This will probably seem like a rant or a 'QQ' thread, I apologize in advance for that.

Nonetheless I feel the need to speak up, as someone who is just immensely disappointed with Skyrim - though not with the game itself. I think Skyrim by design is brilliant, better in nearly every regard than any previous ES title. I was genuinely enthralled with just about every aspect of the game that I've played or experienced.

What I am speaking of is the ridiculously unstable/bug-ridden state of the game on 2 of its 3 platforms, even after multiple updates. I personally play the PC version, which I pre-ordered through Steam, and run it on a system that is leaps and bounds above the required stats - my system is more powerful/advanced than most of Skyrim's recommended system requirement settings. I update video/sound card drivers religiously, defrag my HDD weekly, etc etc. In short I do everything I can to make sure my PC is in a state to run games smoothly. I even purchased a brand new Nvidia card for Skyrim, and have updated its drivers each time new versions are released (in particular because the updates claim improved support for Skyrim). The game currently runs at 40-50FPS for me on Ultra Settings, and the only mods I use are a handful of the 'improved textures' variety. I've even removed them to see if they were affecting stability, which made 0 difference.

The first couple of weeks the game ran rather well - I had a moderate number of CTDs (no error, game simply closed) but it was infrequent enough that I wasn't overly bothered. The most obnoxious issue (which I find still occurs as of 1.3) were that models were missing textures - armor would be solid bright purple, occasionally animals or environment objects would as well. I usually saved and relogged to fix this. Then came the patches, in particular 1.2 which pretty much broke the game for a number of people. I was one of them - as of that patch my game began to crash at a rate which made it impossible to enjoy or become immersed in. I'm talking every 2-3 minutes - to the point where I'm spending as much time reloading the game as I am playing it - and the texture/purple model issue seemed to become even more frequent. Interiors seemed to be randomly missing walls, replaced with a neon-yellow 'fog' or void of some kind. I've tried the LAA fix, the Windows sound fix, basically anything I've read that might help and I've tried it. All without success.

The newest patch, which I hoped would do something to improve stability, did nothing. I still experience multiple CTD's without error/message, still see textureless, bright purple models, and I've simply had enough of it. Despite being in the middle of some truly engaging questlines, despite my absolute love of the gameplay and the time I've put into my character, I'm done.

I understand the business model - consoles are more profitable than PC games because of pirating. I get it. But the PC version feels like an unstable, half-assed port of a game that seems to work fine on Xbox360 (my daughter and ex play it on that system without noteworthy problems), but borders on being broken for PS3.

A friend of mine, who purchased Skyrim shortly after launch for PS3 based on my recommendation, reached a point where her high-level character is unplayable because of a massive loss in FPS that only worsened as she leveled. IGN posted a huge article about this, calling on Bethesda to answer for the issues with the PS3 version. She eventually traded the game in at Gamestop - asking me if I thought she should try the PC version instead, I told her no because of the myriad of issues with it. And these issues aren't just me - any Yahoo or Google search of 'Skyrim Crash/glitch' or even simply 'Skyrim' brings up tons of results that link to complaints/posts about people having the same issues I am. Tons of random crashes without errors. Models missing textures. Issues that the patches have not only failed to fix, but in some cases seemingly worsened.

A game as large as Skyrim was bound to have issues, which I know - I fully expected issues going into the purchase. But this is beyond my threshold for understanding. I literally cannot play the game for 5 minutes without it crashing or glitching or both. And as I said above, I know that I am far from the only one experiencing these issues.

I have taken so much enjoyment from many of Bethesda's games - Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 for example - that I was literally counting the days until Skyrim's release. So, my disappointment with the state of the game cannot be overstated. I don't know if gamesas bit off more than it could chew by developing it for 3 platforms, but the fact that only one of them is running the game reliably speaks volumes. And all this says nothing of the PC version's awkward interface, horribly compressed/pixellated normal maps and low-resolution textures - I really feel like PC gamers really got the short end of the stick. My enthusiasm for future Bethesda games will be far more tempered in the future, if Skyrim is any indication.

In an effort to save this from being an endless flamewar I have noticed some of the default settings on Ultra have been known to cause issues. I'm not sure what exactly but I've narrowed it down to Antialiasing, Anisotropic Filtering, and FXAA (at least from what I've seen).

Shouldn't you be in the PC support forums finding a way to actually fix the problems you're experiencing instead of complaining in the General Forums?

I too play on PC and I haven't had any significant problems with the game. Running on High quality with a smooth 60FPS.

