The OFFICIAL Anandtech Forums TeS V: Skyrim Thread

[Mem]

Yeah, I hate quest bugs, I think i have ran into two of them, one was with blood ice or something. the other is with the theives guild. I cannot get it to progress. I have done tones of the job and did the 4 special jobs but still cant get it go to further. I remember I have to speak to maven black-whatever but will not advance

I fixed one bugged quest by reloading and speaking with Vex,she gave me another random quest but this time in a different place so at least I could complete it.

I've a few other broken ones like speak with Jarl of Riften but don't get any new dialogue lines from her ie same ones so stuck on that,also if you pick up some quest items in dungeon or caves before getting the quest that bugs them (got few of those).

I do think Skyrim is more buggy then either Morrowind or Oblivion either was in my playing experience.

 

[invidia]

I probably have a perfect system, but I'm up to 77 hours playing Skyrim and only had one crash. Not sure how people are having so much bugs and crashing.

 

[HeXen]

I probably have a perfect system, but I'm up to 77 hours playing Skyrim and only had one crash. Not sure how people are having so much bugs and crashing.

its easy. PC's are not consoles, not everyone has the same issues cause developers can't test every possible combination of hardware, plus they only fix a small fraction of the most important from a huge lists they have.

I can't get the game to play since thanksgiving. all i see is the load screen and can hear the game playing. reformatted windows, reinstalled Steam....etc.
nothing works. awaiting next patch.
its TES, its a buggy game

 

[UberNeuman]

its easy. PC's are not consoles, not everyone has the same issues cause developers can't test every possible combination of hardware, plus they only fix a small fraction of the most important from a huge lists they have.

I can't get the game to play since thanksgiving. all i see is the load screen and can hear the game playing. reformatted windows, reinstalled Steam....etc.
nothing works. awaiting next patch.
its TES, its a buggy game

Really sorry to hear that, sir. Since using the 4gb app I've not had one crash....

Now ask me how well Batman: Arkham City runs on my computer! aggah!!!!!

 

[Locut0s]

The cave where the sacred tree is in the "Nettlebane" quest is really beautiful!

 

[Locut0s]

Walking from Whiterun to Riften. Long and very beautiful.

 

[invidia]

its easy. PC's are not consoles, not everyone has the same issues cause developers can't test every possible combination of hardware, plus they only fix a small fraction of the most important from a huge lists they have.

I can't get the game to play since thanksgiving. all i see is the load screen and can hear the game playing. reformatted windows, reinstalled Steam....etc.
nothing works. awaiting next patch.
its TES, its a buggy game

What is your system setup?

 

[Dahak]

I probably have a perfect system, but I'm up to 77 hours playing Skyrim and only had one crash. Not sure how people are having so much bugs and crashing.

Same here, 121 hrs in and the only times i seem to get ctd is if i frequently alt tab out alot. otherwise its fine

 

[homercles337]

Both PCs and Consoles.

I was being facetious. Seriously, with this "patch" i am experience horrid frame rates at times, but not all the time.

 

[Visaoni]

Just moved out of my E8400 and 8800gtx. That setup let me play at medium plus a bit. High wasn't obviously unplayable, but wasn't quite smooth enough for my tastes. Then the 8800gtx up and died.

So I took the chance to upgrade a bit. i5 2500k and 6950 2gb. Then I got a little mod crazy. And then a lot mod crazy. I've probably spent more time today installing mods than I have doing any gaming, Skyrim or otherwise. Finally got some CTDs as I started loading up a bunch of mods, so I installed the 4gb Skyrim mod. Seems more stable, but I've barely played much at all with it.

Game looks a hell of a lot better though. I'll try to remember to post screenshots of anything particularly nice I run across.

 

[Mem]

I probably have a perfect system, but I'm up to 77 hours playing Skyrim and only had one crash. Not sure how people are having so much bugs and crashing.

No such thing as perfect system,why do you think we get updated drivers,patches and Windows Updates etc...?..when you play enough games you know some games are more stable then others,less buggier etc...

You may be one of the lucky players that is having trouble free Skyrim experience.


I'll say Skyrim is the only game that does CTD on my PC even Intel BurnTest,Fumark and my other games don't crash .
The CTD thread is up to 45 pages long now so at least CTD gamers are not alone.Some gamers are getting CTD with latest patch while they did not before so no real pattern.

I'll be very interested to see what is causing CTD?..apart from not enough beta testing.
I can play Skyrim fine for most part since CTD are so random for me ie could be days,hours or mins.

Right back to Skyrim(at least I'm one of the lucky ones that can actually play the game).

