Skyrim Hands-On: Counter Point ...err.. mirror point?... oh I know... "Through the looking glass".. point...

Hi I'm Telkiney.... and I'm a Min-maxer

Much like my buddy Kris's kleptomania. I have a problem as well. I am a Min-maxer and yes this is a disorder, and addiction really.

Wikipedia describes min-maxing as: the practice of playing a role-playing game, with the intent of creating the "best" character by means of minimizing undesired or unimportant traits and maximizing desired ones. This is usually accomplished by improving one specific trait or ability by sacrificing ability in all other fields.

What this means in my case is that you can give me the most beautiful, open, and immersive world ever digitized (And that is what Skyrim most certainly is bar none) and with in an hour I have started the downward spiral of figuring out how to best conquer the world with an iron fist down the world's throat as it screams for help.

Enter the Sword and Shield Warrior.

From the very beginning of most RPGs I tend to gravitate to melee combat unless it becomes clear ranged combat has an overwhelming advantage. In Skyrim it became clear the destruction line which is the pure damage magic line did not have any advantage over melee combat. In fact once out of magic (which quickly happens at lower levels of the game) your choice is to either run away or attack with a weapon. Since one could just cut out the middle man and become stronger in melee combat which I was already inclined to do. That is where I decided to develop my skills. Now I had to take a look at what type of melee combat I was going to do. Skyrim does not have just one choice for melee combat but 4 basic paths one could go.

Two handed weapons at first seemed like the path I should take. With the highest weapon damage rating being on the two handed weapons and still having the ability to block somewhat if needed it was definitely the better damage choice to me over the dual wielding style.

The dual wielding style irritated me to no end as swinging either hand was not independent of each other, in fact you had to wait for the swing animation to complete with one hand to start the other. You could do an animation that would swing both weapons at once but it seems to stop all forward movement your character was making which isn't a problem on a stationary target but becomes a problem if your target is moving at all away from you or around you resulting in many misses. Swinging with a two hander you could continue to move forward and even have very long reaching side swings that no amount of strafing from my enemies could avoid

The third style of melee combat is sneak attack assassinations and back stabs. This requires patients.... I have none, I'm more of a charge the front lines kinda guy so that was out.

It was at this time I started fighting dragons, and it became apparent that they either breathed fire or frost and that these would be some of the main monsters that I would be running into and quite frequently. I noticed a shield perk that reduced fire/frost/shock damage by 50% when blocking, and as the dragons just loved to fly around me not to come down to the ground for a while, all the while breathing fire on me like the cowards they were. So I decided to take up blocking and never looked back.

After a few perks in to block I discovered a perk that slowed down time when I was blocking a power attack. The results of this once I invested this perk were astounding as they were humorous. I could literally strafe around an enemy like a giant as they were stopped in time while I could release a hail of strikes to their back. While I was not doing as much damage per hit as a two hander, my attacks were not that much less damaging and was relatively save from even the hardest hitting attacks behind my shield and just had to wait until the right moment to let out my fury.

I then went about finding "creative" ways at increasing the proficiency in my chosen skills of Block, One-handed weapons, and Heavy Armor. After a time I figured out how to increase my levels even more by increasing skills I didn't use giving me access to more perks, health, and stamina.

So with the combat type dilemma solved, I discovered I had more perk points then I needed so I looked into smithing as it said I could improve my armor and weapons which such a skill. I discovered I could double my damage and armor rating and was very amused. Amused is a great word for it... and then.. I ran into a quest that gave me a glove that increased my smithing even more... now my smithing was already maxed, so I wondered if it would even matter that I had this time. But I gave it a try and sure enough I increased the damage on my seemingly maxed damage weapon by a few points... That was the turning point of the game.

At this point I am going to have to explain two things.

First is that my character was already deadly, Anything that I could swing at was not a challenge, the only challenge was getting in range to swing at something thus dragons and mages/archers were still an annoyance yet nothing to really fear.

Second was that I had at this point also already discovered the enchanting skill although I had not put it to much use as I had not increased its skill at all. With the new found smithing gloves I decided to change that. After discovering I could sell iron daggers (that normally sold for about 18 gold) for 1300 gold if I put a banishment enchant on them which cost me 100 gold to produce I quickly became a wealthy man and this enabled my ability to get to 100 skill in enchanting in a mere hour of buying, selling, and enchanting. With perks invested in the enchant tree I discovered I could take my 15% smiting gloves and turn that enchant into a 25% enchant which I could put on 4 different armor pieces... My weapon damage and armor doubled.... but that was not the end of the ridiculousness. I found different elemental resists, and one handed damage increase enchants that I could put on my armor.

The end result of my enchant train was that I had 100% resist to fire/frost/shock damage and had 160% damage increase to one handed damage on just my enchantments alone. ..... This ment with my armor I was all but impervious to physical and magic attacks. My only vulnerability was poison which I only had a 50% racial bonus to. My weapon damage had gone from before smithing of a 42 damage Daedric Sword, to a 518 damage Daedric Sword. I had transformed into a Demi-God.
With my quest for Godhood complete I was finally able to sit back, smell the roses, and the burning ash of the discarded remains of the victims of my carnage.... for how does one test ones Godhood but with the destruction of an entire city wielding nothing but a blood soaked sword.


