I played for a few hours last night. got 2 hours in probably, and restarted. I made alot of bad choices right from the get go. skill points in the wrong spot. got arrested and then escaped without finding my gear (i couldnt find it!), so i restarted. Im likin my new guy though. orc, gonna specialize in duel wielding. muahaha. oh, and im playing on master difficulty. Attacking a wolf just to be DESTROYED by a mammoth... good times. lol.
Does anyone know how to check out your character stats on pc?
Well played the game pretty much the entire day yesterday. Still only about level 8. Really enjoying it, can tell I'll be playing the hell out of it. Having experienced the awe of first stepping out into Skyrim and having a chance to mess around with several things now, there are a few things I'm disappointed with though.
I'm finding myself a little disappointed with magic in the game. I knew I was going to encounter some issues when they took out spell crafting for whatever reason. It seems like Destruction got a ridiculous amount of attention, conjuration to a lesser extent - whereas the other schools sort of fell by the wayside, largely what we had before with less freedom. Part of what made being a mage fun was experimenting with your own spell combinations, having a hand in your own magic. Now you're stuck to choose from like...15 spells for each school (at least so far as I can find online or in-game). A tiny fraction of what was available in Oblivion, which was even smaller than what was in Morrowind.
Additionally a lot of spell effects have just been outright removed from what I can tell. Some for the reason that they wouldn't work with new gameplay mechanics, which I knew would happen with some things, but there's a lot - dispel (which made for some cool magic fights), a lot of bound weapons, reflect, absorb magicka, chameleon (I'm ok that one's gone), all direct "damage" (health, magicka, etc) spells from the destruction line, disintegrate, command (bummer), absorb, open - just the ones off the top of my head. Just gone from spell use. Some of these are somewhat present in another way - such as available in a potion, passively as a perk, or in a power unique to a race or stone or something. But it's still less you can simply use and experiment with. I'm feeling kinda jipped.
I understand they took out spellcrafting* (edit) because they thought fiddling with numbers took away from the "feel" of magic. But I'll tell you what takes away from it even more - having 5 tomes of "Sparks" lying around.
Magic fights do feel much more intense and involved. But again...80% of that is due to destruction stuff.
I suspect that a huge portion of magic - and skills as a whole, is tied in with the perks which I haven't been able to experiment with very much - so perhaps my views will change as I level up.
I've gotten very used to the UI and don't find it a bother anymore. The only thing I'd really like to see is the ability to actually hotkey dual-wielded sets. Also I don't want my swords to unbind from their keys just because I put a poison on it.
...hard to believe I've still just hit the tip of the iceberg.
Oh - one other thing. If anyone on the PC is having performance issues when you believe you should be able to max the game out - try putting shadows on "high" instead of "ultra". My 2GB 6950 - which maxes out just about anything and should be plenty for this, for some reason gets a bit of odd stuttering (mostly in towns) when shadows are on Ultra. I took some screenshots with everything else maxed out as high as it can go just to see the difference between high and ultra shadows and I honest to god cannot see that there IS a difference. If anything I thought shadows looked a little more accurate on high, and now I'm flying.
Played it for about an hour before it crashed my xbox. This could be the worst lighting engine I have ever seen on the 360.
At any given time 40% of my screen is flat black, even during the day. The shadows and shading are abysmal, and that whole HDR focus your eyes thing is so massively annoying and overdone. I ended up getting frustrated and rushing through the character creator because half of his face was shaded completely black so I could never see what I was doing.
I feel lied to by the videos and screen shots because the only environments I've seen so far looked horrible. 256x256 tiling stone textures with flat white spec, awful looking crazybump normals...and the characters are some how worse than Fallout 3.
Does Bethesda even employ any character artists? Or do they just have unpaid interns use the gamebryo character creator and call it a day?
I have never been so disappointed by a game with this much good looking hype. On a whim I started playing Darksiders for a second time before getting Skyrim and I think I'll just go back to it instead.
