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Vesperas_

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

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There will probably be a thread about this popping up over the next day anyway, so I'm taking the initiative to start one. :)

My experience so far... I stood outside of GameStop for about an hour and a half before I was able to claim my copy. I purchased it for PC (of course!) and while it certainly would have been a million times easier to simply purchase it on Steam, I wanted the box, manual and cloth map bonus. The map is much larger than I had thought it would be. One of the tabs that holds the manual in place on mine is actually busted because the map is too big. The manual is pretty basic and it came with the Rage/Prey 2 card (same deal as with Rage except that was Skyrim/Prey 2).

Now, beyond that, if you're considering purchasing a physical copy, don't bother unless you really want the box. There is absolutely no data on the Skyrim disk besides a launcher for Steam. You still have to download the whole game. I'm not a fan of that decision really. The Steam servers are obviously pretty bogged down, so I'm waiting for mine to finish installing.

Undoubtedly, Skyrim will have a bunch of issues but my experiences with Oblivion and Fallout 3 weren't too bad. Fallout: New Vegas was a nightmare for me but I don't count that one since it was made my Obsidian.

Anyone else purchasing Skyrim? What do you think of it?

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I'm waiting for my copy to come in the post as we speak. It's a little tantalising.

Sig-ma said:

There is absolutely no data on the Skyrim disk besides a launcher for Steam. You still have to download the whole game. I'm not a fan of that decision really. The Steam servers are obviously pretty bogged down, so I'm waiting for mine to finish installing.

Wasn't aware of this. What an incredibly stupid idea.

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Wow. I'm really impressed they went with the whole 'blank disc you have to download the game lolz' route. I heard that a few days ago on the escapist, but I really didn't believe they'd do something that jackass. It seems ridiculous to me to force a paying customer to download something, why even have the disc in the first place? Why not just a little piece of paper with a download code? With a hand extending its middle finger next to it. I may be old fashioned, but to not have the data on the disc you bought just seems criminal. It's like buying a CD so you can go home and download the album, but you can't burn it to a CD afterwards so you can listen to it in your car. Buying a DVD so you can download it on-line, but you can't burn it to a DVD so you can bring it over to a friends house.

I've bought quite a few games on Steam, but I understand that I'm paying for a digital copy that's locked to a certain account. When I buy a physical disc, I expect the data for the game to be on that disc. But I guess I'm just old fashioned, and can't fathom how they can put a disc in a game case, but not put the damn game on the disc. It's not going to stop piracy, I'm sure the game will be cracked and on torrents within the week if it's not up already.

Well, and as said above, it punishes the paying customers because they have to wait to download the game they already bought. And some folks, believe it or not, may have a slow internet connection, or may even have to pay for their bandwidth usage, so a 6gb+ download may take for-fucking-ever, or they may not be able to use their internet for jack shit the rest of the month.

I guess I'll just go back to playing Doom.

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Sig-ma said:

Now, beyond that, if you're considering purchasing a physical copy, don't bother unless you really want the box. There is absolutely no data on the Skyrim disk besides a launcher for Steam. You still have to download the whole game. I'm not a fan of that decision really. The Steam servers are obviously pretty bogged down, so I'm waiting for mine to finish installing.

Jello said:

Wow. I'm really impressed they went with the whole 'blank disc you have to download the game lolz' route. I heard that a few days ago on the escapist, but I really didn't believe they'd do something that jackass.


http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/452910-installing-skyrim-from-the-dvd/

The game data is on the dvd, you just need to goad steam into understanding that.

Also, holy shit haha: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt5aUdijAN8

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Yeah, out of curiosity I looked around a bit more on the steam download thing. And as you pointed out, Steam likes to take control of everything and start downloading the game instead of installing from disc. So yes, it can be bypassed, and the files are on the disc which is great. Seems odd to have Steam take over as soon as the disc is inserted but I guess that's why I don't make the big bucks. But to be fair, the first two things I heard about the PC version were that the files weren't on the disc and had to be downloaded. And what's worse is that while it pissed me off, it didn't really surprise me.

