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

#theelderscrolls In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Guardian Stones give players special abilities. One stone can be activated at a time, and if you've played the game, you will be familiar with them. More »

#theelderscrolls Fake blood, that is. Skyrim player and prop maker Shannon Clawson decided to modify the map bundled with The Elder Scrolls V. Out came the sandpaper, fake blood, and fire. More »

#skyrim One PC gaming truism is that modders make magic, by altering the rules or looks of a vanilla game release into something shinier or more idiosyncratic. In the case of PC modder Xilver, the magic-making's literal. More »

#theelderscrolls Bethesda community manager Nick Breckon has asked his 65 year-old mother to sit down and play Skyrim. More »

#theelderscrolls If you bought Skyrim on PS3, you've likely experienced one of the most frustrating technical hiccups of 2011: a gradually increasing "lag" which slows your game the longer you play it. More »

When Bethesda's Twitter account invited fans to "tune in tomorrow" (that's today) for a "Skyrim tweak guide livestream," one follower pointedly asked the question so many PlayStation 3 Skyrim players out there want to know about the upcoming 1.4 patch to the game: "What about PS3 lag?????" You see, the game has some major memory issues on the PS3, making the game chug as the player's save files weigh down the console. It appears that the next patch, 1.4, will correct this "lag" issue.

"We're addressing that in the 1.4 update," Bethesda's Twitter account responded. The account also noted that the patch will be available at some point "this month." And though we imagine that folks waiting for the update would much prefer something more specific, that's the only launch window we've got for now, unfortunately. So you know, there are only 21 days left in January.

I haven't been playing the PlayStation 3 version, so keep being vocal about your experiences.

Even though Giant Bomb awarded The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as 2011’s Game of the Year, it came with a very specific caveat: it didn’t apply to the PlayStation 3 version.

On Twitter, the official Bethesda account told one concerned user the lag problems associated with the PS3 version of Skyrim would be addressed in the 1.4 patch “planned for this month.”

@ElderScrolls @nvidia @Bethblog What about PS3 Lag ?????

— denisvj (@denisvj) January 9, 2012

@denisvj we're addressing that in the 1.4 update planned for this month

— Bethesda Blog (@Bethblog) January 9, 2012

The PS3 experience remains a troubling one, and that consumers have gone months without some major issues getting addressed remains completely ridiculous. Thankfully, at least one problem should be ironed out this month.

Other PS3-specific quirks should hopefully be coming in this 1.4 patch, which hasn’t been officially outlined yet, but was discussed in early December, in response to fans demanding more details.

“While the 1.2 update fixed the long-term play issues for most PS3 users, we are aware that is not the case for some,” said the company. “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. Right now we know it’s not one thing, but a combination of smaller ones that some folks are seeing, but others are not.”

“These fixes are not in the current 1.3 update that is in final testing, but will be in future ones,” it continued. “We understand how frustrating it can be when your game is having issues, and we thank all of you for your continued feedback and patience. Rest assured we take your gameplay experience seriously and will continue working on this until it’s resolved.”

That doesn’t really help the players who’ve been waiting since November, though.

Bethesda has confirmed that the 1.4 update for Skyrim will address the game's lag issues on PS3. On Bethesda's official Twitter account, the company was asked about PS3 lag and responded "we're addressing that in the 1.4 update planned for this month." An example of Skyrim's framerate issues on P...

When Bethesda's Twitter account invited fans to "tune in tomorrow" (that's today) for a "Skyrim tweak guide livestream," one follower pointedly asked the question so many PlayStation 3 Skyrim players out there want to know about the upcoming 1.4 patch to the game: "What about PS3 lag?????" You see, the game has some major memory issues on the PS3, making the game chug as the player's save files weigh down the console. It appears that the next patch, 1.4, will address this "lag" issue.

"We're addressing that in the 1.4 update," Bethesda's Twitter account responded. The account also noted that the patch will be available at some point "this month." And though we imagine that folks waiting for the update would much prefer something more specific, that's the only launch window we've got for now, unfortunately. So you know, there are only 21 days left in January.

#theelderscrolls You've already seen a man clone himself and play The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on the violin. More »

#theelderscrolls BioShock Monopoly. Mass Effect Monopoly. Now Skyrim Monopoly. I think I see 2012's version of cakes coming on... More »

2011 was an embarrassment of riches in terms of the breadth of high calibre games released. Did you have the time and money to get through them all? Probably not, and you didn't need to, either. Why waste your energy on multiple games when you only need one: Skyrim? What am I talking about? Think...

We had to watch the above video a couple of time to make sure we weren't having some sort of fantastical dream, but we are apparently awake: the late "Macho Man" Randy Savage has made his way into Skyrim, and he's bringin' the pain. Ohhhhhh yeah!

