TES V: Skyrim

[CrazyBernie]

Interesting. I haven't played a lot in the past week, but I haven't encountered any of the issues described, although some of them wouldn't be immediately noticable.

Performance-wise, I run the game on my 20" LCD @ 1680x1050 @ 8xAA and 16xAF, and other than an initial stuttering in the outdoors, it's very smooth. When I run it on my new 50" Plasma (Merry Christmas to me!) @ 1920x1200, I drop the AA (Honestly, it's not really noticable unless you're looking for it, when you're running @ native res), and turn the AF down to 8... and I don't even have stuttering. I'll probably be able to bring the AA and AF back up when I upgrade my processor since the game actually works the CPU as well as the GPU.

It'l be nice when the 2560 x 1440 monitors finally come down out of the stratosphere in price...

[sirdilznik]

I don't generally go above 4X Anti-Aliasing as I honestly can't tell the difference between 4XAA and 8XAA or 16XAA. I suppose if I took screenshots and went over them with a magnifying glass I could spot the difference, but while the game is in motion it looks the same to me. I would rather allocate my resources to cranking texture size and other settings which, to me, make a greater overall impact on how the game looks with less of a performance hit. On the other hand I usually crank Anisotropic Filtering just because it doesn't seem to be as much of a resource hog as AA, at least for my current set up. In the case of Skyrim though, performance wasn't the issue. I could run the game with 4XAA and all my other settings cranked and the performance would be fine except I could count on the game crashing fairly quickly (anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes). For whatever reason AA makes Skyrim super unstable on my computer (note: AA doesn't do this in other games on my system when I do use it). Interestingly Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA) causes no stability problems with Skyrim for me and does pretty much what AA does (gets rid of the jaggies) so that's cool.

On a side note, my sexy female Orc archer is getting ridiculously lethal with her Infernal Bow (Legendary Ebony Bow with a fire enchantment). Yesterday I two-shotted a giant and the bow wasn't even charged so it was only doing physical damage and I was using mediocre (Dwarven) arrows. I just got to 90 Smithing so once I level up I'm taking the Daedric Smithing perk. Legendary Daedric bow and armor here I come.

[llew silverhand]

hmm
well I've earned enough OT in the past 3 days to purchase a few copies of this...
early present for me!!!

[ManusDei]

I got Skyrim from my girlfriend for Christmas.

I heard the game relies heavily on mods, which ones would you recommend ?

Usually I'm more interested in mods that give more information, simplify user interface or give more options than in mods that simplify gameplay (but would I be here if I liked games with simple gameplay ?).

Thanks

[blatherbeard]

My wife, whom i love DEARLY, got me Skyrim and an AMD 6950 2 gig Vc to go with it.

and for other reasons, she is just the best wife ever.

time to lose me to gaming!

[Rune_74]

This is an excellant game:) I'm glad you guys like it too...Thomas, you get this for christmas?

The only thing pulling me away at the moment is the old republic, equilly awesome.

[BasiliskWrangler]

This is an excellant game:) I'm glad you guys like it too...Thomas, you get this for christmas?

Nope, no Skyrim under the tree for me this year. Hopefully I'll pick this up some time in January. I am eager to give it a try.

[ManusDei]

It was on sale on steam yesterday, but not anymore. Very usefull comment, don't you think ?

[llew silverhand]

It was on sale on steam yesterday, but not anymore. Very usefull comment, don't you think ?

Well, it was retrospectively useful for me, as I managed to snag it. I've only put in an hour so far due to the holidays, but I am looking forward to playing more!

By the way, if you have an xbox 360 controller plugged in when you start the game, it will default to that control scheme. I intent to switch to Keyboard/Mouse next time I play.

[CrazyBernie]

Yeah, I was trying to figure out why the game wasn't responding to any controls the other day and realized that I had the controller plugged in. It's pretty annoying that it automatically disables the keyboard and mouse... but then I wouldn't have much else to gripe about.

[llew silverhand]

Didn't get as much play time in over my holiday as I'd have liked (Damn you Terraria!) but so far I have stuck with the 360 controller and am enjoying Skyrim! Now that my son is back to school I'll have my gaming mornings free again!