The good:

The wait function - better than Oblivion's
Player has vocalizations !! May make modding the voices easier !!



The bad:

How the heck do you alter the age of your character?
Voice acting - not as good as Oblivion so far


The Ugly:

Characters are butt ugly and very unrealistic and weird movements

One thing to add to the bad: Massive update for PC. I'm looking at a down load that is going to take 11-12 hours in total time. Just so I can play it. It really makes me wonder if the game was even on the disc I bought.

One more reason that Steam = blech

No kidding. I hope that's all I'm going to be adding to the bad pile.

Good:


The map is pretty awesome

mALX, this is a wonderful idea for a thread! I'm anxious to see all the impressions of Skyrim through the eyes of others, as I don't even consider buying games until they have been out for at least a year or more.

Bad:

Crime ESP - commit a crime in one town and the other towns suddenly know of it? What is that all about? Also, no matter how far away you are when you steal something - if an NPC was FACING YOUR DIRECTION when it occured they can spot you? Something pretty odd about that.

I know I've already harped on this but...

Bad: Poor textures.

Not just the PC version, but I have seen mainstream reviewers (GameSpot, for instance) making quips about how the textures in this game look painted-on and not believable. Considering this is 2011, and Bethesda is using the exact same texturing solutions from their 2008 Fallout 3 engine, that is a bit of a gaping hole in their "overhauled game engine." I would have thought that rewriting the render would include improving the texture-mapping, but I guess not.

Also, yes. Day-one patches should be banned. Installation is done, but now I need to wait for that stupid 200+Mb day-one patch to download before playing. Whatever happened to to those good ol' days when devs didn't rely on patches?

I have to agree. They look fake, and are certainly not an improvement over Oblivion's in my opinion. My son disagrees with me, he thinks they are better. - both these opinions are based on the 360 version of the game, and on an older (non-HD) TV.

I thought the gambryo was a better graphics engine - and required a LOT less of a PC to run it.

Only 200 MB? The steam thing is making me download nearly 6G! What the hell is going on?

The good...

My God it's beautiful...I love the countryside...Absolutely stunning...

The dungeons are soo pretty...Loot is good...People look generally better...

Smoother...Niice...Loving it so far...

Th'wife loves the Alchemy stuff...

The kids are having a blast on it...Absolute classic...

OOoooh, LOVE the dual fire and electric spelly thing...LOVE it!!...



The Bad...

Not a big fan of the swordy combat...In Oblivion, whether people thought it was realistic or not, if you hit someone, you hit them...Doesn't really feel like it connects somehow...Not pleased with that...Looking forward to it I was...

The Ugly...

I think they've completely arsed up the perk trees...They make no sense to me...Too complicated...Stick to the Fallout 3 version...Much easier to understand...

I've had several characters levitate above the scenery...

Whatever other people thought of Ease Burden spells...I liked them...And now I'm pretty incensed that they've taken them all out to stop spoil sports whining...Not a happy bunny...If they were there before, they should be there now...Retconning is sh*t...Utter sh*t...

Other than that...YAY!!... ...

KC: Read this.

Steam is trying to download the entire game instead of install from the disc. If you suffer from that bug, read those instructions to initiate the disc install manually.

More from me...

Ugly: Native AA is utter trash. The performance hit it brings is prohibitive.

Good: Ignoring the aforementioned texture issues, the game does look really good.

Good: People who don't care for Steam, if you launch the game directly from the EXE, Steam will be bypassed.

... I can't even type what I want to say.

Can you do that initially and never have to access Steam? If so, I will unwrap my PC version right now !!! Oh TK, you ROCK if I can do this !!!

You gotta have a Steam account.

EDIT: And thank you TK for posting that.

You still need to install from Steam, but once you do, if you wish it, you never have to deal with the client again.

Just install some kind of (few megabyte) update/patch type thing? Not anything huge? (like gigs) (Yes, thank you TK) !!

The Ugly: My character’s silly walk.

The Bad: Still don’t like blood on the screen.

The Awesome: Everything else.

Blood on screen? I missed that. Or haven't fought much yet...

The walk is a little goofy I admit, but it doesn't bother me anymore.

The waddle-walk? Yes it is pretty silly.

