Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

[AndalayBay]

Well the one thing I didn't like with Oblivion's system was the pairing of attribute and skill in some cases. Since they wanted everything even, they wound up having some skills linked with an attribute that didn't really make sense, in my mind. So shifting that around would be good. But you go through a learning curve with every game. Part of the process is trying to win the game with a less than ideal character - to me that's part of the experience. Quitting a game because you're frustrated with some of these issues is console gamerish, imo. I have friends who are console gamers and that's exactly why they play them - they don't want to think, they just want to kill. I would just hate to see the Elder Scrolls head in that direction.

[Dwip]

I'm not really sure we're getting any less complexity, so much as we're just getting a different sort of complexity with things like the perk trees. And if it comes right down to it, I'd rather have perk tree complexity than the sort of stat micromanagement BS we had in Oblivion.I don't think we disagree re: consoles, by the by, though my last direct experience with them was an N64. There's strategy to be had, but sometimes what you really want to do is play some Goldeneye.Well, ok. Most of the time what you really want to do is play some Goldeneye. That game rocked.

[AndalayBay]

That is true about the perk trees. I played F3 once and my character wasn't all that good because I didn't know how to develop him properly. It was too complex! But I do think there are replay opportunities to be had when you aren't happy with a previous "build" and you want to try something else. So, yeah, hopefully that is still there.Ah yes, the simple pleasures of just playing to blow a bunch of crap up!!

[Sigurð Stormhand]

So how dumb are you if you're confused by Oblivion? Seriously Todd' date=' THAT'S your lame excuse for some of the systems you're removing from the game?[/quote']Heaven forfend you read the manual, eh?What he's saying he doesn't want you to make a character - he wants you to be able to start power building from the off. They should have gone back to Morrowind, where you skills and attributes were actually linked so that you couldn't level your skill above its governing attribute - that pretty well killed power building.I have to be honest, I'm not buy Skyrim on Launch Day - I'm giving it at least six months for them to knock the bugs out and for people to decide whether it's worth it.

[Arthmoor]

Well' date=' I dunno. We've been over this one before, but they've kind of got a point with regards to how stats versus skills vs HP/whatever work, which is mostly what that article is talking about. It's fairly intuitive to ME, because I play a ton of Oblivion and read a ton of stuff on it, but if I didn't I'd be fairly confused. So can't really fault them there.[/quote']You and I have both played our fair share of D&D games, MUDs, and what have you. The TES method of doing things is VASTLY less complex than any of the stuff from, say, 1997. Even when factoring in Daggerfall and Arena. So clearly Todd isn't speaking to us, because we figured the systems out without much trouble.I think I probably looked at the manual for Daggerfall once, the one for Morrowind twice maybe, and never touched the one for Oblivion. It seems unlikely I'd need to do so for Skyrim either.Whether you do it as perk trees or actual linked attributes I'm guessing the underlying mechanics of it all are exactly the same. We won't know that for sure until we get our hands on the game but I seriously doubt they scrapped years worth of tried and true formulas for this.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

Well' date=' I dunno. We've been over this one before' date=' but they've kind of got a point with regards to how stats versus skills vs HP/whatever work, which is mostly what that article is talking about. It's fairly intuitive to ME, because I play a ton of Oblivion and read a ton of stuff on it, but if I didn't I'd be fairly confused. So can't really fault them there.[/quote'']

You and I have both played our fair share of D&D games, MUDs, and what have you. The TES method of doing things is VASTLY less complex than any of the stuff from, say, 1997. Even when factoring in Daggerfall and Arena. So clearly Todd isn't speaking to us, because we figured the systems out without much trouble.

I think I probably looked at the manual for Daggerfall once, the one for Morrowind twice maybe, and never touched the one for Oblivion. It seems unlikely I'd need to do so for Skyrim either.

Whether you do it as perk trees or actual linked attributes I'm guessing the underlying mechanics of it all are exactly the same. We won't know that for sure until we get our hands on the game but I seriously doubt they scrapped years worth of tried and true formulas for this.

Yeah?I have two words for you, "Prequel Trilogy".Which I think I spelled wrong.

[Arthmoor]

Not sure I get where you're going with that.

[Dwip]

I imagine something to do with "Nobody thought George Lucas was going to fuck it up quite as bad as he did."

