Backwards Dragons, Broken Resistances in Skyrim Patch

If anything, backwards dragons should be a selling point. Which other game can you say has backwards dragons?

It's not like this is just a problem for mages either. You know those damn annoying guys at the end of caves and dungeons with over-powered frost magic? Or the fact that a lot of enemies, and magic in general, is damn opowerful? Well, they can be really hard for a melee-focused guy if they mange to slow you down with frost, and there are a handful of enemies in the game that can flat-out kill you in four or five casts or fireball/ice thing throughout the game. After finding a shield that gives me high magic resistance, investing in the 50% reduction in magic damage while blocking, and finding a Dragon Priest mask that increases fire, ice and shock resistances by 30% each, it's going to be quite noticeable when I go back to having zero magic resistance.

The weird thing was I heard about this patch before it hit PC, so I went into Steam and turned off automatic updates for Skyrim. A little while later, Skyrim crashes, I try to load it back up, and apparently it's "unavailable" and I have to try again later. I fully close and re-open Steam, go and get something to eat, and doing that seems to have reset the DON'T AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE SKYRIM option, and when I came back to my PC a little while later, it has installed the new patch.

Eurgh.

We've been putting up with this for too long from them. Either they have a broke-ass engine that needs to be gotten rid off completely, or they need to fire some people on the development team, or fire some people who work on quality control.

Thank god that I have not done the patch yet. I would not want these new glitches to plague my experience with an overall brilliant game (original glitches and bugs aside).

@AiurFlux: Come on. The PC version isn't perfect (far from it), but to rip into it to that degree because of the UI? Seriously? It's not a very good UI and you can see that they made it for consoles, but it's not THAT bad. I would prefer a more direct UI, but I'm honestly not having big problems with it.

By the way, are there any good UI mods out there yet?

I've been playing the patch on the 360 version today, and I've not had any problems yet. Plus, the low-resolution textures are indeed fixed for my game now (I've been playing off the HD since the launch of the game, and the textures loaded fine without needing to re-install). I fought a dragon too and he was normal - no backwards flying and such. I hope my luck continues, and hopefully this means that these new bugs are more rarities than the norm. I will however say that I might be weaker to magic now, and perhaps that is due to the resistances bug (but I'm not sure since I haven't been paying attention to that up until now).

I'd buy a "backwards dragon" giantbomb t-shirt

@Soulblitz: If it helps I installed the PS3 patch and my frost resistance seems to be the same...also here is a cookie

Can we get Backwards Dragons on a T-Shirt please?

Yeah, my game's been crashing every few hours since the last patch. On the plus side, I seem to have gained about 5 FPS in outdoor environments (no idea why).

I guess I should say that I'm playing the PC version, and apart from the game crashing to desktop on numerous occasions when fast-travelling or entering a new area (and since it autosaves, I don't lose progress) I've not encountered any noticeable glitches at all.

Maybe I'm lucky :/

"BACKWARDS DRAGON" GIANT BOMB T-SHIRT WHO'S IN???

Probably still my GOTY though, to be honest. I've been playing for about 85 hours now, still got a ton of stuff to do, and a few crashes can't outweigh how engaging and enjoyable this game is.

I'm sitting here with no less than 10 other games in a pile waiting to be played, but I just keep coming back.

@Soulblitz: If you have more than 4GB of RAM, there is a mod out that can help you with random CTDs you've been experiencing. Send me a PM if you want a link to it.

Ever since the patch the game has locked up both times I tried to play it on my ps3. Have dealt with incredibly shitty framerate and it locking up occasionally, but I cant even play it for an hour until locks up. I really dun want to stop playing, but I might if this lock up thing keeps happening.

My Flame Atronach started taking fire damage :-/

@gorkamorkaorka said:

We've been putting up with this for too long from them. Either they have a broke-ass engine that needs to be gotten rid off completely, or they need to fire some people on the development team, or fire some people who work on quality control.

