I honestly don't understand how I'm crashing. My card is well within the requirements.

I've got a core 2 duo 64 bit processor with 2.4 ghz, and 6 gigs of ram, all on a windows 7 PC. Clearly I'm not one of the people you would say "well we can't cover EVERY computer set up" to... I'm actually pretty much smack dab in the most common, highest compatibility computer setup category right now...

Oh, and I'm running it on Steam, just to throw that out there.

Basically, when I start the game, everything works fine til I get past the opening cinematic that you -force- me to sit through EVERY time I start a new game (I've worked with 3D graphic arts before, so I can understand forcing someone to watch a cinematic that would have taken so long to make... but this is getting -really- annoying).

Soon as the cinematic is over, screen goes black, and hangs there. I've left it like this for at least ten to twelve minutes, and nothing happened. Soon as I try to shrink or switch windows from the game, windows declares that it is no longer responding, and the game crashes.

Can someone PLEASE tell me what I'm doing wrong here so I can play this freaking game that I just paid $60 for? I've looked all over these forums and it seems like I'm the only person with all the normal, recommended parts (ie. not right on the borderline of video cards that can potentially work, and I use Nvidia...) sooooo yeah help?

Problems like this are happening with everybody, including people with high-end gaming computers. The game developers screwed up big time somewhere along the line, and haven't fixed it yet. Personally, I doubt it will be fixed any time soon, they will probably end up putting it off cause they believe that consoles are more important then the PC, and by time they get to it, bethesda will probably have to pull out for Skyrim.

I highly doubt consoles are having issues like this. I know what the requirements for releasing a major title for PS3 or 360 requires, and I can tell you right now that these types of herp-da-derp releases are pretty much limited to PC only. There's a reason we (the steam community) got shafted when they released that old ass version of Dead Island on steam, and all the people who had consoles had no issues whatsoever

I can just tell you right now, if this is the kind of service I'm getting for giving them ridiculous sums of money for a game, good luck getting me to buy Skyrim, or any other Bethesda game, for that matter. Hell, I might just try to make a case and get my money back for this thing. This is a LEMON of a game.

yupp your not alone win7Ultimatex64sp1 quad core 6600, 8gigs of DDR2ram and a nvidia 560 gtx phantom that does not overheat.
crashes are common for me since i have been crashing to desktop from the start to the end of the game its annoying and totally takes away the atmosphere of the game its like driving a Sportscar and you always have the backthought that you cant drive to fast since the motor would eventually blow same with rage you play it so carefully to avoid the crashes but still they will slap you in the face be it in a fight in a town or while talking to an npc or even while driving up a hill bc you want to explore the area...
Unfortunatly there are NO NEWS on driver updates or on a patch 2 so we have to play it like it is and keep walking the dark path until someone offers us a light but that may take a while.

Everybody?
That's not true!

My computer hasn't crashed. Not a single time!
It didn't crash before the patch and it didn't crash after the patch

GOOD for you whats your specs sadly for us it doesnt help that it is crashing

Isn't the game's requirement for a video card an 8800GT? If so, the 96 doesn't meet it.

The requirements were for an 8800GT, yes, but with 512mb ram 9600GT with 512mb DDR3 ram definitely -does- meet that requirement, JUST sayin.

You can look at the specs yourself:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_8800_gt_us.html

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_9600gt_us.html

minimum 9600GT specs are as good or better than 8800GT

Did you really think they'd just say "HERPDADERP WE GUNNA MAKE A NEW VIDEO CARD DAS DA SAME AS DA LAST SERIES!"? Pretty sure they upgrade them all with each series albeit, a lower level 9 series will probably not be as powerful as the highest 8 series, where clock speed or ram amount is concerned, but you aren't about to tell me that this game's graphics are on par with Crysis 2, or even the -first- Crysis game, for that matter... If I can run Crysis 2 with no lag whatsoever, even with the extremely limited graphics options in that game, I'm pretty sure I should be able to run this.

Also, lo and behold, I re-downloaded the game without updating this time, and what have we here? It works! (somewhat... I still have all the issues that were present from before, but... yeah).

Please explain how that works, mr. "9 < 8"

Chill dude. I was only trying to help. Sad to see you took it the wrong way. Hope you solve your problems soon.