 

[Zeze]

For those of you complaining the quests are dull and NPCs are robotic. I agreed with you, BUT.

Join The Dark Brotherhood, turn off all other quests and just follow that only.

SO.

MUCH.


FUN.

Spoiler

At level 23, I too was growing weary of 'fetch this, run that' boring quests until I committed to The Dark Brotherhood storyline. Holy SHIT it is fun and engrossing. From the moment it started, it sucked me right in with killing 3 blindfolded hostages.

Their lair kicks ass, I suddenly felt like I was truly part of their secret clan every time I returned to their hideout. The characters were amazingly interesting (Astrid, Babette, Nazir, even annoying ass Cicero). Every quests were refreshingly fun- killing the bride at her very wedding, killing the emperor as a chef with poisoned food, boarding a big ship at night and trying to kill him again, etc.

My heart dropped when the lair got discovered by the general and they obliterated and set it on fire. Hiding in the Night Mother's casket? Fucking creepy as shit.

Killing the leader Astrid by her request for betraying everyone, settling in a NEW lair, and you are now the big cheese leader from a lowly recruit? Fucking awesome.

This Brotherhood quests took about 10 hours already and still not finished. They put SO much effort into it and I wonder if other clans are as invested and fun.

Go give them a try. Fucking A+ for this storyline alone.

Here's how to join/start their story:
http://www.gamefront.com/skyrim-how-to-join-the-dark-brotherhood/

 

[NoSoup4You]

I've had no issues with stability either, it's remarkably stable by any standards... not just "stable for Bethesda"...etc. I've had four CTD's in 76 hours, and I alt+tab out of the game frequently and often for long periods of time.

I haven't installed any mods though, just some textures replacers and of course the obvious .ini tweaks. Nothing beyond that. Maybe that helps.

With all that said, I've stopped playing until they fix the magic resistances that they broke in the last patch.

 

[KentState]

With my setups, I only initially had CTD, but changing the audio sampling rate seemed to fix the issues. This is about 30 hours between my laptop and desktop. I have not run the 4gb version until the other day when I installed RavenSEAL's mod pack. I typically get around the capped 60fps, but have seen it dip at times.

 

[HeXen]

What is your system setup?

quad core, gTX580, 6 gigs ddr3....i will tell you, i can play games like Crysis/Crysis 2, BF3..etc fully maxed out and modded and runs quite well.
its not really an issue of not meeting requirments. TES games are quite well known for its bugs. but it ran fine the whole week before thanksgiving.

but there is no perfect system. Why?...cause there is such thing as perfect code, thats why.

 

[know of fence]

So Techspot have tested CPU scaling and it turns out that frame rate nearly doubles as they double the CPU frequency. http://www.techspot.com/review/467-skyrim-performance/page7.html

They say: besides lacking multi-thread optimization, it is the shadows on ultra quality that really cut down the frame rate on any CPU. But SADLY they don't present any results to support this claim. The bottlenecking CPU makes all their graphics testing kind of worthless (all results are with ultra shadows).

So are there any more prudent/inquisitive benchmarks out there, just by how much will lowering shadow quality help alleviate the CPU strain.

I tried skyrim on a mobile Core i3, gtx555m @ 1680x1050 and it is barely playable on ultra/high (10 FPS in towns), so i'm itching to slap together a desktop rig. But I'd hate to have to buy a wasteful, loud 300$ turbo enabled intel CPU monstrosity (not doing any CPU heavy tasks otherwise) and a 160$ graphics card.

 

[coldmeat]

Wow the nightingale armor looks awesome. I just need to wait for a mod that will let me enchant it with my own enchantments.

 

[exar333]

So Techspot have tested CPU scaling and it turns out that frame rate nearly doubles as they double the CPU frequency. http://www.techspot.com/review/467-skyrim-performance/page7.html

They say: besides lacking multi-thread optimization, it is the shadows on ultra quality that really cut down the frame rate on any CPU. But SADLY they don't present any results to support this claim. The bottlenecking CPU makes all their graphics testing kind of worthless (all results are with ultra shadows).

So are there any more prudent/inquisitive benchmarks out there, just by how much will lowering shadow quality help alleviate the CPU strain.

I tried skyrim on a mobile Core i3, gtx555m @ 1680x1050 and it is barely playable on ultra/high (10 FPS in towns), so i'm itching to slap together a desktop rig. But I'd hate to have to buy a wasteful, loud 300$ turbo enabled intel CPU monstrosity (not doing any CPU heavy tasks otherwise) and a 160$ graphics card.

