Skyrim is the best game I've played to date, and I've been playing lots of RPG's over the years. I'm nearly 27 y/o and I've seen lots of games, and I've witnessed lots of beautiful moments in gaming.
As far as I'm concerned, this game holds the best fantasy atmosphere to date - and it shows.
The best fantasy atmosphere to date? I don't know. PST is pretty much my favorite on that account. Gothic 2 was quite good as well. D1 was a crap RPG but you can't say anything negative about the atmosphere. Morrowind had it's flaws, but again, it sure had atmosphere. Skyrim? Well, if people were actually afraid of dragons, if cities actually looked a bit like cities, if dragons actually acted like the game describes them (as intelligent beings), and if NPCs wouldn't constantly spew the same inane greeting after me time and time again, then I'd probably rate the atmosphere in Skyrim as (more or less) equal to those games I mentioned.
I do not bash Bethesda for it, neither do I bash the game. They are doing their best - they have been working for years to give us the best possible game they can, and there are plenty of people that are giving them an extremely hard time over the boards. Why do you do that?
I'm giving them exactly what they deserve. You say they're doing their best, but you don't actually know that. Conversely, I'm fairly sure their priorities are dictated by the management and you can be quite sure the management cares little about giving us "the best possible game they can" and much more about getting the best mix between invested man-hours and sold units.
If people just sit back and quietly accept such an approach then profit rules unchallenged and the quality of games will remain where it is. If enough people say that enough is enough then may a miracle will happen and the complaints will work their way high enough that the management will be disgusted with how little respect people have of their bean-counting ways. Improbable, of course, but still infinitely more effective than doing nothing.
Please bare in mind that the PC (and I'm a pure PC gamer) has lots of issues nowadays, because of:
Different rig setups: Multiple GPU's, GPU models, CPU models, RAM amounts, 3rd party applications, different GPU rendering capacilities, technology, and probably the most troubling thing of all - which is NOT under the control of the developers - DRIVERS.
Two things.
1) There are two major graphics card makers at this point. Two. AMD / ATI and Nvidia. And both make drivers that implement the DX standard. There was a time before DirectX where game developers had to work with the VooDoo cards using Glide, dedicated 3D cards that typically used OpenGL (I recall Matrox, Nvidia's early hit chip Riva TNT, and I think there were a few more), and of course non-3D cards. Back then there were a ton of different versions to deal with. Today the market is more consolidated.
2) People aren't actually complaining merely about lag in settlements. People are complaining about save game bugs that are obvious if you actually play the game for a while, massive balance issues, odd game design decisions, a PC UI that is so bad that even your average crackhead would feel guilty for releasing it, terrible dialogue for the most part, quest rewards that are hugely insignificant because it's easy to make better items yourself, destruction magic being designed around stun-locking enemies with zero-cost spells, moronic followers that can't be controlled, a physics engine that is totally off in so many ways, horses that climb mountains like they had a rocket up their ass, an AI that hasn't developed much since Morrowind, absurd guilds, oddly convenient dungeon design, and probably a few things more that doesn't readily spring to mind at around six in the morning.
And if it wasn't obvious in itself then there's not a single one of those issues I mentioned that has anything to do with the variance in PC hardware. Not one.
Do you have any idea how frustrating it must be for developers to develop a game in this scale, just to witness bugs remaining after months of QA process?
If this game spent "months" in QA then someone did a terrible, terrible job. Particularly on the PS3 version.
Do you honestly think you should bash the game about 3-4 days after it has been released, and lower their spirits like this?
YES! And their spirits should be lowered. In fact, it should hit rock bottom after they released a game with that UI. It's so bad that you could write a damn textbook based on it, using the Sky UI as the comparison case of what not to do. It is that bad. I'd call it utter garbage but I'm afraid that might hurt your feelings, so I'll just call it terrible one more time.
They are gathering issues, they have been asking for our DXdiags, they are not Console-Only developers, and we should thank them for not choosing the easy path and developing only for consoles - there are numerous titles out there that has gone this path, and it is our loss.
Actually, if gamesas had gone console only then it would also be their loss. Don't fool yourself, they are making money on releasing it for PC. A lot of money. And while Skyrim will age somewhat rapidly on console, the PC version will be kept alive for years with mods. And console gamers might buy the game again for PC, just because of the mods. They don't give us PC Skyrim because of altruism, they do it because it's profitable.
That's of course not problematic. Profit is what drives just about everything, after all. It just annoys me that they can't be bothered wasting even a lousy septim on giving a nod to any long-time fans of the franchise. Story is cliche, dialogue is cut down to the absolute minimum, the journal is bare-bones at best, there's no description of where anything is so now we absolutely have to use the magic map markers to have any idea where anything is, we can't ask anyone for directions, speech skills are useless, a third of Skyrim is seemingly immortal due to the essential flag (and BGS couldn't be arsed removing the flags after quests were done), weapon skills have been simplified even more, factions have been cut even further down, guilds are even more ridiculous than ever, the differences between the races are now mostly cosmetic, and spell making has vanished, along with a good chunk of spells and spell effects.
All these things would be easy enough to do something about if the people at gamesas actually wanted to, but they don't because it would cost money and thus reduce profit. Why pay to increase quality if the current quality is enough to sell 15 million units or more? But the thing is, I'm not employed by gamesas and I'm not a shareholder. I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to give a damn about their profit margins or their ROI. I'm really just a customer and so I want the best possible product I can get, and gamesas are holding back on actually making that "best possible" product.
Bethesda, I would like to thank you a lot for this game. I'm sure like me is the silent majority, that are having an extremely good time with the game. Thank you for developing this for PC as well- Hopefully you will go on doing this for years to come.
Be sure to brush your teeth well tonight. Your breath tomorrow might kill you if you don't.
» Sat Jun 09, 2012 11:23 am 
