You're just lucky. This is the buggiest game I have ever played, hands down. At any given moment I bet I could stop, look around, and find a bug (glitch, not insect). They are so common.

Maybe you should turn the subtitles on.
System menu - Settings - Display.

Skyrim crashes every half hour for me.
And if you look at my sig, I should be tearing this game to pieces.

Just another buggy release... as usual.

You'd think bethesda after the buggy releases of oblivion and fallout 3 could make the game [censored] playable before releasing it this time round.

They looked like crap for me too until I found the ultra setting for shadows. Setting the game to ultra didn't set everything to ultra. Sorry to hear it isn't working out for you. hopefully there is a fix soon. Or you could try tweaking the .ini

I was more implying that some textures look a bit blurry in a close up that looked fine in the trailers.

But that hardware override sounds intriguing... Since I have a severe surplus of FPS, I'd love to try it out! Is it hard/advanced/complicated to do with an AMD card?

lots of interesting posts, its really late so i want try and reply to everyone individually...
but, YES i am using a controller and for that, theres an amount of luck on my side because i do feel as though theres a certain cimplicity and the fact that (i think) skyrim was lead-developed on the 360 adds to that luck.

the shadow issue is weird. because theres LOW-MED-HIGH-ULTRA???
with mine set to ultra i see the grainy blocky tree shadows as well, but other shadows arent>??? i think theres just a few "stupid" bugs still loafing about...

and as for the odd mouse and KB issues people are having, i found somethign VERY interesting out tonight that MIGHT help people.

i used the 360 controller the whole time since install. tonight i wanted to check out M & KB, BTW, once you get everything tweaked its a great combo and cool tweaks can be made with mice with many button options. but heres the deal, my game started CTDing within 1 min every time i booted it up.
i switched back to the 360 controller and it was immediately fixed. my hypothesis is that if your trying to use mouse and KB and u happen to have ANY controller plugged in, it may be interfering with your mouse and KB setup because the game keeps looking for a controller (because it loves the 360 so much).
and along with that, maybe certain devices that are running on your PC like MP3 players or anything else hooked up via USB while your playing make the game look for a controller and that cause issues as well, so try unplugging all non-essentials. liek i said just a though, but the CTD i experienced while while using the KB with my controller plugged in was 100% repeatable...

again, please ask any questions if you have any.

and as for me being a huge [censored], sorry i cant help it, just try to enjoy that fancy beverage i just handed you, which may or may not have a roofie in, while i punch myself in the face and hit you in the crotch with a hammer when your not looking... and of course i will send the video to tosh.0.

i bet a 5 meg patch could fix lots of these weird bugs.

and look at it this way, once every 3-5 years you actually can buy again thats worth WAY more than 60$!!! they are one of the few companies that actually make a game that is so mind boggling huge that you couldnt even calculate its value. i'm still thinking about the 70% of my friends list on xbox live who are playing the 5 hour campaign of MW3... i know, you might say the value is in the MP... but really that game is so much like madden, they pop one out every 1-2 years and its more-so a game of set rules that requires people playing more than great development, its exactly the opposite of Skyrim!!!
and its just like madden, its a rule-set thats used over and over, like a simple string of programmed data, its like the world of warcraft hamster wheel without the wheel...

Not at all. Just override through Catalyst . The "AMD VISION Engine Control Center" as they call it now..

I think the main issue with the pc is obviously the ui. when we pc players have access to a screen thats much closer to us...tons and tons more possible keybinds not including modifiers which could then double that number....much greater range of motion/speed/accuracy of the mouse......and we then have to settle for literally the simplest possible thing they can think of that doesnt take advantage of literally anything the pc has to offer....thats more than a slight annoyance...especially when its something you have to use constantly throughout the game.

Easy...in all the menus before that it says Enter(ok) Tab(Exit)...I guess they just thought if you're smart enough to play the PC verision you would catch on to that.

The quick slot method is what really gets me going. I'm not one to complain, and in fact I like this game, but the whole idea behind a quick slot system is that you don't have to pause the game every time you want to change weapons.

THANK YOU. I tried it with the xbox gamepad last night and ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. The Keyboard and mouse is much better. If you ask me this is the FIRST GAME to get the PC UI correct. They tried something new and retards hate it. I love it.

