Nobody09

That's because of the amount of theft in the software industry. Like Everquest just totally stole a public online rpg code put a gui on it and shipped it. Things like code not working like they think it should became very evident during the first 6 months as people told them repeatidly that mage pets weren't duel weilding etc, alchemy isn't working, etc. Bethesda likely hires people to make the scriipting engines. Fires them when they are done and trains the team how to use the "package". But since they didn't make it and barely understand it they have no idea how to use it. There's what like 12 or 15 people who do skyrim? And none of them can probably remember one bit of their data structures classes because they are just considered cheapest 'shop' labor that can figure out all the code stored on the server. Just look at Oblivion. As soon as you get smithing to 75 and change the id code on everything you touch it stops chests working because it stops the code stored on the company server that handles the database stuff from working and the people who make the game can't fix it. Relying on the modding community is one thing. But breaking the game so badly that the modding community can't possibly improve it because the underlying game is just NOT THERE. is another. They didn't even bother to phone this one in to the modding community. They are crowd sourcing and relying on free labor and volunteer labor and keeping all the profits they can. Which harkens back the beginnings of everquest that used slave labor GM's who weren't paid anything and had to take the flames from the community for nothing but gratitude. Which means if they choose grattitude as their currency they aren't going to get it from the customers who are one month from release completely sick of this game. The modding community will revolt and throw up all over this spoiled kids birthday party clown.

I have to aggree with pry44. You can't do pure destruction on master difficulty. The only way to stay ahead of the curve is to only allow destruction armor skill and conjuration to go up. You can boost destruction a bunch by taking illusion to 50 and the middle track on illusion at 50 unlocks a perk which adds 10 damage to fire skill. But it adds so many levels that you don't get a return on investment. If you play the game to level destruction which your forced to do without cheats you will be forced to raise all kinds of speechcraft and 1h and 2 hand and stuff you don't need. Without cheats your forced to breton or raising alteration to 30 to get some magic resistance which does next to nothing. Alteration at 50 gives you 10 percent more which would work if you haven't gotten 3 levels getting it. Conjuration won't go up just summoning. You can play for 40 hours and destroy 40 dungeons and you won't get 40 conjuration skill which by the time you get it your flame atronach will be next to useless getting killed in 2 hits. So you're forced to cheat for training or cheat by soul trapping a corpse or just pestering wolves and mudcrabs with soultrapping. Destruction won't level to 40 easily. Because at 40 skill it starts staggering oponents perk or not. Only weak ones and on master difficulty you only get about 1 weak one out of ever 4 in every dungeon. Destruction however once you get past past the insane xp requirements of 20 to 40 starts rising like crazy. You still are going to have to cheat. Mana regen is based on your pool. In other words if you have 300 mana and a summon costs 200 mana you're not going to fill up your pool at all in combat. If you have 300 mana and you only use 50 mana to summon your pool will rise about 8 times faster. In other words the lower you get your mana the more your mana regen is going to wreek. Without cheating on master diffulty and without money cheats you're going to have to spend about a hour and half brawling either summoning sword during the brawl in left hand and using right hand to heal yourself. But even if you do that with 40 armor skill and the 3 lowest light armor or heavy armor perks and not cheating on smthing to make your armor epic. You might as well be naked. Without cheating to get your destruction cost down enough to make it work you are going to need a set of light armor legion gauntlets that reduce destruction. The chances of the game dropping it to you are abysmal and you'll have to console them in. You can't enchant reduce destruction into gauntlets but the game has imperial bracers of destruction 000b9739. I think the game is called I win and nothing you do changes that. You're going to be making snow victims which are like snow angels only with stiff body havok physics. Oh and wards are useless. The barely budge restoration skill and it's hard to get restoration to 30 without training it in a fire pit or some nonsence. The only time they really work well is if you get slammed into a dungeon with a fireballer or a ice mage 10 levels above you and your follower is either toasted immediately by the fireballer or in the case of a ice mage they are frosted and take 3 slo mo steps and go to bow. In that case you have to ward block for them. And your job simply becomes.... warding. Which you can't run fast enough to protect your follower from a fireballer because they will usually want to charge and go mellee. If they can take two fireballs you can save them from one. Ice mage you just sit right next to them and pop a ward up at every ice missile incoming while follower plinks them to death. But problem is it really on works with ice mages. Because those nasties usually have help in the dungeon and will summon and you're follower will immediately keep banging away on the summon. Instead of going after the bad guy. Either way you're going to go through so many mana potions and health potions you'll be forced to cheat up a batch of decent mana restore potions or cheat up your armor or cheat up your enchanting or cheat up a perk or cheat up some money. Sooner or later some way some how you'll cheat. Be it going through 20 potions in 3 minutes and getting sick of running to town or whatever.

The game is highly streamlined. It takes you hours in oblivion to figure out it's annoying but you can fix it and how to fix it. Skyrim is so aweful you try the same routes to live with it as Oblivion and then decide it's just not worth any trouble. If you read the modder's comments you will see this seeping into people's brain pans as they are just abusing the modders. Because the modders can't make anything that will make the game any fun yet.