Just installed the HD pack, detailed stars, color galaxy, and rain/thunder mods. The game is still running butter-smooth on ultra. This is a nice game to have a 4Ghz+ system...

Edit: FRAPS data added

Min Max Avg
38 63 55.77

This was for about 10 minutes of play-time from dark through dusk to early daytime. Some combat, some running, plenty of trees/ect.

1920x1200 8AA/16AF Ultra w/ 4GB memory patch. HD textures, and everything on highest

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Wow the nightingale armor looks awesome. I just need to wait for a mod that will let me enchant it with my own enchantments.

I haven't tried it yet, but in the enchanting tree there is a selection that allows you to add to enchantments to items. Perhaps this works on the nightingale armor?

 

[KentState]

Well, I maxed out smithing and I'm a little disappointed in how easy it was. It appears that crafting XP is linear until you hit 100. Also feel that dragon armor should look and be more legendary. Looks like you are just wearing a pile of bones stringed together. The Deadric armor looks pretty awesome, though I would think that residents would be freaking out seeing someone walking around with it on. I just need to secure three more hearts so that I can complete a quest and make a new shield and weapon.

 

[know of fence]

Edit: FRAPS data added
Min Max Avg
38 63 55.77

They average much lower 51 FPS with a Radeon 5870 and an i7 K2600. More indication the game is indeed held back by the CPU. You may consider lowering shadow setting to see what frame rates you get. You could probably push it beyond 100 easily, not that it would make a difference visually.

 

[homercles337]

Another oddity with this patch: I sent Lydia away, she said, "I will wait at Breezeway." Its been days and she is neither home nor in Dragons Reach. I should mention that i sent her away because she was "stuck" on the maze side of the door to Shalidor's Maze. I would exit and she would stay inside, even after many attempts at "follow me" and "stay here." Isnt a patch supposed to fix bugs, not introduce them? How do i roll back this patch with Steam?

 

[Concillian]

Well, I maxed out smithing and I'm a little disappointed in how easy it was. It appears that crafting XP is linear until you hit 100. Also feel that dragon armor should look and be more legendary. Looks like you are just wearing a pile of bones stringed together. The Deadric armor looks pretty awesome, though I would think that residents would be freaking out seeing someone walking around with it on. I just need to secure three more hearts so that I can complete a quest and make a new shield and weapon.

There is an armor cap, so you can pretty much wear whatever armor you like the looks of. Get displayed armor to 567 or higher and you're capped at 80% reduction. It's pretty easy to hit the cap in heavy armor, and you can do it in any of the smith perk armors with ease if you have some heavy armor perks. Light armor is more difficult, Dragonscale light armor requires only one small smithing enchant (plus max light armor perks) to cap the rating. You can cap elven with stronger smithing enchants, but it's still not outrageous, I think around +50% total to smithing.

Armor appears to have accelerating returns, which is pretty poor game design IMO, but it means that high armor rating is a really big deal if you have a build where stuff is going to be hitting you. It also means you should let stuff that's not dangerous beat on you some in the early game to skill up your armor skill, each point is more valuable than the last. Armor rating really starts getting pretty good return around 300 armor or so.

 

[cytoSiN]

Another oddity with this patch: I sent Lydia away, she said, "I will wait at Breezeway." Its been days and she is neither home nor in Dragons Reach. I should mention that i sent her away because she was "stuck" on the maze side of the door to Shalidor's Maze. I would exit and she would stay inside, even after many attempts at "follow me" and "stay here." Isnt a patch supposed to fix bugs, not introduce them? How do i roll back this patch with Steam?

It's possible she got killed traveling back to the house. I've read of that happening elsewhere. Reload a save, send her home again, then fast travel and see if she shows up?

 

[exar333]

They average much lower 51 FPS with a Radeon 5870 and an i7 K2600. More indication the game is indeed held back by the CPU. You may consider lowering shadow setting to see what frame rates you get. You could probably push it beyond 100 easily, not that it would make a difference visually.

Good to know. I don't have a 120hz monitor, so anything above 60 is really wasted on me anyway. If I can keep it between 50-60pfs, with the best visuals, that's perfect for me. This game appears to love CPU power. I gained a good 10fps increase in averages just going from 3.8Ghz (Bloomfield)to 4.6Ghz (SB-E). If I get around to it, I might test the game with only 4 cores at 4.6Ghz, and all six at stock, just to see what results I get. My 5870 is still doing great though! Looking to get SLI 28nm when it's out, plus a 1600P resolution monitor to match....next year though...