The Elder Scrolls Return With Skyrim 158
Today marks the release of Skyrim, the fifth installment of Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls series. The game is set about 200 years after the events of Oblivion, at which point the province of Skyrim is embroiled in a civil war, and dragons roam the skies. Early reviews for the game have been largely complimentary — one at Rock, Paper, Shotgun artfully details all the things the reviewer hasn't yet done, despite playing the game for over 30 hours. Quoting: "I seriously worried Skyrim would, for all its talk of lavishness, depth and dragons, continue the transformation into a trudging, consolified action game filled with clunky acting. It does not. It slams on the brakes then reverses at dangerous speed back into Morrowind territory. Some things are lost (e.g. Persuasion is a sadly watered-down, irregular affair now mostly to do with shopping), many things are changed (e.g. recharging magic items can be done anywhere) and it’s certainly not as weird (no flying or Siltstriders), but it truly reclaims that sense of being in another world, rather than a generic soft-focus, over-familiar fantasyscape." An addendum goes into more detail on the specifics. If you're curious how the game looks in action, Giant Bomb has posted a ~52-minute quick-look video with commentary.
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:5, Informative)
As much as I love Bethesda games, I won't buy them at launch because they are famous for ridiculous bugs. I also recommend buying them on PC so you can install community bug fixes as well.
Works on Linux too! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Informative)
I've seen several trustworthy people (have yet to get my activation code to verify this) that said that the main executable TESV.EXE is not tied to the Steam client; only the launcher is.
So, briefly, until they very possibly patch that out, once installed it can be run stand-alone with no Steam client, so no DRM.
Only one problem (Score:5, Informative)
The only problem is the curse of the video game console. The PC user get's crappy menus for the sake XBox/PS players.
Great, but control issues exist on PC (Score:5, Informative)
If you try to play with a gamepad it works great - or as well as a gamepad can work. Like in any fps, you turn slowly and imprecisely compared to mouse control, but that's not so bad.
The mouse is another matter. Mouse behavior throughout the UI is inconsistent. It's learnable, but even then it's not entirely predictable. I tried this a bit last night. In many cases I'd place the cursor over an option and click it, but the click either wouldn't register or would happen away from the cursor. The best solution seems to be to jiggle the cursor a bit and try again.
Mouse acceleration is present but can be disabled in the .ini file. Since few people on gaming forums even know what mouse acceleration is, it gets blamed for all sorts of unrelated things like input lag, but in reality it's not a problem. Cursor lag, however, is a bit of an issue. I need to mess around with triple buffering and non-fullscreen modes to look for potential improvements, but with default settings on my rather overpowered system mouse movement seems to have around a 100ms delay. This is common in modern games because gamepads are rather sloshy and don't make input lag apparent due to their inherent slowness. However, cursor movement in menus is actually quite crisp, which is a big improvement over the majority of modern games. That's a big deal and gives me hope that a well modded and patched PC UI could be very satisfying.
The worst and most bizarre mouse input problem, however, is probably the worst mouse input bug I've ever encountered in any piece of software. The y-axis sensitivity is different from x-axis sensitivity. That's not rare in gamepad-based games, since a major concern is keeping console players from accidentally looking excessively up and down while rotating. That's even fixable in a lot of mouse drivers - I can set my x and y mouse sensitivities separately. However, the problem here is, as far as I know, unsolvable without a real Bethesda patch: the y-axis sensitivity is highly variable. If you move your mouse up 2 cm to look at the ceiling and then move a few meters and do the same thing, you're likely to find that looking at the ceiling now takes a 10 cm move. I've heard that this is because y-axis sensitivity is dependent on framerate, but I think that the dependency must be either nonlinear or more complicated than that.
I'm thinking of switching to a gamepad, but then combat is slower paced and it's more difficult to handle groups of opponents by darting between and around them mouse style.
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:5, Informative)
Every review I've read said they've had crashes and issues on the console versions as well that forced them to reload old saves, as well as quests you couldn't finish.
Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas all have community patches that literally fix hundreds of bugs that were still left unfixed after the final patch (GOTY editions) from Bethesda.
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes3Mod:UMP [uesp.net]
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes4Mod:Unofficial_Oblivion_Patch [uesp.net]
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3808 [fallout3nexus.com]
http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/268603-unofficial-new-vegas-patch/ [thenexusforums.com]
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Informative)
They probably won't patch it out. Fallout 3 and New Vegas could both be run sans-protection via bypassing the launcher as well. They knew well, but decided that third-party script extenders [silverlock.org] for modders and such were worth the 'risk'. I find this encouraging.
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:4, Informative)
It's a troll, based on the stupid "Scrolls" (Notch) vs. "Elder Scrolls" (BSW) lawsuit.
Re:Great, but control issues exist on PC (Score:5, Informative)
fixed for you already:
add the following keys to SkyrimPrefs.ini in your My Games dir
fMouseHeadingYScale=0.0100
fMouseHeadingXScale=0.0200
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:4, Informative)
>>all have community patches that literally fix hundreds of bugs
Thousands. In just one game alone.... the Unofficial Oblivion Patch fixes 2,200 bugs when the authors stopped working on it. So people then other took up the banner and kept working on it, because, you know, there were still more bugs to fix. :p
That said, I'm enjoying Skyrim. It has only been crashing about once every 4 hours, which is on the positive end of the bell curve for Bethesda games - Redguard would crash for people with non-Intel processors *off the boat*. You know, the one you start on.
The only in-game bug that bothers me is the fact that NPCs will teleport around some time. You'll be talking to this one dude, and then suddenly another dude is next to him. And then he'll flicker away.
I think a bigger problem is that the game really has been dumbed down from Oblivion... it's a sad trend that we've seen across the board in the RPG industry these days (ME2, DA2, WoW, I'm looking at you...).
Re:Only one problem (Score:5, Informative)
>>What's wrong with the UI and menus exactly..?
Go to the books menu with a lot of books in your inventory. Use the up and down keys to select books, no problem. Now try clicking on another book when one is selected. Half the time, it will open the original book instead of the one you actually clicked on. Some dialogue boxes have the same problem.
This is the problem with Consolitis - they fucking broke MICE for the PC version.
Re:My favorite quick look so far... (Score:4, Informative)
I got rid of the mouse lag by editing the .ini file and turning off mouse acceleration and vertical sync.
I'm not sure which fixed it, but the mouse lag is gone and my framerate is way up, at the expense of a little screen tearing.
The .ini is in your My Documents/Skyrim folder. .ini files, with some settings in each. It's worth searching for a tweak guide.
There are two