Dear Bethseda,

It'd be great if you could read this and give replies to these following issues...

• You built a new game engine for Skyrim. Why is there no cloth simulation? For modders, cloth simulation would have been a very fun toy to work with!
  
  
• The hairstyles. Oh god, the hair. It feels like I'm still stuck in 2005. Why? Havok's many physics packages that are available could have made this much more lively. Was it budget constraints that prevented Bethseda from implementing this?
  
  
• DirectX 11. Why is that non-existent in Skyrim?
  
  
• The design of the UI. Why does it feel like it was geared towards consoles, and not properly adapted for the PC? It's just a few command swaps, from my perspective. It would have truly been a PC centric title if the drag-and-drop inventory management system from Morrowind was married with Oblivion's inventory management system. That way, it would be usable by both PC and Consoles.
  
  
• And finally, this question: Why does Skyrim, on its face, feel like a last-gen game despite large world scale and depth of the mechanics present? Perhaps it's a technical side of the game that makes it feel that way? (Here's what I percieve: Lack of DX11, no cloth simulation, everything seems to have been made using techniques from before 2010, etc.)
  
  
• When a storm happens in the city, why does nothing seem to be impacted by the storm? I'm talking store signs and trees. They just stand stock-still as if made of stone while a blizzard whiteout howls throughout the night. This was a huge immersion-breaker, though people who would not have normally noticed such details, would have seen the details had they really been impacted by the wind. (Their reaction: "Hey, that's pretty cool! The signs sway when the storm's a-heavin'!")
  
  
• Also, one last thing: Why is there no multiplayer function at all? I mean...the ability to host a 6-player session in a persistent world version of Skyrim, would have been a great way to gradually bring the Elder Scrolls into competition with Neverwinter Nights. It would have been nice if I could have had a friend coming along with me for the ride to defeat Alduin, the World Eater.

So, that's pretty much all I have for my grievances with Skyrim. All told, Skyrim is definitely a Game of the Year contender. I just feel that a little more work on asset and physics development (cloth simulation, for example, so we could have properly flowing capes and dresses, as well as flowing hair) would have made the game world feel so much more alive.

-NK

Bumping this, because quite simply, I feel that Bethseda is selling themselves short by not addressing some of these issues regarding game design decisions.

Console = major sales

Making the PC version far too superior = making the console players feel not as great as if the PC version is just similar or slightly better = major loss in sales

I was partially with you until you mentioned multiplayer.

I have to agree.
Sadly though a ton of people will bash on you for bringing up the 'Multiplayer' idea.
Personally I think they are just being stupid. Would having multiplayer co-op affect them? NO. SO SHUT UP. If it's there, it's there for the people who want it!
If you don't want it, DON'T USE IT! It's as simple as that!

As for the others things, I also have to agree on.

I think Bethesda was premature of setting the release date of 11.11.11. and sticking to it quite arrogantly.
So much more could have been added, tweaked and fixed, but they stubbornly decided not to and want their 'special' 11.11.11 release.
Honestly I would rather them implant all these things and have the release for 12.12.12!

Just my opinion though. I feel ya bro. I wish they had all those things. :cryvaultboy:

I agree with you on most parts. It's just some that don't bother me, the latest game pre-Skyrim I played was WoW/Oblivion.

Also, Multiplayer + TES = blasphemy.

Honestly I have no idea why people are against a simple co-op multiplayer.

All of these are things that would have been cool, I just don't know if they could have implemented them all, and keep in mind most if not all would be just for the PC, as much as many people would wish they can't just ignore consoles, but they can't ignore the PC either.

Personally? Most people oppose to multiplayer, only a small playerbase gains something and it drains a lot of resources for that who would be better spent on other parts of the game.

Why is multiplayer such a downer topic. Being able to throw in my battle axe wielding Orc in with my dads lightning weilding Mage to bring the dragon world to it's knees would be awesome. And it CAN be done. But I'm not saying it should

There's only so much content and technology you can cram in a game before you have to find a way to scale your team massively. That usually doesn't work efficiently on software projects. Skyrim's focus isn't on cloth simulation, windswept hair or more shader effects. Some of that is doable with mods on PC anyway. Other games don't give you as much to do in the world.

Small-scale multiplayer in TES would quite possibly be the most awesome thing ever built by the hand of man. Bethesda won't make it and that's ok. DaggerXL just might get it though.

Back on topic: I'm still finding little details and features in Skyrim I didn't expect. I just discovered I can shoot down crows! Yeah, so the model looks like crap close-up; it was fun and new.

