I agree to an extent. However, I just hope it doesn't feel totally butchered to that group of people with the powerful PCs.

Well, it's not like it's the last Elder Scrolls game ever, at least, then. Having one directly at the beginning of a console generation is a bad idea just for the hassle and technical problems that may come of it, I'd say, but a year or two into a new console generation would be the best time, in my opinion, and that may be possible for the next Elder Scrolls game.

1-2 years is really what I meant. I would never release a game within a few months of a console's release (Red Ring fiasco of early 2006).

Anyways, since it's almost 5 AM I should probably go to bed. Good discussion.

Unless you're The Witcher 2 it seems



It'd make Skyrim better than it is now, but at the same time a lot of people don't want to see Oblivion part 2, where the game is rushed out onto a set of unfinalized hardware and it barely takes advantage of the system's capabilities. Sure, it'd look good when we are just getting over the previous generation, but towards the end, and especially for PC gamers, it would show its age much more than most other games for that console. No, I think this is the best way to do it, amaze players with the best quality you can show them now, and later on, you have a large window to develop the next title on newer hardware that you know how to take advantage of.

In one of the interviews, Todd talked about how they were able to do some great things even though they're not making a game for "next generation consoles". Meanwhile, I'm watching this video on a Quad core system with DX11 graphics, that is orders of magnitudes faster than any of the current consoles and probably close to what next-gen consoles will be like. I guess we should be happy they're even making a PC version

On the other hand, it's good if the game is optimized and runs fine even on mid-range PCs. I remember the first time I played Oblivion on my then mid-range system. It ran fine in the sewers, but when I went through the gate out into the open world, the frame rate dropped to about 5 FPS. It's also nice if they focus on other things, like the AI, quests, gameplay, instead of just the graphics.

I didn't have that much difficulty running Oblivion on a PC I built in 2002. It certainly wasn't on max settings, but I was able to tweak them sufficiently to get it running at an acceptable framerate.

You put too much faith in Bethesda then I imagine. Fallout 3 ran like garbage on a machine I had that killed the specs the 360 and PS3 were stuck with. It was near top of the line in 2007. Which was a couple of years after the consoles came out. Yet a game that runs smoothly on the consoles ran like crap on my newer, more powerful, machine? Hmm something's fishy... You would think mid/top range PC's built at least a year after the newest console came out would be capable of playing any multiplatform game perfectly and smoothly. But that's not how it works... because PC optimization takes a backseat unless it's a PC exclusive game like TW2.

If you want an even better example. Check out Gothic 4. The specs are more demanding than the specs were for either of the Crysis games yet it looked like an Oblivion clone and was only prioritized to run smoothly only on consoles. It was probably the worst multiplatform optimization I've ever seen in the game. I doubt Skyrim will be that bad... but I also doubt they'll put as much effort into getting a beautiful game running smoothly on modern lowend specs either.

Edit: Oh hey Mitheledh I like that sig, mind if I copy it to spread the word around?

Completely.



You're wrong. We PC users are the ones who always get that.

And the most irritating thing in scale-down terms is the cursed 6,8 (yes, 6,8 GB'S) size limit that 360 DVD's have (because Microsoft is so idiotic that they had to cut down 1 gb for some anti-piracy crap, thing that only NOW are fixing with their new DVD format). At least the PS3 has Blu-Ray, as well as PC's, of course.

Seriously, the 360 is a shame and a complete burden for the actual gaming community.

Of course PC gamers are gonna get screwed over. That's the way it works.

Anyway, off-topic now, but could someone explain to me all these "Say NO to cross-platform communism! We PC gamers AREN'T the minority!" quotes? Are you against the PC getting privileges for being a minority (which is the point of Communism), or what? You seem to be PC gamers after all. I just don't get what you're trying to say.

Whenever someone (Todd) says "We're aiming for equality between all platforms" I just hear "Sorry PC version, your platform will be dumbed down once again by the consoles."

I don't want to have to buy an expensive current-gen PC to play new games, so I don't mind if they hold back. Just because they can doesn't mean they should because high-tech doesn't = more fun

You do know that you can scale down any technical settings on the PC right?

