Skyrim: 2nd Best Selling Game in 2011 : V - Skyrim

» Wed Dec 14, 2011 8:13 am

I never envisioned agreeing with and entire post from you, Sheo

Hehe. There's a first time for everything...

Fred discovers a cool unsigned band on a music sharing
Lsite, lets call them Spunkbubble. Fred likes them, searches for more of their music, finds their official page/site and becomes a bit of a fan. Fred is happy, and tells all his friends about his amazing discovery, little realising that other people have also discovered Spunkbubble and are busy sharing their amazing discovery with their friends. So after a while Spunkbubble are generating quite a bit of internet traffic, and a small record company takes an interest. Spunkbubble record an album with said company
and it becomes an underground hit. A bigger record company sign Spunkbubble and promote their material to a wider audience. Sooner or later Spunkbubble are a popular band, videos on tv, second album rocketing up the charts. Fred is unhappy because he is no longer part of the exclusive club that Spunkbubble fandom used to be. To Fred, their music has become 'too mainstream', Spunkbubble have 'sold out' and all the fans apart from Fred are 'plastic fans'. This is simply because Fred cannot get it in to his tiny brain that Spunkbubble don't, and never did, create music specifically for Fred. Spunkbubble have lost a fan, but gained many, many more. They don't care. They've never even heard of Fred.

Disclaimer: I am not in a band called Spunkbubble.

Good example. :thumbsup:

» Wed Dec 14, 2011 6:47 am

Well I think that they had such high sales figures based on past performance, not on this launch. The successful sales figures were based upon their reputation, people expected a great game on launch date being that it is TES. But in light of their less than stellar launch and lack of information on fixes with Skyrim, their next game will suffer the consequences. Whatever they do launch next needs to be perfect, even if it means delays.

Actually, Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout were equally, if not more, buggy at release. Especially on Xbox (the main target platform, sadly), Skyrim seems to run rather well. The only real gamebreaking issue I've seen with Skyrim is the PS3 lag issue. Most other big things are broken quests, very poor PC optimilisation or balance issues. Those have been present in Bethesda games since I've been playing them. There are just way more people playing them now, which means way more people complaining and an overly crowded technical issues forum. The lack of PC optimilisation (bad performance, shadows, textures, mouse issues, UI issues, etc) is what bothers me most. I blame this on a release deadline set too early in the production process which they were hard pressed to make. I hope they take a bit more time for that in the future.

However, I know quite a few people with the game on PC and none have had serious issues with it. It runs fine, it hardly crashes and there are only some minor visual issues. Previous titles had way more issues than this. Will it hurt future sales? It might, but I still think they will match Skyrim's sales or even surpass them.

» Wed Dec 14, 2011 8:15 pm

Did you know Bethesda floated on bankruptcy just before Morrowind came out? How quickly things change.

Which is a bit ironic considering they're publishing and producing for Obsidian, which used to be Interplay, one of the bigger names in gaming back in the 90's.

» Wed Dec 14, 2011 12:47 pm

I'd hope it means they skip Fallout 4 for now and get to work on TES 6 next instead

» Wed Dec 14, 2011 9:30 am

I feel proud and glad. It hopefully means Bethesda can hire some real talented programmers to fix the crappy mess that is their "new" engine in terms of performance, heavily outdated graphics, CTDs, and all the bugs their game got.

Having played Skyrim for 90+ hours, i'm a bit disappointed about the graphics. I'm begining to lean towards the Mediocre end of the spectrum. Awful textures. It's 2011 for Heaven's sake. Perfomance is pretty average.

I think unless they fix the bugs and performance issues for the most part, it's going to bite them when Fallout 4 is released.
They need to get their act together.

ANd that's on the tech front alone. I'm not sure how long they can keep TES gameplay almost untouched.
Will people be this dispositioned to buy TES VI if it turns out it's essentially the same game in a new setting?