At any given time 40% of my screen is flat black, even during the day. The shadows and shading are abysmal, and that whole HDR focus your eyes thing is so massively annoying and overdone. I ended up getting frustrated and rushing through the character creator because half of his face was shaded completely black so I could never see what I was doing.
.
yea, this was my 1st impression too. when you see the 1st dragon, it was almost completley a black shape on my screen. I paused it and cranked the brightness almost all the way untill i could see the actual details on it and have been pretty happy ever since. by default it seems really contrasty. at 1st I was pretty underwhelmed but the the overall experience took over and I was in love.
everything on 360 seems to look decent at a distance but up close it breaks down pretty quick. still great looking caves and night time stuff. My buddy got it on pc and besides a crisper overall feel the graphics are not amazingly better. it seems really hit or miss, some things look great while others have super inconsistent texel density all over the place.
HOWEVER....given the size of the world and scope of what they are doing I dont mind being forgiving as the overall experience is so rich and immersive that the visuals stop bugging me after 10 mins of play. Im not even saying it looks horrible, most of the time it looks awesome, its just noticeably inconsistent.
The audio is wicked and the soundtrack is some of the best game music I have heard. Only a couple hours in so far but I just know I am going to love this game for a looooong time.
Btw sandbag, did you install the game or run directly off the dvd? There's some issues surrounding installing the game to the disk where textures will mess up.
All bethesdas videos have primarily been the 360 version as it is today, screenshots have been both pc and 360, but most shown has been from 360.
Using a VPN i got to play this baby 10 hour earlier.. I PLAYED IT BEFORE IT WAS COOL /Skyrimhipster.
I have screenshot random things so far, the game is gorgeous, I love EVERYTHING about it so far, well except the random crashes to desktop (without the error message), over 30 hours in so far, level 26 and I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface here.
Proudest moment:
No other game lets me fight a Dragon at the top of a snowy mountain only to finish it off by standing on it's head and stabbing it to death.
The ONLY thing I want to do is this: Please oh PLEASE let me manually set the shadows resolution with the ini, somehow I don't care if it chugs my system to death, I just can't stand horribly jagged blurry messes under characters
(I already tried setting the two shadow res settings in the ini to 4096 and 2048 respectively, but no change, oh well. STILL PRETTY.)
So what sorts of characters have people been rolling? Anyone done any hardcore conjuring or illusion or anything of the sort? I'm curious as to how those skills would get you through a lot of the game...especially dragons.
The ONLY thing I want to do is this: Please oh PLEASE let me manually set the shadows resolution with the ini, somehow I don't care if it chugs my system to death, I just can't stand horribly jagged blurry messes under characters
(I already tried setting the two shadow res settings in the ini to 4096 and 2048 respectively, but no change, oh well. STILL PRETTY.)
in skyrimprefs.ini look for: iShadowMapResolution=512
for shadows the only issue i've really had is the shadow bias being really bad at points and having the shadows flicker. I'm going to try tweaking the shadow bias scale setting in the skyrimprefs.ini and figure things out.
So what sorts of characters have people been rolling? Anyone done any hardcore conjuring or illusion or anything of the sort? I'm curious as to how those skills would get you through a lot of the game...especially dragons.
If you don't like the PC UI, try plugging in a 360 controller. It was definitely my favorite way to play as the 2 handed combat maps well to the triggers.
Im trying to like the game.. but the UI is one of the worst i have seen in video game history. Loved Oblivion. I dont get the inconcistancy of this one. Thinking of picking up a 360 pad just beacuse.
Does anyone know if i somehow can hook up my Ps3 controller and play with?
Visceralm I use Motionjoy Gamepad Tool for my Ps3 to Pc controller. Works great. It's free. And you hate the UI? I think it's some of the best for the series.
UI is horrible for a mouse. And im not buying a 50-90$ xbox controller adapter because microsoft is too lazy and greedy to just add support for it as a bonus against sony.
Really enjoying it so far, so many side quests and interactions! Amazing game!
