Why are PC games being held back by aged console tech?..... Money. Beth, your a company and need to make money, but PLEASE respond to your fans faith by NOT restricting Skyrims glory on PC. Many in this community time their PC build for the release of Elder Scroll games. I am running an Intel i7 2600K, 2x GTX 580s, and a bunch of ram, and I sure as heck hope it will be put to good use. I've lost faith in Bioware (I wont even start on the PC version of DA2), so Beth please don't go down the same road. Aside from pushing PC graphics capabilities, I recommend retaining the technical nature of the RPG (give us loads of descriptions, on everything, damage details etc), and not dumbing down the PC version. Am I alone in these fears?

As long as they give us a modding tool (which they are), then I'm happy.

lol I am ashamed. Lines of text answered so simply. Bravo!

This pretty much. It's bound to look better on PC regardless and bound to have a large modding community as well. I'm not worried at all.

Eh. I don't even own any of the popular consoles these days and game exclusively on the PC, but I don't want Skyrim to push the PC as far as it'll go or anything. I can't afford to constantly be updating my system to be accommodating to every new game that comes out. I can run Oblivion at max settings but can't run Gothic 4 at the lowest settings. I don't want to have to buy a whole new everything just to be able to play Skyrim.

The trailer looks fantastic and that was apparently run on the 360.

This! you are not alone bro

Hmm, mods. Just export the meshes, subdivide them, and reimport them back into the game. Better models.

Nice comments about the graphics guys, thanks. But what about the technical nature of RPGs going by the way side. Like, lets have an abundance of armor and weapon types etc... Yeah I know, mod it in, but I like to think that Beth makes great games, not good games that need moding.

No, you are not alone.... :ninja:

I believe it to be a legitimate point, if expressed with all the social-finesse of King Kong. With the technology available - if solely looking at processing, hexacores, octacores or the stuff released by Tilera - I wonder why we still see much of the basic premise, game-play wise, in CRPG's with progressively added visual or aesthetic features.

Why not, then, create a world which makes full use of the technology available? A world where NPCS give birth in the diegetic world and create more NPCS whithout pre-defined behaviour? Something like that could truly be called a world, yet few games even utilize four-cores now...

Mr. Howard has all ready said that console is scaled to medium level graphics (as seen in the trailer) and that PC will both have and support higher resolution textures.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Sw_1P2dvWU

Stop complaining about 'consolification'.

Probably because if they tried to make two versions it wouldn't work. Besides, your computer will be outdated in a few months. But don't worry, I bought a top of the line Alienware 2 years ago and it still plays pretty much every game with either high or ultra graphics. Point being if Beth tried to use the top of the line computer when they started, it'd be outdated by the time they were even halfway done and none of the consoles could play it anyway.

I'm greedy. I want an interface designed for mouse controls, higher resolutions, lots of graphical settings, and both mouse and game pad support for pc. Mods alone ain't enough.

There's a magical thing called setting sliders.

Even a crap tastic computer can play Crysis thanks to them!

wuts DA2?

An abomination

... or desire demon, many promises, few delivered.

Unlike the travesty that was DA2's combat (and its third act was also a travesty), Bethesda has not so much as hinted at combat being redesigned for consoles. In fact they are adding complexity to combat and complex hotkeys.

The aspect that the console holds back that is most apparent to me is the level design. Most console games have smaller levels and sometimes very linear linear levels. I attribute this to the small RAM the consoles have. Even if they have less overhead on running applications, 256MB - 512MB still isn't that big in today's standard especially when it has to hold HD texture, NPC data, object data...etc. As a consequence of the memory limitation, games seem to tend to either have a lot of loading screens or relatively sterile environments.

Considering those that have upgraded to a 64-bit system and RAM isn't really that expensive anymore, there's a lot of memory that goes unused as a lot of games aren't even LAA (Large Address Aware) and even more aren't native 64-bit. After a 64-bit windows load up eating around over 2GB of RAM, you still have 5-6GB left of everything else. Fine, PC games get HD textures since it has the memory to hold and stream it to the vid cards, but it just svcks that the levels are still small or sterile all the same.

Well DA2 was in development for what? A year and a half?

Skyrim has been in dev for 5 years and counting, and Beth now has much more resources and talent to put this game together.

And Todd seems absolutely certain that the game will be ready for the 11 11 11 release date, so no delays means he's satisfied with everything.

I really doubt we'll see another New Vegas. Or DA2.

That only works for things that can be modded in. Some more core features which would make worlds of difference for how the game looks, like dx 11 support, are not so easily modded. Those things Beth needs to take the time to put in, for all those faithful PC gamers.

I was wondering the same. Maybe Dragon Age 2?

I doubt it. Dragon Age II seemed to be Bioware attempting to go a whole new direction with their game.

Bethesda seems to be making Skyrim with the goal of it being the best parts of Morrowind and Oblivion combined, both of which worked quite well on PC.

I am running a Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz, an ATI 2600XT/256mb, 4gb of ram, and Win XP / DX9.

I for one, am happy that the cross-development between PC & X360 has kept the minimum system requirements for PC games from growing explosively over the last couple years. It's allowed me to play some really great games.


DA2 svcking has nothing to do with it being developed for multiple platforms. All the main complaints I've seen (re-used locations, little exploration, boring locations, etc) seem to all track back to the game being rushed out in a year.


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re: DX11.... a game & engine that's been in development for years before DX11 even existed, has low odds of being developed for that API. (Heck, according to the Steam Hardware Survey, only 5.6% of users had a DX11 system as of May 2010. Less than a year ago. Yeah, companies were rushing to spend budget on supporting that.)

Yeah, it's more common for people to have DX11 capable systems now. But again.... that'll matter more for games that have more recent development schedules.

I quite enjoyed New Vegas. :turned: