This is just insanity...

Some people don't understand that sometimes the consoles are not te problem My xbox version sometimes has problems to. Saying that PC's were misstreated is just foolish since of all the extra things you can do, they gave you a creation kit, if you find something you don't like with the game fix it yourself... There should be no reason for you to complain on something you can fix yourself...

As a console gamer, I respect what you've written here. The only PC player comments I've read so far are juvenile whinges aimed at the UI.

The people complaining about having to use keyboard shortcuts in menus, have you tried clicking your mouse at all on options or did you see a keyboard shortcut and not bother? Because I bothered o actually use my mouse and found that it works fine.

I think the UI is a lot better because nothing gets in my way. I don't have three clunky bars in the corner or a big clunky compass at the bottom of my screen (it's at the top instead.) It only shows things that are necessary at the time. Much better than the Oblivion and Morrowind UI in my opinion.

The fonts, what a petty complaint. That's all I'm going to say on that.

For those of you who played Oblivion on the PC, you will notice that many of the controls are very similar if not the same. There isn't much difference at all.

I think a lot of these complaints are unfair complaints coming from people who just want to look for problems in a game. The PC version is not just console ported over to PC at all. Effort has been taken to make sure that controls are familiar, which I've found they are.

Now, unless I have the only version of the game in the world that was intended or use with the PC and wasn't just the Console version ported over, I think you'll find a lot of your complaints are petty and need to be looked at a bit deeper than just a 2 minute play and them rant session.

Wow... thanks for bring up the 360 controller thing. I dunno if it'll fix any of the issues i've been having but I hope so.

I will say this though... having the control for PC USERS default to an accessory that MOST PC USERS DON'T HAVE was a pretty idiotic move on Bethesdas part. If that toggle does indeed fix any of these issues, they could have avoided a whole lot of bad press simply by changing the default toggle state of an option...

It's just a sign of the disregard and lack of effort on Bethesda's part toward the pc port

One final damning point about Skyrim's PC port - it's horribly, pathetically optimized, and has major compatibility issues. Right from the bat, I knew that something was wrong when my high-end system was getting framerates in the low 20s from time to time, and when performance did not improve upon lowering the graphics options. Things became even more suspicious when I realized that there was no rhyme or reason for any of the framerate drops - whether I was outside in the overworld, the terrain stretching into the distance, or inside a tiny shop the size of a prison cell, the game's framerate fluctuates all over the place. There's no question about this: Skyrim is badly optimized.

A second issue I immediately ran into was an intense audio distortion - crackling, skipping and popping most commonly heard in dialogue, but also in many of the game's environmental sounds. No in-game audio options helped and there seemed to be no relevant settings in the game's INI files to help. On a lark, I went to my Windows Sound Properties page and dropped my sound card's bit rate from 96,000 Hz to 44,100 Hz. Instantly, the problem was gone - and instantly, I was frustrated at the fact that once again, it was clear Bethesda had foregone so much as basic compatibility testing.

This thread makes me sad. I played Daggerfall and Morrowind, and never played Oblivion. TES to me is for the PC, and I'm used to a UI that's PC friendly.

If Skyrim is just a console port, I'm seriously considering skipping it when I build my new computer. It's bad enough it requires Steam, but if it requires Steam and no longer resembles the old TES games I love, why would I want to bother with it? If I wanted to play console games I'd go buy myself a console (I do not own an Xbox 360 or a PS3).

Morrowind's UI was a bit clunky but it worked great with keyboard + mouse. I can't imagine trying to use it with a controller, but it's a PC game so it shouldn't.

I'm a simulator fan too. I love IL2 Sturmovik + expansions. I have a fighter joystick and throttle full of extra buttons plus rudder pedals, and even with all of them + keyboard and all it's combinations (keypress, key+shift, key+ctrl, key+alt, key+ctrl-shift, etc.) it seems there's not enough. I love that. It's 100% impossible to play a true simulator on a console. Morrowind is nowhere near the complexity of a simulator, but the grid inventory requires a mouse (how do people deal with it on Xbox??) and everything else is accomplished with mouse clicks. It's a PC game.

