An indepth look into the honest negatives and positives of this new revolutionary game, and why it's broken.
This review as the intro suggest will be an in-depth look at what Bethesda has done an excellent job at in this new title and where it falls short, from the amazing graphics at times to the lackluster ones to the horrible support RIGHT NOW for NVIDIA / AMD users, right now being three days after launch.
The good, this game believe it or not has a huge factor most people overlook for me, the load times. A bit of cover story on that, I'm running a SLI system (NVIDIA based, 2 graphics cards) and have had it for 6 months now with 2 7800GTX cards and top end AMD and ASUS hardware. That said, I have NEVER had any issue with any other games to date the way that I, and from the forums worldwide, countless other users with NVIDIA cards do as well. But back to load times, I started playing Monday night, fresh install on a clean system and HD. 3 minuets into the game, during charater creation, the textures in the dungeon walls started to drop (meaning that they flash white for less than a second) but when they do it, it is annoy at best and gives you a BSOD (Blue screen of death) on XP for those who don't know at worst. This went on, and being the fact that the load times are AMAZING for a new high-end title (say sub 25 sec times from start to game) I was determined to fix this issue before playing. After switching up my drivers FIVE times back and forth from new to old, WHQL to beta I finally tried turning on the V-Sync option in the startup screen. That did the trick and killed 90% of the flicker, but I lost some performance due to the v-sync. So I’ll say it again, due to the horrible bugginess in the game, the quick loads are amazing.
NVIDIA users, you may have a problem with this game, that said I'm running the newest 84.25 beta drivers released last night and STILL The same issues. If this review seems in depth, it's because I’m copying it to Take2 and Bethesda for them to see what's going on for most of us. I narrowed it down to the drivers, they keep hanging in the application kernel / pipeline and causing BSOD every 2 hours or so with a few exit to windows issues in between, mind you that is with V-sync on, with it off, I may get 5 min at MAX at a time.
Ok back to the game, the graphics are great up close if you can run them. That said the distance graphics are HORRIBLE. In fact why the dev team has you exit a sewer pipe to overlook a small river and dock is beyond me. I say this because looking over the river the other bank (say 100 - 150 ft) there is SO LITTLE DETAIL it's sick. The texture on the far bank looks to be the res of 256 x 256 placed on a square 20 times that size. What that means is that it's like you took a picture the size of your mouse cursor in front of you and blew it up, just the cursor to the size of your screen. Obviously the details would be lost by a factor that makes the distance rendering in the game look nasty.
Charater play is well done, but there is not enough help in the game as compared to the last game, Morrowind. For example, I wandered into some city sewer to get exp points and explore. I did run into a vampire and while I was killed a few dozen rats I contracted SOMETHING. How do I know?? My skin on my dark elf has gone from a dark brown/grey to a horrible "Incredible Hulk" green and for no reason. I cannot find a cleric to heal me, the cure disease potion I have drunk and then slept off for 48 hours did nothing, and to top it all of, NO ONE has said anything to me in the game about it. I mean if you’re a NPC in the game, someone walks up to you with green skin, and isn't an Orc you would hope they would be like "Dude you need to find a cleric to fix XYZ soon"... Which is something that used to happen in this series. I'm left on my own without a thing to do in fixing it.
With the same thought of what's lacking here, you used to be able to rest in the world, that option is gone. There is now a "Loading area" message at the bottom when the game is doing just that. Well I used to be studying on being a designer, and that KILLS the willful suspense of disbelief for me. I mean what's more aggravating than getting into a cave or city to see a bright yellow message pop up at the bottom.
Gameplay thus far is stop on with the others in the series, NPC's seem to be more lifelike, but you NEVER see them eating and I have yet to find an out house or bathroom. I am interesting to see if user mods will fix the fact that EVERYONE seems ugly in the game and the issues with distance and NVIDIA compatibility. Aside from that negative attitude, this game is going to be one that has people entranced for 10 weeks at the least. You can do anything you want, and the game has limitless sources of adventure.