q1 open, send 2 mooks straight on, 2 mooks around right flank, etc. Since there are a totally finite amount of situations, it's pretty easy to program the AI to fight "intelligently". In a fully open-world, you are capable of approaching from ANYWHERE, any angle, with any kind of weapon, or even without weapons. You can charge in, you can stealth in, you can walk past invisibly. So AI programming HAS to be more general - it's just not possible to allow for every single possibility in every single location.

The fun is figuring out game styles that you enjoy and playing them. My one character was at times a thief (stealing everything not tied down), a hero (Monty Python Lancelot style, including me saying "Have at thee!" as I charged anything that could be a bad guy), a cutthroat (running around perma-stealthed and killing mobs without them ever knowing I was there), an explorer (you have to like this in TES), an entertainer (granted, that was mostly blowing up huge fireballs right in front of people or using FUS ROH DA to knock crap all over the place in shops and Jarl's halls, but I thought it was entertaining), a necromancer (killing people and then bringing them right back to life as servants), a troublemaker (put buckets on the heads of everyone in a village, then find beasties, and pull aggro on them until they are in the village - stuff like that), a min-maxer (again, something fun about this in TES or any RPG) and a glitch-hunter.

[BitVyper]

Not every NPC can be interesting

I can remember a handful of NPCs in Skyrim that were remotely interesting, and none of them were party members.

Skyrim being an open ended game doesn't excuse any of the problems it has when there's stuff like New Vegas out there with almost total freedom (although there were invisible walls in some really unnecessary spots that irritated me) and an enormous cast of colourful characters. Almost every single one of whom can literally be made into beef patties and have the plot actually compensate for them being gone. The player needs that level of agency to make the open world really mean anything. If you can't stretch the world within the context of its own narrative, then you might as well just be looking at photographs for all the exploration matters.

Skyrim's enemy AI isn't just a little bit bad. It's bad to the extent that the only way to not be abusing it is to fight enemies as straightforwardly as possible. It's one thing to have enemies pull the old "GUESS IT WAS JUST THE WIND" after you light their boss on fire and disappear for thirty seconds, it's another thing entirely when I can shoot an enemy who is looking right at me full of arrows just because I'm standing slightly beyond an arbitrary line. The game is designed to allow you to use stealth and range-based characters, but if you play them with any sort of intelligence, you very quickly find that the AI is completely incapable of dealing with you, which breaks immersion and takes away any feeling of accomplishment. It means that a lot of the playstyles the game allows for aren't actually valid in context with the game's mechanics because the game can't cope with you playing them, which means it's not nearly as open ended as it pretends to be.

Most of the player agency in skyrim is just deciding how you're going to break Skyrim.

[Surtur]

I think, we should have a rule that bans rumbles featuring the ES main chars due to their heavy use of game mechanics and lack of quantifiable feats.

We do get some feats though from the lore of the world, albeit not for the main character, though at times the main character can do the same thing in the story. My favorite example is a book from the Morrowind game detailing one dude learning a variety of "increase" spells(you know, increase strength, increase speed, etc.). The "increase intelligence" spell makes him smart enough to write an equation that blinks a dude out of existence. This wasn't some master wizard, it was a random dude who paid him to teach him the spells. How does that translate into feats?

[The Transient Guest]

I've never heard anything about that feat having something to do with math. Course I've never played the games from this series but the thing was always presented as convincing him that he didn't exist, then he has an existential breakdown and disappears, never to have existed so he's not dead to mess up pacifist runs.

Or something.

But now I'm seeing the PC walk up to him, say something like 2-2 = YYYOOOOUUUU. And the guy is all, well shit, the math works out. And the math works out to zero.

*plip*
No more guy.