Skyrim

[Glexn]

So. Two hours and twenty-three minutes until Steam unlocks it. Anyone else running out of things to do?

Those console buggers are already playing it, it was released about 8 hours ago. But noooo, Steam is making me wait until midnight. Got that damn Dragontongue song stuck in my head on repeat.

Sigh.

[Anceh]

Unfortunately I cant afford it yet

[BullpupDFWM]

Pick up the SE today, installing it tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon I will share my thoughts.

[Evil_Crawling_eye]

Yeah, i bought into the hype. Ill install it when steam unlocks tonight.

I watched the trailers and it looks good, im really not a dungeons dragons, goblins and ghouls, lightning bolt, lightning bolt guy, but i fancy an adventure and an exploration. The mountains sitting in the distance ready to climb look astounding too. I do appreciate atmosphere.

Fallout 3 was good, but i got le tired of it and decided not to install the expansions. The running and running and always finding the same shit got old.

[Sicamon]

Been playing it for about 5 hours. The first hour was a bit 'hey Ive done this before...' but things quickly got *shock* different and I'm enjoying myself now. Not as many arbitrary encounters with crap enemies like the last one, which is good. Whenever you see an enemy out int he open world in this, it's probably capable of ending you.

Its late and Ive been in fantasy world all day, Ill post my thoughts in a day or two.

I am an argonian rogue, btw.

[Hamz]

You BASTARDS got it early?!

Fuck youuuu

I'm fucking waiting for it to unlock, I got the pre-load done.

[Sicamon]

Originally Posted by Hamz

You BASTARDS got it early?!

Fuck youuuu

I'm fucking waiting for it to unlock, I got the pre-load done.

Some of the Aussie game stores in Victoria broke the street date and, within an hour or two, every game store on this side of the country had done the same. Like sexy dominoes! I have a work night out leaving straight from work today, the actual launch day, so wouldn't have been able to buy/play it until tomorow. Needless to say, I am delighted.

Killing dragons as a rogue is hard as fuck... basically a lot of running away and hiding behind rocks whle chipping away with arrows.

I have encountered one Oblivionesque glitch so far in this that actually ruined my joy proper for a short while. A character gave me a key to their 'home' where I could restock on supplies and stay the night, and the first time I entered the house by using the key, everyone inside immediately recognised me as an intruder and chased me with weapons. I couldn't yield in combat either. Fucking nonsense. Shit like this best be few and far between.

[Injektilo]

I'll just have to watch the trailer repeatedly until doomsday at this rate. bunch of fucking cunts.

[Sicamon]

Originally Posted by Injektilo

I'll just have to watch the trailer repeatedly until doomsday at this rate. bunch of fucking cunts.

I 'like' this. Would you like me to take pictures of my adventures next time I play it? We can make it like a text-based RPG where you direct me via messages.

Did you get a luxurious textured map with your digital copy? Did you fuck.

[Glexn]

I'm nine hours in, and I have to say, pretty damn good. I'm playing a Dunmer sneaky girl.

It's as buggy as any Bethesda game, though. I walked into a city, and immediately every NPC went nuts trying to kill me. A reload fixed it, though. I've had a few CTDs, and I've noticed that my arrows sometimes stop rendering. Makes it hard to aim. NPC's get stuck on the environment just as much as in Oblivion, and the friendly AI is as dumb as ever. Enemy AI is good, though. That old trick of sitting on a rock and shooting arrows at something doesn't work anymore. The NPC's seek out cover pretty quickly if they can't get to you.

The graphics are barely an improvement over Oblivion, which is a shame. I'm running it maxed out, and the textures are really shit. The only thing that saves it from being no improvement at all are the character models and facial textures, which are very good, if obviously dated, and the crisp textures on planks of wood (really). There's also this weird white outline over all the weapons in first person view. Doesn't show up when the weapons and shields are on the ground, or in third person. Also, Skyrim is only DirectX 9. The lighting sucks pretty hard. They've tried to create a sense of brightness in some places by having the screen darken or lighten depending on the weather and light sources, kind of like the new Battlefields do (with proper lighting), when you walk outside, but it just looks dodgy.

