Something surprising to me: The game runs better in 3rd person mode.

The hilarious: In Skyrim, Elephants can fly.

And if you put a basket on NPC's heads thanks to the new physics you can... Hey guys, ever tried that trick before? Its more of an exploit than a hilarity though.


AND ONE MAJOR THING: SHEO-GODDAMN-GORATH. Guess what.

The good- creatures (the few I have seen so far in the wild) are NOT homicidal/suicidal.

The bad- I did manage to get stuck in the terrain between Helgen and Riverwood (with no "tcl" on xBox I will have to be more careful).

The ugly- My television is TOO small (the creatures mentioned above could have been foxes, deer, or mountain lions).

For those of you who don't like the magic compass, if you delve into SkyrimPrefs.INI, under the Interface entry, you can find a setting called bShowCompass. Set that from 1 to 0 and the game won't display the compass anymore. That means no more map markers and no more quest markers (except on the map, of course, but I try not to use it much). If you are having trouble finding your objective, you can use Clairvoyance instead.

The Good: Love the variety of voices, the detail in every little thing, dual wielding, the docile creatures, the quality of loot found even at low levels, the size of Skyrim.

The Bad: Dark Elves with Cockney sounding accents and the flatness of some of the voice acting, some of the text is really, really hard to read

The Ugly: The spiders. Normally, I love Bethesda's attention to detail...not so much with the giant spiders. Oh and my eye make up after I stood in the Game Stop parking lot half laughing and half sobbing while I held Skyrim

This post has been edited by Jacki Dice: Nov 13 2011, 07:55 AM

Bad: Remapping key functions on PC is borked. I'll let the thread speak for itself, but for me, it manifests as this: the UI completely fails to take into account that I have remapped keys. I swapped the ready weapon and POV switch keys, but this also swapped the Drop and Favorite keys in the Inventory menu, and the UI failed to update the keybinds to reflect this.

I think it's safe to say now that the UI is not just garbage, it is flat-out broken.

Good: Creatures, dungeons, landscapes. Combat is nice now that I've got the cursor moving more freely. The smithing and cooking is a pain but in a good way, I feel. I'm liking the story so far... but I've not really had the chance to get beyond the quests of Whiterun and Riverwood.

Bad: Is there a way to do a better job with bartering? I could put the voice acting here too, but I feel like the quality of the line-reading is better than with Oblivion, if not the voices themselves. Sounds too much like Fallout 3.

Ugly: The interface. I shouldn't have to prowl the internets to make it functional. But I do.

Rented the game from redbox. The forced finishers are very distracting. Voice acting isnt great IMO. It is better than I expected but I dont intend to buy it. I also dislike no classes, attributes, and cheesy blood on the screen but the game is okay, not amazing or even great but it isnt horrible.

The good- they have MAMMOTHS! Woo Hoo! Yes- I AM a geek.

The bad- a number of map symbols are not explained- which is actually probably a "compromise" for those who did not want a "Quest compass" at all. But- you know- do it or don't- but do not go halfway and stop

The ugly- (on xBox) "informational scripts" are unreadable. Things like poison effects- when someone gives you a reward- etc. They are really small- appear in the absolute top left of the screen and disappear quickly.

I tried it out yesterday on a friends comp, created a character, and played through the tutorial.

Like so many others have noted, the PC user interface is flat out broken. Creating the character was a nightmare. Not just because I had to use the keyboard for the sliders, but also because half the time the keyboard itself simply would not work on the sliders, and I had to back out to a different section to the char gen process, then go back to move a slider over a tick, then back and again.

Actually playing the game with the interface like that was not quite as nightmarish, because it least the keys actually worked all the time. But it was still a pain the rear picking things up and dropping them, etc... Using magic was also a pain, because I had to unequip my sword or shield to cast a spell. In Oblivion I just had to hit the 'C' key. There is no way I am playing an entire game like that. It is like they went out of their way to make it as cumbersome and difficult to play as possible.

Then the characters themselves. Unless you are playing a Khajiit or Argonian, it is impossible to create a genuinely good-looking character. The textures they use are simply butt ugly. They make everyone look like a hardened criminal, full of saggy lines, pits, and that worn-out, dried up, weather-beaten look. It looks like their skin is old leather left out in the desert sun for a hundred years. The hair too, is awful. Does no one wash their hair in the province? It looks like there is more grease and oil in these people's locks then in Exxon.

I know it sounds like I am ranting, but the sad thing is I am not one of those people who wants a porcelian doll for a character. I could not stand the Cute Elves mod for Oblivion, because of how cutesy it made them look. So I don't want supermodels for characters. But I don't want horse's rears either.

The rest of the game was okay. The graphics are alright. It seems about the same as Fallout 3. It does run better than Oblivion, but again, so does Fallout 3. I cannot really say much about the story, since I all I did was the tutorial. What I came away with was a desire to help any dragon I see, and kill any Imperial. I think that is the opposite of what it is supposed to be. But the fact is the Imps were going to murder me for shits and giggles, and it was the dragon that saved me. So if someone wants to recruit my characters into the Blades, I am going to kill them. If the game does not let me, its not worth playing. Because if they don't want me to feel that way, they should not work so hard to insure I do. I could not play Mass Effect 2 because of that very reason.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Nov 14 2011, 09:43 PM

LOL. I think the dragon didn't quite understand that its goal would have been fulfilled if it had shown up just a few seconds later.

