While playing some Assassin′s Creed on my PS3 today, and the switching to Dark Souls for PC (amazing game, terrible port; all made well by an enterprising moder) I suddenly got this wonderful revelation, so clear and perfect that I had to stop playing to write this down.

Ok so bear with me; when Oblivion was beign developed the Xbox 360 was relatively new, and the PS3 version would take a more than a year to be released; their hardware and system specs were moderate for the time compared to PCs, so for all the crying and gushing the game was developed for PC but adapted to the 360, as seen by its menus and FOV options. The game was modified to accommodate for consoles but its design and original concept was born off the PC.

Now, 6 years later Skyrim has sold more than 2/3 of its copies on consoles, and we PC gamers raised a furious cry about the game being dumbed down by stripping away the attributes, removing spell making and whatever, and while there is always some ongoing thread debating whether it was streamlining or dumbing down, I have come to realize that Skyrim was dumbed for sure in a certain way. Lemme put it to you this way; if you bought a Falcon PC 6 years ago with top of the line components for those days (dual core extreme and whatever) how would that PC handle playing…say The Witcher 2, probably not badly but hardly something to write home about…now imagine if it was outfitted with less than stellar PC components…get the picture? Since the development of Skyrim had to accommodate the architecture of the consoles and their archaic design first and foremost (since that′s where the big sales are) I am guessing that many of its design (if not gameplay) decisions where based on what could the consoles handle. The most obvious case is the lack of Direct X 11, which has been out since 2009. It is not that they were too late to add is functions, it′s that it was never in the plans since the consoles where not designed for it…

Imagine all the concepts and optimizations that where throw out the window because the where not a viable option for development of the game for consoles…while Oblivion debuted on 1 or 2 year old hardware and was quite a nice fit for it, Skyrim was literally shackled from birth to what the consoles were capable of running…I can only imagine what else was left on the design floor…if Consoles had a set 5 year life cycle (as they had from NES, Super NES to N 64) then Skyrim would have been developed with much more powerful hardware and less limitations…

If you don’t believe me try playing the early PS3 or 360 games; the main difference with their PC counterparts where perhaps higher resolutions, some higher res shadows and maybe some performance tweaks, but as the years went by the PC came out with changes and upgrades, while the consoles where stuck in time and the differences started to show even more. Hell even our PC upgrades (higher res textures, and setting options) are relatively poor compared to other PC centric games…

umm ok so you bring other games to back up skyrim was dumb down in your perspective ok ill give you that just to be nice
but we already have a thread plus calling a game dumb down is rather some what of an insult to some gamer out there

ill say this again tho skyrim is played in another region made by the nords so to them this is how they do thing in there home place unlike cyridal or morrowind (sorry if i spelled it wrong)
So let skyrim be skyrim Thank you

If you say so...

well if you're on pc, that's what mods are for to add all this extra stuff. Personally when making a game of this magnitude, there's enough bugs in it to not need to be adding more complex aspects of other things to get screwed up. Some people act like this is Fable 2 where you run around for 6 hours to beat the game in a minimal amount of land with a half [censored] dog and townpeople that fart at you and say generic one liners.

This game has tons of depth to it but people just aren't looking because they complain of what they used to have. They also didn't have high definition textures and game engines making water splashing against rocks with realistic currents, snowy mountains, well animated dragons, werewolf, vampire transformations, realistic changing seasons, sky patterns, star formations, weather patternsas well as random rabbits, deer ect wandering around acting natural in their environment along with predators hunting them as well as radiant encounters.

Using one hand for shields or swords, dual wielding, dual wielding magic, perk points to imrpove specific skill sets, So saying a game like Skyrim is dumbed down because it's on a console that has limitations is kind of silly. It's user friendly for a bigger audience, but the depth of the world they have created is the opposite of dumbed down. The only things PC would improve unless they take the time to make all this extra stuff is better graphics, maybe better sound but they wouldn't add all this extra stuff just because they have the processing power to do it.

Skyrim is dumbed down because it is geared towards younger kids, and kids IQ has been slipping since the 70's

It common knowledge that most multi-platform games are made to first work on Xbox/PS3 and then ported over to PC with minimal changes.

There is a good reason for not having many changes, few changes mean there is a less chance that new bugs will appear....which could make things worse down the line. I'll take a stable working port over a dodgy port that tries to deliver too much. And adding DX11 support when the core base uses DX9....well its not just like flipping a switch....that is alot that could go wrong.

I remeber reading somewhere that the opposite is in fact true; IQs in developed countries have remained relatively the same...but the percentage breadown has reall become a list of have vs have nots...interesting subject
I guess some of you are misinterpeting my intent; regardless of design decisions which we migth say stealine the game, made it better or whatever, the mere fact that the game was beign to be implemented on such old hardware forced it to be less thatit could have been by virtue of that, regardless of designs or content

Never really understood this conclusion. Could you elaborate, vampire fil- err, Lord Harkon?

Only to a very few handful of gamers, those who feel that the term is overused and/or improperly used in most contexts. I feel that it is an appropriate descriptor for any purposeful lack of complexity/gameplay features from previous installments without any (apparant) justifiable reason. Spears removed from TES? That's dumbing down. Removal of Big Guns from FO3 and replacing the empty skill with Survival in FO:NV? Not at all (since "Big Guns" encompassed many apparant types of weapons that were roughly linked because they were oversized.)

However, I can see where the OP is coming from. The 360 is archaic by current technology standards (if it was made with today's technology, it would be approxamately 8x as powerful.) Since, for whatever reason, we're not seeing much advancement on the console department, and gamesas doesn't want to release solely for PCs, they needed to make Skyrim able to run on a dinosaur of a console, but still match today's graphics.

I disagree that gameplay decisions were based on consideration for the consoles, though. Attributes and birthsigns wouldn't have strained the 360 any more than the perk system and enchanted items would (since they apply modifiers to several values, such as health and melee damage.) Same with spellcrafting and the magic system. As well as seperate cuirass/greaves and the old repair system. I can see some increase to save file bloat, but the impact on RAM should be negligable, unless they're litterally working at the edge of what the RAM on the 360 can handle.

This forum got dumbed down when you made this topic.

Really...so kind of you to point it out...now move along you are drooling on the carpet

Regardless of all else, this thread started off with blaming consoles for what you believe to be a dumbing down of the game. That alone is enough to close this thread as we don't allow pc elitism, console bashing or such divisions of the community.

And in the context you have used it, "dumbing down" sure sounds insulting and we don't allow insulting groups of members either.

Sorry but that's the end of this one.