I am disappointed after reading this thread. I deal with the Grand Theft Auto games being console ports, but not TES. Daggerfall was a complex PC RPG for it's time, and Morrowind improved on it in every way. I skipped over Oblivion entirely because it seemed more a console game than PC (among other things), but now Skyrim? Come on.

Don't skip out on it if you're a TES fan.

Great game.
Horrible UI.

Still worth playing though.

Is something wrong with me? I feel that i am the only PC gamer who thinks that bad UI doesnt mean that a game is cosnole[censored].

One thing I will say is that when navigating the Perks Menu it has a nasty habit of sending me flying off to another perk tree entirely - when I'm just trying to get to another perk within a particular tree. That could definitely be improved on, and I'm assuming it's not intentional.

There is a weird thing with mouse movement, where there appears to be a slight lag time.

There's also a strange issue with clicking some options in some menus where it either causes you to exit out of the menus entirely or selects an option one or two options above or below where you clicked. It's really quite strange.

Again though, all of this seems unintentional. It's not bad, I just imagine it's stuff we should report and that they'll fix. Every PC game has bugs, and even consoles games these days have bugs and glitches that need patched out.

As a console gamer, I respect what you've written here. The only PC player comments I've read so far are juvenile whinges aimed at the UI.
I have to disagree with you on one point, though. I think that consoles are limiting in their graphics, but that's it. Skyrim was changed to focus more on upgrading weapons and unlocking perks, and acrobatics and athletics were arguably just skills to spam to exploit the levelling system in Oblivion. I can't speak for Morrowind as I never played it, but it was a design choice for the series and not because of the limits of the consoles that these changes were made.

This is just insanity...

You removed so much to fit on a console system, but the console-grade GUI you made RUINS EVERYTHING !!!

I paid €50 ($68) for a pc game, You sold me a crap console game, I feel fooled, really, and just because of the interface:

-So bland, ugly depressing black n' gray n' white menus, it ruins the epic dimension, fonts does not reflect ancient epic stories, it just remind me clouds, rain, clouds, depress, a bullet in my head
-Useless (for pc) key shortcuts in menus, better should have worked on the mouse (mouse is great you know, more: every pc have one!)
-In 20 hours of game I spent more time dealing with the menus than playing (almost no game fun at all)
-Navigation is totally absurd: binds different depending on the context, some bind changes not reflected in GUI (E,R,F), in the TAB menu magic is on left & inventory is on right but panels are inverted
-Can't switch between inventory and spells directly so returning even briefly in the game while fighting means a round loss
-Absolutely no kind of global view
-Inconsistent ergonomics (sometimes click, sometimes list, sometimes graphical, sometimes browse with keys, on the left, on the right, schizophrenic navigation)
-Help written in 15 mins (i searched with no luck for magic stones, races, ...)
-Buggy mouse actions on menu items (clics must sometimes be done twice, often no highlighting menus, exits of the shop dialog)
-Menus overlaps each other
-Unending unintuitive lists with no icons, with arbitrary imposed alphabetical order (requires at least 10 seconds to find every item)
-Items lists beginning at the half of the screen requiring constant scrolling, and reading, and more scrolling, and scrolling again, and reading, and even more scrolling
-No item characteristics (1hand, 2hands, stolen or not,...)
- Sicknesses are just hidden to the player, so are the levelups
-The "favorite" bar is just a joke, unreadable, you even have to scroll your entire inventory hoping to find that item you don't want anymore in favs
-No bottom quickbar, no drag n'drop of items on it (could even be hidden to preserve immersion)
-With the 1-8 shorcuts (not even talking about missing 9 and 0), switching between shield(1)+fire(2) and shield(1)+heal(3) must be done with 3-3-1, what a shortcut, yay! and sometimes it even doesn't work
-Switching between spells is such a pain that I almost do not change of spell anymore
-No character sheet (you know, the one sheet that rpg players like when they're doing rpg stuff, and that should make the difference between mario kart and TES)
-Did any of the developers even navigated in the magic section? it drives me nuts, designed to despair
-Redundant spells & skills abilities... Yeaaaah! 5 archery upgrades with no changes but a damage bonus, are you jocking?

