Bethesda “enthusiastic” about “headache” of PC support

A headache you can minimize with proper testing.

I pre-ordered the Steam version today. Almost exactly 24 hours until it unlocks.

There’s only been a few PC games I’ve had technical issues with. Splinter Cell: Double Agent was the worst.

It also coincides with the dev’s making their games console-first.

@ Kabby
Yes but the testing is a headache and will never find all the holes.

Does anyone know is Skyrim is a port? If it is, they can shove it up their arse!

@4 Of course it’s a port

@1
Testing in general is a headache. Unit testing for example can take ages depending on how many classes you have, and i bet there are several hundreds in Skyrim. And testing, where you actually play the game can be an even bigger headache, first you have to find a lot of people, then you have to coordinate with them, get their feedback, read it all, try to make sense of what some persons write, et cetera. It isn’t easy at all!

@4
Of course it is a port. But just because a game is a port doesn’t mean it is bad by default. I refer to Arkham Asylum (haven’t tried Arkham City yet), Deus Ex: Human Revolution, GTA San Andreas, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, and so on. You’ll just have to wait and see how much effort there has been put into porting this to the PC, only then will one know if it is a bad or good port, because there is of course bad ports, but there most certainly also is good ports. Some where the port is better than the original!

tomorrow cannot get here soon enough….. I’ll be picking up my copy at a midnight launch, took friday off, will have the entire night and next day for Skyrim, cannot wait

bethesda cant do a game right. They are a bunch of incompetent who dont know how to do a game playable on day 1. I will never buy another game from this overrated shitty studio.

“Unless you decide not to make your games available for PC, [piracy is] a problem and you have to deal with it”
does he not know how easy it is to pirate 360 games? that most of the pirated skyrim copies right now are 360 games?

@6 That’s why most large studios have a Q&A department with hundreds of people. Ubisoft for example tends to use 2-3 studios just for Q&A on some games, like the AC series, big studios… and they hate PC games.

Thanks. No sale for me then. I will never hand over money to lazy developers. There simply is no such thing as a ‘good port’. Not to draw this into a PC v Console debate, it will be a limited experience in terms of quality.

@11 How there is not good port ?
Not to mention 90% of multiplatform games are port to PC.
And please, you would bought game but now its port and all of sadden that is something bad ? it support Mod tools what else you want from PC version ?

Big studios do not have ‘hundreds’ of testers. If they did we wouldn’t see the buggy turds we get on a weekly basis.

@12, it’s not supporting mod tools. YET.

@12 – of course its bad. To me, it tells me the following

a) the developer is lazy in creating a PC version
b) it will be a limited experience(graphics capped at XXX level because it has been ported)
c) Controls will be clunky as they have been designed for the console market.

So why should I part with £40 for a half baked effort? If they sold it at a half baked price, then maybe I would be interested.

Studios moan about pirates, PC in decline etc etc but the reality is, if a studio spends some time working on the PC version, it will sell – Football Manager, Total War shows that.

If I wanted a console game, I would own a console. Its that simple.

Agree with GrimRita on everything.

Besides, i remember that TES series always pushed visuals, gameplay, gameplay mechanics but after console development gameplay mechanics and visuals are not the best. Since Oblivion.

Oblivion shows that. It was a mediocre experience and i don’t know what to expect from SKYRIM on the PC.
Fallout 3 was ok at best, while old school developers like OBSIDIAN entertainment returned old Fallout feel in it in Fallout:NV.

I don’t give a fuck if it’s going to be 100% on metacritic because of some bias journalism. All AAA titles this year have 89% on metacritic minimum because it is a mainstream business.

90% of games on the market this generation is consolized and stupid crap.

@16 Every Elder Scrolls game since Morrowind has had a console version.

So by your own logic, Arena and Daggerfall are the only two Elder Scrolls games that matter. And those most certainly weren’t “pushing visuals”, even back then.

@ 17 “Every Elder Scrolls game since Morrowind has had a console version.”
You just said it yourself:

Morrowind > port to console

Oblivion > port to pc

and that makes all the difference…..

@17,
Morrowind is a fantastic experience but it is a shitty PC port for XBOX 1.

It was designed as a PC game, not as a console game. While it was awesome, inventory and etc. were huge problems for Xbox 1 because without mouse it’s a frustrating experience.

So no, everything started from Oblivion which is a console port and to be honest it was not even good on consoles to begin with. Maybe for some people who never played Elder Scrolls it is something special… but for people who played Daggerfall and Morrowind, Oblivion was a mediocre experience in most cases.

Mods saved it for some people. I played Oblivion for example with 45+ mods.

@19 I started with Arena, right back at the very birth of the franchise. I put countless hours into Daggerfall, and lost half my life on the original Xbox version of Morrowind. I’ve also played many of the numerous spin-offs, as bad as they were.

I’m as big an Elder Scrolls fan as you can get.

Oblivion’s problems had nothing to do with hardware. It was simply a dull, uninspired, derivative game-world, in a franchise whose lore had always stood out amongst the hordes of Tolkien rip-offs as a strong, deep, and mature setting.

There’s only been one game since Oblivion (which you don’t have any first hand experience of yet), so your complaint about it all going downhill from there has absolutely no structure to support it beyond your own narrow-sighted disdain for consoles.

@20

Oh man, Arena. How I loved that game. I absolutely loved Daggerfall too, although the abundance of game-breaking bugs (one-way dungeon entrances being a particularly galling one) did piss me off a fair bit.

Still, utter classics and I love them to bits.

Also, in a nutshell Michael, what are your impressions of Skyrim thus far? I would go back through forum posts to see but I haven’t had coffee yet and so as a result, i’m too fucking lazy

@21 I’m a big believer in “less is more”. Although the past games had strong RPG elements, I’ve always though the franchise’s true strength was in creating these massive, deeply engrossing game worlds for you to explore.

In the transition from Daggerfall to Morrowind, my biggest concern was a focus on a smaller, more structured map (instead of the practically endless, procedurally generated map of Daggerfall), would take away from the sense of scale the previous two games are, but I found that it gave the series a lot more focus, and the world a lot more depth, because they could really focus on making them come alive as distinctive, unique differently locations.

Oblivion disappointed me because it’s setting was so dull and utterly clichéd. Based on what I’ve seen so far, this seems to be a valid criticism that Bethesda has taken to heart, and this one looks a lot more distinctive, inventive, and willing to embrace the lore of the Elder Scrolls franchise.

I also don’t mind the removal of skills, as long as what’s there is solid and works well. That’s going to be impossible to judge until I have the final game in my hands though, so we’ll just have to wait and see if the gameplay works.