Actually bathing every day was standard for the Romans, and they took their bathhouses all across North Africa, Europe, and Near Asia. It was an important place for socializing, and making backroom deals. When the Vikings conquered eastern England, they were very popular with the local women, because the Norse men bathed on a regular basis. Our modern society likes to think that we are so advanced, and that everyone who came before us were primitive savages rolling around in the dirt. But that is just hubris. Our ancestors were not as stupid, or disgusting, as we like to pretend they were. For example, the Minoans had running water and flush toilets back in the Bronze Age.

Speaking purely in the ES universe, in Skyrim we start the game able to shoot fire and lightning from our fingers. But no one has a spell to wash their hair, or their body? Give me a break.



Give me the Oblivion hair any day. Even the vanilla looks much better then what Skyrim offers. Much less Corean or Rens. The Skyrim hair looks dead and lifeless, not to mention icky. I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot poleaxe.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Nov 15 2011, 05:29 PM

Romans - basically upper class bathed everyday, but the common rabble? No. They had to work. I wonder if they were even allowed in the bathhouses.

Norse - How did they bathe everyday? Especially in the winter months? They going to haul water and heat it everyday inside? I really doubt it.

Yes there are some ancient societies that had pluming. Very limited example though. It was hardly widespread and they made their pipes out of lead.

This post has been edited by King Coin: Nov 15 2011, 06:11 PM

The Roman rabble did take a bath every day. It was cheap, and part of their society. Just like it is part of ours. It is not difficult to bathe. You do not require a super high technology to do it. Just water. You do not even need a tub, or a huge amount of water. A washcloth and enough water to soak it will do. Take a look for some examples.

And even reality aside, it is ridiculous to think that in a world where it is common to shoot out fire and lighting from your hand, let alone conjure up monsters from other dimensions, turn invisible, trap souls, and so on, that no one can cast a clean up spell.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Nov 15 2011, 06:51 PM

Neither one of us are going to budge so I will not waste any more effort arguing.

EDIT: That was more unfriendly sounding than I wanted. We'll just agree to disagree on that point.

This post has been edited by King Coin: Nov 15 2011, 08:06 PM

Thank you, SubRosa! I get so tired of posting this exact same thing in different places. People tend to think that the history of hygiene is a simple, linear progression from "really, really dirty" to "moderately dirty" to "clean". Not true at all - attitudes towards bathing and cleanliness have varied wildly over different times and places.

Of course it's true that in general, rich people would bathe more than poor people. But even in the "dirtier" times in European history - which actually applies more to the Renaissance/early industrial era, rather than medieval times - people would at least try to keep their faces and hands clean, and several pre-industrial cultures (such as the Romans) had fairly advanced plumbing systems. Here's couple more links on bathing in the Middle Ages:
http://www.godecookery.com/mtales/mtales08.htm
http://www.family-ancestry.co.uk/history/v.../uncleanliness/

Regarding Skyrim itself: I haven't played it yet, so I can't comment. Nothing in this thread particularly surprises me, however. I'm definitely going to hold off buying it at least until mods are available to fix most of these problems.

Here is a Good thing:

The fatigue system is more realistic. My character gets staggered in fights, is weakened acting. She pants and coughs after fights like she's really done some hard work.

The enemies are tougher, no one is dropping easily with your sword or magic - and they have equal magic powers and use them.



This post has been edited by mALX: Nov 16 2011, 02:35 AM

Ugly: The revamped physics have an annoying tendency of throwing objects all over the place. Interiors are also frequently filled with thunking and thudding as objects get tossed around. Again, this is performance related; this time if your framerates are too high.

This post has been edited by Thomas Kaira: Nov 16 2011, 03:32 AM

Lots of dead body "havocs" on these larger beings. I've hit one and had it fly out in the sky (and seen several similar scenes on Youtube).

I liked the sound of fire better in Oblivion. Skyrim's fires sound like dust scratching your disk. I kept pulling the disk out and blowing the player clean thinking it had sucked up some dust onto the surface or something.


*

Another Good thing - the walrus's on the ice floes - cool as heck. Also that not every animal attacks. Some avoid you (like foxes, deer, rabbits) - and some will let you pass by but get threatening if you hang around too close - like the mammoths or the walrus's.

This post has been edited by mALX: Nov 16 2011, 03:48 AM

Markath is bugged to hell...

I live there...Soooo many bugs though...

More noticable than New Vegas...



I hate the story...



And please Bethesda, stop contradicting everything...

Stupid game...I'm completely addicted...

I like it...I think...But I don't love it...And I probably never will...

You thought it was hard to organize your things in Oblivion? Wait until you try in Skyrim...sit two things on a plate and watch one fly off like a fat kid just hopped on the freaking seesaw.

The one improvement I can see housing and organizing wise is that there are automatic weapon displays, auto organize book shelves, and mannequins to show off your stuff.

Actually hand placing things in this game is like pulling teeth, worse than Oblivion.

Also, I hate the amount of unusable containers in this game.

This post has been edited by Kiln: Nov 16 2011, 07:40 AM

That bothers me too, because I feel the need to check each one and "see" if it is a real container or just a filler for display.

Me too and sadly a large portion of them are not actual containers. It bugs the crap out of me. There are also alot more environment objects that can't be interacted with this time around.

Like shooter games. The first time I saw Halo I was all excited about the number of crates hanging around till I found out they were just display items, lol.

