Now do you want to buy Skyrim?

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wolf_blitzer85

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#101 Edited By wolf_blitzer85

Just want to reiterate that this is the same exact thing that happened with Oblivion and that still was an awesome game.

All this means is that everyone will get a great version of the game so quit your bitching and actually wait until we know more it.

12 years ago

sickVisionz

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#102 Edited By sickVisionz

I won't be buying it.

12 years ago

Castiel

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#103 Edited By Castiel

I can't understand people getting upset over this kinda thing. I mean is it not the standard today?

12 years ago

Klaimore

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#104 Edited By Klaimore

Whenever I start playing a Bethesda game I can't stop playing it until I'm done, and all those games have been on consoles. But I don't think there is any reason to worry about PC gamers Skyrim is going to look beautiful and play fine, at least that's what I expect from them.

12 years ago

ArchScabby

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#105 Edited By ArchScabby

I was going to buy it on a console anyway. SO IN YOUR FACE OP!

12 years ago

TheDudeOfGaming

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#106 Edited By TheDudeOfGaming

Mods...that is all.

12 years ago

ClaritySam

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#107 Edited By ClaritySam

Oh dear...... Poor old PC gaming master race.... :-)

12 years ago

Cataphract1014

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#108 Edited By Cataphract1014

As long as it has mod support and the extensive community for modding like Oblivion, people will be able to turn skyrim into whatever they want.

@Castiel said:

I can't understand people getting upset over this kinda thing. I mean is it not the standard today?

It is, but it shouldn't be. If you want to make a game for both consoles and PCs, make them both equally awesome, imo.

12 years ago

fjordson

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#109 Edited By fjordson

Makes me want to buy it more.

Video games are a business. Bethesda is in the business of making money, not pleasing PC gamers. Todd Howard himself said that 90 percent of their audience plays on consoles. This choice for the lead platform makes perfect sense really.

12 years ago

SirPsychoSexy

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#110 Edited By SirPsychoSexy

I am happy to here this, don't get me wrong pc games can be awesome, but so much more work and money trying to run games on a pc. Consoles are just a hell of a lot easier.

12 years ago

Yanngc33

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#111 Edited By Yanngc33

They had me at infinit dragons
Also who cares

12 years ago

dirkfunk

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#112 Edited By dirkfunk

@Fjordson said:

Makes me want to buy it more. Video games are a business. Bethesda is in the business of making money, not pleasing PC gamers. Todd Howard himself said that 90 percent of their audience plays on consoles. This choice for the lead platform makes perfect sense really.

Exactly. Why would a company make a product that isn't optimized for their largest market?

12 years ago

warxsnake

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#113 Edited By warxsnake

It is unrealistic to develop a Multiplatform, First Person, Open World game with PC as the lead platform.
Multiplatform, First Person, Open World. These words, in one sentence, makes developers cry and shit their pants. It is insanely hard to develop that type of game for all platforms, and it is simply impossible to make the game work on PC first, and then develop it on PS3 and Xbox. It just does not work. Take this as a message coming from a Farcry3 developer.

Will the game's visual quality suffer? Yes
Will gameplay and game design suffer? Yes
Will you still be able to have better graphics on PC? Yes
Will you have DX11 support as a result? Up to the developer
Will the developer close its doors and fire everyone after the game is done? No, because they were smart with their money and didn't hire a whole separate dev team to create the other versions of the game.

If this comes off as arrogant, I am sorry. But people have no idea how impossibly hard it is to create multiplatform games these days, especially open world first person games.
The reason why it is hard is the PS3.

The PS3 has around ~135MB of memory available to load every asset that is rendered, at any given time, in memory. That involves everything that is visible to the player at any given time.
In an open world game, we are talking about kilometers of rendered assets. In Farcry 3 for example, the engine is capable of rendering 14kilometers of the world.

Now think about what you have to fit in 135MB of memory (versus 256MB on xbox and in general -/+1GB on PC), but while having to render kilometers of distance, at a first person level of detail (i.e. not a Third Person game where textures and assets can afford to be low res because they are seen at a distance).

