Dlc better not be online download only... : V - Skyrim

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 6:19 pm

I do not own an xbox ... but I believe you can get a free month trial of xbox live yes? Surely can use this trial and download whatever you pay for I would imagine.
If not then I wouldn't expect dlc on discs, but they did do it for fallout 3 so you never know.

Actually you can download DLCs with a free membership. It is only online play that is limited as far as I remember.

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 4:25 pm

May I ask WHY you believe EVERYONE should be connected to the internet on their consoles? I've owned a 360 since a year after it's release, and a Wii a year after it's release, and neither have ever touched an internet connection, neither will they ever. You shouldn't ever need to connect to the internet just to play a game on a console if it's single player. I don't agree with the "Game needs to be patched" Game developers need to stop being so damn lazy and get the bugs worked out beforehand. If nothing else they could do a closed beta for the game if they feel they need several thousand people playing in order to find certain bugs. I am NOT their unpaid bug finder, I'm sorry. I buy a game developers product expecting a fully finished, fully polished video game, and if it's not, and is bug-ridden, you can damn well expect that I'll, at the least, think twice before ever buying another game from that developer. Bethesda is just lucky that they have a lot of goodwill built up from Arena, Daggerfall & Morrowind, or I'd have had stop purchasing their products after Oblivion.

If you're bound and determined to upset the status quo and be a really awesome rebel with a cool haircut, go for it. When you're done enjoying that image of yourself, you might realize that gaming is moving towards an online platform. You can kick and scream and resist it all you want, but it's happening anyway. Don't worry, it won't hurt.

As for the ridiculous statement that games shouldn't need to be patched- please, work QA on a game. Better yet, develop it. The QA process for games is designed to find as many bugs as possible before release, focusing on major, game-breaking issues. When developers fix those bugs, they inevitably create more bugs, which then need to be tested and fixed, causing more bugs and so on and so forth. To add to the problem, you have a small team of testers who are supposed to try doing everything in the game within the space of a couple of months. That doesn't mean doing every quest or exploring the whole map. It means opening every single door in the game. It means jumping up and down in every conceivable spot. It means drawing your weapons in every situation that they could be drawn. It means doing everything you can imagine to cause a bug. It's an exhausting process, and it is never going to catch everything, because a small team of people trying to cause bugs still aren't going to find as much as 7,000,000 people doing whatever they want. No game will ever be bug-free. Period.

» Tue Jun 12, 2012 5:41 am

If you're bound and determined to upset the status quo and be a really awesome rebel with a cool haircut, go for it. When you're done enjoying that image of yourself, you might realize that gaming is moving towards an online platform. You can kick and scream and resist it all you want, but it's happening anyway. Don't worry, it won't hurt.

As for the ridiculous statement that games shouldn't need to be patched- please, work QA on a game. Better yet, develop it. The QA process for games is designed to find as many bugs as possible before release, focusing on major, game-breaking issues. When developers fix those bugs, they inevitably create more bugs, which then need to be tested and fixed, causing more bugs and so on and so forth. To add to the problem, you have a small team of testers who are supposed to try doing everything in the game within the space of a couple of months. That doesn't mean doing every quest or exploring the whole map. It means opening every single door in the game. It means jumping up and down in every conceivable spot. It means drawing your weapons in every situation that they could be drawn. It means doing everything you can imagine to cause a bug. It's an exhausting process, and it is never going to catch everything, because a small team of people trying to cause bugs still aren't going to find as much as 7,000,000 people doing whatever they want. No game will ever be bug-free. Period.

I don't see myself as a rebel at all. I just hate the idea of every game in the world eventually becoming online. I'm a hermit who lives on top of a mountain(almost literally, I do have a wife and two kids tho). I don't want social interaction with ALL Of my video games, I want to play them by myself. Which doesn't really have anything to do with what I said, which is "Why should you have to connect a SINGLE PLAYER game to the internet in order to play". I didn't say anything about not connecting to the internet with all games, just single player ones. I have played an MMO or two, though almost solely with friends(again, I dislike social interaction when it comes to gaming). If video games move exclusively to an online format, which would mean that all single player games are gone, I'll simply quit video games(and this is coming from someone who has played video games since he was 4(I'm 30 now), in a time and place when doing so were highly unpopular and would often get the [censored] beat out of you. I say that with complete confidence. I"ll find another hobby.

