Arthmoor

I think that would be a bit harsh since the masks you can otherwise get are usually well worth it on their own. It's only those who seek a complete set to put on the display statue that will be burned by that. Of course it makes little sense in my mind for a stealth oriented character who has risen to Listener of the DB and Guildmaster of Thieves to ALSO have to seek out becoming Archmage of the College just to get that last mask.

Another railroading point: When looking to retrieve the Morokei dragon priest mask, you have to complete the Staff of Magnus quest first. Meaning you need to be fairly far along in the College quests before you can get it since the Labrynthian is locked out until you've done so. This one is going to be difficult to rectify. Maybe even impossible since Bethesda has tied the backstory for Savos Aren to Morokei.

It might also be cleaner to get the person at the head of the bridge to accept your "I'm the Dragonborn" answer without having that draft you by force into being a member of the College, because even that option forces the faction membership on you. Plus it doesn't get rid of the "visit the college" journal entry either. For the MQ you're basically going to see the orc in the library. So either method that proves useful to get that meeting works for me. Either skip the faction drafting or have him visit the city. I suspect making him visit the city will be slightly less prone to compatibility issues.

My only problem with providing a journal entry to go straight to Signus is that it requires meta-gaming with out of character knowledge to even be logical. Your character has no way to know about that option without being told first. Sure, you could stumble over him on your own but how likely is it that most people are going to randomly explore deep into the ice flows?

+1 for Paint.NET. When saving as jpg, you get a quality slider. Set it to 100% and you're golden.

Skyrim is a DX9 game, so yes, installing DX9 should resolve whatever issues you're having wit that d3d9.dll file.

Namira's quest: At the point you're told to go lure the priest into the trap you are not given an opportunity to warn him. The only valid completion of the quest is to bring him to his death. Law abiding PCs might object to the premeditated murder of a priest of Arkay.

Nope, just at the initial railroading point where you're forced into doing something you had no intention of going along with. With the DB, the railroading point is basically at the beginning when you're forced to go along with killing Grelod in order to reach the branch point. Not after you've killed 10+ people and had a change of heart. Escaping at that point should rightly have the Brotherhood members come down on you like a ton of bricks for turning traitor.

I've got plans in the works for one of those once the CK is out. I can see that there are at least a few things that would overlap in function considering the main point of a alt-start mod is to avoid or delay the MQ. I wasn't aware the civil war required MQ interaction until it was brought up in one of these threads so I could see an alt-start mod as wanting to at least break that relationship.

Not sure if it fits, but you may want to consider a 3rd option for the Dark Brotherhood. As it stands right now, you have two paths, both of which require you to do what the Aretino boy wants. 1. Kill one of Astrid's captives, join the guild, etc. 2. Kill Astrid, and follow the alternative to wipe out the Brotherhood. I'd like to see another path where you meet up with the kid and the "I'm not who you think I am" dialogue option bails you out without assigning the quest and optionally allows you to turn him in to the town guards. As much of an evil old woman as Grelod the Kind is, you shouldn't have to be forced to go through killing her to be able to wipe out the Brotherhood. Turning the kid into the guards could even instigate the portion of the quest where the courier brings you the "We Know" note, thus presenting an alternative way for Astrid to confront the player about the stolen contract.

That's pretty much what he's saying they're setting up. 3D modeling and texturing are both non-CK related activities. If you mean non-CK produced plugin files, do yourself a favor and wait for the CK. Using files produced with non-CK utilities is not something that's recommended.

When you start cracking arrow in the knee jokes IRL. How to know your friends and family also play too much? When they understand the reference without having to ask.

Maybe they are and all the other studios are even worse than this? Other than CDProjektRed, I can't think of a single other studio I'd automatically trust to put out a quality game that's as stable as Skyrim is right now. Yes, we're hearing a lot of people with problems. They're a vocal minority out of nearly 7 million units sold to date. That doesn't make the issues any less real or important, but it DOES mean they've outdone pretty much everyone else in the arena in 2011. Good enough for GOTY in my book.

Yep, looks like the good ol ATI transparency bug. Gotta love it. Kudos on 1.0.4 btw

Indeed. If you haven't yet updated to 1.2, DON'T. Unless you LIKE there being no elemental resistances and/or your dragons never being within melee range. I realize that with Steam this may not be possible since it's "don't update me" option rarely works as advertised, even in "offline" mode. I'm still a happy 1.1 non-infected user and plan to stay that way until Bethesda goes and hires a real QA team.

And now we have preliminary Nifskope support.

Yep, early alpha quality but at least the BAIN tab works and you can manage saves and screenshot with it. That's all we need it to do at the moment. Bashed Patch support will come soon I'm sure, but there's little point right now with no mods out. That stuff with the string data makes me wonder if we're going to get stuck having to maintain weird things like that with our own mods as well.

The game treats Update.esm in a special way. It doesn't need to be activated.

Patch 1.2 is announced. Unless there's more to this in typical Bethesda non-documented fashion, it appears 1.2 will be something to skip.

I haven't quite figured out why people are using the LAA patch. I have no such thing in place and the game has had all of one CTD in 110 hours of play. At Ultra settings with some ini stuff slightly over the default limits. I don't doubt that the DRM update really did introduce crashing. It wouldn't be the first game to suffer something like that. Pools of Radiance on PC was a disaster of CTDs and in-game lag until Ubisoft relented and patched the DRM out. The game suddenly sprang to life and was smooth as butter. You'd think after repeating the same mistake over and over again that the industry would finally get it. Students of history they are not. People also insist Bethesda had to push this update, but every indication I see says Valve did it because Bethesda's people act like they haven't pushed anything. Including direct responses from their email and phone support people who insist the second patch is still being worked on. Nobody seems to know about the DRM update. If they're all lying then Bethesda has somehow mastered the art of effective conspiracy and cover up. Something that's highly unlikely to happen.

Best be sure it's the XBox version too, because the PS3 version appears to have gotten shafted hardcore again. They're raging out of control on the official forum over it. Far more than PC gamers are raging over getting the finger with the DRM update.

Well it cost me a bonus during the DB quest but other than that it only seems to be causing people to be up and about at ridiculous times of the day. Which is the weird thing. The TIME (ie 5pm, 8am, etc) is correct. Sunrise and sunset still happen at the correct moments. It's just the day name that flips, but that's one of the global variables so messing with it in weird ways can break stuff.

Well I told 3 buddies who make most "steam haters" look like angels about the bypass and they bought the game. I of course warned them not to log into Steam or it would break their game. That's 3 sales Bethesda got because of the bypass. Mistake or otherwise, those guys would not have bought the game if Steam needed to be launched even in "offline" mode (which is a joke). Several people who specifically set Steam to offline mode still had this patch forced down their throats and hadn't thought to backup their unmodified EXE file. There really is no good reason we should be beholden to a company that has zero stake in any of this. Much less put up with them violating their product terms and conditions. In some countries this patch is straight up illegal because it installed new software without obtaining consent first.