[Sigfried1977]

I really hope Bethesda patches that mess, and fast. My game is completely falling apart at the moment. Doesn't go from perfectly fine to a wee bit too jerky in 3 or four hours anymore (which is bad enough as it is). Instead performance goes from barely acceptable to completely busted within an hour now. It's basically unplayable at the moment.
I'm exceptionally pissed and disappointed with Bethesda now, that much is certain.

[Cyan]

Originally Posted by Man from Atlantis

TES: Real-life race inspirations

That's a nice find. Thanks for sharing.

Even so, whoever created that list, there are things they got a bit wrong, in my opinion.

Altmer, yes I can see the resemblance here.

Argonians, lovely lovely amphibians. The reference to mesoamerican cultures looks completely off to me, because their colourful plumes come from birds, not amphibians. I would love to see Argonia in the next TES installment though, with lush jungles, Crysis style but with the personal touch of Bethesda. It would be truly amazing. Mesoamericans are fine to me. I have a weakness for argentinians, though, which are southerners, more than meso.

Bosmer, their choice is fine. I will only add that mesoamericans could be categorized here. I like americans -they are dreamy and "innocent" to me, although the USA is a world in itself, and some politicians like Bush leave a lot to be desired, interfering in some places and matters in a way that makes this world a worse place to live-. I know of some americans. not IRL, who would like to live in Canada -great country and people- because of their politicians.

Bretons. Cool, after my Argonian, my next character will be a Breton. I will think about his background.

Dunmer, nice too. I like japanese culture.

Imperials, I am fine with the resemblance of imperials to Romans -and Greek also-, but not so much packing the British empire and the roman empire as if they were so similar. Despite the fact the British countries one of the most advanced nations in the history of humanity, very influential, and having some of the most amazing inventors, historically wise it was mostly a colonial empire just like the spanish & portuguese empire at some point. Or even the german, french or belgian empire.

I mean, the Romans created not only a culture, but are the parents of romance languages, most of the western culture, and even created a religion. You can see their huge influence in the english language. Maybe english people don't realize but they have a lot of expressions from romance languages.

I.E. if you say, "celestial dawn", the world celestial comes from the word cielo -ceo, etc-. Cielo is sky. If that word didn't exist you would have to say something as "skyial down", which doesn't make sense.

I am not Italian, but I am roman catholic. Romans were pagans and their gods were based on greek mythology, but they converted to catholicism because they found a more structured, ritualized, spiritual experience in catholicism.

One of the first victims of Romans was one of our fore mothers, a 15 year old girl who died when romans were still pagans -Saint Aginia or something like that, can't remember her name know, and I don't know her name in English also-, or Saint Mary Goretti -I know a few women IRL who are called Goretti- who died when she was 11. They became saints because they were tortured by romans and they found out that it didn't work, and they were amazed at how catholics had structured their religion, and they started to convert because they found it superior to theirs. I am not a priest, but the priest of my parish, a very cultured person -though not very loved here by some people-, told me this when I had a conversation with him this summer. He also told me he had read thousands of books during his life.

But anyways, before I get off-topic, Imperials resemble me the roman empire more, because they shaped the world in so many ways and are the actual first ancestors of the western culture. The British Empire, in its heyday, reminds me of the Spanish or Portuguese empire, unlike the romans. However, imperials may be well based on the british empire too, because imperial comes from empire. They were my favourite in Morrowind.

Khajiit, well, I think they got it wrong here. They are like amphibians, although in this case just cats. Maybe their clothing is colourful and so on, but it looks to me more like the argonian clothes, both dress in a very colourful manner, like hippies. A misconception americans have is that Gypsies are native of Romania, which isn't true. Gypsies come from Egypt. -Gyp... see the analogy here- I remember seeing the Romani and gypsies connection in an episode of Angel -the Buffy TVS spin-off- when they talked about Angel's background, and I was appalled.

Khajiit are like argonians, in my opinion, in the sense that their special skill bonuses are based on the same abilities both species have in nature.

Nords, yes, they are the perfect stereotype as vikings. Close to where I live there was a very famous battle when Vikings tried to conquer these forgotten lands. It's a battle people here commemorate every year, in July. -btw, some names of the months come from roman emperors-.

I was a Nord in Oblivion.