Skyrim is a different game from Oblivion, You are not supposed to be able to have your arms full of weapons and cast spells too.

Character gen: still hard to get a good looking character, but still very possible.

Rosa:



Still, Skyrim's controls are extremely clunky for a PC game. I would say the whole spells issue is just re-learning how the equipment system works, but there is still a lot wrong with the picture. Hotkeys don't work right forcing you to use the favorites menu, the menu UI is hopelessly sloppy, the look sensitivity is tied to your framerates, you can't switch between menus without resuming normal gameplay first, you can't see what you currently have equipped without entering menu mode, switching stances, or switching perspectives, and overall you need to do more button-pushing and mouse-clicking in Skyrim to accomplish functions that were much smoother in Oblivion.

As I said before, Skyrim's UI = epic fail. Bethesda is getting ground into the dirt about it. Form comes before function here, and Bethesda sacrificed usability for pretties. And there is going to be hell to pay if they do that again.

This post has been edited by Thomas Kaira: Nov 14 2011, 09:35 PM

Still puttering around Whiterun on my characters. Mostly due to getting a feel for what way I'm going.

So far..

Good: The land is pretty. Though the shadow renderding slow up mentioned before hurts some. While still a bit undecided on the mechanics of perks, I do like the new 'non-class' system. Also finding myself very fond of the new magic system.

Bad: UI has random moments of sluggish to non-response with the mouse. Menu 'navigating' is a pain more often then not, it's very obvious that it was designed for platforms first, PCs second.

Ugly: Most person models. As others have said, 'realism' effects on everyone makes me wonder if bathing's a fade that never really caught on in Skyrim. Movement animations for the Dragonborn is oddly clunky looking. Also deep hate for being so bloody intertwined with Steam.

Lili: launch Skyrim directly from TESV.EXE and Steam won't interfere. It won't even start if you closed it previously.

Also, here's a few INI tweaks and setting changes that can help fix the sluggish mouse.

First, make sure you disable 360 controller support, this has been confirmed to cause problems with the mouse responsiveness in menus.

Tweak 1: Disable mouse acceleration.

Add entry "bMouseAcceleration=0" to the Controls section of SkyrimPrefs.INI.

Tweak 2: Disable V-Sync.

Add entry "iPresentInterval=0" under Display section of Skyrim.INI (NOT SkyrimPrefs.INI).

Tweak 3: Manually set mouse X and Y sensitivity.

Add entries "fMouseHeadingYScale=0.XX" and "fMouseHeadingXScale=0.XX" to Controls section of SkyrimPrefs.INI, change the Xs to whatever value you feel best. I use 0.0700 and 0.0500, respectively.

This should fix the sluggish mouse controls, but it won't fix the framerate-sensitive look sensitivity, unfortunately.

This post has been edited by Thomas Kaira: Nov 15 2011, 05:06 AM

Let's be honest: If you didn't have indoor plumbing, how much bathing would you do? In the winter especially.

EDIT: I know where you are coming from but it just makes sense that people would be just plain dirtier. Bathing everyday is a pretty modern development.

This post has been edited by King Coin: Nov 15 2011, 05:41 AM

Very true, but there's a pretty common mental disconnect between 'realism' and 'pretty' in most people.

Of course, it could be worse, we could have the shiny plastic hair from Oblivion.

I've never seen so much clipping in any game before. My character's butt is clipping in vanilla clothes, her feet are constantly inside rocks or ground - I have to agree with you TK, Bethesda took a major step backwards in quality on this. I think Toddman thought we'd be so excited over the dragons that we wouldn't care about anything else.

I do like the game, but it has some major flaws that need to be patched if that is even possible. Every bit of mountains is a clipping zone, and the whole place is mountains.

I've been bitten by or fought with every creature in the game, and finally got a disease - what, are all the animals and undead cleaner than the NPC's?

The UI is ridiculous, I have to agree on that too.

Also, as far as that huge map to explore goes - the whole northern border is an empty sea with a few mountain tops sticking up that are mostly impossible to climb. Ice floats and sea bottom - that was really a waste of the map, they could have stuck something up there and made it that hard to get to - or even thrown a chest up there to sop the people stupid enough to explore that vast chunk of water and ice. (like me).

I've been disappointed in a lot, but still like the game. So far nothing has been game ending, just irritating that they thought a few dragons would blind us to the flaws.

This post has been edited by mALX: Nov 15 2011, 02:05 PM

Holy crap malX I swear to god I made this exact same thread on the official skyrim forum. Same name exactly.

Couple other irritants I've been coming across/found.

Alt+tabbing, Oblivion didn't like it, but I could do one or two, Skyrim just locks on the first one.

Bodies dropping below the map on defeat, not often ture, mostly only in dungeon maps and I rarely get anything I usually want to collect, but still...

One ring only. This is really annoying. Found a second ring I wanted to use, but it wouldn't let me have two rings anymore.