The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

When I had 2 4850's in crossfire I experienced microstutter in a couple games. Far Cry 2 and The Witcher IIRC. FC2 needed the framerate limited to 40fps, and I had to completely disable FSAA in The Witcher in order for it to go away. Now I'm running a single 4870 1gb, and I prefer it.

Skyrim looks amazing :>

Danarchy said:

Unless you're buying a whole new machine, I'm fairly certain you can do it for less than that.

Well, I'd likely go for the highest tier upgrades I can find. Anything leftover after that and the purchase of the game would be thrown into savings, but yeah.

I'm confident my rig will be able to handle TES V, and I payed a grand total of $1100 on it, including $100 for the OS. Just saying.

My desktop is running on hardware that's.... something like 2-4 years old, and aside from the processor, things are upper mid-range at best. High powered graphics card, RAM, and new HDD are my main focuses for upgrade. (Current being NVIDIA 9600GT, 5GB, and 160GB, respectively.)

But still, $1000 is just a base upper bound estimation for tuning it up into something awesome. I'm wanting to max it out on DX11, and still have it playable while recording.

You can't have max settings for the newest games and record it without turning the settings down. FRAPS is just too demanding for such a thing.

As for your hardware, you need a new graphics card. A 9600 GT hasn't been good for years. Could you say what processor you have? That would help me tell you what you can upgrade it to. You have more then enough memory.

Are there any system requirements yet??

I'm running a Core 2 Quad 9650, 6gb ddr2, and a Radeon 4870 1gb, which I think will at least run it well at medium. I can run Crysis maxed at ~25-30fps.

caco_killer said:

You can't have max settings for the newest games and record it without turning the settings down. FRAPS is just too demanding for such a thing.

As for your hardware, you need a new graphics card. A 9600 GT hasn't been good for years. Could you say what processor you have? That would help me tell you what you can upgrade it to. You have more then enough memory.

FRAPS isn't -that- much of a resource hog. It is one, surely, but I know strong enough hardware will allow what I envision(just surely not at 60+ FPS; I'm hypothetically expecting 30-45 or so).

As for the processor, it's an AMD Athlon X64.... 5600+ I think? (Not at home so I can't check.) It's a 2.9 GHz Dual Core. (I know it isn't the fancy quad core or x^n power core processor everyone and their brother gets on their budget PCs these days, but it's plenty powerful in my experience. I've never seen the processor being the bottleneck in my experience with it; it's always been the card.)

I do a fair bit of video editing and such, so the extra RAM is "necessary" for my wants. What I've been thinking about is the GTX460 (I think that's what the model is, $199 US.); good bang per buck and a much better deal presumably than my 9600 was when the 9xxx series was still new. Well, no. Under the hypothetical situation I'd have enough for the 580, and presumably enough for a decent 500GB or 1 TB hard drive, the RAM, and the game. Even under hypothetical situations I seem to flock towards mid-range things I could afford in a more realistic situation.

Though again this is hypothetical (as the repeated use of the word would suggest). I probably can't upgrade anything for quite a while, considering uni expenses and the lack of a fucking temp job offered in this shithole of a state.

Xeros612 said:

FRAPS isn't -that- much of a resource hog. It is one, surely, but I know strong enough hardware will allow what I envision(just surely not at 60+ FPS; I'm hypothetically expecting 30-45 or so).

As for the processor, it's an AMD Athlon X64.... 5600+ I think? (Not at home so I can't check.) It's a 2.9 GHz Dual Core. (I know it isn't the fancy quad core or x^n power core processor everyone and their brother gets on their budget PCs these days, but it's plenty powerful in my experience. I've never seen the processor being the bottleneck in my experience with it; it's always been the card.)

I do a fair bit of video editing and such, so the extra RAM is "necessary" for my wants. What I've been thinking about is the GTX460 (I think that's what the model is, $199 US.); good bang per buck and a much better deal presumably than my 9600 was when the 9xxx series was still new. Well, no. Under the hypothetical situation I'd have enough for the 580, and presumably enough for a decent 500GB or 1 TB hard drive, the RAM, and the game. Even under hypothetical situations I seem to flock towards mid-range things I could afford in a more realistic situation.

Though again this is hypothetical (as the repeated use of the word would suggest). I probably can't upgrade anything for quite a while, considering uni expenses and the lack of a fucking temp job offered in this shithole of a state.

