The OFFICIAL Anandtech Forums TeS V: Skyrim Thread

[CottonRabbit]

Very impressed so far. Everything besides interface is great. This is probably the only game I've played this year that hasn't failed to meet up to its hype.

 

[Merad]

If its like any of the other games, hold down the key you use to go to third person and move the mouse around. You can pan all over your character.

You don't have to hold it. Just be in 3rd person with your weapon sheathed.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Is skyrim closer to Morrowwind (which I really liked) or like Oblivion (Which looked a little too normal for me)?

I agree, I felt so disconnected with Oblivion. On the other hand, Skyrim is immersive as hell right out of the gate, I had no idea i even woke up this morning lol; i thought I was still playing.

 

[Phobic9]

Finally got to play after having to work today while everyone else here was off. *sigh*

First impressions:

I sat down, loaded up Skyrim... fast forward 3 hours... Uhh... where did the time go?

I haven't had a game do this to me in a LONG time. The game is fantastic now and I can't imagine how much mods will make it. I did get my first CTD though so I'll give the sound fix a shot.

 

[Demo24]

I have a killer rig but a 30" monitor which means 2560x1600 I'm wondering if I will be able to play at this res?

You should seriously have no problems running that maxxed on that res. The overall textures are low, but it was clearly a trade off for draw distance. So if you step back everything looks quite nice most of the time. Still, some things have annoyingly low res textures if you stop and stare.

I'm getting above 30 on 1920x1200 on high, with full aa/af and some other tweaks. A 5970 will probably laugh at it. :awe:

 

[frozentundra123456]

Played a few minutes. Not far enough into the game to really say much, but the only criticism is have so far, as someone else mentioned, the interface seem really clumsy, and there is not much of a tutorial to explain it. Seems more confusing and less accessable (consolized??) even than the oblivion interface. Maybe I just need some more time with it. Does anyone know how the levelling system works: do enemies still level with you?? Runs OK on medium settings on a low end system (E4500 stock and 9800GT). Hope to get a lot more playtime in after work tonight.

 

[Demo24]

I learned there are 2 ways to go into 3rd person. 1) scroll back on the mousewheel, which will in increments zoom you out of your character. 2)hit 'f' which is more default 3rd person, and this allows you to free camera (I'll have to try method 1 with for FC without weapon equipped though).

I didn't play enough to really get a good idea of it but I enjoyed my hr or so doing the very first part, lol. Rolled a Khajiit just because I like the idea of being a walking cat-human hybrid, lol (I'm not well enough versed in TES to know more than what I see visually).


And yes, textures are a bit disappointing. Clearly this was traded for draw distance, but it just makes me wonder why it's hitting my system so hard for this stuff. I mean lighting isn't terribly crazy, nor super high textures but even in the dungeon parts I'm not getting much more than about 40. So far I've stayed above 30 pretty well, so it's pretty smooth and stable at this point. My absolute biggest beef is the textures on the weapons and shield..they are just terrible and look straight out of Oblivion. I picked up a shield in the dungeon/caves area and it's just horrible. I can understand world textures for draw distance, but come on at least bump up what is right against the screen the whole time!

I will say they did a really good job on the water though! And so far the music is pretty epic. Just makes me wonder what more they could have done if they had spent more effort on the PC version, but oh well.

---

I'm also getting a weird graphical glitch where I have like 1 row of pixels in a blueish haze outlining my weapons (which is really annoying on a bow), anyone else getting that on AMD cards?


I'm on a core i5, 5770 btw.

 

[Red Storm]

cannot stand the controls at all..
played about 5 hours.

tried both K/M and X360 controller.. both are incredibly clunky.

hope the modders will solve this..

not being able to use K/M to its full potential is terrible.

and I do not want to play it with a gamepad.

Elaborate please.

 

[VashHT]

I only played for about 30 min last night but I thought it was fun, my only complaint is that the graphics look a lot worse than the screenshots (I have it on ultra with 4xAA and 8xAF). The animations look a lot better thn Oblivion which is nice, and the character models look a lot better imo. I can't wait to get home and play tonight, luckily I'm nto doing too much this weekend so I should be able to put a lot of hours into this.

 

[CVSiN]

I only played for about 30 min last night but I thought it was fun, my only complaint is that the graphics look a lot worse than the screenshots (I have it on ultra with 4xAA and 8xAF). The animations look a lot better thn Oblivion which is nice, and the character models look a lot better imo. I can't wait to get home and play tonight, luckily I'm nto doing too much this weekend so I should be able to put a lot of hours into this.

vash dont use the ultra preset.. go in and manually set everything as high as it will go..
Ultra is pretty conservative on the preset.

 

[Chaptorial]

Also browsing through the skill constellations is a royal PITA to navigate.

That's the biggest gripe I have so far. All the reviews touched on this somewhat clumsy interface and it can be a pain but by no means a game breaker.

Played about 2 hrs last night getting through the intro and out into the wilds. The intro was very forced as I expected it to be to get you going and I can't wait to start playing the game in true sandbox mode.

Game detected my hardware and set my graphics to High and I can say the game really is beautiful to look at. It seems FOV is around 60 at default going to change that to 95.

Well time to go bag me an elk...

 

[VashHT]

vash dont use the ultra preset.. go in and manually set everything as high as it will go..
Ultra is pretty conservative on the preset.

