TES V: Skyrim Discussion Thread

I agree. If it wasn't for the bugs, it would deserve an 11/10 .

Graphics are amazing. Can't even begin to tell how many time I went "wow" over the sheer beauty of the environments. The design of the cities is excellent, as well as the dungeons and the countryside in general.

Story is incredibly addicting. I decided to skip the main quest for now and just started randomly exploring about. There are so many things to do, I haven't even began scratching the surface of completing most of my quests.

Immersiveness is over the top. The wonderful music helps

Pretty much game of the year, hands down. Every other RPG I have played before this (and I've played a lot including Chrono Trigger and FF VII that are still in my favorites list) doesn't hold a candle to what Skyrim has accomplished in creating an actual Fantasy parallel world.

Don't patch to 1.2 though, many extra bugs. My Xbox360 controller wasn't working with it anymore. I just reverted to the old patch by replacing the new patch files with the old ones.

Go on my fellow dragonborn,
FOOS!

 

I agree with a majority of this. Skyrim is a good game, but it's not perfect. Maybe GOTY, but not many great games came out this year.

There used to be a time when 10/10 ratings meants the game was 100% perfect and was innovative. Skyrim isn't either.

 

Witcher 2 still gets my vote. Even though it was DX9, it did it right visually. It pushed the limits of any PC rig available. The level of detail is astounding. Skyrim, they made an expansive world look great, but that's IF you stay far away. The low textures is apalling sometimes. Witcher 2 took advantage of bump mapping, ambient occlusion, the best sun rays, light filtering I've ever seen, nearly photorealistic at times, just fantastic.

The combat for me, Witcher 2 takes it again. I love the dodging, the rolling. I love the spells a lot more than Skyrim. The spells were just something extra to help, but mainly still a sword swinger. I can't stand the melee fighting in Skryim.

Not like all of you, but I'd rather take a fantastic fantasy story over a free-roaming sandbox fantasy land. Skyrim so far, storywise is just very boring. I preferred DA:O and Witcher 2 over Skryim in terms of story content.

But Skyrim is a great RPG. That's where I leave it. It's a great RPG, but for me, Witcher 2 takes the crown for 2011.

 

No, it is not Witcher 2 or TES V. Honestly, I don't know how you were so far from the mark. It is all about Street Cleaning Simulator. Street Cleaning Simulator User Reviews on PC - GameSpot.com

Walls disappearing now, flesh disappearing, crashes to desktop. Not a big fan of 1.2 so far. Might have to take a look at LAA patch soon.

 

Thats why im love Nintendo games. :3
They cant patch the game after release so they actually have to quality test before shipping.

Still rooting for Patch 1.2.1 or whatever they end up calling it.

 

Probably because Nintendo has released the same couple games over and over again for the last decade(s).

I haven't had a single bug by the way in Skyrim except one floating mammoth. I've actually never had trouble with Fallout, Skyrim or any notorius buggy games. Just lucky I guess.

 

Yeah I did. Unfortunately it changed nothing.

 

just began playing skyrim last night, somehow i expected more out of the graphics, but so far so good.

 

1. Walk and do not fast travel
2. Give it 10 hrs....

To be honest I hated Skyrim the first 5-8 hours (having never played TES before). It felt misguided, lack of story and purpose. Now I am dead sucked in.

Only complaint: interface.
Where is my char stats? detailed ones...

Love the game though

 

I think Skyrim is still a fantastic game. Sure, it's got bugs, but bugs didn't stand in the way of Morrowind winning GOTY awards all around.

I use the FXAA injector, but messed with the settings to reduce the saturation and cut down on something called Techni-something, which alleviated the problem of the game appearing... "grainy".

 

I just use Skyrim Enhanced Shaders, which I found to give the game a much better look, without losing the skyrim feel. It also comes with an fps counter that is handy.

 

lol yeah right, you'll make at least 50+ more threads and/or posts bashing the game.

 

??? I think you're misreading what he's trying to say...

 

Mods worth looking at?
I've got Enhanced Night Sky at the moment, but is there anything else, other than FXAA, which is recommended? I'd prefer completed as compared to work in progress, but if it is close to completion I'll just bookmark it and keep an eye on it.

 

I prefer the ENB-Sourced Enhanced Shaders over the FXAA. I tried the FXAA Injector since the inception but I when I tried the Enhanced Shaders, I found the game way more crisp without overstaturation and oversharpening like what the FXAA Injector does so I am now more of a Shaders guy over the FXAA.

