The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Catch-All

I'd accept that as an excuse if it wasn't for the fact that they've been doing console ports since TES3 (in house?), and it's hardly coming as a surprise to them.

It's not:

"Hey, we've just gone feature complete and we're into beta now. Three months to nail it all down"
"Uhhh, Bob, the guys upstairs say they want console versions too"
"****"

Or at least I hope it's not. They've had *years*and multiple game releases to do these ports, or make adjustments in their engine/content to make it friendly to the platforms they're releasing on. I'm sure doing development is hard, and as a random pleb on the internet I just can't appreciate the full horror of doing it, but many other studios seem to handle it so much better.

dissposablehero wrote:

Was gonna pick up FO:NV again, I played it when it was first released and it was simply unplayable and I had many issues with bugs. Has it been fixed adequately(obviously no game is perfect) yet? Or should I not bothered. I played about 30 hours, then gave up but never actually finished any story lines.

Oddly enough, most of my bugs were at the beginning of my play. Nothing game-breaking, things like half the scorpions walking around at an angle so their tails were up in the air and their faces were clipping into the ground. That stuff weirdly cleared up the longer I played. I put 130 hours into it.

Scratched wrote:

I'd accept that as an excuse if it wasn't for the fact that they've been doing console ports since TES3 (in house?), and it's hardly coming as a surprise to them.

It's not:

"Hey, we've just gone feature complete and we're into beta now. Three months to nail it all down"
"Uhhh, Bob, the guys upstairs say they want console versions too"
"****"

Or at least I hope it's not. They've had *years*and multiple game releases to do these ports, or make adjustments in their engine/content to make it friendly to the platforms they're releasing on. I'm sure doing development is hard, and as a random pleb on the internet I just can't appreciate the full horror of doing it, but many other studios seem to handle it so much better.

Considering that they've had similar problems with every game they've put out on the PS3, I think it might be that there's something about the way they make their games that doesn't play well with the PS3, and they're just not willing to alter their methods in whatever way would stop it from popping up in each of their games. Part of the problem is that the bugs they've found aren't affecting everyone. Considering that they've had to go to Sony to help fix their bugs, I imagine it's probably not the same bug every time, otherwise the fix for the problem in the previous game would have fixed it for the new one as well.

Stengah wrote:

I think it might be that there's something about the way they make their games that doesn't play well with the PS3, and they're just not willing to alter their methods in whatever way would stop it from popping up in each of their games.

That's along the lines I'm thinking, that the way their engine/games work would need to be changed at a fundamental level to make the changes necessary, and it works sort-of-well-enough for a lot of people that they just say sod it and carry on. Even so, I'd like to think they can't be proud of what they're putting out or the problems people have with their games.

I just dread that they'll continue to flog the existing engine for another round on the next set of consoles, beat it into shape for the new architectures and their quirks, and it'll be the same story again. That said, after them claiming that Creation engine was wholly new, I wouldn't believe them if they claimed they were doing an overhaul until I saw it with my own eyes.

Stengah wrote:
Scratched wrote:

I'd accept that as an excuse if it wasn't for the fact that they've been doing console ports since TES3 (in house?), and it's hardly coming as a surprise to them.

It's not:

"Hey, we've just gone feature complete and we're into beta now. Three months to nail it all down"
"Uhhh, Bob, the guys upstairs say they want console versions too"
"****"

Or at least I hope it's not. They've had *years*and multiple game releases to do these ports, or make adjustments in their engine/content to make it friendly to the platforms they're releasing on. I'm sure doing development is hard, and as a random pleb on the internet I just can't appreciate the full horror of doing it, but many other studios seem to handle it so much better.

Considering that they've had similar problems with every game they've put out on the PS3, I think it might be that there's something about the way they make their games that doesn't play well with the PS3, and they're just not willing to alter their methods in whatever way would stop it from popping up in each of their games. Part of the problem is that the bugs they've found aren't affecting everyone. Considering that they've had to go to Sony to help fix their bugs, I imagine it's probably not the same bug every time, otherwise the fix for the problem in the previous game would have fixed it for the new one as well.

Actually, Oblivion's port by a third party ran pretty well, even when including Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles. Amusingly, their game that ran the best on the PS3 was the one they didn't port to the PS3 themselves. The question of why that same company wasn't put on retainer for every subsequent release... THAT is anyone's guess at this point.

