My Experience So Far
I’ve had the game for a week now, and although I haven’t actually spent all that much time in the game, I thought I’d post about my experiences so far - both in terms of the actual gameplay as well as the technical side of things.
Gameplay
First off, I have to admit that I haven’t even begun the main quest yet… As with the previous Elder Scrolls games, I immediately got distracted by various side quests. As I mentioned in my previous post, I decided to go for a stealth based Wood Elf character. I really like the way the character creation has been combined with the tutorial, with the ability to completely change the character before leaving the prison sewers. Afterwards, I went across the river to kill some bandits and mud crabs. I then discovered a dungeon (Sideways Cavern), but the low level imps were no match for my bow, and a single stealth attack usually killed them. After clearing the dungeon, picking up as much loot as I could carry (unfortunately not much, on account of my character’s starting strength being rather low), and levelling up two levels, I exited the dungeon and followed the path to Imperial City. There, I checked out the various merchants, completed a few side quests, and fought a few fights in the Arena to improve my melee skills. I also made some money by selling potions that I made from the many ingredients that can be found in containers across town as well as in the wilderness. Last not least, I practiced my stealth skills by stealing a bunch of stuff, only to realize that I couldn’t sell it anywhere. Since I kept bumping into my encumbrance limit and didn’t want to lose any of my loot, I had to get into the Thieves Guild to get access to a fence. That’s where I left the game yesterday. At this point I have levelled up to level 8, and once I have sold all my loot (and maybe completed a few Thieves Guild quests), I will finally be ready to start on the main quest.
So even though I can’t speak to the main story line yet, the gameplay so far has been a lot of fun. The quests are very varied and not your typical “fetch item X” quests. Aside from quest specific topics, NPC dialogue is still mostly limited to basic topics (e.g. “Rumors”, “Imperial City”, etc.) and not all that interesting, but in an improvement over Morrowind all of it is spoken now.
As for my character: I am now at the point where I have gotten a good feel for my character as well as for the game itself, but at the same time am not advanced enough that it would be a huge deal to start over with another character… So that’s what I’m trying to figure out now. On the one hand I really like playing a stealth based character, but on the other hand it’s a very slow and deliberate style of gameplay and it could be fun to play with a quicker and more aggressive style. I am also still tempted by a more magic oriented character, as particularly the offensive spells are simply a lot of fun to use, and the more subtle types of spells could add a lot variety and depth. The main thing that’s been holding me back from a more magic heavy approach is the user interface, which only supports 8 hotkeys and therefore requires the user to constantly switch to the spell interface in order to select the active spell - a major annoyance. There’s no good reason that the PC version shouldn’t be able to support multiple banks of hotkeys, although I expect that this was a deliberate design decision in order to come up with an interface that works both for the PC and for the Xbox 360 (although arguably, it doesn’t…). But now I’m getting into technical issues.
Technical
On the technical side, my experience has been mediocre. My PC is below par (Athlon64 3000+, 1GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB), so I wasn’t expecting a perfect experience. Then again, the same PC plays pretty much any first persion shooter without any issues. I am currently running at 800×600 (I can’t remember when I last had to drop to that low a resolution) at medium detail settings. The biggest setting that made the game playable for me was to slightly drop the view distance, which has a huge impact on game performance. I also made sure to install the latest video, chipset, Athlon, and soundcard drivers. Last not least I slightly improved my frame rate with some INI tweaks from the various forum posts. At this point I generally get decent frames, although it fluctuates a lot between very good FPS (> 60) and very low FPS (about 20). However, things completely break down when I’m around NPCs. If one NPC is close by, things are still manageable (around 20 FPS), but as soon as there are two or more NPCs, the FPS quickly drop to below 10. Obviously this mostly happens in combat, where it is also most annoying…
Like many people on the various Elder Scrolls forums, I am hoping that an official patch will soon address some of these issues - the same thing happened with Morrowind. But in the end I gave in and decided to order a new video card. My motherboard only supports AGP, which severely limits my choice of cards. As I cannot justify the expense of a high end AGP card (since I first of all don’t have the money and second am likely to buy a new motherboard next year, at which point I’ll have to buy a new PCI-Express based video card), I went for a Geforce 6800GS with 256MB of GDDR3 RAM. It should arrive by the middle of next week and will hopefully allow me to slightly crank up my resolution (1024×768 would be perfectly fine) and detail settings without things coming to a crawl. I’ll keep you updated.