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Yeah steam is pretty good in general, but sometimes it can be pretty stupid as well.

Anyway, I purchased through steam and it'll be finished downloading in about 30 minutes here. This is probably the fastest I've got anything through steam. Very surprising for a new release.

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Quast said:

Also, holy shit haha:


I betting somebody at Bethesda is VERY pissed about that right about now. Funny video.

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Good to know you can install from the disc. When I inserted it, Steam automatically launched and it just started downloading. That has never happened to me before, so I suppose I (wrongly) assumed. Initially, my download was moving very slowly but after 5-10 minutes, it kicked into high and finished very quickly. The games clocks in at 5.6 GB.

I only started playing a bit ago but it is pretty damn cool so far. I have 2 minor complaints so far (one is with the menu system) and the other I won't mention so it isn't a nitpick in the back of anyone's mind when they start playing. Despite that, I'm very happy with my first 40 minutes with it.

The character creation is pretty nice compared to Oblivion, I think. I'm starting out with a Wood Elf (I always play Wood Elves) and you can give them grey alien eyes (black, pupil/iris-less eyes). Cool shit. I need to head to sleep shortly though. My wife will be pissed if she wakes up and I'm still pissing around on the computer (yes, she works very early). :P

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Played several hours thus far. Very immersive, though obviously the same Bestheda we've come to love, The animations are frequently awful, and the speech is, while tons better than most other games, still kind of hard to watch. I still don't get how no dev can seem to do a better job with animating characters talking.

Also, encountered two big bugs so far. My girlfriend can't get her weapons to become favorites, and I've had both a crash and an occasion where I could not exit from a conversation with a trader.

All in all, though, well worth the money, doubtlessly.

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Vordakk said:

I betting somebody at Bethesda is VERY pissed about that right about now. Funny video.


On the other hand if I were a developer I would be patting myself on the back so hard after seeing something like that.

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Trip report: Enjoying it so far. Played a bit over an hour and I'm surprised as all hell the game runs rather smoothly and looks great to boot, which is odd because oblivion runs like shit on this machine.

And of course in I guess my classic style I've already fucked up any chance of seeing the main questline. The first town you go to...I um, I killed a chicken and apparently that is the most heinous thing to do. The entire village came after me with axes! After all was said and done, 2 people were dead in the street and one of them was the person I was supposed to talk to for the main quest. Now I guess I just wander around aimlessly.

The bad though? Something is seriously fucked up with the way the game handles mouselook. I don't know what it is or how to 'fix' it. It's just off and feels odd. And the menu system is terrible and I can only hope for a mod to fix that up right quick.

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Quast said:

The bad though? Something is seriously fucked up with the way the game handles mouselook. I don't know what it is or how to 'fix' it. It's just off and feels odd. And the menu system is terrible and I can only hope for a mod to fix that up right quick.

Noticed this too. Horizontal sensitivity is fine but looking up and down with a mouse is horribly unresponsive.

Works fine with a gamepad though, unsurprisingly.

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Not too fond of certain changes so I'll be skipping this one not to mention steam is hard to bare with the poor internet available in my area.

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If I were to wager a guess.... would those changes happen to be the UI that makes Oblivion's vanilla UI look proper for PCs, simplified stats, "skill-tree" level-up system?

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I'm only a few hours in but so far, Skyrim is fucking amazing. I have not experienced any real issues. I am very pleased with how well it runs. When I launched Skyrim, it recommended low settings but I cranked it up anyway and it works fine. Occasionally I will have a minor hiccup / freeze (seems to last less than a second) but it is insignificant enough to be ignored.

My only real complaint is with the menu system and how unresponsive and finicky it can be. You have to be very deliberate with your mouse clicks (especially in dialog) or you'll probably click something you didn't mean to. The way you assign weapons is mostly pain-free with the quick selection system but it could use a little improvement I think (I really miss my hot-keys). Hopefully that will be addressed in a patch soon.