Some of the textures vary in quality, outsource? Graphics are amazing but still can't help but notice low rez textures / tiling in obvious areas, this is just a nitpick I know how the Industry can be so it was probably due to the crunch and speed, either way, loving the lighting, graphics and atmosphere!
UI is horrible for a mouse. And im not buying a 50-90$ xbox controller adapter because microsoft is too lazy and greedy to just add support for it as a bonus against sony.
I agree that the UI could have some better mouse controls but I don't think it's as terrible as some of you make it out to be. The only problems I have with it is sometimes it messes up and gets stuck on one chat response and enter/yes switch off between Y and ENTER randomly. Otherwise it's been much better than Oblivion.
@TwoListen, I usually roll a Shield/Melee warrior with Restoration Skills and was planning to do that on launch but I felt compelled to do a Wood Elf Archer with Dual Wielding at character creation. Luckily the base restoration skill everyone gets is pretty easy to use with low skill in it compared to Oblivion so I can pull that out whenever I need to.
This might just be the best game I have ever played.
I actually like the art in the game. No you're not going to find everything to be perfect individual assets or have great material definition but if you take it for what it is and look at the bigger picture the game looks very nice in some places. quite a few of the creatures look awesome, especially the dragons. I also love the way art is displayed in the inventory system as well as the loading screens.
This is the only game I have ever played where I have actually *wanted* the loading screens to last a little bit longer, so that I can rotate those models around and read the notes that go with it.
I've only killed 2 dragons so far, 3 if I didn't load a quick save because of some collateral damage the first time, after that it just flew off into the mountain. Oh well.
Oh Lydia, she survived at least 10 Dragons, before succumbing to some random crazed Necromancer prancing around in the woods
Oh well, she's partying up in Sovngarde now.
Also love the design of the Ebony Armor, funny bug though: The Helmet part of the mesh doesn't Cast a shadow :P, so when I put my helmet on, my shadow is headless
I think I have the vampire curse - fought a couple of those buggers, and now people are saying I look 'a little ill'. Bummer.
If you have gotten the disease it should be listed under the tab that shows by what magic etc. you are influenced.
You have about three days to get rid of it. In that time don't rest. Go to the nearst town and get a potion that gets rid of all diseases (cost a few hundred gold).
If you don't make it in time you have a stage one vampire. From now on your powers will grow at night but lessen during the day - up to the point where you should really stay out of sunlight. Also people will stop to talk to you or even attack you on sight, so questing gets near impossible over time.
Getting rid of BEING a vampire was much harder than getting rid of the disease in the other TES games. IIRC in Oblivion there was one NPC that could perform the ritual and itr did cost a lot of time and effort to get the questchain for it done.
Totally unrelated: Stupid NPCs. I've had several of them explaining to me what a Redguard is. I am playing a Redguard. Also I get told I look really pale from time to time. :poly136:
Temples and hall of the dead's usually have altars that you can pray at, which will cure diseases for free, and leave you with a blessing.
I noticed I had received rockjoint a few levels in the game, fun to notice my damage had been down 25% for quite some time xD.
I just couldn't figure out why I was diseased, but people kept telling me. But then I found the submenu.
Ok so I wasnt really gonna get the game (atleast so soon) then with all the freaking review scores I get it. I start playing it and get freaking stuck at the first chest that I search... I just cant get out... there was no button to get out from it except the loot all button... takes me 20 minutes to figure that out since i looted all the objects one by one. (I tend to do that so i can read about what each on is) OMG the first hours were freaking annoying with the loot. I went to the internet for advice, nothing... I later messaged one of my friends who had the same problem (when he started out) The moral of the story is TAB is your friend in this game!
If you have gotten the disease it should be listed under the tab that shows by what magic etc. you are influenced.
You have about three days to get rid of it. In that time don't rest. Go to the nearst town and get a potion that gets rid of all diseases (cost a few hundred gold).
If you don't make it in time you have a stage one vampire. From now on your powers will grow at night but lessen during the day - up to the point where you should really stay out of sunlight. Also people will stop to talk to you or even attack you on sight, so questing gets near impossible over time.