Skyrim was made for the 360 and very badly ported to the PS3 and PC.

To the OP:

Interesting... I thought the PC version was very stable. I have had only two CTDs (that`s with mods) in many hours.

In fact, my PC feels like it`s being underused, like it isn`t even being pushed. I have only a midrange rig yet it runs Skyrim flawlessly on MAX settings (to my amazement) with no stutter like FO3, Oblivion and even Morrowind used to do between cells.

I really have no complaints about stability. perhaps check your PC stability, issues, Ram, cpu, etc on your PC that might be causing your problems?

just ask.

Sounds more than likely its a memory problem;

Either your ram, gfx ram, hd space is lacking.

But this really belongs in the tech forums.

Different people, different rigs, different experiences.

I haven't had that many issues with my games. Others have different experiences. If it were really easy to figure out why it works just fine on my pc, but not on yours, one of the patches they've released would have fixed it.

You may find the pc issues forum to be a better place to explain what your problems are; general "the game doesn't work for me" posts in the General Discussio forum won't help the devs bug hunt. Or, if someone else has figured out what is going on, to help you.

there wont be a day where you and i dont agree o this my arctic avian friend

I have had minimal issues on my PC. The last patch cleared up the over-world stutter, it has not occured again. 200 hours, 3 crashes. But that is my rig, I play on high, rather than ultra High. I can handle ultra-high, but I have found that games seem to be dodgy with it - Witcher 2 I reset to High from ultra, after some annoying, but not overly bothersome graphical stuff.

. Moving this to the PC forum.

i for example have a terrible laptop and shouldnt even be able to play skyrim but i do play but with some lag so you shouldnt really be complaining

These kinds of threads get old....
Is it disappointing that more and more games are ported to PC rather than developed for PC? Yes sir.

Might some of the nuances of the game feel better had it been developed for PC? Probably.

Would the over all game experience be much different? i doubt it. The FPS hit in certain places of the game dont really effect the overall game play. Nor does the "clunky" inventory/magic menu. And when i factor in all the pluses that come with PC gaming (MODS), I'm truly fine with it.

Although no one who has performance issues with this game wants to hear it, the simple truth is that for every person who comes to a forum like this and proclaims how "broken" the game is, there are 5 or more folks, just like myself, who arent having any problems.

It is kind of odd how so many such people post on a tech support forum, however.

I've complained before and it just falls off the face of the earth. In the early days I posted my dxdiags. Now I really don't care to play. I come here instead waiting for another patch to see if it might fix things. It like everything works then the lag sets in and sometimes it clears up and it ok just to lag a few minutes later. Then save exit start again. Over and Over and Over and did I say Over yet?

What I had hoped would be fun for quite sometime has turned into a sour experience I won't soon forget.

I appreciate your reply (and the others) but I'm guessing you just skimmed my post over? I mentioned multiple specific issues. Also I wasn't starting a 'tech support' post, I'm stating my opinion - that I am extremely dissatisfied with the game I've purchased. Not for design reasons (as I said already, I love Skyrim when it bloody works) but just the poor quality and stability of the port. It feels like a very substandard port, not only in regards to the stability issues, but things that simply don't take advantage of the PC - the horribly compressed normal maps and such all scream 'ported from console without much memory to work with'.

I've spent weeks reading forum posts and blogs and such from other users having many of the same issues (in particular the error-less crashes and purple/textureless models) and have waited patiently to see if patches and/or driver updates improved them. As noted in my original post, they have not. 1.2 in particular was noted on multiple game sites and blogs as doing more harm than good.

IGN, one of the largest and most significant gaming websites in the world, published an article that called Bethesda out for the unacceptable state of the PS3 version. This isn't 'just me' no matter how dismissively some here want to think it is.

To the 'svcks to be you' guy, yeah it does. svcks to be me and the countless other people experiencing issues with what is an absolutely astonishing game. Those of you that run it without significant or consistent issues, I envy you because few gaming experiences would satisfy me more than a rock-solid stable Skyrim.

One of the very first replies said that there was a known issue with the game on Ultra, which is what I play it on - it runs beautifully on those settings. Super smooth, even with lots of NPCs and combat. And that's part of what makes this so annoying. Its not as if my machine is struggling to run the game. My PC chews it up, on the highest settings, and spits it out.

I have multiple games on my PC, several of which are much more graphically intensive than Skyrim, and I don't see these issues with them. Different games are different, yes, but the point I'm making is that I can load any other game on my PC without experiencing anything that resembles these kinds of problems. Oblivion, which I had 12+ GBs of mods, Script Extenders, shaders, etc running for - that game is more stable than 'vanilla' Skyrim.