 

If your looking for good mods, but want to keep the original feel of skyrim true then, as I posted earlier the STEP (Skyrim Total Enhancement Project) is awesome. These are the mods:

http://i930.photobucket.com/albums/ad143/Vapkez/Capture-2.jpg

STEP - Skyrim Total Enhancement Project at Skyrim Nexus - Skyrim Mods and community

 

Some of the mods included in STEP are stupid and don't fit the feel of TES universe at all.

Really, once the 2k HD texturepack by Nebula matures, all one needs is that, better NPC modelling, better item textures, and the game would look spectacular. Any further changes (e.g. shaders) just ramp up contrast/exposure/saturation to ridiculous levels and it might look "cool" but really it's usually more unnatural than not.

 

I agree, I do not use all of his mods, you can see that in the picture. But, he does all of the legwork to find good mods, and for that, I give props to him.
SES does not really do much saturation at all, it does a lot of the effect tweaking to make the game run smoother and feel better. So, I do recommend that enhancer.

 

Speaking of mods, have you guys seen this retexture mod? Holy crap

Serious HD Retexture Landscape Skyrim at Skyrim Nexus - Skyrim Mods and community

 

Yes, I downloaded it, but have not gotten around to installing, looks good. Have you used it yet?

 

I tried it; it's not good...too "unnatural" and photorealistic textures doesn't fit with the art style used in Skyrim.

Better wait for e.g. the Skyrim HD 2k textures to update all the environment textures; he seems to know a lot better how to relatively conform with the vanilla artistic style.

 

I agree, I don't like these supposed HD mods so far. They make the game world look unnatural and over sharpened.

 

I like this guy's Whiterun HD retexture though, he did a nearly 100% "vanilla-look" based HD reconstruction of all of Whiterun's textures, and it looks fantastic, not just oversharpened everything.

It's a shame though that he abandoned the idea of retexturing the entire game.

 

Whiterun looks fine on stock. What I do need is a complete HD reconstruction of Windhelm. That place is so friggin' fugly as hell.

 

I see. From the pics it looked like the dev used the same style as Bethesda made though. Perhaps it was too realistic and didn`t fit with all the other unchanged graphics. Many change to a different texture but this looked like a winner. Many good feedback from it too. Oh well, guess people have different taste.

 

Ok, i had been trying to avoid starting this till the Christmas break but i could not resist anymore and started last night. Anyway, what happened was i got the golden claw quest from Lucan in the beginning before i had actually gone to whiterun. When i returned from the quest i was randomly attacked by Faendal, Gerurd, Sven and two others. They all kept calling me a traitor. Could anyone tell me what happened????

 

You probably have a bounty from murdering/assaulting someone?

 

Yeah you can't kill anyone you want usually unless you kill every witness in the area. But some witnesses are unkillable which makes it very problematic. People with names usually can't die in town. You can kill nameless like bandit, imperial soldier etc.

 

Thats the thing, i killed/assaulted no one in the village. Simply completed the quest and got back and was attacked. Must be some sort of glitch. I had to kill them.
Even tried reloading from an earlier point before i started the quest. I leave the village and everyone is fine with me, get back after the quest and they attack me(not all of them though, the trader Lucan and his sister, Sven's mom and the drinking buddy guy are the only ones that don't attack)

 

It doesn't have to be Riverwood itself; your crimes are tracked within the entire hold of Whiterun, which includes the cities of Riverwood and Whiterun themselves, as well as other places in that territory.

 

Kinect Mod Video

This looks like it would be a really fun way to play Skryim! Although the kids would kill me if I stole the Kinect from the Xbox and the wife would probably kill me if I bought a second one for myself.

 

This game has changed the way I look at music forever!

 

Looks like a Windows version is coming eventually anyway.

Maximum PC | Microsoft Tweaks Kinect Firmware, Windows Hardware Coming

 

new update out now. Will the dragons fly the right way now? fingers crossed.

 

Fixed the friggin' elemental resistance break. Cool!

 

I saw the version number just now. I guess it's at v1.3.7 now (if I remember the number correctly). Heading up the 7000 steps was a little exciting today; I was going up a steep incline of stairs and I could not see the big snow sabre cat running at me until the very moment I got to the top plateau .

 

Figured I should ask this here rather than make a new thread.

