SeaGtGruff wrote:
As far as the environmental design, I love how much variety there is from zone to zone. There are swamps, deserts, forests, mountains, frozen tundras-- you name it!
I also love the ambient sounds of the environment, especially in certain zones. For instance, try going into Cyrodiil at night and sneaking around northern Cyrodiil at night with headphones on; the hooting of the owls as you walk through the snow is awesome.
Yes, it really shows that Zenimax has put quite a lot of effort to the ambience and "feel" of different places. It even extends to NPCs. Their animations are surprisingly natural and how they behave in some situations adds to the illusion of reality. For instance the lack of combatants in battle quests was compensated to a large degree by the aftermath: how they celebrate the victory or guard POWs, or any such thing soldiers do after fighting. As for natural sights, I can't wait to get outside Morrowind to see all the different locales in other provinces! At the moment I'm too engrossed in the Ebonheart Pact alliance storyline, though. They wrote too exciting quests
And this wasn't even entirely a joke. Now that I've played through the Stonefalls questline, I'm seriously impressed. I've had some evenings stretching too long into night just because I couldn't stop myself from doing "just one quest more", a feeling I've missed for some time. Especially nice is how you meet characters from previous quests now and again. It was a great moment when, completely by surprise, I ran across Captain Rana in Kragenmoor and also met other Bleakrock people there. And it wasn't even a part of the current quest, but just a chance meeting with some friendly chit-chat. This kind of thing gave the game a surprising amount of depth somehow, made it feel like the NPCs do have lives on their own. The writing really is much better than in Skyrim. Practically the only thing I'd wish is more choice and consequence, since most quests are linear. Some do give choices, though, so this isn't a big complaint.
Also, I've figured out a rather easy and probable way to solve the gold problem. I'll just join a trade guild with small or no requirements and start selling pewter dust, better quality improvement materials and recipes. Those are always in some demand and can net tidy sums (even the pewter dust seems to be in 40-60 gold range per piece). Plus, I already have to make ore farming runs just to get materials for blacksmithing. Pewter dust is found hassle-free as a sideproduct, since the add-on I use has the same markers for ore and pewter nodes. Also, all kinds of recipes are found practically everywhere and the prices can range from anything from dozens of gold to tens of thousands. So the whole selling thing shouldn't take much more than an hour or two a week in order to gather some kind of decent income. I'll gather some starting inventory and then will give this strategy a try. I would not even need that much gold, but I want to be able to buy either crowns or crown stuff with in-game gold since I don't like spending real money more than I have to.
In summary, it was a really good idea to buy this game. Even wholly soloed this far it's been a blast.