It sounds like most of the PC issues are with very high-end systems.

When it comes to first person shooters or any game requiring first person view, "KB + Mouse > Controller" is very true. And yes I have tried both. Other games like racing and fighting, then I'll agree, KB + Mouse < Controller. AFAIK, Skyrim has a first person view option, where KB + Mouse is very handy for those who've gotten used to it.

You're right, I don't know what I'm doing. It's because on PC, every menu lists the nonsensical default controls even after you change them. So I literally don't know what to do. I've guessed and memorized several of them, but some really vital stuff I still can't work out.

Should have expected that from chargen, when I saw a big list of races, clicked on the one I want...and so the list scrolled one entry in that direction. I thought I was selecting a choice from a list of options, but actually, I was simulating moving a stick up or down once on a console. You see? No idea what I'm doing, just like you said. That would be one isolated instance, if it weren't also true of my stats every time I level up or even just want to review the perks.

Or when I bring up the menu, and the first thing I see is a list of four options in a circle, obviously quite intuitive if you happen to have a stick with four main directions under one thumb and a select button under the other. I have enough keys I should be hitting the one for the menu I want, not hitting one generic menu key, mousing way over to an option, and then clicking on that to finally bring up what I needed.

It also took a while to stop being confused by inventory/store screens highlighting a category in big text regardless of the fact that I clicked something else, so I see a big "FOOD" and then in the next pane, a list of armor and clothing. This is because on consoles, you'd move up and down to select a center option, and then over to get to the next pane. But they couldn't be bothered removing that for people who have a cursor and can click anywhere in the list, so they just left it.

Left handed weapons? Bugged graphics and unpoisonable. Because on a console it makes perfect sense to use right weapons on your right trigger. But on PC, you expect left-click to be default, and in order to do that and be right-handed, you'd have to left-click for right hand and right-click for left hand which is also confusing. Only someone on a mouse would care about being able to play left-handed, so the game barely acknowledges that you've got a weapon there at all.

This is why it's such a painful port, to the point that I'm surprised they even bothered to release it on PC at all. It's not because I don't know how to find the nicest graphics settings.


(Oh and by the way, nothing in the description of the favorites menu suggests that you can set hotkeys, nor is there a place to define hotkey controls. So all of us who dismissed "favorites" as some shortlist that won't be useful to us until we've got 80 spells someday had no way of knowing hotkeys existed and were hidden there. It took me a while to randomly think to check there anyway. There is a legitimate complaint there, even if it's a misleading interface instead of hotkeys being gone. Maybe because console players don't use hotkeys, and changing the text on PC would have taken the devs several entire minutes of consideration. But do we get all 10 number keys, or just the 8 it's easy to access on a controller? I do forget....)

LOL

Try any FPS known to man that's console and PC, a keyboard + mouse player will stomp a controller user every time. Controllers =/= precision.

I've had a fair play with both control schemes. My observations are that both have advantages and disadvantages. Game works perfectly on 360 controller but aiming is more difficult, turning is slower and less hotkeys for favourites can be a pain. I did however prefer the controller for moving my character as the variable speed is nicer than the digital WASD. When it comes to kb + mouse the menus tend to be a bit glitchy, mousewheel doesn't always work right. I had some issues with the game forgetting which hand I hotkeyed something into and selecting the wrong option in menus/conversations. Aiming and looking around is far superior though and some complex combat actions are easier due to having full use of the left hand. I only miss the anologue movement and the solid interface response.

I think it needs a patch or 2 or possibly a mod or 2 then the kb + mouse will be superior overall. Obviously this is not the best PC game interface I've ever seen but it's certainly not the worst and is quite workable once you get used to it after a few hours play. It's definitely not enough to mar this superb game.

As for the graphics, textures are mixed bag overall the quality is really good but like almost all games has a few ugly low res ones here and there. Given Skyrims nature as a huge open world game with masses and masses of content I would say it's easily the best looking game in it's class. Many times I've been amazed by this games beauty and I've taken a ton of screenshots that would make fine desktop wallpapers and in one or two cases even looked like pre-rendered images. Anyone who says this game is ugly on PC simply does not know what they are talking about.

I believe plans for PC vs console support for the Xbox were scrapped because of this. In testing the K+M players just slaughtered people using controllers.