A PC testing demo. : V - Skyrim

» Mon Jun 13, 2011 8:01 am

From Bethesda's perspective making a bench test or compatibility demo is not required for the following reasons:

1.) They are on top of the world. They don't need a regular demo to hype the product. That said, why bother with a tech demo just so non customers can waste their time with support issues? Who wants to support non customers?
Its not like they have an entirely new engine. I'd say much of the code is from Oblivion yet and certainly fallout3, just with improvements and enhancements. They have at least 100 guys in house developing the game and countless testers as well on a very wide variety of hardware. The chances of a hardware bug coming up that is so severe that programmers cannot fix and actual paying customers return the game are slim to none.
2.) The time to make a tech demo is substantial. Why not spend those hours improving the game? Its wasting money for something they are confident will not be an issue anyway.
3.) Also, the majority of their customers will be on the consoles. And the port to PC is quite easy from a console, and fallout3 didn't have too many problems, if it did I never noticed the. So really this is just another whiner thread that is wasting bandwidth.
4.) It's also such an epic game that the chances are if someone does buy the game and it doesn't work, most people would wait for a patch than take it back.

Making any sort of demo would be a complete waste of time and money. They should get on with making DLC's and deal with any bugs after the game ships, they know what they are doing and it will be minimal I am sure.

» Sun Jun 12, 2011 11:35 pm

Can it run any game from the past 3 years?

There is your answer.

Seriously, till there is a new console, any computer that could play games decently 3 years ago can play games decently now. Anyone who says otherwise doesn't know squat about computers.

Skyrim will have the ability to output better graphics on PC, which will up the recommended requirements, but the simple and undeniable FACT is that if you were able to play games decently along side the current gen console, your computer will be able to handle ANY game will the next gen console.

I agree but i would say 3 years is a bit much, 1 and a half year yes, cuz i have this same configuration now for exactly 1 and a half year now and i ran anything without a porblem on high settings so like you said unless thay develop a new console pc gamers who have quad core cpu's , 4gb of ram and a decent graphic card shouldn't not have a problem to run this game considering that the xbox 360 is like 6 years old, and about GTA 4 the reason why pc gamers could run it like crap it was cuz it was not optimized at all , the game was released on xbox 360 and just ported on pc without any optimization.

» Sun Jun 12, 2011 6:57 pm

They need a demo to make sure that there are not any huge problems with computer configurations that they did not test. There could easily be a glitch with a motherboard, graphics card processor, or any combination of these and operating systems (XP, Vista, 7, 32-bit, 64-bit). I seriously doubt that they can test all combinations. A demo released just after the game goes gold could revleal some of these problems and allow them to get a head start on an early (maybe even lauch day) patch to fix these issues instead of having angry fans for a month.

Edit: Deliberatly trying to sell someone software that they cannot run is probably not legal. Even if legal it would definately be immoral.

This is a real problem I upgraded to windows 7 and was unable to run Oblivion or Fallout 3. Upgrading the CPU, motherboard , ram and graphic chard solved the problem.

» Sun Jun 12, 2011 5:45 pm

A benchmark program wouldn't be a bad thing, maybe 2 minutes of gameplay video just to see how it would look on our individual pcs. If they do decide to give it to us though, I imagine it coming after the release of the minimum/ recommended requirments.