As far as Skyrim goes, its the best, most complete RPG I've ever played. Skill based games are really the way to go and I'm glad Bethesda walked away from the class based model. There are 3 things however that would have made Skyrim the best game ever made, or at least the best RPG ever made.

1. Drop in - Drop out Co-op.
Do not tell me it is not possible. You have followers in the game, a friend could merely take the place of them. Would it have added a bit more work for the developer? Yes. but is it in the realm of possibility. YES!!

2. Dead Island-esk Melee delimb/decap physics.
Does Skyrim have decap physics.... not really.. its just an animation, not real physics and half the time ends up looking pretty awkward for the one hand version where the head stays suspended in the air for a couple seconds. And then there is delimbing. Its a mature title and they could have done it. Dead Island did and was pretty fun.

3. Stronger dragons.
Now don't get me wrong, you have to fight A LOT of dragons to get your souls for your shouts. But they could have ramped up the number of souls for the harder dragons like the Elder or Ancient and then made them an actual fight. Once I was the level where these were spawning I was walking through them and that was even with the impairment of them mainly doing ranged damage until they were down to 1/3 or so health and me being a melee centric character.

Starhawk Straight Talk, Part 3

Remember when I said that you cannot manually control the turrets? Yeah, I was wrong--there is a little door at the base that grants you access to aim and shoot at will. That said, it still pays to build them in pairs so you can burn down enemy structures while the other turret covers you in automatic mode from Hawk attacks.

So, Starhawk is still awesome. Awesome enough to keep me from playing other games that I really want to play. Man, I really need to clear out my game pile before Starhawk drops next year...

Starhawk Straight Talk, Part 2

I'm totally in love with Starhawk, people. No huge update for today, as last night brought more of the same action and excitement of my first night. I got a lot better at building around the base, and sneaking behind enemy lines and dropping down spawn points.

Just like Warhawk before it, I see Starhawk becoming my shooter of choice.

Star Wars: The Old Republic code named SWTOR

A long long time ago in a Xbox or PC not so far away an epic role-playing game was played. This game was titled Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR). Winning multiple awards and being dubbed Game of the Year for 2003 by numerous critics. KOTOR was set in the Star Wars universe 4,000 years before Han shot first. Given the difference in time between KOTOR and the main stream Star Wars films developer BioWare was given free reign to create a wonderful adventure story and set up Star Wars lore for years to follow.
Now I'm not going to go too deep into the story of KOTOR. For that you should really go play it and its sequel, but in order to establish some basics I'll need to talk about the time frame that this takes place in . As most know from watching all 6 Star Wars movies the Sith are the Chaotic or Evil Jedi. As opposed to in the movies where there are only two(Vader and Palpatine), in the KOTOR time frame there are a ton. This is a time when Jedi and Sith have been and are fighting each other in open war for control of the galaxy. Basically in the KOTOR games they fight and the Jedi end up chasing the Sith out of their part of the galaxy and then just kinda forget about them while the Sith go back to Korriban the home of the original Sith(For those star wars buffs out there you can appreciate the irony because that is how the original Sith empire started, a group of dark Jedi are exiled from the Jedi order and forgotten about. They settle on Korriban and enslave it and start building their empire in secret for thousands of years only to come back and fight the Jedi).

Now comes in the main topic of this Blog, I know it was a long trail to get here, but here you are and I thank you for indulging me in the past so we can talk about the future.


Star Wars: The Old Republic fast forwards us 300 years forward from the events in KOTOR and KOTOR2. Who would have guessed, after 300 years the Sith come back for revenge which is "so out of character for them right?" ... Not!. The Sith come back and start galactic conflict all over again. And so we finally come into the game. We are given the choose between creating a character on the Jedi/Republic side or on the Sith/Empire side of this conflict. Once a side is chosen you choose what Class and then what Race you wish your character to be. If this seems familiar that's because it is. There aren't any real strives of innovation on this front I can assure you, in fact with only 4 classes per side and as far as I could tell at least the Jedi and Sith classes are just mirrors of each other. The differences between the agent to smuggler and trooper to bounty hunter does not seem to far apart either as far as game play mechanics go. So at best the game has 6 core classes if not just 4. Each side seems to have approximately 6 or 7 races to it. Unlike games like Rift, WoW, or Dark Age of Camelot where each side or faction had unique races, SWTOR's sides share many races. For an example each side has humans and twi'leks just to name a few.

