I love these speculation threads. I think he's adding coffee machines to the dwemer ruins.

I heard the ck was going to run at least aswell as the ps3 version of skyrim.

Surprise!

this.

Oblivions creation kit did for me

See here. Hi def texture pack is it. Found by Bonehedge.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1341992-ck-out-on-tuesday/page__view__findpost__p__20225306

http://i.imgur.com/9RKcH.png

Not really, DX11 support is fairly standard in the generations of cards released in the past few years. A GTX460 fully supports it and delivers great performance and can be found for 100-120$. You're right about needing Windows 7, but not a 64 bit version or more than 4 GB RAM. 4 is sufficient for a high end machine.

I could compile a PC that can run DX11 games on atleast medium for 500$, easily.

I would agree that Skyrim has issues that need addressing much sooner than DX11 support, though, since a lot of performance was gained thanks to the compiler optimizations anyway. Game balance and the PS3 version come to mind.

If that's all, that's a shame. There are already mods that have textures that are 4x the quality of the Ultra textures.

But far from quality and artwork of vanilla ones. I'm all for an official HD texture pack. Thats will be really great if they'll release hi-res textures.

It's probably DLC announcement, or HD textures, or horse armor joke, or a small free DLC like in Morrowind.

Very unlikely it's related to DX11, because I think that requires far too much work, but one can hope

No advantage to DX11 - Skyrim is already easy enough on GPUs from a performance point of view and there's no market reason to spend the resources on increasing the artwork/effects. Would love a new shadow engine though I'm guessing creation kit related stuff - doesn't X360 have a contract for the first DLC though?

That's why it'd be a mod, not a DLC.

Anyways, DX11 would help with shadows. It would also actually make use of those GPUs that currently have such an easy life in this game. Not that I think it'll be DX11 support.

I like performance ... though im confused about my dx11 because ive used it in some games but other games are like "herp derp you can't run dx11"

and im pretty sure i have it.

+1 for a move towards DirectX 11, would rank right up there with getting a genuine x64 executable in my opinion as both would be very beneficial for me.

I'll settle for the official high-res texture pack though, I guess.

Spears

DX11 handles shadows much more efficiently (and shadows are a problem for Skyrim), but I would be surprised if they did anything like that with a game that's already been released. Still, Turbine did it for LotRO, so I guess stranger things have happened in the gaming world. I'm just glad Bethesda decided to implement LAA and run the game through a compiler (better late than never). Its running so nicely for me now I'm forgetting how poorly it ran when it was first released.

id take dx11....id be real excited about mountable dragons(for flying), the return of xbows, the return of layered clothing, and most important id like to see children sleep in the game(i find it creepy that they just sit there all night why everyone else is asleep!)

If they're reducing the number of rings you can wear, they're not going to bring back layered clothing.

? The children in your game don't sleep? They do in mine.

(I think its creepy that either of us know this too )

So it is a hi-res texture pack... disappointing...

Why? Myself, I am looking forward to it.

A DLC announcement would be phenomenal.

High resolution texture pack would be nice being as a lot of PC users have been moaning about the texture quality, including me. This or DX11 would be a nice gesture but Bethesda said DX11 in small part was coming.

There are a lot advantages to DX11 but not necessarily all of them are for the user. DX11 MTR would be a good feature to use for Skyrim.

I think the reason some people are disappointed with the surprise being a texture pack is that the game already looks decent enough and a texture pack is just another graphical feature that does nothing whatsoever for the actual gameplay. While the technical quality of the graphics isn't exactly awe inspiring, the game isn't an outright eye sore either, at least not to regular people. A HiRes texture package will up the graphics a bit for those with good computers, but it won't fix any underlying issues. It won't fix any bugs, it won't make guilds any more enjoyable, it won't make horses believable, it won't make magic fun, and so on and so forth.

That being said, I do think a texture pack is one of the better surprises we could've hoped for. DX11 support doesn't really have much to do with the CK so why mention it as a CK release day surprise? Actual gameplay changes might happen in an expansion pack but probably won't happen at all.

The surprise is that the CK we get for free on Tuesday is just a trial version, if you want the full version it costs $99.99.