For the second part, I think you missed the part where I said "Do a CLOSED BETA" Or hell they could do an Open beta for that matter. Lots of game companies do that now-a-days, especially large ones that are expected to have potential game-breaking bugs once the masses start playing. That's how you send out a polished game. Of course I'm not naive enough to believe that any game is ever completely bug-free, but I do fully expect that the game that I just shelled 60 bucks out for should DAMN WELL have no game-breaking bugs that will prevent me from enjoying the game. If the occasional graphical glitch occurs, or causes the game to crash every once in a great while, that's fine, I don't mind. But when you have to release multiple patches, including release day patches, just so people can play the game for more then 5-10 minutes without it crashing, then you're not doing your job right, and again, I am not going to be your unpaid bug tester.

» Tue Jun 12, 2012 1:47 am

I don't see myself as a rebel at all. I just hate the idea of every game in the world eventually becoming online. I'm a hermit who lives on top of a mountain(almost literally, I do have a wife and two kids tho). I don't want social interaction with ALL Of my video games, I want to play them by myself. Which doesn't really have anything to do with what I said, which is "Why should you have to connect a SINGLE PLAYER game to the internet in order to play". I didn't say anything about not connecting to the internet with all games, just single player ones. I have played an MMO or two, though almost solely with friends(again, I dislike social interaction when it comes to gaming). If video games move exclusively to an online format, which would mean that all single player games are gone, I'll simply quit video games(and this is coming from someone who has played video games since he was 4(I'm 30 now), in a time and place when doing so were highly unpopular and would often get the [censored] beat out of you. I say that with complete confidence. I"ll find another hobby.

For the second part, I think you missed the part where I said "Do a CLOSED BETA" Or hell they could do an Open beta for that matter. Lots of game companies do that now-a-days, especially large ones that are expected to have potential game-breaking bugs once the masses start playing. That's how you send out a polished game. Of course I'm not naive enough to believe that any game is ever completely bug-free, but I do fully expect that the game that I just shelled 60 bucks out for should DAMN WELL have no game-breaking bugs that will prevent me from enjoying the game. If the occasional graphical glitch occurs, or causes the game to crash every once in a great while, that's fine, I don't mind. But when you have to release multiple patches, including release day patches, just so people can play the game for more then 5-10 minutes without it crashing, then you're not doing your job right, and again, I am not going to be your unpaid bug tester.

are you a ps3 owner because playing the game 5-10 minutes crash has been my experience with skyrim as a ps3 owner it completely ruined skyrim for me

» Tue Jun 12, 2012 7:23 am

are you a ps3 owner because playing the game 5-10 minutes crash has been my experience with skyrim as a ps3 owner it completely ruined skyrim for me

Actually I was just fighting against the idiotic notion that it's necessary to connect consoles to the internet in order to play video games. I play Skyrim on my computer, after finally getting an internet connection capable of using steam(because a 26.4k dial-up connection DID NOT cut it). Though I did have that 5-10 minute game crash for quite a while, even on my PC, with all drivers updated and graphics lowered to almost the bare minimum. It wasn't until I freaking manually disabled my second graphics card that the game finally stopped crashing. Which is another ridiculous matter all on its own!

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 6:07 pm

I don't see myself as a rebel at all. I just hate the idea of every game in the world eventually becoming online. I'm a hermit who lives on top of a mountain(almost literally, I do have a wife and two kids tho). I don't want social interaction with ALL Of my video games, I want to play them by myself. Which doesn't really have anything to do with what I said, which is "Why should you have to connect a SINGLE PLAYER game to the internet in order to play". I didn't say anything about not connecting to the internet with all games, just single player ones. I have played an MMO or two, though almost solely with friends(again, I dislike social interaction when it comes to gaming). If video games move exclusively to an online format, which would mean that all single player games are gone, I'll simply quit video games(and this is coming from someone who has played video games since he was 4(I'm 30 now), in a time and place when doing so were highly unpopular and would often get the [censored] beat out of you. I say that with complete confidence. I"ll find another hobby.

For the second part, I think you missed the part where I said "Do a CLOSED BETA" Or hell they could do an Open beta for that matter. Lots of game companies do that now-a-days, especially large ones that are expected to have potential game-breaking bugs once the masses start playing. That's how you send out a polished game. Of course I'm not naive enough to believe that any game is ever completely bug-free, but I do fully expect that the game that I just shelled 60 bucks out for should DAMN WELL have no game-breaking bugs that will prevent me from enjoying the game. If the occasional graphical glitch occurs, or causes the game to crash every once in a great while, that's fine, I don't mind. But when you have to release multiple patches, including release day patches, just so people can play the game for more then 5-10 minutes without it crashing, then you're not doing your job right, and again, I am not going to be your unpaid bug tester.

The game is still single-player. You are not required to socially interact with anyone in order to download content or patches. I should have been more specific when I said games are moving towards an online format; I mean that game distribution is moving towards an online format. You can fight it all you want, but it's a lot more cost effective for companies to distribute via cloud.