Gotta have style, gotta have Class:

Now each of the classes have 2 subclasses that you choose between at level 10 like in Dark Age of Camelot. Each of these subclasses has its own 3 talent trees. The talent trees seem to have some pretty obvious and vanilla choices. To get to the top of one you have to spent points in almost everything of that tree to get there, thanks to their point requirements. So as far as customizing your talents there isn't going to be much. You pretty much go up one tree to get the top skill and then have 10 points or so to play with in either the rest of that tree or spread them on the lowest tiers of other two trees. This is where most of the nerf and buff changes after release will happen. And I am 100% certain at least at this stage there will be one solid choice for the min/maxers and you will see plenty of cookie cutters because as it stands there is just not enough room for uniqueness. Now I understand more room to make different specs and such is a balancing nightmare that Rift is still fighting to this day 10 months after launch. But being able to have that choose is not something to frown upon.

Combat is nothing new either, each of the 4 core classes has a different resource management style but they are pretty much stuff you have seen in any other game. The combat is fast and fluid, and they definitely start you off making you feel powerful, you walk through the normal solo mobs, Elite mobs will give you a problem but usually if you don't mess up in the fight you can take even level Elites, if not maybe a level above you. When you group up and do flash points that's where the real action and fun is fighting boss npcs.


Companions: your imaginary friend come to life.

The "companions","crew member", or "followers".. what ever you want to call them, are really where SWTOR starts to innovate. If you have played Skyrim lately this system is going to sound pretty familiar because the basics are the same. Through out the game you will run across multiple people that will join your "Crew". Of your crew much like in KOTOR you can not take all of them with you in your travels, you will have to pick one and leave the rest to their own devices. You can outfit your crew with gear you find to make them stronger and they level as you do exactly like KOTOR. Much like in KOTOR your actions in dialog events effect your influence on the crew members and its implied that should you loss to much they will go away. Now don't fret because in normal game play, positive influence choices give on average 15 point, where negative choices when they disagree with what you have said only take away 1 point. So as you can see its pretty hard to not keep a steady gain on the influence. The follower you have with you can be set to an AI base much like a pet in most mmorpgs or you can toggle a mode where you activate all the attacks as you would for your own character as if you are dual boxing. For the most part the AI is smart and uses their abilities wisely so its pretty easy to just keep the AI mode on.

Now you can't talk about the Crew system with out talking about the Crafting system as they go hand in hand. You see your character does not have crafting skills like a traditional mmorpg. Instead your crew members have these skills. You can choose what skills each crew member has but they are more proficient at certain skills. The interface is very straight forward and easy to use, you simply click on the item you want your crew member to craft and they do so, each item has its own crafting time which at the low level was between one to two minutes. You can also queue up to five items so that you aren't there having to pick an item every minute. Along with the crafting skills the crew also has the gathering skills for the crafting components. How this works is there is a list of missions and what that mission will reward. The mission costs you money(not much) and about 3 minutes for the crew member to complete. This also means the follower will leave your side while on a mission. But when you are grouped up and doing flashpoints the followers aren't out anyway so its a perfect time to have them out getting crafting resources. This is a very different way to go about crafting and I like it. I typically never do crafting in an mmorpg because I always want to be out adventuring but in this system you never have to stop adventuring. Love it love it love it.

"The Fourth Pillar"

One of STWOR's biggest hype engines and marketing is their "fourth pillar" to mmorpg's. And that pillar is Story. Much like KOTOR, SWTOR is rich with story and dialog. Every quest is 100% voice acted and cut scened along with dialog choices which effects the outcome of that quest and your light to dark side alignment. Now if you have ever played a recent BioWare game this is not going to come as to be much of a change from the formula for them. But for the mmorpg market this is quite unique. I've never played an mmorpg and "read" every line of text of every quest. I've never ran up to a quest giver thinking"Ohh I wonder what kinda interaction I'll have with this character". No, I've only ever gone up to a quest giver and gone, I wonder what reward I'm going to get or how long it will take to get the experience from it. But in SWTOR the entire reason I quested was for the cut scenes. In my case I was a bad ass Sith Warrior and I always wanted to make those interactions where my character either threatened the well being of the quest giver or was given the go head to slaughter the weak. Your play through for those same quests might be quite different from mine, You may attempt to look for another option to help or try to steer the quest giver away from an action. Instead of slaughtering those villages because they are camping out on the quest givers sacred ancient ruins. "How about I go get them to move peacefully" may be the choice you choose. That is the true beauty of it, that its up to you. given its usually between choice A or choice B , but at least there is a choice.

While grouping the dialog becomes even more fun as everyone chooses what they want to say then there is a random roll of the dice to see who gets to say their choice. Its a pretty fun and interactive way to go about events. I found myself yelling at the screen in glee when my character was chosen.

All in all STWOR has taken some great steps to be a unique experience in the mmorpg market. I'll forever want more class and skill customization choose out of any mmo I play but STWOR has a lot going for it in other areas that set it apart from the crowd. I hope to have the time to do some editorials on end game once I get there.

Quick Hits: The American Akira Movie

It's all over the internets. There is going to be an American made live action adaptation of Akira coming out. And it takes place in Manhattan instead of Tokyo. And nearly everyone in is is white. And no one is in a motorcycle gang.

If the internet nerd-rage was high regarding the so-called "white washing" of the Last Airbender cast, just wait until the cameras start rolling on American Akira.