Getting rid of BEING a vampire was much harder than getting rid of the disease in the other TES games. IIRC in Oblivion there was one NPC that could perform the ritual and itr did cost a lot of time and effort to get the questchain for it done.
Totally unrelated: Stupid NPCs. I've had several of them explaining to me what a Redguard is. I am playing a Redguard. Also I get told I look really pale from time to time. :poly136:
Thanks Neolith - yes I remember what a nightmare it was to get rid of the curse in Oblivion. I took a cure disease potion just in case (there wasn't anything listed in my magicka tab).
I just did a dungeon quest with a quest NPC and he kept running ahead setting off all the traps and charging headlong into groups of bad guys (dumb fecker) so no change there.
On the whole the game is very polished, and promises to be a real time-sink, just like the others.
Was that that whole business in Morthal with going into the nearby cave?
I got those strange comments from NPC's too.
Can't say how much I love this game. It reminds me why I got into games and is a great sign that there's still large game developers out there who are just in it to make a seriously epic, fun game, not just some interactive movie with multiplayer attached to prolong the play time.
The first Dungeon i went in had two door puzzles and the game didn't tell me anything, the first one you actually learn straight away from a mistake and the second you have to figure out by using the inventory system to actually look at the item for clues. This felt amazing, finally a game that doesn't treat it's players like massive retards.
Loving this game as well, and I'm a general cynic. They've taken note of the problems with Oblivion and improved it. The UI is a bit confusing and a mess. But its plus points way outweight its negatives.
Loving all the little interactions. Like a guard having a go at me for leaving a load of weapons on the ground. Or getting kersplatted by a giant.
Heh another armour mesh glitch. Equip arch mage armour and one of the undead masks that look like something out of Harry Potter and sometimes the game doesn't know which one to render so sometimes you'll be headless.
Replies
This game might possibly be as good as morrowind.
Does anyone know how to check out your character stats on pc?
It's all in the skills menu, tab->skills.
Any diseases, blessings other otherwise more or less permanent powers are in the magic section.
I'm finding myself a little disappointed with magic in the game. I knew I was going to encounter some issues when they took out spell crafting for whatever reason. It seems like Destruction got a ridiculous amount of attention, conjuration to a lesser extent - whereas the other schools sort of fell by the wayside, largely what we had before with less freedom. Part of what made being a mage fun was experimenting with your own spell combinations, having a hand in your own magic. Now you're stuck to choose from like...15 spells for each school (at least so far as I can find online or in-game). A tiny fraction of what was available in Oblivion, which was even smaller than what was in Morrowind.
Additionally a lot of spell effects have just been outright removed from what I can tell. Some for the reason that they wouldn't work with new gameplay mechanics, which I knew would happen with some things, but there's a lot - dispel (which made for some cool magic fights), a lot of bound weapons, reflect, absorb magicka, chameleon (I'm ok that one's gone), all direct "damage" (health, magicka, etc) spells from the destruction line, disintegrate, command (bummer), absorb, open - just the ones off the top of my head. Just gone from spell use. Some of these are somewhat present in another way - such as available in a potion, passively as a perk, or in a power unique to a race or stone or something. But it's still less you can simply use and experiment with. I'm feeling kinda jipped.
I understand they took out spellcrafting* (edit) because they thought fiddling with numbers took away from the "feel" of magic. But I'll tell you what takes away from it even more - having 5 tomes of "Sparks" lying around.
Magic fights do feel much more intense and involved. But again...80% of that is due to destruction stuff.
I suspect that a huge portion of magic - and skills as a whole, is tied in with the perks which I haven't been able to experiment with very much - so perhaps my views will change as I level up.
I've gotten very used to the UI and don't find it a bother anymore. The only thing I'd really like to see is the ability to actually hotkey dual-wielded sets. Also I don't want my swords to unbind from their keys just because I put a poison on it.
...hard to believe I've still just hit the tip of the iceberg.
