Skyrim

My son is a big Elder Scrolls fan so as soon as Skyrim was released he was on it like fleas on a dog. He kept telling me all about it and didn't appear to have any issues so I broke a long standing rule of mine and actually purchased a new release game for the first time in 5 years or more.

I played for about 40 hours with us chatting via Steam chat and apart from about 3 spontaneous crashes to the desktop and one dungeon (Bonechill Passage) that I had to navigate by walking backwards (otherwise it would crash every time a baddy saw me) I didn't have a lot of trouble with it.

Less trouble than you normally get from a damned Bethesda game anyway.

Then along came the 1.2 patch which purported to fix a whole lot of bugs that I wasn't seeing.

What an unmitigated disaster.

Now, Skyrim is totally unplayable.

For some reason, every time I fire an arrow the game hangs, requiring it to be killed in task manager.

Every. Single. Time.

This sucks because my level 15 wood elf has zero magic skills and is built entirely around sneak and archery.

I've tried reverting to an older save. This seemed to fix it for a bit, until I entered a dungeon, where I attempted to fire off an arrow and, yes, you guessed, lock up city again.

This is fricking ridiculous.

I removed Skyrim from Steam and reinstalled it. First I tried to install it with Steam offline to ensure that the update wasn't slurped down again but of course you can't install a game from DVD while offline because the goddam DRM won't allow it.

Fuckwits.

So, I had to install with Steam online which I did. In order to ensure that the patch wasn't installed I went into Skyrim properties and set it to NOT download updates while the install was going.

The install takes about half an hour, during which time I got distracted (I can only watch a progress bar for so long before I get bored)

When I noticed that the DVD activity LED was no longer showing any activity I jumped back to Steam only to find WTF?, the fricking patch has started downloading and there is no way that it can be stopped.

Skyrim simply refuses to start until the patch has installed.

What the FUCK? Am I playing Battlefield 3 here? A multiplayer game where it is important that all the players are on the same version of code?

No I am NOT.

This is a single player game and it is MY goddam computer. I should decide what version of code to run not some ASSHAT who works at a computer game company.

I've got a good mind to take this game back for a refund and find a pirate version at the bloody pirate bay.

I hate the way the game industry has become over the last 30 years.

UPDATE: Eventually a fix for the fix came out and most of the major problems went away. I still had to start a new character and my complaints regarding the DRM and forced installs of patches still stand however.