Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

[Sigurð Stormhand]

TES4Edit didn't reach a useable form until sometime in 2008. I doubt anyone wants to wait 2 years for that in Skyrim. While there are some good programmers out there' date=' if they have to decipher a new record format first we're going to be hobbled badly in this area for quite some time.[/quote']Then I expect we'll be hobbled for quite some time. You'll probably see a period of changeover as people gradually move from TES4 to TES5, maybe a year and a half. To expect the whole range of tools one day, one week, or even one year, after release isn't realistic.Who cares though, TES4 modding barly flagged for four years until TES5 was announced.

[prettyfly]

Another fun tidbit made by a someone on Bethsoft about Skyrim.

I'm excited for legit dungeons. TES has been lacking in the dungeon department since Daggerfall. Morrowind dungeons were non existent. They were caves, mines and wizard towers. Oblivions would have been better had it not been like 2 dungeons repeated over and over, AND had more secrets and traps

Funny, if they liked Daggerfall dungeons so much I would have thought the endless repetitiveness of Oblivion dungeons would have appealed to them.

[Dwip]

Clearly that guy played different versions of Daggerfall and Morrowind than I did, but I'd imagine the big difference is that Daggerfall dungeons are all 50 miles long, and Oblivion dungeons are like 4 rooms and some hallways.Neither is wildly satisfying, IMHO, though Daggerfall at least had giant-pyramid-thing-in-a-multi-level-room-fiiled-with-liches place, which was fun.

[Arthmoor]

I hated Daggerfall's random dungeons. The automap was entirely useless and 9 times out of 10 you'd get to the bottom of some ridiculously deep hole only to find the nemesis was a large rat guarding a pile of rusty swords.I get where he's coming from on Morrowind dungeons. While they were better designed, they did get awfully repetitive since they were in fact just Dwemer ruins, ancestor tombs, mines, and caves.Oblivion you can clearly see went back to their roots with procedurally generated dungeons, but severely gimped in the process. Very few if any were special built. Only one I can even think of off hand is Sideways Cave. Not that most modders have been able to do better either :PSo I'm hopeful that Skyrim's hand built dungeons by an actual dungeon TEAM rather than one guy will be far better than we've seen so far.

[AndalayBay]

We've got a couple of really clever dungeons :grinning:I've liked the look of Skyrim's dungeons from the limited views I've had so far. But those could be the exceptions...

[prettyfly]

Unofficial "Will my PC run Skyrim" thread boggles the mind.There's one guy with a 6970 and a 4ghz i7 who comes along and says 'I think I should be able to get by on medium settings but I'm not sure about on max. Do I need to get another 6970 in crossfire to do so?' Another guy goes 'I've got an 6870 and 3.3ghz i7 and 6gb ram. Will I be able to max the game out? Will I need to upgrade to 12gb of ram to do so'.I'm left wondering how people manage to get such good computers but have no idea what the average game takes to run.

[AndalayBay]

It's all horseshit (which is worse than bullshit - talk to a farmer, he'll tell you). They know damn well their rig will run the game just fine - it's just a chance to piss up a wall. Rather pathetic, but hey...

[Thomas Kaira]

I mean, I did post the Xbox 360 system specs. Did they even bother to read the OP (I'm gonna say no)?So long as they're in that ballpark on PC hardware, they should at least be able to hit medium. My current rig could probably go up to High without much trouble, but I will need to replace my GPU if I want Ultra (for high-res textures and DX11 support).

[Arthmoor]

I'm willing to give people the benefit of the doubt here and assume they're genuinely asking because modded to the hilt Oblivion really is a pig that can bring even my 8GB RAM and 6970 w/2GB to its knees without really trying.Either that or they're trolling and know damn well Bethesda learned not to do that one again.Of course, just wait, when heavily modded Skyrim is a reality in 2-3 years, people will once more be calling Bethesda's game a sluggish piece of shit. Only this time it won't be justified because I guarantee you Skyrim will play WAY better than Oblivion or FO3 did. Just the fact that they're likely to support multi-core setups alone will solve that. Partial DX11 support on PC is just icing on an already delicious chocolate cake.

[prettyfly]

Bah, they'll just complain about the lack of full DX11 support instead. You can never satisfy that group of people.

[Thomas Kaira]

I've just had an idea come to me about quest items...The major weakness with Quest Items in Oblivion was that the Quest Item status did not require the item be tied to a specific quest, and as such relied solely on the devs scripting in the removal of the quest item flag, which they often forgot to do. Very easy for them to fix on their part, actually, just make it so setting an item as a quest item requires you to tie that item to a quest or a specific stage in that quest. This way, with option one, once the quest is completed, the game will immediately know that the item is no longer important, and allow you to drop it, and with option two, the flag is automatically toggled off once that stage is completed.That simple.

