5 Million copies of the PC version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim sold on PC on Steam. Not sure if day one, but about 2 weeks later or so the charts said 5 million PC gamers were playing the PC version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on Steam.

I kept saying it would sell that much and then more ever since 2012, until 2014 and 2015 and I was correct when arstechnica.com and steamspy.com showed their Steam profile data mining on their websites.

I don't know the answer to that. All anyone of us can go on is the hard numbers we are given. The point I made was the pc base is huge, maybe not as big as the consoles but likely far bigger than most people realize. You don't ignore a market that size.

Agree 100%.

Thanks for the numbers. As of 2014, Skyrim sold 20 million copies across all platforms. I do wonder what the numbers were within the first month though. Google isn′t really forthcoming with it, seeing as how I only had one site with that particular info on page 2, with the rest of them being amazon and what have you ads.

^On Tech5
Yes, actually, and for mostly being ignorant on the basics of hardware.
People buy monster graphics cards then blame the game's engine for texture pop when their CPU, RAM or HDD are [censored]e or mediocre.
Case in point, I have all idTech5 games and get no real texture pop.

With FO4 at 60fps, I can actually stand there waiting for the textures of a wall in front of me to finish loading their highest resolution while the ground and buildings farther away have been finished and are waiting there with me.
But this really isn't the point of the thread... I think.
-

At the end of the day, if we assumed that Bethesda's engine is "just fine," that's more worrying than reassuring.
Their games feel held together by duct tape. If the whole thing unwinds before your eyes and bugs out in a hilarious way, you aren't surprised.

If the engine is just fine (ignoring it's physics being tied to framerate), it really highlights how poor some of the work being done is.
The movement and game play mechanics in their games feels archaic, and neither of these can be blamed on open-world.
Programming students can make something more fluid, and they do.

Lol

I love how many professional software developers we have on the internet, who are fully aware of how different game engines actually work and post informative and constructive anolysis on them /sarcasm/
Really.. The "WE NEED A NEW ENGINE RIGHT NOW" is becoming a buzzword (buzzphrase ?) like dumbed down these days. People just throw it around willy nilly.

Maybe it's just me but I had ZERO crash on PC in 80 hours of Fallout 4.
The AI pathing was only not optimal in a pretty complex 5 story building I made, which was fair, what other game even attempts doing such a thing as an optional thing in their game.

I think it was either 8 million copies sold or 10 million copies sold in the first month.

There's a whole lot of back-and-forth in this thread, and a lot of it is incorrect. Since I can't sleep, I'm going to try and point out some things.

Let's start with this.

Bethesda game mods are not some magic programming wizardry. They are simply databases - think of a really big Excel spreadsheet. The "master" (ESM) file is simply one big database with each in-game object, NPC, etc., having its own reference number. All a mod (ESP) file does, basically, is say "replace reference XYZ with this new information" or adds new information to the big database.

Making a video game modifiable like Bethesda has done is not inherently difficult - they are just one of the first developers to see a lot of success with it. You need only look at other games that support modding communities (such as the ARMA series or Minecraft) to see that other game developers have done the same thing. Valve games (like TF2) are known for it as well (hats!).

"No other engine can do with this engine does"? Sorry, but that's not true.

Let's first look at what the Fallout / Elder Scrolls series are perhaps best known for: sweeping worlds that extend out to the horizon. There are many different game engines that have accomplished this feat, both old and new. And, no, Fallout 4 does not have the biggest map size, not even close. Just Cause 3, running on the Avalanche Engine, has a map size of 400mi², much more than Fallout 4's 43mi².

And as far as "hundreds, even thousands, of fully interactive objects" in the game world, let's clarify some things. Bethesda games are made up of cells, roughly 3317.76 m2 in size, and the number of cells depends on the game in question. For example Skyrim has roughly 11,186 cells. Without getting too technical, Bethesda games load everything that's in the current cell the player is occupying, plus or minus a few things (such as buildings that are set as view-from-distance). Obviously the game does not load every cell, with every object in that cell, or else your Xbox One and PS4 (and most PCs) would beg for mercy. The cells (at least in Skyrim) with the most "interactive" objects are often interior cells - think of all the knick-knacks scattered on shelves and tables that you can Fus Ro Dah everywhere. At most you're going to get 400-500 different "interactive" objects. And I put "interactive" in quotes because these objects are simply physics / Havok enabled, i.e. they can be bounced around by the physics engine and put into the player's inventory. Doing that sort of physics work is nothing new (see Psi Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy for a 2004 example).

