Gaming Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Review

Game runs well on my GTX 480 in my Desktop and on my GT 540M in my laptop. Mediums with 4x AA at 1366x768. Can't complain

 

Just installed my copy. It's GREAT! I really like it.

 

I'm a few hours in and so far so good.

It has a very Oblivion like feel (expected I guess), graphically is decent and I can play maxed at 1680 x 1050 with my overclocked GTX 560ti; not as much eye candy as I was hoping for but still non too shoddy.

Dual wielding is excellent and, as a mage, I feel like the Emperor from Star Was striking my enemies down!

 

I hoped you would have given it a 55% like it deserves Like the new CoD.

 

In response to the quest about ever seeing such a pretty talent tree, yea I have. It's called FF-XIII and their talent tree's are prettyyyy.

 

Too right 95% although I think it deserves 100% I was initially too excited expecting it to be way better than I anticipated so wasn't as blown away as I thought I'd be at first but man, the more time I spend playing it the more I'm loving it, freaking awesome game & looks gorgeous all over, caves, dungeouns landscapes buildings, wildlife npc's it all looks great, voice acting works great for me.

GOTY for me so far & it is wonderfully stable had no problems throughout, I heard of the beta drivers by nvidia but I'm still on the last official ones, playing maxed out on 1080p @120hz & get tearing so a very well made game.

I won against the first dragon but got my rear whooped badly by an angry bear, could hear the grizzly git but couldn't see it & when I did was like ohhh sheeeet ruuuun , couldn't outrun it though, so fast at charging, tried running for my life but had to face it & get mauled & that was with refilling my health twice with potions love this game .

 

Wow, who would've thought they could make a game about a window cleaners cloth?

 

Having played it for about 4 hours: the control / menu / HUD system is a bit of a disaster.

The Map is almost unusable. A straight-up JPG would be more usable; as it is, merely scrolling around will cause you to zoom out as the camera "hits" mountains; and the more you zoom out, the clouds obscure your view! Since I have the Steam version, I don't get recourse to a physical map.

Worse: you can't rebind all the keys consistently. The Map and Favourites menu keep using WASD, even when you're not using WASD for movement. This makes the Favourites feature unusable; and since you can't bind weapons, spells etc to numbers, it is an infinite pain to switch.

It's pretty clear that the HUD was designed for the console and hacked to work for the PC; it has two inconsistent "item selection" highlight mechanisms. One is based around using the movement keys to select an item, and causes the selected item to be rendered in larger text and a bigger margin-space; but since PCs have mice, there is a second one based around mouse hover and clicking, and it's rendered by drawing the menu item in white. So depending on what order of operations you used to select a menu, it looks like there are two different selected items - the white-text mouse one takes precedence.

Trying to scroll the graphical display settings menu (the one with all the sliders for view distances) is a similar disaster; the mouse wheel is used for both scrolling the list of sliders up and down, and, if you reach the end of the list and the mouse cursor is over a slider, the mouse wheel now controls that slider itself! The net result is that if you simply casually scroll through the display settings, you end up randomly changing various sliders!

And graphics bugs: there's an horrific decal texture problem with the game on my 5870: as I move around interior rooms that have moss or other decals on the walls, they randomly shimmer in and out of existence and different levels of detail. At one moment, the room is bare; move the mouse view a fraction, and there's moss everywhere.

If you can ignore the decal texture problem (or it doesn't occur on your hardware), and don't have to change weapons / spells too often, you can get an experience reasonably similar to Oblivion, however. It's not all bad, not by any means. Just annoying enough to break immersion, and cause me (for one) to not want to play it for a few days.

 

I can't seem to kill the Ice Troll so I simply ran past it but now my helper is dead :-(

 

Spoiler

I blasted the crap out of it with my fire spells, finished it off nicely

 

This. This all over.

 

Well there are some glitches I can see. The general level of detail is not bad but once or twice landscape has simply "popped" into view.

 

Game of the year edition it is then. I've still got Rage + Steam sale stuff to get through, and by the time that's done ME3 will be out!

 

Yup. Exactly.

The menus are hideously console ported and I find them very difficult to use in a consistent fashion. It was pretty clear from the review that using WSAD for menus was going to be awful....and it is. My mouse cost me more than an XBox360 costs these days....I'd like to be able to use it please.

Another major annoyance with the menus (and this goes for most console ported in-game menus) is having the System Settings along side things like the Map etc. Mass Effect 1/2 were terrible for this. It totally breaks the immersion for me.

The graphics are very, very dated. Take a look at the screenshots someone posted in a previous comment....I can't believe some of you guys are looking at those and thinking "ooh pretty"...look at the walls and shadows in that second screenshot! Awful.