Orsimer or Orcs, I don't see the resemblace here either. Mongols had an advanced culture, and Gengis Khan was the leader of one of the largest empires in the history of the humanity and was one of the best leaders in the history of humans, too.

If anything, Orcs would be like Huns, especially under the reign of Attila. Attila the Hun terrorized Eurasia in the middle ages -coincidently, the Middle Age began after the fall of the Roman empire, their importance was supreme-, pillaging villages and stuff.

There is a very very famous saying here which says: "You are like the horse of Attila, everywhere you step on the grass doesn't grow".

I still remember the mongolian fable of the blue wolfess and the fallow deer in a game called Age of Empires. I loved the mongol campaign.

Redguards, sounds good to me. I can imagine a new TES taking place in Hammerfell with arabian or middle east motifs. A similar city to Constantinople would be amazing. Back in the middle ages the Persians had a very advanced culture.

I hope the next TES takes place in Argonia. There are islands for expansions -true expansions, not the so called, currently, DLC, which sometimes features the most petty inclusion these days- and there are places with lovely names like Soulrest or Greenglade.

[joker454]

Originally Posted by Sigfried1977

The beauty of the stealth in Bethesda games is how you still get to eliminate everyone. A 15x damage multiplicator for a back stab using a a dagger is pretty impressive. You can one-shot Giants this way. It also works beautifully in tandem with both the single handed weapon and light armor skill, so you can still tank it out in case your sneaking approach fails.

Ah good point, didn't even think of that. I do like to go berzerk with my girl character though, just running into the room slaughtering everyone. Having 5 enemies attacking me at once then secondsd later they are all dead on the floor, quite satisfying.

Originally Posted by Billy Idol

what I realized yesterday: regarding those greybeard guys where you learn shouting...you can go back to them, and ask them about shouts, and they give you small quest which you can do to find the other shouts! furthermore, some of those quests include those masked mini-bosses...there are a total of 8 mask bosses as far as I know...and they are all extremely mighty, but really worth it because you then get their mask...check it out guys!!!

Hmm didn't know that. I've been just wandering the world clearing out any locations I find and I've found many new shouts this way, I guess I should go back to the old dudes and see what they tell me. One shout gave me a little trouble yesterday night to aquire...the dude guarding it would not only disarm me, but he would condure up multiple instances of himself that would all attack you, but you wouldn't know which one was the real one so you had to attack them all. They would also teleport to different locations in the room which made it a bit of a pain. Ultimately he fell to my blade though.

[Sigfried1977]

Supposedly installing an SSD into the PS3 fixes all the hitching and stuttering issues with the PS3 version. Well, being the hopelessly impatient idiot which I am, I just ordered one from Amazon. If it doesn't do the trick I'll just put it into my pc, so it's not really a big deal one way or another. Always wanted one anyway.

[assurdum]

Originally Posted by Sigfried1977

I really hope Bethesda patches that mess, and fast. My game is completely falling apart at the moment. Doesn't go from perfectly fine to a wee bit too jerky in 3 or four hours anymore (which is bad enough as it is). Instead performance goes from barely acceptable to completely busted within an hour now. It's basically unplayable at the moment.
I'm exceptionally pissed and disappointed with Bethesda now, that much is certain.

I hope for them, because I want this game on my ps3. It's really embarassing to see screw so much the 'sony fanbase' from fallout 3 unitl now; why at this point not engaged the same studio who worked to Oblivion indeed this mess, a real & unacceptable shame. Even a bad port it's more playable, it's really ridicolous to release a game in these conditions.

[Cyan]

Originally Posted by Sigfried1977

Supposedly installing an SSD into the PS3 fixes all the hitching and stuttering issues with the PS3 version. Well, being the hopelessly impatient idiot which I am, I just ordered one from Amazon. If it doesn't do the trick I'll just put it into my pc, so it's not really a big deal one way or another. Always wanted one anyway.

