PC gamers, do feel this way? : V - Skyrim

» Thu Dec 30, 2010 3:14 am

People misuse the word "dumbed-down." How can something be dumbed-down when it wasn't meant to be "smart" in the first place? The PC version is just aiming towards lower specs. It's not being dumbed-down in any way.

Perhaps "toned-down" is a better way to word it? I always find dumbing-down as something more to do with game-play.

» Wed Dec 29, 2010 8:17 pm

What do I want?

Hmmm.

Utilization of more than the 512 megs of ram most consoles natively boast. And that is just not -using it-, but using it efficiently.

I find that funny (as a PC user). Why? Because programming for consoles is all about using the limited resources (since the hardware doesn't change over years and years) more efficiently. That's why Year 5 games are more amazing than Year 3 games are more amazing than Year 1 games - the programmers, having a stable hardware & OS platform to study, have learned how to do stuff more efficiently.

Meanwhile, over in PC land, they have historically not given a crap, because..... who cares? Users can always add more RAM, bigger HD, better GPU, etc. No need to control bloat, learn to stop programming wastefully, etc. (Note, I'm talking PC software development in general - it's ludicrous, for example, that a word processor can have a multi-hundred meg install, for instance.)

This past few years of cross-development between consoles & PCs has been a boon to gaming - the massive requirement bloat has been severely held down, compared to previous eras.

» Wed Dec 29, 2010 7:57 pm

"Having it the same on all platforms"

That is a dumb statement.

Why?

Because the PC is light-years ahead of rotting old console hardware. Console hardware was mid-high end 5 years ago. Moore's Law basically states computing power doubles each year, and so far, it is proven to be true.
That means PCs can have at most 2^5 the computing power of consoles. On an average computer though, it is still probably around 5+ times more powerful than a console. Why the hell do we not take advantage of that and make something good?

Why do devs insist that ancient console hardware is good, and continually develop something that is holding back EVERYTHING? Look at Dragon Age 2. Streamlined to [censored] because of consoles. It also barely looks better in graphical terms, and in some cases worse.

Now, I doubt that will happen to Skyrim, but devs should stop neglecting the PC and it's power.

» Wed Dec 29, 2010 11:36 pm

Have you guys seen the amount of http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/04/eidos-talk-deus-ex-human-revolution-pc-exclusive-features/ they've put into the PC port of Deus Ex: Human Revolution? I know that when you're making a sequel to a game as iconic as Deus Ex, you really want to go out of your way to ensure the original fanbase feels familiar with the game and not like they've been displaced in favor of a new demographic, but it's still a very interesting example worth looking into.

A traditional drag-and-drop inventory, keypads you actually have to manipulate, additional options for customizable keybinds, and look at the http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2011/05/Deus-Ex-Human-Revolution-action-shot-1.jpg. Can it be? It's basically the interface from Deus Ex 1! More importantly, it doesn't cover up half of the screen! I understand that some people think us PC gamers are fortunate enough to be getting mod tools, but I think Bethesda has to realize that they could (and should) always go the extra mile - there's MUCH more to creating a worthy PC game than upping the texture quality and making the fonts smaller. And as Mitheledh so helpfully pointed out, PC gamers are hardly the minority and should get just as much attention as the console folk.

Todd says they went with the hidden UI for increased immersion, I say it's so they can get away with not having to tackle the issue of creating an intuitive and non-console-centric interface head-on. Todd justifies the big, flashy fullscreen skill foldout by how "sleek" and Apple-esque it is, but to me it's not that special. I hope Pete Hines really meant it when he said that the PC interface is "in good hands." :spotted owl:

» Wed Dec 29, 2010 8:19 pm

this is a silly statement because CD Projekt is a Polish developer and PC gaming is much, much bigger in Northern and Eastern Europe than anywhere else in the world. TW2 plays much better with a gamepad than with a mouse and keyboard but calling it "console crap" is just ignorant because it wouldn't mesh with the general console gamer demographic at all.

as both a pro-Microsoft troll and as a proud, lifelong member of the PC gaming master race, i'm generally disappointed in how much PC gamers hawk on and on about graphics and worthless [censored]. the only meaningful ways in which consoles are holding back PC gaming are a) in limited controls (which for the most part is mitigated by good developers who realize that a keyboard has like ten times the number of keys as a gamepad has buttons (Bethesda has proven several times that they are one of these developers)), B)in memory constraints (which for the most part is mitigated by good developers who know how to optimize their games well (Bethesda has proven several times that they are not one of these developers)), and c)in storage capacity.

