The First 15: The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

BoydofZINJ

AVOID THE PC GAME!!!

AVOID GETTING THIS GAME FOR THE PC!

From a technical standpoint, yes, the PC is a headache. It just is, Bethesda VP of marketing Pete Hines told Joystiq. My opinion is: A headache you can minimize with proper testing.

Skyrim, or How Not to Make a PC Game

As with many, I have been looking forward to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with both intrigue and trepidation. As a PC player, I generally expect Bethesda to deliver, if not the most polished and native PC games ever, at least a degree of quality that allows me to play their games without too many issues.

After spending a couple of hours with the game, there's no other way for me to say it: Skyrim is one of the worst PC ports I have ever had the displeasure of playing. I wasn't expecting Skyrim's interface to astound - indeed, preview footage lead me to believe that it was a classic case of Bethesda once again trading in functionality for looks. Fair enough, that's nothing new. Skyrim's PC user interface is quite possibly the clunkiest and most difficult I have ever seen in a game made after the DOS era. I have played games from 1985 that were infinitely more usable than Skyrim; that a modern game makes so many elementary mistakes suggests a certain kind of malevolence, not simple laziness.

The first sign things aren't as good as they could be comes before the game even begins. The main menu is as sparse as can be, but is lacking features as basic as the ability to change settings before jumping into the game. Why is this the case? I can only speculate, but it probably would have required Bethesda to edit a couple of lines in an XML file somewhere, far too much effort to even bother considering. Things take a nosedive soon after, as one realizes that not only are there standard menu items missing, but that the mouse doesn't even seem to work half the time. That's right, even on the main menu, most of the "buttons" you'll find don't actually do anything - you need to use the keyboard.

You can not effectively use the mouse in this game! For the PC game!

Let us pretend you want to load a save game and as you are looking at your save games... you decide you do not want to load anything and go back playing the game... GOOD LUCK. Can you tell me how to reverse that menu system - in Skyrim?


Key remapping is something that you'd think would be a standard feature in a game, and that would work. Bethesda, it seems, have decided that getting such a feature working isn't critical to releasing a triple-A product. Though key remapping is in the game, whether or not it actually works properly is a crapshoot. Many functions in the game can't be remapped, whether that's certain hotkeys or interface elements.

Using the console in games to manipulate quest variables, add items to the inventory, to noclip through walls, and so forth has been a standard practice of players for many years, and even more so for Bethesda games - not because Bethesda players are damn dirty cheaters, but because the number of bugs in Bethesda games almost necessitates the occasional use of the console in order to avoid running into problems, whether that's getting stuck on the terrain, a critical item being lost or disappearing, or a quest not functioning properly. Again, no hard feelings; it's an open-world game and sometimes things can go wrong.


I also 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. I've heard of a number of people have experienced severe graphical glitches, including corrupt textures, anti-aliasing incompatibilities, and strange flickering black marks across the screen while playing, all of which hint at a rushed and completely apathetic release with very little testing.

"Mods will fix it" is a phrase common, But REALLY?!?! Why should i want to play a modified fan based game if I want to play the game everyone else is playing?