Why Skyrim Should Have Been Delayed: An Argument in Pictures

[RaNDM G]

Those aren't glitches. They're features.

 

[sifffffff]

This is for the OP. I read a few responses before I got tired of seeing more escapist douchbaggery so I'm going to jump straight to my response to you.

I had the same issue with purple textures and crystalline trees. The thing I found that has fixed ALL of my technical game glitches (crashes, texture problems) was to download the Skyrim 4gig mod and use that to run the game.

Go to the Skyrim Nexus website and download it. Since you said you have a new PC you should have more than enough RAM for it.

And don't worry that you own an Alienware PC and didn't build your own. I don't know how some of these tech geniuses even have time to play Skyrim with all the pussy they must be rolling in.

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

The total loss of textures resulting in pink, purple or other 'bland' objects or actors seems to be a rather common one. Yeah, that probably qualifies as a bug, neat and proper.

The dragon AI worked in 99% of my own personal encounters... as for the 1%, well, that was some wierd stuff. Proper bug.

The rainbow pixel gloop and the pyramid tunnel look like your graphics infrastructure either would be happy to get the most recent, appropriate driver installed... or is about to call it a life and blow some resistors. The last two do not look good. I have never seen those before and if I did, I'd be alarmed.

 

[Bvenged]

Skyrim can best summarized as an outstanding and unique recipe with a mediocre cook. The recipe is still amazing, and is still going to be popular for the people who like that kind of food, but it would still be 10 times better if Gordon Ramsay was cooking, and it's a simple fact that once you've burned the food, you have no choice but to start over if you want to get it right.

Yes, you raise some very good points - but I cannot accept your retort to them making something that might have been intentional, as having no excuse. While I do not work at Bathesda, and I do not know what they were thinking, even to me it would seem having objects tied to an instance would make sense. Of course this can't be done for every object, but for things like candles and whatnot; yeah, instance lock it.

It was not Bathesda that admitted the framerate drop on PS3 was unfixable, it was the lead developer of Obsidian. Pete Hines retorted that the problem is fixable, which shows either Bathesda were unaware of it, or knew about it but decided to go ahead and release to meet the deadline.

The games core systems are not flawed, they are very efficient and make fantastic use of scaling. Loading is a blast and textures are compressed right down (I bare witness to that). IT is also very easy to come up with an idea in planning, run with it and then discover it isn't working when it's too late. You've got to take that into consideration. It's it spectacular how they've got DLC in the works and are somehow pumping out theses patches weekly? It's like they prepared for them; and all the time between is for fixing the unexpected compatibilities that arise, like Backwards dragons and whatnot. that is a factor you've go to review. They could've assumed that this memory leak wouldn't get out of hand; originally they could have been cutting back on execution rate, load times and increasing details on screen, but as the game got even bigger than what they expected, and it did - the leaked occurred. But they'd already announced a solid release date (which all the devs are doing now) and had to polish off the main features of the game first.

Sorry if I came off as ignorant, I just hate writing in detail and then going unheard. Also, since TES is about the closest thing to fanboy-ism I'l get; what's the harm in defending it aggressively and near enough knowing all teh details, when there are fanboys of some truely shit games *CoD-like-cough* and real life scenarios *religion-aimed-cough* that some people would defend to the grave even when they're proven wrong?

 

[ediblemitten]

Something is wrong with your game, system, or drivers... only ever had one texture error, and it wasn't nearly as bad as these.

 

[ImperialSunlight]

Wow, that's crazy. I've been playing A LOT and have only run into a few glitches. Of course, I'm on console.

 

[Taunta]

While I have seen people complain about the odd glitch occurring and never happening again, you do seem to be having an unusually large amount. I laughed rather heartily at the screencaps.

Kind of an off-topic question: Why is it that Skyrim has so many bugs? I play WoW quite frequently, also a huge open-world RPG, but these kinds of graphical glitches never happen to me. (I've never seen flying NPCs, quest givers melting into the ground, dragons exploring space,etc) The worst seems to be "oh this mob is evade-bugged", which gets fixed relatively quickly. Is it just a difference in the beta, the developer, or what?

