[Request]. Morrowind port on AndroidiOS systems.

Post » Fri Dec 12, 2014 10:25 pm

Before creating this thread, I contacted with Bethesda support and Alex S. from support suggested (Incident: 141206-000471) to create topic on this forum

Hi!
I'm a huge fan of Elder Scrolls franchise, and I have a feature request to port any of TES games to mobile operating systems like Google Android or Apple iOS. In the past, I played mobile games like Shadowkey and Dawnstar and I loved them. So, please make a port or enhanced edition of these games or maybe even Morrowind. AFAIK, modern smartphones and tablets support modern APIs like OpenGL ES 3.1, OpenGL 4.4 (for example - Tegra K1 SoC with full-featured Direct3D12/OpenGL 4.5 compatible Kepler GPU), gadgets can work with controllers like MOGA or NVIDIA SHIELD and others. Studios like 2K, Rockstar, Valve and others released games with rich graphics like GTA: San Andreas, Bioshock, Deus Ex, Bard's Tale, Mount&Blade: Warband, Half-Life, Portal, XCOM, Oddworld and other, so modern devices can work even with games graphically equal to Morrowind. I'm ready to pay for good games like TES (Shadowkey, Morrowind etc), and in Morrowind case you can make Tribunal and Bloodmoon packs available via in-app purchases.

I have devices with good performance that can theoretically run even Morrowind
Sony Xperia Z1 Compact (720p, 4-core Qualcomm Krait 2.26 GHz CPU, Qualcomm Adreno 330 (~130 GFLOPS), OpenGL ES 3.0 compatible)
NVIDIA SHIELD Portable (720p, 5-core ARM Cortex-A15 1.8 GHz CPU, NVIDIA GeForce 4 ULP (~97 GFLOPS), OpenGL ES 2.0 compatible with multiple NVIDIA's extensions, integrated Xbox-compatible controller)
Tegra 4 and Adreno 330 are fully Direct3D10 compatible GPUs on hardware level, but on middleware level in Android/iOS they use OpenGL-renderers. Many popular devices like Galaxy Note 3/4, S5, iPhone 5S/6, iPad Air, Shield Tablet have powerful GPUs and more than 1 Gb of RAM, so there are more than 100 million potential buyers of TES games on Android/iOS.

AFAIK, NVIDIA has rich SDK tools for Android like debuggers and profilers in Tegra Android Development Pack. Last year John Carmack told that Android platform has a great gaming potential, and modern releases of Android has multiple improvements in graphics stack (OpenGL ES 3.0 support in Android 4.3, OpenGL ES 3.1 and hardware tesselation in Android 5.0). I'm not an Apple user, but, AFAIK, Apple's GPU's support OpenGL ES 3.0 and Metal API for enhanced performance. Android and iOS support native development via NDKs, so Bethesda engineers can reuse native C/C++ libraries from Windows version.

So, IMO, modern (2013/2014) Android/iOS hardware haven't any technical restrictions to porting your perfect old games like Daggerfall, Shadowkey,
Morrowind etc., so, please, make a port for Android/iOS and I'm sure that TES fans will purchase your games on Apple AppStore and Google Play Store (or Amazon AppStore).

Best regards,
Anzhel Bozhinov.

P. S. I can provide prooflinks, but I haven't permission to post links on this forum.

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Dawn Farrell
 
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Post » Fri Dec 12, 2014 6:05 pm

Welcome to the forums. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it sounds like Bethesda's customer service person was just looking for a polite way to give you the brush off. There have been many threads over the years about porting/remastering any or all of Beth's games to various platforms, including but not necessarily limited to the Android, tablets, Macs, etc. as well as consoles like the PS3, PS4 and Xbox one. The general consensus is that it is never going to happen. Once Bethesda is done with a game, they move on to the next game and don't look back.

Also, Bethesda has a reputation for not communicating with its fans. It is extremely rare to see Bethesda posting here, mostly its just official announcements. But Gstaff does occassionally post, just not very often. In my three plus years as an active member here I have never seen any post anywhere from anyone associated with Bethesda other than about a dozen posts from Gstaff, and half or more of those were official announcements. I have responded to a couple of Gstaff's posts asking questions and never got any response.

I would not expect anyone at Bethesda to take any notice of your thread. In general, Bethesda does not seem to pay whole lot of attention to what people say here. Its mostly just a place for fans to gather and share ideas and information.

Regarding the permission to post links, you need to make a few more posts before you are allowed to do that. I think you need 10 posts under your belt, or something like that.

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cassy
 
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