#theelderscrolls Ever wonder how such a highly polished game as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim wound up with so many bugs and glitches? Dorkly has uncovered a completely fictional series of letters between Bethesda's Todd Howard and the lead developer that may explain the situation. More »

Utilizing mods and console commands for the PC release of Skyrim, fans have crafted some truly hilarious situations and captured them on video. But sometimes, the hilarity comes from Skyrim itself. Dragonborn just want to have some fun! Here now are some of our favorite Skyrim mods and glitches... ...

A mighty warrior stands in a frozen, Beowulfian wilderness, surrounded by traditional characters and archetypes: kings, damsels, wizards, trolls, dragons and, yes, a quest that promises both personal glory and salvation for the downtrodden. The reward at the end of the quest? Our hero gets to learn a new word.

On paper, Skyrim sounds like your high school English teacher's ultimate fantasy. In practice, it is one of 2011's greatest adventures. That is, of course, assuming you can keep your mind on the quest at hand.

#2011yearinvideogames While Portal 2 walked away with Kotaku's official game of the year award for 2011, Kotaku commenters held their own damn awards this year and they ended with a resounding chorus of "FUS ROH DAH". More »

#theelderscrolls Ask any fan of virtual idol Miku Hatsune. It should have a leek. The character, who always carries a leek, is huge in Japan, and Toyota is even using Miku to sell cars in the West. More »

#theelderscrolls YouTube user Jason Yang cloned himself for one very special reason: to play beautiful Skyrim music to you. That's so nice! More »

#speakuponkotaku In today's memorable edition of Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter Eatplaysleepmore thinks he's found a major character flaw in Bethesda's latest masterpiece. Do you agree? More »

#theelderscrolls Perhaps these Dr. Zoidberg modded Skyrim mudcrabs aren't as freaky as the contorted spider Spider-Men, but their screams of agony when you kill them are pretty spot on. More »

The RPS Hivemind is still recharging, the major nodes soldered directly into the towering soul-capacitors necessary to sustain their thin simulacrum of consciousness for another 12 months. Fortunately, an errant pustule has attained basic mobility, and opted to present you with artifacts from the Shotgun archives to help see you through until our resurrection. First up, a return to the Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, with a haphazard diary series written by Alec back in Summer 2009 during a obsessive revisit of the game that many still feel is Bethesda’s finest hour. It’s a tale of hats, spider-dwarves, assassin-besieged home ownership, grand burglary, poorly-designed forts and existential crisis, in a land far, far stranger than Skyrim.(more…)

#theelderscrolls Artist Darwin Yamamoto, whose video game portraits made November just that little bit more special, has completed another set, this time specifically for the game of the minute, Skyrim. More »

We're rarely brought to tears by displays of holiday-themed lighting strewn across the face of a residential building. Then again, most holiday lights aren't synchronized to the totally radical theme to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Fortunately, some are -- like the one seen in the video above.

#theelderscrolls If you're going to make a fan film based on Skyrim, you need to replicate not just the spirit of the game, but it's maddening technical bugs as well. More »

#theelderscrolls Let's pretend, for a moment, that the court battle between Skyrim's owners and the developers of Minecraft never happened. And that instead of fighting each other, they got together and made a sweet, sweet video game. About blocks. And blocky dragons. More »

No, it won't help you take down giants or snow trolls more easily, but a new Skyrim patch does purport to increase the frame rate PC setups that rely heavily on the CPU. Bethesda forum user Arisu has created the Skyrim Acceleration Layer which, in his own words, "works mostly by rewriting some x87 FPU code and inlining a whole ton of useless getter functions along the critical paths because the developers at Bethesda, for some reason, compiled the game without using any of the optimization flags for release builds." You get all that?

We're unable to test the mod ourselves, though forum users are reporting frame rate increases in more graphically intense areas (Markarth, in particular). Meanwhile, Rock, Paper, Shotgun seems to have noticed at least a slight improvement. The mod requires the Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE), which you can find here. Head over to the Bethesda forums for detailed installation instructions.

#2011yearinvideogames Oh look. Somebody is voting for Skyrim as Game of the Year. How shocking. More »

We've already walked you through The Gourmet's signature dish, the Potage le Magnifique, but did you know there's another recipe found within his book, Uncommon Taste? A new show called Feast of Fiction has debuted on YouTub, and in its first episode the duo creates The Gourmet's other Skyrim dish, the Sunlight Souffle.

They're hardly the first group to cook in-game dishes -- Gourmet Gaming has been around for a while now -- but it's still novel. The Sunlight Souffle doesn't look too difficult, and the video above does a pretty good job of breaking down the recipe into easy-to-follow steps. Based on the looks of the end product, it's also a tasty dish.

I can’t entirely attest to the efficacy of this performance mod for Skyrim as framerate is about the one problem I haven’t had while playing TES5 on my main PC, but it did seem perhaps a little smoother on my puny laptop. The creator reckons it can add a performance boost of around 40% in CPU-dependent scenarios; for instance, around 10 frames per second to chug hotspots such as Markath. It’s been achieved, apparently, by fixing an alleged tiny oversight on the part of Bethesda.(more…)