BECAUSE WOW HAD A FUCKING ALPHA TESTING AND BETA TESTING (WHICH WERE DONE BY A WHOLE MESS OF PEEPS) AND IS CONSTANTLY BEING PATCHED BY HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE AT THIS VERY MOMENT AND HAS BEEN DOING SO FOR QUITE A WHILE. FUCK.

Not to mention the fucking differences in gameplay features and that the entire world of WoW is fucking static as shit. Can you knock down every single candlestick and fucking sweetroll that you see in WoW? Don't think so tim.

Someone needs to take a Xanax. Also, my question has already been answered several times over, thanks though.

 

[Athinira]

Yes, you raise some very good points - but I cannot accept your retort to them making something that might have been intentional, as having no excuse. While I do not work at Bathesda, and I do not know what they were thinking, even to me it would seem having objects tied to an instance would make sense. Of course this can't be done for every object, but for things like candles and whatnot; yeah, instance lock it.

Whether or not it's intentional is besides the point if the decision is stupid to begin with (which it is). If it's intentional, then once again that just proves that they aren't really that adept at making good decisions in regards to programming )

The games core systems are not flawed, they are very efficient and make fantastic use of scaling. Loading is a blast and textures are compressed right down (I bare witness to that).

I didn't say all of them were flawed, but a lot of them are.

The game loads fast because it's not really that huge a game. Despite the game worlds immense size, the install size of the game folder is less than 6 gigabytes if i recall correctly, and that's rather low-end for a modern game. And even then, i actually don't consider the loading times THAT fast. They're okay, but they aren't exactly what I'd call snappy, even when playing the game from my brand-new Intel 320 series SSD.

IT is also very easy to come up with an idea in planning, run with it and then discover it isn't working when it's too late. You've got to take that into consideration.

Normally i would agree, but my point is that some (or rather, a lot) of the flaws in the game are flaws that any decent game studio WOULD have picked up on before it was too late. Especially the game flaws that are carried over from previous titles are inexcusable, unless Bethesda genuinely thought they were a good idea (in which case, I'd still have to call them out on being retarded once again).

It's it spectacular how they've got DLC in the works and are somehow pumping out theses patches weekly? It's like they prepared for them; and all the time between is for fixing the unexpected compatibilities that arise, like Backwards dragons and whatnot. that is a factor you've go to review. They could've assumed that this memory leak wouldn't get out of hand;

The reason they are doing this, and are capable of doing this, is because the game really isn't that 'huge' to begin with (apart from the size of the world).

Like i mentioned earlier, the game is just short of 6 GB install size, compared to say the 14 gigs of a game like Modern Warfare 3. The game has a lot of content, but it is also a very simplified game, with most of the content being the world itself. This, to me (along with my observations inside the game itself) showcases that it's in fact a very simple game, in the sense that it's build on rather simple systems, even if those systems are deployed to great scale.

Skyrim uses very little scripted content, and instead relies on systems (Radiant Story system) etc. to make up a lot of the world. This means that they don't have to sit through buttloads of scriping content when doing bugfixing, since most of the bugs can be found in the game systems and the engine itself, and can therefore be fixed and deployed at an incredible rate.

To your last argument, I'd say that it's very lazy for a game company to make assumptions like that. If you have a suspicion that something is going to be a problem, then you test it out. It wouldn't have been hard for a Skyrim dev to create a test level with ridiculous amounts of objects and try it out, or even create a custom modified save file where the global list is artificially inflated to recreate a the scenario that some PS3-users are having. This just smacks of bad Q&A practices, not to mention that this is something they in hindsight should have seen coming on systems like the PS3, where you are limited to 256 MB's of RAM (and another 256 MB's of video game RAM).

This leads me to deduce that Bethesda didn't think of the problem until people became aware of it. Which they really should have, because even at the theoretical level it's a very obvious problem given the framework they build the game on.

Sorry if I came off as ignorant, I just hate writing in detail and then going unheard. Also, since TES is about the closest thing to fanboy-ism I'l get; what's the harm in defending it aggressively and near enough knowing all teh details, when there are fanboys of some truely shit games *CoD-like-cough* and real life scenarios *religion-aimed-cough* that some people would defend to the grave even when they're proven wrong?