There's nothing wrong with REQUIRING you to go through content they created with a gag ball in your mouth. It could even be pleasant if the content was not just totally freaking stupid lame. And it's purposeful. I've watched the RADIANT (DEVIANT) quest engine shut off quests in order to resort you into multiple passes through multiple locations. The only way I can enjoy the game is to cheat at the start. Head to solitude and train destruction up. Destruction is ANNOYING AS can possibly be. If you unlock the 50 skill perk for fear in illusion it adds 10 to your fire spell. This makes for a very nasty mage as you do about 20 damage/second with a single hand on fire. And 44 damage per second duel casting. This causes a couple things. First destruction won't level at all from 20 to 30. It's dog slow because SOMETHING messes up the game counters. The computer is not able to "DEAL" with the streaming of it. It's like they don't have enough hit points to make the formula for destruction work on advancing. Setting it to master helps but not much. Then from 60 on destruction levels at an ALARMING rate mostly because you've gotten enough levels to give the foes enough hit points. You see the problem here is bethesda is insane. They've gotten so wrapped up in ways to control your behavior in the game that they forgot to make it any fun. Like trainers and the training limit. It's all fine for the old leveling system in oblivion but under skyrim they give you one or two common trainers one or two expert trainers and one master trainer for EVERY SKILL in the whole game and the starting city and everything close to it is completely and utterly DEVOID of trainers. Which is the opposite of being full of master trainers that you can't use anyway. Ripping out the old mechanics that gave you something to do and replacing it with an even worse system is a mistake. They have a "dogs" guild in the starting city but it's quests usually keep you close to home until you're so deep in the muck that you can't move or get your well rested bonus back without completing it. I'm SHOCKED they didn't pull every vendor in town around the dog's guild to force you to go to the next step 9000 miles away next to winterhold. Pretty much the same thing with the mages guild. Finish one part and they loose magic anomolies all over the place. Throw you in an ambulance lock down the guild like a prison complex and force you into the next "cut scene" which is conveniently placed 9000 miles away as well. It's like cattle stalls that don't provide you anything you need along the way. You are just pushed onto some sort of slaughter. And the "timed" missions. If you run up to the companions fighting the giant and help them you get good friend faction with some of them. But if you get anywhere close to whiterun you set the level of all the companions outside. You won't fix level on any followers inside till you go through gates and you won't fix level of the house carl at dragon reach until the games says you discovered dragon reach. But it's possible to fix a worthless follower a master training heavy armor trainer with 3 times more speech skill than heavy armor who uses a 2 handed weapon but has way more skill in one hand and has a skyforge 2 handed sword until he drops it when he becomes a dog and won't pick it back up and pulls a iron 2 hander out of his butt. You see what I'm talking about here don't you. This is somoene's on crack and designing games. People say I'm not smart. Those people get my fist but you I like. Uh. I have 67 speechcraft skill and if you had waited 15 more levels i'd have a 100 but still only 27 heavy armor skill. The other timed quest is the orc stronghold next to the dwarven ruin that makes smithing go from rediculously easy to level to an unnoticable 25 percent faster level of rediculousnes that means absolutely nothing in the number granularity until about 60 skill anyway and doesn't even help at all until you reach 70 smithing skill. Anyway that's for the level 9 quest for volundrungs weak hammer which if you unlock the above mentioned fire perk under illusion unlock fire enchanting and enchant a dagger of destroy your stamina which is classified as fire in the game you can turn every caster into a one cast wonder who doesn't have any stamina to cast and spells fail and any twohander get's one swing then you could sneak away from the swings and not get hit. In that quest. If you get about 900 miles from the strong hold it starts a giant rampage. 3 guys run outside and an npc. The giant one hits every single one of the guys who run out at ANY LEVEL. The girl who will become a follower after you complete the quest gets one block and she's dead next swing. You can do it easily by going there before level 9 then fast traveling to it and kill the giant before the, no one bests an orcs, come sprinting out of the stronghold to get turned into fly swatter goo. But the only way to do it otherwise is to USE a weapon. Use a paralyze potion. Sprint as fast as you can to the fight and hopefully paralyze him before he kills the girl that breaks the quest. Which you have to redo 3 times because the first 2 times he kills one flyswatter orc then goes straight for your quest target. Now there's no reason behind any of this other than decisions by the programmers to be jackholes and make the quests stupid. Oh look I can program computers and be an annoying jackhole at the same time. Aren't I special. This game just sucks. Until there's a mod that kills every single npc in the game. Strangles the radiant quest engine and rewirtes the perk and skill tree it's a turd. A turd on fire in a brown bag on your doorstep. Then it can be what it's meant to be. A nice chicken game. Where all the quests involve killing skooma dealers who are trying to ruin the family farm and kill the dog. You then adventure with the chicken to destroy the skooma den. Then you brawl with the dog till it leaves the chicken alone and then wonder the streets to the next town destroying 5 dragons with a learn how to fly you idjut FAA manual and the guts of a radar screen that shoots lightening bolts. Even then. The graphics engine will suck 3 times worse than oblivion but at least it won't beat your cpu silly with a stupid quest scripting engine written in turdsoft unstructured derp language. I have NEVER finished the thieves quild quest line and NEVER DONE the stupid civil war quest line. But what I have done is told the idiot in the house in marketh his little hammer sucks and I don't want it and radiant immediately put the priest in the same place as the dibella quest. And really enough with the lets use the z axis to turn 5 feet of x y coordianates with unscalable walls between every quest giver and quest target who you have to run 500 miles to the left and 500 miles to the right to get 10 feet with wolves spiders and bears every 10 feet. Or else you can just shove your lost hunting party up your butt because you need to move to another city for that to make ANY SENSE other than just being frikking annoying. I'm telling you. Next game from them is going to be glued together from broken code chunks stored on the office server by people paid 3 dollars an hour plus a one hour crack lunch and free crack from 7pm to 9pm. The community is just pee'd off and are attacking each other because they are all inside the same black hole of stupidity. And no the interface is NOT a great interface that you just have to learn and get used to before you fall deeply in love with it. It's the WORST INTERFACE IN THE HISTORY OF PC CONSOLE PORTS. They'll NEVER do a desert region centric game again. Because they can't herd you with moutains and water. Kajiit are forever gypsy support characters.

Annoying shouting talos plugin. 19.99. Puts annoying talos shouters every 10 feet. Adds +50 to your sneak skill as everyone is DEAF.