It runs fine on my laptop. Had 5 ctd. Get lag in places such as cities.
Worse bit I get is the thieves guild in the ragged flagon. Apart from that it plays fine. Your friend is missing out if he's traded it in.

I agree with the original poster. 100% I too will be re-thinking my support in the future as well. After all these years of support and to now have Bethesda and others make the bottom line more important than the customer... Well they are going to loose more money by alienating us customers who have supported them.. much more money than they would ever loose to piracy.

yeah, but as the adage goes... "an unhappy consumer will tell 5 people about it and a happy consumer will tell one..."

When you buy something, you expect it do what it supposed to do. Surely you wouldn't expect to see a bunch of "i bought Skyrim and works just like it should!" posts, would you?

Have you ever started a new game with the latest patch? The game I started with 1.3.1 is very stable (no CTDs) although I'm 50 hours in and run quite a few mods and texture packs.
In my experience the old characters I started with 1.0/1.1 became unstable with the new patches at some point. Installing possibly buggy mods and / or removing mods over time could be a reason for increased instability, too.

As it is now there are also quite a few problems with cleaning up some things in the game world, like dropped items by you and npcs (weapons, arrows, etc.), ash piles, duplicating nirn root glows, etc. Apart from making the savegame size grow faster there may be other consequences. There's a mod out yet which tries to tackle some of these things http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4528.

I hope you'll come back to Skyrim one day and until then Bethesda hopefully has fixed most of the issues. The other remaining bugs will be fixed by the community once the CK is released.

Some suggestions for the OP.

If you're experiencing textures not loading even after the LAA patch, I would uninstall the game, browse to my games root directory and make sure everything in the Data folder is gone and re-install, and let Steam patch the game to the most current version. I suppose it's possible (especially if you install it from Steam) that the textures.bsa file could be bad.

Since you didn't post any specs, I assume if you're using the LAA patch you're running a 64 bit rig? It's taken a bit of work to figure this out on my end, but I finally figured out that my 64 bit rig runs this game best if I turn off AA & AF in the game launcher, and go into the Nvidia Control Panel, find the Skyrim Profile under Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings tab, and set your AA & AF there to override game settings and tweak to your systems capability and personal liking.

That one change made an incredible difference in my game. With the in game AA & AF set to maximum and the Skyrim Profile set to use the game settings, my performance was extremely disappointing (I have a pretty beastly rig), and I simply couldn't accept that I couldn't run everything maxed out and still get good performance. But with that one change, I now run buttery smooth and rarely drop below 50 fps, and I'm running a TON of Hi-Res texture replacers including everything you see outside. (Sky, clouds, terrain, rocks, trees, foliage and mountains etc.) I'm also running the Realistic Colors & Real Nights mod which also uses a little more resources. I've even been able to run shadows on Ultra which helps the ambiance a lot.

As for CTD's, I'm not sure I can offer any concrete suggestions, but you might want to try this mod: http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4387

It's supposed to help performance, but there have been comments that it also helps CTD's.

Two other suggestions as well. If you have a lot of saves in your My Games/Skyrim/Saves folder, you might try moving most of them out of that folder and just use the last save you made to start playing from. This seems to help me for whatever reason. But the fewer number of saves I have in there it seems to help run smoother. Also, if you try the stuff (especially a clean install) I suggest, you might at least try creating a brand new character from scratch and see if your problems persist.

Honestly, I don't think most PC users are having CTD problems after the official LAA patch came out, and with Nvidia's newest drivers most of us have seen much better performance compared to the initial release.

I hope this helps and I hate to see you give up as it really is a stunning world, and for the most part pretty fun quests.

I agree with the OP, as well. Some consumers are upset and they have a right to be. I certainly didn't expect to see this many problems across all platforms/OSes. You guys that haven't had any probs whatsoever, good for you, but others do and so accept it. No need to be dikeish to the OP about it; he was just venting his frustration and it's justified; he paid good money for what he thought was a good product. Any of you would do the same.

Seems to me that CTDs are the most common problem that all people would/have experienced with an "as installed" vanilla, no mods game. I actually started over after not being able to save my game progress at all. I now play ver. 1.3.10 with the optomized launcher and had only 1 CTD so far with no troubles saving games....yet. I also now stay offline and will not update 'til... maybe never. My original game CTD'ed several times within the first half hour of play. I didn't start getting save problems until I had been playing with the Whiterun enchanting table mod and glowing ore textures, that's all. Which brings a question to bear.... If the Creation Kit isn't out yet, wth are modders using to make the current mods????..... the utilities from Oblivion??! All it takes is for a few hex values in the wrong spots to be calculated a few hundred times repeatedly and a bug develops. Could explain such a large and varied amount of similar bugs/problems reported. Who knows.

