TES V: Skyrim

[Grall]

Well, they did have to hit their magic street date, so of course the game was rushed...

look at skyrim wiki: you find how to manipulate certain quests from command window: you can either reset quests, or set you to a certain midlevel. this helped me when the game did not advance in my master destruction spell quest...

Thanks Billy, I've read here and there that this thing exists, but I've not had to use it up until now. I'll go have a look at fixing my Companions quest in a bit, I don't wanna risk spoiling myself and see what happens in future stages.

Does anyone by any chance have the command that starts the next step (

Spoiler

Retaliation for the attack on Jorrvaskr?

)

 

[Sxotty]

Just put a paper over the screen to cover up the quest stages Grall

 

[kyleb]

Training block is effing ludicrous though. Takes forever!

Just go use the warrior stone and then let a mammoth attack your shield for a while.

 

[Grall]

Aaaaah... Yeah, that's a good idea. Thanks!

Got any good ideas for how to train alchemy too? I'm at like, 87 or something, and each level requires dozens of potion crafting attempts, which totally burns all my stores of materials.

 

[KimB]

Aaaaah... Yeah, that's a good idea. Thanks!

Got any good ideas for how to train alchemy too? I'm at like, 87 or something, and each level requires dozens of potion crafting attempts, which totally burns all my stores of materials.

Well, if you want to semi-cheat, you can just use the fortify restoration alchemy exploit to make super-powerful potions. Skill gains in alchemy are, as it turns out, dependent upon how poweful the potions you make are, so you can use that exploit to max alchemy after making about 10-15 fortify restoration potions (depending upon your +alchemy gear). Then if you don't want to really cheat, you could just dump the resulting potions and go on your merry way with maxed alchemy. Alternatively, you could sell them to any merchant to instantly max speechcraft.

 

[Vadi]

SSAA really smooths the shader aliasing in soeme spots a lot, like on the shoulder armor seen in the video. I recorded frametimes with fraps too. The slight specular shimmering on the chain armor in the video is caused by the codec, although the video scaling blurs it a lot.
I tried different resolutions, AO, SSAA and frame limiter on a GTX480. The resolutions are 800x1280 (lo) and 1050x1680 (hi) (both portrait). I alternated AA between 2x2SS + 2xMS +2xSGSS and 2x1SS + 2xMS + 2xSGSS. Ambient Occlusion was set at high quality, frame limiter at 40 or 45. The game ran in a window on Windows 7 with latest Nvidia beta drivers and the beta Skyrim patch.
I played around with Calc, counted the frametimes according to their duration and divided by the total count.

 

[Grall]

Read up on the Companions quest on one of the major TES wikis (the one with the mustard-yellowish color set, whatsitsname; has very good sections on Morrowind there...), and went through the motions of fixing the quest. It worked, except I did not get to hear the NPC's introduction dialog, or see any of the player's dialog choices. Oh well. Another time, perhaps. After Bethesda maybe has had time to fix their sorry bug-ass mess of a game...

At least it worked. I'm now two steps further along the chain, and it's time to go sleepies.

 

[Daozang]

Read up on the Companions quest on one of the major TES wikis (the one with the mustard-yellowish color set, whatsitsname; has very good sections on Morrowind there...), and went through the motions of fixing the quest. It worked, except I did not get to hear the NPC's introduction dialog, or see any of the player's dialog choices. Oh well. Another time, perhaps. After Bethesda maybe has had time to fix their sorry bug-ass mess of a game...

At least it worked. I'm now two steps further along the chain, and it's time to go sleepies.

I wouldn't expect Beth to do anything about those bugs...
But I'm sure an unofficial patch will surface, when they release the CS...

 

[Grall]

They've already fixed some quests, and more are getting fixed in 1.4. They're also swimming in money now over there at bethsoft, so it's not as if they can't afford it. Raking in the cash and then simply abandoning their customers would lead to bad blood, I don't think they'd be so cynically evil.

 

[Daozang]

Me neither
I'm judging from their history.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Well the 1.4 patch brought a LOT more performance bugs than Skyboost ever did.
I'm experiencing a lot more CTDs and extreme slowdowns when I do a certain order of events (whenever I leave the blacksmith house in whiterun, my fps go from ~50 to ~2, for some 20 seconds).

Performance overall is better, but I was expecting the game to be more stable than what I had with Skyboos, not less.

 

[Grall]

Only the 1.4 beta is out isn't it? So hopefully it is just a quirk that'll get straightened out before release (touch wood......)

Hopefully it's not a case of "what Bethesda giveth with one hand, Bethesda taketh away with the other". Oh well. In any case, a few upgrade spin-cycles on the hardware evolutionary carousel and Skyrim will be our bitch, just like both Morrowind and Oblivion are today, regardless of if Bethy actually fixes their game or not.

 

[Albuquerque]

I haven't had any problems with the 1.4 beta so far, at least nothing like the FPS sag you describe TottenTranz. It was an immense help to both my i5-520m and overclocked Q9550. I go through that blacksmith shop pretty often in Whiterun, but I'll check it out again tonight and report back...

