Here's the deal, I recently bought a new laptop. It's quite nice, 6 gigs of ram, intel i7 core processor, 1080p resolution with a gig of dedicated ram, blu ray, all the bells and whistles.
Here's my question, as someone who prefers the experience of console gaming over PC gaming, should I purchase the game for PC or a console? If I get it for PC, I will be setting it up to my TV and buy a 360 controller for windows to play on. Unfortunately though, I am not familiar with the mod scene. I flirted with it briefly with Morrowind, but a lot of the mods I downloaded were conflicting and crashed the game for me, I am also simply unwilling to pay for mods or to subscribe to a mod community. That said, is getting the game for the PC really that much better? Despite not being familiar with mods, unable to make any, and unwilling to pay/subscribe to a service to get them, and playing it like it's on a console anyway?

Please, offer advise and opinions to me (and others) without being rude to myself or others, and DO NOT turn this into a flame war. I simply am unfamiliar and asking for advantages of the PC version, nothing more. I am already familiar with both consoles, so please do not tell me they are terrible! Thanks!

Well, your new laptop sounds like it'd be able to run Skyrim without breaking a sweat, so I'd get it for PC if I were you. That way you can download mods (which are free from TESNexus by the way, and if you have to pay for anything other than official Downloadable Content, you're getting ripped off, in a very illegal way I might add) or even make your own if you get the construction set.

^^ What he said. Plus if there are bugs that bethesda for some reason cant fix for the consoles, someone in the mod community will be able to fix it and you'll be able to download that patch from them.

Where the hell are you going that requires you to pay or subscribe to get them? By subscribe do you mean sign up? Because signing up over at the Nexus to get larger than 2mb mods is totally worth it. It's a one time thing that gives you infinite free access to like 99% of mods made for these games.

If you have the gear for it (which apparently you do) than PC. It can't hurt ya. Also, if you really want to use mods, you will eventually understand how to use them. I was the same way, you just have to kind of ease into it. Hopefully Skyrim will have some kind of .omod right from the CS, maybe it will even have all the data as well as the mod file itself automatically wrapped into a neat package for us this time. We can only hope.

In summation, you have the tech, get it for PC.

That's the thing, I don't really have time ti make my own. Thank for the tip on TESNexus.
Would you say that mods are really that much of an advantage? I don't want Dragon mounts or anything silly, I much prefer to play the game the way they made it, usually.

Buy a bigger PC screen to plug into your lappy when gaming imo. Saves your TV screen for other people to use and looks better .

If you can think of it, there's a mod for it. Oblivion for example has anything from new spells (Midas' Magic is a particularly good one), to full mechanics overhauls (Deadly Reflex and Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul). I even managed to find a survival horror mod I really enjoyed (Gates to Aesgaard parts 1 and 2)

if you don't enjoy game crashing and your system turning off because of overheating, i'd go with the console.

save it for when you get a desktop because laptops are terrible for running games with those specs, even if it meets the requirements.

Right now, I would have to say, wait and see. We don't have the specs yet for what the PC will need to run it. Right now for your Laptop, my guess is you will be running it at 360/PS3 settings, not maxed out settings. Not sure what your graphics card for the Laptop is, so it's a wait and see.

For me, I am getting it on the 360. I don't think my laptop and other computer will run it. I want to install disk, and play. I don't want to deal with Steam. I don't want to worry about tweaking my computer. I don't want to worry about upgrading this, doing this, doing that, to get my game to run on the PC. I had to do it for every TES game, and I am tired of doing it. So for me, playing on the 360, I don't get mods, I don't have the best graphics but I am happy with what I get.

So if you don't care about mods, if you don't care about jaw dropping graphics and don't care about playing on a keyboard and mouse, then the 360 could be a good fit for you. What do you want out of it?

Do you want mods?
Do you want to use the console for cheating or if something goes wrong you can correct it?
Do you want jaw dropping graphics? I don't think you will get it with your laptop but you will still get good or very good graphics.
Do you want to deal with Steam?
Do you want DLC as soon as it comes out?

