TES V: Skyrim

[Sxotty]

Well, just finished the Dark Brotherhood quest line....I have to say, that is definitely the best quest line yet

It's actually of a reasonable length, unlike the others that feel like they're over before you've begun. It almost feels like the Dark Brotherhood quest line was finished first, and then the others were cut because of development constraints.

I have to question this. The first real mission you have to kill a bandit and optionally kill an old friend. In prior games you could have talked the old friend around and still been rewarded. Not only was there no option to as far as I can tell, but when I talked to the old friends family they thought she was already dead although she was well alive still... just poorly done. It would have been easy to make that better.

 

[Bludd]

This game is unadulterated shit sometimes. I was clearing out this cave looking for a guy to confront (ie. talk to). I found him in a room with some enemies and I killed one enemy and then went to talk to him, figuring my follower would mop up the last bogey. Well, she didn't. While I was talking to the jerk, she just stood there letting the bogey fire arrows at me.

Unfreezing dialogue mode wasn't the best idea, imho.

 

[Malo]

1.3 update now on Steam apparently?

Update 1.3 Notes (all platforms unless specified)

General stability improvements
Optimize performance for Core 2 Duo CPUs (PC) (woohoo for me)
Fixed Radiant Story incorrectly filling certain roles
Fixed magic resistances not calculating properly
Fixed issue with placing books on bookshelves inside player purchased homes
Fixed dragon animation issues with saving and loading
Fixed Y-look input to scale correctly with framerate

We’re also planning on rolling out support for 4-Gigabyte Tuning (Large Address Aware) next week for our PC users. Stay tuned!

 

[homerdog]

I still have a Core 2 Duo so that makes me happy.

Also the impending 64bit support should alleviate some of the stability issues some of you guys are having. The game has been very stable for me, but I don't have much going on in the way of mods. I imagine if you load up a bunch of tweaks and enhancements you could easily run into the 2GB limit, which causes an instant CTD with no error message as far as I can tell.

 

[Sxotty]

I still have a Core 2 Duo so that makes me happy.

Also the impending 64bit support should alleviate some of the stability issues some of you guys are having. The game has been very stable for me, but I don't have much going on in the way of mods. I imagine if you load up a bunch of tweaks and enhancements you could easily run into the 2GB limit, which causes an instant CTD with no error message as far as I can tell.

It crashes for me some, but usually when I alt tab to do something else. Fairly stable I would say.

 

[hughJ]

...Also the impending 64bit support....

They said 4GB/LAA, not 64bit, or am I missing something?

 

[Albuquerque]

I ran into that ONE scenario where my first scripted interaction with a dragon as part of the Graybeards questline resulted in seven CTD's in a row. That was infuriating to be sure, but I have never since had a CTD situation.

I'm generally pretty forgiving about games of this "size" having quirky issues, and while infuriating, even that particular instance I'm generally willing to overlook so long as it doesn't happen again.

They said 4GB/LAA, not 64bit, or am I missing something?

LAA would only provide 4Gb on a 64-bit system; a 32-bit system could only ever allow 3Gb, and only if the user manually adjusted their boot.ini or BCD file to use the /3GB switch. Meaning, for the grand majority of users, only 64-bit OS owners will see the difference.

 

[homerdog]

They said 4GB/LAA, not 64bit, or am I missing something?

I didn't mean a 64bit executable (I doubt they'll bother with that). Just that they will enhance stability for those with 64bit OS with a LAA patch. Which should be most Skyrim players, since according to the Steam survey more than half of PC gamers are on Vista/7 64bit.

BTW WinXP (32 + 64bit) is down to 18%. But sure it still makes sense to release DX9 only PC games.

 

[KimB]

This game is unadulterated shit sometimes. I was clearing out this cave looking for a guy to confront (ie. talk to). I found him in a room with some enemies and I killed one enemy and then went to talk to him, figuring my follower would mop up the last bogey. Well, she didn't. While I was talking to the jerk, she just stood there letting the bogey fire arrows at me.

Unfreezing dialogue mode wasn't the best idea, imho.

Why the hell would you fire up a conversation when somebody is firing fucking arrows at you?

 

[Bludd]

Why the hell would you fire up a conversation when somebody is firing fucking arrows at you?

He was fleeing.

 

[KimB]

He was fleeing.

Well, you *could* have just exited the conversation (tab on PC) and gone after him when he came back

 

[Bludd]

Well, you *could* have just exited the conversation (tab on PC) and gone after him when he came back

Or the follower could be sensible and KILL the fetcher.

 

[Entropy]

Seeing as there are quite a few reliable old hands here, I have to ask about the levelling.
I hated Oblivions auto-levelling to the point of leaving the game when I realized its consequences, and never going back to it. Time was too short. And it has gotten shorter since.
I've understood that Skyrim still implements a degree of auto levelling, but somehow "less". My questions are twofold:
How does it actually work?
If I really hate an auto-levelling world a la Oblivion, should I even bother picking the game up? Even 10-20 hours of my time is awfully precious these days, and I would really appreciate any aid in avoiding spending them pointlessly.

 

[Dresden]

Apparently, the LAA issues are being adjusted, next week:

"They also announce they will be rolling out a patch next week for the Windows PC edition of the RPG sequel to support Large Address Aware configurations."

I know it's all been explained before, but could someone tell me what exactly the LAA is?

