Fallout: New Vegas Dev weighs in on Skyrim's PS3 Lag Issues

[DarkRyter]

Meh, tradeoff.

An engine that can support an astounding number of possibilities and circumstances, allowing for a wide girth of role playing experiences, but actually managing this feat on a technical level is astoundingly difficult.

 

[ResonanceSD]

"having a graphics card with three times as much VRAM as a PS3 has RAM"

"Having two of them"

=D

 

[Creamygoodness]

And here I thought they were complaining about PC's a few weeks ago.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114150-Bethesda-VP-Developing-For-PC-is-a-Headache

 

[Trishbot]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-ps3-skyrim-lag
"Game of the Year" nominee, and it is unplayable to millions after a certain amount of playtime.

How can Bethesda get away with it? Yes, the foundation of the game is good... but that's only HALF the point of making a good game. The other half? Making sure the game WORKS. In fact, making a game that doesn't fall to pieces should probably take priority over talking dogs and detailed leather loincloths.

"But it's a Bethesda game. We should expect it."

Just Cause 2 is VASTLY bigger than Skyrim... I don't recall there being anywhere NEAR the same number of bugs and glitches, let along game-destroying lag.

http://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/large-video-game-worlds2.jpg

Seriously, how come NO JOURNALIST brought this up? (EDIT: Journalists are starting to bring it up) Why aren't we beating down the doors and demanding a product that, you know, WORKS as intended?

If you got the PS3 version, demand a full refund. You're owed it. And, no, you should not have to expect patches after launch to fix a faulty product from breaking and crashing and freezing because the devs were too scared to delay the game and fix it when it obviously NEEDED to be done. But, whatever, they got their $60, right?

 

[Rad Party God]

Not to beat a dead horse but... I fucking knew it.
Consoles desperately need more freakin' memory, NOT more video or processing power, just more memory and call it a day!.

Other than that, just avoid the PS3 version.

 

[Hal10k]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-ps3-skyrim-lag
"Game of the Year" nominee, and it is unplayable to millions after a certain amount of playtime.

How can Bethesda get away with it? Yes, the foundation of the game is good... but that's only HALF the point of making a good game. The other half? Making sure the game WORKS. In fact, making a game that doesn't fall to pieces should probably take priority over talking dogs and detailed leather loincloths.

"But it's a Bethesda game. We should expect it."

Just Cause 2 is VASTLY bigger than Skyrim... I don't recall there being anywhere NEAR the same number of bugs and glitches, let along game-destroying lag.

http://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/large-video-game-worlds2.jpg

Seriously, how come NO JOURNALIST brought this up? (EDIT: Journalists are starting to bring it up) Why aren't we beating down the doors and demanding a product that, you know, WORKS as intended?

If you got the PS3 version, demand a full refund. You're owed it. And, no, you should not have to expect patches after launch to fix a faulty product from breaking and crashing and freezing because the devs were too scared to delay the game and fix it when it obviously NEEDED to be done. But, whatever, they got their $60, right?

The comparison to Just Cause 2 is a tad disproportionate. JC2 may be larger overall, but it has a much more simple structure: little to no civilian AI, no interior cells, no persistent NPCs, etc. You'd be surprised how much that sort of thing can affect the performance of a game. When people say that it should get a pass because it's big, they usually aren't just referring to the size of the landmass, they're referring to the number of variables. The sheer number of scripts needed to run the number of things Skyrim does makes almost everything in the game interconnected. A glitch that caused inadvertantly killing an NPC result to result in failing an entirely unrelated quest might not show up in 75% of cases during testing, and that's only counting the people who came across the circumstances in the first place. And even if you fixed that glitch, the game might just shift the blame onto a different NPC without telling you. We might eventually be able to have a glitch-free Bethesda game, but it would probably take at least two years of nonstop testing.

I'm not saying that the glitches should be ignored. I'm just saying that they're a necessary evil for what the games are.

 

[lomylithruldor]

Thinking about this a bit more now, wouldn't it be possible for the game to create a list of locations an object would need to be, such as companions for example, and only pull that reference once the player enters the same area? I'm not entirely sure, but isn't that how Oblivion worked?

When the problem is not enough RAM so the game lags, the reason it lags is because the game actually has to load from a hard drive or a disc something that should be on the RAM (like the save file for this engine). RAM is hundreads or thousands times faster than a hard drive. If you have to access it every time the player makes an action, there's got to be a lot of wait time. You also have to keep the file organised so that you don't have to parse all the data every time you have to save or load something.

So, what you said would slow the game down for everyone, not just PS3 owners.

 

[Frostbite3789]

Hang on, doesn't Skyrim use the Creation engine, not Gamebryo? I'm sure they share a similar base, but still.

I heard the Creation engine Bethesda made for Skyrim was heavily based off Gamebryo but I'm unsure how true that is.

It's the same as the Gamebryo engine being based off the NetImmerse engine, the engine Morrowind uses.

So basically, it's as much of a difference from the Gamebryo engine as the Gamebryo engine is a difference from the NetImmerse engine. Personally, I see it all as iterations of a core engine. A core engine that seems to be broken, by the looks of it. And yet they're still selling it.

If anyone else sold a broken product like this, the backlash would be insane. Not sure why or how Bethesda gets away with it so easily.

Because herp derp Skyrim dragons GotY.

 

[Trishbot]

We might eventually be able to have a glitch-free Bethesda game, but it would probably take at least two years of nonstop testing.

I'm not saying that the glitches should be ignored. I'm just saying that they're a necessary evil for what the games are.