You take that 135MB and you make a budget out of it, let's say:

20MB for environments (Geometry and textures for mountains, ground, trees, sky, foliage, buildings, cities...)
10MB for weapons (Geometry and textures for weapons, items, gear, armor...)
15MB for SFX and GUI (Textures for particles, effects, menus, minimaps, post process textures...)
10MB for unique scripted items (Dungeons, caves, quest items...)
10MB for characters (Geometry for all NPCs, unique textures, common textures, heads, hair...)

And so on.. There's a ton more that need to fit in that budget, such as creatures in this case, simulations, physics, loot system...
That sounds fine right? Well, that budget is a joke. Consider that any given first person weapon costs 1.5MB to load. Consider that any given character costs 4MB to store. Consider that most SFX textures have transparency layers in them, doubling their size in memory. A single environment texture, such as a rock texture, can cost upto 1MB if its a 1024. Flash data for the GUI also gets counted. What format are all these textures saved as? DXT1 DXT5? Are they transparent? What are the LOD values and distances on objects, All this gets counted and needs to fit in 135MB at once. In short, this means that:

You can't have too many NPCs loaded in an area at once, or else you bust in memory
You can't have too many weapons loaded at once, or else you bust in memory
NPCs have to share the weapons you are using so that they get counted once in memory
NPCs have to share textures, assets, so that they can fit in memory (Same clothes, same head, same textures, and so on)
Textures have to be cut in half to fit in memory (e.g. 1024 on PC, 512 on console)
Enemies in a particular area have to be more or less the same type, but not varied (areas where there are only wolves, only ants, whatever)

Why do you think in GTA4 when you get into an given car, 90% of all other cars are the same. It's far from a bug. More of a console limitation. Why is it that in RPGs, weapons that have different stats and names look the same? The artists are not lazy, they want to make more weapons, but they can't afford it. Stuff has to share the same look to fit in memory.

And when I say area, I mean whatever is visible to the player. In this case, that can mean ~3,4 kilometer sectors.
This is why, in an open world game like GTA4, they can afford variety because the buildings act as occluders, you can't see past them so the areas are smaller and more dense, and the console can stream in a stable manner.
This is why, in an open world game like Red dead Redemption, they can't afford too many things on screen because the areas are wide open, and as a result, barren.

Memory limitation has, obviously, ramifications on graphics, but also on gameplay.
Game design has to take into account that they can't have all sorts of different types of enemies in an area, they have to compromise and have you fight hordes of the same creatures. Cities are smaller, there are loading screens everywhere, enemies are the same, weapons are the same.

The budget for open world games is just not cool. Corridor games like Call of Duty and to a certain extent Dragon Age 2 don't have to worry about all this shit.

And I just talked about memory. That is just one needle in the haystack of things you have to take into account. There's also render-time, draw calls, and CPU instructions, streaming speed (bluray, DVDs or off HD), dynamic streaming of textures, dynamic streaming of geometry. Fitting all this in memory is a huge challenge, but what's it worth if the console is not fast enough to stream all that you created into the scene, or if the graphics card on console is not powerful enough to render all those things at once.

All this to say take it easy and give them a break. It's impossible to lead on PC for this type of multiplatform game. Deal with it. You will have some drawbacks, but whatever has not been affected by game design in general (texture sizes, graphical quality, and so on) can still be pumped up on PC.
Engine tools these days let artists save their assets in multiple profiles. A profile for PS3 that has smaller textures and more strict level of details, and a profile for PC that has the huge textures and ultra detailed geometry.

And none of this prevents a dev from making a DX11 subset. It involves more work that is unique to the PC, so it's up to the developer to invest in that extra work. (crysis 2)

12 years ago

alistercat

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#114 Edited By alistercat

I play The Elder Scrolls for immersion in a huge fantasy world, not because it's cutting edge or hardcore, or anything that the PC offers. It plays best, for me, on PC but the reason why I enjoy it isn't because it's accessible or not. I'm sure mods will take care of any problems I have with it.

12 years ago

ChaosDent

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#115 Edited By ChaosDent

@Cataphract1014 said:

As long as it has mod support and the extensive community for modding like Oblivion, people will be able to turn skyrim into whatever they want.

@Castiel said:
I can't understand people getting upset over this kinda thing. I mean is it not the standard today?
It is, but it shouldn't be. If you want to make a game for both consoles and PCs, make them both equally awesome, imo.