Perhaps I've just been spoiled with the graphics of Battlefield 3

The "combat" is as clunky as ever...something I really hoped they'd change...however, same old Gamebryo, same old wooden characters, same old disconnected feeling when swinging a sword.

I'm sure with more play-time I'll grow to love the story, the exploration etc..but right now I've just rage quit (hence this rant) because the game is f**king me off so much.

And...calm.

-_-

 

Heads up for NV Surround/Eyefinity useres- We are experiencing major fail from Skyrim, and Bethesda's response was to sod off... read the saga here

 

Oh... I was mainly interested in this because I thought it would have a much improved engine. Sound like it doesn't

 

The only issue I seem to be having (apart from the slightly awkward menu system on the PC), is the fact that I don't seem to be able to drop anything. I either have to wander around at a snails pace if I overload myself by accident, or I have to "search" a dead body and shift stuff back into its inventory.

Yeah I know you press R to drop things, but for me it doesn't seem to be working. I have remapped my KB layout as I hate WASD configurations, this makes using the menu system a bit awkward and not quite as intuitive as it would be if I was still using the WASD layout as the game doesn't update the keys in the menus to match your setup for movement, but everything seems to work fine except not being able to drop stuff.

 

It's impossible not to view the interface and combat systems as a huge step up from the last version of this game system, which would be Fallout New Vegas. For a start the interface has keyboard shortcuts; I press 'i' and I get the inventory. Obvious, but lacking from Oblivion and the recent Fallouts. Yes, the favourites can take a bit of getting used to, but it's a much more versatile system than the 1-8 shortcuts, especially coupled to the dual wield mechanic. Combat is vastly improved, and the idea that it shares failings with the earlier games is laughable. Play Oblivion or Fallout New Vegas, then play Skyrim, and try to tell me that it's not vastly better in Skyrim. Perfect? No, not quite there yet, but it's brought the combat up to par with rivals and left the old legacy of wobbly people and disconnecting weapon waving behind.

Moving past the corrections of those old flaws, and seriously do fire up Oblivion again if you honestly think that Skyrim has a bad interface, the actual game itself is magnificent. And I don't use that work often or easily, because it sounds silly, but it is what it is. It actually makes me stop to look at things, sunsets, bubbling hot springs, caverns, even creatures.

According to the Steam counter I've only played a paltry 14 hours of Skyrim so far, but so far it is shaping up to be a real contender for being the best game I've ever played. It feels like the developers have taken Oblivion and really hammered away at the obvious weaknesses, while raising the bar to new heights in the games strong areas.

The idea also that this is just some half arsed console port and thus bad is simply ignorant. Bethesda have made this game for the consoles, sure, even Shakespeare had to get paid, but the fact that they have still, even in this day and age, fully embraced the capacity of the game community to mod the game makes this a PC game. While today the PC version are the console version have parity, in a few months to a year the PC version will be different, because anybody who mods games will have their own personal Skyrim build. These guys want the game to be played on PC and they want PC players and modders to have fun with it, and it's that sort of loyalty to the PC market that I admire.

Bioware? Didn't even release Mass Effect on the PC for over a year, then completely shut out modders from all their games. Rockstar? Often don't release PC versions at all and again deliberately take steps to prevent modification of games. EA and Valve? Don't mind us we're just data-mining, oops our forum got hacked now everyone has your credit card number. When it comes to developers I think Bethesda deserve a lot of credit for not actively trying to shaft PC gamers or drive them onto the consoles. The definitive version of their game is the PC one and they embrace that, rather than trying to level the playing field by clipping the wings of the superior platform.

 

Having clocked 9h overnight (just after I came back from work hehe), the controls at the start were bit meh on PC. But getting used to them.

Going now to the next session, the batteries are charged, so the 360 PC controller will work.

As for graqphics. On overclocked GTX570, and AMD T1090 @ 4.2 Ghz, I haven't see any issue. On the contrary I edited the config files and raised the details of shadows, water, trees etc to pretty high to levels never dare in any other game. And still awesome speeds at 16AF, 8AA, all on the max and 100 FOV.

Sound is awesome on the G35 also Proper true directional 5.1 sound. Which isn't very often the case.


Seems Bethesda raised the
graphics quality
-------------------------
graphics power needed

ratio quite high.

 

i dont understand the 95% for a game made on a barely rehashed old Fallout engine (and lame PC port version) which this very site criticised New Vegas for.
they've just slapped some DX10 effects and lighting on top of that old clunker and call it revolutionary and eye-candy...

it does look good on the consoles, i dont argue that, but on PC it looks very meh.

some people were annoyed that it scored similar in reviews to MW3 - well, it uses the same business model - rehashing the old engine for pennies and selling it at full price, money saved on development was spent on creating the "secong coming" hype and PR...

game is average and definitely not GoTY for me, that place is still occupied by The Witcher 2...