The next patch is going to address the PS3 performance bug. There is no mention of the texture bug present in the Xbox 360 version, though. I will install the game to a USB drive meanwhile, whenever it arrives. I pre-ordered it and I am still waiting for Skyrim. It will get here some day, ooooh bby, the vacation time. 8)

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...-28th-november

Eurogamer has made a really beaufiful video showing the time lapse in Skyrim. There are moments when the game is a sight to behold.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...orld-in-motion

[Sigfried1977]

Pete Hines didn't really say anything. Every one of his tweets was kept deliberately vague. "Patch will improve long term performance on the PS3." That sounds roughly like "general performance enhancements" from the Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas patch notes, which turned out to be more like placebos that didn't really do shit.

[Cyan]

Originally Posted by Sigfried1977

Pete Hines didn't really say anything. Every one of his tweets was kept deliberately vague. "Patch will improve long term performance on the PS3." That sounds roughly like "general performance enhancements" from the Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas patch notes, which turned out to be more like placebos that didn't really do shit.

Well, have some faith in Bethesda. They aren't the best at creating bug free games, but I think they will address the PS3 performance bug if they said so.

I know of companies who promised something and never delivered, and vice versa, but I usually think in a positive manner. They will fix it. Sometimes I was a bit regretful that this never occurs... but... the hope and what you call the placebo effect was nice enough that I was satisfied.

[dlm]

Originally Posted by Sigfried1977

The beauty of the stealth in Bethesda games is how you still get to eliminate everyone. A 15x damage multiplicator for a back stab using a a dagger is pretty impressive. You can one-shot Giants this way. It also works beautifully in tandem with both the single handed weapon and light armor skill, so you can still tank it out in case your sneaking approach fails.

+1 for this.

Stealth is simply unbelievably good. Around level 22 or so, I found a glass dagger and mace in a ruin somewhere. The dagger is 24 damage at Superior and can 2-shot a giant before it even has a chance to turn around.

I've yet to find anything less powerful than a giant that doesn't die in 1 hit.



Archery also combos really well with stealth (even with very little skill and no perks in it). In general, a bow is capable of 1-shotting most low-level mobs with almost no investment. Anything you can't kill with the bow, you can shoot and arrow at a location to trick an enemy in to investigating and knife them that way.

[Sigfried1977]

Originally Posted by Cyan

Well, have some faith in Bethesda.

After 3 busted games that all shared the same problems? (and which were never really fixed) Nope, no can do. As much as I'd like to.

[Scott_Arm]

Took me a while to warm up to it, but I'm pretty involved in the game now. Melee combat is better than I had thought at first, as many enemies will block and circle. Still not nearly as good as the melee combat in Demons' Souls/Dark Souls, but it's good enough. So far, adventuring as Dildo Faggins (no offense intended to either homosexuals or dildos) has been pretty good. After figuring out some weirdness with the quest log and the map, and then figuring out the cat guy night vision is mapped to RB, things have gotten a lot better. Right now Dildo is learning some magic. After that, I'll probably beat some up some people for the fighty guys in that town.

Edit: Also, the graphics may not in any individual area be the best of the best, but the overall impression is very good. I especially like the snowy areas, by the frozen water. At a distance, looking over the land can be quite nice.

[NRP]

LOL @ your character's name! I hope you didn't actually choose that yourself.

[Cyan]

Here is the Youtube version of the video featured in the article published by Eurogamer about the time lapse in Skyrim.

Standards haven't lapsed in this video, and some scenes look great. I didn't expect villages to look so nice in the game. I liked the contrast between nighttime and daytime, especially when the torches are lit in some buildings, and the light radically changes its behaviour, for obvious reasons.



If this doesn't seem to be all the information you need, there is an article on the article by Eurogamer here:

http://www.geek.com/articles/games/s...ents-20111121/

[Cyan]

Apparently, the landmass of Skyrim is even larger than initially thought. A PC player made a neat and pretty awesome discovery, when he crossed an arch-like structure using the no-clip command on the console. It is very surprising because it turns out that Cyrodiil and Morrowind are built into Skyrim. Of course, not remotely with the same level of detail, but they are there.

Surprisingly, you can go to Vvanderfell, and see the volcano of the red mountain that drestroyed Morrowind, or travel to Cyrodiil and find the white gold tower.

This is the gate where the PC player found he could cross the barriers Bethesda made to prevent people from traveling to other places. It's in a place called Stendarr’s Beacon



It leads to this place, where the foliage is still exhuberant, but after a while it gradually thins to slowly disappear.

Here you can see Vvanderfell and the volcano that destroyed Morrowind.