I don't think it's realistic to develop a game for both PC and consoles at the same time, one will always get more attention due to the limitations of software development on 3 or 4 platforms. On the other hand, Bethesda did a great job with both the Xbox port of Morrowind and with the PC port of Oblivion, so I know they can be equally awesome. In fact, as you say, their continued commitment to mod tools will make the PC version of Skyrim the gold standard and give it a life long beyond the console versions.

12 years ago

TorMasturba

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#116 Edited By TorMasturba

@CaLe said:

I'm becoming more of a PC gamer recently and this doesn't bother me at all. A lot of PC gamers bitch over nothing.

This. I played Witcher 2 the whole way through with a pc adapted Xbox 360 controller, and I think this fact speaks volumes. I havea great PC and I use it sometimes to have a console experience ON PURPOSE.

Also I found that Witcher 2's control settings were excellent, aside from one small issue with the D-pad on some menu's, but that was it. I played the first two hours of the game with the standard keyboard layout and got so frustrated that I switched to the Pc adapted xbox 360 controllers.

Anyway, I bought Oblivion for PC first and loved it. I never experienced any bugs and played it obsessively, Same goes for Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

12 years ago

spiralsin

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#117 Edited By spiralsin

I haven't had an opportunity to read the article yet, but I'll leave my two cents.

While I'm not opposed to Skyrim leading on consoles (I own a 360, PS3, and a PC so I'm not biased), I just hope the PC version doesn't "feel" like a console port in the end. I hope Bethesda takes the time to develop a "PC-centric" interface and options for tweaking graphical features, controls, key mapping, etc. The "more accessible" statement worries me a little. Another high profile RPG (Dragon Age 2) claimed to be more accessible as well. This turned out to mean the gameplay and environments were oversimplifed and repetitive. As I understand it, this wasn't received particularly well by the PC or console communities. Let's hope Skyrim avoids that same mistake.

12 years ago

TheHBK

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#118 Edited By TheHBK

@zoner said:

@DaemonBlack said:
@CaLe said:
I'm becoming more of a PC gamer recently and this doesn't both me at all. A lot of PC gamers bitch over nothing.
I also am getting more and more into PC games but I still don't get up an arms about stuff like this either. Maybe a false sense of entitlement comes with time?
It's not a false sense of entitlement. It's being held down by old technology. Look at Witcher 2, that is a PC game first. Look how incredible it looks; now look at Skyrim

Yeah until the Devs of Witcher 2 realized, fuck, we need to put this game on at least one console to make some real money. Sorry, but it is a false of entitlement where you believe that PC makes everything better. Except money. While some love games that looking so fucking amazing, most people like that a game can simply run well. You are asking devs to sacrifice cash just so you can feel better about your big ass PC rig. Now, I am not saying spending that cash is bad, I just built a new PC because I want to play Battlefield 3 and Skyrim turned up beyond what the consoles can do, but that doesn't mean I am praying to the PC gods that developers make the game PC only or something. It is the same as arguing that all titles should be exclusive to one platform so that the devs get the most of it instead of worrying about a release on the other console.

12 years ago

Spoonman671

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#119 Edited By Spoonman671

I really don't give a fuck what platform is lead, as long as the product is good.

12 years ago

Scottish_Sin

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#120 Edited By Scottish_Sin

@warxsnake: Very informative post. I never realised the differences in memory capacity between the 360 and PS3. it's interesting to get a developers thoughts on the whole thing, so thanks for that.

As for me, I played Oblivion on the 360 and loved every minute of it and I intend to do the same with Skyrim later this year.

12 years ago

YoThatLimp

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#121 Edited By YoThatLimp

@zoner said:

@DaemonBlack said:
@CaLe said:
I'm becoming more of a PC gamer recently and this doesn't both me at all. A lot of PC gamers bitch over nothing.
I also am getting more and more into PC games but I still don't get up an arms about stuff like this either. Maybe a false sense of entitlement comes with time?
It's not a false sense of entitlement. It's being held down by old technology. Look at Witcher 2, that is a PC game first. Look how incredible it looks; now look at Skyrim

Which looks amazing? What is your point here?

