Change is always painful. I think what we are starting to see is consoles taking over and PCs gradually becoming obsolete. Consoles are becoming cheaper and more powerful, and more importantly, they are more convenient. People live at a faster pace these days, and they no longer have the patience to come to grips with a two grand computer. I think that pc gaming will become a niche market, like collecting vynal records. :violin:

How the [censored] do any of you know if Xbox and PS3 "stopped Skyrim reaching it's full potential". As far as everyone is concerned, you don't know jack [censored] about Skyrim, or how it truly looks, or how it's gonna play, or feel. If you don't like it on release, mod it. Or shut up. If you rant about it now, where do think it will get you? You don't know that the consoles have stopped anything. In fact, you don't know if Bethesda have optimized the consoles to accommodate PC standards or not. Bethesda said themselves, there is more potential for the consoles in the current gen. And their new engine has allowed them to give unprecedented detail and life to Skyrim. Yes, I know the PC is better. But it's not 'that' much better. A few graphical tweaks here and there and that's it. The consoles aren't far off at all.

i dont think your right on the ps3 ram... The PlayStation 3 has 256 MB of XDR DRAM main memory and 256 MB of GDDR3 video memory for the RSX

accroding to Todd they are gonna take advantage of the new CD compression for the xbox 360

there will always be two sides to this argument. PC hardware is better yes, and with it you can make a "better game" the problem is that it limits you to only the PC, PC's with good hardware are expensive no matter what you say, a decent gamer PC costs at least $300 dollars more than any console.givin that your limiting the game to only the people with enough money to buy a decent PC. yes the game will be better i admit i played OB on both the 360 and PC.

the consoles on the other hand allow us with less money to get the games we want to play. Beth is doing a good thing allowing us with little money to play their game. that said they should not just create an interface for consoles, but they should look into PC interface as well.

full pontential or not, it alows more people more ways to afford and get the game they want. thats all i have to say about this argument.

We've all seen this argument a hundred times over. There are pros and cons to both. PC is obviously more advanced graphically but many of us can't afford to jack up our PC year after year to play games. Consoles are a more affordable gaming avenue for the majority of working-class people who have kids and mortgages and don't live at home with their parents. This is not a knock on anyone, it's just a statement of the financial situations people are in. When I lived at home with my folks, I didn't have to pay room and board, so a lot of my money went towards gaming and I could afford to have a pretty good PC as well as consoles. Regardless, I enjoyed playing games on all platforms. Now that I have more financial responsibilities, I didn't want to stop gaming entirely, so I opted for consoles, which will last me a while longer before I have to purchase new hardware. I can then save up for when the next console comes out.

In regards to the money-making comment, I think we all want gamesas to make more money so they can keep releasing better and better games, hopefully more in the TES universe. It's a bit of a catch 22, in that we want them to sacrifice money and cater to PC's rather than consoles, but with less money, how can they keep improving their games. I'm not pro-console or pro-PC. I think they both have a place in the gaming world but I do think it is high time for next gen consoles to start making an appearance.

And really, did the home PC stop Space Invaders from reaching its full potential on the Atari 2600? No, I think the Atari 2600 stopped Space Invaders from reaching its full potential on the Atari 2600.

It is what it is people. We ask the gaming companies to sacrifice making money and develop solely for PC to get maximum game potential, but if they don't make any money, the PC games will svck because the team working on them would be much smaller. Don't think we'd see eight dungeon designers for Skyrim instead of one like they had for Oblivion if it weren't for the money gamesas made off consoles.

Just my two cents...

Is RAM what dictates whether we end up with closed or open houses and cities? or is that a graphic card thing? because i hear consoles have terrible RAM but good graphics, is that true?

Well, maybe, since I haven't played consoles much.
Also summing up GPU memory and RAM memory isn't right.
And I was talking about RAM only.

^ excatly why should i pay 800 dollars or more for a PC when i can buy a 360 for around 200 dollars

Console have more or less acceptible GPUs
As far as I know enclosed areas and decreased number of NPCs is due RAM limitations, but I might be wrong

Consoles limit the game technically due to the hardware. Then they limit the content due to disc space.

But both limits are so high that the game can still be amazing on both console and PC.

I don't think the game would be much better if it was only for PC. Perhaps some mild graphical improvement (but not much) is really all I see.

EDIT: Also your third poll question is kind of silly. With Fallout 3, 90% of the people who bought the game bought it on console. So 'A little bit more money' is more like most of the money they make, and if they threw console gamers under the bus to focus on PC gamers, they would go out of business...

Ah i see, why don't consoles have more RAM then? i thought RAM was cheaper than either GPU or CPU.

(Careful nerd speak ahead) RAM is random access mem. CPU access the RAM when the CPU runs out of avaible memory. look up processers when they say L3 6 MB cache. this means how much the memory the CPU can use before it has to access the RAM, RAm is a good thing but if you have a big CPU cache RAM is used less.

PC is just one gaming platform out of several. There is no onus on Bethesda to favour one over others.

