Out of Pod Experience

I heard the thing was huge.


but I must ask, "huge" as in huge or "huge" as in "HOLY MOLLY DID YOU JUST PUT AN ENTIRE COUNTRY IN THERE??"

Odd. The game is working perfectly for me on Ultra settings. Win7 64bit, EVGA GTX 470, 4 gig o' ram, Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatality sound card.[1] Have you updated your sound drivers? (plus graphics, etc., drivers?) You can also try disabling sound in the game as a quick check.

Also, the game is gorgeous. I haven't gotten very far (a couple of hours,) but Skyrm makes Fallout 3/Oblivion look really drab, stupid, and clumsy in comparison. The first quest dungeon was really well done.

I was worried the game would just be an upgraded Fallout 3/Oblivion, but it's shaping up to be a lot more than that.


[1] I wonder what their next "gaming" sound card will be called. Sound Blaster Triple-X-Fi: The Culling of the First Born?

tbh, Oblivion grabbed me more in the opening of the game.

Skyrim was kinda meh, but it's starting to pick up a bit that I've been dumped into the world on my own.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. Just disable the sound to determine if it's a sound related problem. IME, sound cards can cause a lot of incompatibility issues.

It's also why I buckle down and only buy proven name brand hardware (i.e. buy an EVGA nvidia card instead of a generic brand nvidia card) and even then I try to buy the specific components used by a hardware review site that tests gaming rigs (such as www.tomshardware.com) I haven't had a game not work for me in years.

Worst case problem I've seen was where a motherboard's RAID driver was somehow interfering with the sound card. Second worst case is malware or spyware that interferes with the OS's normal operations (such as interfering with the TCP/IP stack.) So backup your data/create a check point and upgrade your motherboard drivers and run some anti-spyware apps.

Good luck on getting the game running.

The best part is that the weapons feel like they have actual weight. Combat is so much more tactical than Oblivion where it was just hack slash and pray. Shield bashing is fun as well.

I feel bad for that guy at the beginning. Had he stalled for 30 seconds or so he wouldn't have lost his head.

Still getting a crash between some loads of Dungeon to World - but very sporadic. Ill put that down to needing a new NVidia build for now.

Played good and long time this time, got the claw quest out the way and went on a rampage with my staff of sparks and new destruction gear - all went well till the game sprung a mage bandit on me, biatch toasted me in about 2 seconds. 1 second of 'oh, thats not my sparks.... DODGERAMA' and 1 second of realising she must have cast defense spells and was more than a match for my twig o sparks.....

Oh well, good time for a break.

The world is BIG and it is (as advertised) way more dense than Oblivion, theres stuff everywhere and i can only assume crafting is a massive part of the game the amount of ingredients lying around. Makes a change from calipers anyway.

Nice touch with the tanning hides too - i guess it means you can truly make everything, from armour sets to spells, poisons and then enchant your own gear.

Very impressed. Engine is optimized like a BOSS. Ran it 100% full settings with no issues as did several people I know on STEAM/Forums that have weaker machines. NO bugs so far *knock on wood*. Going down hills/mountains is much better then other games. You don't insta die from fall damage unless it's really far. You don't skip off of rocks and slide down, you almost always 'stick' when you land somewhere. Generous 0damage distance.

My only complaints so far are that there is no quick switching weapons. Instead they use a favorite items/spells menu which pauses the game and that it uses the same stupid numbered save system that's not unique to character.






Necromancy is odd. You have to kill an enemy with something else and actually raise them. They come up as a pet (which you can only have on of, two with a perk.) and fight as they were when they fell but pale and glowing blue. Same weapons and style. Only last 60seconds. Kind of hard to use on the fly.

I'm a bit disappointed in the magic. The one hand magic feels weak to the point you have to dual wield it. If you went PURE destruction I'm sure it would be very nasty to cast one handed pure damage spells through the early/mid levels but that only works until you hit max destruction skill and continued to level up without getting proportionally stronger. Though if you ONLY played by destroying things, I guess you'd mostly stop leveling and always be nasty.

honestly I don't think any gamer has a real idea of how big a country is.

even all of world of war craft is apparently if in real life the size of rhode island.

which is a 2 day walk across. which is pretty big for an mmo. So we'll see if a game can someday really get that big of a world into it.




well other than with cheap gimmicks, like arcanium.

You sir, are the man.




And 'tab' being close a container. I spent the whole intro thinking I had to loot all or I was stuck in the container forever. It was only once some tooltip or something said tab brought up another menu that I thought to try the key in a container. Sure enough, somehow someone thought it would make sense that the menu key brought you out of containers instead of ESC or the usual interface 'back' key from the rest of the game.







It's actually smaller than Oblivion. I don't have the link handy but it was a direct answer from a dev, stating it's much smaller than Oblivion, but it's more divided and it's hand crafted. You won't find a giant field with nothing in it or an area that's just procedurally generated flora and random harvest nodes and wildlife spawns. The entire world is almost all hand placed and has more points of interest dotted over it.

I play an MMO called DAoC with an absolutely massive frontier area, but that area is almost entirely empty. It's just hilly ground with basic terrain. I get a friend with the best speed buff and run over it without a second thought. I tried to go just from one town to another in Skyrim before work, and didn't make it half way because of all the things I ran into that demanded attention.

Wolves fighting walrus, a typical cave type dungeon, a shrine with a dead guy at it where blasts of icy magic hit me when I tried to approach so I had to figure a short way in to loot the body and alter, a random skeleton warrior shooting arrows at me enticed me up a hill where I found a small one person tomb in the open world (no zone load) guarded by a tough undead, a cluster of clams and barnacles going off under water all harvestable, a camp where two fishermen (read a journal) had set up but gone off to hunt, a rare snow fox that I had to chase a bit and shoot a few arrows at before I got it for it's fur, a wrecked ship in which bandits had set up a base with back entrances guarded by bear traps and a stash of supplies, a hidden gold vein on top of any icy hill you would never need to go to, an ice berg floating off with a lone wolf trapped on top howling and then the dead bodies of the two fishermen near... it never ends... and the whole time you're finding books refferencing other places with stories, treasure maps, or people are telling you to visit one town or another to join causes.

Content wise, Skyrim is the richest thing I've ever seen, and that makes it seem huge because you can never just auto run through three minutes of zero interest towards a waypoint and you're not pushing some story forward that you're only interested in part of, you're just exploring the world.

Damned amazing. Must have played it for ~15 hours yesterday.

So far my only problem is that a companion who seemed to be invincible, and had gotten up from 'death' a few times, eventually died permanently. Not sure how the mechanics work exactly.

I'll never forget you, Lydia.