yep, like Modern Warfare 3. it's sad that awards are given to games with no innovation and small improvements, sorry but Skyrim and MW3 fall into both of those categories. I'm sad that PC gamer even called Skyrim a PC game.

You know if PS3 magazines give Skyrim game of the year, you know they have been paid off.

Why? everyone gives their own, just like there are Oscars and Golden Globes, as well as hundreds of lesser awards.

Seroiusly, I have to explain this?

It's called "GAME of the year", not GAMES of the year.

Well, I have Skyrim for PC. I'm playing it on my PC.

How could we possibly call it a PC game?

It's a XBox360 game that Bethesda just ported to the PC as a second thought. If you have a Xbox360 controller for your PC then you have an Xbox360 game in reality.

Well, the interface is controller orientated sure.

But it's hardly a second thought. Console, releasing the Creation Kit, Steamworks integration, higher graphical settings. The game is much, much better on PC.

But when a specialized and well respected magazine picks their game, it's a different story.

It's much better with mods and tweaks yes but the default isn't. If this was any other game it would be fail PC port of the year.

The only reason to say It's a console gaming is the UI, which can already be modified.

The control was also setup for a controller and the mouse movement was terrible on release. You can tell it's a pure port because they leave mouse acceleration on for controllers which makes the mouse control terrible like most bad console ports. I'm shocked though, there is no "press start to begin screen" which is the normal useless junk that get's put in PC games.

Skyrim is based on tech Bethesda built specially for it, rather than the middleware engine used by Oblivion and Fallout 3.

One tweak is a huge loss, though: you can’t design your own spells. Oblivion’s spellmaking opened up so many clever possibilities – now you’re mostly restricted to what you can buy in shops.
While we’re on the negatives, physical combat hasn’t improved much. There are cinematic kill moves when your enemy is low on health, but whether they trigger seems to be either random or dependent on whether the pre-canned animation fits into the space you’re in. Too much of the time, you wave your weapon around and enemies barely react to the hits.

It fails where the previous games fail: it tries to make your mission feel epic by making it about a prophecy, then does all its exposition in the time-honoured format of old men giving you interminable lectures. The acting is stagey at best, painful at worst. And it adds a new problem: your dialogue choices are now written out in full, and your only options are to react like an incredulous schoolchild to every predictable development. It doesn’t make it easy to feel like a hero.

We got a review copy of Skyrim the day the game was officially finished, but it’s curiously buggy. Among a lot of minor problems such as issues reassigning controls, there’s glitchy character behaviour that can break quests, and AI flipouts that can turn a whole town against you. And the interface isn’t well adapted to PC: it sometimes ignores the position of your cursor in menus. There’s an update due as soon as the game’s out, but there’s a hell of a lot to patch here. Next time, maybe don’t commit to a specific release day just because it has a lot of elevens in it?

Magic, meanwhile, has been given an incredible crackle of raw power. Emperor Palpatine would be a level one mage in Skyrim – unleashing two torrents of thrashing electrical arcs is literally the first trick you learn, and it doesn’t even get you tossed into a reactor shaft.

The games we normally call open worlds – the locked off cities and level-restricted grinding grounds – don’t compare to this. While everyone else is faffing around with how to control and restrict the player, Bethesda just put a [censored] country in a box. It’s the best open world game I’ve ever played, the most liberating RPG I’ve ever played, and one of my favourite places in this or any other world.

Except for the fact that the game is built and tested on PC first. Other then that it's a total port.

But how? I'm not running any mods at all, and my experience is much better than it is on my console. My graphics are superb, I can fix bugs with the console, I can if I want tweak things, I'm looking forward to modding with the Creation Kit. Performance is good and while the interface isn't the best, it's not the worst I've ever used.

I think what the TES series does well is try to stay true to its main concept.

Except for the fact that the game is built and tested on PC first. Other then that it's a total port.

Mouse movement, UI for keyboard and mouse is horrible ,badly optimised. Just tell me though, I'd like to know if the console version dropps frame-rate in the same place as the PC version with the same settings. I don't think the Xbox360 version drops to 17fps in such places where everyone complains.

Also, I'd expect 60fps for such a game because the draw distance is awful with this engine. Gothic 3 draws far more distance detail on tweaked ultra settings and that's a 2006 game.

They don't even mention the dizzying amount of bugs in the verdict, like they did with Battlefield 3 (which didn't have nearly as much). 800+ reports on the Unofficial Skyrim Patch website. There's also no mention of how many of the bugs seemed to have been carried over from Oblivion and Fallout 3, like they did mention for Battlefield 3.

Apparently Skyrim deserved a handicap because the reviewer has a hard-on for Todd Howard.

4/10 Presentation
Frustrating quest log, but other menus work fine. Lots of bugs that ruin immersion along with fairly frequent crashes.

9/10 Presentation
An elegant menu system and a huge amount of story content to dig into. Bugs and stability issues do exist, however.

Mouse movement depends on your mouse. For example, my mouse is worse with acceleration turned off in the INI.
UI isn't the best, but I found Morrowind's UI horrendous. I associate things by words, not little round icons in a grid.
It's a hell of a lot more optimised than any previous Bethesda game. Oblivion you'd look at 3 NPCs and drop 20 frames. Morrowind is still horribly optimised. Are both those bad console ports too? In Skyrim you can have tons of effects and 20 odd NPCs and only drop a bit of FPS.
Console graphics are a lot lower. If I change my shadows down to medium I get 30fps in the problem areas, which matches the console framerates.
And you can't compare a Bethesda game to another game. The way the game loads things, the open-ness of the world, the complexity of the NPCs. Every single Bethesda game in the past has been impossible to have constant 60fps. Skyrim is no different.

Yes, it says how bad the engine is. Multi-core is there for a reason in that you can shift the AI and physics to the other cores while the GPU does all the graphics. The CPU is useless at doing anything graphics intensive but thanks to Bethesda and their XBox optimisations they treat the PC like one. The game is a shadow of what it could be if Bethesda made the engine more modern.

It's funny that people called Crysis unoptimised, yet it can pull 60fps on a top end machine rendering much, much more detail and yet Crysis was developed in the Dual-Core age.