That sucked. I wanted to play my drum naked in the streets while under the influence of Moon Sugar. I had it all planned out. Come on all these games have turned into tool box cookie cutter recipe games. It's like 20 people with a server loaded with code that they piece together. None of them could solve a complex data structure to save their life. They got crafted weapons to stack unlike oblivion but they now goofball soul gems. They've made the same game for 15 years and can barely make THAT work. You think they are going to try something hard like letting you play an instrument. It's not in their toolbox so they can't. I'm playing the game totally clean no cheats at all on expert. Not even a console item add. It goes from rediculously easy to rediculously hard to rediculously easy. I mean they send level 14 bandits out at level 7 on ya that can fry you in 3 seconds flat and leaders than destroy you in 3 hits. Then when you get level 36 with so high of a smithing and armor rating that they can't touch you. You see a saber tooth tiger on the road. You are level 10 and setting is expert. It's going to freaking eat you. If you walk close it will go agro. If you shoot first it will give you an assault flag for the encounter. LOL Murdering the orphanage lady gives you an assault flag sometimes a murder flag sometimes and no flag sometimes. Hitting a resting drauge in a tomb before it gets up on some tombs gives you an assault flag and others no assault flag. You are inside a freaking dungeon. You are not in a civilized city, what is this assault flag nonsense. I'll tell you what it is. It's 20 guys making the same game over and over and over using a toolbox that they don't quite understand made by people who worked there and developed the toolbox and then were fired for being smart and talented. The mages guild end quest had the epicness rating of the thieves guild end quest did in oblivion but nearly ALL the guild quests go off on an emergency ambulance theme. They throw a hireling at you and force you to go to the next step. They throw hostile creature in a town and force you to go kill them. They still add quest items that you can't remove. Same bugs different junk. The entire skyrim thing is vilja mod under oblivion. They all talk like her but her voice work actually DOES something. It's funny or cute or entertaining. There's voice files for EVERYTHING in this stupid game. I sneak into dungeons just to listen to people inside there chat about the dungeon like a babbling freaking fool or simply sing. I sneak attack one guy 3 times to get his health down low enough to set off a trap and kill him or disable him with it just to freaking survive at expert setting. I have only ONE cheat loaded 4 stamina per second sprint instead of default 7 stamina per second sprint. All the guilds do is sit around and chat about stuff. The companions babble on and on about the werewolf situation everytime you go into the place. They put voice files for the starter quest golden claw where she leads you to a bridge and babbles on and on about the claw and the robbery but fails to explain to you that the dungeon is actually just 15 feet away you just have to go up and around this hill to get to it. Same thing under oblivion. You spend all this time running the water edge collecting nirnroot and you think the game world is huge but if you don't follow the water way paths and just cut straight across it's tiny. They just use rushing water and impassable mountains to make you run 20 times further than necessary. The companions are loved by their host town and respected but they are werewolves that go out and eat stuff. The mages are hated by their host town but it's just the stupid high elves causing all the problems. I only like to play high elves because 50 magika points are way way better than any other races mods. The magic system is horrible. The item maker has fallen down from the top shelf on daggerfall and landed in the dumpster on this game. The alchemy system has always been good and just gets weird on this game. People are modding the stuffing out of the destruction line but all you have to do is suck down a 80 percent more powerful destruction potion you crafted throw on a lightening cloak put ice spike in left hand and sparks in right hand and just slaughter people. But everything is so messed up in this game. You can create some rediculous potions at 40 skill and some are barely an improvement on store bought at 80 skill. If you take all the right perks and use the right gear you can have rediculous base damage and magic damage without using a petty souls worth of charge in 50 fights. But still the entire MAGIC system is a mess. They throw a 1000 quests at you right from the start and the quests follow the same old script take this here to clear quest book. Oh wait the guy you talked to wants you to slaughter something in the mine. Every quest is scripted to give you more quests. Your map ends up so full of stuff you can't find a new quest objective. If you enable all of them you have 1000 pointers blocking out even the east west markers much less completely covering your blue pointer for map way points. The only thing that's really changed is leveling. You used to have to work and work hard to level in oblivion and now you can't step out your front door without gaining 5 levels. I can barely make it out the ancient knowledge quest without being level 18 before ending up level 30 from smithing doing 1000 damage per swing running to reloading the game 5 times to sell all the daggers and rings I enchant. I take it back i have another cheat loaded. Lets you do double upgrades on some standard items just because I don't like any of the armors in the game and you don't get enough perk points to fill out anything. The game needs a much more complex perk system with lots of perks to start with that don't cost much and don't do much and powerful upper tier perks that cost a lot of perk points. But on this complete rambling rant I went way off topic. All the quest are script systems. They rely heavily on the script system and actors. It's buggy as all get out. I run around just ramming into people to get them to wake up and move where they need to go. The walk speed is so slow in the game they can't path or adjust movement rate so they aways ram into each other and then sit there waiting for the other one to get out of the way with your cpu churning at 100 percent usage. The script system is constantly adding new topics in this game unlike oblivion and like I said all the rambling on and on they do with the buggy script system it just gets rediculous. They have this thing about making you go through all the content. Under daggerfall all you did was the daedric quests you wanted to do. The ones that you wanted your character to have. They now try to force you to do them all. You tell whats his face you don't want anything to do with his stupid mace of malog bawl and he tells you fine and go get the priest anyway and then they put the heart of dibella in the same prison with him. As soon as someone makes a flying demon race people will be able to finish the main quest in 30 minutes flat. And like I said a year ago. Daggerfall had great guilds. You had to join them do the quests do the temple quests get a few daedric items and finish the main quest. It was preparation. Now they are just interested in working on the scripting AI and actors toolbox and don't really care about "the game" any more. You can't get anything from a guild you can't smith 20 times better just for making 300 iron daggers. You can't get any better armor you can't ceate with a ordinary set of steel and 70 smithing skill. Or make a weapon that you need to be awesome with anything more than a long bow and piece of firewood and the sneak skill and perks to use it. And they can't even make the guild quests mesh with the worlds motivations in any meaningful way despite 2 gigs of dialog. And the last but not least the entire "hipocracy" factor of oblivion where you go and take 50 sets of clothes from 50 undead dungeons and sell them to 10 merchants all over the place with a quest for a grave robbing thorinir to get a ring, is summed up in the thieves guild line. Which is modeled after the Beaureu of Alcahol, Tobacco and Firearms which made booze illegal shot and imprisoned the people involved in it. Then opened up giant freaking corporations that made mega tanker trucks full of booze and made cigarettes more addictive than heroine. You do that quest in the thieves guild. And if you pull a sword and kill miss black briar she just keeps getting back up over and over and over. Because you have to follow the "script". They make a big deal out of "choices" in the game but click something else. It all ends up the "same" in the end. From following the stormcloaks to following the legionaire none of it really matters. The only "choice" in the game is doing the stormcloaks quests or doing the empires quests. I'd recommend unflagging the bards college leader as essential and killing him just to make the game consistent. LOL Oh and spoiler alert. If you see a kajit that you've never seen before in any town. Kill them and loot and asassination note from the corpse.

Absolutely not. Your 8800GT is going to bumpcrack and die some day anyway so just wait till then. Nvidia does planned obsolescence like HP they just screwed up with precisly timing it. I did some research and it seems most of the reviews on newegg said their 8800GT died after 3 years. I've had mine for a little over 3 years, so I'm on borrowed time now. I don't want it dying on me while just starting to play Skyrim, because that's just how sh*t happens. So I decided to get the new card. You do realize that once a manufacturer goes planned engineering obsolescence route that they are on their way to becoming the most annoying thing you can deal with. 460 GTX's are already dying. Their manufactured obsolescence relies soley on engineering the pga material and bump depths to target a cracking event after their primary dealers warranty period expires. They think they are rocket scientists but they can't make this work. Besides you can just rebake the cards over and over to to keep them going.