If you can support this statement with evidence, you might have a good case. However, the consoles are extremely limited compared to a PC. Everybody knows that.

I agree that Witcher 2 set a new standard for role-playing games. At this point in the junction, the creators and financiers of Skyrim are going to have to choose whether or not to post-pone the release date in order to accommodate changing technology, or they can carry on with their plan and ruin the good name of the Elder Scrolls.

Skyrim will be probably be the best developed game of the series, if you ask the developers.

They know the tech and have worked with it for years. If you've never done a tech job, or works with mechanical items... becoming familiar with all the tips, tricks and extensions of the tools you work with always makes the job easier.

If you give a carpenter a room to finish with an all new toolset, he's not going to do as good of a job as the carpenter who uses the same traditional tools he's used for years.

So no, I think the 360 develop cycle is only going to help Skyrim.

As a PC gamer, there's always something that can be done extra to enhance a TES game. But honestly, that's what mods are for.

There's no denying they hold back the PC. PCs hardware has gotten 4 or 5 console generations better since they came out. In New Vegas they had to separate Vegas into sections because of the consoles. If it was a PC exclusive there would be none of that.

Remember this, or this thread will most likely be shut down

I already did.
Todd Howard:
"It is nice to be able to work on a system you know really well now, that you've worked with for the last 5 years. It makes a difference in the quality of the content that you're making."

so your saying because its not the witcher standards the TES game is going to fail. i dont like how people relate games to others even if they are the same genre, they are completely diffrent games and one should not be judge by the other, i believe the ONLY standard for a TES game is another TES game.

Most of you don't get what I'm saying but that may be my own fault for not being clear enough, but let's all calm down for a minute.

If you read my thread title 'X360, PS3 stopped Skyrim to reach it's full potential?'

What I mean is that because they make Skyrim for Xbox 360 and PS3, they don't take PC power into consideration in their gameplay making as bigger battles, seamless world with less loading because you don't need to own a hardcoe computer anymore, most cheap computers can do more then what Xbox 360 and PS3 can.

So this is not a PC against consoles or consoles against PC.

This is just, why not make the PC version of Skyrim different from the consoles version of Skyrim?
Then you say, it's not worth it - then I say.. Well, fine but I wish there was some PC community spirit within the developers that felt more passionate about the PC and remember where The Elder Scrolls all started and who has been contributing with mods and building up communities and following them as soldiers for years and years before any consoles.

think of it as the business perspective, it would costs much more money to create 2 versions of the game when you can create 1 version with little diffrences from the each other. its just faster to push out the game this way. plus more costs effective.

Hm, can't cost that much to do some adjustments that would benefit the game on PC that you can't do for the consoles?
To be honest, I have no idea what they are doing to make it different from the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3... All I know higher texture but still DX9, I guess?

I'm all for consoles getting Skyrim, but i can't pretend that having closed off cities and closed off houses that feel like a box i can't look out the window of is a small deal, it's fairly noticable and restrictive actually, at least i feel it is, it would be a nice touch there was a slightly different PC version free of that hindrance.

Apparently, yes. Todd himself has said that due to technical limitations of current generation consoles, they were forced to make choices which they had otherwise not have to make. Not only graphic wise (open cities not being possible due to memory limitations being a good example of this).

I don't think this should come as a surprise. If you look at the hardware inside consoles, it's not all that impressive anymore. The PS3's GPU is based on a Geforce 7 (G70) and trails behind a cheap desktop card, say for example the 4670 or the 5770 (heck you could even grab a second-hand 3870 for $40 these days). A somewhat similar story is true for the Xbox360 GPU. Then there are also some pretty bad memory limitations on both consoles. Just for the moment assume that both consoles would have 512MB of dedicated RAM and an additional 512MB of dedicated VRAM, they'd still trail behind todays average computers.

So from a technical standpoint I can see that developers have to drop certain things because they are not possible on all systems and thus preventing a game from reaching it's full potential. This statement has nothing to do with bashing consoles. I own a PS3 and used to own a 360 (I barely used it and most games were also available on PS3 of which I prefer its UI) and both systems are pretty neat, but to say they're not holding back PC gaming at all? I sincerely doubt that.

I don't know about that. My PC is about as old as Oblivion, but I wanted to try Oblivion on PC now to try out some mods, but I have to dumb-down the graphics so much that it looks terrible, just absolutely terrible. I will have to wait till I get a new PC and try it again. I know, I can add some better parts but my PC is old so I'd rather save up and start with a new one so I can add newer components if I wanted to. Need a more current processer and graphics card too. I'd also like it to be able to handle Skyrim, so I'm going to save up and get a really good PC once it comes time to change out the old one. In the meantime though, I am enjoying Oblivion and DLC on the Xbox 360 and will be getting Skyrim for 360 as well. Hopefully, gamesas will convince Microsoft to allow at least a few mods to be downloaded on Xbox Live (this is really a long shot, but I'm glad they are giving it a try).