I was a bit curious how the class, talent and perk system would work compared to previous Elder Scrolls games and I honestly feel Skyrim's system is an improvement. Quite a few skills seem to be missing (like athletics and acrobatics) but the perk system more than makes up for it. Leveling skills up requires you to actually actively use them. The skills that seem to be missing are the ones you'd level up without any input whatsoever (for example, just exploring the game world in Oblivion, you'd level up your athletics). The perk system is great, imo. You're blocked off from the higher perks unless you invest heavily in a skill and level that skill up but it is a great way to make the character you want (whether it be a pure character or weird hybrid). You can change your specializations with some work but there are guardian stones which help out by increasing how much experience you gain under certain class specializations (mage, thief or warrior). I like how leveling up is something you actually look forward to now rather than the "meh, whatever" it was like in Oblivion.

Skyrim is extremely immersive. The goofy feel that Oblivion had is almost entirely gone. I'm very happy with it.

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For anyone waiting for me to write music for them or for any teachers who need me to do a project or two....don't hold your breathe.

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6 hours in, an excellent game. There's so much to do I don't know which quest or side-quest to pick next. The world is large and beautiful, and not just technically, but everything from the mountains to the Nordic indoor settings look carefully designed and detailed. The voice acting is as good as it gets for a game with 10,000+ lines, and the character's faces finally look believable. Still a bit expressionless, though. The music is very fitting to the Nordic setting, and beautifully done, as are the sound effects.

Personal highlight is seeing the Aurora Borealis in the night sky:

Looks even better ingame.

There have been a few glitches, mostly some things you may be familiar with if you've played previous Bethesda games like Fallout 3, where you have characters floating alittle above the ground, odd animation state transitions and so on. And it wont work well with 96Khz sound output. for some reason. But no crashes or bugged questlines so far. The interface is well designed and very minimal, but would need a few tweaks to work really well on a PC. I miss being able to use the E, R or Tab key in some dialogs or menus, and the skilltree\starmap navigation can be a bit finnicky.

But it's a great game so far. Wouldn't be surprised if it ended up as GOTY.

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Apparently, you can assign hot-keys. You need to assign an ability or item to your quick select first, hover over the item and simply press one of the number keys. To assign it to a different hand, hold shift and press a number key.

Changing FoV, appearance and whatever else can be easily done via the console as well. Several hours in and still haven't encountered any real issues beyond the menu complaints I made earlier and some NPC pathing issues (which have been negligible).

I am actually extremely surprised how polished Skyrim is (everything considered). I know Todd Howard or whatever mentioned Bethesda purposefully left some bugs in the game because they were funny but beyond the video Quast posted, I haven't seen any. Really seems like Bethesda took many of the complaints about Oblivion and Fallout 3 to heart and did quite a bit to stamp out those issues. Crazy how Bethesda released a game that is (thus far) seemingly less buggy than many other games I've played this year from various other developers who were historically known for releasing very polished games.

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I'm over 8 hours into the game and think it's awesome so far. Skyrim has great atmosphere and I'm really liking the beautiful outside places and the dungeons look snazzy cool.

At this point I want to check out the Construction Kit whenever they get around to releasing it and see how they pieced together the dungeons... I'm not seeing any seams like there was in Oblivion... or I'm being blinded by the fine looking water and all that worn stone. Also need a house mod ASAP or need to buy that house for sale that I came across, which I have no idea is worth buying or not.

The only glitch I had so far is I came out of a fort ruin and noticed there was a 2nd entry which I couldn't reach, so I went back inside, looked at map, then went right back out again and the game locked up solid.

I pissed off one of those giants and his last hit killed me and I flew about a mile into the air. That looked pretty funny.

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I've somehow managed to clock up 20 hours in the game so far (it released a bit earlier in Australia), and wow, it's really an amazing game. I'm consistently being awed by the scenery, some of the views you can get from the tops of mountains are pretty epic. It runs pretty smooth on my system too, which is almost exactly the 'recommended' spec they set for the game. I'm running it on ultra but with a couple of things turned down a bit (shadows and antialiasing), 1920x1080.