You and I have both played our fair share of D&D games' date=' MUDs, and what have you. The TES method of doing things is VASTLY less complex than any of the stuff from, say, 1997. Even when factoring in Daggerfall and Arena. So clearly Todd isn't speaking to us, because we figured the systems out without much trouble. I think I probably looked at the manual for Daggerfall once, the one for Morrowind twice maybe, and never touched the one for Oblivion. It seems unlikely I'd need to do so for Skyrim either. Whether you do it as perk trees or actual linked attributes I'm guessing the underlying mechanics of it all are exactly the same. We won't know that for sure until we get our hands on the game but I seriously doubt they scrapped years worth of tried and true formulas for this. [/quote']I actually read the Daggerfall one a couple times. Back when I read manuals.And yeah, sort of what I was trying to say - I'm/we're pretty advanced user here, so complexity can be shrugged off. Not everybody's like that, obviously, and if they can trim some of the more esoteric complexity for stuff that people actually get, and that gets more people to play, well, more power to 'em.Re: FO3 - That actually had about the right level of complexity for my tastes. Stats still showed up, but they more or less made sense with the skills, and most of the management was in perks.Oh, and speaking of waiting for 6 months to fix bugs, at least we're very unlikely to ever get the Daggerfall experience ever again. Good God.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

I imagine something to do with "Nobody thought George Lucas was going to fuck it up quite as bad as he did."

You're proton torpedo went straight down the exhaust port there.

Oh' date=' and speaking of waiting for 6 months to fix bugs, at least we're very unlikely to ever get the Daggerfall experience ever again. Good God.[/quote']I'm not aware (didn't have a PC before Windows), how bad?

[Arthmoor]

This dinosaur happened to like Episodes 1-3. Except for Jar-jar, who should have been shoved down the exhaust port along with that proton torpedo.Daggerfall had something in the neighborhood of 7-8 patches and still came out the other end a pile of bug ridden crap. All in the days before Windows and before high speed internet. In fact, IIRC, before the internet had been commercialized much at all. Command line telnet and ftp type bad. Or even worse, direct-dial BBS setups.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

This dinosaur happened to like Episodes 1-3. Except for Jar-jar' date=' who should have been shoved down the exhaust port along with that proton torpedo.[/quote']It would have been good if they'd cut out Anakin, Naboo and Padme. Also, more Qui-Gon Awsome

Daggerfall had something in the neighborhood of 7-8 patches and still came out the other end a pile of bug ridden crap. All in the days before Windows and before high speed internet. In fact, IIRC, before the internet had been commercialized much at all. Command line telnet and ftp type bad. Or even worse, direct-dial BBS setups.

I have no idea what you just said, gramps.

[Arthmoor]

You youngins have all been spoilt! SPOILT I SAY!

[Dwip]

*shakes cane at Sigurd*I'm still a little sad that they patched whatever the birthsign bug was that let High Elves get super duper extra ludicrous magicka. I used to make the most OP guys with dai-katanas and destruction magic. Good fun.I did at least get my patches from what I'm pretty sure was the stone age version of the UESP. So there's that. As opposed to the Ultima 8 patch....wait, even all of Episode II? The worst love plotline in the history of life? All of that?

[Arthmoor]

Clearly I watched an entirely different prequel trilogy from what you two describe because aside from Jar-jar it was all perfectly fine.

[AndalayBay]

Compuserve anyone?

[Arthmoor]

Sorry, local dial-in only BBS's beat Compuserve any day

[Kayle]

Firstly, I'd like to toss a very hearty Fuck you, to everyone who said this reduction in complexity is because of Console gamers. I happen to be a console gamer, and you can all go to hell.Secondly, The prequel trilogy wasn't as bad as most people make it out to be. It had it's moments of epic suck, but for the most part it was alright.

[Arthmoor]

Well that's nice. Problem is, it's true, and even Todd has said as much. They're doing this to draw in more casual gamers, who are typically console users. PC users are becoming an increasingly more "hardcore" crowd of gamer.That said, I think the kind of console gamer that brought all this on (not you Kayle, obviously) is dragging the rest of us all down to the lowest level. Gaming quality in general is being stifled by 5-7 year old hardware. For God sake, we're all still using DX9. Features get cut from games so they'll run on the infernal Xbox 360 and it's paultry 512MB of RAM, in an age where 2GB is now considered minimal and 64 bit operating systems are the norm - not the exception. Probably the only thing that's of any relief is that the Xbox 360 is a tri-core processor and companies woke up one day to realize this and most recent titles will take advantage of more than one core if you have them. Hello massive performance improvement in Fallout 3 vs Oblivion.When the 720 comes along and runs DX11 with a decent amount of memory and a good video system, we'll be far less likely to be generally upset by the situation.

[AndalayBay]

Sorry' date=' local dial-in only BBS's beat Compuserve any day [/quote']A friend of ours still has one up and running

[Hana]

I have no idea what you just said' date=' gramps.[/quote']I laughed so hard. But then, I know what he was saying.

