MurrayBfromCanada

Absorbing does not have the same meaning as devouring. An absorbed soul might be released at some point but a devoured one would be gone forever. This "gift" seems demonic to me. Alduin devours the immortal souls of heroes and our "hero" devours the immortal souls of dragons. Interesting. In most RPGs soul devouring is a high level demonic ability and is not something any character of good or neutral alignment should be doing. In ESIII my main character was not a Paladin but murdered no one, stole nothing, and never trapped a soul. In addition he joined no factions, not even the Blades, and yet managed to finish the main quest with 40 reputation. Morrowind without the expansions was probably the least linear CRPG I have ever experienced. It was similar with ESIV except the character auto-joined all sorts of factions but still did not murder, steal, or trap souls. Oblivion was gorgeous but far more linear than the original Morrowind. It had multiple parallel quest lines and within a group it was very linear just like the ESIII expansions and most other CRPGs. In ESV it does not seem that there is much to do for good aligned characters. Most quests seem to involve stealing, murdering, or devouring immortal souls? One wonders if the developers are aware of this.

Normally I go adventuring using a character with good alignment. This is a habit formed over many years and is something not easily changed. In several RPGs the ability to "devour" a soul is a power of very high level evil demons. Alduin the dragon seems to have this evil demonic power and consumes the souls of fallen heroes for breakfast. This seems pretty clear. What confuses me is the true nature of the Dovahkiin. There are many references in the simulation to "absorbing" a dragon's soul without being too specific about what this really means. Then, at one point, the main character converses with one of the Blades: The player says, "Why are you looking for a Dragonborn?" Delphine responds, "You're the only one that can kill a dragon permanently by devouring its soul." Whoa! Is Delphine correct that the Dovahkiin "devours" dragon souls the same way that Alduin "devours" the souls of heroes?

Our original console purchase just sort of happened. My wife and I were looking for a DVD player and we went to the store and started looking for one. As it happened the salesperson was a former student of mine and he said,"You don't want a DVD player." just like a Jedi. This was surprising so we asked what we did want and he responded an Xbox. It was the same price as a DVD player but could play games too. So we bought the console and never regretted that decision. A few years later the original Xbox was forced into obsolescence by M$ and there was no more sofware available even though millions of consoles were still working fine. For a time I just continued playing the old games but when Oblivion GOTY came out I had to get it. This was not a want but a NEED because I really NEEDED to get back to Tamriel! This meant buying a new console to run the new game in addition to many hidden costs that were not apparent at the time of purchase. When the console was a little more than three years old it failed as all XBox 360s do. M$ is not saying why but it seems to have something to do with non-conducting crystals forming in the lead-free solder. The rate of crystal formation appears to be temperature dependrnt and since the GPU runs too hot it fails there first. Ask anyone under thirty about RRoD and they can tell you what happens when the crystals grow large enough. All XBox 360s [not sure it this applies to the newest version] will fail in the same way and it appears they have a 100% failure rate with about three to five years of average use. This uncorrected problem seems to have brought its own punishment. At Christmas time I noticed mountains of unsold XBox 360 consoles at retailers. After Boxing day some places had marked the model with the hard disk down to $120 and they still weren't moving off the shelves. It looks like M$ has lost an entire generation of customers without any clear way of winning them back. Of course if M$ bankrupts itself I expect they will go crying for a government bailout just like the other corporations. By the way, when you say furious do you mean furious as in very angry or do you mean furious as in the following video which contains some bad language?: That's what I call furious but also funny as heck for anyone that's been RRoDed by their M$ XBox 360.

It doesn't surprise me very much. These companies are about profit and perfecting software does not make them more money. When I was playing Oblivion on the XBox 360 I noticed that patching just stopped at a certain point even though the software still contained some serious bugs. Even now I don't know why the patching stopped.

What horrified me was advice that their hardware was not sufficient to run Skyrim thus killing the sale of the product. A better answer would have been to wait and see what mods come out that might reduce system reqiurements. This could still allow enjoyment of the product when the hardware is less than the official minimum. That video of Syrim running okay on an AMD E-450 / Radeon HD 6320 was not the stock software installation. That user had downloaded some mods that reduced resource requirements so that the program ran well enough on that laptop to be enjoyable. In my case 1280X720 might not even be necessary because for about 800 hours I enjoyed ESIII and ESIV on a SDTV. [it is strange but Grakendo Udico in Passwall seemed better looking at 640x480 than at higher resolutions.]

