» Sat Nov 17, 2012 11:19 pm
To be honest, I actually believe this is a (predominantly) technical issue. Considering what I've seen of Skyrim that they have considered "acceptable workability" I can only imagine that Dawnguard straight up just doesn't run at all or severely impacts the performance to levels which exceed even day-one Skyrim or the water-crash 1.4 patch.
Having read the most recent "locked" thread (wouldn't it be something if they would let us respond to those 'information' threads. I'd really like the opportunity to speak to someone who ACTUALLY makes the software. Executives make money making money...designers and coders and writers MAKE CONTENT. You want to know who I feel is qualified to tell me something about the performance of software: someone who ACTUALLY WORKS WITH SOFTWARE. If your job revolves around phone calls and market projections and making statements then to be perfectly honest I have no reason to trust anything you say regarding performance. It's a matter of ethos, and executives lack the necessary qualifications to earn it unless they themselves used to be production-level employees in the same field.
And to be honest, any of you gamesas/Zenimax employees who might read this and have the pull to actually matter: vague apologetic non-answers do very little to increase consumer confidence or instill trust. And the more you tell us "we still can't get it to work" the more reason we have to fear the prediction that gamesas is in fact waiting to scrap PS3 Dawnguard until AFTER the release of Dishonored to maintain market share on the PS3. But at this point, can we even trust that Dishonored will run any better? I understand that Bethesda is only publishing the game, but at the same time...how much can we really trust anymore? Is Dishonored going to be another port, even though it's become PAINFULLY obvious to everyone who's played these games that porting is not a good strategy. In that regard my guess is that hiring PS3-compatible coders is simply beyond gamesas's budgetary (as in decided, not actual) range of possibility.
While it's entirely possible that some legal issue could be the problem, I'm not sure that a company would willingly make themselves look incompetent to mask a legal issue in which they are kind of an intermediately-related third party. If the issue is in fact between Sony and MS, then gamesas is unlikely to cite their own inability to perform their jobs. More importantly, Sony is one of the major corporate supporters/lobbyists for the legislation which allowed companies to block class-action lawsuits, so I don't really think that Sony is going to really care if someone can or cannot give some other company money. People who have PS3's have already given Sony their money, and people who pay for PSN plus have done likewise, and are unlikely to cease spending money on the console/games/services from which Sony can draw it's percentage because some games produced by one third-party company exhibit severe problems.