I think Bethesda are the issue rather than the engine, as these issues have appeared in all their games, while other devs could use the GameBryo engine without any major issues.

There are of course different kinds of bugs, and at launch I didn't notice any severe in Skyrim. Occasional glitches where creatures spawn half-way into geometry or way up in the sky, backwards dragons or stuff like that can at least partially be excusable as open world jankiness, as bugs generally have to be repeatable in order to track down the error in the code, and in an open world game with a lot of interlinked systems random shit will happen. Basic game mechanics, like the magic resistance, not working at all is inexcusable though.

The backwards dragon looks like a time-lapse fake video.. I'd like to see a more fluid instance..

@SpiralEye said:

The backwards dragon looks like a time-lapse fake video.. I'd like to see a more fluid instance..

When it happened to me it looked like the kind of rubber band lag that you see in online shooters. It was freaky.

I've personally been fine with the game as it has played since the day it came out. Textures aren't great, sure. But the game plays fine for me at least. I acknowledge other people have had all sorts of problems but other than textures mine has been fine. But this? I'm terrified to even turn the game on right now.

Watching that video of the resistance glitch on the PS3 version.

Holy shit, are the load times normally that long on PS3? Is it that bad on 360 too? I don't remember from the live broadcast thing.

Even on my 4 year old PC load times are a few seconds. Going between areas or loading saves I usually don't even have time to read the tip.

My gameplay has been pretty great despite some setbacks. Fallout had a billion times more and locked up pretty much once a sitting. I don't mind some imperfections here and there. But anything gamebreaking would not be good.

@msavo said:

I'm glad I stuck to my original plan, get the GOTY edition next year. It was tempting though, some Black Friday deals had Skyrim for $40.

I'm with you. I decided to do the same thing since before Skyrim launched. Bethesda is notorious for two things: Their buggy game launches and their inevitable (and cheaper) GOTY editions with all add-ons included. Just look at Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3. The track record speaks for itself.

I'm still experience very frequent crashes to desktop. Honestly had enough of trying to play the game now, this kind of experience with a game is completely unacceptable.

LOL Fail

I can confirm the magic resistance glitch in the PC version, I just played a couple of hours. Still won't stop playing though.

@MrKlorox said:

Yep, it's still a Bethesda game. Why are any of you upset or even surprised? While you sit and frown at your TV, I'm playing Skyrim and loving it. This game will never ever be perfect; that's just impossible. Accept it and enjoy it.

You speak the truth, good sir. Only had one encounter after this patch that was totally impossible on Master(Arch-Electromancer, one shock is death without resists), so I turned God mode on for that, but other than that, it's been alright. I can manage until they patch this. Shouldn't take long.

I've played for 4 hours, PC version, since the patch came out and I haven't noticed any new issues in the game.

Although it does crash as often as it did before, but I haven't noticed any new bugs such as those mentioned here.

Good thing I installed that patch then read this.. *facepalm*

@ItBeStefYo said:

I found one of those dragons, after painfully trying to kill him, he didnt fall to the ground when he had 0 health, just glitched about in the middle of the air and then would fly up so i couldnt see him anymore

This thing happened to me too:

Immediately after I fast travelled to Windhelm stables to see a Dragon slide down the slope opposite town and into the river where he drowned. Dragons are... kind of busted right now.

@akumous said:

@PrivateIronTFU: So if you're car doesn't start as it supposed to you're still calling it the best car in the world? Is people like you is the problem with this gaming industry and the community, you guys just accept rubbish.

Sure. Except for the fact that I'm not calling it 'the best car in the world', and for the fact that it absolutely did start as it was supposed to. Which would be completely obvious to anybody that actually read my post. You're kind of an idiot.

Also, we're talking about a video game here, not a car. A multiple thousand dollar piece of machinery is not exactly the same as a $60 piece of software.

