sea's (Mostly Technical) Skyrim Initial Impressions

[Destroid]

Shadows should help a lot, the graphics in FO and FONV looked like shit because of no shadows.

 

[Turisas]

Can you at least bind your weapons/spells/etc on 1-9?

Nope, you just have a key to access your 'favorites', which isn't categorized at all but just one long list of everything - items, spells, powers/shouts. If you haven't tagged something as a favorite, you have to navigate through the shitty menus each time you want to access something. Pro quality popamole.

 

[Stabwound]

Say what you want about the game, but the dungeons seem vastly superior to Oblivion and Morrowind. Hell, I'd even say they're better than Gothic 1/2's dungeons. Traps, some minor puzzles, etc. The "boss" fights (even just random fights) are pretty challenging, too, especially on the hardest difficulty. Having said that, I just now only went through one of the beginning dungeons, which took me a little over an hour.

And yeah, if you can play New Vegas on your PC you should have no trouble running Skyrim. I have a Radeon HD 4850 and can play on almost all Ultra, including 4x AA at 1920x1080. I was worried that I would need to upgrade but it seems to run even great. No need to buy huge upgrades if you can play other recent games.

Finally, yeah, the UI is unforgivable. Like I said, it reminds me of the Might and Magic 3-5 UI. It's entirely keyboard driven - it has mouse support, but it's just tacked on and barely works. It's by far the weakest point of the game so far. Not even hotkeys - just fucking awful. I have no idea what was going through their minds with this one.

 

[CorpseZeb]

A console port doesn't run well just because the original hardware it was developed for is vastly outdated.

Well, then on today pc, that pig should be flying... But problem lies elsewhere - in the insane amount of specific console low level hardware optimization (so, any console port, to works optimally on PC, should be written from scratch, or its renderer part, at least).

 

[MetalCraze]

A console port doesn't run well just because the original hardware it was developed for is vastly outdated.

Fucking up a console port to run less then optimal on 4-5 years old PC takes a very special and rare kind of talent.

So far only two studios have it - Rockstar and Volition

Why? Because the sheer power of PCs easily runs over any crappy code bottlenecks intorduced in console ports and one needs to specially try superhard to write a code to fuck up PC.

 

[Gord]

Your homework assignement for today:

Elaborate the differences between the following two posts and analyze its content. Which one is better and why?

Well, then on today pc, that pig should be flying... But problem lies elsewhere - in the insane amount of specific console low level hardware optimization (so, any console port, to works optimally on PC, should be written from scratch, or its renderer part, at least).

Fucking up a console port to run less then optimal on 4-5 years old PC takes a very special and rare kind of talent.

So far only two studios have it - Rockstar and Volition

Why? Because the sheer power of PCs easily runs over any crappy code bottlenecks intorduced in console ports and one needs to specially try superhard to write a code to fuck up PC.

 

[Castanova]

Can you at least bind your weapons/spells/etc on 1-9?

Nope, you just have a key to access your 'favorites', which isn't categorized at all but just one long list of everything - items, spells, powers/shouts. If you haven't tagged something as a favorite, you have to navigate through the shitty menus each time you want to access something. Pro quality popamole.

Actually, you can bind things to the number keys. I haven't tested it out (I don't have the game) but I read about it elsewhere.

1. Favorite the item
2. Hit Q
3. Highlight the item
4. Press the number you want to bind it to

Apparently it's not perfect, though, since there's no way to bind the item to a particular hand. So, using the hotkeys with dual wielding is a biatch.

 

[Trash]

Got distracted by the press preview of the sequel to one of my fav games evah being handed over to me (woooot. Expect TC preview on the 18th) but do have some more impressions. UI is even worse than I first thought, world seems much less static and more alive because of little enviromental details, Bethesda played Gothic, snow being blown around is neat, sky at night is worth looking up for, dungeon design is a lot better than in previous titles, some fake c&c in quests so far, animations are not as terribad as I feared, still terribad though, music is annoying, world is fun to walk around in, towns still feel rather dead.