4 GB is more then enough for video editing, especially when editing FRAPS video.

As for the GTX 460, that is a solid upgrade from your old card. Newegg has some models of it for as low as $155. That is a mid-range card as well.

Massive bump, but some new information released by Bethesda: http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1207390-skyrim-fan-interview/

As a Morrowind fan, I'm not too happy about some of the more Oblivion-esque simplifications they're keeping. Especially considering some of the explanations are just plain stupid. Also, perks.

Nothing surprising there. They kept a lot of what worked out well in Fallout 3. I happen to think perks are fun when you don't have too many uber-cheap ones like "here are all the map locations."

I've been hoping they've been watching the Oblivion modding scene and building some of the best ideas in. They might not care, as long as they figure the community will build those features if they're wanted, though.

One thing that seems unclear about houses and marriage is if you marry somebody with a house do you gain ownership in their house as they would with yours? You should, but I wouldn't put it past them to screw that up.

Aliotroph? said:

Nothing surprising there. They kept a lot of what worked out well in Fallout 3. I happen to think perks are fun when you don't have too many uber-cheap ones like "here are all the map locations."

IIRC Oblivion had a sort of perk system too. As you reached a new rank in each skill (apprentice, journeyman, expert, etc.) you'd gain some kind of special ability for that skill, such as the ability to do a roll once you reached the journeyman rank for acrobatics, or the ability to knock over your opponents if you're an expert with bladed weapons

i'm wondering if the dragons are going to be the new cliff racers.

The Lag said:

i'm wondering if the dragons are going to be the new cliff racers.

complete with blight

If ES5 is as engaging and similar in length and amount of content as ES4 then I'll be a happy camper. Can't comment on ES3 or earlier as I never played them.

I miss using spears, and that explanation about the removal of "Mark and recall" is pretty lame as well.

I'll probably still buy this though...

Every debate on Skyrim I've ever listened to reads exactly like this.

"SKYRIM DOESN'T HAVE SPEARS THIS IS BULLSHIT"
"Uh, neither did Daggerfall or Arena"
"IT DOESN'T MATTER SKYRIM DOESN'T HAVE CLASSES EITHER"
"Nobody used classes, the just made their own"
"THE STORY IS PROBABLY GONNA SUCK TOO I MEAN DRAGONS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE EXTINCT THE LORE IS BEING RAPED"
"No they aren't, they're just a rare species. King Edward, Part XII in Daggerfall said that"
"BUT SKYRIM DOESN'T HAVE SPEARS"

>morrowindfans.jpg

All I know about Skyrim is that as soon as it comes out, nobody will be able to find me.

DeathevokatioN said:

...and that explanation about the removal of "Mark and recall" is pretty lame as well.

They could easily make it have a long cast time, or not usable in battle.

Mr. Freeze said:

Every debate on Skyrim I've ever listened to reads exactly like this.

King Edwards is pretty much non-canon anyway*; but the problem with Skyrim dragons would rather be that they're hostile animals rather than an integral, if secret, part of society.

(* It was written by one of the Arena beta testers and did not correspond to TES lore as the developers were building it.)

Personally I don't care that much about spears but the apparent removal of the spellmaker is a sad, sad thing.

On spellmaking...
It's just another hoop you have to jump through. If there indeed is a CS, you should able to customize the spell attributes there. Of course this isn't "legit" so to speak, I haven't heard Bethesda's justification, but it's probably along the lines of "it wasn't perfect, so we deleted it".

On classes...
I don't get it. Cowwa dooty has it, and assuming that's the kind of audience they're going for, I don't see how it would have been too "complex". Having a class added nicely to the feel of "having a character" and helped you with the skill use. Some have said that having a class limits your skill choices, but you'll effectively have to raise only a few skills anyway due to the xp system, so I don't get that either. Pointless removal. What's next, removing attributes? Oh, right... Attributes were kind of strange in MW and Oblivion, having a cap like SPECIAL but having minimal effect even when maxed. Still, a feature in the previous game not being perfect isn't a reason to delete it altogether. I'm all for making Fatigue (Stamina) useful though, previously it was a butt monkey of a stat that tried so hard to be meaningful but just wasn't (more so in Oblivion).

