Being the author of Cutting Room Floor, would you say there were pieces missing to the stuff you pieced together and had to fill in some parts that weren't there / incomplete?

I'm mostly speculating based off of other people's comments suggesting content may have been cut due to hardware limitations. What those would be I don't know. Their comments may be based off of some sort of other speculation as well. I thought maybe some people read an official comment somewhere that alluded to this. That's why I haven't actually questioned it because I don't know for sure myself, but you do have valid points that do put it that hypothesis into question.

NO the "console crowd" does not feel "hosed" -just shaking my head-

What the hell is survival mode? Sounds like a lame unneeded thing.

Fallout 4's Survival Mode is what most people here are using as a reference. It includes these features:

A good example is the removal of levitation and jump spells post-Morrowind. Opening Skyrim and Oblivion's cities would've been too taxing on consoles, so they were made interior locations. Levitation would've shown that what you see from the outside is only a low-res version you can't actually enter.

You'll notice I said "might".

And just in case you took a different meaning that was intended, where I grew up the term hosed was roughly equal to cheated, jilted, left out, neglected, etc.

I have no idea where I've been, but last time I read about Fallout 4's Survival Mode. I don't remember reading this at all.

* Most threats are not visible on the compass.

It probably was written in there, but I don't remember reading about it at all.

Then when was this introduced?

* Robotic companions created in the Automatron add-on, excluding NPC robots like Ada and Jezebel, will now be destroyed if not repaired after being downed in combat.

Ever since Bethesda Game Studios released the Survival Mode for Fallout 4 you can repair robots?

So you can repair the Power Armor and the robots, but they didn't make all armor and weapons repairable? Sigh.

I copy-pasted the list from the Fallout Wiki: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Survival_mode

I have not played Fallout 4 yet, so I do not know how accurate the list is.

So the assertion is that these features were purposely dropped from Skyrim in order for consoles to be able to play it?


Well seeing the outstretched game world via levitation is little different from looking across a vista from a high point...and even in Oblivion spells could be chained that enabled such things as jumping clear over city walls into unloaded outside areas and also ramping up the speed to run like a motorbike....so I wouldn't see a spot of jumping or levitating as causing a console's chips to throw a seizure.


Loading screens to enter cities IS more of an issue...but more tied in I think to 'read ahead, delete behind'. I could be wrong but I wouldn't see the need for the entire Skyrim map including all city interiors to be loaded simultaneously.......the game only ever fully loads what is nearby (i.e. within draw distance). In otherwords...the city buildings would only begin loading in detailed, as you neared the open city gates....shrug.


Bethesda choose to have a clear demarkation between 'inside' and 'outside' by using loading screens.......so are we quite sure these are vital for console play and could you be sure that Bethesda would have chosen to NOT have loading screen for a pc only game?

Honestly they would have been pretty taxing on PCs as well.

Yes, Open Cities exists and is super cool, but there are very good reasons to put cities in their own worldspaces.

Yes, that is precisely the assertion. Closed cities and the removal of levitation appeared at exactly the same time (i.e. in Morrowind's Tribunal expansion). One has always appeared wherever the other has appeared.

I am not aware of Oblivion's Open Cities mod, by itself, causing appreciable lag for most players on PC. It certainly caused no lag on my machine in 2006, when the mod first appeared, and I did not have a state-of-the-art computer. Consequently, it is my theory that the postponement in releasing Oblivion (from 2005 to 2006) was due to Bethesda needing to re-tool the game to meet Microsoft's performance requirements. And this resulted in cities being removed from the Cyrodiil worldspace.

The fact that a player can invent ways to get over walls in Oblivion does not disprove MarkedForDeath's post. But If you want to believe that there is some other reason besides 2005-era console technology for taking cities out of the Tamriel worldspace, by all means, you are welcome to your belief. But do not expect myself or many others to share it.

On PC it's not true at all.

Like Lady Selene said on PC the Open Cities mod is not that taxing on PC hardware. It wasn't for me as well. Though I did have a high end PC in 2006.

Todd Howard I think before Fallout 4 was even announced he said how he likes the more powerful hardware that PC's, the PlayStation 4 (PS4), and Xbox One have today and that he is interested in developing video games with that power, because you can have NPC's sitting inside their houses or inns or whatever talking and doing whatever they want to do and you can be outside and listen to them talk and do other stuff through the windows.