 

[Ruprekt]

How bad is the UI on a scale of Gothic 1 to Gothic 2.

Or is it off the scale?

 

[hoverdog]

Please notify me when someone mods that MAJESTIC ui

thx

 

[Peter]

It might possibly be the worst UI I've ever encountered in a PC game.

I'm not exaggerating.

Thankfully, UI is one of those things that mods can atually fix, and other than that, the game is pretty fun if you turn your brian off. I don't wanna go into details, but it basically seems to be popamole Gothic from the hour I've played. Way better than Oblivion and Fallout 3.

 

[MetalCraze]

It might possibly be the worst UI I've ever encountered in a PC game.

a PC game?

Way better than Oblivion and Fallout 3.

 

[Gord]

Thankfully, UI is one of those things that mods can atually fix

I'm afraid it might be beyond fixable. Don't know how much you can do with it.

As far as i can tell, if Bethesda set out to create the worst UI possible for a pc game, they might have just nailed it.

 

[Stabwound]

Problem?

 

[hoopy]

No, no problem. He can walk through walls because he's a wizard. This ain't your grandpa's RPG.

 

[Toffeli]

Please notify me when someone mods that MAJESTIC ui

thx

It's a close to the thing Plinkett ever described EP2.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Hahaha oh wow. 3 pages just in the time it took me to get home, take a bath and make a coffe and a sammich. Took almost two weeks for the most recent Goldbox thread to get that far. Keep up the good work, Closetdex.

For now, the most important tweak has to do with the fact that VSync is automatically on and can't be disabled from within the game. This not only reduces FPS, it also introduces mouse lag. To disable VSync in Skyrim, add iPresentInterval=0 to the bottom of the [Display] section of the Skyrim.ini file in the \Users\[Username]\My Documents\My Games\Skyrim directory.

Just like in Oblivion! Bethesda cares about tradition after all!

 

[Excidium]

Hey CK? What do you think of the game so far?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

MAJora's Mask was better.

 

[Mastermind]

Can you at least bind your weapons/spells/etc on 1-9?

Nope, you just have a key to access your 'favorites', which isn't categorized at all but just one long list of everything - items, spells, powers/shouts. If you haven't tagged something as a favorite, you have to navigate through the shitty menus each time you want to access something. Pro quality popamole.

do f1-f4 bring you straight to a specific menu like in Oblivion?

 

[Mastermind]

It's Gamebryo. Every screenshot shouts exactly that.

Skyway has no clue what an engine is. News at 11.

 

[Stabwound]

Actually, you can bind things to the number keys. I haven't tested it out (I don't have the game) but I read about it elsewhere.

1. Favorite the item
2. Hit Q
3. Highlight the item
4. Press the number you want to bind it to

Apparently it's not perfect, though, since there's no way to bind the item to a particular hand. So, using the hotkeys with dual wielding is a biatch.

Okay, that does actually work. You're right that it doesn't seem to work well with dual-wielding, though.

Anyway, after 4 hours of play, the game seems pretty fun. I miss the surreal world/setting of Morrowind, but other than the UI, it seems like a pretty big incline over Oblivion in many ways. I really like that, at least on the hardest difficulty, you'll run into areas that you simply can't get through without getting better gear/stats. Come across a cave guarded by a troll -> troll one hit kills you and you can't even put a dent in it. I fucking loved that from Gothic 2, and that's exactly the kind of stuff that makes these hiking simulators fun. I'm glad they realized that Oblivion-style level scaling completely fucks the game up.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

this thread is going to reach 200 replies before crispy even gets back and says he's marrying the game this weekend

 

[ironyuri]

he's building anticipation for what is inevitably going to be a shit post.

pretty much the same reason he hasn't had sex yet.

he thinks the longer he waits, the better it will be.

 

[Destroid]

I don't understand why you all have this game. Bethesda games have all sucked since Morrowind, right? RIGHT?!