Short intro,
I 'discovered' morrowind, because it was bundled with my geforce 4200.
Not immediately a fan of this game, because after installing that game I got stuck in the scenery within minutes, so I uninstalled this crap, and went on playing other games.
Much (year?) later I noticed that there was a large community around morrowind, so there should be something good about that game.
I installed it again, and with the help of various fansites, I could find the right console commands to work around the game bugs.
Please Bethesda, do include the most important console commands in the manuals of your games !

Later I bought also the extensions.
When Oblivion was released, I still had the geforce 4200, and could not run it, I bought the game when I had a system capable of running it.
By that time, several patched were released.
Later I bought Fallout 3 + extensions, and new vegas, so I suppose I am a fan of these kind of games.

Now for Skyrim...
It was the first time I bought a Bethesda game fairly quick after the release.

The first problem started with the intro, I always play these kind of games with reversed Y mouse (like flight simulator) and I could not change that.
During the intro I mainly viewed the sky and the floor.

As soon as you could change settings, I changed the mouse Y and keymappings in a way wich resembles the mappings I used in morrowind and oblivion etc..
By the time I did my first real enemy encounter, I started to figure out, how this 'favorite/equip item' should work.
I tried to make weapons 'favorite', but things reacted not as expected, and after leaving the item menu, my most usable weapons dropped on the ground, and my character was butchered.
Apparently my 'favorite' button was remapped to 'drop' button, well, small bug, they only had 5 years of development, you can not expect everything in such a short development time...
Who at Bethesda thinks that remapping game movement buttons should also remap menu control keys ?
And additionally display the wrong key hints on screen ?
Probably nobody, and obviously they did not bother to test their quick and dirty console port.

The Y mouse invert has also a weird effect in the dialogs with NPC's. In these dialogs, mouse movement is then only translated to a view rotation, when the mouse cursor hits the border of the screen.
Very confusing, when you reach the top of the screen with the cursor, you do not get more sky, but the view goes to the ground.
Yes yes, I know I inverted the mouse Y setting, but to implement it in this way in dialogs is silly.

Apart from the terrible UI implementation, I had very little problems running the game.
Yes, I do get crashes, not to desktop, but to reboot. But these are avoidable by not using 'alt-tab' to switch out of the game.
There are occasional texture glitches, but although a good looking game is nice, if gameplay is a boring, then brilliant grapgics will noy save a game.
Fortunately, Skyrim is far from boring (big understatement).

Another gamesaver is the fansite www.uesp.net, to find the console commands to proceed in some buggy quests.

Despite the dreadfull key mapping and general impractical UI implementation, the game is very addictive, so I kept on playing and playing and playing.

Then there was a patch, I noticed in the description that they did some work on the keymappings.
I run steam in offline mode, but for getting this patch, I turned steam online.

Well, what a nightmare, Steam did something (appart from displaying all kind of info about games I never want).
Skyrim would not start anymore...

Great, back to reading various forum posts, and apparently I was not the only one.
You have to delve deep in the steam menu's to check the game cache integrity, why bother a user with this, or at least put a menu/help item on the skyrim launcher to do this in case of problems.

The gamecache check took some time, and all was OK, but Skyrim stil did not launch.
It took me quite some time and fiddling in steam menu's, trying who knows what, to finally get a short popup indicating that the steam servers are too busy.
Well, what a wonderfull implementation of upgrading, first make sure the current installation does not work anymore, then start download the update, but sorry servers are busy, so leave the customer with a broken installation.
Is it maybe an idea to start the update after the required files are downloaded ?

Much later I got the update, and yes, something had happened to the keymappings, it is still a mess, but a more consistent mixup.
Now in all menu's the same keys are exchanged, before the patch, not all menu's were affected the same wrong way.
Please Bethesda, fix it properly, or copy the interface implementation from Oblivion or Fallout 3.

Do understand, I love the game, but I hate the interface (and steam).

Before people ask, I do not run any mods or modified 'ini' files, this will of course change when Emma starts modding for Skyrim.


George

(system : Windows XP on : asus m2n32 deluxe + phenom II 945 + 4gb + gtx560ti + 4x MFB541)

this game is my first experience with steam also - & man can i ever do without it

i know its to minimise piracy, but the issues with steam are almost motivation to do that!

what ive found is that re-installs are probablly unecessary - after you resynch the first time, simply reboot your PC

Skyrim / Steam do not seem to like restarting with the RAM containing all the info from the previous gaming run, ive had the Error Code 51 block me before & after a restart the game would launch