leet_x1337 said:
omicron1 said:
leet_x1337 said:
SirBryghtside said:
leet_x1337 said:
Before I opened the article, I just knew you were going to keep praising Skyrim as the best game ever made, despite its numerous flaws (among them not one but two bad ports and the bugs in all three versions.) Either I'm psychic or every single game critic ever thinks that Plan 9 from Outer Space couldn't possibly be a better movie.
Because Azura forbid that a game has flaws! What's your favourite game, by the way, so we can poke a million and one holes in that? OK, fine. You hate it. Well done, your opinion is obviously better than everyone else's. Have a bloody sticker.
Guess what? Skryim is so praised by everyone there's no way future historians will see it the same way as the gaming press and critics these days. Just like Duke Nukem Forever was panned mostly due to 12 years of excessive media-generated hype and didn't hold up, Skyrim won't hold up in future generations due to the excessive fan- and critic-generated hype right now.
There are two possible ways Skyrim could be remembered - as Oblivion, a game released to hype that outweighed its quality... or as Morrowind, a game whose other quality overcame its somewhat fiddly nature.
The fact of the matter is that Skyrim came out in very good condition. PS3 slowdown bugs aside, the bugs-per-hour in Skyrim is comparable to many other high-profile games (Red Dead Redemption comes to mind), and the value of the game far outweighs its flaws. It will not be remembered for its flaws, soon modded and patched to Oblivion; rather, it will be remembered for its coherence of vision, its audacity of achievement. And this, despite your pessimism, is More a win(d) for the future of gaming than a perfect, smaller game could ever be.
For all mediums are borne forwards on imperfect works, works which stretch beyond their reach, sometimes failing, but all the more beautiful for it when they succeed. Why should gaming be different? Why should games like Skyrim be weighed down by (exaggerated accounts of) bugs and flaws when they have a chance to carry the medium to a brighter tomorrow?
Nice post there, Shakespeare. Here's the thing: you misunderstood me.
Games are allowed to have flaws, even major flaws. I wasn't saying otherwise. Hell, Mirror's Edge is one of my favourite games ever, despite the amount of sodding trial and error. Thing is, with everyone glossing over Skyrim's flaws, people will come to expect that it's a flawless game, and it's not what they'll get. It's what happened to Duke Nukem Forever last year: twelve years of hype for a game that hardly delivered on any of it.
Besides, major flaws ought to at least take a whole point off a game rated out of ten. Mirror's Edge caught that for its trial and error, Serious Sam 3 for its lack of changes from the original, so why is Skyrim's inability to run on most PS3s, the fact that patches made it worse and that "necessary" mods can't be used by two-thirds of its players being glossed over?
Skyrim's bugs aren't being glossed over. You seem to take exception to its winning game of the year, somehow believing that its bugs disqualify it... but you miss something important: It wins game of the year despite its bugs. Skyrim, with its bugs taken into account, is still the best game out there this year for a great many people.
Yes, the PS3 has issues right now. Bethsoft has been vetted on this point and it appears they did not pull a Kerberos - they did not realize the extent of this issue; they did not shove an unfinished product out the door intentionally. And even taking the PS3 into account, it's still the best game this year on at least 2/3 of the major platforms.
As an additional point, why are you complaining about mods? Skyrim is rated on its current potential, not its future potential. The PC build will get mods, but there are no mods necessary for play, and Skyrim wins GOTY based on its modless state. Mods will, however, transform Skyrim from its current excellent self into the biggest thing running on PC for the next four or so years straight. This is one of the main selling points for the PC, and I don't see how you can justify complaining that the closed-system consoles won't get the mods.
That's the bloody point.
Look, I am approaching this whole thing from the viewpoint of a programmer. I know exactly how hard it is to weed every bug out of a simple
calculator, let alone a game, let alone
this game. And quite frankly, they deserve a pass, and a huge pat on the back for making it as far as they did. Same with the patching process - when you have to put out new code every few weeks, things sometimes slip. In all likelihood, the single big case of degradation everyone noted - backwards dragons - was a simple result of a last-minute change before the thing went out the door. What you seem to be missing is that patching is even more of an iterative process than development, somewhat equivalent to getting the wrinkles out of a bedsheed - each tug gets some, but causes others, and it takes many tugs before the thing is perfectly smooth.