Can someone confirm if the patch has been taken down? My PC is powered down - before I fire it up to play, I want to make sure I don't get borked.

@patrickklepek: PC can't even play the game anymore. It just loads to the main menu but none of the load/save, etc. buttons load.

my resists are all doing nothing.

also, the deal breaker for me. is dragon AI is flat out broken now. they fly backwards away from me constantly.

what i don't understand is why this went through? PS3 users were reporting all these bugs way before the PC got the patch, but they still had steam patch it anyways? did they even test it? these arent minor little things. dragons, the big selling point of the damn game, are flat out broken.

I posed this in another thread, but maybe it'll get more views here:
 
I've been using a Dualshock3 emulated as 360 controller on PC, and I prefer jump to be on what would be the A button and interact to be on what would be the X button (and subsequently I had to move sheathe to Y). This worked great up until now since menus and the rest of the UI used A to confirm. Now since I moved interact to X, menus and UI now use it instead of A (X selects items, A favorites, Y drops) but the button labels in the menus don't change. I'm curious if this has crept into the console versions, or if this is a side effect of the way they changed keyboard stuff.
 
Does anybody use remapped buttons on the 360 or PS3? Can you confirm if menus and UI now use those remappings instead of the default?

It's really kind of sad, Skyrim turns out to be a fantastic game, maybe the best this year, and then Bethesda goes and kind of turns it around by making such bad support for the game.

The game worked fine from my play through, now your telling me they patched it and now its worse? Right...

I've been playing it on the PC since day 1, and even after the patch I have yet to see a single glitch 40 hours in. My magic resist still works too. Am I missing something?

I really was having little to no serious problems before. The occasional bug or crash to desktop. Now I'm worried about even launching the game.

Yep happened to me today although I managed to kill it in the air with magic. Although when I did kill it, It didn't die so I had an invincible dragon break-dancing through the skies and bringing my frame rate to a glorious 5-10 FPS.

@Sporkbane said:

THAT DRAGON IS FLYING BACKWARDS BY SHOOTING FLAMES OUT OF HIS MOUTH

BETHESDA WINS AGAIN

Didn't you know? Dragons run on rocket fuel :3c

I only had one glitch before the patch. I played it for 30 mins today after the patch and witnessed 5 glitches. :/

@SpikeSpiegel: You stole my name:O

Yeaaaahhh this happened to me:P Way better framerate on my ps3 but holy shit did my first Dragon encounter spass out after the patch:P Ill have to see if it was just that one dragon, as I have heared others speak of the same one, or if it has effected all encounters..

That dragon looks totally fine to me guys.
 
Also no issues on PS3 thus far.

What about the 360 version though. Is the resist thing only for PS3, or does it also go into the 360? And is the installing to hard drive issue fixed?

I'm kind of glad now that my internet connection at uni won't let me connect my Xbox to the internet. Haven't had any serious problems since I've had it, although I haven't bothered installing the game because of the issues i've heard with the textures and installing the game to the hard drive. :P

A problem solved is a problem caused. -- Karl Pilkington

@Frootsnax said:

I've been playing it on the PC since day 1, and even after the patch I have yet to see a single glitch 40 hours in. My magic resist still works too. Am I missing something?

It's possible it is PS3 specific, but that kind of bug looks like it shouldn't be. I certainly have experienced the magic resistance bug on PS3, but no other major issues (not even the frame rate stuff it seemed everybody else had).

My dragons just fly in place way up in the sky

@Robo said:

Watching that video of the resistance glitch on the PS3 version.

Holy shit, are the load times normally that long on PS3? Is it that bad on 360 too? I don't remember from the live broadcast thing.

Even on my 4 year old PC load times are a few seconds. Going between areas or loading saves I usually don't even have time to read the tip.

Yeah, there are pretty long load times on the PS3, always enough time for it to cycle through 2-3 hints (and they cycle every 10 seconds I think?), a couple of times it's been more than a minute.