It's been a long time between posts. Has my latest venture of Permadeath died? No, that has not occurred.
The project has been shelved and is gathering dust.
Other games are getting my attention at the moment. They aren't necessarily better, I think Skyrim is just plain awesome, they are just a bit more social. Lord of the Rings Online had an expansion released, a bunch of my friends are playing it, and I am not paying Skryim the attention it deserves to get back into the game to continue.
With such long breaks between playing, there's that re-introduction feeling to get back in the zone. Only after long hours of playing, and fighting do you feel the rhythm returning, where you feel in complete control and can dominate each encounter.
I've noted that the Dragon Born expansion has been released. In an effort to engage once more, I purchased it. Installing it via Steam was met with some issues and the game ended up having to be installed fresh after being removed. Have no fear, I backed up the saved games so I lost nothing.
After a lengthy installation process, I then applied once more a range of Mods. The list is much reduced from before, here's what's in place:
W.A.T.E.R. - Water and Terrain Enhancement Redux
Sound and Propagation Overhaul
SkyUI (honestly, how can you play it without this?)
Skyrim HD - 2K Textures Skyrim - HD v1_6 Full - Riften
Skyrim HD - 2K Textures Skyrim - HD v1_6 Full - Towns
Skyrim HD - 2K Textures Skyrim - HD v1_6 Full - Misc
Skyrim HD - 2K Textures Skyrim - HD v1_6 Full - Landscape
Skyrim HD - 2K Textures Skyrim - HD v1_6 Full - Dungeons
Enhanced Blood Textures
That's it. It's looking a treat. Very nice graphics, absolutely beautiful. Sound and propagation overhaul is pretty interesting. Check out the Youtube video demonstrating this. On a headset, this is a must have.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqfekEHV3NA&feature=player_embedded
With the release of Dragonborn, there are a couple of key things on Permadeath that have changed. Namely, the difficulty level of "Legendary" and the "Legendary" skills.
I've had a long hard think about these. I'd been playing on the Master difficulty rating the entire game as that was the hardest rating until now. Should I bump it up to Legendary? My decision on this is to leave it on Master.
When I roll a new character, I'll have a crack on Legendary from the very beginning. This game, I'll leave it as it has been from the start. It's true to the Permadeath rules. It's plenty hard, and the fear of death is always present especially with spells.
So next feature was the Legendary skills. This basically resets a skill back to 15 and you can level it once more. Your character will be nerfed in the skill in a big way if you do this. So what's the benefit? First and foremost, you get all your skill points you've allocated back...these can be reassigned to another skill. Smithing for instance, once you smith up the very best items, you can reset it, allocate the smith points to other skills, and then grind up your smithing skill all over again. While doing this, you will gain ranks to level your character.
I'll also reject this feature with one exception. If somehow I manager to complete all skills and have them all maxed out, then I will reconsider this as I will be unable to level any higher. I could legitimately use this to farm up levels. While I'd be able to gain levels reasonably quickly once more, it would make the game super boring. I put in the hard work grinding up skills like smithing to make good gear, I'm not going to reset it, it's time to complete some of the major quest lines and take on the hard content.
Last of all, I applied a few great little tweaks to the ini files. I'll post in a separate article once I finish up with these. They really enhance the experience, wish I'd known about them before. One takes away that annoying lag when you transition to first person mode.
Once I'm done with all the tweaking, and adjusting and Skryim is ready and perfect again for the next session, I'll get some time off Lord of the Rings Online and put in an effort to acquaint myself with Skyrim once more.