Yeah, I run the "Open Cities" mod for Skyrim, and have no problems at all.

Thank you for your....very 'direct' last paragraph Lady Selene.....I do not expect you...to share my beliefs at all.


But nothing has addressed the question of whether closed cities in Skyrim was a convenience rather than a necessity.


In other words....if Skyrim had been made available to only pc players....would there still have been loading screens as a convenience for Bethesda....(perhaps it is a matter of ease of construction!)


If yes....then you can not 'blame' console users for the simplifying of Skyrim in this regard....as was the original question.


Maybe if you offer Bethesda a pledge to pay a higher price for TESVI to offset lost console sales, they might produce it pc only for you. Otherwise I am afraid catering for the console market is a given......I would add that if there were features that made it unplayable in consoles...that would probably affect pc/laptop players at the bottom tier also. Thats losing a lot of customers just to meet things like your open cities wishes eh!


Of course...if you are simply modding things back in that you 'believe' were dropped due to console use...well where's the issue at all?

Part of the problems on 360 /PS3 was lack of memory, it would be easy to get too much stuff on the screen that the system would run out of memory, Look how fast they remove corpses in huge battles in Skyirm, same in Mothership Zeta in FO3. Divinding the strip into load zones in FO:NV is another,

Now oblivion was pretty taxing on computers then released so levitation over IC would killed framerate, just walking around could be solved by not having too long views like the curved design IC had.

None of this is relevant with the PS4 / One nor modern computers.

Honestly, I'm pretty skeptical about how powerful the PS4 and Xbox One really are. People used to say the same about the 360 and PS3...

Yes, in quite a bit of it. Especially the village portions. While there was sufficient data to know what they generally had in mind, no details were present. So a lot of it is stuff I had to construct myself to fill in the gaps.

They actually wouldn't, and never have been. The entire issue with Open Cities for both Oblivion and Skyrim has always been about memory availability. Something which only the 360 and PS3 ever had any real trouble with. That is, until PC got saddled with the PS3 memory allocation system and lots of mods went from running just fine with no issues to encountering nothing but problems. 2013 was a dark time for memory intensive mods.

Closed cities were done entirely for the consoles. Todd Howard himself even said as much.

With SSE, those restrictions will be gone because none of the platforms it supports have memory issues to work around.

Hee...consoles generally come in capability wise equal to a low'ish level pc/ laptop. You get what you pay for and consoles are not bad, but neither can they (clearly) manage a performance like a 'good' pc. A really hot gpu on its own costs more than a whole XB1....


Console manufacturers do over state the capability if their machines of course....they are trying to sell them afterall. Even now if you read the write up for say XB1....by the time you finish reading about all its Teraflops speed and big RAM etc etc you'll be believing it's a mainframe in a shoe box.


However, at the other end of the debate...you might be surprised at what a modern console CAN handle. I am only still on X360....but even that can run quite a big bunch of npcs around without falling over. Horse riding around the Rift in the rain is very likely to earn a screen freeze, but that could be due more to the Skyrim engine than the console cpu/gpu failure to cope.


RAM was an issue with ps3 because the unit functioned with two distinct 250Mb allocations one for graphics one for the cpu. The X360 has a single 500Mb RAM available which the game engine allocates between graphics and cpu function as optimally as it can...thats the simple view and reason that initially it looked like the game was not even feasible on PS3 due to extreme lagging and freezing. Yeah I had it on PS3 at first...and initially it was bad..especially once the save file went into double figures! But official patches helped by reducing anti aliasing simplifying shadows and reducing draw distance (god those frozen waterfalls).


It shows just how much Bethesda wanted that extra PS3 market that they persevered until the game could run on it...now even with dlc!


The whole "open cities thing" is simply one example given (here) that Skyrim was dumbed down to make it console compatible and that may be true (shrug), you could say the same about not having detailed shadows! Or the reduced draw distance, but its not the crux of what was being said....that being, that Skyrim lost a load of 'content' due to console requirements, content means people, places and quests....which I do not believe is a console issue huh! (Come to that....why would they labour hard to bring open cities to the game when mods can do it for pc anyway?)


