Friday 6 April 2012

Skyrim - Post 1.5 Patch Happiness!

After the last downer post I can at least say I am very, very happy with my game since the 1.5 patch.  In dozens of hours and two new characters I made out of necessity because previous saves wouldn't load due to mods I removed, I've only had a few CTD's and a couple of "Skyrim is unresponding" incidents. I can live with that...lol.

I even like the archery and magic kill cams since they don't happen too often to be annoying and the water and DOF looks great...under and over.   Shadows on the grass look a bit crappy, but I've read upgrading to the latest Nvidia drivers can fix that.  I have them but haven't gotten around to installing them yet.

I've revived my sneaky Khajiit, Tukassi and in a twisted kind of masochistic way (after all the drama I've had with my game) I'm glad I had to because I've built her class much better this time round.  The first incarnation was my first ever character and more of a leaning experience with the new perks and such.

The second new character is a Redguard warrior, one handed, shield and archery who I'm is rapidly becoming my favourite.  I guess you could say the other short lived characters i had were test runs.

Her name is Eshe which is an Egyptian name meaning Life...or so the name site I found it on says.

Not the greatest screen shot but this is just after killing the dragon at Whiterun which was an experience in itself with awesome Deadly Dragons mod and it's "Events" which I had to turn off for the time being.  Being suddenly confronted with a Deathlord and a Lich summoning minions at level 5 was a bit much and I only got to see them for a split second before I died anyway.  They popped up behind me as I was entering the scripted dragon zone at Whiterun.  After two deaths to the same event I reloaded again and got another very powerful dragon instead, so I spent most of the time hiding in the tower and taking potshots at a fire dragon and a shock dragon like a little coward.  They both could one shot kill me otherwise.  I did actually get the final kills on both and it took half an hour, real time, but I enjoyed every minute of it.  The adrenaline was really high, I can tell you.


 I'm also using the Ultra Realistic World Lighting mod which is just excellent.  I never knew the game could look as good as it does with what may seem a simple mod, but must have taken an insane amount of work and that has no performance loss at all, which is great for us who can't, or don't want to use the Bethesda Hi Res texture pack.  I don't because I use better 3rd party texture replacers and then not for everything.  Besides, my system would hate me if I tried the Hi Res pack and personally my game looks beautiful to me and that's all that really matters.

I'm still keeping the game offline with Steam in case another patch messes something up, but as I said before I've stopped reading the "horror" posts after a patch is released because it's more often that not, user error and mods that need updating.  Not always, but usually. 

My only gripe now is Steam and how long it takes to exit and that it sometimes it errors on exit because the Game Overlay doesn't shutdown making it necessary for me to log in otherwise Steam says it's not present on my system, which I don't want to do, but things could be worse.  It could be Origin.  Now, though I make sure Game Overlay shuts down through Task Manager before exiting Steam which is a minor annoyance in the scheme of things. 

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