Well, Bethesda's games have always been buggy as hell, regardless of engine. Even Arena was buggy as hell in 1994. It's not just consoles. Not as busted as Obsidian's games usually are or, gods preserve us, Troka's, but still. Part of the problem is extremely ambitious designs. Can't shove that much stuff in a game and not expect something to break, it seems. Makes it hard to QA too.

The ambition of the designs is why I generally give them a bit of a free pass. To me, it is amazing that Skyrim works on the (currently, compared to PCs) limited consoles at all, there's so much stuff in it.

Not much help or solace for console players dealing with bugs, however. I feel sorry about that.

tboon wrote:

Well, Bethesda's games have always been buggy as hell, regardless of engine. Even Arena was buggy as hell in 1994. It's not just consoles. Not as busted as Obsidian's games usually are or, gods preserve us, Troka's, but still. Part of the problem is extremely ambitious designs. Can't shove that much stuff in a game and not expect something to break, it seems. Makes it hard to QA too.

The ambition of the designs is why I generally give them a bit of a free pass. To me, it is amazing that Skyrim works on the (currently, compared to PCs) limited consoles at all, there's so much stuff in it.

Not much help or solace for console players dealing with bugs, however. I feel sorry about that.

Nah, and that's been my philosophy as well with them (and with VtM: Bloodlines, still one of my favorite games). The problem they created for themselves, however, was talking about how the PS3 version was at nearly perfect parity to the Xbox version before release. A lot of people expected, then, that when an addon was released for the Xbox, it would be ready for the PS3 pretty quickly... then patches fell behind (1.8 in February at least) and the PS3 community was getting stonewalled on news of any kind...

What I think is funny is after dozens of threads on their forums with a lot of PC users who were saying things along the lines of "Screw the PS3 version, we want the PC version now, they're used to it!" (with lots of misspellings, contractions and pronounced reduced to texting style, etc...); now there is an uproar about the PS3 community getting discounts on DLC for a week after each's launch, and some PC players are trying to say we suffered just the same as they did, help us out PS3 guys! Hilarious.

Amusing point of anyone can find something to Female Doggo about though, there are people complaining that the one week timeline for discounts isn't fair, as they're releasing in reverse order and they want to play them in the order they were meant to be played in (not that there's any such thing, there's just an order of release).

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a gamer in possession of an Internet connection must be in want of something, anything, to whine about.

tboon wrote:

Part of the problem is extremely ambitious designs. Can't shove that much stuff in a game and not expect something to break, it seems. Makes it hard to QA too.

The ambition of the designs is why I generally give them a bit of a free pass. To me, it is amazing that Skyrim works on the (currently, compared to PCs) limited consoles at all, there's so much stuff in it.

I could buy that too... if it wasn't the zillionth game of a similar nature that they've made. I could agree it's ambitious if they were diving into the great unknown, if they were switching genres, if they were going from a narrow corridor to vast open world world, but this is Bethesda's bread and butter, this is their specialism, this is what they've been doing for years, with the same or a very similar engine for the past decade. Sure, it's big and impressive, but they should know how to make these games now, and how to make them well, both in the content they produce and how that content runs on the platforms they release it for.

They've had plenty of opportunities to revise things. If you only look at this generation only looking at major title releases (not DLC), Skyrim is their third release on the PS3, fourth if you include FO:NV (sidenote: and it's not only PS3 where there's bugs). They have had plenty of opportunity to investigate and fix things up. If someone said they'd been negligent, I'd struggle to disagree with them. If this was anything but entertainment software, people would be waving pitchforks around.

Scratched wrote:
tboon wrote:

Part of the problem is extremely ambitious designs. Can't shove that much stuff in a game and not expect something to break, it seems. Makes it hard to QA too.

The ambition of the designs is why I generally give them a bit of a free pass. To me, it is amazing that Skyrim works on the (currently, compared to PCs) limited consoles at all, there's so much stuff in it.

I could buy that too... if it wasn't the zillionth game of a similar nature that they've made. I could agree it's ambitious if they were diving into the great unknown, if they were switching genres, if they were going from a narrow corridor to vast open world world, but this is Bethesda's bread and butter, this is their specialism, this is what they've been doing for years, with the same or a very similar engine for the past decade. Sure, it's big and impressive, but they should know how to make these games now, and how to make them well, both in the content they produce and how that content runs on the platforms they release it for.

They've had plenty of opportunities to revise things. If you only look at this generation only looking at major title releases (not DLC), Skyrim is their third release on the PS3, fourth if you include FO:NV (sidenote: and it's not only PS3 where there's bugs). They have had plenty of opportunity to investigate and fix things up. If someone said they'd been negligent, I'd struggle to disagree with them. If this was anything but entertainment software, people would be waving pitchforks around.

