This is Lara and Taylor playing the theme music to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Lara is the one playing piano and singing, Taylor is the violin player. They made their own arrangements, so there is no sheet music. Just sit back and enjoy this middle of the day break.
[via Reddit]
As noted in this post (via here), Skyrim contains much of the rest of the continent of Tamriel in rudimentary form outside its mountains. bBorderRegionsEnabled=0 in Skyrim.ini and no-clip on does the trick. Thanks, commenters. There’s a huge heightmap out there, well beyond view distance, down into Morrowind, Cyrodiil, and Hammerfall. It’s a bit buggy, mind and seems unstable once you’re out of skyrim. Looks like it’s just a chunk of the world rendered around Skyrim for view-distance authenticity, rather than any possible expansion.
The Taiwanese news animators at NMA take on the newest Elder Scrolls game with a news report that covers Skyrim's blockbuster launch and pesky bugs. It's ironic to see NMA shining a spotlight on a title's bugs when their own lo-fi, CGI oeuvre seems to be drawn from Will Wright's nightmares. This clip isn't as bloodthirsty as the Tanooki Mario one, but has a voyeuristic Grim Reaper and a baby with a glowing forehead tattoo. Just keep the crazy coming, NMA.
Skyrim drums up sales; bugs plague users [Next Media Animation]
See this hat I’m wearing? The one with the dark tuft at the top? You should be afraid when I wear this hat. Very afraid. Because this hat means I’m grumpy>. But it’s okay, I’m not grumpy at you. I’m grumpy at unidentified tech sorts at Bethesda Softworks who last night released the first patch for Skyrim. A patch whose only effects was to limit what we can do with the game. It was released without fanfare or explanation, but forums swiftly figured out its purpose.
The 18MB downloadette is essentially there to stop the game from running without Steam: the main executable is now tied thoroughly into Valve’s security, unreliable offline mode et al. Nothing remarkable there, save for the surprising fact that it was at all unbound at release, but one of the upshots of this is that we’re now limited from faffing about with said executable. Most particularly, the large address aware third-party patch that enabled Skyrim to use more than 2GB of system RAM.
Update: a new LAA workaround that apparently does the job without altering the exectuable! Phew. Now can we have official> support for all our lovely RAM please, Bethsoft? (more…)
YouTube video director Wren the Reaper tore himself away from Falcon Punching people into bloody smears to create this stunning three minute tribute to the glory of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. If you're away from your gaming system and cannot play, find consolation here.
What you're seeing is the end result of 40 hours of work using more than 80GB of captured footage from Bethesda's masterpiece, lovingly modded and color-corrected in post to present the sort of footage one would expect to see on the Nature Channel. Wren tagged me on Twitter the other day, calling out the lovely Skyrim time-lapse video we posted last week.
"So you know that Skyrim time-lapse video Kotaku showed? I decided I think I might make one too. And much better."
Did he get the job done?
The fifth installment in Bethesda's long-running Elder Scrolls series took the industry by storm last Friday, earning an impressive aggregated review score of 95/100.
Based on early estimates, Skyrim has shipped seven million copies worldwide across all platforms, including digital stores such as Steam. During a peak hour last Monday, Valve's platform alone recorded some 287,000 Skyrim players — greater than the combined peak activity of MW3, Counter-Strike, Football Manger 2012 and Team Fortress 2.
We usually don't open our performance reviews with sales figures, but we felt compelled to illustrate the magnitude of Skyrim's launch because role-playing games rarely garner this type of attention. Although its popularity is undoubtedly aided by the cult-like status of the Elder Scrolls franchise, Skyrim isn't just a clone of its predecessors (we're looking at you MW3). Bethesda has made many gameplay refinements, especially to the graphics and animations — our area of interest.
For its day, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had incredible visuals, leveraging advanced lighting and shader techniques such as HDR and specular mapping. In fact, before Crysis launched in 2007, Oblivion was arguably the most taxing PC game available. You'd have been lucky to see 50fps while exploring the expansive realm on high quality with a pair of ATI Radeon X1900 XTs (a $1,200 proposition at the time). We don't expect Skyrim to be that stressful, but we do have high hopes for its graphical fidelity.
While it may not bring your PC to its knees, Skyrim promises to be the best-looking Elder Scrolls title to date with its newly developed game engine, called the "Creation Engine." Among other things, the framework lets Skyrim display greater draw distances and produce a more realistic world overall. Shadows can be created by any object or structure, tree limbs and the flow of water can be affected by wind, and other weather effects have been introduced, such as dynamic snow fall.
