The OFFICIAL Anandtech Forums TeS V: Skyrim Thread

[coldmeat]

A word of wisdom if you're working on the main questline, you're missing out on a lot of cool stuff!

fixed

 

[pontifex]

Are you people who have mages that use no mana and are godlike using trainers or cheats?

How do you level up your skills so much/fast? I feel like my magic and enchanting skills barely move. I'm not finding much that's useful either.

 

[Anteaus]

I don't understand what the big deal is.

I mean, I get the foulness of a developer adding additional DRM post release. I agree with the idea that Bethesda is being wierd about it....HOWEVER, Skyrim was a Steamworks game from the beginning. Anyone who has ever used Steam has known the score, and it was odd that starting the executible bypassed the client in the first place. Bethesda isn't doing anything but reinforcing the fact that your using Steam. They aren't adding DRM, nor or they changing the game in any meaningful way.

The argument of "OMG I can't believe they are requiring me to start the Steam client even though virtually every other Steam game requires it" is just silly, even more so since many of the people complaining have already put in well over 30-50 hours into the game. At what point do you stop and go, "Damn that game is/was fun" and just continue with your day?

The battle for DRM free gaming is over. We should celebrate the small victories, and otherwise just learn to live with it or find another hobby. My 0.02.

My Steam client has been running for every one of the 45 hours I've dumped into Skyrim....it hasn't made it any less grand.

 

[RavenSEAL]

http://www2.ati.com/drivers/hotfix/catalyst_11.11_hotfixes/amd_catalyst_11.11a_windows_vista_7.exe

AMD Catalyst 11.11a performance driver features:

Batman Arkham City
improves DirectX 11 performance for single GPU and CrossFireX configurations

Rage
Delivers AMD CrossfireX performance scaling
Resolves a number of image / stability issues seen with the title:
Fix geometry corruption, sometimes seen in Bash TV entrance
Fix issues with Low-memory conditions on 32bit systems.
Fix issue with extreme corruption with missing textures on 32bit systems.
Fix memory leaks when deleting/reusing sync objects.
Fix hitching and pausing, especially noticeable on some Quad Core systems when doing races and Stanley Express runs.
Fix some missing shadows

Elder Scrolls Skyrim
Improves performance on single GPU configurations
Resolve corruption seen when enabling Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing on the AMD Radeon HD 6970 Series

Battlefield 3
Resolves intermittent corruption seen when playing the game at specific camera angles
Build Info:
DriverVer=11/18/2011, 8.911.1.0000

Still no Skyrim xFire fix :\

 

[Snock514]

:'(

 

[Locut0s]

I posted this on the Beth forums. Minus some bolding and large font

-------------

I'm not saying this is or is not the reason behind what they have done, but there are many possible reasonable explanations.

In order for them to fix problems they have to remove as many variables as possible. This is simply how bug testing and programming in general is done. You simply can't nail down a problem if you have 20 different variables at play. One of those variables is user modified executables. Yes I know LAA was just a simple flag but there may have been other things they have been looking at too. Another is having the game launch from different points, having different background tasks active, from Steam or directly from the launcher in this case. From the point of view of their code base, for future upcoming patches, and to help bug tracking this patch might make a huge amount of sense!

 

[Locut0s]

:'(

No underwater effect I see.

 

[coldmeat]

:'(

I had that happen once too. I didn't realize that there was supposed to be water there until I ran into it and suddenly there was a big splash. Scared me.

 

[Mem]

I have had 5 CTDs tonight within 2 hours of palying ,going to try adjusting sound to 44KHz and see if that fixes it,some Skyrim solutions here http://segmentnext.com/2011/11/11/skyrim-crashes-freezes-sound-keys-errors-fps-lag-textures-and-fixes/ for various issues.

It does get annoying when you don't know when you are going to get CTD,especially tonight since I have had quite a few CTD.


Btw this is the one I'm going to try,

15# Crash To Desktop Fix
Go to Start > Control Panel > Sound.
In the Playback tab, right-click on Speakers (or whatever has a green tick next to it), then click Properties.
In the advanced tab on this new window, select 24 bit, 44100Hz (Studio Quality) in the drop down menu.