Would it be a good idea to play Morrowind and Oblivion before playing Skyrim? I've never played an Elder Scrolls game before so I'll be completely new to lore, fighting mechanics, classes, spells, everything!

 

I would only play TES: III and TES: IV if you want the lore (background story) but otherwise Skyrim's game mechanics has been severely dumbed down since TES: III and TES: IV. Therefore, if you don't care about the lore (which is quite a shame if you do since Bethsoft are very good writers), then you can just proceed to Skyrim (and catch up on the lore by reading UESP or something).

 

No. It just might be fun for you is all. Skyrim takes place in a different area of Tamriel. And it takes place 200 years after Oblivion.

Anything you'd need to know in terms of lore is available in books you collect.

 

Thanks for the fast replies! I think I'll end up playing Skyrim this winter and definitely going back to play the older games.

 

I have never played TES before skyrim, and it's no issue. Sure you could probably appreciate things other could not, but I guess overall it wont matter too much.

if you played fallout, and you have not played the original Fallout (1997), you survived as well. (Though i loved the original fallout and think ever body should play it! )

 

I played a little of Oblivion before Skyrim but in my opinion, Skyrim is much more polished and enjoyable. I feel everything is vastly improved so I don't think I could enjoy Oblivion or the others as much anymore. If you are going to play the old ones, I would stay well away from Skyrim otherwise it may spoil you with its improvements.

 

Agreed; Oblivion is smack dead in the middle between "retro" and "current-gen", which unfortunately devalues it a lot.

 

Just put about 10 hours into skyrim... its a better game than oblivion for sure. better combat and level up system finally makes sense.

 

Not to hijack this thread, but Oblivion runs like poo on my i5. I'm talking FPS in the teens when there's any significant amount of NPCs on the screen, and one core maxed while the others are doing nothing. Is this just poor optimization, or is there something I can do to make it run like a game from 2006 that was specced for a P4 should?

 

You've clearly a problem. My old C2D ran Oblivion flawlessly (mix of mid-max settings). Could be your GPU.

 

I second this. Everything you need to know is available in books ingame. I would at least recommend reading about the Great War and the Oblivion Crisis. That will get you mostly up to speed. You can learn the important bits through quests/etc as well.

 

Sorry to pull this up after so many days. The reason I ask is because you seem to be hating on this game an awful lot for someone who has clearly enjoyed themselves for a big chunk of time. I did read that you admit it's a great rpg, and that you like Witcher 2 more, but I'm a bit confused by all the hate

Then again, that seems a common theme with this game. If you take several parts, such as the graphics or melee play or the fairly weak main questline, it fails on several fronts. But throw them all together and it's a masterpiece, imo.

 

I think it has more to do with hulawafu77 being disappointed with the lack of work on the PC version compared to Xbox 360.
But the worst version was released for the PS3 folks. D;

 

My issues aren't with the game content. My issues are with the technical side of the game.

1). The game runs on 2 threads, which means even though it will be distributed across 4 cores on a Quad Core, only one core will be stressed, the other 3 aren't doing much. It won't take advantage of logical cores and just about every quad core from Intel now has hyperthreading.

2). Bethesda offloaded shadows onto CPU. So the game runs on two threads on the CPU right now. Among that it has Radiant AI for all the characters in the game. CPU is also doing the draw calls, single thread, telling what the GPU to do. Then it has physics for the game on the CPU. AND it has to do shadows???? Probably also why shadows in this game are terrible.

3). The game doesn't have DX11 support. Bethesda said the game would have DX11 rendering for performance, and I'd expect Mult-Threading support, more draw calls from CPU to GPU. Get AMD on board with that, with command line support, which Nvidia already supports.

4). They tied the mouse movement to the FPS. They fixed some of this with Patch 1.3.

5). If they did the above, the performance would be greatly increased. They should have SSAO, ambient occlusion support then, since most computers will be able to use that.

My overall disapointment is that, this is a game made 4 years ago, that's what it is. It's a 2007 game, not a 2011 game. And as such, it should be running smooth 60 FPS constant. But it doesn't. This game doesn't have any right IMO to be running any less than 60 FPS on any mid-range PC right now.

So if Bethesda wants to release a game with low quality textures and expect the mod community to provide the High Quality textures etc, then they should provide proper support for modern hardware. As the mod community adds better quality content for the game, the technical limitations of this game is just going to cause the game to run slower and slower, and with more crashes etc. It's going to become problematic.