Rastas - Feeling lost and disconnected

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.

Creatures of Skyrim.

I took these two nice pic's just before I one shotted both of these foes. The dragon was a standard dragon type guarding another dragon wall. I'd never visited there, normally I'm encountering ancient dragons so I am wondering if the dragon walls are pre-determined with regards to the dragon type on there.

Second is a Giant. I really like this, the body scars that are put on him are so detailed. From the side, they are slightly raised and look like the real deal. Such great attention to detail.

Cut Scene Kills

Using the console to pause the cut scene I've taken some nice snap shots as cut scene kicked in on a few kills.

 

First shows Rastas after he has ran his dagger across the neck of a bandit for 30x backstab damage. Note the flame effects start to come through. The blade does fire damage and can also paralyse just in case the victim survives the initial attack. It's quite the deadly combo.

 

 

 

Next is a caged Skeeva with the flames spell going through the cage bars soaking it in fire and kill it. The graphics are simply spectacular. The level of detail in this game is really impressive.



Final is another caged Skeeva cut scene. This time I've opted for the fireball attack which exploded all around the poor beast. I got the snap shot just as the explosion blew away the poor Skeeva. You can't even see it in all that flame. 

Murder at the Stumbling Sabre-Cat in Fort Dunstad

While questing through the mountains I stumbled upon Fort Dunstad which was filled with bandits.

There's a tavern inside the Fort and it has the name of the "Stumbling Sabre-Cat". Check out the pic to see why. Note the circlet on it's head...very strange.

Additionally, there appeared to be the tavern owner (Baral Sendu)
 downstairs, murdered on his bed. There were two bandits standing by it when I went down and I disposed of them.

Check out the screen shot. I have the a mod installed for additional blood details.

Rastas - Now a Vampire Lord

Hunting down some vampires on the Dawnguard questline I found myself in a situation where I was offered a chance to become a Vampire Lord. I didn't like the idea of this, but the situation where you get the offer could have meant that I was destroyed by multiple foes. I didn't have the guts to reject the offer and now here's the result.

Yep, that's Rastas. Not happy about the transformation at all. Hoping it can get reversed somehow. Obviously, the people that may know how to do this are the Dawnguard, yet I don't really want to turn up to them like this they'll hunt me down.

Hmmmm....

Rastas - Level 60 Permadeath

Had a fight with an Old Orc and tanked him for quite some time to get my blocking skill up high enough to hit level 60.

Check out this awesome screen shot of Rastas. I've been enjoying the roaming camera quite a bit.

Level 58 - Master Assassin

Another productive session on last night.

Took out a dog fighting ring near Riften and also cleared out Honeyside for the thieves guild. Additionally, found and joined the Dawnguard and have my first mission with them.

I got interested in taking some nice screen shots as well and discovered that you can essentially unlock the camera view using the console.

Basically you open the console by using the ~ key.

You then type

tfc 1

This turns on the roaming camera. The game pauses and lets you roam around using the ASDF keys and you can position the camera to get the perfect shot. I was surprised just at how detailed things could get doing this.

Opening the console once more and typing

tfc 0

Will turn the feature off again and revert the game back to having locked to your character.

Apparently the command tm will remove the HUD and give you a nice clean clutter free camera shot. I haven't tried this as yet.

I bound these commands to my MMORPG Razer Naga mouse to the side buttons using the macro feature. I can now see something and quickly get the camera feature activated, take a good picture, and then turn the feature back off and snap back into the game.

I noted that this command can be used as a cheat as you can use the free camera roaming ability to look around corners, and scope out a place before you actually go there. I certainly will not be doing anything like that. I am simply using the feature to get screen good screen shots. If anything, the distraction could end up fatal if I stupidly try and look for that perfect opportunity to take a snap shot rather than my health getting damaged.

Here's three samples of what I captured last night.

Picture 1 shows Rastas drawing back the bow and aiming it down a road. I like this as the level of detail is simply amazing. You can see the bow string, the position of the fingers drawing the bow back, even the position of his eye.

Picture 2 shows Rastas in his full glass armour inside the Dawnguard citadel. I'll look to get a better pic of this with the HUD off perhaps at a more scenic location.

 

Picture 3 shows Rastas assassinating some poor bandit in a cut scene death. Note the blistered skin on the face of the bandit. This comes form a mod called "Burn Freeze Shock Effects v3.3" A very nice mod which obviously does what it says on bodies. The flame burning this poor man has made him nice and crispy. Note also the blood spray out. Cut scenes deteriorate the high definition graphics due to the way the work. Using the roaming camera here with my macro'ed mouse buttons simply pauses the game. I can't reposition the camera. I'll try and get a cleaner shot of this type of cut scene where I remove the shield and it can get in the way of a good pic.