There will always be those who regard the non pc platforms as parasitic...ruining the potentially great pc game because the devs can't resist the lure of greenbacks for the console market....but that market helps to fund the final product...Without it, you still might not get that even better version....because development costs coin eh! I prefer to think of all Skyrim enthusiasts as single community who can enjoy discussing the game together...as we generally do here!



So what about that survival mode? That should not be too taxing for a console to handle I think, but Beth just has no interest in it when mods can give the experience instead.......time is money!

I apologize for my tone. I have problems with my temper and sometimes it gets the better of me. It is one my many failings, I am told.

Reading this, I am not sure whether you are referring to actual loading screens or to closed cities. The two do not necessarily go together. One could, theoretically, have separated world spaces with no loading screens. Conversely, Oblivion spammed quasi-loading screens ("Loading Area...") even in the contiguous Cyrodiil worldspace.

If your question is about loading screens, I think the reason why Bethesda used them is because they did not know where we might go next. If they knew in advance what cell we we were going to enter they could load that data in advance and dispense with loading screens. But in games like these they cannot predict where we're going to go next and cannot pre-load every possible cell into memory. So they wait for us to make a decision and then load the data.

Apparently Witcher 3 does not have loading screens? I haven't played it yet so I don't know if this is true. If it is, I suspect they must use some sort of streaming technology, similar to that used by Dungeon Siege. Ballowers100 is our resident expert on Witcher 3. Maybe he knows.

I would love to see loading screens (and closed cities) disappear from Bethesda's games forever. Perhaps this is the advance in technology they are waiting on before they make TES VI? It's an intriguing thought to me.

No The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has absolutely no loading screens at all.

Well I shouldn't say absolutely no loading screens at all, because the only times there are loading screens in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is when you die and have to load a saved game or tart the video game up of course and when you make Geralt of Rivia fast travel.

All of the caves you can just run in or walk in without any loading screens at all.

All of the houses you can just run in or walk in. There's a lot of houses with locked doors that you cannot get into like in Novigrad, but you can look through the windows and see inside it and sometimes you can see the NPC's inside of them moving and doing their own stuff.

Some locked doors can be broken down.

There's sewers in the big cities like Novigrad where you can just run in or walk in when you find their entrances in the cities and on the outside of the cities like at the ports or rivers or canols that run through the cities.

There's absolutely no loading screens for any of those places in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt at all.

That sounds really nice. I hope Bethesda does the same thing with TES VI.

I did a little digging on the internet to try and see how CD Projekt RED did it, and it appears my guess about streaming was correct: "... major bullet-points for the engine include support for 64-bit precision high dynamic range, fully tessellated environments, and a streaming algorithm to permit a completely open-world game design."

Yeah I can see Bethesda Game Studios doing that or at least waiting to try that after what Todd Howard said.

At least for The Elder Scrolls VI and moving on forward from then on.

It would svck so bad if The Elder Scrolls VI had loading screens when your Player Characters (PC's) walk into a house or into a inn or even in a cave or dungeon.

CDPR used http://umbra3d.com/licensing/ middleware for occlusion culling and other rendering optimizations. There are no loading screens inside of the regions and it becomes natural and you stop thinking about it until you go back to a BGS game Their new game engine was built from the ground up and it is a true current-gen engine and that makes a difference too.

what did Todd Howard Say? I'm really curious because since I experienced the witcher 3 absence of loading screens it has become for me a real annoyance. I stil prefer Skyrim but I really loathe such interruptions during my explorations. It has even ruined the dragon riding feature developed for dragonborn and the vampire "class" with its ridiculous fried chicken wings. I repeat, for me it is necessary the complete absence of loading screens in tes vi. I strongly doubt bethesda will solve this problem. They kept it in fallout 4 partially making it a Boring annoyance.

I should say also....that on my x360.....about half the screen freezes occur 'during' loading screens. Entering Dragonsreach is always a fingers crossed moment.


I have also had crashes during normal saving screens...though thats much rarer.


I would love zero screens....especially entering caves without even a door....thats an immersion breaker....on the plus side dragon fire can't get you just inside the entrance....er' no...wait...that's a bad thing....dragons SHOULD be able to flame you just inside the entrance!


Right...straying off topic again....so yeah shut up Rick....chuckles