Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

[Arthmoor]

Thousands of trees :PYes, the 720 will still be a console. But with DX11 capabilities, and we assume beefier hardware, it won't be holding PC back to 2006 levels anymore. I'm not expecting them to put 8GB RAM on it with 2GB dedicated video memory, but surely they'll put at least 2GB RAM on it with 512MB video? That's generally good enough for most modern games to play at a decent level. Plus with both being able to use DX11 developers will be able to offer higher res stuff for those of us with rigs that can handle it, and they won't have an excuse not to since sourcing their material at higher resolution to start with would make more sense.It looks like Skyrim has taken numerous mods and incorporated their concepts. Not just elements of OOO. Finishing moves are clearly Deadly Reflex territory, although many other games have had those too. One could argue they took a lot of concepts for the updated magic from one of the many magic overhauls. I'm fully expecting there will be animated containers, which were introduced by Harvest Containers. They got the message on weather already. So there's plenty of stuff that's not just OOO inspired.

[prettyfly]

I suppose the modding community must make developing somewhat easier for them then, since the community can indirectly tell the developers what they want in the game through the mods they use.

[Thomas Kaira]

Arthmoor: I cannot upgrade to a 64bit OS because my Motherboard does not support 64bit software. It's really that simple.But really, given recent events (see Random Stuff post) none of that shit matters anymore.

[Arthmoor]

I've never heard of a case where the motherboard made or broke the choice to update to a 64bit OS. The CPU, yes, but never the board. But yeah, somewhat irrelevant at this point.

[prettyfly]

Reading a thread populated by MW fanatics who think that fast travel will ruin Skyrim. My blood boils.

[Dwip]

Boy are they late to that party.

[Dallen68]

Actually, they were late to the party when Oblivion was released. I was browsing the UESP wiki, and it turns out that that argument had been settled in developement. Same with the compass, same with the quest markers. Personally, I'd bet a lifetime supply of Tamika 415 that a lot of the people complaining about them were (are) the same people who were complaining that MW doesn't give you explicit enough instructions to get places.

[Dwip]

Kind of where I was going with that, yeah. There are exceptionally good reasons why we quest markers, &c, and those battles got fought long, long ago.

[Arthmoor]

I laugh because Morrowind was the anomaly as far as that was concerned. Arena had fast travel. Daggerfall had fast travel. Oblivion has fast travel. Skyrim will have fast travel *AND* a carriage type system. It pays to keep in mind most of the idiots bitching about stuff on the Skyrim forum think Morrowind was the first TES game.

[Dallen68]

Actually, I always wondered why no one made a "cart" system for Oblivion, like in Daggerfall. I mean, I know there's the magick cobl luggage, but not quite the same thing. That being said, the feature being there doesn't force you to use it. If you want to walk from one end of skyrim to the other, you can. Personally, I like to balance between the two things; and I have cobl set up so I can only "travel" so many hours at a time (mostly so I don't arrive having starved to death). As far as the "immersion" thing, a little imagination is all that's needed. It does get tedious sometimes, walking from A to B to C. So, fast forward to C, and "imagine" you walked to the stable, caught the travel services guy, and rode to C. The only thing that would make it better, for me, is if the travel services mod was scripted to remove the appropriate amount of gold from the inventory in this situation.

[Arthmoor]

Also keep in mind Daggerfall had horses too. So even that was taken out by Morrowind, then returned in Oblivion. For however messed up they were.I'd argue that for Arena and Daggerfall, the game would have been impossible to complete without fast travel. You try walking from one end of Tamriel to the other when they claim it would take you real time days to do so. Or from one end of High Rock to the other because doing so would take 19 real time hours on a horse. With barely anything worth mentioning to encounter along the way even.I think they should have stuck with what they came up with in Morrowind, but alas, they were attempting to appeal to the lazy gamers with Oblivion. The ones who can't be bothered to read shit or walk more than 30 feet without complaining they're getting bored.

