The OFFICIAL Anandtech Forums TeS V: Skyrim Thread

[ArenCordial]

I don't get the penny-pinching attitude when it comes to DLC. I bought Skyrim on sale for $40. I'd say I've easily gotten several hundred hours worth of enjoyment out of it; at even at $0.50 an hour, it's provided me with over $100 worth of enjoyment. So even if Dawnguard and Hearthfire are "overpriced," the overall cost of my Skyrim experience is still worth more than I've paid. The only reason I haven't gotten either yet is because of concerns about compatibility. I have no problem giving Bethesda more money for crafting a product that I feel has given me much more than my money's worth over the last year.

Its a question of each person's disposable income, thats all. Especially with Steam and GOG, you can buy full games for that price. So it becomes a question of value. If a person does not have any need to budget then yeah I'd easily recommend Dawnguard, but I perfer to not make that assumption for people and just recommend DLC at what I think they'd be worth in my estimation. Not so hard a concept.

Anyway really looking forward to Dragonborn.

 

[shortylickens]

I don't get the penny-pinching attitude when it comes to DLC. I bought Skyrim on sale for $40. I'd say I've easily gotten several hundred hours worth of enjoyment out of it; at even at $0.50 an hour, it's provided me with over $100 worth of enjoyment. So even if Dawnguard and Hearthfire are "overpriced," the overall cost of my Skyrim experience is still worth more than I've paid. The only reason I haven't gotten either yet is because of concerns about compatibility. I have no problem giving Bethesda more money for crafting a product that I feel has given me much more than my money's worth over the last year.

If you go crazy you may find yourself pissing away tons of cash. I've already got 10000 hours of game play I may never get too.

Same with cell phone apps. too easy to go crazy.

 

[Face2Face]

I gotta say I pirated Skyrim when it first came out (not proud of it) Then when it went on sale for $40 on Steam I purchased it. I purchased Dawnguard and Hearthfire @ full price. Call me pathetic but I have had the most fun playing Skyrim. I love the lore and sandbox play style. I have racked up over 160 hours and still am not sick of this game. That says something to me. This is purely my opinion but I will drink any Skyrim Kool-aid Bethesda wants to give me...

 

[Qbah]

Got the new card now (system RAM still on its way, hard to get DDR2 to match my current sticks...). Game is pegging at under 3GB VRAM usage

I enabled everything possible, transparency AA, shadows on everything (not really GPU, but hey), max texture modes and what not and the game is chugging along just fine. I do get the occasional stutter 0.1s, but I'd say it's from the CPU getting hammered by shadows or something.

By maxing everything though, the GPU is running at 95+% usage for the most part :awe:

Also, played for many hours and the game didn't hang at all. But that could have been due to updated mods, beta 1.8 patch or Lady Luck smiling on me...

But oh my god, does the game look gorgeous! When looking at the armor or weapons... so beautiful :awe:

 

[lkailburn]

great to hear qbah. It's like a whole different game. That's why i couldn't resist the upgrade.

Side note- is there anywhere ingame that will tell you how many hours you've played or only steam?

 

[Qbah]

great to hear qbah. It's like a whole different game. That's why i couldn't resist the upgrade.

Side note- is there anywhere ingame that will tell you how many hours you've played or only steam?

Thanks! Yea, it's like a new game With the Milky Way sky... fog... aurora or clear skies... just wandering in the night, hearing the wilderness sounds is so much fun... It's really like looking at your mind when reading a book... last time I had that was in Baldur's Gate 1&2. And to a lesser extent, in Oblivion with IQ mods.

As for timer, no idea for total except for Steam. You can check how long you played each character though. When you go to load game and select a save, it tells you how long you've spent playing that char.

Also, what the other person said... I'll buy anything for Skyrim Bethesda throws my way :awe:

 

[lkailburn]

Thanks! Yea, it's like a new game With the Milky Way sky... fog... aurora or clear skies... just wandering in the night, hearing the wilderness sounds is so much fun... It's really like looking at your mind when reading a book... last time I had that was in Baldur's Gate 1&2. And to a lesser extent, in Oblivion with IQ mods.

As for timer, no idea for total except for Steam. You can check how long you played each character though. When you go to load game and select a save, it tells you how long you've spent playing that char.

