The OFFICIAL Anandtech Forums TeS V: Skyrim Thread

[Locut0s]

I play at 1920x1200 at high+ settings. Looks very nice and runs smoothly (I haven't checked the FPS but there is no jerkiness at all). In fact, I'd say it runs better than my modded Oblivion did. Stability wise, I've had one CTD and one full freeze in 47 hours of play. After thousands of hours playings Morrowind and Oblivion, I am used to saving every couple of minutes anyway. I always use three named saves on top of the quicksave and automatic ones, so I can go back a few minutes if needed.

So far, I feel no need to upgrade and I'm not even overclocking anything. That will change once a high-res texture pack appears and I need more than my 1GB of VRAM.

It's nice when you can still get so much enjoyment out of three-year old hardware.

No mod used yet. Just changes in .ini to enable shadows on trees and rocks.

This is what the game looks like. I have disabled AA & AF in game and just enable them in Catalyst Center like I did for Oblivion to have HDR.


http://imgur.com/a/Jw6wJ#0

Thousands of hours in morrowind and olbivion huh nice to see a fan. So I guess you are a lock in for tes 6 whenever it comes out.

Wish I didn't have a xfire card to tell you the truth as it's really really buggy right now. Hoping the next and cap fixes things. Having a a huge amount of fun so far.

How do you rate the game so far?

 

[CottonRabbit]

How did you get so many companions? I thought you could only have 1

Two of them are from the spell dead thrall, which allows you to permanently revive almost any human. The two atronachs were then summoned by them.

 

[ManBearPig]

Any suggestions for perks for an offensive Mage?

 

[RavenSEAL]

Thousands of hours in morrowind and olbivion huh nice to see a fan. So I guess you are a lock in for tes 6 whenever it comes out.

Wish I didn't have a xfire card to tell you the truth as it's really really buggy right now. Hoping the next and cap fixes things. Having a a huge amount of fun so far.

How do you rate the game so far?

I gave up and disabled crossfire, the game runs smooth as butter now.

 

[hans030390]

So yesterday I spammed making iron daggers with some minimal enchanting too so that I could get my Smithing up to 100 and bonus my enchanting some. So I now have full Dragon Plate Armor, upgraded to Legendary, and a Daedric Sword upgraded to Legendary. Also it put me now at level 30. And I get killed by a random group of bandits with swords shortly after. I have little trouble with Dragons, but bandits with sword killed me. And I got most of them in single combat, it was when I got double teamed that I couldn't keep up.

Get better at blocking.

 

[dennilfloss]

Damn, the atmosphere in some of those dungeons makes you want to piss your pants.D:

Drusilla's atronachs killed their first draug deathlord. Scary guys to hear talk and shout just around the corner... She's now level 21 and still wearing no armour, like a good summoner/necromancer should.

 

[dennilfloss]

Thousands of hours in morrowind and olbivion huh nice to see a fan.

How do you rate the game so far?

A fan indeed and with so many hours to kill. I rate Skyrim a 9.5 now. It'll go to 10 with mods and I will replay it with many races and professions, as with its predecessors.

 

[Locut0s]

Damn, the atmosphere in some of those dungeons makes you want to piss your pants.D:

Drusilla's atronachs killed their first draug deathlord. Scary guys to hear talk and shout just around the corner... She's now level 21 and still wearing no armour, like a good summoner/necromancer should.

Do you play in 1st or 3rd person?

 

[dennilfloss]

I play 1st. Not a fan of third as it breaks the immersion for me.

 

[PrayForDeath]

Last night was the first time I actually delved deep in to the game. Prior to that I would just play it for an hour or two and do some trivial tasks, but last night I did quite a bit of exploring, joined the thieves' guild, did a ton of quests, and leveled from 9 to 17. I think I played for 6 hours.

No. It's just 5k. Seems like a good amount at first, but it's not. Just paid a 7,500 bounty and didn't even care.

If you do a fair amount of exploring or take your time in the dungeons, you'll find lots of stuff to sell. I don't even do all the other things, like make items, enchant, etc that you can do for more gold.

Yeah I already made 4k back, so I'm feeling less worried about it now.

I must say though, the first time I slept in my house, I was playing late at night, and I freaked the hell out when my character opened her eyes and saw that thing! Don't wanna spoil this for those who have yet to buy a house, though I'm thinking this might happen if you sleep on any bed (that was the first time I'd slept on a bed in the game.)

