Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Message Board older than one year ago

#theelderscrolls Skyrim's "Arrow in the Knee" meme didn't only inspire an epic dubstep anthem. It also inspired this tattoo. More »

(Update: Microsoft Chief of Interactive Entertainment Aaron Greenberg has released Xbox 360 sales via Twitter, which are included below.)

It's a little good, a little bad with this year's November 2011 NPD results. While "unit sales grew for console hardware, as well as console, portable, and PC software," NPD analyst Anita Frazier warns that "a decline in average retail price in all categories" besides portable hardware resulted in dollar sales that were flat compared to last November. That said, November 2011 "marks the best November on record for sales of new physical content," besting the previous record holder, November 2008.

Unsurprisingly, the Xbox 360 was the top selling piece of gear for the month and Frazier notes that the "gap between 360 sales and sales of the next best selling platform was the largest we've seen since December 2008 when the Nintendo DS was the top selling system." Microsoft Chief of Interactive Entertainment Aaron Greenberg later added via Twitter that the Xbox 360 sold 1.7 million consoles during the month of November, up 23% year over year. For the month, Nintendo announced it sold more than 860,000 Wii systems, more than 795,000 Nintendo 3DS systems and more than 350,000 Nintendo DS systems.

Meanwhile, Sony declined to provide specific sales numbers for the PS3. According to Sony PR chief Patrick Seybold, "PlayStation 3 is off to a phenomenal start to the holiday season, recording the best ever Black Friday sales period in the console's five-year history. According to the November NPD report the PS3 saw a 70% increase in hardware and a 30% increase in software year-over-year." The PS3 sold 530,000 units last year, which would situate PS3 sales for November 2011 in the neighborhood of 901,000 units.

In the software arena, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 took its perch at the top of the charts, besting Black Ops "by about 7%," while Skyrim managed "a five-fold increase over Oblivion's first month sales" coming in just a half-million units short of matching its predecessor's lifetime sales. Other newcomers include single SKU exclusives like Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception in seventh place and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword in ninth.

[Image source: onrpg.net]

(Update: Microsoft Chief of Interactive Entertainment Aaron Greenberg has released Xbox 360 sales via Twitter, which are included below.)

It's a little good, a little bad with this year's November 2011 NPD results. While "unit sales grew for console hardware, as well as console, portable, and PC software," NPD analyst Anita Frazier warns that "a decline in average retail price in all categories" besides portable hardware resulted in dollar sales that were flat compared to last November. That said, November 2011 "marks the best November on record for sales of new physical content," besting the previous record holder, November 2008.

Unsurprisingly, the Xbox 360 was the top selling piece of gear for the month and Frazier notes that the "gap between 360 sales and sales of the next best selling platform was the largest we've seen since December 2008 when the Nintendo DS was the top selling system." Microsoft Chief of Interactive Entertainment Aaron Greenberg later added via Twitter that the Xbox 360 sold 1.7 million consoles during the month of November, up 23% year over year. For the month, Nintendo announced it sold more than 860,000 Wii systems, more than 795,000 Nintendo 3DS systems and more than 350,000 Nintendo DS systems. Using Microsoft and Nintendo's sales numbers, it appears that the PS3 sold approximately 840,000 units.

In the software arena, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 took its perch at the top of the charts, besting Black Ops "by about 7%," while Skyrim managed "a five-fold increase over Oblivion's first month sales" coming in just a half-million units short of matching its predecessor's lifetime sales. Other newcomers include single SKU exclusives like Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception in seventh place and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword in ninth.

[Image source: onrpg.net]

It's a little good, a little bad with this year's November 2011 NPD results. While "unit sales grew for console hardware, as well as console, portable, and PC software," NPD analyst Anita Frazier warns that "a decline in average retail price in all categories" besides portable hardware resulted in dollar sales that were flat compared to last November. That said, November 2011 "marks the best November on record for sales of new physical content," besting the previous record holder, November 2008.

