I never had the lag issue in the PS3 version, nor any noteworthy bugs (only occasional giants spawning 30 meters up in the sky, or dragons spawning dead half-way into mountainsides) but the game did get noticeably smoother after the patch, but it also gave me the first game breaking bug, as my character and companion both relies on light armor and magic the broken magic resistances were really noticeable, our atronachs die instantly (thankfully, so do a lot of enemies). I'm taking a short break from Skyrim until that issue is fixed. Good thing I just bought 12 old school RPG's from GOG.

Is Skyrim better than oblivion ? then i will maybe bother with the Goty for 10 €....

Yes but if you only pay €10 for brilliant games then I suggest you find a new hobby. Harsh? Maybe but I'm sick of the amount of people who said the same about Fallout: New Vegas then played and thought, this is a fucking good game!

I kind of hope from the attention that skyrim's gotten that GOG would try and get and agreement with Bethesda for the originals like Elder Scrolls: Arena and Elder Scrolls:Daggerfall, or Red Guard etc. I'd pay for them, but they're no where to be found :(
Also, as a self professed lover of all things fallout, Skyrim freaking OWNS New Vegas. Hands down. I hope they release a fallout game with this engine, it's incredible.

While those people annoy me as well I think the Steam sales themselves are partly to blame too. We've established this paradigm now where games are $10 with all the DLC a year later, so people who aren't rabid fans think "why not wait?"

Slash11, the game is MUCH better than Oblivion. I'm not sure the writing quality is up to Obsidian standards but it's about 1,000,000 times better than Oblivion's writing. The world is much more well designed and interesting as well, and the actual quests are mostly pretty good. The misc. quests are all fetch quests, but the game is nice in that it signals that up front for you.

*sigh* guess I am to be plagued with crashes with the 1.2 update :/

Haven't crashed in a long while [since changing some graphics options to lower settings], now I just CTD with no error or anything. Hopefully my last auto-save is good because I forgot to save right after turning in a quest.

Steam/GamersGate/EA/Direct2Drive are only guilty of making sales. What ever happened to 'I need this game now'? It's not Steam's fault because for years console owners have been buying these games full price and we have been ignoring them. Which is why we are last on the 'do we do a port' list. I'm starting to believe PC gamers don't buy at full price because it's so easy to pirate.

It won't. It'll be a nice tool for people just casually modding the game with 5-20 mods or so, but the people seriously modding the game (e.g. 100+ mods) will still be doing manual installations while using a community made mod manager. The integrated Steam system also probably won't handle mods that go beyond a simple esp (such as script extenders), plus it remains to be seen if the Steam system can even handle things as simple as changing the load order of mods (something that's been important for both Morrowind and Oblivion mods). Ultimately I think the Steam system will help introduce quite a few people to modding the game, who will then switch over to downloading from sites like the Nexus and manually installing the mods once they really get into it.

I'd contend that people not buying at full price is more due to the massive number of options that PC gamers currently have. I ask anyone reading this: just how long is your current backlog of PC games? When you've got a bunch of games lined up waiting to be played, it takes a damn good game that you're really interested in to justify paying full price to skip it to the front of that list. From what I've seen console games drop in price much slower and you're less likely to see massive sales causing people to load up their backlogs with a bunch of excellent $5-10 games that will then occupy them until the next big sale. In short, I'd say we have more of a free market when it comes to PC games, and as a result PC gamers get to reap the benefits of intense competition (at least between the various distributors). That's not to say that developers can't still make big initial sales as games like Skyrim have showed (and we won't even touch the long tail right now), but they also can't expect to just phone it in and beat out the many other games vying for people's time and money.

Late reply, but some console games do have the option to turn v-sync on or off. It barely happens though, the only two games I remember having the option were Bioshock and Saints Row 2

Uh... what? Am I missing something? The "features" mentioned don't seem anything to gush about...

- bundling mods... 7zip?
- hosting and distributing mods... PlanetElderScrolls, etc?
- automatic installation... Can't unpack an archive? Or use a mod manager?

The only useful feature that comes to mind would be an automatic notification that an installed mod has been updated. Given Steam's tendency toward automatic processes, this benefit is likely undermined by the games it'll f*** up by updating a mod that requires a clean save.

And then there's the issue of having Valve and Bethesda lord over mod content.

I am a bit tired... perhaps I'm not catching something obvious... ?

Maybe people are exited because now they get something to smack the "OMG MODDING IS PIRACY!!!111" people with. :p

User-friendly.
I can go to one of many modding sites, download a mod, unpack and install and fiddle with a mod manager since this mod won't work with that mod or that other mod has to be loaded before yet another mod.
I can also go to Skyrim Mod Page on Steam, choose the mods I want, click and have a cup of coffee while they all download and install.

I seriously don't understand why you people hate everything new. This is just an easy solution to modding your game; you don't have use this.
This is probably not aimed at people who want to mod the shit out of Skyrim but aimed at those who wouldn't normally be arsed to mod the game or those who want to try a few mods without spending an hour or two.

Actually, that's a great effect of piracy on the market: Piracy virtually forces the publisher to lower a game price to a reasonable level as time passes, which in turn results in more gamers buying and enjoying the game, and the publisher still makes money hand-over-fist. Now the publisher will bitch, of course, because selling fewer units at a higher price can actually be more profitable, but honestly I don't give a damn that they didn't make that extra million, that their CEO didn't get to buy another Porsche, if they're already swimming in profits and more gamers are getting to buy and enjoy the game because of the lower price. Might be a bit different if the game was a loss, but that's not the case with Skyrim and a lot of these AAA productions (hells, a loss might be a good kick in the ass to get game budgets under control... it's starting to get as ridiculous as Hollywood).

Not hating, just questioning why SV seemed to think it so great.

That most people crave convenience and to simply load a Steam app and pick high-rated mods that install automatically is a HUGE deal to them.

Not the point.

It's not about "which games are better" but instead that "Skyrim should have been better".

Almost every aspect of the game smacks of laziness. I constantly find myself thinking:

"Was any playtesting or quality control done? How could they miss this simple and obvious bug?"

or

"It's neat that they added this thing, but since they didn't put in the effort to do it right, they may as well not have bothered."

(example: an extremely limited selection of marriage partners instead of a truly open system of scripted checks and assignments)

or

"I wish they made a smaller number of quests with real options or interesting plots instead of hundreds of mindless fetch/kill quests."

or

"These mechanics are so f***ed."

We could argue examples and details and all that, but I'm tired tonight and not much interested right now. Besides that, I'm still playing and trying to keep at least a somewhat positive attitude. The occasional rant here allows me keep playing rather than microwaving the disk. ;-)