Cyrodiil, the imperial city, and the tower in the background.



Top view of the Imperial city



A couple of photos showing where the player was





A lot of more photos of his findings here:

http://ppsh-41.tumblr.com/post/13145...lt-into-skyrim

Although initially as big as Oblivion, this would place this game as one of the open world games with the biggest map created to date. afaik, TES Daggerfall, which I never played, hast the largest map ever featured in a game, because it comprises the same expanse of land as England, according to Bethesda.

This is a picture comparing the videogames with bigger maps.

http://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/u...me-worlds2.jpg

[patsu]

Yay ?

Bethesda to patch Skyrim PS3 problem
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...im-ps3-problem

After pages of forum posts and consumer complaints, Bethesda will attempt to fix the issues faced by PlayStation 3 Skyrim players with a new patch next week.

"PS3 and 360 updates have been submitted for certification. PC coming too. Current estimate is they will be live the week after Thanksgiving," said Bethesda's Pete Hines.

"On the list for this update is improved performance for long-term play on PS3."

A large number of PlayStation 3 players had found that after playing for a number of hours save files were hitting the 9MB mark, causing the game to severely lag, eventually making the game unplayable.

[Sigfried1977]

Originally Posted by patsu

Yay ?

Questionable indeed.

I'm restoring my PS3 system now with a nice SSD inside. Supposedly that's a solution to the problem as well (albeit a very pricey one that shouldn't be necessary)

[Dungeonscaper]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

One wonders how these bugs get through on fixed hardware, but then I remember Naughty Dog's last-minute bug hunting for Uncharted, where one of the team happened to take it home and play it on an original PS3 and encounter streaming nightmares. I guess HDD performance is a variable in supposed fixed-function hardware that's throwing console devs. Is the XB360's cache locked to the faster sectors of the HDD? And when playing an installed game, is the cache used? Cause if it is, and it would make sense to as you use the same IO system, then the head will be thrashing slowing down the cache access. Running off disk, the HDD head can be kept in the cache sector. On PS3, the install could end up all over the HDD depending on how fragmented it is (we have no idea what PS3's OS is like for managing fragmentation), so there could be serious disk thrashing there too.

This is one more why next-gen should have some flash cache. Read/write from that will be constant whether data is coming from discs or HDD.

During shut down (After pressing the power button/ turn off system with controller) the PS3 automatically defragments the hard drive. Data is hardly ever fragmented on the PS3 unless you leave it running 24/7 and delete and install large amounts of data.

[Dungeonscaper]

Originally Posted by Cyan

That's a nice find. Thanks for sharing.

Even so, whoever created that list, there are things they got a bit wrong, in my opinion.

Altmer, yes I can see the resemblance here.

Argonians, lovely lovely amphibians. The reference to mesoamerican cultures looks completely off to me, because their colourful plumes come from birds, not amphibians. I would love to see Argonia in the next TES installment though, with lush jungles, Crysis style but with the personal touch of Bethesda. It would be truly amazing. Mesoamericans are fine to me. I have a weakness for argentinians, though, which are southerners, more than meso.

Bosmer, their choice is fine. I will only add that mesoamericans could be categorized here. I like americans -they are dreamy and "innocent" to me, although the USA is a world in itself, and some politicians like Bush leave a lot to be desired, interfering in some places and matters in a way that makes this world a worse place to live-. I know of some americans. not IRL, who would like to live in Canada -great country and people- because of their politicians.

Bretons. Cool, after my Argonian, my next character will be a Breton. I will think about his background.

Dunmer, nice too. I like japanese culture.

Imperials, I am fine with the resemblance of imperials to Romans -and Greek also-, but not so much packing the British empire and the roman empire as if they were so similar. Despite the fact the British countries one of the most advanced nations in the history of humanity, very influential, and having some of the most amazing inventors, historically wise it was mostly a colonial empire just like the spanish & portuguese empire at some point. Or even the german, french or belgian empire.

I mean, the Romans created not only a culture, but are the parents of romance languages, most of the western culture, and even created a religion. You can see their huge influence in the english language. Maybe english people don't realize but they have a lot of expressions from romance languages.

