TES V: Skyrim

One interesting thing is that the skill increases always did depend upon an improved item's value. This usually doesn't mean much, but if you use the alchemy/enchanting exploit to get absurdly high percentage +smithing gear, you can max smithing to 100 by just improving a handful of iron daggers.

Haven't played Skyrim since the 1.5 patch, though. Been focusing on Mass Effect 3 and I've picked up City of Heroes again.

 

I have a 3850 512MB and I've stumbled upon a strange Skyrim shadow bug. I'm fairly sure I didn't see this before Bethesda released their various patches. The shadow problem does not go away with older drivers (tried 11.11, 12.1, 12.3). Nor does varying game detail level help.

I verified the game files with Steam. There are no mods installed. I also tried the card in another machine with its own game install.

 

I've seen something similar to that after alt-tabbing. Shadows and water textures get completely screwed sometimes from alt-tabbing. Restarting resolves it.

There's been some hints about some DLC being released. Snow elves and crossbows?

http://www.gamenguide.com/articles/1540/20120428/skyrim-dlc-snow-elves-prince-mystery-revealed.htm

 

My main problem with all games like this (inc Torchlight/Diablo3 etc) is the gear you can buy from vendors. While I don't always want the high end stuff to be better than the highest end stuff I can craft, the items you can get while leveling from vendors invariably sucks.

I would *really* like currency in these worlds to matter. I have about 1mil septims in Skyrim, and nothing really to spend it on. I've never bought a weapon from a vendor because even the crap I've picked up on random quests is better. I would prefer vendors to have at least a couple of OTT items, that are 20-50k-500k to give me something to aim for, rather than lots of crap at 2k.

It just breaks my suspension of disbelief. The vendor in town in Diablo3 is all like "Ah traveller, look at these amazing weapons I've newly uncovered in the deepest mines, just for you!". My character is pretty much: "but that's no better than this axe I found on a pig in a cellar I walked into by accident". And the vendor then says "Indeed it is! It is MUCH better than this weapon I was going to charge you 2000gold for... how about I give you 50gold for it". "Piss off".

Bethesda/Blizzard, give your vendors ridiculous weapons @ ridiculous prices, for those of us that actually want to go out there and kill every mob to get every last gold piece!

 

You and I are in complete agreement on this subject. Money is usually worthless, when on the market for new weapons. If I remember correctly, vendors in Oblivion actually sold some enchanted weapons and armor, emphasizing the importance of saving your money. Not only are weapons and armor sold by vendors unenchanted in Skyrim, whatever you have your eye on will potentially appear somewhere in the world, if you're prone to exploring. For example, "Hey, it would be nice to upgrade my iron armor to steel. This vendor sells it, but chances are the in next group of bandits I kill, someone will be donning it, which will in turn be mine for the taking." The only thing I found myself actually saving for in Skyrim were houses.

 

I wish the amount of gold vendors had on-hand would increase as you levelled. I know there's a speech perk that adds 1k per vendor, but still. . . .

 

Yes, I agree...money is typically useless in such games...I also dont care much to buy houses or such things...so I have always lots of unused money sitting around

 

I don't understand, there are always enchanted weapons and armor sold by smiths and general merchants in Skyrim.

 

I usually spend my money on training. That's about it.


BTW, I also tried the game on another machine with a lowly low-profile Radeon 4350 512MB. After about a minute (before it gets done loading the save), all of the meshes begin to display missing triangles. It's a fascinating, semi-transparent experience. I imagine that is a hardware problem but it doesn't crash. Loaded up Furmark and that looked fine (and it wasn't running hot). Prime95 seemed good too. Mysteries w/ Skyrim!

Oh, and I've tried a 512MB 8800GT Superclock as well. Other than the 512MB being an issue with high texture settings in some areas of the world, it runs quite adequately at the 1680x1050 of the LCD.

 

Yeah, money becomes relatively pointless as you progress through the game. Somewhere around 30 or 40 hours in, you basically have accumulated enough currency to buy anything you really need. I do like having the houses (makes sneaking around as a vampire a bit easier) but at this point I really am just trying to offload all the crap I don't need.

Looking forward to DLC though

My laptop plays Skyrim reasonably well -- i5-520m, AMD 5650 1Gb Mobility. Overclocking the video card does wonders for the framerate

 

Unless I haven't been paying attention, the only instances I remember vendors selling enchanted gear was after I sold it to them and it was placed up for sale. I could be wrong, and probably am.

DLC was announced today! It's called "Dawnguard." Beyond the name, I'm not certain what it entails. They've released a promotional picture of the Dragonborn with glowing red eyes. I'm not exactly sure what that implies. If there's any truth to the suspicions floating around the web, a new race and crossbows would be a nice addition. What has been confirmed is Xbox will be the first platform to receive the DLC.

Read about it here: http://www.gamespot.com/news/skyrim-adding-dawnguard-dlc-this-summer-6374442

 

Hope you can turn off the Kinect shit on the 360 port, or else people playing that version with annoying siblings in the same room are gonna get trolled majorly. Just yell "fus!" as you walk past, and loads of anger and swearing will come flying back your direction from the person playing the game...

 

The only merchant I've seen that carries weapons/armor but doesn't ever seem to carry enchanted gear is the guy at the Skyforge. All the others seem to carry one or two random pieces of enchanted gear that refresh every couple of days. I've taken to traveling around to various merchants once I get a few thousand gold to buy a few choice enchantments (e.g. banish, which makes weapons that sell for a boatload).

 

Haha

If the speech recognition is decent, I think it would be pretty fun to have that, though.

 

It would actually do nothing. You need RB pressed to have dragon work. And it's not like they couldn't mess with you before kinect anyway. (start a 2nd controller and push the guide button, etc)

The speech recognition is a decent feature it gives you much quicker access to all of the shouts. You can specify a level of shout if you use RB and 'dragon', or full shout without a button press if you use english.

 

Ahhh, I see. Okay, well, it was a fun thought IMO, making townspeople, guards, objects and so on go flying inadvertently (for the person actually playing the game anyway)...

 

Here's what a Radeon 4350 looks like on Catalyst 12.4. I had to go back to 12.3. I found a forum thread with people having the same problem with SWTOR.


Unfortunately, the Radeon 3850 shadow problem posted earlier does not get fixed with older drivers.

 

Problems like these are what makes me extra sad that AMD moves those GPUs to legacy

 

What's the bug status with Skyrim like these days? Have the largest issues been ironed out?

 

I've been putting a few hours in every day for the past few days and it's been rock solid and I haven't seem any brokenness. I play it on a Core i5 @ 4.3 with a tweaked 6950.