Why is it just consoles that are blamed for restrictions? I'd say 20% of PC gamers dont have spec any higher than a console also. Not everyone wants to spend a lot of money just to play games.

Agree with OP, this is all crap. Consoles can handle it, so long as the information is game data is organized in the right and most efficient way. Rockstar knows how to do it, so do lots of other developers. I think Bethesda is doing everything they intended to do with the game, REGARDLESS of which platform it is being produced for.



Do you think they would have open cities if they werent doing it for xbox too? No. Why? Bethesda doesnt do open cities and X number of other things. Its not like they decided not to make a new game engine because of the 360. The 360 brought in a lot of money for the company that they wouldnt otherwise have to make Skyrim in the first place.


People underestimate the potential of the consoles, I think many people here are speaking out of ignorance.

OK, I feel I have the time and the effort to explain this all.

The first thing we have to consider is the Oblivion was moved to the 360 very late in it's development cycle (I think something like 6 months before release). So, the engine is very very, and i mean very unoptimized, even for the PC. The 360 was completely new, so they didn't have time to get used to it. RDR and Just Cause 2 came out at least 4 years after (I haven't counted or checked this) the consoles had been out; the developers have had a lot of time to play with making games for it.

Secondly, there is absolutely no http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_surface_determination (which basically only renders what the player can see), which would (probably) easily allow there to be open cities. Well, provided the engine was optimized. Not to mention the fact that all of these meshes were http://sites.google.com/site/oblivionpoinfo/optimization/pyffi), and had a high poly count. The next thing we need to consider is that nearly all the objects had collision, as in they could be picked up and thrown about. This sort of thing is very taxing on the GPU, which slows things down a lot. So adding all of this together, and the fact the game had to still render the rest of the outside world (in the closed cities if you go outside the land is blank with rubbish textures and no wildlife etc,you can see it doesn't bode well. Let's not forget all the high poly NPCs and armour and weapons etc.

Now, if we move onto the CPU. This has to keep track of all the NPCs going about on their day to day business, and if hostile NPCs and creates could run into the town willy nilly, things would slow to a crawl. This is because the AI of Oblivion is very resource hungry (because it does a lot of stuff). Just Cause 2 does not have NPCs with schedules, that go about their daily business in a routine, and do other such stuff. Combat AI is even more taxing than the routine AI that would normally happen. Please note the reason why combat in cities in vanilla oblivion doesn't slow down is because there are not the extra NPCs/creatures from the wild that have just rampaged their way into the city. So this would tax the CPU too much, causing things again to slow down (even if the GPU wasn't suffering from all those polys; they are seperate and one will bottleneck the other, so if one is taxed too much, the whole things slows down).

So, the summation of all of the above features will one way or another cause a slow down.

The optimisation of software (the game engines etc.) has developed considerably since Oblivion, which is why consoles can do so much now, even after being 6 years old. So Skyrim should be able to have open cities, if BGS chooses to go that way and invests sufficient resources into it.

So, that pretty much answers it. Consoles are holding back games with their aging hardware, but the evolution (and considerable investment) in the software that runs on them will prolong their life for a few more years.

The term "dumbed down" isn't really accurate, but making a game primarily for consoles does come with some losses - most importantly, the number of buttons you can effectively use.
For example, Crysis 2, being a cross-platform game, has lost free leaning and lying prone, two things many PC gamers used to take for granted, but due to the fewer buttons on console controllers there's simply no room. The game hasn't been dumbed down, in that it's made for less intelligent people (Because a game where driving a jeep through a house, then blowing it up, was a viable combat strategy was never going to be built for intellectuals), rather it's made for less flexible control schemes.

@SURPLUS_NINJA: The clock speed of a processor alone doesn't tell you anything about it, as it says nothing about how many instructions a processor can complete in one cycle, or many other important statistics. Processors now are much more efficient than they were 6 years ago, where a 6 year old 3GHz processor will be blown out of the water by, say, a 1.4GHz i3. Processing power is insanely more powerful than it used to be.

OK??

i dont think they'll ever get it; it's the same thing with the 64 players for pc and 24 for console issue on BF3.

Well MAG can do it.
*explain technology behind BF3 and sony/microsoft bandwidth caps*

response.....

Well Frontlines can do it.


/facepalm.

I think people main complaints aren't the fact it's closed off by walls, more the fact that it's in a separate worldspace. Therefore that means no levitation etc. etc. And no loading, which people seem to care about a lot

It was proven with Morrowind and Oblivion that consoles CAN play TES games. Think about it here, the game mechanics that truly run the game will be pretty identical to the old code they used on Oblivion. It might be a simpler, more advanced, better working code but everyone who makes a good game like Rockstar, Bungie, Unreal, obsidian and all the rest use 90% of the same code in ALL of their games. The biggest change to the game is going to be the graphics and we have had many games come out on consoles that look just as amazing as Skyrim will. They say it will be top of the art, and it might just well be, but every video game has claimed that and many of them still played on the xbox and ps3. So no I don't think they are holding the game back because they are making in on consoles.