I'll say Skyrim CTD has beaten all my other games over last 20 years put together,never had a game in my life that CTD so much as Skyrim,oh well wish me luck going to play Skyrim again and see how far I get without a CTD .

 

[Snock514]

I had that happen once too. I didn't realize that there was supposed to be water there until I ran into it and suddenly there was a big splash. Scared me.

Hahaha, I was exploring when I walked up and saw fish I was like WTF?!? I looked around and saw the water and facepalmed D:.

 

[Merad]

I know like half a dozen people have posted now shouting me down about the LAA thing, so I won't address them individually. Like I said to begin with, I'm past wasting time arguing about it. Believe whatever pleases you.

And it's kind of pointless now anyway. From what I read the update today prevents usage of LAA unless you're going to crack the Steamworks DRM.

 

[OCNewbie]

Not basketball but I did encounter a baseball-sized ball of light in a barrow on the northern coast. It kept multiplying until the end of the dungeon. Harmless except very annoying (distracting).

Not what I'm referring to. This is something different, and it has been one of the coolest experiences/areas I've had so far in the game. I don't want to give anything away.

 

[Snock514]

Not what I'm referring to. This is something different, and it has been one of the coolest experiences/areas I've had so far in the game. I don't want to give anything away.

Spoiler tags!

 

[Merad]

Not what I'm referring to. This is something different, and it has been one of the coolest experiences/areas I've had so far in the game. I don't want to give anything away.

Spoiler

If you do the quest for the Deadra shrine just down the road from Solitude (Meindra? something like that) she/it transports you up into the air and speaks to you as a ball of light.

 

[OCNewbie]

Has anybody fully fleshed out the archery perks? I just got the "Ranger" perk, the one that is supposed to allow you to move faster with a drawn bow, and I'm incredibly underwhelmed with it. I can't even tell the difference. I'm still moving incredibly slow.

Edit: Not sure if I had walk turned on, or what happened, but after saving, exiting the game, and coming back later, it seems to be working as expected now. Moving with bow drawn seems to be the same speed as standard run (not sprinting) speed. So, it's a pretty sweet perk afterall!

 

[OCNewbie]

Spoiler

If you do the quest for the Deadra shrine just down the road from Solitude (Meindra? something like that) she/it transports you up into the air and speaks to you as a ball of light.

That's not it either =P

 

[RebelCapitalist]

Are you people who have mages that use no mana and are godlike using trainers or cheats?

How do you level up your skills so much/fast? I feel like my magic and enchanting skills barely move. I'm not finding much that's useful either.

I'm not. I've played just over 70 hours so far. Not sure I'd call that fast. I've spent a lot of time collecting and killing in dungeons, so I always had tons and tons of items to sell, enchant, etc.

I didn't see a tremendous difference until I got my enchanting up to a higher level. Once I added the fortify destruction and the item from completing the college quests, my magicka stopped disappearing so fast.

 

[KIAman]

Are you people who have mages that use no mana and are godlike using trainers or cheats?

How do you level up your skills so much/fast? I feel like my magic and enchanting skills barely move. I'm not finding much that's useful either.

You really want a step by step instruction on how to do this?

I will give you general tips that I found useful but won't give away everything.

1. Find the locations of all the skill shrines - use them when skilling up your specific skills

2. Beat up, sneak, shock the guy in the intro for free skill up/level ups

3. Rest - XP bonus!

4. Mine/gather

5. Make stuff (dagger for blacksmith and most expensive potion by value for alchemy)

6. Steal/pickpocket without dying

7. Make enchantments

8. Sell stuff to recover money

9. Steps 3 to 8 rinse and repeat

By the time I made it out of the introduction to the first town, I was level 7 or 8 I think and my sneak and destruction were pretty high as well.

I didn't officially start questing until I was level 31ish or so and my destruction spells were free from a set of crappy armor pieces. Then I blew stuff up from ranged and looted them then made better armor, etc. rinse repeat.