The laptop is now reliably at the limit of the video card (mildly overclocked 5650m 1Gb at 1366x768), the desktop is a bit more even between the GPU and CPU (overvolted + overclocked 5850 1Gb running at 1680x1050.) I'm pretty much just burning fillrate at this point by using OGSSAA on the desktop, the little laptop card can churn out 4xMSAA within reason.

 

[Cyan]

Well, if you want to semi-cheat, you can just use the fortify restoration alchemy exploit to make super-powerful potions. Skill gains in alchemy are, as it turns out, dependent upon how poweful the potions you make are, so you can use that exploit to max alchemy after making about 10-15 fortify restoration potions (depending upon your +alchemy gear). Then if you don't want to really cheat, you could just dump the resulting potions and go on your merry way with maxed alchemy. Alternatively, you could sell them to any merchant to instantly max speechcraft.

Alternatively he can use a Vampire Necromage, which is the ultimate build for everything, as explained in these two videos:

 

[Grall]

Couldn't wait for the final release, so I hopped onto the beta bandwagon and I've not encountered a single problem. Framerate is much smoother overall, especially in towns and cities. Not much difference indoors, because my system wasn't having any issues there most of the time.

Still some inexplicable sags here and there, even when looking straight at a wall in front of me and so on, but hey... It's still crappy ol' gamebryo under the hood, so I guess that's to be expected.

The scripting slash quest bugs are still out in full force of course, but I'm patient. One day they might get fixed. I'm just not sure how bethesda could allow them to appear in the first place. The number of quests that break if you clear a dungeon or pick up certain items before accepting the quest in question (no pun intended) is just staggering. Don't they playtest for just this sort of thing...? *shrug*

 

[KimB]

The scripting slash quest bugs are still out in full force of course, but I'm patient. One day they might get fixed. I'm just not sure how bethesda could allow them to appear in the first place. The number of quests that break if you clear a dungeon or pick up certain items before accepting the quest in question (no pun intended) is just staggering. Don't they playtest for just this sort of thing...? *shrug*

Sounds to me that what they really need to do is examine their development process so that they can avoid these errors in the first place.

 

[Sxotty]

Sounds to me that what they really need to do is examine their development process so that they can avoid these errors in the first place.

Why? People buy huge quantities of their games already so why waste resources fixing them? The gaming public is happy to be a free beta tester. To me it just highlights that stability and buginess really don't matter that much. They are generally just used to support an already held opinion about a title.

 

[pcchen]

Why? People buy huge quantities of their games already so why waste resources fixing them? The gaming public is happy to be a free beta tester. To me it just highlights that stability and buginess really don't matter that much. They are generally just used to support an already held opinion about a title.

To be fair, part of the reason why Skyrim sold so well is because it has very little competition, if at all. Compare this to, say, a general MMO-RPG. You can easily see that a MMO-RPG in such state wouldn't be able to sell much.

I'm not saying Skyrim is a bad game. On the contrary, it's a very good game. It's just these game breaking bugs greatly reduce the value of this game. When I was playing the game just after I got it, I tried to explore every caves I saw and it's actually a great experience. I can explore any unknown dungeon and sometimes there are even some "hidden" quests to do. This is completely different from the traditional "got some quest, go to the target area and kill some guys" model and I like it a lot. However, then I encountered some game breaking bugs which need to be solved by using console commands (and some can't be solved at all). Then I have to refrain from exploring any dungeon I saw, and that sort of completely defeat the purpose of this game.

By the way, I don't think this is an impossible problem to solve. A complex quest system is basically a state machine, and it should be possible to enumerate all possible states to see whether some state sequences may trigger some game breaking bugs.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

To be fair, part of the reason why Skyrim sold so well is because it has very little competition, if at all. Compare this to, say, a general MMO-RPG. You can easily see that a MMO-RPG in such state wouldn't be able to sell much.

That's true, but what competition would Skyrim have? Bethesda have created their own RPG sub-genre, with a virtually limitlessly interactive world - you can go anywhere, speak to anyone, take/steal anything.
Even though this keeps the NPCs from any kind of character development (I really miss that from Bioware titles), this kind of interactivity makes their RPG games (Elder Scrolls, Fallout series) their own genre, with no comptetition..

By the way, I don't think this is an impossible problem to solve. A complex quest system is basically a state machine, and it should be possible to enumerate all possible states to see whether some state sequences may trigger some game breaking bugs.

Doable? Yes.
But at what cost and development time?

 

[pcchen]

That's true, but what competition would Skyrim have? Bethesda have created their own RPG sub-genre, with a virtually limitlessly interactive world - you can go anywhere, speak to anyone, take/steal anything.
Even though this keeps the NPCs from any kind of character development (I really miss that from Bioware titles), this kind of interactivity makes their RPG games (Elder Scrolls, Fallout series) their own genre, with no comptetition..

Well, this is exactly my point

Doable? Yes.
But at what cost and development time?

I believe with careful planning this can be automated. Only "dependent" states need to be tested (as in, if all quests are independent, then there shouldn't be any "game breaking bug" because all quests can be done independently). In theory, the state space is finite. It may be very large, but careful design could make it reasonable and it should be possible to test automatically.

Another solution is to make it possible to "drop" a quest and quest items, like, say, World of Warcraft.