David

Item: Call of Duty: Black Ops II Price: $29.99 Free shipping from Amazon. If you've held off, $30 is a pretty good price point to jump in at. System: 360 Retailer: Amazon Deal Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007XVTR3K/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B007XVTR3K&linkCode=as2&tag=therebecomm-20 Click here to view the deal

Bumping this topic as I've heard a few things from the Beta. At the last event, racial skills consisted of 5 passive abilities and one ultimate ability. Here are a few examples that I read about. Dunmer Passive Abilities: +10% fire damage, bonus to dual-wielding skill experience, 30% fire resistance (scales with level?)Nords Passive Abilities: +50 armor (does not scale), a 30% cold resistance (scales), increased experience gains with the Two-Handed Weapon skill.Argonians Passive Abilities: +15% increase to incoming healing , 30% disease (or poison?) resist that scales. These are all what a beta user remembered off hand, so as usual take it with a grain of salt when anticipating the final version.

I finally worked up the motivation to go through the companions questline. As I figured, it was really mediocre - just a ton of dungeon crawler-type missions for the same item repeatedly. I suppose you could say the same thing about the entirety of the game, but this wasn't nearly as engrossing as the Dark Brotherhood, Thieves Guild, or even the Mages Guild quest line. The writing was pretty poor, and there were quite a few things that happened from a character standpoint that didn't really make sense to me. Your character joins the "circle" or whatever almost right away without having done anything, even though it's made out to be some sort of elite/secretive group. I have no idea how Kodlak, a supposedly great warrior, managed to get killed by a bunch of farmers with butter-churn sticks (the Silver Hand) when all he ever does is bunker down in the Jorrvaskr cellar. The motivations of secondary characters don't really click, such as Vilkas randomly refusing to do anything in Glory of the Dead. By the way, Glory of the Dead is the most hilariouly anti-climatic final guild-quest I've ever done. Weak enemies, a one level dungeon, no boss fights, etc, etc... Anyways, continuing on. The guild quests are always kind of dumb in the sense that you go from guild applicant to leader in like 5 quests, but the Companions hit a new low for this. I didn't feel like I accomplished anything significant at all, and there's not really any reason for my character to be the Harbringer by the end except for the incompetence of everyone else. I did this quest at level 55 or something and it was clearly a level <10 quest-line, so maybe I'm being a bit unfair. It just seems like very little effort was put into the Companions compared to Oblivion when you actually deserved every promotion you earned in the fighters guild. The story gets a D in my books (C is average). Aela's legs are the only redeeming quality.

Very interesting, thanks a lot for posting this. Promoted it to the front page.

Unfortunately there's no known fix for that particular issue. You're probably going to have to reload a prior save.

If you're serious I'm eagerly looking forward to a write-up on your thoughts after playing it.

Another revision. This one will make Fergal jelly. Last night, right after I ordered my SECOND set of RAM... Newegg started an unreal promotion on CPU/RAM combos. This culminated in me getting G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (normally $125) and the UD4H (normally $190) for a combined price of $215 ($100 off). Comparatively, I previously had the UD3H (tier lower mobo) and 8GB Vengeance (worse quality + half the size) for $215. For $8 more (required shipping charge) I got a major upgrade. Now, the bad news... I'm going to be returning $272 in Amazon products right away for questionable reasons. I'm fairly worried my Amazon account will be banned because I heard they do that if there is a high ratio of returns. I haven't really bought much from them this year so this will probably be 60% of what I've spent in 2013.

You need to either be invited or have someone who was invited willing to give up their spot for you. When Zenimax sends out invites and allows people to download the client, it's only good for the duration of that beta event - probably no more than 2 days. That's why there aren't going to be things floating around torrent sites.

@Saucy I'm going with Windows 8 because from what I've heard 8.1 is going to fix a lot of the usability issues. There are also significant changes - for the better - behind the scenes. Few adjustments... Pending... GPU: GTX 760 - $265 Going to get the MSI Twin Frozr because it has the best cooling. Unfortunately it's out of stock everywhere at the moment; when it returns I expect it will be about $15 more than what I had previously. HDD: 1 TB 7200 RPM - $70 OD: Asus x24 - $5 Decided to cart an optical drive because there was a bundle price on Newegg with HDD's. Adds about $5 depending on the HDD I choose. PurchasedCPU: i5 4670k - $200Mobo: Z87X-UD3H - $150Case: Corsair 500R - $70Heatsink: Hyper 212 Evo - $30PSU: CAPSTONE-750-M - $70OS: Windows 8 OEM - $90 RAM: 8 GB (2X4GB) - $65SSD: 128 GB - $125 I decided to get a 128GB 840 Pro instead of the shittier quality SSDs because for some reason they were all abnormally highly priced (~$100). Since I was already paying $100 I figured the extra $27 or so would be worth it. I fucked up on the RAM and bought 1.65V 1600Mhz, which is borderline bad quality and I don't want to screw with the motherboard. Fortunately, I'm going to say Amazon had a misleading description so I should be able to return it for a full refund... But my replacement 1.5V Corsair Vengeance 2x4 is $8 more at $64.99. It really stings because last year the same RAM was $40 everywhere. Anyways, my new expected total price... Total: $1195 - $55 MIR = $1140 Went way over my budget so this has been a failure of an expenditure.

You can cure yourself of either one, so you're fine either way.

Not sure. I would prefer more of a Zybez role honestly, but I wouldn't have a problem hosting an "official" ElderSouls guild along with the others in the guild database.

You have to become a werewolf to go through the Companion's quest line, it becomes the main story of those quests.

Here's our guide. How it Works The most common way players become infected with Sanguinare Vampiris (the name of the disease) in Skyrim is through combat with Vampires casting Vampiric Drain (each VD spell has a 10% chance of infecting you). If you want to become infected, it's beneficial for you to keep your distance with the vampires so they attempt to cast the spell instead of engaging with you in melee, as the spell is the only way for you to contract the disease. You should be notified under the Active Effects menu when you're infected with the disease. Vampire Dungeons and Locations The following dungeons are locations of generic enemy NPC vampires. [*]Broken Fang Cave [*]Pinemoon Cave [*]Mara's Eye Pond [*]Haemar's Shame [*]Morvath's Lair [*]Bloodlet Throne [*]Fellglow Keek

How much did you save? From what I can see both OEMs are $90 on Amazon currently.

That was just an insane, unusual price. I was shocked when I saw it so I bought it on the spot. I was actually planning on waiting to do this but I figured now that I have this PSU I may as well move forward with the rest. I'll probably do that. No real reason for EVGA other than I've heard they're one of the better ones along with ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI. Regardless of the hate it gets it's still the most recent version of Windows. I figure most people hate it just because of the metro screen, but I read somewhere that 8.1 is getting the option to boot straight to the desktop anyway.

GPU: GTX 760 - $250CPU: i5 4670k - $200Mobo: Z87X-UD3H - $150Case: Corsair 500R - $70Heatsink: Hyper 212 Evo - $30RAM: 8 GB (2X4GB) - $70HDD: 1 TB 7200 RPM - $70SSD: 128 GB - $98PSU: CAPSTONE-750-M - $70OS: Windows 8 OEM - $90___________________________Total: $1098 after several rebates.Anything major I'm forgetting? Not worried about optical drive at the moment. Planning on buying a 1920x1200 ~23" display later for around $250. In the meantime I have an older LCD.Don't plan to overclock initially so I could also probably drop the heat sink. As of right now I'm only locked in to the PSU and case because I found great deals on them ($50 off each). I listed a fairly meh SSD; hopefully there will be a deal on a higher quality Samsung 840 before I start assembling.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=22-136-533&Tpk=N82E16822136533

Zahkrii Do Yol for a sword enchanted with fire damage. In the Dragon language of Skyrim it translates to Sword of Fire. I use UESP's Dragon language page. Coming up with immersive names for your weapons is pretty fun.

Well that escalated quickly. Welcome to YouTube, though.

Oh, really? I had no idea - do you have a link? I don't doubt what you're saying but I'd like to read about how that will be implemented so I can update some of the pages. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll add that shortly.

I don't mind, I just want the link juice.

If you're going to advertise here you should add a site link-back like Zybez.

I'm not saying those aren't good/great games, but none of them are even as complex as Oblivion. It's not about being an open-world necessarily, it's about all of the interconnecting things you can affect. A small example being how you can change the roles/schedules/factions of hundreds of NPCs that in turn alter a great deal of quests, dialogue options, etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JyGlqb1s_n0