Absolutely not. Your 8800GT is going to bumpcrack and die some day anyway so just wait till then. Nvidia does planned obsolescence like HP they just screwed up with precisly timing it. Spell details are simply a turd storm of massive guassian particle simulations. I always turn those down to medium or low. And I highly doubt skyrim will even ALLOW you to attempt to set it's engine to 60fps. You can't set oblivion engine to that because it's just not necessary. I declock my 5550 to 450mhz and turned ram from 1050 to 900 on oblivion because the engine would only tax gpu to 80 percent on rare occasions with those speeds and would actually spend quite a bit of time jumping into 2d clocks. 8800gt's and 5770's actually play the game over half the time on 2d clocks. Basically I just set my 5550 to stay around 58 to 68 c as it's fanless with one low speed quiet case fan. If I set spell detail up that high I couldn't get away with it. Or if I ran windows 7 I couldn't get away with that at ALL. The only unknown on skyrim is how much cpu time the npc ai is going to need. If it needs a lot you're going to have to have extra gpu power to be able to keep it from grabbing the system all the time as a bus master and locking the cpu out of processing.

Mobilities run at lower clock speed so that hurts their texture handling ability. Just judging by the graphics on the game you're going to need about 9 gtexels a second to run it very high on XP and somehwere in the neighborhood of 18 for windows 7 with a good view distance. They seem to be loading about twice the environment polys as oblivion did. If you wanted to max view distance something in the neighborhood of 12 gtexels per second on xp and 24 on windows 7 should comfortably dish it out. Now this series has a relatively low twitch factor and runs good at about 25 frames a second so it can get away with a straining engine. As long as the don't have zones that incorproate so many textures that it overruns your gpu memory like the harbor did. My guess is you'll be able to run it on ultra fairly well with some features disabled or a touch off the view distance. But that will make your laptop so hot you'll probably want to back that off. Run gpu-z and find your texture rate and you'll have a good idea of view distance you can set. Ultra is likely going to bring in dx10.1 tesselation and 5 series isn't really good at that. If the engine does that the texture speed requirements will drop enormously and it will get shifted to your shader speeds. But it could handle it if you turned off bloom and hdr and even under that scenario view distance drops not from slugging around so many hiqh quality textures but from slugging around so many low quality textures that need so much post processing. They are nuts if they think the 8400gs and on board gpu's are going to be able to handle this game at all except for super low resolution. Those would go 6 to 8 frames a second on oblivion with no view distance in certain areas. Laptops are pretty safe because they don't have too high of resolution screens. It's always the guys trying to run 1980x1200 screens that have all the problems. And they are now supplanted by the guys trying to run 2650x1600 screens. Which isn't going to happen for years on a normal single gpu. But they have wifi's and cellular phone modems which are notoroious for turning them into latency pigs. So they'll have to figure out to turn that stuff off. Anybody with a sane 1366x768 to 1600x900 screen that ran modded oblivion well isn't going to have much problem. As those are 3 to 2 times less pixels than a 1980x1200 screen.

Actually you see. Windows 7 has the GPU scheduler on it. It's is a latency dog and anyone using windows xp will go up a full category on this chart. An 8800GT should be able to max the game sans AA AF which are only needed for stupidly high resolution monitors running stupidly low resolution graphics. But only on XP. Under windows7 you'll probably need this chart. Fonger's mobility 5650 is about equaivalent to the 5550 5650. Won't be too great under windows 7 but if it's xp will smoke the game. Turn off the weirdo HDR bloom lighting and any of the 4 series mainstream cards will likely eat it alive. 4670 might struggle with it a bit as it's not as fierce of a texture crammer as the 5 series is. The popular ones 5770 will max it under XP with a dual core even at low clock speeds. But windows 7 and 8 microsecond latency without the gpu scheduler is much easier on computers than windows 7's 80 to 100 microsecond latency. http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

In these games you're basically a mobster enforcer for the king anyway. So giving you armor is like giving the maid a vacuum cleaner. It's ok to hate sean bean. You can sign up to kill him but you got to get in line behind all the cows. Is anyone surprised they killed him in games too. Just wait till the music industry Tupac's him.

Weird he should be there. You can make that quest easy by swamping the actors. In other words I always talk to amusei. Then i run off and leave him. He's not able to follow me until we get out of the castle. Otherwise if you let him follow you they will stick you behind doors waiting for guards to leave. So I just run flat out banging through the doors till I get out of the castle and he finally catches up with me on zone to the bridge.

