21 replies to this topic

[Yovaneth]

i.e. if you haven't bought it and you're thinking about it, save your money. I can't play for more than ten - fifteen minutes without the game hanging on an area transition and once it's hung, if you're inside a building you're screwed because you can't use the fast travel trick to get out of it. This is the absolute vanilla, fully-patched version; no mods, no replacement textures, just straight out of the box.

I had been so looking forward to this and I've been left angry and disappointed by what is essentially a badly-QA'd pile of junk. If it wasn't assigned to me on Steam it would be up for sale at a bargain bin asking price. Actually, I'd give it away because I'd feel guilty at charging someone for something that doesn't work.

-Y-

[Kaeloree]

We bought it on the 360, and haven't experienced any real problems so far. Some collision errors, one or two badly generated creatures (like sabretooth tigers on top of trees etc) but overall it's been fantastic. I assume you played it on the PC?

[Choo Choo]

I'm playing on the PC and haven't had those kind of problems at all - the occasional crash, but it's rare enough that it doesn't bother me. A few dragons flying backwards, one broken area transition. Otherwise it works fine.

Have you contacted tech support?

[Solaufein]

It is? Wow I must have missed something. I haven't had any type of crash on my PC. Unlike that New Vegas game when it first came out. Skyrim so far for me has been painless. Which I'm surprised being a Bethesda game.

[Western Paladin]

For what it's worth, I've got the PS3 version, and I haven't had any really serious problems of that type, especially since I changed the settings to autosave less frequently. I've had a couple of bugs in quest progression, which are sort of a different issue.

[Yovaneth]

After an hour of searching forums and reading crash threads, it seems my problem is rather too common. That, plus a CTD every five minutes (I've only had one of those). I've also spent the same period trying the various suggestions (most of which didn't work) but a combination of disabling all autosaves, reducing most of the game settings from Ultra (default) to High and Waiting/Sleeping for a couple of hours at a transition hang seems to have got me back my two worst problem transitions (Jorvaskyrr to Whiterun and Dragonsreach to Whiterun). In the latter case it goes like this:

Transition hang
Task Manager
Kill TESV *32.exe
Restart the game
Reload the previous savegame
Sleep/Wait.
Try the transition again.

Some bloody rigmarole that is. We'll see how successful I've been over the coming days.

On a slightly more cheerful note, I'm working on a utility that will track the installation of new files into the Data folder (new textures, sounds, actors, etc.. - not .esp or .esm files). It should make it easier to determine what you have installed and whether you want to keep it or not.

-Y-

[Edit] Yes, it's the PC version. The 360 version is, by all accounts, damn-near completely bug-free (hmmm - I wonder which version was ported?). The Tech Support forums have over a thousand complaints about the same problem and have not replied with a suggestion or acknowledgement once. Additionally, there's the usual crop of Tech Support stupidity:-

User - 'I'm having x, y and z problem. My game is patched to patch 1.2' (or 1.3 depending on the time of posting)
Tech Support - 'Please upgrade to patch 1.2 (or 1.3) as we have fixed the problem in that patch'.

Edited by Yovaneth, 02 January 2012 - 04:19 PM.

[ghostdog]

It's a Bethesda game, so you should know that you'll find bugs varying from amusing to devastating, depending on your system and luck. It's not *the buggiest game evar*, but it's buggy like all their games.


Don't worry, Modders will fix it... eventually


Well, basically I'm half-kidding. Your chances are with the community and not the official tech support. Check Skyrim Nexus site and forums.

[Darziak]

Ouch sorry to hear that your having troubles with Skyrim.

I must be lucky as I haven't had any problems with Skyrim apart from a random crash and texture not loading, but that was before there were any patches out.

[cmorgan]

On the positive side, Y, your pain has kept me modding - I was wavering on whether to fight January doldrums by getting Skyrim, since many of you folks have liked it - given that you are having these troubles, I think it would be better relaxation to mod and wait for the next round of patches for the PC version.

(No, i'm not going to go buy an X-Box360!)

[Kaeloree]

Would this be an appropriate time to chorus "We want Aran, we want Aran, we want Aran!" cmorgan?

[berelinde]

@cmorgan:

Modding>>>>>Playing Skyrim

And if it's that "shiny new game" fix you're after and still want to mod, shoot over to TATW and check out the workroom. I'm telling you, I haven't gotten such a thrill out of playing an alpha since the first time I got an NPC to spawn in-game.

[Yovaneth]

Well, I played for an hour last night on the new settings without any transition hangs. I'm cautiously optimistic.... but now I've hit that bloody stupid hard-coded key-mapping problem - the one where if you map a key away from default and it has two functions, the second function (e.g. key-binding a 'favourite' weapon) no longer works because Bethesda in their wisdom have hard-coded it. I've found a mod that should fix that but I haven't installed it yet.

-Y-

[Archmage Silver]

Sorry if it has been a buggy trip to Tamriel for you - although when has it not been that? The games are too massive to be released without bugs. I'll give you that these kind of bugs are generally more annoying though!

[Yovaneth]

You've got to love this game, haven't you? It's now hanging on the Steam 'Preparing to launch....' screen. It's not Steam because all of my other Steam games launch okay.

[Edit] Corrupted game file.... Right click on game title in Steam library | Properties | Local Files | Verify integrity of game cache. In addition, the Steam Cloud sync was having problems and it took almost half an hour to sort itself out. Offline mode tonight, I think.

-Y-

Edited by Yovaneth, 05 January 2012 - 09:48 AM.

[Yovaneth]

Another method for dealing for dealing with load hangs i.e. when you're starting the game from the Steam launcher and the savegame you want to load just hangs: load a known working savegame and then load the required save from within the game. I have to do this on most attempts to start the game.

-Y-

[Archmage Silver]

Hm... could be corrupted files in there somewhere.

[Yovaneth]

Well, the good news is that I seem to have got some stability into the game. I did spend quite a long time tweaking settings to try and restore some of my 'lost' ultra setup but the main thing for me appears to be don't accept the default settings (ultra) and turn off all autosaves. nVidia (http://uk.geforce.com/optimise/guides) have a good guide to optimising Skyrim including how to use the video card to improve the visuals. Ironically, it's just possible that my game display is now better than Bethesda's Ultra settings.

-Y-

[cmorgan]

How's the video requirement working out? I have an ATI 5870 with a mild overclock, but I spike high temperatures on DA:O and Civ 5 when running AA. (stock Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q9450 3.4GHz). Am I going to want to upgrade?

[Yovaneth]

According to this your card should push the Ultra settings without too much problem. I find that mine (nVidia GeForce 560Ti) has a just noticeable stutter when in high shadow areas i.e. caves and buildings with small rooms but I haven't finished tweaking yet. I don't know about the CPU but to me it looks okay - apparently Skyrim only pushes two core threads anyway.

-Y-

Edited by Yovaneth, 13 January 2012 - 03:38 AM.

[Dark_Ansem]

got it for the PC, finished main quest and only had one CTD. I played straight to latest patch, tho, so maybe that's why. and 1.4 seems even better.