One thing that bothers me is the fact that some people in this community say that they will fix all this stuff when the Kit comes out.... orgisms to Bethesda's ears, lol. Free fixes that they don't have to pay for and when it is fixed well enough to run well and looks better, word spreads and people will buy that didn't buy the first time due to all the bad reports. More Bethesda money, yippee! They love you guys. But will that make them make a better game, I doubt it. You see, cheaply made crap is the new world standard. Bethesda has lowered their standards, as far as I'm concerned. If it were me, I wouldn't put out this for PC in such poor optomization, dx9, not dx11? BS..etc. I love PC gaming and am dismayed at the steady decline in the industry. Obviously, Beth went where the money is and did what they did and took a dump on the consumer, oh, but not the Xbox users, MS made sure of that.

If anyone is going to bother to make something and ask good money for it, do the right thing and make it the best you can or don't bother.

I can fully sympathize with the OP. The quality of Skyrim is simply a disgrace, and Zenimax should be ashamed. (*

Two related observations:

1. It seems to me, that many of those, who are happy to boast about having no problems never refer to the conditions that seem to create problems for others, nor bother to state whether or not they have those conditions themselves, such as a large save size. My impression is, that many may simply be trigger happy after playing merrily for a brief while or with frequently started new characters. If so, they are doing no service to themselves or others, and are merely distracting from actual problem solving. It is also amazing, how freely they feel authorized to speak on behalf of "most players" without any factual backing, while those with problems do experience them as real facts.

2. The extent to which people don't even expect Bethesda/Zenimax to be capable of patching up their products, nevermind delivering them in good condition to begin with, speaks volumes. It is frightening, how prevalent the notion is, that "the community" will fix them, and this notion is not doing anybody any good either. With Morrowind and Oblivion, community fixes were mostly about broken stuff in game content (in .esm/.esp databases, some specific item meshes), and engine related issues might be looked at much later. Now we are in a situation, where the community already at this stage is compelled to look at fixes to the game engine itself (such as TESVAL and SkyBoost, not to mention all the issues with the user interface). That is just horrible.

*) Why Zenimax? As the corporate parent of Bethesda, they are ultimately responsible for the policies applied in product development, marketing, and customer service. And they get all the $. In fact, I have started to make note of which games are under the Zenimax umbrella.

Agreed, the state this game has been released in is simply disgraceful.

Funny how the bug texture on the 360 that a few people had got fixed in a jiffy and CTDs and lag issues on the PC and the memory leak on PS3 never got fixed.

Post 1.3 using 12.1 catalyst preview and drivers and setting ccc to allow the application to control everything forcing triple buffering on(through ccc) running steam online however with overlay disable and preset to High even though my autodetect says Ultra has led to zero CTD's. I also run UAC in win7 off and the launcher and TESV as admin...doubt those have much to do with it. I also did a clean reinstall and a registry sweep after the patch before appying these changes...before that I was in the same mindstate as the OP. Since I have been enjoying the game.....oh and I have all reflections and AA and AS off...game barely uses 60 % of my GPU and def no where near all of CPU but it doesnt crash and on high still looks pretty good. Just my experience with the game so far.....
ALL THAT SAID.....THERE IS NO REASON ONE SHOULD HAVE TO DO THIS MUCH TO GET A GAME RUNNING WELL ON A HIGH END RIG.......AND WHERE THE HECK IS THAT NEW ENGINE?

I agree with you that Bethesda should release their games in a more polished state, especially true for PS3 users. It makes the game's release look rushed. That's probably the reason why most other developers don't set absolute release dates anymore - it's just Q1 to Q4 and even those estimates get postponed often.

The thing with Skyrim is, it's pretty much alone in its own category. Show me one game with a comparable complex open world and similar mechanics that worked flawless at release date AND is so much fun to play. To my knowledge there's nothing that comes even close.

As for DX 11, unfortunately there are very few games released that support it at all. Probably not without reason, since there are armies of DX9/DX10 card users out there - as there are millions with 'stoneage' dualcore or lesser CPUs.

CTD's have only gotten worse with each patch. No matter how 'safe' my nvidia and Skyrim settings are the CTD's randomly occur like an unstoppable force.