PC gamers have absolutely no issue with games spanning multiple discs, but you can't have a game that requires mandatory installation on the 360, and since a 360 disc can only hold around 7GB, games that could and should span several discs are forced to cut content. Oblivion is a confirmed example of this. how in the hell Rockstar managed to fit everything they did into GTA4 on one disc is something i'll never understand.

poor optimization is not a new concept at all, nor is it something explicitly fueled by console limitations. i generally feel like most games are getting more and more optimized as time goes by - Fallout 3 runs much better than Oblivion at the same settings on the same hardware, despite having more going on in a single scene on a technical level. the sole fact that a game like Skyrim has full dynamic lighting on consoles makes me feel confident that it will run beautifully. sure people will have problems with it, and they'll complain loudly and yell BETHESDA IS A [censored] DEVELOPER, but welcome to PC gaming - hardware conflicts are part and parcel, and PC exclusives like ARMA and STALKER arguably suffer more from poor optimization than multi-platform games.

(i'm totally a wall of text factory today [censored])

Its clear you don tknow what your talking about sorry.
Revise your thinking, get some facts.

» Thu Dec 30, 2010 12:19 am

I'm getting a negative vibe here on Xbox users.

Did people miss the fact that Todd stated in which Skyrim is being developed on the PC? Yes, Xbox is his favorite console, but Bethesda has always developed their games on the PC first (Sort of obvious..)

I don't mean to cause flame bait here, but PC users are getting higher textures/resolutions and the CK. Bethesda doesn't have to release their CK to you (Something other Devs NEVER do.) As a former PC user now Xbox user, I would be extremely happy with that. What do you want Bethesda to do, screw over 70% of the fanbase and go PC exclusive? Not gonna happen. I think you should be thankful for Bethesda, because the way I see it, they're putting in a lot of effort into the PC version of a multiplatform game, again, something other Devs don't really tend to do.

» Thu Dec 30, 2010 12:28 am

I'm getting a negative vibe here on Xbox users.

Did people miss the fact that Todd stated in which Skyrim is being developed on the PC? Yes, Xbox is his favorite console, but Bethesda has always developed their games on the PC first (Sort of obvious..)

Because coding in C++ is hard on Xbox.

» Wed Dec 29, 2010 6:14 pm

I find that funny (as a PC user). Why? Because programming for consoles is all about using the limited resources (since the hardware doesn't change over years and years) more efficiently. That's why Year 5 games are more amazing than Year 3 games are more amazing than Year 1 games - the programmers, having a stable hardware & OS platform to study, have learned how to do stuff more efficiently.

Meanwhile, over in PC land, they have historically not given a crap, because..... who cares? Users can always add more RAM, bigger HD, better GPU, etc. No need to control bloat, learn to stop programming wastefully, etc. (Note, I'm talking PC software development in general - it's ludicrous, for example, that a word processor can have a multi-hundred meg install, for instance.)

This past few years of cross-development between consoles & PCs has been a boon to gaming - the massive requirement bloat has been severely held down, compared to previous eras.

Not so smart comment, a unoptimized PC game looks way better than an optimized console game becuase of the 512 limitation, old CPU power, when the Console games looks near pc the game is plagued with limitations in its gameplay.

» Thu Dec 30, 2010 3:59 am

I find that funny (as a PC user). Why? Because programming for consoles is all about using the limited resources (since the hardware doesn't change over years and years) more efficiently. That's why Year 5 games are more amazing than Year 3 games are more amazing than Year 1 games - the programmers, having a stable hardware & OS platform to study, have learned how to do stuff more efficiently.

Meanwhile, over in PC land, they have historically not given a crap, because..... who cares? Users can always add more RAM, bigger HD, better GPU, etc. No need to control bloat, learn to stop programming wastefully, etc. (Note, I'm talking PC software development in general - it's ludicrous, for example, that a word processor can have a multi-hundred meg install, for instance.)

This past few years of cross-development between consoles & PCs has been a boon to gaming - the massive requirement bloat has been severely held down, compared to previous eras.

Despite doing so, you are still severely limited by the hardware.

Lets say we have Anti-Matter and Coal to burn wood to generate energy.

Anti-Matter (we'll call this consoles (not that accurate an anology, but bear with me) has 100 pounds of wood to burn at 100% efficiency. Lets say that generates 100 arbitrary units of energy.
Coal (way understated) has 1000 pounds of wood to burn at 70 percent efficiency. 700 arbitrary units of energy are created. And that is 10x the power, which is what a mid-high end PC can easily achieve.

