I was nitpicking the meaning of "terrible level design" and that's really only cos I'm bored myself... >_>

Go do something outrageous. I put on my wife's underwear the other day and bolted out into the living room not realizing her parents had stopped by to visit. Awkward. But it killed my boredom.

Rotflmaololomgwtfbbq!!!111

Haha! God I hope that's true! XD

Reading through this I can clearly see both points of view, in particular the comparison to the emptiness of Dead Money, but you can get out and go back in which for a DLC that adds an extra Game World is excellent. Using Dead Money as an example, once in there your stuck until completion. Old World Blues same again stuck until its finished, Soul Cairn once you realise you can go in and out that easily fits both opinions, just go and do the basic requirements and get out asap, or if you want to stay and wander to your hearts content, or maybe just go back for your next holiday and finish finding those extra pages???

You should have an icon on your desktop 'Nvidia control panel', or it will be in your programs list in your start menu, click on it to bring it up, then look in the menu along the left side for 'manage 3D settings'. Select that, and it should take you to a screen with two options along the top row, the first is 'global', which is the overall setting for your rig, and the other option is program specific...you can actually set a different graphics setting for each of your individual games. In either of those menus, you can turn down your anisotropic setting by lowering the number. You can also change your entire graphics setup to suit yourself...

The other option you have is to click play in your steam game listing (for skyrim) and when the small menu pops up with 'play', 'options', 'data' etc, select options, and you can then set your anti-aliasing and anisotropic settings in that. If you prefer, you can set your global settings in the Nvidia control panel to let you select those settings in game through that skyrim menu.

If you have any issues, pm me. Good luck.

Agreed. If you don't "get it", I can see hating it. The design is dastardly evil on a sublime level. One poster said "it's like a maze". THAT'S the point. you're SUPPOSED to feel lost, despondant, you're SUPPOSED to feel discomfort to a degree. Now, the REAL brilliance is that this maze has but one real wall (besides the border barriers) and you can STILL get lost. My first time in, I followed the physical path directly to Valerica. Not deviating much from task, I didn't get too lost. The second time, I decided to explore a bit and rapidly got lost. BUT, I did discover quite a few interesting things. Still have figured out where the horse skull is, and haven't found more than 6 or 7 pages of Jiub's, and still have yet to find the hidden boss. I don't do Wikis, cheats, or anything like that and I'm not a completionist, so play throughs remain fresh the third, fourth, fifth time.

Film critics are so disconnected from the majority of people and what they want, so who the hell cares what they think. They don't understand that people like watching movies with lots of explosions simply because its got lots of explosions and absolutely no engaging story line. They only want people to follow their opinion.

I think the level design and art style for the Soul Cairn is great. It is supposed to be a terrible plane of purgatory and I think that is exactly what the devs created. It is vast, open and unending, while simultaneously claustrophobic and disorienting. It is aesthetically dim and dreary and it goes on that way in every direction as far as the eye can see. Now imagine that you don't have a fancy staircase available to walk right out, that is how the souls that are trapped there feel. I think it is a great level design for a plane that is supposed to be nightmarish and oppressive.

I liked it, it's supposed to be a barren wasteland where souls are trapped for eternity.

i hated darkfall more than soul cairn. I was able to get out of SC pretty easily, no problems, just jump from objective to objective. But darkfall pissed me off especially when I'm on the top floor, get hit, and fall into the crack back to the bottom floor...

Didn't care for FV either... Especially with the quest markers bugged.

Firstly, you've made a generalization the size of a Buick. Secondly, yours is an altogether different argument (discerning the motives of critics) and has nothing to do with the discussion I was having with Doozer.

I agree on the Soul Cairn, it had a great art style but it was empty. I strongly disagree on Dead Money though, it had FAR more content within the Sierra Madre and the Villa and it kept me occupied. The SC just has a few useless structures and two characters. Meeting (SPOILER ....... SERIOUSLY) Jiub was very cool though as he is one of the most BA characters in TES.
EDIT
I'd like to add that I wouldn't expect the SC to be on the same level of content as DM as it is only one part of a much larger dlc. While DM focuses solely on the area in question.

This. I always dread Darkfall on later playthroughs.

I also think it's boring. The idea was nice but the content added into it is lacking.

I prefer to see it as a great background just waiting to enhance the painting that must surely be coming.

It's a little boring now, but the potential for future additions is definitely there.

OMG, all are some of the best areas of Skyrim, for me anyway. I love Darkfall, how can you see those tubeworms and not?

FV would be better if the dawnguard game didn't have a few game breaking bugs that I needed to fix with console commands.

With the bugged quest marker and all the other bugs I hit I just said f it and used a console command to port me to the last shrine. I wasn't gonna run around the whole map after all that in search of it, after needing to fix other things with mods and consoles.

Darkfall I just didn't like. I liked the weird glowing things that disappeared, but that crack was annoying. If I couldn't just fall back to start in the middle of combat then I'd like it more. But something about that caves design turned me off personally.

I liked the Soul Cairn, I loved the Forgotten Vale.

2 game worlds added by 1 DLC, on totally opposite ends of the scale from each other.

TES equivalent of hell, and a winter wonderland.

FV?

Seemed to have plenty of content to me, you just had to look for it.

Vast and mostly empty... and so frustratingly tightly locked up until I figured out the trick of getting the doors to open in some of the areas. Little touches like that are what makes the experience worth it though. STILL havent found all the pages or reaper shards yet. Overal I had a blast exploring the place. Even managed to get lost a couple times, but o to the nature of hte place that is to be expected. The Ideal Masters after all are not the types to mak it easy for any one to walk into their domain and leave with their soul intact. Getting hopelessly lost and becoming a permenent resident is supposed to be a real and present danger. That said, I was rather expecting to get attacked far more often or perhaps even have to bargain my way out again. There is sooo much they could've done with the place! heck I'd have loved a player home i there and it is bar none an enchanters heaven. Just take your empty gems to the nearest fissure and fill them and you're ready to rock. Getting dragon bone items off the Keepers was also fun! My werewolf fighting the pockets of undead resistance was a sureal scene in this setting.
In my honest opinion the only thing needing to be 'fixed' is to increase the number of hostile undead residents.

forgotten vale

I did everything in SC. It still felt boring.

Not to mention I had not enough magicka to summon Arvak. Who the hell tough it was a good idea to make summoning him a spell and not a power?!

It's amazing.