There's tons of things "wrong" with oblivion. The main quest is disappointing. It's biggest problem is scripting though. First off you can "control" the number of gates that open. When you first bring martin back to cloud ruler the game sets 25 percent chance to open 10 to 25 gates. If you roll that bad you can go back and have it roll more open gates or less open gates. When you finish the attack on the mythic dawn dungeon. The crisis escalates to 50 open gates with a 50 percent chance of one opening when you enter a zone. When you finish paradise the crisis stops and if you've closed 20 gates no more will open. But the game tries to force you into following the script. Like when you kill the super gate and everyone stands around clapping. If you get even close to martin he'll "scan" your inventory and make your statue in bruma. So you run off go sell, put on what you want your statue to wear and come back and they are still standing around clapping and martin's "follow space" expands tremendously. He'll come up to you and run the script. It's the same thing with paradise. It would be nice to de-escalate the oblivion crisis and finish when you want to. But NOOOO martin wants to go running off to be crowned king RIGHT NOW. So you can do the same trick. Run away from him and you'll come back later to all the blades bowing with swords drawn. LOL. The 2 weeks to get the armor from it thing is rediculous also. Like you're going to keep playing for 2 for weeks. Oblivion just shatters the original daggerfall scheduling and tasking. The original daggerfall you did all the guild quests and got high in the guilds and temples and you were prepared for the main quest. Oblivion if you do all the guild quests you're no better prepared for the main quest than if you just dove in and did it. Honestly. If you want to be a jerk about the main quest. You could level to 12 or 15 and get max stamina speed and pretty good agility. Use a cheat character that can fly or throw on an acrobats amulet, set timescale to 1 and you could blow through main quest so fast that you'd close allies for bruma gates and pretty much nothing else. Making the main quest about as involved as collecting statues for a sour faced high elf. Which I've done. Though I got cranky with the game and wanted to poison apple the count of bravil. I got the 11:30 to 12:18 time window for the tomb. Was finishing up allies for bruma and figured I was rushing too much and I'd just pick a few of them while they were at the dinner table. The count of bravil is one that never leaves room for dinner. And he was my last one I needed. I break in sneak past his bodyguard. Initiate conversation calm him down and his body guard kept putting a bounty on me and having them both run after me. I killed every guard in bravil castle out of frustration. Tried another tact and got them both chasing me. Since I couldn't fast travel. I tried to make them follow me into oblivion gates as they were popping open 2 and 3 for every cell I entered. I don't even remember how I finally got him to talk to me without the whole interrupting my dinner is an act of friggin war thing. But the whole speech thing about how much they appreciate you saving their city followed by let's have a frikkin war over you interrupting me eating my stupid apple in my stupid chair in my stupid room. Ya we appreciate you just don't interrupt my dinner you scumball. I kept trying to get him to chase me outside the "forbidden castle zone" out to where he'd talk without his let me call dog the bounty hunter bodyguard. But everyone inside there like me so much they kept killing him for attacking me. Which is what spoils oblivion. The whole solidifying the data structures of the game makes it rather psychotic. And it's limited responses. Like I'd really like to put the sigil stone to the bravil gate BACK right now and re-open it. Couple it with the dripping seething rotting hypocricy makes it even more annoying. You spend hours ripping the tops off coffins taking everything inside and to have to listen to the whole speech about how horrible the copious coinpurse guy feels about selling dead peoples clothes.... and how he's going to give you this fantastic ring to assuage his "guilt".

As ratcatcher said. Using the trancscedent sigil stone of shock, fire, and frost gets you 75 armor class. Which is about as good protection as full daedric with 100 armor skill. The limit on armor is 85. And the difference between 75 and 85 is nonexistent for a very long time. In fact you only need 25 to 50 ac till about level 15 to max damage mitigation pretty much. Unless you play at max difficulty (6x damage or 2/3rd difficulty 4x damage.).

It's not a frustrating oversight at all. It's simply what game companies do. They work with the bleeding edge of data structures and always combine their data structures to insure that the game has glitches and stupid things in it that can't possibly be tracked, understood or fixed. It doesn't matter if it affects another systems integrity. They feel like it's necessary to have it as a 'reward' for a treadmill. An attention focuser. I did beta testing for anarchy online and through 90 percent of beta they had a flat file database that would lose items, ? mark items, dupe items right and left. It's the same thing. The database they use can't handle arrows, stacks of things, and items having an id coupled with a damage percentage id coupled with another system id that changes the base parameters from broken to 100 percent to broken to 125 percent. So what do they do? They put lots and lots and lots of those things in the game. 40 different kinds of enchanted arrows. If the game would allow you to advance and retract skills I'd do it. I'd advance my skill to 75 repair all gear I'm wearing to 125 percent. retract it down to 74 and repair anything I want to restore. It makes the treadmill nonsense and makes you not even want to try anything to work the treadmill. One of the best ways is to simply keep a rusty iron set of bows, daggers, and axes for training, sell and dump all iron and steel weapons, keep everything silver or better. Load up chest full of sets of armor and weapons. You can go from 75 skill in armorer to 82 or 85 instantly just by processing your war chest. But yet again. Even if you sell off most of the junk you just end up going from broke to having like 125 thousand gold instantly and nothing to spend it on. Then you throw in the other problems it causes. Like if you use partners to carry loot. Sometimes not always but most times if you hand them something they will instantly convert it back to 100 if they equip it the second you finish the share. This gives you several points in armorer at a time when you don't care any more. Then you have the treadmills turning other treadmills to meaninglessness. I usually up heavy armor to 75 just so I can equip some heavy gear to sell and get the weight discount. Meaningless once you've gotten to the point where you can collect just 3 little sigil stones and enchant 3 little pieces of clothing with 25 percent fire, frost and shock shield. Same thing with light armor. It's something sexy to wear to look at while you are using it to raise skill. I usually raise speed with athletics 2 or 3 times and then revert to light armor for the points. I just get fed up with agility and finally start pcadvancing security through the roof once agility reaches 60 or 70 because the tumber speeds are rediculous based on the level. The minigame is not a game at all. On the pc you get too many tumblers that are just going to fail no matter what you do based on your security skill at the tumbler at the time. It works on the xbox from what I've seen but on the pc some systems it works some systems it's severly broken. The curves on skills are all junk. It's too hard to raise athletics, it's too easy to raise armorer and the specializations things mess everything up. Mercantile is a sick joke, armorer is easier to raise from 75 to 93 than it is to raise from 37 to 50. You can spend a bunch of time raising mercantile and speechcraft to get max disposition when if you just level you end up with one loot haul being enough to take a vendor from 35 to 100 disposition based on gold caps. There's too many screw ups with rewards. Like personality you want every single thing at master. Because it's great to be able to just boost disposition of anyone you run into at the time. You definitely want illusion at master because illusion spells are awesome. And you definitely want mercanitile at 75 so you can have something to do with your cash. But take block, heavy armor, and armorer. Who cares about block at master. Well if you want to finish the stupid quest for the gray knight you better have block, athletics and blade at master because if you don't you are never going to get the perks. But the athletics master perk only helps you raise acrobatics after a time when you don't need it because it's at max or close to max and you get more acrobatics from simply falling down. But the master shield perk just disarms people and makes thier weapon fall through the floor half the time. But only if it's a weapon you want. That's what I hate most about oblivion. The treadmills became counter productive interweaved hipocracies with the quests. Plus the quests are all hipocracies anyway. Oh poor thorinor is robbing graves and selling the clothes. When what do you do during the azura star quest? Rob graves and sell clothes. What do you do during the amelions tomb quest. Rob graves and sell clothes. You buy a pirate lair and do quest after quest murdering pirates or fighing pirates because without the pirate lair security raising is pain. It's become like this. Psychotic. Not fun like daggerfall. Daggerfall was awesome. You staid level 1 to 3 as you trained skills up, climbing the walls at the inns, doing quest after quest for the mages guild, and all the various guilds and temples. You prepared yourself for when it came time to level. You leveled you finished the main quest you had fun. You went back and did it over as a dark elf or a high elf this time. Then you put it away. Now it's become a brutal strange hipocracy of counterproductive quests and skills. You had money to train and didn't care about money after you started on the main quest. Now you don't have money to train or buy houses at low levels, then the game goes from overly sinking your cash to not sinking it at all. From stupid useless limitations of game play to unlimited without any purpose. From level 10 to 15 you can go from barely being able to afford training spells and 2650 for a stupid shack with storage to being able to plunk down 35 grand for house in skingrad just so you can get a few shepards pies and still have 20 grand left over. It goes from novice equipment in alchemy that you can't even make a decent healing potion to master level equipment where if you drink one of your healing potions nothing is going to be able to kill you for the next 180 seconds. You can skip training for a level and put the points in train at 70 plus skill levels after you level 10 times and it won't even dent your cash. But in the beginning 30 dollar loots is supposed to pay for 1400 dollar training sessions. And some of the things are just absurd. The level 20 quest for goldbrand where you kill something in 2 hits on easy, 6 hits on normal difficulty and loot 127 strong healing potions from them. But at least it matches real life. Where rules and approaches and tacticts are stupid and arbitrary and meaningless because the game designers are psychotic, illogical and simply trying to grab your attention and mind screw you. With rewards that are meaningless once you achieve them. Thanks for the +15 blade ring but my blade is at 95 skill now. Oh but having leveled items is another great chance to have 4 or 5 different versions of something with 4 or 5 different item id's to mess up the database 4 or 5 times more. And all these years later still downloading mods. Yes I used to use a mod that changed leather armor that asassins could wear from brown to black. And I'm still naming itemmaker stuff funny names. I used to make a yellow thong that looks amazingly like huntsman leather thong today with a poison over time spell and called it stinky drawers. Now I buy a gold belly chain from the goddess store and enchant with str and call it WeightLifter's Belt. Basically my take on oblivion is that it's daggerfall if you hired psychotics and neurotics and asked them put more cowbell code in. ti's a semi fun time waster but the storage bug just stabs it in the frikkin heart. Modders do such wonderful and I mean absolutely wonderful work with it. But without being authorized to inject lithium into bethesda employees there's only so much crazy they can drain out of the game. Can't wait for TES 5. A bunch of crazy stuff plus shouts. I hope they keep the weird curves too. Like athletic from 5 to 70 = slow motion. Athletic from 70 to 80=normal speed. Athletic from 80 to 100 equals comical fast motion movement like you're in a permanent strange virtual munsters world.

