The OFFICIAL Anandtech Forums TeS V: Skyrim Thread

[s1njin]

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.

I wonder if the ui on the PC version works better with a 360 controller plugged in?

 

[Hikeon3]

I wonder if the ui on the PC version works better with a 360 controller plugged in?

Regardless, new UI's are going to be designed by modders that will make the PC version not only more playable, but probably far superior to the console version.

 

[gothamhunter]

I wonder if the ui on the PC version works better with a 360 controller plugged in?

It works nicely with a 360 controller. That said, I'm not that angry with how it works with M+Kb.

 

[Nintendesert]

I had to unplug my controller because the game defaults to it and I couldn't use the mouse at all.

I moved Skyrim from my old slow HDD to my SSD with that Steam mover program. Damn it's nice to have everything load so quickly with the game.



Now as for the game, it's good. Like really good. So much better than Oblivion. I'm having so much fun just wandering and listening to the stories in the towns and exploring the countryside.

I've been doing some smithing and want to get into enchanting. I'd love to build some crazy uber armor and weapons and put some effects on them. I went the Elvish/Glass route for smithing and my gear is so much better now that I fixed it up some.

Beautiful world too, and the music and sound is just great. I'm really enjoying this game and it has pulled me almost completely away from WOT and BF3.

 

[PrayForDeath]

Is a mage/thief hybrid viable?

That's exactly what I'm doing right now. I lurk in the shadows and open with my bow (gives backstab bonus), and once they figure out where the arrows are coming from (sometimes they don't) I unleash my fire spells.

If there's too many opponents I struggle to stay alive, but I enjoy the risk.

Apparently you can transfer your Xbox360 savefiles to your PC, heh.

 

[Merad]

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

I've been quite impressed by the dungeon design. They have their flaws -some are very short, most are basically linear- but overall there is a good variety and some very well done environments. In Oblivion there were basically just three dungeons (cave, fort, ayleid ruin) and if you see one one dungeon in that style you've practically seen them all. I guess technically in Skyrim there are only 4-5 dungeon styles, but they do a good job in making them more unique. I've probably been through 25-30+ so far and they haven't become boring or repetitive yet.

BTW, fought a Draugir Deathlord this morning. He was a royal pain to fight.

 

[RavenSEAL]

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.

Because we paid a ton **** of money for our cards and are getting performance comparable to 1 card in the next LOWER tier?

 

[coldmeat]

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.

The Xbox is 6 years old. It will actually be 6 years exactly on Tuesday.

 

[ManBearPig]

Anyone wanna suggest some good perks for a spellcaster Mage?

 

[RebelCapitalist]

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'm level 30ish pure mage and just rolling through people. At one point I thought I had made a mistake, but then I read a post elsewhere about how to make sure your mage takes no prisoners.

My destruction was also lacking because I ended up becoming a conjur/resto mage to survive. But then I did what's below and am tearing it up.

One thing that helped (didn't believe at first) was that Magicka regen is far, far, far less important than the bonuses that reduce the cost of spells. Your magicka will regen like crap in combat no matter what. However, if you have a good amount of reducing benefits, you can cast and cast and cast.

The main step was getting enchanting to 100. You want the 5/5 initial benefit, Insightful enchanter, Corpus Enchanter and Extra Effect perks.

You'll want to disenchant something with a destruction bonus on it to get Fortify Destruction.

Enchant a ring, circlet and necklace with Fortify Destruction. Once you're at 100 enchanting, these pieces will really rock.

Put your perks for Destruction into Shock 2/2, the usual adept/etc, Dual Casting and Impact (nice).

For leveling, keep choosing Magicka until about 300-350 base then go health. Also, get health on 1-2 pieces of your gear.

Get the spell Chain Lightning. Dual cast it to send your enemies into oblivion. Once I did these changes and started dual casting, my destruction took off. Took me like three days to go 50-51 before this. After, I went to 75 in a handful of hours.

Should point out that the Impact effect works on dragons. Without any real magicka regen on me, I'm having no trouble. Took on 8 guards at once last night and the battle lasted about 30 seconds I think. My magicka bar was still plenty full for more.

In short, do your stuff right and being a pure mage is plenty fine for blowing through stuff. BTW, my armor is the arch mage robe and some 0 or 1 armor items. Don't need it.

 

[waggy]

i have noticed i spend a lot of time listening to people. you hear some odd stuff from the NPC"s.

also i read a really weird book in a dungeon. it had me laughing though. they did a good job on the small details in this game.

 

[hdeck]

yay killed my first dragon after the initial one in whiterun!

then later my pc went into powersave mode when i was fighting another dragon during the quest for the inn keeper in riverwood

 

[RavenSEAL]

FYI: Armor Texture Mod is EPIC:

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=106

This game has honestly been worth every penny i've spent, including the $60 I wasted in BF3.

 

[Snock514]

Spoiler

Poor story about the guy and his wife who left him, anyone else not able to tell him the truth? Okay, if you don't fight the wife and are told to go back to the husband, don't kill her after unless she attacks you, the quest glitches.

 

[lavaheadache]

Because we paid a ton **** of money for our cards and are getting performance comparable to 1 card in the next LOWER tier?

Multi GPU for the lose.

This is why I strongly urge people to get the strogest single card they can afford.