12 years ago

shiftymagician

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#122 Edited By shiftymagician

@Metalideth said:

@zoner said:
@DaemonBlack said:
@CaLe said:
I'm becoming more of a PC gamer recently and this doesn't both me at all. A lot of PC gamers bitch over nothing.
I also am getting more and more into PC games but I still don't get up an arms about stuff like this either. Maybe a false sense of entitlement comes with time?
It's not a false sense of entitlement. It's being held down by old technology. Look at Witcher 2, that is a PC game first. Look how incredible it looks; now look at Skyrim
Which looks amazing? What is your point here?

Although I never agree with people with aggressive stances such as these, I share the wishes that I want to play games like this with as much visual fidelity as possible for the purpose of creating purely visual immersion. Most players today have picked up the notion that graphics don't matter for their gaming preference, which is fine for them but not for others, which is understandable. Also note that what looks amazing to you differs from what looks amazing to another person. Also note that both of you can be correct about the quality of something depending on what you value in a game.

I'm not as picky and I find the current fidelity fine for an Elder Scrolls game and will buy it day 1 and probably call it a 5-star game, however the lingering thought that they can do better to make it a visual wonder still stings me mentally (which is my personal preference that you cannot refute). Thank god the modding community will likely create a graphics extender to increase the visuals of the game even further beyond what the current consoles will ever achieve, but this is not possible in all games of course.

In short, people with such aggressive stances should simply be ignored, but don't lump everyone in the PC community with the scum. Some of us want better visuals but prefer to discuss and rationalise it rather than just yell and complain about it.

12 years ago

Dragon_Fire

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#123 Edited By Dragon_Fire

As long as I don't see GFWL (Games for Windows Live) anywhere on the box/agreement (Steam) then I will be FINE.
I still hope to see a DirectX 11 support, I can hope right?

12 years ago

haggis

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#124 Edited By haggis

@spiralsin said:

Another high profile RPG (Dragon Age 2) claimed to be more accessible as well. This turned out to mean the gameplay and environments were oversimplifed and repetitive. As I understand it, this wasn't received particularly well by the PC or console communities. Let's hope Skyrim avoids that same mistake.

Dragon Age 2's limitations, I've been led to believe, had more to do with a short development cycle than a specific desire to make it "more accessible." They didn't have time to build the assets they wanted for Dragon Age 2, and thus we had forced simplifications that I think the designers would not have made had they been given more time and resources. So far, the design changes I've seen with Skyrim look rational to one degree or another (that is, they seem to be trying to fix the flawed elements of Oblivion), and they don't seem to be soft-pedaling it. The "accessible" argument with Dragon Age 2 always sounded like an excuse or justification for time and budget. I don't quite get that same feeling with Skyrim. Of course, we won't know for sure until we play it.

12 years ago

ThePickle

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#125 Edited By ThePickle

I'm mainly a console man so yeah.

12 years ago

dragonzord

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#126 Edited By dragonzord

@Metalideth said:

@zoner said:
@DaemonBlack said:
@CaLe said:
I'm becoming more of a PC gamer recently and this doesn't both me at all. A lot of PC gamers bitch over nothing.
I also am getting more and more into PC games but I still don't get up an arms about stuff like this either. Maybe a false sense of entitlement comes with time?
It's not a false sense of entitlement. It's being held down by old technology. Look at Witcher 2, that is a PC game first. Look how incredible it looks; now look at Skyrim
Which looks amazing? What is your point here?

haha... No it doesn't.

12 years ago

Seppli

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#127 Edited By Seppli

@ch13696 said:

I'm sorry Bethesda, but I'm more interested in this game being mainly PC and then ported to consoles. Not the other way around. What do you guys think about this?

http://www.gamersmint.com/bethesda-consoles-to-be-the-lead-platform-for-skyrim-aim-to-make-it-really-accessible

It's usually for the better. There's more mandatory Q&A since first party console makers have to certify the software. From a 'cutting edge technology' point of view, consoles being lead platform makes it harder to push that envelope, much to my dismay - 10 year console lifecycles make the latter couple of years hard to bare, hence I'm currently playing more on PC than consoles.

12 years ago

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