Funny you should say that. Did you know for all of Nintendo's big releases, they try and dedicate around one year JUST to bug-hunting and glitch-finding? One whole year for every Zelda game is dedicated to finding these problems and ironing them out, one whole year with Mario games testing it for problems, one whole year making sure their top games meet their high standards of quality.

... So maybe Bethesda SHOULD do what you said, or at the very least consider a whole year, maybe not two, but at least 1 year of bug hunting.

 

[brainslurper]

Hang on, doesn't Skyrim use the Creation engine, not Gamebryo? I'm sure they share a similar base, but still.

I heard the Creation engine Bethesda made for Skyrim was heavily based off Gamebryo but I'm unsure how true that is.

Same in functionality, but rendering is WAAY different.

 

[brainslurper]

Nothing a good garbage handler cant fix. This guy overly exagerates. files are files. files can be edited. files can be deleted. dont care what the engine does with it. this is fixable.

Of course it is fixable. If I had the source code I could just rip a couple chunks out and be done in about 10 minutes. But what is causing this problem is the fact that the world goes on without you, and changes you make to the world stay. Without that, it would be a very different game.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

The problem is endemic to the Gamebryo engine and seems to have been passed down to the Creation engine that powers Skyrim. It's not going away any time soon. " It's not like someone wrote a function and put a decimal point in the wrong place or declared something as a float when it should have been an int," Sawyer responded to one question. "We're talking about how the engine fundamentally saves off and references data at run time. Restructuring how that works would require a large time commitment."

So, take the time and make the commitment. Do Bethesda not know how much good will they would garner if they took the time to build a new engine from scratch? How much hate they wont get once they figure out how to make a game run smoothly?

 

[brainslurper]

We might eventually be able to have a glitch-free Bethesda game, but it would probably take at least two years of nonstop testing.

I'm not saying that the glitches should be ignored. I'm just saying that they're a necessary evil for what the games are.

Funny you should say that. Did you know for all of Nintendo's big releases, they try and dedicate around one year JUST to bug-hunting and glitch-finding? One whole year for every Zelda game is dedicated to finding these problems and ironing them out, one whole year with Mario games testing it for problems, one whole year making sure their top games meet their high standards of quality.

... So maybe Bethesda SHOULD do what you said, or at the very least consider a whole year, maybe not two, but at least 1 year of bug hunting.

Say a zelda game is 10 hours long, and it takes them a year to debug it. If my math is correct, which I am almost positive it isn't, skyrim is 300 hours long, and would take 30 years to debug by nintendo standards.

 

[weirdee]

I think the solution is just to set the refresh rate of any given zone to just two days, because I get around a lot, and it's probably complicating things.

Either way, guess which users have their own 4gb ram mod that lets you dodge these issues? That's right! Not you.

The problem is endemic to the Gamebryo engine and seems to have been passed down to the Creation engine that powers Skyrim. It's not going away any time soon. " It's not like someone wrote a function and put a decimal point in the wrong place or declared something as a float when it should have been an int," Sawyer responded to one question. "We're talking about how the engine fundamentally saves off and references data at run time. Restructuring how that works would require a large time commitment."

So, take the time and make the commitment. Do Bethesda not know how much good will they would garner if they took the time to build a new engine from scratch? How much hate they wont get once they figure out how to make a game run smoothly?

Do you know how long it would take? It would put some sort of perspective on such a "simple" request.

There's a reason why there's profit in licensing engines out to other companies...and it's not "new engines are easy to make from scratch."

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Do you know how long it would take? It would put some sort of perspective on such a "simple" request.

There's a reason why there's profit in licensing engines out to other companies...and it's not "new engines are easy to make from scratch."

Never said it would be easy or quick. But imagine just how much better Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim would have been had they taken the time to build an engine rather than using one they knew was faulty.

 

[Dahaka27]

Now I know why my copy of Oblivion GoTY on PS3 broke after like 3 weeks of playing it, I'm just lucky I bought Skyrim on PC this time. Seems the problem of giant bit fields will still occur on PC but much later on considering that most people have Skyrim modded to use 4GB of RAM and if and when it ends up using exacly half my RAM something will really be up ie I will have been pronounced dead or missing from lack of human contact.

What I find quite odd is that I had exactly 0 gamebreaking issues releated to this engine fault with fallout 3 /new vegas on console and I played the crap out of them New Vegas especially.

Sure there were bugs like walking into megaton and observing a Brahmin clip through the floor and watching deathclaws fly across the landscape while stretching like an elastic band, these were funny to see and not a huge deal. I'm really surprised they didn't see this coming.

 

[Zulnam]

You no fixy, Bethesda, me no buy-y... Well, you get the idea. This sucks. I was really excited to get it for the PS3.

 

[weirdee]

Do you know how long it would take? It would put some sort of perspective on such a "simple" request.

There's a reason why there's profit in licensing engines out to other companies...and it's not "new engines are easy to make from scratch."

Never said it would be easy or quick. But imagine just how much better Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim would have been had they taken the time to build an engine rather than using one they knew was faulty.

I'm imagining that people would not have waited the extra year or two for them to come out before other games took the spotlight away from them.

 

[DeadDodo]

The interesting thing I find here isn't that the engine is faulty, it does what it has to (perhaps a bit inefficiently), but that the consoles have so little RAM available.

Consoles probably don't need as much RAM as your average PC, because I doubt the OS takes a big chunk out of it, but some games (and more to come I guess) benefit from having several gigs of RAM.

Here's hoping the next generation of consoles doesn't skimp on RAM.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Atleast I can still use it as a frisbee, my dog will be so pleased.

Thanks Beth!