As for game testing: I agree. Testing should catch any bugs severe enough to be considered game breaking. In the case of Skyrim, the only major game-breaking bug (I'm assuming you're referring to this one, because it's the only one that affected a significant number of players) was the issue that a small percentage of PS3 players experienced. They knew about it, and they patched it very quickly. They didn't delay release because it didn't make sense to delay the game based on a bug that would only affect a tiny percentage of the overall playerbase.

» Tue Jun 12, 2012 3:14 am

The game is still single-player. You are not required to socially interact with anyone in order to download content or patches. I should have been more specific when I said games are moving towards an online format; I mean that game distribution is moving towards an online format. You can fight it all you want, but it's a lot more cost effective for companies to distribute via cloud.

As for game testing: I agree. Testing should catch any bugs severe enough to be considered game breaking. In the case of Skyrim, the only major game-breaking bug (I'm assuming you're referring to this one, because it's the only one that affected a significant number of players) was the issue that a small percentage of PS3 players experienced. They knew about it, and they patched it very quickly. They didn't delay release because it didn't make sense to delay the game based on a bug that would only affect a tiny percentage of the overall playerbase.

I'm glad we cleared up the second matter. Sadly we still disagree on the first matter. Due to my "Being a hermit living on top of a mountain" I only recently managed to acquire an internet connection faster then dial-up(literally, hasn't even been a month since I got off 26.4k dial-up). Sadly, it's MyFi with AT&T and it's a 5gig cap. I'm not going to move just so I can download a video game, and I"m not going to pay $10 more a month PER gig either. So, if video gaming goes the way of entirely online distribution, I'll still be out, as well as if they ever completely eliminate single player gaming(Which I'm glad to see we did clear that issue up). I'm not some kind of rebel or person "Fighting against the Man, Man", I'm just a practical person who plays video games to relax, and not be bothered by every newb on the planet wanting help, nor am I rich and able to pay exorbitant amounts of money in order to download video games that are often larger then my entire Data Cap for a month is. If ever REAL High-speed internet is brought up here, I'll probably change my stance towards cloud gaming and the like, though I will say that I Will ALWAYS prefer a hard-copy of my game. 30-40 years from now, I'll still be able to play my old NES/SNES/N64/GameCube/PS2/etc games. People who do download only though, likely won't be able to say that. Servers go down, companies go broke, things happen. Again though, I'm not saying I WON'T utilize cloud gaming if I ever have an internet capable of it, just that I would prefer not to.

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 11:41 pm

I am on sat interet and have a 300mb per day dl cap.

I'm hoping the DLC will come in under that amount, or foolishly...on a disk like SI.

Hopefully they'll make it possible to d/l somewhere (a buddy with a faster internet connection), burn to a DVD, install it to another computer and only then activate it on-line

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 7:57 pm

What the hell? You want downloadable content that you don't have to download?

We use the nickname "DLC" simply because it's more convenient than "expansion pack."

And if you can post on these forums and support a gaming hobby, you can afford an internet connection and XBL.

That is a very flawed statement. The actual cost of paying for an internet connection is almost never the issue, in fact in rural areas where broadband simply doesn't exist the satellite and wireless broadband companies charge you much, much more than they would if you went with an industry leader and a traditional wired broadband setup.

It'd be one thing if you're simply out of luck or having bad financial times, but if you're just complaining that Bethesda always does this (like with FONV), then you're just not getting internet, which is silly.

Another flawed statement. I personally "get" internet more than most people do. My entire family is a collection of techno-enthusiasts, and a significant portion of us have successful careers in software engineering. I understand that there are a lot of business-related problems with releasing DLC in a tangible format, but the suggestion isn't ludicrous and depending upon the circumstances I'm sure that it could indeed be profitable to Bethesda.

This is an absolutely absurd thing to complain about, and certainly an unreasonable request.

The petition we're making here is perfectly legitimate if you actually understand what the issues and arguments at hand are, so shut up and enjoy your limitless downloads and latency-free data streams while the rest of us lay out our opinions in peace.

» Tue Jun 12, 2012 7:49 am

I play on my Xbox as well. I am pretty sure it will be an online download (the name DLC does imply that). However a silver membership is FREE. All you need is an internet connection. If you don't have internet, take your Xbox to a friend's.

You DO NOT NEED A GOLD MEMBERSHIP to download content. Silver membership gives you access to the Xbox Live Marketplace. The main difference between gold and silver is simply online multiplayer.

Also, if you do or your friends do not own a wireless adapter, you could use any hardwire connection (as imposed to wireless) in your house. Just unplug the cable from another device and into your Xbox.

There's a lot of ways to get connected online. Bethesda and Xbox Live want to make money. It wouldn't make sense to make online access hard for that reason.