Try clicking the link and reading the article. I saw the article myself before, even linked it to several others in heated console vs PC arguments, but I never thought about putting it into a sig.



This. Morrowind was probably the last TES game that was developed with the PC platform in mind. The xbox version had several memory problems and severe limitations that couldn't play the game properly the way it was meant to be played. So by the time Oblivion rolled around... things were taken out or held back if they couldn't work on the console version. I personally don't think any of the consoles have enough processing power to handle true "Radiant AI" on the dozens or even hundreds of NPC's that populate the areas. So that's why when the game was finally released it was a shell of what it was supposed to be. Merely nothing but sleep and pathing schedules and basic reactions. Nothing really "Radiant" about that when the first Gothic game had the same back around the year 2000.



That's the thing... if they don't optimize it for PC's you're likely going to have to buy an "expensive current-gen PC" to be able to run the game. So you basically need a more expensive machine to run last generation graphics. It's awful and plenty of games are guilty of it.

Not AI elements, to my knowledge only graphics scales



Not to mention the controls hardly ever work for consoles and PCs when there are lots of buttons involved

Still complaining? You should stop complaining, you are already getting more than half of the cake.

You're able to scale down pretty everything technical, either through settings or .ini files - enough to run the game on a very bad computer. It has been like that for ages. For TES there have even been mods to scale things down further (Oldblivion), so that even people on very ancient computers can run the game.


Well the Radiant AI part for Oblivion had nothing to do with consoles as far as I know. What more had to do with consoles for Oblivion is obviously the UI and some possibly graphical features, like soft shadows, which were originally in Oblivion. The (quite funny) reason I know why Radiant AI was a lot "stripped down" before the release was because the NPCs ended up buying all the equipment in the local stores, so when the player actually came to buy... there was nothing left

Oh, Okay :whistling:

optimization of portal 2... crysis 2 is the same i am told

but i can sorta see what you mean.. bbc2 and new vegas and many games on unreal engine

i have an amd athlon ii x4 , 2gb ,nvidia 220 - this should beat an xbox

really? i thought it was the other way around

Your lack of faith disturbs me, the graphics in skyrim are gonna be unreal! if anything, they will be better, or the equivalent of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY0xeCYFpI8 and if your still not convinced i suggest you go watch the skyrim trailer again!

PC users complaining again ?

Your just just hating on Beth with this. If you compare OB to FO3 on the order of optimization then look no further than their respective occlusion culling routines. Oblivion's routine worked on direction of sight which means that 500k poly city that i can't see is still being rendered just because I'm looking towards it.

I got a new PC 2 months ago and I'm running vanilla OB on max w/ 4xAA,4xAF at 45-70 fps and on the same machine I'm running FO3 w/ 2-4x textures, 8xAA and 8xAF at 70-100 fps. I'd say you put too little faith in Beth to come up with an even better routine that even further optimizes their new engine. They'll deliver an even more optimized game than any of their previous games and yet there will still be a few thousand people(you were apparently one of them for FO3) that it won't even run on their configuration or at least not well. That is the nature of PC gaming and it's beyond the scope of any developer to accomplish full function on every one of the millions of hardware configurations floating around out there. No wonder they want to focus on the consoles, that configuration doesn't change constantly. If your a PC this is something you have to come to terms with.

At least my PC can run the Xbox-port on max graphics. It's not the best, but it's better than the consoles.
I won't be complaining. I have mods to enhance the graphics

Mainly wat the pc gets for having to deal with us console gamers snd our 6 yr old software is the creation kit...which possibly might be an amazing mod tool

Hate to bring down your hopes but mods won't be able to do much. Textures will practically the only "graphical" thing they can do, if we can even call textures for something graphical.
New shaders? Don't expect it. New engine for modders to learn to "hack", if it's even possible to do at all. At best, if it will ever happen, it will happen after quite some years. What we see now is what we will get.

In short, mods won't be able to make the game look better graphically... :/