I.E. if you say, "celestial dawn", the world celestial comes from the word cielo -ceo, etc-. Cielo is sky. If that word didn't exist you would have to say something as "skyial down", which doesn't make sense.

I am not Italian, but I am roman catholic. Romans were pagans and their gods were based on greek mythology, but they converted to catholicism because they found a more structured, ritualized, spiritual experience in catholicism.

One of the first victims of Romans was one of our fore mothers, a 15 year old girl who died when romans were still pagans -Saint Aginia or something like that, can't remember her name know, and I don't know her name in English also-, or Saint Mary Goretti -I know a few women IRL who are called Goretti- who died when she was 11. They became saints because they were tortured by romans and they found out that it didn't work, and they were amazed at how catholics had structured their religion, and they started to convert because they found it superior to theirs. I am not a priest, but the priest of my parish, a very cultured person -though not very loved here by some people-, told me this when I had a conversation with him this summer. He also told me he had read thousands of books during his life.

But anyways, before I get off-topic, Imperials resemble me the roman empire more, because they shaped the world in so many ways and are the actual first ancestors of the western culture. The British Empire, in its heyday, reminds me of the Spanish or Portuguese empire, unlike the romans. However, imperials may be well based on the british empire too, because imperial comes from empire. They were my favourite in Morrowind.

Khajiit, well, I think they got it wrong here. They are like amphibians, although in this case just cats. Maybe their clothing is colourful and so on, but it looks to me more like the argonian clothes, both dress in a very colourful manner, like hippies. A misconception americans have is that Gypsies are native of Romania, which isn't true. Gypsies come from Egypt. -Gyp... see the analogy here- I remember seeing the Romani and gypsies connection in an episode of Angel -the Buffy TVS spin-off- when they talked about Angel's background, and I was appalled.

Khajiit are like argonians, in my opinion, in the sense that their special skill bonuses are based on the same abilities both species have in nature.

Nords, yes, they are the perfect stereotype as vikings. Close to where I live there was a very famous battle when Vikings tried to conquer these forgotten lands. It's a battle people here commemorate every year, in July. -btw, some names of the months come from roman emperors-.

I was a Nord in Oblivion.

Orsimer or Orcs, I don't see the resemblace here either. Mongols had an advanced culture, and Gengis Khan was the leader of one of the largest empires in the history of the humanity and was one of the best leaders in the history of humans, too.

If anything, Orcs would be like Huns, especially under the reign of Attila. Attila the Hun terrorized Eurasia in the middle ages -coincidently, the Middle Age began after the fall of the Roman empire, their importance was supreme-, pillaging villages and stuff.

There is a very very famous saying here which says: "You are like the horse of Attila, everywhere you step on the grass doesn't grow".

I still remember the mongolian fable of the blue wolfess and the fallow deer in a game called Age of Empires. I loved the mongol campaign.

Redguards, sounds good to me. I can imagine a new TES taking place in Hammerfell with arabian or middle east motifs. A similar city to Constantinople would be amazing. Back in the middle ages the Persians had a very advanced culture.

I hope the next TES takes place in Argonia. There are islands for expansions -true expansions, not the so called, currently, DLC, which sometimes features the most petty inclusion these days- and there are places with lovely names like Soulrest or Greenglade.

The Romans didn't exactly convert because of 'other' Catholics, these other Catholics were already Romans. The Romans created Christianity (and arguably the first bible, they wrote the New Testament though), and based it on the teachings of Hinduism and the Egyptian's religion, for instance Set and Krishna died and were ressurected 3 days later like Jesus along with many other similarities which is actually just based on earlier astrology and Sun-god based religions describing the path of the Sun and stars (For instance the Sun, during the winter Solstice, appears to stay at its lowest point for 3 days (hence death) before rising again due to the tilt of the Earth (hence ressurection)). The large yellow circle behind Jesus' head is actually the Sun as he is the 'Son' of God (This is just coincidental though, Sun and Son sound quite different when translated into other languages). In many pagan religions you see the symbol of the cross with a circle around its intersection. The Sun, during this 3 day period sits on the intersection of the Southern Cross (or Crux) constellation, hence the depiction of the Sun on the Cross. In many other religions before Christianity the main person who dies in their anecdotes/ stories and is resurrected tends to have a similar name; Christos, Krishna, Christiu, Kristo etc. which are the basis of the name Christ.