Oh - one other thing. If anyone on the PC is having performance issues when you believe you should be able to max the game out - try putting shadows on "high" instead of "ultra". My 2GB 6950 - which maxes out just about anything and should be plenty for this, for some reason gets a bit of odd stuttering (mostly in towns) when shadows are on Ultra. I took some screenshots with everything else maxed out as high as it can go just to see the difference between high and ultra shadows and I honest to god cannot see that there IS a difference. If anything I thought shadows looked a little more accurate on high, and now I'm flying.
Because I want my money back.
Played it for about an hour before it crashed my xbox. This could be the worst lighting engine I have ever seen on the 360.
At any given time 40% of my screen is flat black, even during the day. The shadows and shading are abysmal, and that whole HDR focus your eyes thing is so massively annoying and overdone. I ended up getting frustrated and rushing through the character creator because half of his face was shaded completely black so I could never see what I was doing.
I feel lied to by the videos and screen shots because the only environments I've seen so far looked horrible. 256x256 tiling stone textures with flat white spec, awful looking crazybump normals...and the characters are some how worse than Fallout 3.
Does Bethesda even employ any character artists? Or do they just have unpaid interns use the gamebryo character creator and call it a day?
I have never been so disappointed by a game with this much good looking hype. On a whim I started playing Darksiders for a second time before getting Skyrim and I think I'll just go back to it instead.
Playing it some more...Still dont get it, but going to keep trying. That HDR shit is driving me bananas.
yea, this was my 1st impression too. when you see the 1st dragon, it was almost completley a black shape on my screen. I paused it and cranked the brightness almost all the way untill i could see the actual details on it and have been pretty happy ever since. by default it seems really contrasty. at 1st I was pretty underwhelmed but the the overall experience took over and I was in love.
everything on 360 seems to look decent at a distance but up close it breaks down pretty quick. still great looking caves and night time stuff. My buddy got it on pc and besides a crisper overall feel the graphics are not amazingly better. it seems really hit or miss, some things look great while others have super inconsistent texel density all over the place.
HOWEVER....given the size of the world and scope of what they are doing I dont mind being forgiving as the overall experience is so rich and immersive that the visuals stop bugging me after 10 mins of play. Im not even saying it looks horrible, most of the time it looks awesome, its just noticeably inconsistent.
The audio is wicked and the soundtrack is some of the best game music I have heard. Only a couple hours in so far but I just know I am going to love this game for a looooong time.
Oh and got another one
All bethesdas videos have primarily been the 360 version as it is today, screenshots have been both pc and 360, but most shown has been from 360.
I have screenshot random things so far, the game is gorgeous, I love EVERYTHING about it so far, well except the random crashes to desktop (without the error message), over 30 hours in so far, level 26 and I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface here.
Proudest moment:
No other game lets me fight a Dragon at the top of a snowy mountain only to finish it off by standing on it's head and stabbing it to death.
The ONLY thing I want to do is this: Please oh PLEASE let me manually set the shadows resolution with the ini, somehow
(I already tried setting the two shadow res settings in the ini to 4096 and 2048 respectively, but no change, oh well. STILL PRETTY.)
Otherwise there might possibly be some hard limit.
in skyrimprefs.ini look for: iShadowMapResolution=512
for shadows the only issue i've really had is the shadow bias being really bad at points and having the shadows flicker. I'm going to try tweaking the shadow bias scale setting in the skyrimprefs.ini and figure things out.
Battlemage: Magic/One-handed/Heavy Armor
Shouts: Elemental Fury, Frost Breath, Unrelenting Force, Disarm, Whirlwind Sprint, Throw Voice, Slow Time, Animal Allegiance, Storm Call
I've killed 12 dragons so far.
Bound sword is an awesome spell to cast in both hands. You become a whirlwind of magic blades.
Does anyone know if i somehow can hook up my Ps3 controller and play with?
Some of the textures vary in quality, outsource? Graphics are amazing but still can't help but notice low rez textures / tiling in obvious areas, this is just a nitpick I know how the Industry can be so it was probably due to the crunch and speed, either way, loving the lighting, graphics and atmosphere!