Theres quite alot of people out there who want it though. And honestly it doesn't seem that it would be that hard. Look at Baldur's Gate/Neverwinter Nights. That was a pure awesome RPG Singleplayer experience (Back in 1998 anyways) And it had 6 player co-op and it worked perfectly. It would be a blast to grab a buddy or family member and fire up some Fun time Skyrim Co-op.

There are 3 people in my family that want the Co-op so we could all play together but alas...It isn't so.

And also Cross-Platform between the Xbox 360/PS3/PC should be possible for the non-existent multiplayer. It's not skilled based game so it would work perfectly making the player base for it higher.

Therefore, it would work.

Economics dictates that they design for consoles so that they don't have to spend time scaling things between platforms. That's just how it is.

Making it an MMO would be horrible, but basic coop functionality doesn't demand too many resources. Basically one guy could spend a couple of weeks on it and be done with it.

What made the ES good was the singleplayer, multiplayer doesn't really have a place there, plus the above posts. Co-op is more work than you might think.

While I have no real gripes about the game so far ( only lvl 9 at the moment ). Bethesda would have known that this would be a huge seller on the PC world wide they should have invested some extra coin for the PC version. What they failed to do was utilize what the PC has to offer and make the game even better. This does not make it a bad game for the PC but it could have been better., If Bethesda need to learn a lesson here it is that PC gamers are not stupid and we expect bang for our bucks.

I really like most of the ideas. I don't like the idea of multi-player because I prefer TES as single player and would rather development time be spent on other features but that's just me.

[img]http://rlv.zcache.com/tru_dat_tshirt-p235782087310113803t5hl_400.jpg[/img]
Tru-Dat

Actually, they ended up using just a modified version of the engine used in Oblivion, iirc.


Who knows, other than perhaps Skyrim has been in development for a long enough time that DirectX 11 would've been a difficulty to include? Hairstyles probably weren't a priority though.


Because it was, lol.


Because it is a last-gen game. Skyrim and Oblivion have to run on the same hardware - that is, Xbox 360 and PS3 (Dunno is Oblivion was PS3 as well though). Consoles are overdo for a new generation, being 5-6 years old. Until Sony and Microsoft get off their bottoms and up the ante, the large share of gaming dominated by the console market ensures that this will be the case.


Probably either overlooked, or with how much detail the game otherwise has, perhaps they were cutting back on the 'icing on the cake', as it were, to reduce lag. I know the PS3 already has terrible problems with frame rates on this game, so maybe they were concerned about overloading consoles or lower end PC's with too much stuff.


Multiplayer really wouldn't work. It's a neat thing to consider - but there's already real problems getting stuck on your NPC companion while navigating dungeons. What would happen if you had multiple other players running around with you? Further, TES is just geared for single player - the combat system isn't very friendly for multiple people attacking the same target - too easy to hit each other, too hard to maneuver. Plus, compared to other co-op action games, I could see Skyrim getting boring really fast.

THIS

cloth? :dry:

The [censored] does this have to do with the PC?

To the OP: I agree with you somewhat. I'm a pc player and Beth did put us in the back burner but in the end Beth is a business. Money can be harvested in the console arena and with microsoft support, even more so. The writing is on the wall when TES will only be a console game. Luckily for me and other pc players TES will, by then, be so arcady for us to care at all.

First 6 are because of consoles.
7th point is because of the amazing balance Skyrim has and mods.

I do love Skyrim.

This is my primary complaint about Skyrim and other games that seem to be developed for the console and ported to PC. I don't mind the UI so much as the lack of physics being processed by the CPU instead of the GPU. I could be wrong but I think Skyrim's physics are processed by the CPU because console video cards do not support physics.

I don't know how much work it would take to make it so the PC version used physics on the video card rather than the GPU. It seams like it could be a simple driver check to see if the video card supports physics and if it does then use it and if not then use the consoles version. The physics would be smoother and FPS would go up as well. I just don't understand why the cost of development relative to sales has to be so tightly wound, I mean sometimes a better engineered product is worth spending a few dollars.

I bet the reason for DX9 and not DX11 is to reach a larger player base.

I don't see why this can't be done during install so the needed binaries are setup. Obviously this would require a bit of time but I would think it would not be to long and worth it. Then again the people are buying the PC version so I guess they lack the motivation.

Do you sometimes reply to a thread just so you can show that picture. :fallout:

Multiplayer takes dev time away from the single-player, as well as disc space and budget. Want an example? Bioshock 2, or perhaps AC: Brotherhood. In the future, I will say Mass Effect 3.