Hey guys and gals,
Some among the community seem to be somewhat disheartened that Skyrim will not take full advantage of DX11. Keep in mind though, BGS does a lot for their community that most developers never do, in particular, construction kits for the community to make their own content. Knowing you can only choose one or the other, what choice would you make for Skyrim? This ideally comes down to whether you would want better graphics for PC, or if you would want content from the community (Keep in mind modders won't likely be able to take advantage of DX11, as it would be too time consuming and tedious. If we do see any DX11 support from modders, don't expect to see it for many years down the road, if at all). I'm curious to see how much some of the community is willing to give to truly have the best, visually looking experience they can get, or perhaps the freedom to create whatever they'd like. These are the kinds of decisions game developers have to make when deciding what content goes in and what doesn't. What are you willing to give up?

*Keep in mind that Skyrim will have the Creation Kit regardless. This is just merely a hypothetical of what people would rather have. What are they willing to sacrifice for something else? Also, keep in mind that more DX11 support could have a dramatic affect on the look and feel of the game. It's not just a simple graphics improver.*

No contest - some graphic boosts vs huge amounts of free content. Hmm.


And as a modder, I have further inclination towards the latter choice. I'll be sorely disappointed if Skyrim doesn't give us access to the Creation Kit, like what Bioware pulled with Mass Effect 2, and then Dragon Age 2.

Brain's already buzzing with mod ideas - it'll be a relief to be modding an open world game again. Modding linear games gets so tedious and constrained.

I believe this will be the preference of many PC gamers. Although, I'm curious to see what people are willing to give up. If BGS didn't focus so much time and attention into making the Creation Kit, it is very likely they could focus their time on other aspects of the game, in particular more DX11 support. I can only imagine how much time and effort goes into making a fully-function construction kit for members of the community to enjoy and be creative with. BGS obviously sees it as being important, as they continue to implement the feature into their games.

Where is the "Meh" option? Dx11 is not something that I would use. I would rather they implement better game logic than better shaders.

There you go.

Thank you... :foodndrink:

well... except that the primary reason I'd buy the game is for the creation kit. :shrug:

Fortunately you won't need to be disappointed as Bethesda has already confirmed there will be a CS for Skyrim.

@OP: DX11 is nice, but mods outweigh that any day.

That's fine. This topic is more along the lines of what people are willing to give up for other features though. BGS can't put everything in the game, and the Creation Kit definitely takes a lot of time and effort more than likely. I'm just curious if people would be willing to give up that feature for other features in Skyrim, in particular more DX11 support.

Uh... Yeah. Easiest poll ever.

Ah... Then for me, I'd certainly pass on DX11, but I'd want the creation kit... I dunno how demanding the CK would be [resource-wise], as they have to have it anyway, to make the game with.

(And they are not obliged to release it before the game ships; or at all really.)

That is true. But making it compatible for the community to use and take advantage of has to take time and resources (there's a chance the creation kit won't be ready for the community by launch). BGS could easily focus their efforts onto other aspects of the game and not even worry about having a kit the community could use.

Exactly. They don't have to release a creation kit at all. BGS just chooses to. But as a result, it does take up time and effort.

Agreed. So long as they release it, I will consider buying the game.

*Surely they will have released the CK (and a few patches to boot), by next year, when I'll decide if I might like to buy it. :thumbsup:

If there was no Creation Kit then I'd play through the (at least slightly flawed) game once and forget about it afterwards. With the CK I'll probably still play Skyrim 5 years after release, experiencing new quests, dungeons, locations, gameplay changes etc all the time. Not to mention the fun and creative outlet modding itself is. No fancy graphic feature could ever make up for the Creation Kit.

And I also don't think that releasing the Creation Kit will take an incredible amount of time, implementing DX11 features that really make a difference would take 1000x as much time. They have the Creation Kit already, it's what they use to make the game after all. Maybe they'll fix some bugs to make the latest version a bit more stable and make a more user friendly UI for the community release, but nothing that would take a huge amount of time. Implementing DX11 features would mean coding them from scratch, testing and bug-fixing and finally optimizing them. While I'm not a programmer I think there is much more to it then simply adding a few lines of 'Tesselation code' to the existing code.

Ugh. To me this is a choice between adding a tiny bit of eye-candy that will be appreciated for the first 10 of the 60-odd hours of gameplay, versus getting 500+ hours of gameplay that are vastly more fun and satisfying. So yeah, I chose the DX11 option, 'cause you know, I get that 10 hours of joy right up front, as opposed to having to wait months or years for mods. (Kidding!)

For me, not releasing or gimping the Creation Kit would be the beginning of the end of the reign of Bethesda, if not the end. BGS would become just another game developer. If you gave me a choice between ASCII graphics or the Creation Kit, I'd seriously have to mull that over for a while.

DX11 can be scaled down to DX9 status. So any DX9 capable computer would be able to run it, so long as they included the DX9 shaders and what not (which are already made because the 360 uses them). So it's only a matter of how much love Beth is willing to give the PC users.

I wish it did include all the DX11 features, but not if the tradeoff would be removing the CS. Even if they did add full DX11 support, we wouldn't lose the CS. But if I had to pick one or the other, CS all the way.

Creation Kit is the clear winner here.

Besides, with the amazing skill and talent the Bethesda modding community has, I wouldn't be surprised if they could implement the other "missing" features of DX11 in Skyrim such as tessellation, better soft shadows, improved shaders, etc. If they can turn Morrowind into a DX9 game from straight DX8, then I don't see how it's not possible to turn Skyrim into a full DX11 game with Skyrim already supporting DX11.

Sure, it may take A LOT of time, but I'm sure it's doable.

Difficult choice. I don't want Skyrim to be as poorly optimized as Oblivion was at release and it's really beginning to look like it will be. Even if the majority here are content with their DX9/DX10 machines, DX11 offers huge performance gains for GPUs that support it. It's just plain stupid for BGS to ignore 20, 30, and even 40% performance increase. svcks that everything revolves around the 360 nowadays, it's the only reason the PC version will not support DX11.

Creation kit for sure. As someone already said huge amounts of free content for years to come along with grqphics mods that will make it look better anyway or graphics for the vanilla game? No doubt the CK for me.

Dx11 is just the cherry on top for me. Sure it's delicious but why eat only the cherry when you can have the whole cake?

... er.. the creation kit is the tool they use to create the game. It isn't some sort of secondary feature.

IT actually DOES support DX11. Just not any of the graphical features (tessellation, better shaders, etc). We will see better performance though.

:facepalm: Not much else to say.

Tessellation is a huge part of DX11 performance. It's almost pointless to even support DX11 with no tessellation.

Not necessarily. Increased performance is always nice. And I'd rather have that than nothing at all. Don't get me wrong, tessellation, super-sampling, etc, etc ,etc WOULD be amazing, but seeing as this time around they don't want to do that stuff, I'm glad that they are implementing some of the increased performance features.

You do realize that they use the Creation Kit themselves in order to create the game right? It's not a separate frill that they toss to the players, they need to use it themselves or there wouldn't even be a game. Which makes this poll pointless really.

Yes, necessarily. Of course the game will perform better with more raw horsepower coming from the cores of high end GPUs, it has nothing to do with DX11. Without tessellation is may as well be a repackaged DX10.