I did not deserved this fate I swear!
Do you hate personal computers? Do you hate us? Are we doomed? Cursed? Punished? At war? Invaded by consoles? Under a mass pc genocide planification? Is it HELL?
Or do you need help? Are you kept prisonners by console conspirators? Are you missing money for some decent game rigs? Do you have keyboards? maybe mouses???
Don't let the modders do YOUR work (for which we paid... do you plan to pay them?)

I waited 3 years for this game, the 11-11-11 was a reserved zone, I was quite hugely disappointed.
I will have to wait even more for a mod that makes this game playable on a pc (could I even dream of an official GUI total redesign?)

So, so, so disappointed uh

What a load of drivel!

Perhaps a nice read for you. http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/EricSchwarz/20111111/8866/Skyrim_or_How_Not_to_Make_a_PC_Game.php

Also, there is no harm in what you do, but you could have watched a movie instead if all you care about is graphics and storyline. I care for both of those, but one thing is more important if you actually want to play a game: playability. The UI is an important part of that experience. But you must admit, consoles and their controllers compare not to the level of control PC gamers have. Ergo, games are more arcade and easy to play. All fine when all you care about it graphics and story, I suppose.

Just refrain from posting if you have nothing to say.

Beyond the UI, some fans have also quickly surmised that many of Skyrim's performance problems stem from memory leaks and the fact that much of the game's rendering is done on the CPU rather than GPU - i.e. shadows, which could be much more efficiently done on the GPU, but on consoles there isn't the same power available there. That sort of optimization may require more work but it again shows a lack of forethought for the PC version of the game than basic hardware, software and driver compatibility.

As for the lack of driver support from AMD in particular, I'm not sure exactly where the blame lies, but in this day and age there is no excuse for developers not doing their best to collaborate with the GPU vendors to get the best possible performance at launch, instead of two weeks after.

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Joe Wreschnig

12 Nov 2011 at 4:52 pm PST
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"much of the game's rendering is done on the CPU rather than GPU - i.e. shadows, which could be much more efficiently done on the GPU, but on consoles there isn't the same power available there."

I'm not sure you know what you're talking about. Speaking very generally, console GPUs are much more like PC GPUs than console CPUs are like PC CPUs. If Skyrim is doing "shadowing on the CPU" (not sure what that means in this case, because it's certainly got to do a *lot* of the work on the GPU no matter what shadowing implementation it takes) that's going to hurt consoles much more than it hurts PCs since PCs have faster cores, more cores, and speculative execution.

If on the other hand you mean it's doing techniques that could be done more efficiently taking advantage of the GPU using DX10 or DX11 rather than DX9, I'll buy that. But that would lock them out of a huge portion of the PC market as well.

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Aleksander Adamkiewicz

13 Nov 2011 at 2:55 am PST
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@joe

That is exactly the case. Skyrim is relying on CPU to render dynamic shadows instead of using DX hardware acceleration (which imho is laughable and completely asinine).
This is also the reason why people get really bad performance on low-CPU systems (core2 and quad) and no graphics tweaking can make it better.
Additionally the engine is not optimized for more than two threads, meaning if you have a corei7 your performance gain will not come from your additional threads but from the clock.
But this is getting awfully technical.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074 -9.html

Don't skip out on it if you're a TES fan.

Great game.
Horrible UI.

Still worth playing though.

Wow... thanks for bring up the 360 controller thing. I dunno if it'll fix any of the issues i've been having but I hope so.

Some of the issues that exist with the UI aren't made better by the 360 controller. I'm using it and sure I don't have actual problems with being able to navigate the menus, but they are still badly organized and badly designed. For example, imo, the favorites menu is a terrible invention. I want my hotkeys back. Everytime I have to use a favorite the action is paused. That svcks. And other information/functions that should be easy to use and find just aren't.