[Dwip]

Well that's nice. Problem is' date=' it's true, and even Todd has said as much. They're doing this to draw in more casual gamers, who are typically console users. PC users are becoming an increasingly more "hardcore" crowd of gamer.That said, I think the kind of console gamer that brought all this on (not you Kayle, obviously) is dragging the rest of us all down to the lowest level. Gaming quality in general is being stifled by 5-7 year old hardware. For God sake, we're all still using DX9. Features get cut from games so they'll run on the infernal Xbox 360 and it's paultry 512MB of RAM, in an age where 2GB is now considered minimal and 64 bit operating systems are the norm - not the exception. Probably the only thing that's of any relief is that the Xbox 360 is a tri-core processor and companies woke up one day to realize this and most recent titles will take advantage of more than one core if you have them. Hello massive performance improvement in Fallout 3 vs Oblivion.When the 720 comes along and runs DX11 with a decent amount of memory and a good video system, we'll be far less likely to be generally upset by the situation.[/quote']OTOH, gamers like this guy. PC gamer, plays all the same stuff we do, has a rampant hate on for graphics past about 2002.

[Arthmoor]

Sadly, since he wrote that in 2008, he got his misguided wish and we're all still stuck with a graphics pipeline that sucks complete ass because Microsoft thinks the 360 is good to go until 2015.I can't find the link right now but Intel had a nice professional chart of their own indicating PC gaming has an audience of something like 120 million people, many of whom have hardware more than adequate to fulfill the needs of a decent DX11 game. Mainly due to the mass migration of the market to Windows 7, which has DX11 out of the box. Sitting there, unused, because the marketing drones think console gamers are the larger market.Just the fact that the article talks about hardware that hasn't changed a bit in 3 years time is something I find sickening since the rest of us who WANT that stuff simply can't get it.

[Dwip]

He's still saying it now, as it happens. It's kind of a thing with him. Which, you know, I think most of his experience is either from about ten years ago, or with Valve's Source engine, which is a brilliant piece of technology but which is also old. So he's sitting there talking about 72 hours per room, and I'm sitting here thinking "Man, working by myself in FNV, it took me like 72 hours for the whole mod, of which the small part was the actual room." I dunno. I guess we have it really good or something? Or maybe there's some screwy time calcs on how long the modeling takes or something.And speaking of, if you wanted my takes on why everything costs so damn much, I'd tell you modeling and voice acting. But I don't think those really tell the entire story either. Sort of an across the board increase in production values equals an across the board elevation of costs as you have to pay more people more thing. Dunno, I'm not a game studio exec.I'd be pretty interested in that chart. This chart, perchance? Indeed, that is an interesting thing.

[Arthmoor]

Yeah, I mean, I just churned out a fully working update to the destroyed Bruma guild in less than 72 hours actual work time. Sure, I already had a room, but I wrote the script, dropped some NPCs, gave them AI schedules and gear, and tested all the staged updates to make sure they work right. So you might just be right. I'll wager us TES modders have it a lot easier than others do. Case in point, the NWN modding engine. ACK.I think I'd probably agree with you that a full staff of professional level voice actors isn't cheap. Especially since that probably involves some sort of Hollywood union.Yep, that's the chart. I guess my Google-fu failed me. I also find this trend toward laptop gaming rather interesting.

[Dwip]

Not, now I think about it, that he much likes the Source level editor much either. And I am now recalling a couple of instances creating Battlefield 2 levels where it took 72 hours to do shadow generation or some such. Which I guess you can do if you want, but given the modern graphics age with HDR lighting and dynamic shadows and such, I'm not sure why you would. Gets back to that point about the joys of modern technology and all that.Too, once you start writing off individual textures and models that get used over vast swathes of the game, the art part of things starts looking fairly cheap by comparison. I mean, surely it took somebody a ton of time to model the whole Ayleid set, or the cave set (UV mapping must have been a bitch on that), but even at an hour (probably more like 20 minutes when you get the basic shapes down) a piece, when you use that piece a hundred or two hundred times, that starts looking pretty reasonable. It's the actual level design and the scripting that are rediculously time intensive. I suppose you're eating up time on the coding end of things to implement HDR, shaders, and what have you, but I can't help but think you'd be doing an awful lot of that anyway.Too, I'd wager that your voice acting gets a whole lot more expensive when you're rolling with Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean. Both of whom I love, but you know.I'm not a big fan of NWN modding in general, but my brief forays into it left with me a reasonable appreciation of it. If I cared to sit down with it, I'm sure I could wrangle it into doing my bidding about as well as I wrangled the Oblivion CS into doing the same. You want bad, ask me what it's like doing any kind of shit at all period in any given Battlefield game. Making maps in that editor wasn't precisely soul crushing, but it was pretty awful. Days to generate shadows and lightmaps and things. You thought Fallout navmeshes were bad? In Battlefield 2, you had to let the editor generate its own navmesh as a final step in level creation (which took for damned ever), and then hand edit it in a 3D modeling program to make it work. You don't even want to know about AI.