As for the gameplay, I've been playing a mage, and the magic system in this is easily the best out of all ES games. It's simplified a little from previous versions, but you can do quite a few interesting things with it, due to being able to have a different spell in each hand, or the same and either combine or alternate them (alternating fireballs can be pretty fun :P). The dragon fights are especially well done for the most part, their animation is generally pretty fluid, they way they perch on random buildings is cool and they can even be somewhat unpredictable at times. Haven't come across any dragons that were much of a challenge so far though, but maybe that's my choice of class + spell schools (destruction+restoration), seems to make lots of things easy as long as I don't run out of magicka (having some ~250% faster magicka regen rate helps a bit :P)

It's crashed on me a couple of times, but I remember oblivion and fallout 3 being somewhat worse in that regard, so I'm not too bothered. The only real complaint I'd have is how awkward it can be to use the mouse with the menus. I have no problem with the menu design itself, it just seems pretty fiddly to interact with unless you use the keyboard only. Oh and the map, while kinda nifty, can be pretty useless sometimes since it doesn't show roads.

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7 hours in and I'm really enjoying it so far. It's a massive improvement over Oblivion and it even rivals Morrowind. I'm playing as an argonian and emphasizing dual wielding, archery, light armor, smithing, stealth, and lock picking. The contrast between the races is pretty nice too. In Oblivion, once you got past their differences in appearance and voice actors, there really wasn't anything to set them apart from eachother. In Skyrim they all seem to have their own defining roles in the game.
I've only killed two dragons so far but the second was a real holy shit moment. I knew they could spawn randomly but I didn't realize they could attack towns so I was pretty surprised when I quick traveled to a town only to see the guards draw their weapons just as a dragon swooped in, landed on a building, and spewed fire at the guards. After the fight all the towns folk ran out and gathered around the corpse, marveling at me absorbing the dragon's soul which was a nice touch.

I am kind of curious as to where the hell all the Argonians are. So far with the exception of two bandits, I really haven't seen any.

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30 minutes in and I got killed by villagers as I slaughtered a chicken.

Game is a lot of fun, played about 4 hours so far, playing the main quest. Glad I got it

A few niggles:

Horses are useless. Esp since you can't fight, use magic on horse back. Though same as oblivion (horses were more useful, faster).

Menus are a little inconsistent - some you have to use the mouse, others the keys with no indication. At times try and change something with the mouse, then the keys stop working forcing you to cancel and go back in to restore them.

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The mouse movement in the whole game is a bit weird. Even looking around is sometimes weird, and this after turning off mouse acceleration in the ini file. My biggest complaint about the menus, however, is you can't rebind the menu keys. I use ESDF to move and rebinding F caused the favourites button to stop working. Poop.

The graphics are pretty sweet. If they aren't sweet enough there are again more things you can crank up in the ini file. For example, you can make the shadows affect the trees.

The lighting is a bit weird I find. Skyrim continues Oblivion's habit of using bright point sources indoors in ways that make it look like the air is glowing rather than the windows. The extra contrast added by the shadows everywhere also draws attention to the mis-use of HDR. Scenes look like HDR photos where a fire is as bright as sunlight and not much brighter than an area in shadow. This isn't a new or unique problem, but it makes me want to scream at developers because Valves used to say they added HDR to Source to avoid this.

I'm having a lot of fun so far. The only glitch I've seen some weird shadow flickering and the odd flicker like a menu decided it wanted to reappear for a frame or two.

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I'm a few hours in, and loving it. It's a huge improvement over Oblivion in almost every way (can't speak for Morrowind as I never played it), and considering the number of hours I ploughed into that game I can expect Skyrim to keep me entertained for a long time.

Runs quite well on my old system, except I get these 5-second pauses here and there while traversing the open plains of Skyrim. Probably down to the fact I only have 2GB of 400MHz system memory, which along with the rest of my specs barely passes the minimum requirements guidelines. Maybe I can tweak a few settings to reduce or cure that issue, dunno. But it's not that unbearable.

I guess the only complaint that I have about the game itself so far is that the menu system is fiddly and awkward, along with the mouse issue mentioned earlier. Otherwise, it's everything that I expected it to be. You could complain about the character animations being a little dated and the textures of objects in the world not being monumentally detailed, but with a game like this you have to look at the bigger picture and marvel at the sheer scale, depth and intricacy of the whole thing.

