I doubt that they're going to miss the release date, or that they're going to be cutting corners to make it. It's not an "epic" number like 11/11/11, and considering they haven't been talking about this game at all for years, I think it was probably content locked by the time they announced it.
There is nothing that was cut from Skyrim that has been shown to have been done so to meet 11/11/11.
Devs generally dont remove data from a games at all.
Its considered a bad idea too remove data from a game, even if its seemingly unused data, because you might have something referencing it in some weird way, and removing it could possible break something that's working.
that is why you can find cut content in any game with cut content, regardless of if it has modding support or not.
like said, the Windhelm arena. there is Also the whole civil war problem, which was meant to be a MUCH, MUCH bigger and well, thought out part of the game, but was never able to be implemented. This includes at least two giant battles similar to the solitude/windhelm and Whiterun battles. they are in the files, so we KNOW they were in the game, but it was cut because of time.
And neither of those were cut because 11/11/11.
The giants were cut because the civil war content was broken, and they couldn't fix it, and the giants tied into that, the area was cut for reason we have no idea.
No game ever includes everything the devs planned.
False, the civil war content was cut because of scripting problems. Notes within the game files say as much, warning people wanting to learn scripting to not use the civil war scrips becuase they are broken messes.
Last time they announced the game a whole year in advance while it was still far from finished, and clearly thought they would be able to pull more off than they did. It may very well be the reason they announced it so close to release this time, they wanted to make sure they knew what the game would ultimately look like before they start talking about it so they wouldn't be making promises like how player actions could effect the local economies and then not deliver.
Todd has said as much in some interviews.
Not surprised, considering all the crap people (myself included) gave him over the whole "Sabotage wood mills and effect the economy!" stuff from Skyrim's press statements.
Maybe he's tired of being associated with that Fleetwood Mac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWrgwde7O8?
Also they have not stated too much about the game even after the announcement.
Given how Todd has reacted to things in interviews, he probably finds it funny more then anything.
I think that's partially because the meme is a lot more good natured than the treatment that Peter Molyneux gets. Granted, Todd Howard's less than accurate truths aren't anywhere near the level of Molyneux's. And I would add that Bethesda's games are more fun to play.
Usually if a game is pushed back, it's not because of fine-tuning, finishing content that could be left out for the time being, or bug testing. Pushing back is a major decision, because that's money in the bank at stake. A game is pushed back usually because there is something majorly wrong that is going to take a lot longer to correct that will heavily impact gameplay before they shuffle off the game build to be pressed to disc and whatnot.
I'm not a fool and I don't expect perfection. Bugs and glitches happen. I've come to expect them, as it reminds me that I'm playing a video game. This dates back for me as far as my NES days in 1989. But back then if an NES cartridge gltiched or bugged, you had no choice but to restart from scratch unless you bothered to write down the level code you were on. Back then, what they shipped was what you got. We live in a wonderful age where patches and bug fixes are a thing.
So if the game IS pushed back, I would expect it to be direly vital to the game's stability, not because a fetch quest didn't make the cut, or a unique weapon got left on the cutting room floor. Like, they would have to discover a bug that causes the game to crash when you equip the Pipboy, that has it's roots in a string of code involving multiple instances of conflict across the game matrix. That is worth pushing a games release back.
I remember Alpha Protocol was pushed back almost a year, and the announcement to do so was almost literally the day before it was supposed to be in stores. You would think that this is a little late. The game should have been ready, in CD cases, and in boxes in the back room of stores.
I think the story was they discovered a fatal flaw in the game, and recalled all printed copies. But I like to think the Development Lead simply forgot to send off the Game build to the publishers and didn't realize it till that morning.
yeah no movie/book/game ever survives editing process things get cut period.
I would agree.
Even at the end of the video you linked there is that semi-famous picture of Todd Howard's face with stuff like "hes the CEO of your ass" and "Todd Howard can pull of this look while you cant without looking gay" and other stuff.
Despite his tendency to talk about things before they are finished, and thus, before they get but because they don't work, Todd still manages to put out games with tons of [censored] in them, so people forgive him for the things that don't make the cut.
Peter Molyneux just doesn't release anything.
Good ideas are relative, and sometimes things just get dropped to the cutting room floor, because they just didn't work out for the Devs or fit what they had in mind or wanted.
Or time constraints and the publisher breathing down their necks to get them the final build force them to drop the last few in-game projects they were working on. It happens.
Good ideas are easy. Finding a way to ?implement those good ideas is much harder.
Some cut content is very normal, even when there is not a critical time pressure.
It's editing.
They waited to announce until they were ready.
There's only 115 days, I don't see this launch delaying.
So man people use Skyrim's "gimmicky release date" as a scapegoat, but it's not like Skyrim was a disaster that could have been averted had they only delayed it a few months; and if they felt they needed to delay it, they would have, as they've done before.
They delivered a complete game on 11.11.11, and we'll probably never know how much of the cut content was cut because of time constraints, irreconcilable errors, or just a matter of taste. Giants in the civil war seems like a case of the latter to me, but who knows.
It certainly wasn't as rushed as New Vegas, which shipped with a sorely underdeveloped Legion storyline and some really painful bugs, even by Bethesda's standards. And New Vegas is still pretty great; but you can't give it a pass if you're complaining about rushed development.
it might also be cut for other reasons like performance. technical or gameplay reasons.
Yes this would probably be solvable with enough time but its not that they was working on it the 10/11/11 and then stopped and scraqed it because of timeout.
Fallout 4 was pretty much done then they announced it, yes more work to do but nothing real hard. Remember that after the quests are done they have to be voiced and tested.
You also have to do general beta testing including long plays to see if something will show up.
On the contrary, this is exactly the impression many of us get when we look through the game files.
To some of us, Skyrim's unused game files feel different than the unused game files we see in Oblivion or Morrowind. In those games, content has obviously been cut out fairly early as a natural process of developing a game. It is a process all developers go through.
Let's look at Oblivion. Looking at the unfinished state of cut content like Sutch or the Chorrol Arena it is fairly obvious that these things were not cut at the last minute. Someone made the call to cut that content early and as a consequence very little of it is in a finished state.
Skyrim feels different. There are so many files so close to being finished that one does in fact get the impression of employees working hard right up to quitting time, at which time the files are yanked out of their hands so that the game can go gold.
We will never know for sure. The people in this thread who claim that 11/11/11 was not a factor cannot prove it. Those of us who believe that 11/11/11 was a significant factor also cannot prove it. The only people who can prove it are the employees at Bethesda and they're not talking.
Wait wait wait. I could have sworn that the Skyrim arena system was cut because TH talked about time constraints. I swear he mentioned this in a pod cast or something...