Ah ok thanks, I'll have to try that when I get home. It was running pretty well on my system at those settings, I didn't run FRAPs or anything but I didn't notice any slowdowns.

 

[Zenoth]

Superb game so far, I really like it. It's much better than Oblivion, in every single aspects. The attention to details is great, animations, music, sounds, voice acting, graphics, beautiful scenery, good story, etc, it's all there and well done. It's not perfect however, there's bugs and a few things that do annoy me a little bit but it's no show stopper. I've had a single crash to the desktop (I was expecting it), but it took seven hours (I've been playing since it unlocked until about 20 minutes ago). I've seen some bones and bodies of dead wild animals partially stuck (and sometimes moving) in terrain geometry, or a shovel that mysteriously started to move straight up towards the sky only to eventually fade out of view...

I know I'm going to see some minor bugs here and there and unfortunately it's going to crash a few times, but so far it's ok, "more stable" than Oblivion (for me) and certainly too enjoyable to turn my back on it due to those bugs. The game is absolutely enormous and even if the developers (and testers) would have disposed of another year to work on it I highly doubt that they would have been able to fix even a fraction of the bugs that exist right now. In a year or two from now we'll be talking about the Unofficial Skyrim Patch, and maybe even the famous Qarl will make a come back and create a new Textures Pack. I can't wait to see what the modding community will add to this game.

I'd like to say one final thing for this post concerning one thing I love in this game; the battles against the dragons are A.M.A.Z.I.N.G., that is all.

 

[Soundmanred]

Quick question, how do I put items from my own inventory into a container/dead body?

"Store"

 

[IGemini]

I'm not sure if anyone else has this issue, but drop doesn't seem to work in the most recent version (1.1.21 via Steam). Workaround for now is to store whatever you want to get rid of in a body/chest/etc.

EDIT: Okay, pushing "R" itself doesn't work, but clicking it does. Strange bug.

 

[Jules]

Where are you guys storing items at?

 

[RavenSEAL]

That's the biggest gripe I have so far. All the reviews touched on this somewhat clumsy interface and it can be a pain but by no means a game breaker.

Played about 2 hrs last night getting through the intro and out into the wilds. The intro was very forced as I expected it to be to get you going and I can't wait to start playing the game in true sandbox mode.

Game detected my hardware and set my graphics to High and I can say the game really is beautiful to look at. It seems FOV is around 60 at default going to change that to 95.

Well time to go bag me an elk...

I like the interface, specially when you consider how horrible IV's was. I love the new quick access menu as well and the combat model has decently improved.

By the way, sleep deprived friday is going like ****, but at least I had a lot of fun last night.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Where are you guys storing items at?

My assistant and dead bodies :biggrin:

 

[RavenSEAL]

Oh yeah, so because i'm such a boss and killed the dragon, i got my own personal "assistant" chasing me around. Unlike in Fallout, she's actually really useful.

 

[randay]

so i stole some stuff, and then the owners come in and the one guy doesnt fucking die! he just hunches over for a bit then starts after me again. did i steal from an important npc or something? or is it like that for all of them??

 

[McWatt]

Someone on Hardforum claims that the weird y-axis mouse sensitivity variability issue that makes the game unplayable for some but doesn't show up for others is due frame rate changes. He says that the y-axis sensitivity scales with framerate (or maybe it's an inverse scaling).

As I ran through caves last night I noticed that in some areas a 1" mouse move up would have me looking at the ceiling, and then 5 feet further forward it took 6" of mouse movement to do the same thing. I can't check it out until later, but the fps-connection seems quite plausible, though I think it counts as the worst mouse control problem I've ever seen in any software. Luckily, it can be patched out. Unluckily, it may require a Bethesda patch, and they're likely to never address it.

 

[Arkaign]

Great great game so far, though I agree it needs some work with the menus. It's evident from the very beginning when you should be able to use your mouse on everything, but can't, that they were a bit lazy with the PC port of this.

Hopefully a community patch will fix the UI shortly (I'm sure this is a very common complaint).

 

[VashHT]

Great great game so far, though I agree it needs some work with the menus. It's evident from the very beginning when you should be able to use your mouse on everything, but can't, that they were a bit lazy with the PC port of this.

Hopefully a community patch will fix the UI shortly (I'm sure this is a very common complaint).

Yeah, imo this is the biggest failure of most console ports, no one seems to want to redesign the interface for use with a mouse. I know in Oblivion there were a few mods to change the in game UI that made it a lot more usable.

 

[randay]

Someone on Hardforum claims that the weird y-axis mouse sensitivity variability issue that makes the game unplayable for some but doesn't show up for others is due frame rate changes. He says that the y-axis sensitivity scales with framerate (or maybe it's an inverse scaling).

As I ran through caves last night I noticed that in some areas a 1" mouse move up would have me looking at the ceiling, and then 5 feet further forward it took 6" of mouse movement to do the same thing. I can't check it out until later, but the fps-connection seems quite plausible, though I think it counts as the worst mouse control problem I've ever seen in any software. Luckily, it can be patched out. Unluckily, it may require a Bethesda patch, and they're likely to never address it.

i have felt that mouse acceleration issue. mostly over guis but i also feel it during gameplay but not as bad.

 

[Mem]

So you guys liking the game?...my retail copy has been dispatched but probably won't get it until Monday.