[Dwip]

Except that there are perfectly legitimate reasons to have non-quest quest items in Oblivion, since that flag allows them to persist in the world forever. Every single dead horse/guy/whoever in an Oblivion realm would be impossible done this way, among other things, or at least excessively hard.I'm sure there are some good reasons why I wouldn't want that sort of thing automatically forced on me inside a quest, too, nevermind that how you would reasonably write in such a thing in the UI is beyond me.Best just to remember to toggle your quest flags properly.

[Arthmoor]

The idea has merit - for items and NPCs known to be quest specific. It would take at least some of the maintenance work out.Dwip is right though. It would make corpses you're supposed to find a whole lot harder to manage because they'll get cleaned up by the code before you ever see them if that flag isn't checked, and that's not always going to be tied directly to a quest.The UI function could just be a dropdown menu of quests. Click "quest item", have a drop box available, pick quest to attach to. When that quest is no longer running, untag all associated items. A hook or whatever into the StopQuest command would do the trick nicely.Of course, the devs have already said Skyrim scripting is a whole new system, so we don't really know what's in store for us.

[Thomas Kaira]

So? Just tag them to a dummy quest. We do the same thing for scripts all the time.

[Arthmoor]

Then how would you go about clearing the flag on stuff like that? I may not want a particular corpse to be around forever the way Bethesda's "dead X" series are and I'd rather not have to create extra junk to deal with it.For non-quest associated corpses, it might simply be better to have them automatically lose that flag if you get close to the thing, close enough you'd be guaranteed to have seen it. As long as it isn't carrying something important, it won't matter if it's QI flag is removed.The only real problem here is that currently the QI flag applies to the base record, not to the placed references. That logic really needs to change in order to properly handle the generic "dead X" guys.

[Thomas Kaira]

There's a better point to make. Technically, you wouldn't really need to create any extra junk to deal with that stuff, if there are still going to be dummy quests in Skyrim, then you could always attach one of your dead bodies onto a vanilla dummy quest. But we don't know anything about that, either.Really the best solution here is to just allow quest items to always be droppable, but warn the layer when he is about to drop a quest item.

[Arthmoor]

So long as there's some protection against the bad old days where you could accidentally drop one and not know it. Plenty of older games did that and caused untold frustration.The system we have now isn't perfect but it's the best one there is so far.

[Thomas Kaira]

Actually, I think we completely forgot about the Clairvoyance spell, and this changes a lot. No need for quest items to be undroppable anymore, just give a quick tidbit about them being quest items, but let the player drop them, and if they do lose track of the item, Clairvoyance will guide them back to it.

[Arthmoor]

They would have to be quest targets for that to work. You can't quest target something in your inventory, and I doubt the Skyrim system is going to be flexible enough to quest target a dynamically generated form ID. Unless they're fixing that aspect of things so that you drop the real deal instead of a dynamic copy.

[Thomas Kaira]

I'm keeping in mind engine level updates as a possibility, Samson. Besides, this is all speculation, of course. We're probably going to just get the exact same thing we had in Oblivion. Not that I have too much problem with it, aside from some items occasionally getting stuck in my inventory because they didn't have their quest item flag removed.

[Arthmoor]

Well, shit. No mention of DRM attached yet, but I don't view this as a good sign for those of us who despise Steam with every fiber of our being.

[AndalayBay]

Well you can get Oblivion on Steam too, so it might be ok.I thought Fallout 3 required you to activate it on Steam, or am I confusing it with something else?

[Dwip]

F:NV requires Steam activation.FO3 requires you to (sort of) have GfWL, except you can get rid of it.And yeah, absent an announcement from Bethesda, that doesn't mean anything. Of COURSE Steam is going to sell Skyrim.

[prettyfly]

If the exchange rate is still slick enough at the time I may buy Skyrim over Steam. Games are generally overpriced in Australia, I doubt the retailer will be shifting it for PC at anything less than $100.

[Arthmoor]

Yes, and said announcement is indeed absent. Almost like they didn't want people finding out. As if it wouldn't be noticed immediately anyway. I know Bethesda is generally secretive, but they're being ridiculous about it this time.The only thing I keep falling back to in some vain hope is that F:NV being steam-locked was Obsidian's decision and that hopefully Bethesda realizes most of us don't want the game being steam-locked.