I have had many sli/crossfire setups and the cons outweigh the pros

 

[lavaheadache]

FYI: Armor Texture Mod is EPIC:

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=106

This game has honestly been worth every penny i've spent, including the $60 I wasted in BF3.

I love Skyrim Nexus... I have loaded up quite a few of the mods and already the game looks wayyyy better than vanilla.

I just can't wait to get a little better minimun frame rates.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Multi GPU for the lose.

This is why I strongly urge people to get the strogest single card they can afford.

I have had many sli/crossfire setups and the cons outweigh the pros

Your point being? Every other game I play runs amazingly. xFire HD6870s perform at the level of a single GTX 580 for way less money, I blame the CAPs programmers for simply not having the software ready pre-release.

 

[yhelothar]

I'm level 30ish pure mage and just rolling through people. At one point I thought I had made a mistake, but then I read a post elsewhere about how to make sure your mage takes no prisoners.

My destruction was also lacking because I ended up becoming a conjur/resto mage to survive. But then I did what's below and am tearing it up.

One thing that helped (didn't believe at first) was that Magicka regen is far, far, far less important than the bonuses that reduce the cost of spells. Your magicka will regen like crap in combat no matter what. However, if you have a good amount of reducing benefits, you can cast and cast and cast.

The main step was getting enchanting to 100. You want the 5/5 initial benefit, Insightful enchanter, Corpus Enchanter and Extra Effect perks.

You'll want to disenchant something with a destruction bonus on it to get Fortify Destruction.

Enchant a ring, circlet and necklace with Fortify Destruction. Once you're at 100 enchanting, these pieces will really rock.

Put your perks for Destruction into Shock 2/2, the usual adept/etc, Dual Casting and Impact (nice).

For leveling, keep choosing Magicka until about 300-350 base then go health. Also, get health on 1-2 pieces of your gear.

Get the spell Chain Lightning. Dual cast it to send your enemies into oblivion. Once I did these changes and started dual casting, my destruction took off. Took me like three days to go 50-51 before this. After, I went to 75 in a handful of hours.

Should point out that the Impact effect works on dragons. Without any real magicka regen on me, I'm having no trouble. Took on 8 guards at once last night and the battle lasted about 30 seconds I think. My magicka bar was still plenty full for more.

In short, do your stuff right and being a pure mage is plenty fine for blowing through stuff. BTW, my armor is the arch mage robe and some 0 or 1 armor items. Don't need it.

Cool thanks for some great tips!

 

[pontifex]

I haven't had any issues and I am using xfired 4850s. Although I have only played for may 2.5 hours.

 

[pontifex]

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.




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

It was lesser ward. +40 armor, -40 magic damage

 

[RavenSEAL]

AMD CrossFireX Temporary Fix​

1.
Download RadeonPro from here and complete installation

VirusTotal Scan here

2.
Open the RadeonPro and follow these steps!

Click Next

Click Next

Click Next

Click Next

After you have done this, you can simply hit next until you finish the wizard.

3.
If you did it correctly, your end result should look something like this:

If it doesn't, run the wizard again.

The tweak isn't perfect, but it resulted in a noticeable difference in my system. And if done correctly, you can expect a decent performance boost until AMD releases the official CAPs.

 

[Locut0s]

AMD CrossFireX Temporary Fix​

1.
Download RadeonPro from here and complete installation

VirusTotal Scan here

2.
Open the RadeonPro and follow these steps!

Click Next

Click Next

Click Next

Click Next

After you have done this, you can simply hit next until you finish the wizard.

3.
If you did it correctly, your end result should look something like this:

If it doesn't, run the wizard again.

The tweak isn't perfect, but it resulted in a noticeable difference in my system. And if done correctly, you can expect a decent performance boost until AMD releases the official CAPs.

Thanks! I downloaded RadeonPro with the intention of doing this but wasn't sure if it was worth it or not. Have you noticed improvements in other areas like the missing textures and the like? BTW what's with VirusTotal?

 

[RavenSEAL]

Thanks! I downloaded RadeonPro with the intention of doing this but wasn't sure if it was worth it or not. Have you noticed improvements in other areas like the missing textures and the like? BTW what's with VirusTotal?

I've definitely noticed improvements and have had very little problems during the few hours i put into the game after doing this fix. No textures missing or anything & the game now stays upwards of 50-60 FPS compared to 30-40 before hand; not to mention it actually feels smooth.

VirusTotal is an online service that runs files through several anti-malware programs on their servers and then spews out the results for you to see. I did it just to be safe!

 

[RebelCapitalist]

Please let there be a killer Black Friday deal on a good GPU so I can finally use my HD 5770 elsewhere. It's the last remnant of my old PC.

I wish all games gave me this good of a value for $60. At 60 hours played, I'm at $1 per hour of fun and the price is going down.

And seriously, getting sick of these crappy NPCs talking smack to me. Bring it on guards, bring it on.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Please let there be a killer Black Friday deal on a good GPU so I can finally use my HD 5770 elsewhere. It's the last remnant of my old PC.

I wish all games gave me this good of a value for $60. At 60 hours played, I'm at $1 per hour of fun and the price is going down.

And seriously, getting sick of these crappy NPCs talking smack to me. Bring it on guards, bring it on.

It might be your lucky day?

http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/62776/1-sale-a-day-ati-radeon-hd-5850-1gb-ddr5-graphics-card-oem