If the past is any indication then most of the bugs will be patched by modders and not the company. Try Daggerfall without the third-party mods and see how far you can get. To know it is to call it "Buggerfall". This is from the UESP on Morrowind, "...the Unofficial Morrowind Patch (UMP) by Thepal and quorn fixes almost all of the bugs and problems with Morrowind and its expansions. While the official patches by Bethesda only fixed a couple of dozen bugs, this patch fixes several hundred..." One official patch for the XBox actually made me angry. Originally you could knock Hrordis unconscious and steal her ring but after the patch it was necessary to murder her to get the ring. That change applied to all characters and really reduced immersion. Eventually I had to quit playing since the save game became unstable after it grew to a certain size. This is from the UESP on Oblivion, "...major mods by Quarn and Kivan that fix over 1,800 bugs (and 70,000 object placement errors) left over even after the latest official patch is applied..." There were a couple of irritating bugs that were never fixed on the XBox 360 version of the game. One that happened when a door at a monestary beside Azura's temple was opened and this made it impossible to finish the thieves' guild quests. There was a work around for the PC but on the console the only solution was to reload a save game before the door was opened. In my case that was hour 3 on a character with over 400 hours on it. The other bug was even more irritating. After downloading most of the DLC my character got the Abomb. This made the DLC impossible to finish since it would take a half hour for doors to open if the thing did not crash completely. Some kindly modders provided instructions how to work around the problem with a game cartridge and a dongle for the PC. I went out and bought the cartridge and then heard that M$ would permanently ban from Live anyone who modified the save game in this way. Since I had just renewed my subscription and they don't give refunds I decided it was too much of a risk to get a few more hours in. For Skyrim all I expect to see from Bethsoft is enough patches to get the thing running but we will have to wait for the modders to fix the rest of it. In the case of the consoles they are going to remain somewhat buggy for the rest of time.

The Bethesda company is famous for releasing buggy software and virtually all companies now do the same thing. Anyone that tried the original "Buggerfall" can attest to this. The only reason that "Buggerfall" became playable was because some kind souls in the modding community patched it enough to run. If you are patient then I expect that modders will come up with ways that will allow you to enjoy the software on your existing equpment. There is a video on YouTube of a fellow getting good results with only Intel HD graphics. He states that he lowered the resolution and downloaded mods from this site that reduced resource requirements. It looks like it runs nicely now.

There is [now] a principle in computing science known as the Mursenberg Uncertainty princinple. It is named after me and it goes like this. It is not possible to measure the framerate with software running on the local machine because the software must reduce the framerate. Fraps itself can seriuosly lower the frame rate and does not serve a useful function on slower systems. For an average computer the best way to capture an image is to run the output to another machine and record it there.

Many posts on this thread are horrifying. Bethsoft sold millions of copies of Skyrim but most of them are still sitting on dealers' shelves. They can't sell them because some people claim the sofware won't run on 90% of the systems in service and few of the potential customers can afford to upgrade because of the recession. Very soon Bethsoft will have to take the software back or give large rebates to the dealers. This will cost them dearly and might have serious consequences for the company. My Xbox died last year and I decided to quit with that Money Pit and purchased a small baby gaming laptop from Best Buy. I still had a gift card from there with enough left on it to purchase Skyrim but bought something else. VIRTUALLY ALL online sources indicated the software would not run on the measily HD 6320 video chip that is in my laptop. Today I watched a video on Youtube of Skyrim running fine at 1280x720 resolution on an Asus 1215b with HD 6320 video processor! Maybe the video was fake but I expect that it was not because virtually all online sources are discussing Skyrim at vertical resolutions of 1080p and up. Almost nobody is talking about the playability of Skyrim at 1280x720 or 1024x576 resolutions which should be possible with most existing graphics cards. The common theme online seems to be that no matter how good your existing equipment is you need to buy all new stuff to run Skyrim. Unless, of course, you happen to own an NVidia Tesla terraflop machine which is absolutely guaranteed to run Skyrim at 1000 fps with 1000 Megapixel resolution. They are nice machies but if you can get by with 24 fps and a less than 1 Megapixel display then you probably don't need a Tesla or any other new hardware for that matter.