I've heard countless times how there won't be open cities because the consoles can't handle it. People say that TES is limited by the consoles.

Really?

Maybe I'm completely wrong and shouldn't be posting this, but what about RDR? The map was 71 square kilometers, and Just Cause 2 had a map that was over 100 square kilometers. Both worked completely fine on the consoles.

Now, I know that the PC has many technical advantages over the console, but I think the consoles are underestimated. Things work smoother on the PC, the PC can do things the consoles can't, but I don't think they're really holding TES back.

Question: I know that PCs have graphics sliders (only from being on these boards, I'm a console gamer myself) - does having the game on the lowest possible setting make the game look worse than it would on a console? Or is it still better, or about the same?

Pure map size has nothing to do with it, map size is simply a matter of space. Things like open cities and such that the consoles can't do will however hold the PC version back. Sure the PC version will get better textures and shaders but who cares really? The improvements that would count can't be done on consoles and Bethesda isn't going to bother to do it for just 1 platform so yes the consoles do hold PC back.

You guys also have a construction kit to change anything and everything you want, hell you can completely convert the game into something of your own making. This is why I don't get why the PC Nazis are always [censored]ing about consoles holding back the games.

Question: I know that PCs have graphics sliders (only from being on these boards, I'm a console gamer myself) - does having the game on the lowest possible setting make the game look worse than it would on a console? Or is it still better, or about the same?

:|

You literally have no idea what you're talking about. Not to be insulting, but you really don't. The code used for Oblivion was pretty shoddy. New code is what keeps the consoles alive, and the fact the graphics are pretty good as it is. Nothing will change the fact that PCs have moved on by 6 years, and you just can't make a game for consoles that has the minimum requirement of a PC that's better than the consoles. So yes, they are holding games back.

EDIT:

@Lady Syl

Read my above post about why Oblivion was closed cities.

The problem is orders of magnitude more complex, and dumping them all into the same worldspace where it's easy for complex actions to take place even without the player necessarily being anywhere near is a bad idea.

It can go worse than consoles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDUcy2IkyQM&feature=related

I have worked in the gaming industry for years, have had my fair jobs as a world designer and level editor, I have also done my fair work on game engines and coding. Look at games like Neverwinter nights 1, Neverwinter nights 2, then look at their games like Knights of the old republic, Mass Effect, Jade Empire. They are all using the same code, and anyone with a brain can point out similarities between the two. Evolution of game engines is what drives the gaming industry. No one ever, and I mean EVER takes their old engine and tosses it out the window and starts scratch. Sorry if that is what you believe. Unreal is testimonial to this. Every time a company makes a new game they take their old code and improve it, they make better code out of their old code, their code evolves.

I am sorry but only a [censored] could make a game using a engine that not only pushes computers to their max, and admit it 90% of you had to buy new computers just to play oblivion you dirty litter liers, while it could still play on the consoles and not be able to make a game based off of the same code and not pull the same feat again. You would have to be a total [censored] to not know how you did what you did the last time.

The biggest change to the game is going to be the graphics and we have had many games come out on consoles that look just as amazing as Skyrim will. They say it will be top of the art, and it might just well be, but every video game has claimed that and many of them still played on the xbox and ps3. So no I don't think they are holding the game back because they are making in on consoles.

I have worked in the gaming industry for years, have had my fair jobs as a world designer and level editor, I have also done my fair work on game engines and coding. Look at games like Neverwinter nights 1, Neverwinter nights 2, then look at their games like Knights of the old republic, Mass Effect, Jade Empire. They are all using the same code, and anyone with a brain can point out similarities between the two. Evolution of game engines is what drives the gaming industry. No one ever, and I mean EVER takes their old engine and tosses it out the window and starts scratch. Sorry if that is what you believe. Unreal is testimonial to this. Every time a company makes a new game they take their old code and improve it, they make better code out of their old code, their code evolves.

If you worked in the VGI like me (I'm guessing Ali too because he is well versed in game design) then you would know that Gamebryo is a leased game engine. They can't build the new engine with Gamebryo as the base because that would be copyright infringement. This new engine was built from scratch. They can't just pick apart Gambryo and make their own engine on top of it...

If you worked in the VGI like me (I'm guessing Ali too because he is well versed in game design) then you would know that Gamebryo is a leased game engine. They can't build the new engine with Gamebryo as the base because that would be copyright infringement. This new engine was built from scratch. They can't just pick apart Gambryo and make their own engine on top of it... However they still may be using their old archiving, which I thought was pretty quick at retrieving game objects.