The voice acting is really hit-and-miss. Some character's lines are really well delivered, but then the next line will be weirdly dull and flat. The writing is the same. Some dialogue is clever or funny, some is just vapid or banal.

The menus are really frustrating. Pretty often while using the mouse, it doesn't recognise what you've highlighted and picks a random choice, which is very annoying when shopping since there's no buy-back option. Using the keyboard helps, but it's annoying and fiddly and slow. And the hit-boxes for picking up objects are quite big, it's hard to target things precisely when trying to steal, or even open a chest with stuff on top of it when trying not to steal. The inventory and character stuff are all buried in trees and unnecessary scrolling because of the giant fonts.

The HUD fades away nicely and doesn't obscure the pretty foliage, which is great because it's so damn ugly and everything is huge. Every notification plasters giant white scrolling text across the top third of the screen, killing the immersion. The pop-up for opening doors/chests/using things is really large and obtrusive as well. Perhaps I've been spoiled by the DarNified UI mod for Oblivion and Fallout 3/NV, but I really hate Skyrim's HUD, the icons, the menus, the fonts, it's lot of it is driving me nuts. And they still haven't fixed the mouse acceleration problem on menus that's been around since day one of Oblivion.

The levelling is fun, it feels like much less of a grind than Oblivion. I like what they've done with it. The perk system offers a lot more to the customisation, and getting rid of the major/minor skills makes levelling feel more natural. It means you can randomly start becoming a mage if you want, and still be able to level.

Dual wielding is cool, but sometimes it picks random hands when you use hotkeys. For instance, I've wanted to swap my shield for my heal spell, and sometimes it swaps with the weapon instead. For the most part though, it's fun and cool and adds a little more to the combat, making it more involving than Oblivion.

The spells are fucking awesome. So are the bows. There's no more turning people into pincushions, just a few well placed arrows takes most things out. This is balanced by barely being able to move while drawing.

The crafting system is a lot more fun, and instead of having to maintain weapons and armour, now you find parts to upgrade them. There's cooking, and smithing armour and weapons from scratch, too. Pretty cool.

Quests are a lot more fun, too. The main quest in Oblivion and Morrowind were pretty lame, but Skyrim is shaping up to be much more interesting. There's still the obligatory fetch quests, but they've even jazzed up the guild quests to make up for it. So far, the Companion (Fighter's Guild) quests are pretty great.

The way the world levels is just as annoying as Oblivion. They made it so that when you go through an area, NPCs stay at that adjusted level for the rest of the game. The downside of that is it's incredibly easy. I'm playing it on the hardest difficulty and haven't found much of a challenge yet, including the dragon (though I've only killed the first one so far). Except for the trolls. Those bastards hurt.

Overall, I'm loving it. It's awesome fun, but they managed to carry across nearly all of Oblivion's niggling little things into a brand new engine. I'm not sure how. Skyrim basically needs all those Oblivion overhaul mods ported over for it to be fantastic.

[BullpupDFWM]

Okay, I might have to wait for a patch before I can even play this thing. The controls are total buttsauce, to the point of being unplayable. It's running slow as hell, even with everything set to minimum (on a system that plays Battlefield 3, Metro 2033 and Dead Island all on decent to high settings with no issues). No matter how much I've played with the settings it just runs and plays shit. I'll try it on my other system as soon as it's set up, but I was really looking forward to this and it has totally shit the bed.

[Glexn]

I had the same issues with performance, but I discovered I can max it out as long as antialiasing and anisotropic filtering are no higher than 2x. Maybe it'll work for you?

[BullpupDFWM]

Turned antialiasing off, got everything on medium except for shadows which are on low, and got anisotropic at 16, and it seems to be working fine now, except for the occasional hiccup. I'll play with it a bit more with those two off and see what happens.

[Glexn]

Cool. That hiccup, every now and then it locks up for a moment? I get that like clockwork, and it doesn't seem to have anything to do what's happening in the game. Doesn't seem to cause any significant problems, though.

[BullpupDFWM]

Yeah, it seems the AA is the big problem. Got everything on medium with AA off and it runs fine, with AA on it's fucked.

[Raptor]

So you might enjoy this visual comparison then:
See The Differences Between Skyrim's Four PC Graphics Settings



Low ---> Ultra

[BullpupDFWM]

There is absolutely no noticeable difference between those screens.

The difference in game is pretty glaring, medium looks very nice, low looked utter shit. Gonna try it on high (and gradually increasing) with the AA off and see how it runs.

[Raptor]

I suppose you'll see it most when in motion.
Also if you open the screens up fullscreen and compare side by side it's easier to spot differences. (check the trees and shadows)

Also a story on the performance from Tom's Hardware:

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: PC Performance, Benchmarked : Can Your PC Handle The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim?

Gamers at the entry-level side of the spectrum should be happy to learn that a GeForce GT 430 or Radeon HD 5570 delivers a 35 FPS minimum frame rate at 1680x1050 using medium details. As settings drop, so do CPU requirements. So, any dual-core processor running at 2 GHz or more should be ample.

[constrector]

I've been running it without a hitch on high (havn't tried ultra). 5 hours non-stop and not a hic-cup.
My sneaky heavy armor Argonian from Morrowind and Oblivion is back. Heh, I'm still using a 360 controller to play on my pc though, after the first two, switching would have just felt weird.

[Anceh]

Decided to get this so I did and its fucking awesome like is stated here a lot.

[Glexn]

If you want to max out the graphics beyond the settings in the launcher, try this.

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim - graphic mod (ini-tweaks) maxed out HD

Close

You need to upgrade your Flash Player

It's a pre-configured ini file, and fixes a lot of the graphical issues, like the awful shadows, and it adds better shadows to the environment, and a few other things. The download link in the description. I'm running it maxed out with this ini, but with AA and filtering on 2x, and there's not a performance hit to speak of.

For reference, I have a Phenom 9600, a Radeon HD 5770, and 5gb RAM.

I also made a mod. I retextured the Dark Brotherhood clothes, because I think the combination of dull red and grey looks kind of crappy.

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=168

[Eldritch]

How does it play on Xbox 360? I am thinking of getting it for that platform, but I'd rather not if it turns out to be unplayable.. I really do not want an FPS or a game where aiming is hard as hell for a console FPS newbie.

[Sadogoat]

Went to Best Buy last night to snag a PC copy and despite their stock terminals saying there were 8 copies in the store, none of the staff could locate a single one (not including the 2 expensive 'collector's editions'). The stock terminal also said that no other stores in my region currently had any copies. What utter bullshit

Of course there were plenty of X360 and PS3 copies but I'll be damned if I'm getting a console version.

[Anceh]

Why not just get it on Steam Sado?

[Sadogoat]

Because I have credit with Best Buy that would save me spending $60 out of my wallet.

[Sicamon]

Originally Posted by Eldritch

How does it play on Xbox 360? I am thinking of getting it for that platform, but I'd rather not if it turns out to be unplayable.. I really do not want an FPS or a game where aiming is hard as hell for a console FPS newbie.

Plays good. Looks about medium exteriors, high interiors, going on pc graphics shots Ive seen. Aiming is fine with a pad. If you use the bow a lot, you quickly unlock a slow-mo zoom ability so a mouse isn't necessary.

Other than that I haven't had any problems other than the usual cross-platform glitches. Couple of cases of characters disappearing etc but that stuffs more 'broken game' than console fault.

My pc could easily run Skyrim, but I chose to get it on the Xbox, so rim my ass motherbitches.

[Raptor]

Originally Posted by Sicamon

My pc could easily run Skyrim, but I chose to get it on the Xbox, so rim my ass motherbitches.

How long's the que by now ?

[Sicamon]

If I lie on my back with my feet at my head, you can all gather round in a circle, like kittens lapping at a saucer of milk.

[Raptor]

I prefer liek this:

[Sadogoat]

Originally Posted by Sicamon

My pc could easily run Skyrim, but I chose to get it on the Xbox, so rim my ass motherbitches.

Typical fanboy statement if there ever was one....