As fun as it is to chat about Skyrim's graphics, we're dying to get a little more "eyes-on"...
Skyrim is quite demanding when running at max quality. When testing at 1680x1050, the HD 6750 was shoved below the 30fps threshold, while the HD 6770 and GTX 550 Ti barely made the cut. The HD 6790 and HD 5830 were about even at 38 and 39fps, while the GTX 460 and HD 6850 were the first cards to guarantee a mostly lag-free experience.
The HD 6870, 6950 and GTX 560 Ti all managed 58fps — a decent showing for two of the cards, but we're disappointed by the HD 6950. That said, the GTX 570 was only a fraction faster at 60fps, while the HD 6970 managed 62fps. Nvidia's current and previous-generation single-GPU flagships were the most impressive, managing 69fps and 70fps.
When cranking the resolution up to 1920x1200, most of the lower-end products struggled to deliver playable performance, or in the case of the Radeon HD 6770 and 6750, completely bombed. Even the HD 5830 was quite sluggish with 34fps, while the GTX 460 failed to break 40fps. If you want to exceed 40fps, you'll need an HD 6850 or GTX 560, while 60fps+ will require an HD 6970 or better.
To enjoy Skyrim on its maximum quality setting at 2560x1600 or higher, you'll have to invest in some serious rendering power. The GTX 580, which was by far the fastest graphics card tested, managed 51fps, while the GTX 480 slipped to 43fps, followed by the HD 6970 at 41fps.
Skyrim is said to be a heavily CPU-dependent game and, as you are about to discover, this is true. We hear the game offloads shadow rendering to the CPU and as a result, ultra quality shadows really hammer the processor.
The game appears to only be optimized for quad-core processors, as just four threads of the Core i7-2600K were active when playing. However, of those four threads, only one reached between 90–100% while the other three worked at around 30–50%. This means a decent dual-core processor should have no trouble playing Skyrim.
This is possibly the first game we've tested that truly stresses the i7-2600K. Reducing the chip to 2GHz lowered the GTX 580's average frame rate to just 44fps. Moving from 2GHz to 2.5GHz provided a 25% performance boost, and from 2.5GHz to 3GHz allowed for another 16% gain. We yielded 14% more performance when jumping to 3.5GHz and then another 11% moving up to 4GHz.
In other words, if your system is struggling to keep pace, you might want to decrease the shadow quality and/or overclock your processor.
We were surprised by two results on the graph above: the Core i7-3960X's 20% performance lead over the 2600K, and the AMD FX series' lousy showing. The FX-8150 and FX-6120 averaged just 50fps, making them just 1fps faster than the Phenom II X6 1100T, which was also sluggish. By comparison, the i5-750 averaged 56fps, the i3-2120 delivered 57fps and the old i7-920 managed a solid 59fps. Meanwhile, the more modern i5-2500K was sitting pretty with a respectable 67fps — 1fps below the i7-2600K.
Image Quality Comparison
Testing Methodology
High Quality Performance
Ultra Quality Performance
Final Thoughts
Republished with permission.
Steven Walton is a writer at TechSpot. TechSpot is a computer technology publication serving PC enthusiasts, gamers and IT pros since 1998.
Let me begin by saying this is not a spoiler. This is a random sandbox event caused entirely by something I did, and is in no way scripted into the game. Your Lydia could live forever. So…
There are few NPCs in games that have inspired me to write a song. Well, there’s one. And her name is Lydia. This is the story of her death.>
Bethesda's filled the province of Skyrim with enough side quests and random missions to keep adventurers adventuring for months, but commenter Bennythegamerguy found that the end of the main storyline signaled the end of his play time.
You know what I found odd while playing Skyrim? (Hold on) While playing, I would find myself starting a quest and ending with having more than what I began with. This excites me as I become more and more busy within the world of Tamirel. Now I thought to myself, "Heck, I have the main mission, brb peoplez," and went off to beat the game. Then I beat the game. Then I felt as if I did not feel like playing anymore. It's like the feeling of doing stuff before beating the game felt better than say...beating them after completing the main mission.
Nobody has that feeling too?
div class="modfont">About Speak Up on Kotaku: Our readers have a lot to say, and sometimes what they have to say has nothing to do with the stories we run. That's why we have a forum on Kotaku called Speak Up. That's the place to post anecdotes, photos, game tips and hints, and anything you want to share with Kotaku at large. Every weekday we'll pull one of the best Speak Up posts we can find and highlight it here.