@AhmadMetallic said:

@GlutenBob said:

(on PC)

play The Witcher.

This.

Skyrim...

@AlexW00d said:

@MadMagyar92

@AlexW00d said:

@Subject2Change said:

Witcher 1 was poorly coded; similar to Crysis; hence the issues.

Crysis totally wasn't poorly coded. A the Witcher was kinda spotty, but it should run fine for him as it ran fine on my laptop.

Poorly coded doesn't mean it was a bad game. It's just that Crysis was horribly optimized. For the time, yes, PCs couldn't handle it. But even today, some of the mid to high tier rigs have occasional chugging. That's a sign of poor optimization via poor coding. The Witcher wasn't nearly as bad, but it also isn't as demanding.

The reason it didn't run very well is because of various things, it being visually splendid, it having to render a huge island, and calculating the behaviour of every single AI on the map at all times. To be fair to it, it still looks better than 90% of games out there to this day 5(?) years later.

Exactly, I loved Crysis but using it as a benchmark was always a poor idea in my head; same with Metro 2033. Crysis was beautiful and had one of the best in terms of fair to difficulty shooters i've played on the hardest levels to completion.

Dragon's Dogma is more fun to play, whereas Skyrim is more fun to explore.

@Subject2Change: But that's not what poor optimisation means. Metro on the other hand is poorly optimised.

E: poorly coded even.

@AlexW00d said:

@Subject2Change: But that's not what poor optimisation means. Metro on the other hand is poorly optimised.

E: poorly coded even.

There is an age long debate about whether it is or is not poorly coded/optimized for performance. And it goes either way, I am by no means a coder or programmer of sorts but i've always had a powerful to mid range machine and always felt I should of had a better frame rate with it.

@GlutenBob: I adore both of these games. And it really depends what you're looking for. Dragon's Dogma is charmingly low-budget, janky, broken, and just... ugly. It's such a relentlessly inconsistent experience: you'll go from laughing at one-shotted wolves to walking right into a Gryphon who will promptly one-shot you at level 5 and set you back 15 minutes of gametime. But some part of that inconsistency is exciting. Venturing into newfound lands is terrifying. It sort of reminds me of Dark Souls in that way, but is significantly less punishing all-around.

Skyrim on the other hand is brilliantly well-done. People can bitch about bugs, but they just feel like they come in-tandem with experiences that bizarrely large and comprehensive (and bugs are far more frequent in DD from my anecdotal experience). But the experience is consistent from start to finish in comparison.

In Dragon's Dogma, you'll be wholly frustrated again and again at how seemingly poorly made some aspects of the game are, but then you'll stumble into an overpowered sword that one-shots everything short of a bandit for no reason along with more money than you know what to do with. Skyrim's emotional range is a lot more tame: everything you do feels tailored to you (aside from some early game stuff like trolls being jerks and Giants), the loot is rarely 'exciting,' and the cash flow is always consistently abysmal.

Ultimately, what makes Skyrim exciting is the variety of stuff to do, the abundance of it, and the sheer level of polish across the whole thing. With Dragon's Dogma, it's a smaller, frustrating world to explore and that cautious exploration of unexplained systems and uncharted lands is the excitement.

Personally, I'd go with Skyrim. But I still highly recommend Dragon's Dogma to anyone who can stomach a little jank and a severe lack of polish.

I want to recommend a couple other titles for you: Two Worlds 2, The Witcher 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Dark Souls