Rofl...??

Obviously it's a big conspiracy as the real depth of the series came from the armor slots, and we cannot have that! Or is it bugs, clipping and other silly things, that sounds logical...

... or is it because what they originally said: Preformance.

If you look at the graphics difference between Skyrim and Oblivion, and seriously tell me that they didn't need to tone down the visuals for 360... I would be banned for making a frank assessment of your mental faculties.

Now, I for one don't care even slightly that Skyrim has watered-down console graphics. I like being able to run it on my laptop, and think that the improved art design counts for a lot. But the stifling effect of stagnant console hardware on video game develop is just... true.

And it's not the developers' choice, it's their financial reliance on the customer base.

Performance? NO.

Easy to parent leg pieces onto the skeleton. Two small models aren't much different from one model with twice the detail. Furthermore oblivion did fine. So did Saints row 3 (which had great customization 10 times better than skyrim/ It also had better ai, cloth physics, better physics... etc etc) . Such little customisation does hardly anything to the framerate. If bethesda were concerned with optimisation then they wouldn't have had the engine written by a narwhal on heroin.



edit: bethesda Didn't do a good job writing the engine. They probably didn't dumb shaders down for the xbox- they might not have even known how to write most of them. Bethesda used Low res textures for the game to run well instead.

jack254, I wouldn't be too quick to say it's not about performance.

We've basically reached the limits of what consoles can do; Skyrim is already pushing the console's limits to their extremes. The reason the consoles are having issues with Skyrim is wholly to do with memory issues, (the PS3 struggles in particular, it just doesn't have enough on board RAM, thus the frame-rate stuttering after extended game play on individual saves) and the developers are needing to cut corners. More amour pieces to render on an NPC is more pressure the system.

Skyrim is? I don't think so. Skyrim does many things inefficiently (and unwell). I would have fixed them before removing leg pieces.

Yeah, Oblivion went smoothly... because you couldn't see as many NPCs in one screen as you could in Skyrim...

Greaves and a cuirass has the same number of polys as a unified armor set. The difference is only in the existence of a slot, which requires no memory.

You can mod extra slots into the game easily, adding unlimited rings. There's a superfluous tail slot for non-beast races.

The effect of clothing on performance is so laughably irrelevant to the actual issues of memory use...

And Skyrim didn't have any more NPCs on-screen than Oblivion did. Morrowind had the least of all. Todd Howard is blowing smoke up your ass with an industrial-strength windtunnel fan.

Oh I know that PCs are superior machines, I'd never dispute that. It's just that without the increase in revenue generated from consoles, the industry would be very different, not necessarily for the better.

You're right, all TES does is cut cut cut, remove remove remove.

They have never added or improved anything. Ever.

I love sarcasm.

You mean you love sarcasm.

I like how it has to be some kind of malicious act on Bethesda's part. Processing power people, processing power. If we aren't complaining about leg armor, we'd be complaining about how graphics or x feature wasn't added because they put that resource into leg armor instead.

You are very poorly informed about the way the armour rendering and implementation system works.

It's not simply about the amount of polys the game has to render when you are looking at an NPC, Every NPC in the game that is rendered has to pull their inventory up every time they're loaded in. With the capacity for so many NPCs on screen at once, and so much detail in the world around said NPC, the amount of memory it would take to load up 30 or so NPCs all at once, in the same place in the world, would overload and crash the Xbox, the PS3 and most moderate PCs.

It's a very minimal ammount of processing power.


Plus.. the only thing that skyrim works harder than oblivion in is

A: draw distance
b: animations (not that they have become much better)
c: the lighting from the sky

Plus, meshes became somewhat more optimised. The point is.. this is a feature cut for a small bit of what you call"optimisation" . Surely bethesda should have optimised something else!


When you look at saints row- You see a ridiculous amount of character customisation (tattoos, earings, left and right bracelets , high heels that make you taller, a Much better weight slider etc) and it doesn't realy have a visible performance impact.


One additional thing to add- The times where the player sees a lot of npcs is the civil war battles. Both the imperial leather armour and the stormcloak cuirass would still be in one part.

They didn't include greaves because they're out of fashion. Every hipster Nord knows that...

I love stupid strawmen.

You just made that up.

The presence of another item in the gameworld, when its attached to an NPC, has no reason to be anything but a single line in config. Another piece of armor doesn't DO anything. It has no physics, no hitbox, no location that isn't defined by its wearer. And you seriously think that just ONE more item on an NPC is going to CRASH the entire game? That Skyrim is always running a few bytes of RAM away from catastrophe?

By that logic, if you loaded 30 NPCs with beards, the game would crash. Because it takes so much extra memory to render a beard! And most NPCs don't have them!

A cell can have hundreds of trees and not crash, but a few extra inventory references spells CTD? I can drag sixty pieces of armor into a scene, and nothing bad will happen. You can spawn hundreds of physics-enabled items in the console, even on my low-end PC, each one requiring more complex calculations than a dozen cuirasses. Consoles can handle this load too, through the Oblivion duping glitch. Look it up. Another way to disprove this would be to use a mod (on a "moderate PC") to fill NPCs inventories with junk. Let them each carry around four suits of armor. See all the crashes that don't happen.

Your fabrications go so far out on a limb in defense of PR doublespeak that it's almost saddening.

Oblivion had just as many NPCs on-screen as Skyrim does, with greaves and briastplates. Two ring slots as well. Why didn't the poor RAM run home to mama?

I love you.

Don't forget the grass. Skyrim's countryside is considerably less demanding than Oblivion's. That waist-high thick grass is completely gone. And the speedtree models have barely improved, with less wind animation overall.

Only the dungeons have really scaled up the fidelity, with high-poly models everywhere.

I think it looks gorgeous on both my Xbox 360 as well as my PC. And it's infinitely better on Ultra than Oblivion was.

That 'single line in the config' is far more important than you're giving it credit for.

It's in the realms of being tenuous, and that's why the PS3 had so many problems after long-play, it became so full of information it ran out of space.

Not one cell in the game has anywhere near hundreds of trees.

And the frame-rate is -and-was appalling, so what's your point? If that happened in normal play, people would be outraged.

Because the world was no where near as detailed. Most of it was even procedurally-generated in order to save memory.

This is just ridiculous on so many levels. For one, there is no speedtree, they are full 3d models now.

And while not entirely your fault, your attempts at both insults and conceptions about how game rendering works are equally saddening.

I believe you are defeated. Stand down,sir. Your arguments do not appear to be valid.

^ Actually, he brought up some rather valid facts.

What because he said agrees with what you completely erroneously believe? What he said is gibberish.

Crash the game? No, hardly. But enough to cut into performance, yes. Remember that console games need to be able to run at a damn near constant 30FPS under any circumstance.

No, it wont crash, but it will be more memory then if those 30 NPCs didnt have beards, due to the mesh polygons as well as the extra data pertaining to the beards equip slot.

No cell has over 100 trees. Spawning hundreds of physics objects may not crash the game for the vast majority of people, but it can severly cut into the performance. As i said before, console games need to be able to run at 30FPS(ish) under any condition. Sure you could collect a [censored] ton of objects just to lag the game out, but most normal people dont do that.

As for the NPCs with inventory of armor, that's pure loading data, and would only hurt loading times and save file size.



Complete and utter bull [censored]. Oblivion would start to lag from ~10 NPCs. The AI was heavily optimized back then. Skyrim, I have seen 20+ NPCs with no sign of performance hit.