Entirely true. Oblivion isn't a very good game without mods, truthfully. Lots of cripplingly bad design decisions. Same with Fallout 3. Sadly, you can't fix a horrible storyline with mods.MiracleOfSound said:
Skyrim to be a console port which "shouldn't be too hard"
- Thread starter DaHero
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Oblivion crashed so many times on an Nvidia video card that the mod community literally had to release an unofficial patch to patch the 50+ crashes that occurred in the MAIN storyline. Meanwhile, Bathesda was busy with horse armor DLC.Nedoras said:
THAT, it what a "not too hard" port does.
It didn't crash for me, not even once. In fact no one I have meet (in person) who played Oblivion on release ever had a problem with it.DaHero said:
Maybe. Maybe not.Pandabearparade said:
We've got Steam on PS3 now and free DLC worked out for The Witcher on Xbox 360. To say nothing of minecraft and it's constant content updates. I think you're underestimating the power that can be leveraged by a developer to a console in search of an edge. And Bethesda can bear a lot of leverage.
Did you or any of your friends have a custom built design? If your tower was store bought it came with a pre-built list of components that really isn't much different from a console, so of course there were no issues. The major fallacy in the console vs. PC argument is that PCs are expensive, which is false. One can build an insane PC, which outright dominates consoles with almost the same amount of money as one would spend on a 360/PS3. The problem? When a game is ported to the PC, those customizations don't work, and are flooded with bugs. So now you've alienated the biggest part of the PC community: The custom builders.artanis_neravar said:
Nope we all custom build our PC, don't know why we didn't have any problems but we didn'tDaHero said:
Just Cause 2 is a PC game at heart (bar control though). After you mentioned Just Cause 2, I think you are a troll.
VAST difference there. Valve and CD Projekts are other businesses that can be encouraged to police themselves. Mod communities aren't and neither Sony or Microsoft are exactly fans of unregulated content being available on their precious little devices.Ghengis John said:
Also, has anyone bothered to ask the mod communities what they think? Some of those mobs are rabid PC supremacists.
To be honest? I don't think anyone cares what they think. Though I'd wager the reasonable ones would be excited to have a larger audience and the unreasonable ones will become increasingly bitter, isolationist and ignored. Kind of like the way the fallout community works.RhombusHatesYou said:
Console ports are frowned upon because they can (but don't always) botch the game experience on a PC. In a perfect world, here's what would happen:MiracleOfSound said:
Code:
Console version of game is made to fit a console
PC version of game is made to fit of a PC.
Code:
Console version of game is made to fit a console
PC version of game is made to fit a [s]PC[/s] console.As an example, let me point you to Mass Effect 2. In the console version, you have an 'action' button that will perform multiple things. It will interact with items, speak with people, take cover, and sprint. Consoles have a very finite amount of buttons on a controller, so in order to add the new actions into the game, others had to be removed or condensed. They were adjusting the console version to fit the console, and they did a fine job of it.
On the PC, you also have your one button that does several actions, but you also have a ton of keys that are unused. Because everything is needlessly condensed onto that one button, you've now lost fidelity in your control scheme for no purpose. Say an enemy charges me, and I want to fall back to a previous position. As I'm running past a box, how does the game know whether I want to take cover behind the box or run past it? Answer: It doesn't. If the sprint and take cover/crouch keys were different, then it would be obvious what I was trying to do. I've been killed several times because I sprinted too close to cover, and the game thought I wanted to duck on the wrong side of the box.
Clearly, a keyboard has sufficient buttons to support using different keys for sprint and take cover, but that change was never implemented. I am now unable to use my platform's advantages because the game is still conforming to a console's limitations. Still a great game, though.
Console ports are frowned upon because it usually means the game will not take advantage of a PC's strengths, be incredibly buggy, and/or have a poorly thought out and unintuitive UI. Basically, the game's a copy/paste without adjusting it to the PC platform. To hear that Skyrim's a port is scary because Bethesda's basically saying "Our game's going to be good. You may or may not get a good version of it, though."TLR:
Several things that have annoyed me during the last few years of console-ports:MiracleOfSound said:
Poor optimization
Poor graphics settings - in some cases I wasn't even able to change anything.
Crappy controls:
poor K + M controls making the game almost unplayable (in some games, if was using K + M, icons for controllers would appear onscreen, like for example during QTE's and I'd get told to press "Y" (as in the yellow controller button) but then I'd have to remember what that button is assigned to on my keyboard (so its annoying that I don't see an "F" key instead)
Being forced to use controllers on some games (I don't mind as much when it comes to games that are better played with controllers)
Not being able to use my Direct Input controllers that I've had for years and being forced to buy X-Input ones
Not being able to configure my controls at all in a few games.
Poor UI (like for example, Borderlands. The amount of text boxes that were too big to fit on screen and I had to scroll down but couldn't scroll using the mouse wheel - no I had to constantly mouse-click on a damn down arrow over and over again, was a little frustrating. other things that were mentioned, like not being able to type in how many items I wont to sell on games but had to use a slider, annoyed me too. I just wish that the folks porting the games over would spend a little more time on them.)