Obviously Coal (PC) wins. And in reality, console games aren't being programmed more efficiently.

Consider this:

Consoles run games at 720p (or in many cases, lower). 1280x720 is a very low resolution for a modern computer, as a modern computer will usually have 1080p or 1650x1050 or something along those lines.
Lower resolution = massive performance gain.
Consoles also have no/cheap anti-aliasing which is the reason for all of those excessive jagged edges (Halo 3 is a massive offender).
Their textures are also EXTREMELY low resolution. I don't know how I can stress this enough. It gives devs an excuse to slack off and put bad resolution textures on the PC side.
Everything is set on low.

That means it is extremely easy to get good performance.

It's not all just about graphics though.

They need to dumb things down for the consoles to function properly. Most developers call this streamlining, but look at DA2. They need to limit functions that a player can carry out so that they can map it onto the controller.
And that is not good for evolving gameplay.

» Wed Dec 29, 2010 5:46 pm

I hope they see sense, either the console versions need to look amazing, which i cant see happening as they're still on ageing direct X 9, or they need to allow us to have a better graphical experience.

They have already said those on pc with direct x 11 will have added benefits, which dont need explanation if you have it.

All others regarding xbox360 vs playstation, its not a question of which is better, it is a question which is easier to work with and that happens to be xbox360, both platform actually play games at about the same lvl, playstation has a stronger set up, but suffers from poor system usage, whereas xbox360 has a cheaper set up, but is a much more optimal system usage machine, thus xbox vs ps = nearly the same gameplay overall

» Thu Dec 30, 2010 2:40 am

i copy pasted that to a text file next time someone says having a PC doesnt make that much of a difference for games besides textures.

:)

And notice I didn't mention any (well, except for shader model 5) DX-11 features like tesselation, which I doubt many understand....just that you could do things like, oh, totally drop bump and normal maps and go with strict displacement mapping.
You can also use tesselation in certain animation abilities. Take a hard shelled beast, with exposed flesh between the rigid plates. Run a sine waved tesselation script on those 'fleshy' parts, and the beast would -expand- at the seams as it breathes...or prepares to attack....and then shrinks as the plates move together. No keyframing, no extra geometry, just tesselation and structuring of the mesh so that it =can= do that....and setting a minimum for the polygon size, so that after a certain point, it displaces as it tesselates rather than 'just' tesselating.
Or make low polygon figure meshes (like 5k polys or far less, depending), then boost it at runtime to levels that can accept a Zbrush displacement map. Talk about turning a Quake 1 figure into a dynamically lighted, high res monster....
Or the Compute Shader, which allows you to run non graphic code on your GPU; AI, collision, whatever. With 336 processing nodes in the full Geforce 460 GPU, you could offload a =lot= of math.

» Wed Dec 29, 2010 6:44 pm

Its clear you don tknow what your talking about sorry.
Revise your thinking, get some facts.

well i'm certainly humbled by this.

Not so smart comment, a unoptimized PC game looks way better than an optimized console game becuase of the 512 limitation, old CPU power, when the Console games looks near pc the game is plagued with limitations in its gameplay.

if you think STALKER doesn't look dated as hell compared to even console-EXCLUSIVE games from the same timeframe you're pretty much just dumb.

» Wed Dec 29, 2010 4:14 pm

All of them comes to the same conclusion: More processing power.

RAM isnt processing power. it determines the max size of textures and effects you can use in a game. thats why console textures look damn fugly. the 360 and PC could in fact run higher rez textures if they werent idiots and limited themselves with such a small amount of RAM. when the systems came out the recommended RAM for most games was 512mb. anyone with a brain at microsoft or sony should have recognized that within a year or two console games were going to require more than that to keep up.

techinically you could squish the rest of it into "just processing" but that is belittling the HUGE difference in performance PCs vs consoles. there was an even better list awhile back that i wish i had copied and saved that had even more ways games could be improved with modern hardware adn still easily scale down to work on consoles.

» Wed Dec 29, 2010 4:42 pm

:)

And notice I didn't mention any (well, except for shader model 5) DX-11 features like tesselation, which I doubt many understand....just that you could do things like, oh, totally drop bump and normal maps and go with strict displacement mapping.
You can also use tesselation in certain animation abilities. Take a hard shelled beast, with exposed flesh between the rigid plates. Run a sine waved tesselation script on those 'fleshy' parts, and the beast would -expand- at the seams as it breathes...or prepares to attack....and then shrinks as the plates move together. No keyframing, no extra geometry, just tesselation and structuring of the mesh so that it =can= do that....and setting a minimum for the polygon size, so that after a certain point, it displaces as it tesselates rather than 'just' tesselating.
Or make low polygon figure meshes (like 5k polys or far less, depending), then boost it at runtime to levels that can accept a Zbrush displacement map. Talk about turning a Quake 1 figure into a dynamically lighted, high res monster....
Or the Compute Shader, which allows you to run non graphic code on your GPU; AI, collision, whatever. With 336 processing nodes in the full Geforce 460 GPU, you could offload a =lot= of math.

yeah..........i didnt understand much of them except polygons. those are shapes.