[patsu]

Originally Posted by Dungeonscaper

During shut down (After pressing the power button/ turn off system with controller) the PS3 automatically defragments the hard drive. Data is hardly ever fragmented on the PS3 unless you leave it running 24/7 and delete and install large amounts of data.

I suspected the GameOS has some auto-defrag capability but where do you get the info to confirm it ? ^_^

[Sigfried1977]

I can now confirm that a Solid State Drive pretty much eliminates all the performance problems with the PS3 version. When fast travelling to a larger city like Whiterun after a coule of hours of playing, my game used to be pretty much unplayable, now I can run all the way across the city and maybe get a single hitch or two. Navigating the UI is vastly more responsive as well. It's a day and night difference.

[Phil]

Thanks for the help on wether I should get the game or not. In fact, I have ordered it and should be receiving it by end of this week! Many thanks!

Sigfried1977:
What make and type of SSD are you using? Your information might be something for this topic (http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=59143) which I started a while back on SSDs in PS3s. There's also a bit of information in there that caused some concern that not all SSDs seem to be compatible. I'm looking to get a SSD too for my PS3 (probably a OCZ SSD Vertex 2 120GB), but am a bit concerned it may not be supported. Which one are you using (sorry if answered previously and I missed it)?

[Dungeonscaper]

Originally Posted by patsu

I suspected the GameOS has some auto-defrag capability but where do you get the info to confirm it ? ^_^

Sorry I can't find a source for PS3 defragging on shut down but I'm fairly sure I read it. Solid info on the PS3 hard drive is very hard to find, but this is what I put together over several hours of research:

PS3 uses the CFS (Source) (Cell file system, aka CellFS) which is a UFS2 (Unix File System 2) filesystem with 256-bit AES-CBC/AES-XTS encryption with a sectorsize of 512 bytes (Source). The maximum supported drive size of UFS2 is 1TB and supports fragmented data (source). Some forum users on other sites claim the file system is ext4 based but based on the previous sources ext4 is only similar to UFS2 as both are based on UFS. Ext4 uses extents and allocate-on-flush which greatly reduces fragmentation compared to NTFS. UFS2 uses extents/ extent-like behavior too (source) and UFS uses a similar technique to allocate-on-flush called block reallocation (source) however UFS2's block reallocation can optionally be enabled or disabled (source) and it's unknown if it's in use on the PS3. Some users have reported performance increases after running 'Restore filesystem' and 'Rebuild database' from the PS3 recovery menu (source) but apparently these 2 options only fix corrupt files and do not deal with fragmentation (source).

Conclusion: Data on the PS3's hdd most likely does not fragment easilly and isn't of any, even minor, concern with regards to performance. My unverified claim that the hard drive defragements what little fragmented data does exist on shut-down further emphasizes this as a non-issue.

tl;dr don't worry about fragmentation on your PS3

[Dungeonscaper]

Originally Posted by Sigfried1977

I can now confirm that a Solid State Drive pretty much eliminates all the performance problems with the PS3 version. When fast travelling to a larger city like Whiterun after a coule of hours of playing, my game used to be pretty much unplayable, now I can run all the way across the city and maybe get a single hitch or two. Navigating the UI is vastly more responsive as well. It's a day and night difference.

That's it, I'm getting an SSD.

[hoho]

Originally Posted by Dungeonscaper

That's it, I'm getting an SSD.

Or you could just get the game on PC and not worry about the problems at all

Pretty much all the Betsheda games have huge customization possibilities so anyone can tailor the game to suite their playstlye the best. E.g if I couldn't eliminate the maximum carry weight problem I probably wouldn't have played the game more than a couple of hours at best. Yes, I'm a packrat but that doesn't mean I should try to fit my playstyle to the game when it's trivial to make the game fit me instead and thus maximize the fun I get from it.

[Sigfried1977]

Originally Posted by hoho

Or you could just get the game on PC and not worry about the problems at all

I thought of that myself, but then it occured to me that I really shouldn't reward and encourage Bethesda's shoddy QA by buying yet another copy of the game. After all that SSD isn't only beneficial to Skyrim. Besides that I also didn't feel like starting all over from scratch.

I bought a Corsair Force 3 by the way.