Agree with everything you said. My only point is that, with Bethesda, they've always released buggy games. Always. Never, not once, have they failed to disappoint with regard to this. When you buy a Bethesda game you will get a wonderful, awesome game world that is filled with bugs. Not saying it is right, just saying it is.

I love their games to death but maybe this is how it always will be. But, if Paradox can turn their quality around, maybe there is hope for Bethesda. I would not hold my breath though. I assume this will be true about about TES 6 or FO 4 as well.

complexmath wrote:

It's the Pure Waters mod. However, I've just read that it has a few issues with Climates of Tamriel, so I'm going to try WATER tonight. I have to say though that the change I made that has had the biggest improvement is enabling Tree Self-Shadowing from the NVidia Tweak Guide. I really don't understand why this was disabled by default.

I tried WATER and didn't like it as much, and it conflicted with some of the textures in the Skyrim HD mod, so back to Pure Waters. I also installed ELFX and it's really nice in general, though the lack of ambient light in caves is taking some getting used to. I kind of wish I could have a little bit of ambient light in caves in addition to all the point lighting in ELFX. Climates of Tamriel does that, so it may just be a matter of messing with mod load order. I'll experiment a bit more. It's really amazing how good this game can look with some work.

EDIT:

I had to work my way through a tricky Falmer cave last night as a part of Dawnguard. I understand that it's realistic that Falmer don't need lights (the glowing mushrooms illuminate exactly nothing), but after 30 minutes of throwing Magelights around just to try and figure out how to get out of one particular area I was done with ELFX. With it disabled the area lit up in an unrealistic but really spectacular way. This cave at least was designed to be viewed with the ambient lights present. I may look into just editing ELFX so it does everything it does but leaves the ambient lighting alone. Climates of Tamriel can dim that universally anyway.

complexmath wrote:
complexmath wrote:

It's the Pure Waters mod. However, I've just read that it has a few issues with Climates of Tamriel, so I'm going to try WATER tonight. I have to say though that the change I made that has had the biggest improvement is enabling Tree Self-Shadowing from the NVidia Tweak Guide. I really don't understand why this was disabled by default.

I tried WATER and didn't like it as much, and it conflicted with some of the textures in the Skyrim HD mod, so back to Pure Waters. I also installed ELFX and it's really nice in general, though the lack of ambient light in caves is taking some getting used to. I kind of wish I could have a little bit of ambient light in caves in addition to all the point lighting in ELFX. Climates of Tamriel does that, so it may just be a matter of messing with mod load order. I'll experiment a bit more. It's really amazing how good this game can look with some work.

EDIT:

I had to work my way through a tricky Falmer cave last night as a part of Dawnguard. I understand that it's realistic that Falmer don't need lights (the glowing mushrooms illuminate exactly nothing), but after 30 minutes of throwing Magelights around just to try and figure out how to get out of one particular area I was done with ELFX. With it disabled the area lit up in an unrealistic but really spectacular way. This cave at least was designed to be viewed with the ambient lights present. I may look into just editing ELFX so it does everything it does but leaves the ambient lighting alone. Climates of Tamriel can dim that universally anyway.

Yep, I also had issues with Dawnguard and my lighting mods, basically all the Falmer caves were completely pitch black. I had to disable them for a few sections and the caves looked pretty incredible if a bit unrealistic

The problem I have with their pretty stuff is less technical but more that their pretty stuff becomes boring through repetition. Every now and then I do stop and look around, and say "hey, this is good stuff", but after you've seen the same thing so many times, the same tileset, the same kind of layouts, it becomes invisible.

I wish they had more ways to vary what they made, or be more realistic with what they can do with the art they create. Boring the player in any respect should be avoided if possible.

Scratched wrote:

The problem I have with their pretty stuff is less technical but more that their pretty stuff becomes boring through repetition. Every now and then I do stop and look around, and say "hey, this is good stuff", but after you've seen the same thing so many times, the same tileset, the same kind of layouts, it becomes invisible.

I wish they had more ways to vary what they made, or be more realistic with what they can do with the art they create. Boring the player in any respect should be avoided if possible.

Well having every dungeon be thematically unique would be somewhat tiring to me as well. I like gaining that experience with like Nordic ruins to know, hey, this passageway up ahead looks like the ones where the blades can swing back and forth, time to watch for any tripwires or pressure plates. But always facing something completely knew where learning the style of one dungeon provides no experience on what to expect in the new dungeon would be somewhat frustrating as well... though it might help making that "don't trigger pressure plates" perk from Sneak a bit more useful.

