So..

There's been a lot of speculation regarding what the surprise with the CK kit will be.. I believe it won't be a high-res pack and I'll explain why, but my suspicions will probably get this topic locked because it could be the truth.

This is no a troll thread or console vs. pc war but it touches on consoles a little. I have PC and Xbox and I like them both for different reasons so don't get your knickers in a twist.

My suspicions;

1) Bethesda have had higher resolution textures on their HDD since release.... fact! Beth obviously downscaled textures for consoles so they must have the originals somewhere, unless they artists who made the items, weapons and environment drew them intentionally to look washed out and blurry. If they did, my following arguments are invalid but I doubt it.

If they wanted to have released the hi-res textures they would have on release date, it appears it would have only encouraged sales and made people more happy. This apparently is a WIN-WIN situation, therefore there must have been a greater reason why they didn't release it which leads on to my second suspicion.

2) Imagine you are a game developer and a substantial portion of your buyers (PC gamers - See note 1) buy your product on the basis that the platform is modifiable. I know PC has better graphics (I have a high-end PC) but who really cares about graphics that much I could play Skyrim on Xbox but mods made me buy it on PC for the mods. So mods not only promote digital sales (no cost to developers except steam's cut) but keep the community alive and the developers have in essence get 10x as many people working for them for free as modders promote further sales and provide the developers with free insight into what gamers enjoy which they then later employ into their own future titles, as they did from oblivion to skyrim.

I believe Bethesda didn't release the hi-res pack on purpose because they knew the CK kit wouldn't have been out for several months after release and for the above reasons they choose not to do it. This is the only reason why I think they didn't upload them when it would only take perhaps an hour or two to upload onto their website. If I was Bethesda I would do the same.. it's genius.


Note 1: Even though you may disagree I bet PC make up a larger portion of the market than you realize. Unlike consoles there are not as many middle-men between them and their income. Consoles have microsoft/sony then manufacturers and then whoever sells the games on the internet in the shops then must make their cut. However, with digital sales only steam cuts into their profits. So Bethesda make more money per digital sale than console sale and from the amount of sales they've made on digital downloads they have made a killing. Example;

On Skyrim Nexus there have been 290,000 unique downloads for SkyUI alone I bet there are many more people who are not aware of it or not interested so lets say 300,000 bought Skyrim on steam thats $60.00 x 300,000 = ￡18 million... thats a lot of money and my sales figures were modest.

Don't get your hopes up =) they did not scale back anything really, instead of the Xbox being at max graphics, it's basically set to low via pc standards.

If you want numbers, just look at VGCharts. The 2011 numbers for Skyrim places total sales at about 10 million (9.99). 5.2 million for the Xbox 360, 3.07 million for the PS3 and 1.72 million for the PC. Then take into consideration that, unless something changed, VGCharts does not take into consideration digital downloads. Estimations are that digital downloads account for 50%-70% of all PC sales. So in total the PC version likely sold somewhere between 3.44 million (more than the PS3) to 5.73 million (more than the 360) copies.

Not small numbers. Certainly worth a bit of attention from Bethesda.

I do agree, though. When I look at the PC version's textures at the highest setting, I find it hard to believe that they actually painted them at that resolution. So surely they have some better ones that they could release if they chose to.

trust me I am not getting my hopes up that they will upload their hi-res textures it would cause a wave of anger after modders have spent months of creating textures for them to release all the official ones.

I think a more likely reason that a high-texture pack(if it exists) was withheld was to help diagnose the bugs and graphical glitches. Clearly, the game had some issues on the lower spec'd machines upon release. Also, the texture glitches were prevalent before the 4gb patch was implemented. If a texture pack was released, many more people would have download and installed it only to end up exacerbating their technical difficulties. This also would have made diagnosing issues even more difficult and harder to pinpoint.

The game on a mass scale wasn't ready for them to introduce that particular anomaly into the mix, even if a fair number of PCs could have handled it without problem. I am sure the decision was probably made to "protect" the average consumer by witholding it. Once the game is patched to a bit more stability and most people have played the game and know what to expect, then the pack could be released. This way, if it crashes someones game or causes problems, the person is much more likely to attribute the problems to the texture pack rather than the game itself.

I like your theory, you could be right. Let's hope you are and they release them.

However, I think that if your theory is correct then Beth treating us like kids is not the way to go about it.

upside down flying dragons because backwards flying dragons didn't get enough love.