Unsurprisingly, the Xbox 360 was the top selling piece of gear for the month and Frazier notes that the "gap between 360 sales and sales of the next best selling platform was the largest we've seen since December 2008 when the Nintendo DS was the top selling system." For the month, Nintendo announced it sold more than 860,000 Wii systems, more than 795,000 Nintendo 3DS systems and more than 350,000 Nintendo DS systems.

In the software arena, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 took its perch at the top of the charts, besting Black Ops "by about 7%," while Skyrim managed "a five-fold increase over Oblivion's first month sales" coming in just a half-million units short of matching its predecessor's lifetime sales. Other newcomers include single SKU exclusives like Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception in seventh place and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword in ninth.

[Image source: onrpg.net]

#raptr Video game social network and stat tracking service Raptr has announced the winners of its 2011 Most Played Games awards, and while overall gamers spent more time playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 than any other 2011 title, it's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that walked home with the Most Played Game of 2011 award. How's that work? More »

Recently, I maxed out pickpocketing in Sykrim. The top perk for doing this is that you can even rob items that people have equipped. This includes, for some reason, their clothes. Yep: they do not notice you removing their clothes. It’s a handy way of making heavily-protected enemies a little less tough before you go in for the kill, which is about the only reason I can think it was included.

It’s also a way of humiliating an NPC populace that has absolutely no idea it’s being humiliated, and would continue to treat me politely even though I could see their nipples. My cause was clear: every single citizen of Whiterun must be stripped to their underpants. It took me one long, strange evening, but I did it. Welcome to the naked city. And they had no idea of their own nudity. Or did they? Talking to them, I started to get the funny sense they knew what was going on after all…(more…)

Popular game-tracking service Raptr recently published its list of top-performing games of 2011, a roster entirely decided by the amount of man hours (and woman hours) its gaming community poured into them. The list isn't terribly surprising: Skyrim was the most-played RPG (beating out Dragon Age 2 by a factor of six), Modern Warfare 3 was the most-played shooter and FIFA Soccer 12 was the most-played sports game, because, you know, Europe.

Here's a surprise, though: According to Raptr, the most played game of the year was Skyrim. Crazy, right? We thought for sure that Modern Warfare 3 and the siren call of its quintuple prestiges would take the cake. We admit this tendency could have possibly been surpassed by infinite dragons and somehow-even-more-infinite adventure.

#theelderscrolls Meghan's husband has everything. "For instance, he has two pomegranate spoons," she told Kotaku. "Two of them. I don't know why. He doesn't even like pomegranates all that much." More »

Raptr has revealed what its 10 million members have spent their time playing throughout 2011, breaking the results down by genre and awarding Bethesda's epic, Skyrim, with the prize for Most Played Game of 2011...

We’re loving Skyrim. Nary a spare second of our spare time isn’t spent hacking and exploding our way through it. But we’d really like it if it worked properly. Bethesda’s patches have so far been peculiar in the extreme, seemingly making the game more broken, or just fixing the last patch. With new additions breaking mods, and introducing backward flying dragons, I’d like to suggest that future patches maybe strike a bold new direction and bring in some improvements. But what improvements? Below is a selection of what we think Bethesda needs to do to make Skyrim be the game it deserves to be.

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Nvidia has published an extensive optimization guide -- written by TweakGuides creator Koroush Ghazi -- for Skyrim. It explains and advises on the PC game's standard settings (anisotropic filtering, motion blur, etc.), as well as more granular modifications involving console commands and custom initialization files. It should be immensely helpful in getting Bethesda's sprawling game looking and running as good as your system allows.

Be attentive while following the guide, though. Our game used to run so well, but we took an error to the INI.

Both console versions of Skyrim have enough issues that it may be worth waiting a bit more.

Bethesda Game Studios releases are certainly prone to weird issues, but the PlayStation 3 versions especially so. Users have reported serious performance issues with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim when playing for many hours at a time, prompting a response from the company.

Bethesda has started to acknowledge these PS3-specific reports are a problem, promising specific fixes in a patch coming after version 1.3, which is expected later this week.