Especially when going up steep inclines and half your leg clips into the ground. Fallout 3 had better terrain tracking than that.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Actually bathing every day was standard for the Romans, and they took their bathhouses all across North Africa, Europe, and Near Asia. It was an important place for socializing, and making backroom deals. When the Vikings conquered eastern England, they were very popular with the local women, because the Norse men bathed on a regular basis. Our modern society likes to think that we are so advanced, and that everyone who came before us were primitive savages rolling around in the dirt. But that is just hubris. Our ancestors were not as stupid, or disgusting, as we like to pretend they were. For example, the Minoans had running water and flush toilets back in the Bronze Age.

Speaking purely in the ES universe, in Skyrim we start the game able to shoot fire and lightning from our fingers. But no one has a spell to wash their hair, or their body? Give me a break.



Give me the Oblivion hair any day. Even the vanilla looks much better then what Skyrim offers. Much less Corean or Rens. The Skyrim hair looks dead and lifeless, not to mention icky. I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot poleaxe.

Romans - basically upper class bathed everyday, but the common rabble? No. They had to work. I wonder if they were even allowed in the bathhouses.

Norse - How did they bathe everyday? Especially in the winter months? They going to haul water and heat it everyday inside? I really doubt it.

Yes there are some ancient societies that had pluming. Very limited example though. It was hardly widespread and they made their pipes out of lead.

The Roman rabble did take a bath every day. It was cheap, and part of their society. Just like it is part of ours. It is not difficult to bathe. You do not require a super high technology to do it. Just water. You do not even need a tub, or a huge amount of water. A washcloth and enough water to soak it will do. Take a look for some examples.

And even reality aside, it is ridiculous to think that in a world where it is common to shoot out fire and lighting from your hand, let alone conjure up monsters from other dimensions, turn invisible, trap souls, and so on, that no one can cast a clean up spell.

Neither one of us are going to budge so I will not waste any more effort arguing.

EDIT: That was more unfriendly sounding than I wanted. We'll just agree to disagree on that point.

Thank you, SubRosa! I get so tired of posting this exact same thing in different places. People tend to think that the history of hygiene is a simple, linear progression from "really, really dirty" to "moderately dirty" to "clean". Not true at all - attitudes towards bathing and cleanliness have varied wildly over different times and places.

Of course it's true that in general, rich people would bathe more than poor people. But even in the "dirtier" times in European history - which actually applies more to the Renaissance/early industrial era, rather than medieval times - people would at least try to keep their faces and hands clean, and several pre-industrial cultures (such as the Romans) had fairly advanced plumbing systems. Here's couple more links on bathing in the Middle Ages:
http://www.godecookery.com/mtales/mtales08.htm
http://www.family-ancestry.co.uk/history/v.../uncleanliness/

Regarding Skyrim itself: I haven't played it yet, so I can't comment. Nothing in this thread particularly surprises me, however. I'm definitely going to hold off buying it at least until mods are available to fix most of these problems.

Here is a Good thing:

The fatigue system is more realistic. My character gets staggered in fights, is weakened acting. She pants and coughs after fights like she's really done some hard work.

The enemies are tougher, no one is dropping easily with your sword or magic - and they have equal magic powers and use them.

Ugly: The revamped physics have an annoying tendency of throwing objects all over the place. Interiors are also frequently filled with thunking and thudding as objects get tossed around. Again, this is performance related; this time if your framerates are too high.

Lots of dead body "havocs" on these larger beings. I've hit one and had it fly out in the sky (and seen several similar scenes on Youtube).

I liked the sound of fire better in Oblivion. Skyrim's fires sound like dust scratching your disk. I kept pulling the disk out and blowing the player clean thinking it had sucked up some dust onto the surface or something.


*

Another Good thing - the walrus's on the ice floes - cool as heck. Also that not every animal attacks. Some avoid you (like foxes, deer, rabbits) - and some will let you pass by but get threatening if you hang around too close - like the mammoths or the walrus's.

Markath is bugged to hell...

I live there...Soooo many bugs though...

More noticable than New Vegas...



I hate the story...



And please Bethesda, stop contradicting everything...

Stupid game...I'm completely addicted...

I like it...I think...But I don't love it...And I probably never will...

You thought it was hard to organize your things in Oblivion? Wait until you try in Skyrim...sit two things on a plate and watch one fly off like a fat kid just hopped on the freaking seesaw.

The one improvement I can see housing and organizing wise is that there are automatic weapon displays, auto organize book shelves, and mannequins to show off your stuff.

Actually hand placing things in this game is like pulling teeth, worse than Oblivion.

Also, I hate the amount of unusable containers in this game.