On spears...
Nobody should have been surprised that they weren't returning. The continuous removal of skills is more pressing. Take Mysticism for example. They remove all of its good uses in Oblivion and then go and say "man dude it was like so redundant and useless, so we merged it into alteration". Really now? Bethesda said something along the lines of "we want to control the 'experience' and teleport skills were in the way" on the matter of spells like Intervention and M/R. That sounds very worrying to me. In essence they mean that they want to make big scripted sequences the player cant affect in any way. That doesn't really sound like TES. If they really want you to stay at some location, like the invasion of the imperial city in Oblivion, they could just make an excuse and say something like "the energy currents from the gates prevent teleportation". I don't know if Todd(ler) Howard knows it, but games like TES benefit from emergent gameplay much more than they do from canned content.

Meh. Spears. Was never bothered.

Having mark, recall and levitate would be nice. I don't buy the crap about controlling the experience either. Scripted sequences in games suck.

Things like that have me thinking programmers should be controlling game design. They shouldn't be doing art design, but the gameplay design should be ruled by programmers. This is just going to have me back on my olde rant: nobody with an arts degree knows anything useful. Thankfully, it's probably not that hard to build teleport-spell mods if they are really wanted.

Spears don't do much for me. I certainly never missed them in Oblivion.

I don't even give a crap about levitate. I'd actually prefer to have a grapple and be able to scale walls n shit.

Mark and recall is nice and I used it in Morrowind but didn't miss it in Oblivion at all.

Hmm, a grapple could be good. Daggerfall had wall climbing, but it had nothing to do with grapples or spells. It also had levitate, mark, and recall. Of course it had zero scripted bits and mostly just empty game. :D

I typically don't like removal of these sort of things in sequels/subsequent games; it can work if done right.

Assassins Creed is one example (imho). AC2 removed various features/minigames that #1 had; but it made for a more solid game. After playing AC2, AC1 feels a lot more tedious.

Mafia and Mafia 2 is an example where removal of features it had a very big negative effect (melee weapons, no shooting from vehicles, introducing other features as DLC).

It will be interesting to see how Skyrim turns out. I disliked the levelling in Oblivion and while mods have sorted most of that out, I've never gotten back into it.

While I enjoyed the story of AC, the gameplay got too repetitive. I felt like I was doing a tedious grind to get more story. The story of the game was fantastic, but gameplay was too monotonous for me to play it to the end.

Daggerfall is my favorite in the series, but I'm not particularly concerned about whether or not they remove or change features present in the earlier games. The only thing that stuck out to me as massively broken in vanilla Oblivion was the way the world levelled around the player. So long as they fix that, and provide a decent potential for exploration, I'll be more-or-less satisfied.

Werewolves would be nice, too.

POTGIESSER said:

While I enjoyed the story of AC, the gameplay got too repetitive. I felt like I was doing a tedious grind to get more story. The story of the game was fantastic, but gameplay was too monotonous for me to play it to the end.

That's about what I thought as well. Somewhere around (what I assume was) the midpoint of the game I realized that it wasn't worth sitting through any longer, and I haven't touched it since.

Nobody else I've talked to had the same complaint, so I thought maybe it was just me.

Aliotroph? said:

Meh. Spears. Was never bothered.

Anyone who says they miss spears are either trolling or incredibly stupid. Unless you were using halberds the only way you could even do reasonable damage was with a forward thrust. They were pretty much useless. Also, as far as damage goes:

Daedric spear
Chop: 2 - 9
Slash: 2 - 9
Thrust: 6 - 40

Daedric longsword
Chop: 2 - 32
Slash: 1 - 44
Thrust: 4 - 40

Which would you prefer?

"IT DOESN'T MATTER SKYRIM DOESN'T HAVE CLASSES EITHER"
"Nobody used classes, the just made their own"

Especially true for Daggerfall. I had enough trouble getting out of the beginning dungeon alone with the premade classes (none of them were really prepared to deal with the deadly instakill imp). Leveling up wasn't much easier since a lot of the primary classes for them could only be leveled up in very specific ways.

Craigs said:

(none of them were really prepared to deal with the deadly instakill imp)

Ebony dagger.

In the Q&A session that completes chargen, most spellcasting classes could get an ebony dagger.

Gez said:

Ebony dagger.

In the Q&A session that completes chargen, most spellcasting classes could get an ebony dagger.

I was talking about its bullshit instantkill magical attacks. One of the reasons I always made my character from scratch was so I could choose to have my character be immune to magic.

I don't remember having had too much trouble with it, really. With good footwork you can avoid the attack. With enough hit points you can actually survive one strike and last long enough to kill it. It's a hard fight but still a possible one.