[Dallen68]

It took 20 hrs (rt) to drive a horse and cart from Daggerfall to Wayrest.Sometimes, it's not about not reading shit. It's about the shit your reading not being clear enough. As far as map markers go, my personal opinion is that it should depend on the mission, and perhaps you have to talk to the right person to get it.(As in, if there's no reason that guy would know where X is,other than a general area, it wouldn't appear; but if it was someone who'd been there umpteen times-of course he'd know.) The Morrowind system was also fine. I guess something changed in the engine to make things like divine recall cumbersome.

[Arthmoor]

I guess something changed in the engine to make things like divine recall cumbersome.

Yes. It's called closed cities. Biggest dumbass thing they ever did in cowtowing to Microsoft and the 360.However, that should not have affected Mark and Recall since those would do nothing more than place a roving marker in the last place you used the Mark spell at.I still stand by my opinion that they caved to lazy gamers, and there's a distinct possibility that they'll have caved even more with Skyrim. Time will tell I guess.

[prettyfly]

I don't see why there shouldn't be fast travel, but cutting the more realistic forms of transport was a dumb thing to do. I found Oblivion was so much better once I was using Cyrodil Travel Services and Mages Guild Teleporters. I agree on the 'lazy gamers' thing to, though at least where getting a cart travelling system with vanilla in Skyrim.And yeah, closed cities...that's you're job isn't it Arthmooor?

[Arthmoor]

All depends. It's only my job if we get shafted with load screens. That's so 2006.

[prettyfly]

Well, at least we have people who are experienced with doing such things if necessary.

[Dallen68]

I still don't see why there wouldn't be divine recall, mages guild portals, and carriage service just because of "closed cities". You do at least two of those things from interior cells anyway. I'd have handled fast travel differently, also. I'd have placed "waypoints" at various places on the map (usu. near an inn, wayshrine, or city enterence) and made it that you picked a direction and went to the NEXT way point. If you did not have a horse (or something equivelent) you'd have the option of paying for faster service if that waypoint had a travel agent. Too, I would have made it so there was a random chance of being stopped along the way for battles, customs inspections, messengers, and so on. Of course, this feature would depend on the actual distance to the waypoint. Too, I would have put a lot more inns along the roads, or at least "rest stops" . All that being said, I don't think they caved to "lazy gamers" or xbox (I've never once seen an Xbox drop frame rate). I think they caved to accomodating as many system possibilities as possible. (The load screen does give the memory a chance to clear) They could just as easily did what every other game company does: build the game for the Formula One system of the day, and then "maybe" the game is still popular enough when that system becomes "average" in 6 months to a year.

[Arthmoor]

Mage guild portals and a carriage system are easy. You know where you are and specifically where you're going. Divine Intervention has to do calculations on distance. That's impossible to do in a celled interior inside a celled city.The load screen is irrelevant. You can issue a memory clearing command without even having to touch a doorway. You can cell the cities the way Witcher 2 did, and all the player will see is the door open, you walk through. There may be an artsy little spinning icon or something to indicate it's loading from disk.If CD Projekt can build their flagship game specifically to take on high end machines, then scale that down to the 360, so can Bethesda, and they have absolutely no excuse for not doing so. Bethesda is a much larger company with a lot more talented people behind it. They have the resources to have done this right from the beginning but chose not to.

[Dallen68]

Divine Intervention has to do calculations on distance

I don't see why. It's moveto (cell number), with the cell number being the closest temple. I'm still glad Bethseda "didn't" build the game to take on high end machines. You sell more games building to take on "average" machines! : D And actually, probably a lot more brain work and planning, too.

[Arthmoor]

Maybe I'm not remembering correctly, but Divine Intervention was the one you cast and ended up at the nearest temple, yes? That being the case, how do you propose to do the distance calculation on a marker inside an interior cell that's inside a celled city? It would be fine if you mean to send someone to the nearest temple in the same worldspace. Fortunately Morrowind had only one such worldspace: The world.Taking out Mark + Recall was silly, that's a floating marker that can be placed anywhere. Taking out the guild guides was probably silly too, since you tell the guide which city you want to go to, which means it knows precisely which marker to send you to. Being in a celled area means nothing in either of these cases.In theory Bethesda did make Oblivion to take on high end machines. In fact, they had to viciously gut quite a bit after Microsoft told them the 360 was too feeble to handle the game as it was. Rather than panic gutting half the good stuff from the game, they could have simply downscaled all the textures to make the cut on video memory, and scaled back the AI a bit. They didn't have to gimp the PC version for the sake of some unproven platform.