 

[Ferzerp]

I can't play this without CTDs ever 30 minutes or so without the LAA patch, so I had to restore from backup and use that to play.

 

[Zeze]

Something really strange happened.

My overclock setting got turned off somehow and was running the game VERY SLOWLY at lowest settings (only 1920x1080). The vid card is HD4850 (below recommended).

So I OC'ed back on to 3.2Ghz from 2.8Ghz (quad core).

Now I can suddenly run the game with every single thing MAXED. What the hell? How is this possible... just from 600mhz gain and below recommended vid card?

 

[cytoSiN]

Has anybody fully fleshed out the archery perks? I just got the "Ranger" perk, the one that is supposed to allow you to move faster with a drawn bow, and I'm incredibly underwhelmed with it. I can't even tell the difference. I'm still moving incredibly slow.

Agreed. I actually tested it, was similarly underwhelmed, and reloaded a previous save and spent the perk elsewhere. The top perk seems underwhelming too, although I haven't tested it. But a small chance to paralyze something that is going to die in a few more seconds (1-2 more shots) isn't worth it imo. EDIT: I've fleshed out and find all of the other archery perks very useful!

My build prioritizes archery and sneak, with some destruction (shock/impact) and restoration, and with block/1h (mace of molag bal) in case of emergency. I'm using as my main weapon a maxed legendary glass bow (soul trap and shock dmg) with ebony arrows. I one or two shot almost everything while sneaking. Dragons kinda break my play style a little since you can't really sneak shot in 1v1 situations, but if I can lure the dragon to ANY other bad guy, pop an invisibility potion (doesn't seem to work on the dragon, but gets the other bad guy to attack the dragon, not me), then I can usually sneak back around and get off 1-2 sneak arrows on the dragon.

But, in general, I'm finding a lot of the top tier perks don't seem all that useful to my particular play style. Then again, that lets me diversify even more, which I'm really enjoying.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Something really strange happened.

My overclock setting got turned off somehow and was running the game VERY SLOWLY at lowest settings (only 1920x1080). The vid card is HD4850 (below recommended).

So I OC'ed back on to 3.2Ghz from 2.8Ghz (quad core).

Now I can suddenly run the game with every single thing MAXED. What the hell? How is this possible... just from 600mhz gain and below recommended vid card?

Skyrim can only feast on two cores, so the higher the frequency the happier it will be. A great example of a game not fully optimized for PC, as great as it might be.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Agreed. I actually tested it, was similarly underwhelmed, and reloaded a previous save and spent the perk elsewhere. The top perk seems underwhelming too, although I haven't tested it. But a small chance to paralyze something that is going to die in a few more seconds (1-2 more shots) isn't worth it imo. EDIT: I've fleshed out and find all of the other archery perks very useful!

My build prioritizes archery and sneak, with some destruction (shock/impact) and restoration, and with block/1h (mace of molag bal) in case of emergency. I'm using as my main weapon a maxed legendary glass bow (soul trap and shock dmg) with ebony arrows. I one or two shot almost everything while sneaking. Dragons kinda break my play style a little since you can't really sneak shot in 1v1 situations, but if I can lure the dragon to ANY other bad guy, pop an invisibility potion (doesn't seem to work on the dragon, but gets the other bad guy to attack the dragon, not me), then I can usually sneak back around and get off 1-2 sneak arrows on the dragon.

But, in general, I'm finding a lot of the top tier perks don't seem all that useful to my particular play style. Then again, that lets me diversify even more, which I'm really enjoying.

Wow, we pretty much have the same gameplay characteristics.

 

[RavenSEAL]

fixed

Have fun without the shout that brings dragons down from the sky and binds them to the ground. :sneaky:

 

[Zeze]

Thoroughly enjoying the game so far, but UI is just.. HORRID.

Why can't they use a simple color scheme on item texts so you can distinguish things better?

When I'm forging a new item, I can't tell if what I want to forge is a better than my current wear. I have to constantly go back and forth for all types of armors.

Also, is it so hard to simply denote if an item requires 1h or 2h? I can't tell if I want to buy it or equip it only to find out it's 2h.