Been playing Skyrim way too much and I like it a lot although there are several minor stuff that I don't like at all;

- The menu and interface, although not a minor issue but a big one, is pretty horrible - you can clearly see it's meant for consoles and not PC.
- The talent trees are filled with useless and uninteresting talents. They should have removed talents like Armsman for example which just increases your damage and just let stuff like that scale with your skills instead of implementing them as talents.
- Wish more objects and light sources projected shadows. The spell Candlelight as a light source looks great on the walls and other surfaces, but it doesn't add a shadow to my character. Some of the light in this game is great but it just seems that some light sources don't give off shadows sort of while others do. Think the whole physics engine could've been better.
- Finishers are cool and I don't mind that much but would've liked it better if it didn't appear as a cut scene and that you could finish people off from a first-person view or third-person view for a bit smoother combat.
- People also mentioned environment clipping and I have to agree on that. Think it's a step back when my character stands above rocks or ankle-deep on solid surfaces.
- And then there's the voice acting, which is great sometimes but the dialect just sounds weird, especially for the guards.
- I also think that some of the player and NPC interactions could use a bit of work when you take on misc. quests and such. At least in certain quests the NPC doesn't really ask for anything and the character is like "Oh, I'll get that for you. I have no problem venturing into a ancient catacomb filled with hordes of Draugr and unknown dangers to get your left sock back." If more of the quests/NPCs tried to involve the character into getting him interested and giving him/her a reason for doing the quest.
- Better view distance and long-range graphics. I run this game with everything on full and although it looks amazing it bothers me a bit that especially trees look really poor in the distance.

Hmm, other than that I can't think of much else but I'm bound to run into more sooner or later.

I pretty much love everything else. The scenery is great and they've managed to add a lot of diversity to the landscape and not just snow everywhere. I like the combat, stamina and how casting works etc. and that every dungeon is uniquely designed - although catacombs may look the same they're all different and that's really something I appreciate especially after playing games like DA2. I also think this has the best character creation menu so far. I'm like level 30 now and still haven't finished Act I on the MQ yet so looking forward to seeing how that story develops.

Regarding finishers: some are first-person and some are third-person. Seems to me Beth couldn't decide which they wanted, so they just did both. I don't really like that, I'd prefer them to be one or the other. And I actually do like the finishers, but I am going to mod at least one set out, likely the third-person restricted finishers while leaving in the first-person ones. Assassinations are the exception, however. If there is a way, I will leave the assassination animations alone. Kills to be savored should be savored, after all.

I agree about the guards, they sound really canned with that obviously fake accent. I'd have preferred it if good ol' Wes did them all again this time, he did a good job with the guard voicing in Oblivion.

Also wish they had finishers for archery/magic. Well, somewhat anyways. The cutscene sometimes jars one out of a rythem if it's an intense fight. Though when you can kill an opponet in one (power) attack and you get a finisher each time it deffinatly has a feel of 'Oh yeah, I'm a baaad mutha F****'.

Come across a few things you can edit in the skyrimprefs.ini file to get sharper shadows and also more shadows for trees and the landscape. Going to test changing the FoV as well to 90-95 to fit my monitor and see how it looks.

Anyone tried out some mods yet? Some improvement mods have been released to make faces a bit smoother and more detailed for example, need to check those out.

Bad: In Skyrim, horses are aggressive. They literally engage other enemies in combat. That is just wrong. That is so incredibly wrong. And this is going to raise my number of horse-deaths to extraordinary levels, resulting in a huge waste of my money. I do not want to have to replace my horse every other play session because my horse reacted to combat exactly the opposite of how he should have.

Horses are passive animals whose first response to battle is to FLEE. Horses do not fight unless cornered, ever, ever, EVER. They will kick you if you kick them, but they NEVER start the kicking unless they have absolutely no other choice. If they smell blood being spilled, their first instinct is to run, not to rush in and join the frenzy.

It gets me so riled up every time I get into a tussle with Bandits and it becomes a battle to preserve the life of my suicidal mount. Why do they even do this? Why can't we just have the NPCs leave the horses be during combat? This just makes the whole problem Oblivion had with horses dying in combat even worse, because now the horses actively seek death and I am literally forced to console-disable them every single battle because of how badly it exacerbates that problem, and because such behavior is so incredibly unnatural and wrong for them.

Not happy. Not at all.

/rant

(Really needed to get that off my chest)

This post has been edited by Thomas Kaira: Nov 18 2011, 04:34 AM

Good- I like these random encounters

Bad- Wolves attacking me in the middle of my conversation so I have to stop talking so I don't get killed (and of course the person runs away) so I have no idea WTF is going on!

Also bad- Wolves are officially the cliffracers of Skyrim. I can't go more than ten seconds without "AWOOOOOO!!!" and there's a small pack of the disease ridden things.

My bookcases keep disappearing!!!... ...

I own the Markath house, (A Knight of the Nine fan owning Vlindrel hall? Whatever next?... ) Markath being the most bugged city ever - I think - Aaamywho, twice now I've come to load up having saved last in my house and the bookcase, shelves on the other side of the room and the Mannequin have all disappeared...

If I load up the autosave from when I came into the house, they're all still there...But it scared the hell out of me the first time it happened!... ...

Oh, and presumably you should be able to display armour on that mannequin...Nope, it just goes invisible...*Sigh*...

Yeeesss...I started again...With my Argonian - J'Drell...He's level 8 in 3 hours...The kids hate me... ...I think J'Drell is just too cool though personally... ...