The thing is, those cues make good gameplay sense. If you're going down an average corridor and suddenly you get a swinging blade of death, or any stone could be a pressure plate, then it's probably a bad move as there's no way to learn. I could see them making the disguise a bit different, say for the pressure plate it could be how the surrounding stones (in an otherwise matching tiled floor) are laid out, or if it had scorch marks, no dust, lots of gunpowder, etc, surrounding it so the cue isn't the object itself, but how it's integrated into the environment.

I was about to write my usual thing about how Bethesda 'need' to make a smaller game to concentrate on these things rather than making a hundred bland things, but I'm not sure that's the solution to their dungeon problems. What I do wonder is what they make of other developers games, do they analyse what others are doing and crib their discoveries and design methods to improve their own. That's the kind of behind the scenes you'll never know though.

Scratched wrote:

The thing is, those cues make good gameplay sense. If you're going down an average corridor and suddenly you get a swinging blade of death, or any stone could be a pressure plate, then it's probably a bad move as there's no way to learn. I could see them making the disguise a bit different, say for the pressure plate it could be how the surrounding stones (in an otherwise matching tiled floor) are laid out, or if it had scorch marks, no dust, lots of gunpowder, etc, surrounding it so the cue isn't the object itself, but how it's integrated into the environment.

I was about to write my usual thing about how Bethesda 'need' to make a smaller game to concentrate on these things rather than making a hundred bland things, but I'm not sure that's the solution to their dungeon problems. What I do wonder is what they make of other developers games, do they analyse what others are doing and crib their discoveries and design methods to improve their own. That's the kind of behind the scenes you'll never know though.

I would say the differences in leveling and character creation would speak to them at least learning what customers want. Morrowind was a great setting, but nigh unplayable without guides or at least a map (or my preference of using console commands to teleport around, basically creating my own fast travel after having been somewhere before). Instructions on getting places like, it's a straight line north of such and such, but by the way, that's like 2/3 of the way across the island that you're walking, were obnoxious at best.

Next game they created, arrows to guide you! Crazy! Some people hated it, I loved it. If i wanted to wander, I could turn off quest markers, etc... if I wanted to participate in a quest though, I had the options to guide me or not.

Skyrim is about as happy as I've been with a Bethesda game. Leveling is somewhat streamlined, but I like not having to try to level certain skills with each level up to avoid having a level with low stat multipliers (or trying to max out luck, which was almost never feasible, in spite of my prefering to have exactly that) or being stuck at certain skill level for a skill because your stat level isn't high enough to continue leveling it.

TES is one of those series that's been going on for a long time where I think long standing conventions are fighting against evolving game design 'standards'. There was a thread on reddit with a lot of people pining for the old ways of earlier titles, and I think there's some validity to what gets brought up both pro and con. I guess Bethesda is a studio I'd like to see what they would produce if they were given a truly blank slate (including the engine), not to make a sequel or another entry to TES or Fallout series, and to have their minds blanked enough to not remember their old games so they can't draw from them, but still remember the lessons learned (tip of hat to Braid).

I stumbled across the Lost to the Ages quest that's part of the Dawnguard expansion, and it starts off with you entering a Dwemer ruin with a pretty interesting layout and a well-voiced, interesting character who accompanies you. While I haven't started the main Dawnguard quest yet, I have stumbled across some locations added to the game for it and they're already more interesting than many of the standard caves and ruins in the base game (and I found the ones in the base game to be a massive improvement over Oblivion's). It seems the expansion let them stretch themselves a bit in terms of level design and scripting events in the dungeons, so I'm hoping for more of that from Dragonborn next month.

So need advice as I just got caught up in the Markath Conspiracy quest. So I'm playing a nord loyal to the stormcloaks who firmly believes the Imperials are sell-outs and traitors who must all die. I recognize Ulfric is a bit of a blowhard and some of the Stormcloaks are xenophobes, but it was fun playing the rebels and also getting a chance to kill Roman-looking troops (yes I'm back into the Spartacus TV series).

But after delving deep into the Markath Conspiracy, I realize:

Spoiler:

The Stormcloaks are genocidal maniacs who regularly butcher little kids in front of their parents. And Ulfric is a little proto-Hitler. I really have little interest in continuing to work for them, although I love the big battles.