 

[Bludd]

Apparently, the LAA issues are being adjusted, next week:

"They also announce they will be rolling out a patch next week for the Windows PC edition of the RPG sequel to support Large Address Aware configurations."

I know it's all been explained before, but could someone tell me what exactly the LAA is?

Some info here

http://www.monash.edu.au/policy/gp-laa.htm

 

[Dresden]

Some info here

http://www.monash.edu.au/policy/gp-laa.htm

I assume Skyrim is only a 32 bit program, therefore utilizing 2 GB or RAM. Right? If that's the case, no wonder my game runs like crap, sometimes.

 

[pcchen]

I assume Skyrim is only a 32 bit program, therefore utilizing 2 GB or RAM. Right? If that's the case, no wonder my game runs like crap, sometimes.

Technically, under x64 Windows, each program should be able to have their own 4GB address space (the same should also apply for x86 Windows with PAE, but unfortunately after Windows XP SP2 this function was removed because some wide spread driver incompatibility issues with PAE). Therefore, all programs should be able to access up to 4GB under x64 Windows. Unfortunately, older x86 applications only see 2GB address space, and in order to maintain full compatibility with all possible old programs, the WoW64 sub-system under x64 Windows (for running 32 bits applications) default to 2GB address space for each application. Since it should be possible for all applications, without modification, to access 4GB address space, Microsoft introduced a flag which basically lets an application to claim that "I'm good so I want to have all 4GB address space!" In theory (again) all applications should be able to enable this flag without any trouble and cost.

However, since almost all applications use some 3rd party libraries, it's difficult to say that if any of these libraries are 4GB compatible (e.g. doing something stupid like modifying the MSB of a pointer), and that's why most developers play safe and do not enable this flag by default. For most applications it's actually fine because few applications really use that much memory. Games, of course, is completely different.

 

[Kyyla]

Seeing as there are quite a few reliable old hands here, I have to ask about the levelling.
I hated Oblivions auto-levelling to the point of leaving the game when I realized its consequences, and never going back to it. Time was too short. And it has gotten shorter since.
I've understood that Skyrim still implements a degree of auto levelling, but somehow "less". My questions are twofold:
How does it actually work?
If I really hate an auto-levelling world a la Oblivion, should I even bother picking the game up? Even 10-20 hours of my time is awfully precious these days, and I would really appreciate any aid in avoiding spending them pointlessly.

Well I'm level 40 now and most of the mobs I run into now are tougher versions of the originals for example for draugr I get draugr wights, scourges and deathlords. This seems to be happening at least in all the new dungeons I go to. So yeah there's a large degree of auto-leveling. IMO the Gothic way is superior.

 

[KimB]

Seeing as there are quite a few reliable old hands here, I have to ask about the levelling.
I hated Oblivions auto-levelling to the point of leaving the game when I realized its consequences, and never going back to it. Time was too short. And it has gotten shorter since.
I've understood that Skyrim still implements a degree of auto levelling, but somehow "less". My questions are twofold:
How does it actually work?
If I really hate an auto-levelling world a la Oblivion, should I even bother picking the game up? Even 10-20 hours of my time is awfully precious these days, and I would really appreciate any aid in avoiding spending them pointlessly.

My impression of the auto-leveling in Skyrim is that it is much less glaring as it was in Oblivion. One way it gets around the issues with Oblivion is that objects laying around the game world are now auto-leveled just like objects in chests. While having additional auto-leveling may seem like a step backward to you, in reality it tends to hide the auto-leveling, making it less obvious. Another thing that makes the auto-leveling less obvious is that no matter your level, you still run into large numbers of low-level opponents (and items). In fact, I'd say that most of the opponents you will face in any given area will be low-level no matter your level. But as you gain in levels, you start to find clusters of high-level opponents that can, on occasion, and depending upon your character build, be rather challenging.

There also isn't the issue where you'll suddenly start running into bandits fully decked-out in glass or daedric armor. In fact, glass and daedric are always relatively rare in the game, no matter your level (daedric being much more rare than glass).

It also helps that it's not completely auto-leveled. You can still run into rather powerful enemies at rather low levels if you head into the right (or wrong) dungeon or area of the map. There are also a large number of pieces of equipment that are independent of level (on enemies, in chests, and sometimes just sitting around).

 

[Vadi]

I'm not sure about the leveling, I'm level 20, light armour, and I think having relatively high smith and sneak skills make fights tougher for me. I read that mountains are more dangerous than the rivers.
Now, when I enter bandit camps, I can kill with one hit mostly, only the leaders are tougher. The usual bandits don't carry enchanted weapons, their armour and skills are better.
In one quest dungeon, the skeletons are also weak, but the boss can kill me in two hits (with a two-handed sword).
Dwemer ruins are dangerous for me still, I can barely survive a group of the easiest enemies there (no, not spiders).
The fauna has tougher species that I can cope OK with, but the even tougher ones I have to look out for still.
Dragon encounters level up with you.


I tried the cell load variable, and it can introduce very visible mesh holes, which usually lead to a CTD, when you travel in that direction. Fast travel isn't safe either.
I hope the 4GB patch will help, because it can improve some mesh glitches too, and I like playing without the compass (too bad you can't turn off the landmark display and only have N,E,S,W).
At the beginning you can make out the hut on the other side of the river by increasing the variable once already, and I'd like that visibility range.
More just increases details, and I don't see the point of having all the details there at the horizon. It just shows how small the world actually is.

details and hut:


glitch:


improvement: