Skyrim - Bethsoft Announces Successful Launch

Dhruin

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Bethsoft sent us this press release announcing a successful launch of Skyrim, with 7M units shipped to retail and 50% sell-through so far, which means first week retail sales of over 3.5M:
ZENIMAX MEDIA ANNOUNCES
SUCCESSFUL LAUNCH OF THE ELDER SCROLLS® V: SKYRIM™


With More Than 50 Perfect Review Scores,

Seven Million Copies Hit Retail Shelves Worldwide

November 16, 2011 (Rockville, MD) –ZeniMax® Media Inc. today announced that Bethesda Softworks’® award-winning title, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, has enjoyed an enthusiastic reception by gamers across the globe. After shipping seven million units of Skyrim for the Xbox 360® video game entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system, and PC, Skyrim’s launch units are expected to generate more than $450 million in global retail sales.
With tens of thousands of fans lining up at retail outlets at midnight on 11/11/11 to purchase the game, Skyrim continued to record strong sales following its release. More than 50% of launch units were sold in the first 48 hours and Bethesda Softworks has been receiving large reorders from major retailers in North America, and across Europe and Australia. Online activity has been notable, with Steam reporting that in the first 24 hours of its release, Skyrim set a record with over 280,000 concurrent players, far outdistancing all other titles.
“We are grateful for the fans’ response to Skyrim,” said Robert Altman, Chairman and CEO of ZeniMax Media. “Todd Howard and his team at Bethesda Game Studios have crafted a very special game. Anticipation for Skyrim has surpassed any game in our company’s history, and we are pleased that sales and reviews have reflected the quality and hours of amazing gameplay it provides.”
The eagerly-awaited title has garnered more than 50 perfect review scores, earning praise from some of the industry’s most influential and respected critics including: USA Today, G4TV, GameSpy, Wired, Eurogamer, Destructoid, GamePro, Official Xbox Magazine, Joystiq, The Guardian, and GamesRadar. G4TV describes Skyrim as “one of the greatest games ever made” and Eurogamer was one of many outlets to call it a “masterpiece.”
“Without a doubt, this has been our most ambitious project ever,” said Todd Howard, Game Director on Skyrim. “After over three years of development, we’re finally excited to get it into everyone’s hands.”
More information.
 
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I play on PC. It's awesome, but does have bad memory leaks. After a while textures start disappearing. Restart doesn't take long though.
It does quickly crash out to desktop a lot, so constantly doing quicksaves is needed.
 
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Wow. I'm 15 hours in on two different characters and haven't had a single crash. I have seen the texture pop though, but it's infrequent.

I've logged about 75 hours and crashed twice. Both times I was trying to take a screenshot with F12. The only other bug I noticed was minor keybinding glitches.

On Topic:

I hope the level of commercial success sends some sort of message to other developers about the value of taking time to craft a high quality, very detailed game with more content and greater complexity than its predecessors.

This flies in the face of the trend toward "dumbing down" sequels to reach a bigger audience.
 
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Wow. I'm 15 hours in on two different characters and haven't had a single crash. I have seen the texture pop though, but it's infrequent.

Same here, although I'm in for more hours total. Only crashes I have had are 2 CTD, both of which were on a transition (zone door).
 
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I hope the level of commercial success sends some sort of message to other developers about the value of taking time to craft a high quality, very detailed game with more content and greater complexity than its predecessors.

This flies in the face of the trend toward "dumbing down" sequels to reach a bigger audience.

I couldn't have said it better. Agreed completely.
 
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Same here, although I'm in for more hours total. Only crashes I have had are 2 CTD, both of which were on a transition (zone door).

When suffering crashes put sound device on 24 bits, 441000 khz (studio quality) and don't play the game with Steam in the background (do this by starting it from the install folder with TESV.exe). This has resolved my regular crashes.

OT: nice figures for an RPG!
 
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i get random crashes to desktop ever handful of hours. after 40 hours or so in though no big deal. my biggest gripe is i have my volumnes turned all the way up and the game just isn't as loud as i want it at times. this game really does make oblivion looked like chopped liver too.
 
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I play on PC. It's awesome, but does have bad memory leaks. After a while textures start disappearing. Restart doesn't take long though.
It does quickly crash out to desktop a lot, so constantly doing quicksaves is needed.

I'm a little over 30 hours in. Had a few crashes earlier but none lately. I did notice the memory leak. I have to restart every couple hours so it's not too bad. A great game. Haven't had this much fun with a single player rpg in ages.
 
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I'm 45 hours in and haven't crashed once. I've never had crashing bugs with Bethesda games though, I think the cause of that is usually driver conflicts and I try to keep excess drivers off my system.

I do have the ground textures not pop-in sometimes until I'm right up on them though. That could be my old and slow HDD though, I need to get a new one here soon.
 
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I'm only about 4 hours in so I cant comment on too many things yet but the world seems well designed so far and I like the NPC models much better, especially the faces.

That being said I play it on max settings (pc version) and honestly it doesn't look that much better than Oblivion did I dont think. I guess that's because its a console port written for a 7 year old console (or something like that).

Also HATE, HATE the UI. The worst is the skill trees, they are just awful. I want more on the screen and dont want to scroll so dang much.

Hopefully Mods will improve the graphics and improve the UI.
 
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They could have at least listed the perks in the manual. That manual is worse than useless for going over character creation. It would have taken one or two pages to list them and would have helped immensely with getting an idea with what kind of character I want to make.

Instead I have to remember what perk is where in the skill tree which is tedious because sometimes I don't remember where I saw a particular perk I wanted to get.
 
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Totally agree on the perk thing. I'm ready for a better UI too. The Favorites idea doesn't really work. I have too many things that I want in the list that it becomes unwieldy.
 
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I would just settle for it to stop forgetting my HotKey bindings. Other than that its been
rocksteady and performs flawlessly in ultra settings for me. I hope this trend continues as
I put more hours into it...
 
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They could have at least listed the perks in the manual. That manual is worse than useless for going over character creation. It would have taken one or two pages to list them and would have helped immensely with getting an idea with what kind of character I want to make.

I'm sure the $25 strategy guids has detailed perk lists. :(
 
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my biggest gripe is i have my volumnes turned all the way up and the game just isn't as loud as i want it at times.

Yes, this! The first thing I noticed about Skyrim was that I had to turn my volume way up and then there also was this annoying background hum/crackle in some places. I did put my audio settings on 44.1Khz/24-bit, but it didn't make any difference.
 
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Yes, this! The first thing I noticed about Skyrim was that I had to turn my volume way up and then there also was this annoying background hum/crackle in some places. I did put my audio settings on 44.1Khz/24-bit, but it didn't make any difference.

It's EXTREMELY compressed to fit on one Xbox DVD, and that is likely the reason for this. It's a shame developers don't bother using different compression for the PS3 and PC, which can handle much larger file sizes. Shitty and horribly compressed 720p videos are the worst!
 
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Hmm it sounds great in my system (24 bit/48 Khz) I think there are some bugs at work here...

btw Vurt had posted a file size comparison between Xbox and PC versions and the Sound folder on the Pc was 4x the size of the Xbox one if that means anything...
 
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