[Dallen68]

Simple: you divide the main map into zones. For example, if you're in zone 1, you end up in Bruma. If you're in Zone 2, you end up in Cheydinhall, etc clockwise around the map. If your in zone 0 (The middle of the map), you end up (I haven't figured that part out yet). If you're already in said city you get a message that says "The god's have decided to let you walk to the temple, lazy sinner" (+1 infamy).(There's no reason to be doing a DR when the temples 10 feet away). Also, there's enough mods out there that do approximately this to have proof of concept. Sometimes, they're not "perfect", but works most of the time.Bethseda also put in things called "sliders" to accomodate-less high end PC's. However, you're right about them gutting it for 360. They could have done what everyone else does and have one version for PC and a different version for console. It's pretty much what they ended up with, anyway.

[Dwip]

I feel like I'm the only person who actually really likes the ability to fast travel. Sometimes I really just want to get to the dungeon. Also, without silt striders and pack guars, it's just not the same.Also, I don't think divine intervention is all THAT impossible:- The ability already exists to find whatever in closed areas (quest markers do this all the time), and from there calculate distance (fast travel does this all the time). I don't figure as how this is particularly insurmountable on the coders' part, given what they have to work with.- For that matter, it's a fairly trivial problem to make a hackish version of the thing via script, though it's not easily expandable. Cast the spell, run a distance check on some exterior world object in each city, choose the closest one, and warp the player to a marker in front of the chapel.Which is all to say that it isn't like they faced insurmountable technical limitations that led to them scrapping the system, so much as I'm guessing they figured with the advent of fast travel, why bother, since everyone would just use the fast travel system instead. That's a debatable proposition, of course, as we're all aware, but it does have a logic behind it.

[Arthmoor]

You forget, quest markers have specific references to target. They aren't asked to pick the nearest one out of 10 or something. A transport spell with a known marker won't have any issue with it either. It's finding the unknown ones when they're not in an exterior worldspace that becomes an issue. Perhaps with OBSE you could pull something off, and perhaps the devs have hidden cool stuff we never see.We can all see that "let's just use fast travel" backfired on them in a big way or they wouldn't be offering that along with a Morrowind style system.Also, I don't mind having fast travel. I use it almost exclusively for testing. For playing, no, I hoof it or use my transport mod. It really does feel like too much of a cheat because it's flawless in its execution. Then again, they could have gone all "You have been waylaid and must defend yourself!" on us

[Dallen68]

Well, I don't know if it's flawless in it's execution. I like to use it sometimes, but like a lot of things it's open to abuse. Which is rather unfortunate, (that people can't stop them selves from exploiting everything for Power Leveling and stuff, I mean.) You should be able to gain experience with weapons on the practice dummies, for example. But then you have some yahoo that figures out how to put himself on auto-swing and does that for the next 10 hrs (real time) and suddenly has a 100 blade. Maybe they "could" have made it so practicing with it would give you half a kill a day's experience. Same thing with jumping for acrobatics, or blasting the target for destruction/marksman. I mean, if used as intended, none of these are cheats. Abused to the point of absurdity, yea they are cheats. I mean, do you really see yourself hopping everywhere you go? really? Sadly, the people that find it necessary to do this, end up on the forums whining about how "unrealistic" it is! No, the feature itself is fine, it's a fatal wetware error that's the problem.The transport mod adds a little something to it, and I already suggested the possibility of an attack during fast travel. The highway men all go on vacation because your fast traveling, yes?

[Sigurð Stormhand]

I have always felt that Oblivioin suffered from being "we fixed this from Morrowind" without any actual critical thinking involved. The developement process seems to have been this:"People don't like this in Morrowind, lets cut it and do something else!"