» Thu Dec 30, 2010 1:52 am

Not in BF3.

The PC version of BF3 won't run on systems that doesn't support DX11. Great scalability indeed...

Well, sorry if technology advances and we aren't stuck in Doom 2 graphics. Truly, I feel really bad for that.

» Thu Dec 30, 2010 12:26 am

Have you guys seen the amount of http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/04/eidos-talk-deus-ex-human-revolution-pc-exclusive-features/ they've put into the PC port of Deus Ex: Human Revolution? I know that when you're making a sequel to a game as iconic as Deus Ex, you really want to go out of your way to ensure the original fanbase feels familiar with the game and not like they've been displaced in favor of a new demographic, but it's still a very interesting example worth looking into.

A traditional drag-and-drop inventory, keypads you actually have to manipulate, additional options for customizable keybinds, and look at the http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2011/05/Deus-Ex-Human-Revolution-action-shot-1.jpg. Can it be? It's basically the interface from Deus Ex 1! More importantly, it doesn't cover up half of the screen! I understand that some people think us PC gamers are fortunate enough to be getting mod tools, but I think Bethesda has to realize that they could (and should) always go the extra mile - there's MUCH more to creating a worthy PC game than upping the texture quality and making the fonts smaller. And as Mitheledh so helpfully pointed out, PC gamers are hardly the minority and should get just as much attention as the console folk.

Todd says they went with the hidden UI for increased immersion, I say it's so they can get away with not having to tackle the issue of creating an intuitive and non-console-centric interface head-on. Todd justifies the big, flashy fullscreen skill foldout by how "sleek" and Apple-esque it is, but to me it's not that special. I hope Pete Hines really meant it when he said that the PC interface is "in good hands." :spotted owl:

Am I the only one who sees this Deus Ex Pc optimization thing just as an advertisemant.

Most of these things they say about the interface are already done in other console ports (drag and drop quickslots? Nearly every game with clickable quickslots has this...). And I don't know what's so specaial in that screen-shot. First it doesn't really look like the one from DE1, it still misses mainly the augmentation menu, but I don't know how this is any different than a console FPS interface...

And implementing the mouse into the hacking minigame? How about implementing the keyboard to, I don't know, figuring out and typing in the username and password by yourself maybe...

» Wed Dec 29, 2010 6:09 pm

Am I the only one who sees this Deus Ex Pc optimization thing just as an advertisemant.

No, but what saddens is me how they actually have to market these sorts of things as if they're something totally profound. Ten years ago, it would have been a no-brainer for PC developers. Then we had Crysis 2's "Press ~~Start~~ Enter". :facepalm:

» Wed Dec 29, 2010 9:06 pm

I don't care if its a 360 port, but I do care if the interface is difficult to use on a PC. Remember Oblivion's huge font and 5 inventory slots at a time? Terrible. Disgusting. Pathetic.

» Wed Dec 29, 2010 10:18 pm

We'll have texture overhaul mods to make the game look like The Witcher 2, so I'm not too worried. Lighting effects will be hard to improve, but I'm hoping Bethesda will do a good enough job in the vanilla game.

I never felt Oblivion was too limited on PC by being multi-platform. At least the limitations that were there were fixable, unlike the console versions.

» Wed Dec 29, 2010 7:11 pm

I find that funny (as a PC user). Why? Because programming for consoles is all about using the limited resources (since the hardware doesn't change over years and years) more efficiently. That's why Year 5 games are more amazing than Year 3 games are more amazing than Year 1 games - the programmers, having a stable hardware & OS platform to study, have learned how to do stuff more efficiently.

Meanwhile, over in PC land, they have historically not given a crap, because..... who cares? Users can always add more RAM, bigger HD, better GPU, etc. No need to control bloat, learn to stop programming wastefully, etc. (Note, I'm talking PC software development in general - it's ludicrous, for example, that a word processor can have a multi-hundred meg install, for instance.)

This past few years of cross-development between consoles & PCs has been a boon to gaming - the massive requirement bloat has been severely held down, compared to previous eras.