I'm wondering if robbing people or their houses can cause this little mini-event to happen every once in a while. I had previously been to Darkwater Crossing (and robbed her house), but I had never met or talked to Annekke herself. Very interesting...

Oh shit, I've been ransacking houses left and right ever since I joined the Thieves' Guild and upped the related skills. LOL

I think everyone should level their pickpocketing skill regardless of their character's 'style'. Not only do you get a ton of gold from all the items that you steal, but you also get an amazing perk called "many pockets" at level 50, which ups your inventory by 100 (equivalent to leveling stamina 20 times!)

It's so easy to level pickpocketing. I went from 20 to 75ish in just a couple hours while doing various thieves guild quests and just simply mugging every person I run into. Sometimes you gain two skill-ups from the same person if you steal valuable items. It's awesome.

It's a known AMD/XFIRE issue. The damn cap needs to be here..

Why are you guys so worked up about xfire? Your 5970 or 5870 should be able to handle Skyrim easily with just one GPU. It runs fine on my 560 (non-ti) @ 1920x1200 and max settings.

I'm actually the type of player that likes to loot every single thing that's not nailed down and sell it for cash but the game, like Oblivion before it, doesn't make this all that easy.

I used to be like that, but when I started playing Skyrim I quickly realized that this won't be feasible here. So when looting I observe both the value and weight, and only pick up the item if it has a reasonable ratio of weight to value.

 

[dennilfloss]

Drusilla just fought her toughest dragon fight so far, once again alone in the open, in those beautiful marshlands east of Solitude. This guy was tougher than the blood dragon she fought recently but he was simply called dragon and was a bitch to make land. That fight lasted like 20 minutes and she got roasted pretty good but prevailed in the end.

*Mortal Kombat*

"Your soul in MINE!!!"

 

[HeXen]

i wondered into a stormcloak camp and a dragon attacked. i noticed the dragon animations werent very smooth and kinda weird at times, anyway, i didnt have to do a thing, the stormcloaks killed it for me, they lost 3 or 4 guys so i could loot em too boot.
lol
but if thats the basis for dragon fights, them floating around and occasionally landing to blow fire. then its pretty damn stupid regardless of difficulty. i was expecting something impressive with some COD style melee's or something.

this game does have some horrible animations for 4 legged creatures though. they can spin around like their on a turn table. lol

 

[Locut0s]

...i was expecting something impressive with some COD style melee's or something...

Not sure if serious.

 

[yhelothar]

meh I'm having a hard time with my mage character
I'm playing dark elf and I'm level 10. I'm getting killed easily by 2-3 hits often, even by little critters.
It also doesn't help that I'm playing unarmored, but even with a 75% magicka regen robe with a 30% magika regen hood, I'm still not having enough magika to own those little critters.
I'm having to reload several times just to get through every little section with enemies.
I think I leveled too many times with sneak/lockpick/alchemy that my destruction stuff didn't up enough with my leveling? :\

 

[Locut0s]

meh I'm having a hard time with my mage character
I'm playing dark elf and I'm level 10. I'm getting killed easily by 2-3 hits often, even by little critters.
It also doesn't help that I'm playing unarmored, but even with a 75% magicka regen robe with a 30% magika regen hood, I'm still not having enough magika to own those little critters.
I'm having to reload several times just to get through every little section with enemies.
I think I leveled too many times with sneak/lockpick/alchemy that my destruction stuff didn't up enough with my leveling? :\

It seems that though levelling is MUCH better than Oblivion you can still level a character badly by doing the above. I'm a melee character but I too am finding it a bit difficult. Though not neatly as hard as you are. I'm going to spend the next few levels concentrating just on fighting.

 

[Zebo]

I play at 1920x1200 at high+ settings. Looks very nice and runs smoothly (I haven't checked the FPS but there is no jerkiness at all). In fact, I'd say it runs better than my modded Oblivion did. Stability wise, I've had one CTD and one full freeze in 47 hours of play. After thousands of hours playings Morrowind and Oblivion, I am used to saving every couple of minutes anyway. I always use three named saves on top of the quicksave and automatic ones, so I can go back a few minutes if needed.

So far, I feel no need to upgrade and I'm not even overclocking anything. That will change once a high-res texture pack appears and I need more than my 1GB of VRAM.

It's nice when you can still get so much enjoyment out of three-year old hardware.