Well, i consider myself having proven you wrong, so what the hoo-haa

Personally I'm not a fanboy of ANYTHING in this world. Every game that has earned my love still has to fight for it, and i can still criticize any game, even the ones i like the most.

For example, my favorite game series of all is still Baldur's Gate, and it's unlikely there will ever be a game i like more. But i can still criticize it to death if i have to, pointing out how it fails to appeal to a more broad audience, how it also has bugs (although nowhere close to Bethesda level), how it has a difficulty curve that will leave most casual-gamers giving up almost before they've even started and almost requires you to research the entire game and read all the 2nd edition AD&D books to even properly understand the combat system to begin with. Sure, once you understand the combat system and how the enemy AI works, the game becomes a lot easier (but are still challenging), but i actually had to sit down and get to learn the game with tutorials and strategy guides, and most people obviously simply doesn't have the patience for that, so I'm going to call it out on it.

My second favorite series is the Metal Gear Solid series. And that series i can also criticize to death once again (I'll save that for another time though).

My point is that fanboys in general piss me off, including if they are fans of a game i like, because their love just simply makes them blind to what constitutes good game design, which makes games stop to improve. I think Shamus Young said it best at the end of this very well written article of his [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/7405-Experienced-Points-Go-Back-To-WoW]:

"Never be satisfied with the game you've got. Always encourage the developers (politely) to improve the experience. And don't listen to the fanboys."

 

[Bvenged]

My second favorite series is the Metal Gear Solid series. And that series i can also criticize to death once again (I'll save that for another time though).

My point is that fanboys in general piss me off, including if they are fans of a game i like, because their love just simply makes them blind to what constitutes good game design, which makes games stop to improve. I think Shamus Young said it best

Gotta say, my favourite game of all time is Unreal Tournament 2004, only just scraping the title from UT1; with my second favourite being a tie between quite a few titles. I can also think up negatives to UT04, like the character models sometimes just being different colourings. hmm... that's about it besides stupid AI. Now, I'm not defending Skyrim or Bathesda to the death, but what I am trying to do is make it clear to people who are slating it for its bugs which are actually pretty damn slight in comparison for what you would expect some developers to manage, whether that be systems or scripts. though I must argue it is harder to make an open world sandbox with a system than a load of over-arching scripts giving the illusion of free-will.

"Never be satisfied with the game you've got. Always encourage the developers (politely) to improve the experience. And don't listen to the fanboys."

IT's this very reason why I don't get involved with console wars. I'm a fan of Xbox, I was a PC gamer - and plan to make a return to where I use both equally as much (RTS & TBS, god games, RPGs & Sims of PC; Everything else on Xbox.), however arguing that PS3/Wii is shit and everybody should get Xbox, while that may be the case it would mean those competitors would fall out of the market. Then who would encourage Microsoft to add freeware to the 360 like they did this December in competition with Sonys free iPlayer etc. Or to make a Kinect in competition with Wii? This would never have happened if Xbox was the only contender in the market, so I completely agree with you there.

Modern Military Shooters still need to exist today in their bland, outdated style as to benchmark to more prosperous developers & consumers "That's not what our game is going to be like".

 

[Weentastic]

These all seem to be graphical glitches, and you are running a PC. I'm not saying that warrants a bunch of bugs, though. I get more pissed off at the bugs that are caused by the developer trying to force things on me, like quest objects that get stuck in my inventory, multiple people talking to me or a person trying to talk to me while I get attacked. That stuff's just irresponsible.

 

[Electrogecko]

Idk man....some of these things would be the most interesting encounters in the game if they weren't glitches. Who wouldn't want to go explore that giant red pyramid?

 

[lRookiel]

Firstly may I start by saying that your avatar is very cool, and second, patches will solve this all eventually, and yeah it's bethesda (Brilliant but flawed).

 

[rod_hynes]

You seem to think that because you have a decent computer that it will work fine, but your settings could me causing a lot to happen too. While everyone lauds ES games for the modability, have you though about the havoc that some mods can do to your game?