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I'm 8 hours in, level 10 so far.

While I kind-of fixed the mouse movement issue by disabling mouse acceleration in the ini my biggest issue is that the game is getting kind of hard on the default difficulty. It clearly has something to do with the rather odd leveling system. I'm trying to play a stealthy conjurer. As such I'm trying to put points into marksman, sneak and conjuration, but the problem is that I'm sitting on 6 unspent talent points at level 10. The base skill points you use simply do not level up fast enough it seems to allow one to naturally place the points in their trees regularly. The only one that kind-of does is sneak and that's only because I'm never not in sneak mode and I have the thief's blessing active. Unless I wanted to put them at the bottom of trees I'll never use like heavy armor or destruction.

Why, why, why do the TES leveling systems need to be like this? I do not understand. Oops I've accidentally unlocked a chest, healed myself or made some potions because I'm playing the game trying to have fun and the 'wrong' abilities are leveling me...sigh

Am I doing something wrong?

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About 2 1/2 hours in, lv2 right now. I guess I like to take my time and enjoy the scenery.

That and I'm playing on the hardest difficulty, Master. I'm sure that will bite me in the rear at some point soon.

Playing as an Argonian like I always do in the ES series.

The game looks amazing, the music is awesome, not much else really needs to be said here. Enjoying the game immensely so far.

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Quast said:

Why, why, why do the TES leveling systems need to be like this? I do not understand. Oops I've accidentally unlocked a chest, healed myself or made some potions because I'm playing the game trying to have fun and the 'wrong' abilities are leveling me...sigh

Am I doing something wrong?


I've been wondering about this too. They don't seem to know how to make a system that lets you just play what you want without worrying about things getting harder.

I think of the TES games I've played extensively I prefer Daggerfall's system. It worked out essentially like Morrowind, but with more skills and no attribute multipliers. You did get to assign a variable number of points, but that was based on a dice roll. Its only negative side effect was the tendency of players to want to save before resting, just in case a level-up happened, so they could try again and get max points.

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I like the leveling system in Skyrim over Oblivion. Skyrim has a weird leveling system from what I understand-- you can experience both low and high level enemies at any point but enemies in dungeons and random encounters are leveled with you, within restraints.

That said, I am having the same problem, Quast. I have entered a few random caves and in one, I ran into a necromancer that completely kicked my ass (but his skeleton minions were easy), while other caves not even too far away, felt about right difficulty-wise.

Perhaps someone can explain this for me... how do you effectively use the dual-wield system? I am playing kind of a rogue-type character who primarily uses sneak and archery, with a backup restoration and enchanted dagger setup for close-combat, but you can't block while dual-wielding, so I constantly need to manually deselect my healing spell by going into the quick select menu. I don't understand why I can equip/unequip my dagger no problem by using my hot-key but not my spells (pressing the hot-key again causes me to dual-wield my healing spell, pressing it another time does nothing).

In Oblivion, archery was much more potent early-on (probably too powerful actually). In Skyrim, it is much harder to use the same way as I did in Oblivion, so whereas in Oblivion I could pick off 2-3 enemies and finish the last one with my dagger, in Skyrim I'm having to resort to battling most of them up close and personal. Does anyone have any recommendations for becoming more efficient at melee combat? I don't really want to start hauling around a shield or using a bunch of spells.

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Sig-ma said:

I like the leveling system in Skyrim over Oblivion. Skyrim has a weird leveling system from what I understand-- you can experience both low and high level enemies at any point but enemies in dungeons and random encounters are leveled with you, within restraints.


I don't think enemies level with you at all. Yesterday I entered a dwemer ruin only to be killed almost instantly by a centurion sphere. I haven't gone back since but I'm pretty sure that once I've leveled up a bit and grabbed better gear they'll be much easier.

I'm also wondering if going with light armor was a good idea or not. Right now I'm wearing a full set of elven armor and yet there are a lot of bandits using iron and steel weapons who can easily kill me with two or three blows

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