» Mon May 28, 2012 4:39 pm Let me begin by stating that I have been a "really devoted fan" of your company since 2003 when I first bought "Morrowind: GOTY". That game and the modding community blew me away and I am still actively playing it to this day. The game rewrote my expectations for modern PC games and as such, I am the proud owner of the entire Fallout series along with the Elder Scrolls series from 3 onward.
However, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been such a poor experience for me that I am strongly considering never purchasing another product developed and/or published by your company or its affiliates again. The Elder Scrolls was originally made for the PC community, the PC community gave you the success that you rightly deserved, and yet the PC community now finds itself getting shafted by the very company that they had a part in making the behemoth that is has become. Let me begin by listing the general gamebreaking bugs and/or performance issues that I personally have come across:
1) Quest breaking bugs: The vast majority of these have already been listed by the community here so I will not bother recounting them. I will state that while my expectations were low in regards to a "bug-free" experience, Skyrim has been a complete mess, even more so then Fallout: New Vegas (Which I couldn't even play at release due to the lag issues. I had to wait for a community fix in order to proceed past Goodsprings) or Oblivion. Skyrim is, effectively, unplayable for me as well.
2) Complete and utter lack of beta testing: I understand that you will claim that you beta tested. How can you not in today's litigious society? However, I staunchly believe that your beta testing team consists of a bunch of monkeys jumping up and down on the keyboard and eating bananas all day. You should be ashamed and humiliated by even claiming to have beta tested this game.
3) Shoddy patches: As you are undoubtedly aware, your patches tend to break the game rather than fix the game! As this has been well-documented on the official forums, I will spare the detail here. I will claim that this further confirms point #2 of this letter.
4) Favoritism towards Xbox 360 owners while pushing PS3 and PC owners to the side:
PC) I understand that Microsoft paid you to release the DLC a month early for the users of their gaming system. I am angry because PC gamers are the ones who made your company what it is today and yet you flock to the newest segment of gamers, the console users, while essentially ignoring the PC community. Would it really hurt your company to show some respect to those who made you what you are today?
PS3) While my dislike of console gamers is obvious, even I cannot ignore the plight of PS3 users. Skyrim is effectively UNPLAYABLE on their console! Yes, the memory is a problem. Yes, you're trying to correct the problem, this is common knowledge. Why release it on the PS3 and willingly let people spend $60 on a game that will eventually become unplayable? Please don't acknowledge the hypothesis that you had no idea that this would occur because, if you do acknowledge that, you will have given further proof for point #2 in that no true beta testing occurred. Therefore, I believe that you knew and released it anyway thinking that you could always fix it later. It saddens me to even consider this possibility but it seems to be the only explanation. I would sincerely hope to be proven wrong in this regard but I doubt that I ever will be.
5) Creation Kit: At first the Creation Kit was to be released at launch, then it was pushed back to December, now January... Your word seems to be as good as a paper bag in a hurricane. A large reason for this, beyond the delays and broken promises, is that your communication with the community on your OFFICIAL FORUMS is nonexistent. The community would not be so frustrated with you on this topic if you would just keep us in the loop, instead you chose to ignore us. What a way to treat your PC community Bethesda.
6) An extreme LACK of CPU/GPU Optimization: Here is where my real complaint begins. When I first purchased Skyrim, I was playing it on an Asus G60VX whose specs were; Core 2 Duo P7450 @2.13Ghz, nVidia GTX 260M, 4 GB of RAM. I managed to play on a mixture of medium/high and my performance was acceptable up until patch 1.2 which completely ruined the game until patch 1.3. However, that patch did not fix the new performance issues (which were the same as the majority of the PC community) that I was having so I decided to quit until I read that my issues had been addressed. This plan was altered, however, when I built my new gaming PC with the following specs: ASUS Crosshair IV MOBO, AMD Phenom II X4 970 BE OC'ed to 3.8Ghz, Asus Geforce GTX 560 DC II OC 1GB (OC'ed further to 950/1200/1900 on voltage of 1.087), 16 GB of G-Skill RAM. My temps never exceed 51C under load on my GPU and 51C on my CPU and both overclocks are completely stable as tested using various stress-testing programs/gaming sessions/etc. Now, I am running everything maxed and my performance is still sub-par with my FPS dropping from 60-20-60-30... you get the idea. Now before you say "Lower the settings!" realize that this computer is fully capable of maxing this game out with vanilla textures/meshes, etc. In fact, I claim that my computer is having FPS issues due to a complete and utter disregard for proper code optimization. Backing up my claim, I present the mod "Skyboost". This mod optimizes certain aspects of Skyrim and now my FPS varies from between 34-45 in Markarth for an average of 43 (Before I was low 20's, low 30's) and mid 40's to high 50's in Whiterun and Solitude. Same settings without the mod as with the mod and yet I see an improvement, on average, of 10-15 FPS. You should be embarrassed releasing a product with such an obvious lack of optimization that programmers without the Creation Kit [CK] or any in-depth knowledge of the game engine are able to optimize your code for you.
GPU Optimization: Here is the straw that broke the camels back. Early this afternoon, I decided to edit my GPU settings under the nVidia control panel. I changed my AA to 8X, my AF to 16X, among other things and generally made my Global settings my settings for all games so I wouldn't have to worry about messing with individual games graphics settings. Of course, I made it so that the GPU overrode any applications settings. Now, I went and played COD: MW3 for some time and had 0 FPS issues. After that, I thought "What the heck" and loaded up Skyrim to continue on with my character (Note: I did turn off AA and AF in the Skyrim start-up Menu due to it being on via nVidia control panel). Imagine my surprise when I suddenly had unplayable FPS jumps! By that I mean the FPS would suddenly jump from 45 to 33-34 back up to 45 (In Whiterun). It did this every few seconds no matter if I was outside, inside, looking at the menu, loading a cell, looking at the main game menu, etc. After checking my GPU Usage using GPU Tweak from ASUS (Excellent program btw, been using it since Beta for anyone reading this who is looking for an alternative to MSI Afterburner) I saw that my GPU usage would skyrocket from 50-60 to 98-99 and back down again every few seconds while I was playing the game. Thinking that my Overclock had become unstable, I reset the GPU back to stock and loaded up Skyrim to compare. There was NO difference. I had the same problem as before. I then re-OC'ed my GPU and reset my GPU settings back to "application-controlled" and started up Skyrim yet again. After resetting my graphic settings back to default (Which is Ultra-High so AA and AF at 8X and 16X respectively) all my FPS stuttering issues were gone! After repeating this process multiple times, I can confirm that Skyrim does not play nice with the nVidia Control Panel.
While this may seem like a trivial issue ("Just turn AA and AF on in the Skyrim start-up menu!") it is a major issue to me. It was the issue that finally made me break and write this letter. While I sympathize with how hard designing and programming a game of this magnitude can be, the game should still be able to run properly on release date. Being an avid student of Economics, I can also understand the pressures that the market (especially investors) can place on a company but in the same breath one must realize that releasing a shoddy product such as this will only drive future consumers away from your brand. It will only hurt you in the long run. For every person who bothers to write a letter to your company, there are 1000 others who just throw your game into the trash and say "Never again!". Who can blame them?
Sincerely,
Black_Shark
Edit: Apparently I cannot use the word f.a.n.b.o.y. so the forum replaced that word with "really devoted fan". Interesting, however I was the former.