No mod used yet. Just changes in .ini to enable shadows on trees and rocks.

This is what the game looks like. I have disabled AA & AF in game and just enable them in Catalyst Center like I did for Oblivion to have HDR.

http://imgur.com/a/Jw6wJ#0

It's built for 3 year old consoles like most games unfortunately. If you want to tax PC HW get high detail texture packs and HDR/Bloom packs over at skyrim nexus.

 

[Snock514]

meh I'm having a hard time with my mage character
I'm playing dark elf and I'm level 10. I'm getting killed easily by 2-3 hits often, even by little critters.
It also doesn't help that I'm playing unarmored, but even with a 75% magicka regen robe with a 30% magika regen hood, I'm still not having enough magika to own those little critters.
I'm having to reload several times just to get through every little section with enemies.
I think I leveled too many times with sneak/lockpick/alchemy that my destruction stuff didn't up enough with my leveling? :\

I was playing the same way exactly level 10, too, I just started a new char because it was just not fun. Going to try a melee character now.


Also, has anyone found a way to skip the intro a saw the mod that claimed to do it, but it did nothing. I also deleted the .biv file and that also did nothing. I also didn't reload steam, maybe that's the problem, I just spent the 5 mins and watched it again for the third time, heh.
Edit: Okay, just kidding, restarting steam didn't do the trick either.

 

[PrayForDeath]

meh I'm having a hard time with my mage character
I'm playing dark elf and I'm level 10. I'm getting killed easily by 2-3 hits often, even by little critters.
It also doesn't help that I'm playing unarmored, but even with a 75% magicka regen robe with a 30% magika regen hood, I'm still not having enough magika to own those little critters.
I'm having to reload several times just to get through every little section with enemies.
I think I leveled too many times with sneak/lockpick/alchemy that my destruction stuff didn't up enough with my leveling? :\

You won't survive with destruction spells alone no matter how strong you get. You'll need conjuration and alteration spells for minions/shields. Possibly restoration too.

Alternatively, you can bring companions to take the heat off of you, or use your sneaking skills creatively.

 

[Hikeon3]

I agree. I levelled my smithing a little too early on and my 1h/block/heavy didn't level quite quickly enough. So even with my full ebony set I was having some issues taking too much damage. But 2-3 levels worth of just adventuring rectified the imbalance pretty quickly. I'm right back to beast mode.

 

[yhelothar]

Awe. In oblivion, I made up for this weakness with poison arrows that worked extremely well. It'd take three poison arrows to kill an imperial guard.
I might try honing that again.

 

[pontifex]

Does stealing work the same way it did in Oblivion? So like if I steal something in the beginning of the game and then get caught stealing something near the end of the game, I lose everything I've stolen in between?

I got this spell that increases armor and some other stat by 40. It doesn't show a time limit for how long it lasts, so does that mean it's always on?


Any tips for a beginner? I want to play a mage character since I always play a fighter type character in other RPGS.

Is a mage/thief hybrid viable?

 

[s1njin]

Are most of you buying this game on cd and importing into steam or are you buying it straight off steam?

 

[dennilfloss]

I bought a boxed version and the Prima official guide at a nearby brick & mortar store and installed from the DVD. Put 53 hours into it so far.

 

[Hikeon3]

I'm playing it on the xbox. Cashed in a free month of Gamefly to test it out. Will be purchasing for the PC. The UI on the 360 might be intuitive, but the load times are insufferable.

 

[Demo24]

Does stealing work the same way it did in Oblivion? So like if I steal something in the beginning of the game and then get caught stealing something near the end of the game, I lose everything I've stolen in between?

I got this spell that increases armor and some other stat by 40. It doesn't show a time limit for how long it lasts, so does that mean it's always on?


Any tips for a beginner? I want to play a mage character since I always play a fighter type character in other RPGS.

Is a mage/thief hybrid viable?

Yes, you do lose your stolen goods. You can also pay off your bounty's, or try and persuade them to look the other way. I've yet to be stopped though, the guards aren't as intrusive as in Oblivion.

I am assuming you mean oakflesh, and no it only lasts like a minute or so.

I'd recommend at least a bit of sword action, just in case but you could get by as a mage. Fire seems to work pretty well in my experience. Conjuration is a good tree to go down as well.

Are most of you buying this game on cd and importing into steam or are you buying it straight off steam?

Straight off steam, I don't particularly want a box these days.