As for mods, mods are free, you don't pay or subscribe to them at all. When I finally got a laptop that can play Morrowind and Oblivion, I downloaded the mods and man the modding community has done some beautiful work. I don't think I can play Morrowind now without the mods. I just played too much Vanilia Morrowind that I don't want to play the begining of the game anymore without mods.

So for me, for the first 2 years, Skyrim without mods will be ok with me. I will not need them. So for me, it's 360 all the way. In 2 or 3 years when I get a better computer, then I will get Skyrim for PC.

So it's up to you. What do you REALLY want out of the Skyrim experiance?

I use my laptop for gaming and it's never crashed on me once. As long as you make sure the vents aren't blocked off, maybe pick up an external fan to be safe, you should be fine.

I've actually been thinking about getting back into PC gaming. (Havent had a decent computer in a few years.)
Thanks for posting this thread!

I will be playing on my notebook, Asus G73JW-A1. I am not sure how well it will run Skyrim, but it certainly runs everything beyond 360/PS3 settings. I also have money saved for a new desktop rig if needed.

Another reason to get it on PC is Steam. If you loose the disk you can redownload. I had to buy over 11 Morrowind disks, between 360 and PC, vanilia and Goty, over 8 copies for Oblivion and thank god I only bought one copy of Fallout 3 and New Vegas. My son is getting so much better now. :bowdown:

What about official expansions (IE: Bloodmoon and Shivering Isles) are they easy to get on the PC, and do they come out at the same time as the 360?

Yes, it's usually only the PS3 that has problems with receiving official DLC late, if any platform does.

You might want to note that you are likely going to be unable to play the game maxed out at 1920x1080, if the amount of strain Oblivion placed on then-new PCs is anything to judge by. However, you will almost certainly get a prettier experience than if you play it on a console, which has relatively weak hardware. For reference, the XBox 360's GPU is about as powerful as a desktop ATI X1900, perhaps a bit better. Even accounting for the fact that more sparkle juice can be squeezed out of console GPUs than desktop, it'll still probably be prettier on your laptop than on the 360.

Plus you get to use mouse and keyboard. <3

And loads of improvements: I almost posted a bug request then the plants did not change after I harvested them then I disabled all mods as a test. Once forgot that potable sleeping bags is not in Oblivion.
Tons of utilities: buyable deployable furniture, alchemy sorters, in game notebook.
As Riverstyx said it's easier to list things with no mods.

Main downside with the pc is that sometimes games don't work for unknown reasons. Sometimes it's drivers sometimes hardware. My previous computer worked well with oblivion and fallout 3, I had to reinstall windows so I upgraded to windows 7, suddenly they did not work anymore. Found that the best was to upgrade everything as I had a buyer for the old system.

lol yeah i use caps of water bottles to prop my laptop off of its surface to encourage air flow. hasn't failed me yet.
but still a desktop would be ideal...

My notebook is a solid 7.1 in the windows experience index. Oblivion maxed never drops below 50 fps, most areas it hovers around 70-100 fps.

My processor is a 7.1
Memory: 7.3
Graphics: 6.6
Gaming graphics: 6.6
Primary hard disk: 5.9.

Seems to be good to me, but I'm no expert.

Another advantage of the PC is if the game screws up in some way then you have the console commands to fix just about any problems you might have. If a big quest get glitched up on the Xbox or PS3 then your pretty much screwed.

What is your GPU? 360M? Mine has GTX 460M

As you likely already have a good enough PC to run the game well, I recommend getting the game for PC because of the mod support. The mods increase the game's lifespan so much, and also allow you to fix bugs that the devs leave unfixed.

It remains to be seen how well usermade mods are going to work with the new game engine. Hopefully the engine is so much better that less crashing occurs - especially on a 64bit Operating System and with more than 2Gb of free memory for the game.

I don't know what that is, lol. See my point in inquiring about all this?