Ok. Most frustrating. There's a CM Mod that has 2 characters. An Ice elf mage and a wolf elf barbarian. I like the ice elf mage. She can do group heals through the tears of the savior quest because of cold immunity. What's annoying is just the general combat stuff. It's really funny in many ways but annoying in many ways. For one she never has any skill in any sort of weapon. So I try to giver her a nice sword or a nice bow and she instantly begins casting the summon war axe for everything. The problem with that is with the obse script extender. If she has that war axe summoned and I go to do trade the game hard locks. Reset button time. I don't rely on partners to do any damage because it's just been my experience that they will summon a daedra run back to where theres a blocking structure and cast ice spells at nords, fire spells at anything super resistant to fire and just genrally be annoying. I only use them carry loot. But what do they do. They have to use every single bow I give them till it's not a perfect health and wont stack. They also want to change clothes all the time and don't know anything about elemental clothing. If you give them clothing that is sigil stone elemental enchnated they should have 75 ac and and 75 percent damage reduction. They'll throw on a lousy 10 ac piece of daedric instead of the 25 ac clothing item you gave them. The most annoying and I mean absolutely INFURIATING thing about the game is when you hit 75 skill in armorer. It completely nukes every single storage chest you have in the game. It apparently futzes around with the item id transposing it to some one of the wierder temprory in game id's. Which has some strange affect of nuking every database the game uses. All chests now have 2 or 3 or 4 listings on them. Meaning if you put stuff in them only some of it shows up and you have to quick save and exit the game and reload to get to the next list page and find what you want in the chest. It's perfect and works perfectly right up till you get 75 skill armorer after that you can't just throw stuff in a chest or retrieve something you want. It's a save and reload game till whatever you want to see if you are wanting to save a few more of shows up. Like i come back have 6 ebony currasses, 3 gauntlets, 2 greaves and I want to save 10 of each piece and only helms and shields show up. If you save and reload ebony disapears entirely from chest. If you save and reload again a couple more ebony items show up in the chest and if you save and exit again the rest of the ebony armor will list in the chest. It always makes me so mad and frustrated that i start piling crap up in rooms and throwing it all over the game world and STILL you can't find anything. So I get mad and restart. The combat thing though always makes me laugh. Game companies are always harking about artificial intellegence and all their code ends up doing the absolute 180 degree opposite of intelligent.