Also, what the other person said... I'll buy anything for Skyrim Bethesda throws my way :awe:

Under my char it says 107.51.13....is that 107 hours :-O

 

[Qbah]

Under my char it says 107.51.13....is that 107 hours :-O

Yep. 107 hours, 51 minutes, 13 seconds Not counting deaths and reloads.

 

[lkailburn]

Wow I had no idea i've played that much. Definitely a great game considering I feel like i've done very little in the way of the main quest and have already spent so many hours. One of the reasons I was so disappointed in the last game I played( I don't play many games) wahich was Dragon Age 2. It took me only 40 hours to beat the whole game. Felt more like and add on to the first one.

 

[mmntech]

I actually liked Dawnguard. The problem with it however, is not the content but the pricing.

At $20 its way overpriced
At $15 its still overpriced
At $10 I'd say its a fair value for DLCs these days
At $5 its a steal

If I were you I'd grab it on a holiday sale for the next time you feel like running through Skyrim.

Yep, $20 is way too much considering all the Fallout 3 DLCs were $10. Point Lookout and The Pitt were pretty big expansions too.

 

[dennilfloss]

New character: she's a wood elf (though I made her look kinda half-elf during character creation as the Skyrim pure elves are quite unattractive.

I have a save I call charactercreation.ess that is basically saved just before exiting Helgen Keep, so I can just load it when I want to start a new game and use the showracemenu command. That way I don't have to go through the OMG Dragon! Follow me if you want to live! intro each time.

 

[dennilfloss]

Yep. 107 hours, 51 minutes, 13 seconds Not counting deaths and reloads.

I'm currently at 1077 hours. What a coincidence!:thumbsup: That's for a bunch of characters though as I tend to create a new one and start again using a different route once I reach level 60 (one day I'll infiltrate the Thalmor embassy and follow the main quest to completion).

 

[Qbah]

I'm currently at 1077 hours. What a coincidence!:thumbsup: That's for a bunch of characters though as I tend to create a new one and start again using a different route once I reach level 60 (one day I'll infiltrate the Thalmor embassy and follow the main quest to completion).

Game is so awesome, all that is time well spent! I'm at 342 and enjoyed every single minute. I'm playing a Khajiit now, lvl51, heavy armor. Went with an axe and a shield for a long time, training the use of Ebony Blade now though (with no perks in 2H :awe! I use smithing only to improve stuff I found and no enchanting (apart from the training to get levels).

 

[Atomic Playboy]

405 hours here. I thought it would be less. Whoops.

 

[shortylickens]

I've only got about 150 hours.
And thats over two characters. For the 2nd one I've used house mods to make inventory holding easier. I also gave myself the full map so I wouldnt have to wander if I didnt feel like it.

By comparison, I figured out how to beat Final Fantasy 2 in 8 hours.

 

[dennilfloss]

Heard in the Whiterun market:

"You know what's wrong with Skyrim? Everyone's obsessed with MODS!"

 

[dennilfloss]

Might not be practical in the end or too heavy/warm but I'm thinking about making myself some kind of cardboard visor (think Cyclops on the X-Men) the opening of which would fit exactly the relative size of my monitor, so I would only see the world of Skyrim while I play. I already have an inkling of that since my computer glasses lose focus when I deviate from the center of my field of view by more than a few degrees.

 

[Qbah]

Might not be practical in the end or too heavy/warm but I'm thinking about making myself some kind of cardboard visor (think Cyclops on the X-Men) the opening of which would fit exactly the relative size of my monitor, so I would only see the world of Skyrim while I play. I already have an inkling of that since my computer glasses lose focus when I deviate from the center of my field of view by more than a few degrees.

Get a bigger TV Or a 100+" projector Works well for me with my 40" TV and sitting around 1.5 meters from it

 

[Atomic Playboy]

Okay, I installed Opethfeldt. Pretty straight forward installation. Overall I am happy, I just need to tweak it some more.

I changed the vignette to 0. I also removed the Effect.txt file in the Skyrim root dir. It makes the game look really blurry, kind of like FXAA - which I hate. Here are some low resolution screen shots of my settings so far. I am also happy this ENB doesn't have DOF.