So the supposed "feat" of having hundreds / thousands of "interactive" objects in the game-world isn't something that only the Creation Engine can do, since it's not some marvelous thing.

I think I saved the best for last. The "human eye critical limit is 24 FPS" is completely wrong. The flicker fusion threshold (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold#Explanation)) for human eyes (specifically the cones of the retina) have a threshold of 60 Hz (though at very high illumination levels). What this means is that most people are able to detect intermittent light flashes up to 60 Hz, and after that the light simply appears to be continuously on.

Personally I don't really see the need for a brand-new engine, but there are definitely some issues in FO4 that I hope Bethesda fixes.

And one more thing: tying your game physics to graphical frame-rate is a bad idea, even in the indie game-dev scene where we play around with programmer graphics all day.

Finally someone who explained this probably better than I ever would have or probably would have been ignored.

For Crysis a 2008 video game in Cry Engine 2 I was able to make a mod to be able to talk to almost all NPC's as long as they are not enemy NPC's.

If you know in Crysis you can pick up almost every single item in front of your face just like in The Elder Scrolls video games, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 4. There are mods that let you pick up even more stuff for Crysis.

Now back to the being able to talk to all if not all almost all NPC's. I did this with Unreal Engine 3, specifically in Unreal Development Kit (UDK), and I also did this in Unreal Engine 4. In Unreal Engine 4 due to having access to all of the Source Code I managed to be able to do it for all of the NPC's easily.

Now for the 60FPS thing. I can definitely also tell when a video game is running at 10FPS, 15FPS, 20FPS or 60FPS.

I told people for a while I was able to do this to talk to almost all NPC's in Cry Engine 2, in Unreal Development Kit (UDK), and in Unreal Engine 4 for a while, but it kept getting ignored I guess.

Thumbs up for taking your time to explain this.

The whole "human eye can perceive" thing isn't the whole FPS issue anyway. For fast twitch/fast movement games, more FPS makes large & quick movements look smoother. (like, you spin 180 degrees in .2 seconds to shoot behind you. More fps = that 180 spin is a smoother pan rather than a skipping slideshow.)

That said, I'm not an FPS snob. I was fine playing Skyrim at 35-45. What I care about more is steady framerate. A rate that's bouncing up and down like a yoyo is even more noticeable than just a low framerate.

Two 7200 RPM raid 0, 40-50 sec first loading.

If people stop buying the game then yeah. Vote with your wallet.

60 fps has an clear benefit in going from 30 fps or lower, this is very true for aiming, past 60 fps the benefit is far lower same way as going from 1080x800 to HD has has an higher impact than going from HD to 4K, you also need serious monitors to handle more than 60 fps.

Note that in at least earlier versions of counter strike very high fps, far higher than the monitor could handle had some in game benefits even if not visible because of engine features.

It's not just all of the hundreds of little physics enabled objects, by the way. It's the world itself. The level design is all modular - for instance, all of the interior architecture is made up of pieces that snap together, so that you can create several completely different interiors with the same "Nordic Cave" or "Office Building" tileset - and then fill it in with furniture and clutter. Exteriors, too - after the basic the basic landscape is built, they fill it up with rocks, plants, trees, roads, exterior architecture, everything. Then there's the lighting and post-processing, although it's not too bad here - all of Bethesda's shadows have to be dynamic, they can't have any lighting data just baked into the textures since everything sees so much reuse and the environments can change appearance pretty easily.

This is how the drawcalls can go from the hundreds to the thousands. This is also how Bethesda can make such massively detailed worlds in a reasonable timeframe - once the assets are made, the process of actually putting everything together is really smooth. So it's also a workflow thing; the Creation Engine makes it really easy to iterate on things and add in new content as you go. New Vegas is a testament to this.

This has almost nothing to do with the right hardware.

I have a good SSD - Samsung 840 PRO.

It was already stated and tested - FPS does have an impact on loading times.

Just go to some crawded/big areas, turn v-sync off and compare loading times with v-sync on.

I tested it on top of trinity tower when looking on panorama.

As I don't have v-sync on I just modified fps limit on riva tuner.

58 fps limit : 26s loading time

no fps limits : 18s loading time

So please, don't go on with "it's not a game fault but hardware".