I agree. While I don't like some of the gameplay 'consolification' that is happening I'm glad that the existing hardware is used more efficiently instead of simply relying on better, more expensive hardware. I remember how it used to be in the late 90's/early 2000's. Back then the hardware spiral was crazy. I bought a system in 99 for ~1500$ and less than a year later the first games came out that I couldn't play properly at all (which means even on medium settings they would give me a very bad framerate) because the system requirements were too high. 2-3 years later I could completely forget about playing any new games. Computer gaming was a very expensive hobby, you basically had to spend 1000$ a year to be able to play the latest games. Now I could still play almost all games on decent settings with the computer I bought 5 years ago (which cost less than 1500$).

While I love computer gaming it's not the main focus of my life. If I constantly had to buy and install new, expensive hardware only to play the latest games then I'd probably switch to consoles instead (which I did after my 99 computer - bought a Xbox in 2003) and just play a few 'casual' games for the fun of it from time to time.

» Wed Dec 29, 2010 5:28 pm

I don't care if its a 360 port, but I do care if the interface is difficult to use on a PC. Remember Oblivion's huge font and 5 inventory slots at a time? Terrible. Disgusting. Pathetic.

that isn't "difficult to use", it's just a minor inconvenience. the interface is still mostly functional and well-organized, and there are people with poor eyesight who don't care about the font size at all. the only major problem is dropping and selling items - everything else works fine. it's not perfect by any means, bu it's certainly not "pathetic".

"difficult to use" would be the interface in pretty much every game Codemasters has ever put out. Red River has a "press return" screen and you cannot press ANY OTHER KEY except return to get through it.

» Thu Dec 30, 2010 7:14 am

that isn't "difficult to use", it's just a minor inconvenience. the interface is still mostly functional and well-organized, and there are people with poor eyesight who don't care about the font size at all. the only major problem is dropping and selling items - everything else works fine. it's not perfect by any means, bu it's certainly not "pathetic".

That size of font on a 1280x1024 screen is most definitely pathetic.

"difficult to use" would be the interface in pretty much every game Codemasters has ever put out. Red River has a "press return" screen and you cannot press ANY OTHER KEY except return to get through it.

I did not mean to imply that Oblivion's interface was difficult to use, only that I care about that aspect. But I was still disappointed in Oblivion's craptastic interface, at least for PC users. Huge fonts and only 5 items at once is not convenient. At least there's always Darnified UI.

» Thu Dec 30, 2010 8:50 am

5 items at once is not convenient.

http://s.uvlist.net/l/y2009/07/61538.jpg

Yes folks, we had scrolling lists of four items at a time in Daggerfall's inventory. At a resolution of 320x200. The fact that Oblivion came out ten years later with more or less has the same interface yet designed for displays with resolutions upwards of 1024x768 is, frankly, pitiful.

» Wed Dec 29, 2010 7:41 pm

http://s.uvlist.net/l/y2009/07/61538.jpg

Yes folks, we had scrolling lists of four items at a time in Daggerfall's inventory. At a resolution of 320x200. The fact that Oblivion came out ten years later with more or less has the same interface yet designed for displays with resolutions upwards of 1024x768 is, frankly, pitiful.

:rofl:

» Thu Dec 30, 2010 6:51 am

Direct X 11 is definitely overrated Ive used it many times but fail to see any substantial difference in looks and Ive heard from many game developers that its just meant to be a performance boost for rigs that you wouldn't see to much of a difference if any.
But i guess its better than nothing Direct X 9 isn't that outdated its pretty flexible with modern games. The Xbox 360's overall graphics power is good there's no doubt about it and the game still looks good so you shouldn't worry its not the graphics that make the game its the engine and game play.

But the BIG thing people apparently refuse to see is the fact that Bethesda soft-works is using ALOT of money on the game so far for them to go exclusively and make the graphics better for PC, that would take more time and money than they have. Do you guys even stop to think how hard it really is to make an engine like they are right now? hours and hours of work daily are put in, if i was a developer at Bethesda and looked at this topic id feel a bit upset that the work Ive put in wasn't being recognized and simply being seen as "it should look way better for PC" were is the heart in game design if everyone worries about the graphics of the game alone "I think it looks amazing anyway" and not the storyline, lore, AI, Engine, gameplay, etc. Its not being held back for consoles there doing the best they can and doing a great job with there current resources so don't worry it'll still hold true to elder scrolls completely more than others have in the past in fact.

Keep up the great work Bethesda, Skyrim's going to be great. :]