“We’ve been reaching out to a number of those users to collect save games, so we can take a look at their specific issues,” said the company on its blog. “Right now we know it’s not one thing, but a combination of smaller ones that some folks are seeing, but others are not.”

Version 1.3 comes after version 1.2, which fixed some things and broke others, ala backwards dragons. It's up for PC now.

Knowing things will change eventually doesn’t really help PS3 owners right now, but the company did offer some temporary solutions that could alleviate the pain on its message boards, which I’ll quote in full below:

• "Turn off auto saves. This can cause temporary stuttering since the PS3 saves these files in the background. This is most noticeable with large saves when fast traveling to a new area or entering a new area that auto saves.
• Clear space on your hard drive. Skyrim makes heavy use of the hard drive, and freeing up space on here seems to help many people. Hard drive speeds also differ in PS3 models. Some users have reported increase performance by upgrading their drives.
• Waiting for time to pass. Many things are running in the world depending on what quests you've done or places you have visited. Using Wait or Rest options, passing time will clear up some of these. It depends how long you wait, it may take up to 30 days for some items. Saving, resetting, and loading after this will have the largest effect."

The nature of the problems facing Skyrim on PS3 are understandably upsetting to users. Please report anything you’re running into within the comments, as I’ll be playing close attention.

It's well known now that Skyrim on PlayStation 3 has some serious problems. Indeed, the newest patch released, 1.2, seems to make things worse for some players, to which Bethesda has promised "greater care" in creating patches in the future. And while we were left wondering how Skyrim could have been released in this condition, developers from other studios have taken it on themselves to sound-off on Skyrim's PS3 issues, claims Bethesda has since refuted...

This past weekend, we reported on claims from Obsidian developer Joshua E. Sawyer that Skyrim was experiencing problems on PlayStation 3 due to the nature of its "divided memory pool." Sawyer was a lead developer on Fallout: New Vegas, which was built entirely on Bethesda's technology, lending cr...

This past weekend, we reported on claims from Obsidian developer Joshua E. Sawyer that Skyrim was experiencing problems on PlayStation 3 due to the nature of its "divided memory pool." Sawyer was a lead developer on Fallout: New Vegas, which was built entirely on Bethesda's technology, lending cr...

This past weekend, we reported on claims from Obsidian developer Joshua E. Sawyer that Skyrim was experiencing problems on PlayStation 3 due to the nature of its "divided memory pool." Sawyer was a lead developer on Fallout: New Vegas, which was built entirely on Bethesda's technology, lending cr...

Skyrim has received a rather hurried patch 1.3. How do I know this? Because my game of Skyrim just crashed to desktop for no given reason, and on trying to restart it, Steam’s patcher kicked in. Maybe it will fix random crashes to desktop?! It does offer “General stability improvements”, who coincidentally was a man I served under in the army in the 1940s. So have they addressed any of the litany of issues on everyone’s lists? Well, if the books not sitting correctly on the bookshelves was one of yours, then you’re a winner! If not, well, then maybe not so much.

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Patch 1.3 Notes:

General stability improvements
Optimize performance for Core 2 Duo CPUs
Fixed Radiant Story incorrectly filling certain roles
Fixed magic resistances not calculating properly
Fixed issue with placing books on bookshelves inside player purchased homes
Fixed dragon animation issues with saving and loading
Fixed Y-look input to scale correctly with framerate

#speakuponkotaku In today's tear-jerking and slightly spoilery edition of Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter Firescorpio tells us about a special relationship he formed in Skyrim, and how he wound up ruining it. More »

Last week, Skyrim's V1.2 patch went live, claiming to address some of the performance issues PS3 players in particular were experiencing as their playtime and the size of their save files increased. But the patch hasn't fixed the game for everyone, and in fact, it's made the experience even worse for some gamers, forcing Bethesda to promise to be more careful with updates in the future...

Questing through Skyrim with Kinect forms the latest tech demonstration from YouTube user KinectFAAST. The mod features the motion controls he's shown off in previous videos, along with additional voice controls for Skyrim. This means one important thing: Shouts!