So, a few questions:
1. Is there a way to switch sides in the middle of the Civil War?
2. is there a way to eventually kill off Ulfric?
3. Do the Stormcloaks in any way reddem themselves throughout the Civil War quest, or do things just get worse? In other words, did I inadvertently pick the "evil" side?

What's great about this game is I didn't even mean to visit Markath - but after a night of heavy drinking in Windhelm my character wakes up at the shrine of Dibella there.

I don't think you can switch sides, but there is another way to resolve the civil war. How far are you through the main quest? (hint hint)

Scratched wrote:

I don't think you can switch sides, but there is another way to resolve the civil war. How far are you through the main quest? (hint hint)

Still pretty early - I'm just about to go hit the embassy. I've been distracted quite a bit by side quests, which isn't helping my efforts to scratch Skyrim off the pile list. I probably should drop everything and power through the main quest.

jdzappa wrote:
Scratched wrote:

I don't think you can switch sides, but there is another way to resolve the civil war. How far are you through the main quest? (hint hint)

Still pretty early - I'm just about to go hit the embassy. I've been distracted quite a bit by side quests, which isn't helping my efforts to scratch Skyrim off the pile list. I probably should drop everything and power through the main quest.

It is possible to switch sides, and even go back-and-forth, I believe -- and that's until

Spoiler:

The Jagged Crown quest, if I recall

.

There's even a spot mid-mission that's your point of no return. You got a little ways left to dither -- two or three missions, at least.

Any news on PC release of Dragonborn yet?

BlackSabre wrote:

Any news on PC release of Dragonborn yet?

February 5th, according the Bethesda's blog.

Awesome.

Caaaaannnnnn'tttttttt Waaaaaiiiiittttttt!!!

Skyrim has been getting a lot more attention from me recently, I finally decided to get some smithing and enchanting done.

P.S Confession time: I'm about to hit 100 hours soon, and I've never really even tried the main questline, certainly nowhere near finishing it, with either of my characters 0.o

Maybe I should remedy that before Dragonborn is released..

I got my smithing up to 100 last night. No perks except being able to improve magical items, so with a few smithing-enhancing items and potion, I was able to improve all my standard gear to Legendary status, which is just hilariously overpowered now. I'm working on improving my secondary skills so I can reach level 81, but once that's done I'll have a stellar set of gear to equip for Dragonborn and other random things I do.

beanman101283 wrote:

I was able to improve all my standard gear to Legendary status, which is just hilariously overpowered now.

Worth reading: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Armo...

Having better smithing lets you improve armor more, so it's easier to hit the cap with a wider selection of armor, which might be useful if you're not into enchanting your own stuff.

I think my armor rating was 610 or so without a shield equipped, though I did have an Amulet of Articulation that counted as light armor. I was wearing a combination of high-end Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild gear, along with the Krosis dragon priest mask.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
dissposablehero wrote:

Was gonna pick up FO:NV again, I played it when it was first released and it was simply unplayable and I had many issues with bugs. Has it been fixed adequately(obviously no game is perfect) yet? Or should I not bothered. I played about 30 hours, then gave up but never actually finished any story lines.

Oddly enough, most of my bugs were at the beginning of my play. Nothing game-breaking, things like half the scorpions walking around at an angle so their tails were up in the air and their faces were clipping into the ground. That stuff weirdly cleared up the longer I played. I put 130 hours into it.

The main bugs I saw were;

The floating robot companion thing that you can get near the start disappeared at somepoint but the game thinks it's still following me and acts as if it is still there. i.e When you go to get the robot dog companion it growls at the floating thing as if it's in the room but is completely invisible to me and I still get it's perk. I don't even know if that's happened to anyone else and if it's been patched.

The guy right at the start - his head started spinning like this;

I think this one was patched, because all the Reviews pointed this one out.

There were a couple of small ones that are inconsequential, which may or may not have been patched.

Plus it crashed way too many times for me, I actually thought there was a problem with my 360.

I played it for around 40 hours. Just isn't good enough for games coming out in this generation. Remember games like FF7 - massive game found a list of glitches http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII/Glitches_and_errors#Cloud.27s_PHS_.28Phone.29
And some of those are basically cheats! I realise games are way more complex and graphically superior, but someone pointed out games that are developed for a console shouldn't be ridiculously buggy 5+years after it's been out and just relying on everyone being online and just patch it afterwards. It's so annoying after paying £40/$60 for a game on release and it's nearly unplayable and there are allot better examples of that out there.

P.S sorry for being off topic - back to Skyrim.....:)