If you buy one of the latest [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Xbox-360-Wired-Controller-Black/dp/B003ZSN600/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1321142381&sr=8-3]wired Xbox 360 controllers[/ame] it will work directly on your computer without an adapter apparently.
I agree that the UI could have some better mouse controls but I don't think it's as terrible as some of you make it out to be. The only problems I have with it is sometimes it messes up and gets stuck on one chat response and enter/yes switch off between Y and ENTER randomly. Otherwise it's been much better than Oblivion.
@TwoListen, I usually roll a Shield/Melee warrior with Restoration Skills and was planning to do that on launch but I felt compelled to do a Wood Elf Archer with Dual Wielding at character creation. Luckily the base restoration skill everyone gets is pretty easy to use with low skill in it compared to Oblivion so I can pull that out whenever I need to.
WOW! those config options make the game amazing! Why werent they turned on to begin with????
http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=31#content
40 hours of gameplay, I'm rocking a full set of (Epic)Ebony Armor I crafted myself and still doing randomly generated quests and exploration.
Main quest has barely opened itself to me, same with the Guildlike quests, only joined and completed the Companions so far, also: Level 30 woo
I actually like the art in the game. No you're not going to find everything to be perfect individual assets or have great material definition but if you take it for what it is and look at the bigger picture the game looks very nice in some places. quite a few of the creatures look awesome, especially the dragons. I also love the way art is displayed in the inventory system as well as the loading screens.
This is the only game I have ever played where I have actually *wanted* the loading screens to last a little bit longer, so that I can rotate those models around and read the notes that go with it.
I've only killed 2 dragons so far, 3 if I didn't load a quick save because of some collateral damage the first time, after that it just flew off into the mountain. Oh well.
Oh, and this:
Oh well, she's partying up in Sovngarde now.
Also love the design of the Ebony Armor, funny bug though: The Helmet part of the mesh doesn't Cast a shadow :P, so when I put my helmet on, my shadow is headless
My sentiments exactly
You have about three days to get rid of it. In that time don't rest. Go to the nearst town and get a potion that gets rid of all diseases (cost a few hundred gold).
If you don't make it in time you have a stage one vampire. From now on your powers will grow at night but lessen during the day - up to the point where you should really stay out of sunlight. Also people will stop to talk to you or even attack you on sight, so questing gets near impossible over time.
Getting rid of BEING a vampire was much harder than getting rid of the disease in the other TES games. IIRC in Oblivion there was one NPC that could perform the ritual and itr did cost a lot of time and effort to get the questchain for it done.
Totally unrelated: Stupid NPCs. I've had several of them explaining to me what a Redguard is. I am playing a Redguard. Also I get told I look really pale from time to time. :poly136:
I noticed I had received rockjoint a few levels in the game, fun to notice my damage had been down 25% for quite some time xD.
I just couldn't figure out why I was diseased, but people kept telling me. But then I found the submenu.
Thanks Neolith - yes I remember what a nightmare it was to get rid of the curse in Oblivion. I took a cure disease potion just in case (there wasn't anything listed in my magicka tab).
I just did a dungeon quest with a quest NPC and he kept running ahead setting off all the traps and charging headlong into groups of bad guys (dumb fecker) so no change there.
On the whole the game is very polished, and promises to be a real time-sink, just like the others.
Was that that whole business in Morthal with going into the nearby cave?
I got those strange comments from NPC's too.
Can't say how much I love this game. It reminds me why I got into games and is a great sign that there's still large game developers out there who are just in it to make a seriously epic, fun game, not just some interactive movie with multiplayer attached to prolong the play time.
The first Dungeon i went in had two door puzzles and the game didn't tell me anything, the first one you actually learn straight away from a mistake and the second you have to figure out by using the inventory system to actually look at the item for clues. This felt amazing, finally a game that doesn't treat it's players like massive retards.
Loving all the little interactions. Like a guard having a go at me for leaving a load of weapons on the ground. Or getting kersplatted by a giant.