I finally went ahead and installed Opethfeldt ENB myself. I'm on the fence about the FXAA; it definitely blurs the textures, but it also makes face textures (especially for old people) seem more realistic and not so sharp. I haven't tweaked the Vignette at all, and I miss the Depth of Field from ForceWithin, so I may look into adding some Bokeh DOF back. That said, the results have been fairly astounding...

I got so caught up staring at the light dancing off a tree stump (why am I so obsessed with tree stumps?), I didn't realize that a dragon had snuck up on me until he started melting my ass....

Overall, I'm mightily impressed with the results. The interplay between light and shadow feels much more natural and the blacks don't get crushed through excessive contrast boosting. It's definitely bright and there's a little bit of colors washing out in direct sunlight, but I find that's fairly accurate to life; when the sun is shining directly on something, it can be blindingly bright. Definitely my preferred ENB at the moment.

 

[Qbah]

Hey Atomic, what system are you running this preset on? It looks absolutely stunning! I'd like to try it out, but I don't know if my 4GB GTX670 can handle it...

 

[Atomic Playboy]

i5-2500k @ 4.4 GHz
EVGA GTX 680 2GB (stock clocks)
16 GB DDR3
256 GB Crucial m4 SSD boot/game drive

I think your biggest stumbling block would be your CPU/RAM. The GTX 670 is pretty close performance-wise to a 680 and my biggest issue now is running out of VRAM if I fast travel through a bunch of different areas (your 4GB of VRAM will end that issue). Glorious Grasses, the three required files for Texture Pack Combiner, and Opethfeldt ENB will give you results very similar to mine without all the additional foofaraw. That said, I do dip down to 25 FPS or so in heavily forested areas, so you'll probably need to dial back anti-aliasing to maintain a playable framerate.

 

[Qbah]

i5-2500k @ 4.4 GHz
EVGA GTX 680 2GB (stock clocks)
16 GB DDR3
256 GB Crucial m4 SSD boot/game drive

I think your biggest stumbling block would be your CPU/RAM. The GTX 670 is pretty close performance-wise to a 680 and my biggest issue now is running out of VRAM if I fast travel through a bunch of different areas (your 4GB of VRAM will end that issue). Glorious Grasses, the three required files for Texture Pack Combiner, and Opethfeldt ENB will give you results very similar to mine without all the additional foofaraw. That said, I do dip down to 25 FPS or so in heavily forested areas, so you'll probably need to dial back anti-aliasing to maintain a playable framerate.

I'm picking up another 4GB system RAM tomorrow, the shop got it delivered today.

As for dipping to under 30FPS, that's already happening to me in heavy forest areas... I got Glorious Grass, TPC with a lot of additional mods, also additional weapon re-textures and higher rez textures for a lot of stuff that's not in TPC.

Gonna try it out once I install the extra 4GB of system RAM.

Thanks!

 

[cronos]

New kid on the Skyrim block reporting! Finally got a decent graphics card to run recent graphical intensive games so I can finally play this game! It's only a 7850 so nothing super fancy, but I have been sticking with my 8800 GS for five years so it feels like a totally new world to me.

So, what now? I'm thinking of mods so I skimmed through this thread last night and luckily found Atomic Playboy's excellent list of mods, so I got NMM and installed SKSE and SkyUI. I also couldn't help myself and went to install TPC, just the required ones for now. Beautiful stuff!

Finally, I have one unbelievably stupid question, how do I assign my skill points? Every time I leveled up, it gives me this graphical view of the skill trees (if it's the right term) and therefore a ton of options, but I could not figure out how to actually assign my points to something and whatever I do it just keeps zooming in/out of the trees.

 

[shortylickens]

Congrats. You could have played it months ago on Minimum and it would have looked fuckin great.

 

[cronos]

Congrats. You could have played it months ago on Minimum and it would have looked fuckin great.

I know. I was intentionally holding out because I wanted the experience to be amazing (it was, and more). Jumping from a Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz + 8800 GS (384 MB) to an i5 3570k + HD 7850 (2 GB) was awesome

I also wanted to get it on a relatively good deal. I thought about waiting for the Steam holiday sale but when Amazon lightning deal had it for $35 a couple of days ago and my new computer is ready, I thought "screw it, I gotta get it nowww!".