What are your specs? I was surprised how well it ran on mine. It defaulted to all the lowest settings but I've been able to boost several of them without noticeable performance loss.

Graphics abilities have often exceeded current market graphics card technology. Crysis is probably the biggest example of that. It was months after release of the games that graphics cards came out capable of supporting it on the highest settings.

Then, if you want the best quality gaming experience... you shouldn't be buying a laptop. Desktops will always be capable of more if only due to increased hardware space; laptops sacrifice quality for small component sizes.

Last but not least... if you judge an entire game based on playability at maximum graphics settings alone, well... you're not even judging the game. You're nitpicking about one element of it you have extreme expectations of. I play it on low-to-medium graphics settings, still think it looks beautiful, and have had very few bugs or crashes over the nearly 200 hours I've played it already.

Even my wife is playing it, and she's not a gamer.

Sounds like a cry for attention to me.

After building my own computers since the age of 12 (that's 19 years) and having gone through many laptops provided by my employer, I've learned desktops are the way to go. While I had a successful stint of playing WoW on a laptop some years back (my desktop was down), I'd never expect top quality performance of a brand new, graphically-intensive game. For everything else, I RDP from my laptop to a desktop for everything, leaving the laptop as little more than a dumb terminal.



Yeah, it would now. When it first came out there wasn't a graphics card that could handle it. And there sure as hell wouldn't have been one for a laptop. Would you have deemed it an "utter disappointment", too?

If you recognize that desktops are better than laptops, I really don't understand how you'd deem a graphically cutting-edge game a disappointment when it doesn't run perfect on one.

Because my fucking cousin with a $6,000 godly PC has the same issues that I have with my laptop that has roughly 85% of its total power. You were right in pointing out Crysis is a kind of "fluke" in the gfx area being that so much was put into its development and because of this extra attention they created one of the best game engines ever. Crysis NEEDS a insane PC to run on max and if I remember correctly didn't have HALF of the bug/crash issues that Skyrim does at this point in its release. I think you're failing to see Bethesda's total lack in response to player concerns while they eek out a vain effort to stop people from hacking the game...wow ya they did a FANTASTIC job of that considering I cracked the game right after the patches came out.

And I guess it's this damned social life I have but having a badass desktop is like being chained to your house. It's pretty cool when you can DL any movie you want, then go over to a chicks house, plug in 2 cables and being hooked up through HDMI and THX stereo out. The fact you judge laptops on ones being provided to you and not on the actual best you can get shows me enough right there. IVE OWNED BOTH.

Pfft gamespot....

http://beta.demonoid.me/...ails/2777873/?hl=skyrim

http://beta.demonoid.me/...ails/2778021/?hl=skyrim

Nope, go blow that $60 on a bar tab or something it will be much better spent.

My pleasure, don't forget to get peerblock before you start. http://www.peerblock.com/

Hard to say...
I have a quad core so if there'd be a big difference, I couldn't tell you.

If those are the recommended, though, it'd probably run on less. Like me, you just wouldn't be able to cap out the settings. The newest parts of my system are probably 2 years old, and my graphics card is 4 years old. I'm able to play on about medium settings at 1920x1200 and only have noticeable performance hits in one city, but even there it's still very much playable. I could probably easily knock down the resolution and put a lot of the settings on max.

The game has an insane amount of content which really makes $60 a bargain. For comparison sake, I have 200+ hours playing Skyrim and am on my fourth character--and I still find a lot of stuff I never saw before. I have a combined 200 hours playing Mass Effects 1 and 2 combined, and I ran 8 characters through *both* of them, doing almost every mission every time, including DLC for ME2.

So ME1/2: 200 hours for 16 characters, everything seen, $120+
Skyrim: 200 hours for 4 characters, still a lot unseen, $60

I do a lot of game, movie, and music downloading. But I'll definitely pay for this kind of bang for the buck.