The voice controls go even further, enabling the player to switch weapons and access favorites. There are also some voice commands not featured in the video, including "Hello" to start a conversation with an NPC and "Journal" to access the quest log. It'd be the type of feature we'd love to see added to the game if we thought it would work "first time, every time."

#theelderscrolls Look at this guy. He's rigged up a copy of Skyrim to work with Kinect. And it doesn't just work. It works well. More »

#theelderscrolls There's a problem with Skyrim on the PS3, in that for many gamers, the bigger their save game file gets, the slower the game gets. It's so bad sometimes the framerate can drop to zero. Despite a recent patch many users are still complaining about the problem so, uh, what's up? More »

#theelderscrolls This is the power of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Non gamers watch this video and think they may be witnessing the powers of international televangelist Benny Hinn during one of his many faith healing summits. More »

In the weeks since the PlayStation 3 version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released, it has become clear that something is badly wrong. Now the game's publisher Bethesda faces some tough questions, which it must face without delay, and with absolute clarity and frankness. Serious accusations from frustrated fans are growing in volume; that the company knew there was a problem before it released the game...

Stuttering, unwieldy exploration in the PlayStation 3 version of Skyrim may be a symptom of the game's design and its consumption. Players report dramatically impeded performance creeping into the frigid realm, as save files grow and in-game clocks count down to the imminent death of a social life.

The problem, while particular to the game's complexity and duration, may be rooted in memory management, according to pixel counting pros Digital Foundry. "The bottom line is that Skyrim is an unbounded game world running on a space-constricted system - and this applies regardless of the platform you play it on, hence reports of the PC version running out of address space and displaying solid colours instead of textures," says Tom Morgan. "The PlayStation 3 is unfortunate in that it's the platform with the most oppressive RAM issues (in addition to the split-pool set-up of the memory, the OS has a larger footprint than its 360 equivalent) so it makes sense that it has the most noticeable issues."

Said issues led to some disastrous framerate hiccups in Digital Foundry's 65-hour game ("It's the first time our performance analysis tools have ever recorded a 0FPS reading.") and inspired a warning to consumers from CVG. The latest Skyrim patch reportedly brings improvements, but DF suggests it's "still unplayable for those with a huge time investment in the game - unless you're only willing to play Skyrim in half-hour bursts, saving and restarting the game."

We'd advise you to take regular breaks anyway, though we'd prefer if they were less motivated by the game breaking down. As usual, we'll keep you updated as Bethesda issues further updates to all versions of Skyrim.

#theelderscrolls Jon Fitch (above, celebrating after a win) makes his living kicking the crap out of people. As one of the world's best mixed martial artists, he's top drawer at what he does. But when he's not fighting and not training, he's thinking. About Skyrim. More »

Ever since Skyrim was released in November, gamers have been posting all over the Internet about problems with the PlayStation 3 version of the game. Apparently, issues ranging from incessant slowdown and framerate stutters to outright freezing are tied to the size of your save file, which grows excessively as you work your way further and further through Bethesda Game Studios' most recent epic RPG...

Every few months a group of ravenous, garrulous gamers descends upon La Pentola restaurant in Pretoria, South Africa. If you're a savvy waiter, you realize just how receptive this audience can be to quests -- or requests -- coming from a stranger.

"I heard you're going away soon," he tells me as we shuffle out. "Good luck!"

"Same to you," I say. "I hear you're going to Skyrim."

Have you listened to the sound of the Skyrim breeze rustling the cloak of the Dovahkiin as he stands, proud and silent, atop a rugged mountain range? Have you read his thoughts in the frail grass and felt the strength of his resolve? Have you? Listen to this stunning rendition of the Skyrim bard song "The Dragonborn Comes," and you will feel as if you have.

Singer Malukah (Malufenix) performs in both English and the language of the dragons in this hauntingly beautiful song -- it has already been used in a mod, and anyone interested can download the track directly from Soundcloud. Personally, we have it on repeat to soothe our sensitive, creative psyches.