Well you see the problem with integrated video is it goes on what's called a multi chip package. Ram is easiest to make, then cpu's, the gpu's then multichip packages and systems on a chip. So integrated video is going to be one process size too big to be of much use. For instance when the 8200 8300 came out it was on 80nm while the 8400gs discrete card which is the exact same gpu came out at 80nm and then switched to 65 nm. Both versions the chipset gpu and the discrete gpu ran at 450 mhz at 80nm. When they shrunk the add in card version to 65nm the speed went up to 567 mhz. Not so much a problem for AMD though as they tend to use the cutting edge for chipsets. As you said the 65nm version of that the gpu on it would go 550ish mhz. On the 890 chipset it's 55nm and the gpu goes upwards of 700 mhz. You can't run oblivion with eye candy on any integrated gpu unless it's at really low resolution like 1024x768. Now the memory thing isn't too much of an issue. The sideport ram isn't to make speed as much as it makes the frame buffer that the video card reads to display the monitor a known entity. If you run oblivion or morrowind simply pull up the console tdt command. It'll display frames per second. Then bring up the inventory screen. You'll see it set to a solid 30fps or 45fps or struggle if there's something in the background that is moving. In a non moving background the engine is simply making the video card read the same memory locations and display it to the monitor over and over 30 times a second. The sideport isn't to speed things up as it's to make a known ram location that the gpu has to go to in order to secure protected content. It's also a security issue. The cpu can be forced to get to ram that the gpu is using if it's using system ram. It can also be forced to get to ram that the gpu uses but it has protection measures that are more easily enforced to stop you. The gpu's ram is simply set up an 64mb agp port buffer or as a 64 or 128mb "device" window in the address space. It then sets up how ever many "pages" of ram it needs to use all the video ram. The only problem using system ram isn't bandwidth any more as system ram is pretty close to video ram speeds on most cards unless you are using a very high end card with the special 7mb/sec gddr5 there's plently of memory bandwidth as that memory is only about 15 percent faster than plain old 800mhz ddr2. But it's only 64 bit. There's 128bit hdr and bloom operations but I never use high dynamic range settings on any engines because it just looks like a shiny watery eyed gaussian blurr to me. I like the old school light source transforms much better than hdr. So 128 bit hdr would need 128 bit system bus to be fast. Now the using a low end discrete gpu with an integrated gpu is called hybrid sli on nvidia or hybid crossfire on amd. It's pretty sucky. When you do SLI you have 2 strategies. One is to allow one gpu to render half the screen while the other gpu renders the other half of the screen. The the other procedure is to allow one gpu to render one frame while the other gpu renders the next frame. If you've got a 890 based motherboard and a 4550 video card the speeds are pretty closely matched but it's a pain because a the 4550 costs nearly as much as a bigger mainstream card. Using a discrete-integrated gpu crossfire if you do either method of rendering your discrete card is going to be slown down to match the integrated gpu. The other option is the AMD zecate based motherboard. It puts the gpu stuff right along side the cpu sutff within the cpu. The problem here is clock speed. The system clock speed is lower on gpu's than it is on cpu's because gpu operations are much more intensive and trigger much longer chains of transisters that have to get all the way to the end off the process before completing it's instructions. Zecate having these intense gpu instructions in the cpu causes it to slow down the cpu quite a bit. So normal integer operations suffer from the lower clock speed that they can work at. Zecate runs at about 1.3 to 1.5 ghz which is really slow for a cpu and really really fast for a gpu as only 40nm gpu's are able to break 1 ghz barrier. You can get a 55nm gpu up to high 800ish mhz. So the problem with zecate is really that it's very capable in video department but it's a bit too light to fight and too thin to win in some of the other normal cpu integer operations. If they can get that chip up to 1.8 to 2.0 ghz at 28 or 22nm then it would be an awesome system able to do light to medium gaming. So enough of the gritty technical details. It does look like the future is going to be integrated gpu/cpu in small ITX motherbords. So for now any cheap mATX motherboard is likely to come with a gpu anyway and it's really a no charge deal. So just get whatever is almost the cheapest cpu. Throw 2 to 4gb in it and get a decent mainstream video card like a GT220 GTX430 or ati 5670. Any low end athlon II or the 640 you like will likely be plenty of cpu. And you ran into the video local bus problem. I had an old system where the fan on the video card blew out the bearing and didn't shut off current it over amped and just by pulling too many amps through the agp port it knocked out the video card the entire motherboard destroying the sound, lan, everything in the chipset. The cpu was fine and the ram was fine but not having any electrical isolation between between the video card and the system buses it all goes at once. The exact same thing happens with pci express though it is slightly tougher. Also watch out for front side USB ports. If you get a huge static charge built up on you like during a freakish dry spell in the middle of winter and you touch one of the metal usb front ports on on the case it will do the same thing. Zap not only your system boards usb ports but likely the sound, lan, video everything hooked up to that same chip.But be careful bumping or knocking the video card or having a cheap fan on a video card go out. Stick to one that uses one of the larger 70 or 80mm fans like this one. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125360

All the games are console ports. So anything faster than a 2.8 ghz pentium cpu and a 7800GT should cover it

Ya I had this in my last game. For some odd reason the npc script behavior would go nuts after I installed some companion stuff. The people would not go through the eating script. As it is now they wait several days and then eat and eat usually 2 or 3 food items. So the destruction magic vendor guy in anvil mages guild just died. I rezzed him but he has been dead for while. It's caused no scripting problems though from him being dead for a while. I thought it was a companion spell caster that hangs out there accidently hitting him with a destruction spell while training. The companions go on bow shooting, sword swinging and spell casting rampages right before you level or after you level. Thought nothing of it and then I was in fighters guild in same city and talking to guild master when the dark elf athletic trainer screamed and died while sitting on the bench in the dining area. Only serious bugs I have found with the companion stuff.

I think the ring for go fish quest in weye is a much better one. Fin gleam is too heavy to tote around with you just for a underwater breathing spell. It's easier to get a ring and just change out if you need it. I never did the go fish right though finishing it once and getting almost done with it once. You can finish it out quickly if you just stay in the water and keep the quest active. I would always kill all the fish then go do something else. Come back the next day or two and kill off a few more. But if you stay with it and follow the map makers from having it the active quest it's much much easier.

3850 is a great card. My 7600GS just devours oblivion at 560 mhz clock. 12 fixed pipelines don't mess around. It's not quite as good looking as newer cards but I still love to jump up and down while casting spells that have light shadow effects and watch them change the character shadow way too slow compared to the older cards.

Well you got a p55 motherboard so why not TURN OFF THE intel gpu on the cpu. And have you tried the 11.1 driver and the 10.8 driver? And why flip flop to extreme. Figure out what you like to play and card for it. A 5770 will basically run oblivion at all max all high settings twice as fast as it needs to run but it's kind of nice because it doesn't lag out as much when you hit the waterfront zone.

