So, Skyrim's out 11/11/11

[kandrathe]

Are you really able to hit dragons with archery while they are flying? My assassin has pretty high archery skills and can almost never hit a dragon unless it has landed.

The Ancient I fought yesterday dropped an ebony bow with a 6 sec paralysis enchant. I've yet to see if they drop out of the sky with that one.

It did also exhibit some odd flying behaviors. Attempting to get closer to a mob at a distance from me, it went head down toward the ground, with it's tail almost straight up in the air, and began spinning as if a tornado had grabbed it for about 30 seconds.

I hurt one bad enough and had it crash into the ground recently too. It created a crater, and ripped up the ground reminiscent of the "bugs" co-opted space ship crash in the original MIB.

On many levels, if they can get some of the painful defects ironed out, the dragon AI and animation in an open world 3D game space is a tremendous gaming accomplishment. I was pretty shocked at how "decapitate" *really* works, as the orc brigand's head rolls on down the hill. I would have been even *more* surprised it the head, and the body had separate loots.

My biggest gripes are 1) now, the broken resistance crap, 2) the lag in bringing up the save games list, and 3) blathering NPC's with a limited vocabulary.

Such as, every time I head to the apothecary in Whiterun, the shopkeeper says the exact same thing every 10 seconds. Or, the lack of any prescience whatsoever, such the Whiterun court mage continually suggesting that I may have some talent, and to head up the Winterhold -- not realizing I've been in charge of the Mages College and the Archmage for 6 game months. Having built some stuff in the prior construction sets, these variable checks are really very easy things to program into an NPC. What is not easy, is re-hiring the voice actor to add optional dialog after the fact. Even if they couldn't get it into the initial release, I hope they've scripted more content than they used.