Simplified gaming - this covers too many things: from the reduced zoomed-in-FOV of a lot of FPS to reduced amount of possible commands (not being a long time PC gamer, I was stunned when I bought Freespace 1+2 from gog.com and found out that the game had what seemed like 2000 different commands in the game, now whenever I see just 10 commands yet wish I could have the option to do more things and not see any reason why I couldn't, other than "the controller ran out of buttons" that annoys me) and other things others have mentioned already.
I don't think it would be a terrible port, as it was already said Bethesda aren't that bad at porting. If the super-easy sounding description of the game isn't annoying me enough (and the game had better make good use of difficulty levels - pfft, who am I kidding? it won't. Giving the enemies more health and more damage is just lazy design to me) then there's just one key word that isn't giving me a lot of faith that its going to be an excellent port:
"They are developing on the 360, then doing a QUICK-port to PC"
That was a bullshit statement from the DN developer though, there are plenty of console games that let you use multiple weapons. Half Life 2, Mafia 2, Bioshock, GTA, Mass Effect... all fine.KRosen said:
He was talking out his ass to cover up the fact that they tried to modernise their game in all the wrong ways.
I haven't played the others yet (and probably won't play DA2 with how bored I am in DAO already less than halfway through), but what was wrong with JC2? A friend and I both played it all the way through with no problems, and I spent a bunch of time doing lots of optional stuff just for fun. The only real problem was the controls for the planes, but a different friend who played the console version said planes were nearly as bad there. Aside from that, it ran great and handled great for me.DaHero said:
I fully expect Skyrim to be a complete and total mess, though, because Oblivion still is after all these years. Heh.
Where did I say that PC's are superior in terms of gaming? I remember talking about hardware issues and how consoles are the ones dumbing down games due to the hardware being so old and outdated.Liudeius said:
Making wild accusations without even disproving any of my claims directly is not a good way to prove superiority in a debate. Making wild claims about arguments you never bothered to reply to isn't what I'd call "logical" and neither is making ad-hominems.
Oh, and that "ending" couldn't have possibly been intended as a joke. Not at all. It was a clear statement of superiority and you managed to see through it you sneaky person. You caught me, hands down.
I don't feel entitled at all I just want to be treated fairly.Ironic Pirate said:
It has the same capabilities as a PC? Let's face it, consoles do NOT in fact have the same capabilities. Ignoring the fact that games have actually been getting shittier in terms of mechanics and innovation since console gaming has become a huge market, the controller is way to limiting and the hardware gets outdated quite quickly.
In regards to piracy. Piracy does not hurt the industry as most major publishers would like you to believe. The thing with piracy is, if someone did not pirate a game you would not have full certainty that the person would actually buy that game. We also get no data on WHO and WHERE most downloads go to so in the end we simply get a few companies claiming piracy hurts them with no data whatsoever to back that up.
Console piracy has also become easier in recent years. The chips used to circumvent the protections in place are easy to get a hold of nowadays and piracy on the PS3 has become possible with the use of an external HDD. Piracy on consoles has also risen quite a bit.
Oh, and throw a fit? Of course people are going to be angry when developers are dumbing down game. If you do not demand quality from your games then that's fine by me but don't expect others to hold the same opinion.
And thanks for implying PC gamers are all pirates. It only reinforces my original point.
Well yeah, they do need to make money to stay afloat. That's no excuse to dumb down games in order to appeal to idiots. I'm not saying all console users are idiots, hell I own a console myself and I regularly play games on it(360 by the way). What I am saying is that we should not accept their shit.
Let's face it, console hardware is outdated. This is why they have to make so many compromises. This is the problem with console gaming. Whilst you don't have to upgrade your console every 3 to 4 years in order to be able to play the most recent games on the high settings they're essentially holding back technological advancement. This is why there are so many compromises with games nowadays. Cities are always small and separated in sections with 5 or 6 NPC's to populate the whole thing and you can never have huge all out battles because the hardware doesn't support that. Remember the Bruma battle I believe it was in Oblivion? It was described as being this huge, epic clash between the forces of Oblivion and those of Bruma. In the end, you had 8 soldiers against waves of 4 enemies at a time.
I never said their entire purpose was to make things I enjoy. What I'm talking about is staying true to the audience that made them all rich. I'd expect better treatment from a company that would have been dead in the water right now if not for PC gamers everywhere buying their shit. They can still make a profit on the PC, the Witcher 2 proves that. What you can't do is make a console game, port it to the PC and expect that money to come rolling.
Console gamers don't necesarely buy more, it's just that the only profit a developer can make off a console game is from console gamers. I don't understand why developers expect PC gamers to suck it up and continue buying shitty ports of shitty games. You designed a console game, not a PC game. Don't expect me to buy it.
Also, tantrums? Criticism is a good way to tell a developer what they did wrong. A good developer listens to its audience. A bad one can't see anything due to its own arrogance.
Sorry for the double post.
AndyFromMonday said:
Developers do what gives them the most money, and sometimes it's not what the fans want.
EVERY developer is like that. Expecting anything different will be silly.
Of course it's silly. I mean fuck me, how stupid could I have been to believe that the company we PC gamers supported 3 games in a row would give a shit about us. I mean we gave them our money and in the end, that's what mattered the most. Fuck brand loyalty.Alon Shechter said:AndyFromMonday said:
Developers do what gives them the most money, and sometimes it's not what the fans want.
EVERY developer is like that. Expecting anything different will be silly.
And of course I believe PC gamers are the "master race". I even said so in my comment hehehe....