I'll try that, thank you. Hope it works. EDIT: Well for Minecraft it didn't do anything, gonna try Oblivion and Fallout 3 now. o 3o; 5450 is powerful enough in some ways. That gpu doesn't have the 6 series uncore architecture. Which means basically all the shaders run at very low clock speed. He's just going to have to turn off hdr as that uses tons of shaders. If he doesn't want to turn off hdr he'll have to compenstate by turning lighting effects off or down. He should turn grass off for sure. And then simply turn down the draw distance till he gets 25 frames per secong under most circumstances. But he's going to have to do something first. Download the 11.1 drivers, try them. If they don't work try the 10.8 drivers. If that doesn't work try the 10.2. But mostly you are going to have to overclock it. You can get by with a nice 850 core and 900ish memory clock. And you are going to have to limit resolution. I like playing with small cards but if you got a 2560x1080 monitor you aren't going to make it. If your monitor does well with a lower resolution try that. I don't like playing windowed but you can have fun with small cards just by letting your screen set up a black bar on the sides to keep aspect ratio and setting games to full screen at 1366x768 or 1440x900. My monitor is native 1600x900 but you cut the work load on gpu by 11 percent just by setting 1440x900 and by 37 percent by setting 1366x768. But most importantly is overclocking. 750mhz shaders are just toooo slow for modern games and 850 is much more workable. Current Mode: 1680 x 1050 (32 bit) (60Hz) Too much monitor for that card. Need at least a 5550 or 4650 or GT 220 for that. At LEAST. Setting game and monitor to full screen on black stripes at 1440x900 mode would drop gpu workload 27 percent. Display Memory: 2289 MB Dedicated Memory: 1015 MB Shared Memory: 1274 MB Plus your I5 seems to have it's gpu enabled and wanting to set up some kind of monsterous frame buffer in your system ram.

Video cards are first order bus masters so they take direct control over the memory system. There's no real issue here as they tend to do rather large transfers and not tweak and peck at the memory subsystem. The clock speed of the ram affects the latency but that doesn't matter there's no massive difference between lowly 400mhz ddr and 2000mhz ddr3. The simply add more and more wait states and report a higher theoretical throughput which is fine for very small hunt and peck systems. Most of the ram speed increasing is to help support mutl core chips. When you run multi core chips you have memory addressing problems as one thread can want to access the same memory locations. So it all just pauses and locks up waiting for access. The twitchy ram does much better at this. It's not a real problem unless you start getting past 4 cores but people want 8 and 16 core systems for servers which are of little benefit to the consumer. But the consumer gets dragged along for the ride to help pay for it. Memory requires a FULL 3 shrinks to get any speed advantage. For every 15 percent speed increase you get from cpu you only get a 5 percent increase in ram. But you don't get it all at once you get it after the 3rd shrink. So they keep upping the clock speeds to try to squeeze those tiny little percents out on a wait state fraction. IE if your ram runs 3 wait states at 400 mhz running it at 800 mhz gives you 6 wait states. But since the ram has had a process shrink or two it's actually able to pull 5 wait states at those clocks. Depending on your system you can simply drop your divider and up your bus speed to put your ram on edge. My cpu is 2500mhz at 12.5 divider. with 200 mhz bus speed giving me a 1000mhz hypertransport link speed. I set the computer up at 7 divider and 300 mhz front side bus speed giving me 1500mhz ht link speed. This puts my ram from 800mhz to 840 mhz because it's on a 1:5 clock to cpu. The divider I chose puts cpu at 2100mhz and my ram is on it's lowest divider of 1 clock for every 5 clocks of cpu. The actual clocks are 400mhz and 440 mhz. But since it's ddr2 they lie and say it's 800mhz and 880 mhz "theoretical". My ram max stable is 480mhz real at a 8 to 1 bus:cpu divider for 2400 mhz. Actually it's bleeding max is around 488 mhz where it will start getting flakey. My cpu retires about 14 instructions a cycle on 2 cores at 2500mhz. That's too many as pentium 4's would retire upwards of 4 instructions per cycle at 2.8 to 3.6 mhz and those will run plenty of modern games. I set mine up to retire the same 14 instructions per cycle but at a lower clock. Plenty of kick. It's only 2 cores so it doesn't have much problem with memory locking and it operates at pretty much max throughput. Simply configuring your system to run the memory at max clock while giving you whatever cpu power your comfortable with and maximizing your hypertransport link if you run AMD cpu or qpi link if you run intel cpu will give you the most your video card can do. I achieve a good benchable and frame rate provable increase in video speed by doing this as well as subjective "computer feels snappy". All that being said. It's a GTX 460. It's not a monster but it's the redline of middle graphics market enthusiast market graphics card. It should eat just about anything you throw at it. And if you understand the kinds of things I'm talking about in this post then you understand the bottlenecks are all inside that card. Fermi was delayed because they tried to put a bunch of passthroughs in the silicon and make a system with a huge bus bar that wouldn't have a whole lot of internal bottlenecking. It resulted in a chip with terrible yields because they didn't put in enough reduntant passthroughs. After redesigning it throwing out 32 sp's and filling that space with more passhtrough redundancies they were able to get yeilds back up from nearly NOTHING. The GTX 460 simply represents failures of the GTX 480 chip. They turn off packs where the passhtroughs failed or the shader packs failed during the masking process and the result is a chip that operates very well on what works inside of it. Plus I doubt your ram runs at 600mhz. DDR 2 has 667 and 800 and 1033 clock rates. They really represent the 'edges' of timing though with 667 operating at 4 wait states, 800 operating at 5 wait states and, and 1033 operating at 6 wait states. Latency for inital transfer is around 15ms for 667 or 60ms with 4 wait states, 13ms for 800 or 65ms at 5 wait states, and 10 ms or 60 ms at 6 wait states though some 1033 ram can do 5-5-5-5 timings. The actual initial timing pulse improves though giving about a 58ish ms 667 system which can overclock down to about 54ish ms, a 54ish 800 system which can overclock down to around 49-51 and, and about a 52ish 1033 system which can overclock down to around the same 49-51 as most 667 800 and 1033 are generally the same 55 to 40nm process theres just not a whole lot of difference between them. Now those fancy 30nm chips which make up the 4gb single sticks they'll twitch a might faster but you can't get them as they are presently being swallowed whole by the server industry.

It's doable for oblivion. Just needs 2 gb ram and a 4670, 5550, or one of the new 6450's once they box them for retail. OEM only part right now. You can run it pretty decently on a 5450 if you just turn off grass and cut distant draw down. Grass easily doubles your gpu needs as well as making picking alchemy ingrediants a total drag. Ram might be DDR instead of DDR2 which would make it pretty expensive and oblivion won't use much memory. If your old card was like an nvidia 8 series it probably bump cracked and you could fix it by baking it in oven. Just search web for the process and be careful. I mechanically bump cracked an old Geforce 2 by yanking the glued on heatsink off it. It baked alright but since it was so old it worked a bit differently because they used slightly different solder compounds back then and had tons more rosin flux in them. So my normal procedure really melted it up and a few capacitors slid out of place just slightly. So if you do decide to bake it just keep an eye on it.