You’re just a an unimportant piece of some game *Contains major spoile

[imperistan]

-I actually got curious and booted up Skyrim, and I spawned for myself 100 bandits, which all had all their equipment slots full for the most part. The game ran fine at a fairly consistent 40FPS. So, then I went back into the CK and made a new bandit that was completely the same as any other bandit, just without any equipment. I went back into the game and spawned that bandit 100 times. My FPS raised by an average 3-5. (note this was in Whiterun, so the bandits all promptly entered combat. They weren't just standing around.)

 

My computer is powerful, but a difference like that between the two cases is absolutely insignificant (Honestly, if you're going to get caught up in trying to save that amount of FPS, then your computer probably can only just barely run the game as a whole), and further, proves that equipment being rendered on an NPC is for the most part irrelevant. The FPS differences could easily be reconciled by having the graphics options dictate how many NPC's can spawn at once, which is actually perfect because almost all cases in Skyrim where so many NPC's are present on screen at once (where it actually becomes a real concern to try and save FPS), its a case of the vast majority of them being generic and, not only that, they're NPC's that you're not only expected to not even want to loot, but also really can't. (IE, Civil War battles)

 

This also doesn't stop them from creating one-piece suits for these generic, mass-spawned NPC's.

 

And yes, this doesn't help the consoles in their strict and limiting hardware, but honestly the idea that the content between the platforms HAS to be 100% the same is just dumb (especially once you consider that the modding community does in fact exist, so the argument falls apart anyway). Sure don't give the PC items that the consoles can't get a hold of, but don't deny the PC its ability to do more with the world just because the Xbox or the PS3 can't.

 

-And the difference is?

 

-That kind of expansion is just poor game design. And more than that, don't straw man me. You know damn well I'm asking for for substance, not just meaningless expansion and development. The two are not exclusive.

 

-They clearly did when the excuses they give for not including certain things fall apart once you sit and think about it logically. Logically, if your system for spellmaking is a problem balance wise, then clearly the idea should be to limit the abusive or problematic parts of it. Intoduce a cap on certain problem effects, either directly through a hard cap, or indirectly through a soft cap in the form of exponential increase of costs. Both solve the the problem of balance in the system, one by simply stopping the ability to abuse altogether, the other by requiring the player to put a MASSIVE amount of work into obtaining the absurdly powerful.

 

And concerns over "spread sheety"? Not only is that just silly altogether, but you can remove the spread sheet aspect entirely and still maintain the spellmaking we had. Either create a new menu altogether for spell making that doesn't use numbers to convey what you're doing, or, better yet, make spell making a mini-game of sorts. He says that spellmaking takes the magic out of magic, well, lets make the player delve into the real spellmaking. Make whats implied in the creation of a spell the actual process of it. I can't think of a way to design such a game atm, but its still a far more interesting idea than "Eh, lets just cut out the idea entirely".

 

And as for the physical aspects of magic? It was awesome to have this in Skyrim, but there was nothing stopping these things from being introduced to spellmaking, and indeed could have made it even more interesting. Does your fire spell have more force or heat to it (difference between an explosion and a wall of fire)? Is your frost spell more emulating of a blizzard, or a deep freeze? Your lightning spell more debilitating or destructive? Etc etc.

 

Cutting the system out entirely is just lazy, there's no way to dispute that unless the system was SO unbelievably broken and fundamentally flawed from the very basics of that system that it would have be completely redesigned from the ground up to fix it (Which isn't the case here, at all).

 

-Someone's forgetting that there are more than 3 AC games, and more than that, you're ignoring as well that Beth has had their entire history to continually develop their original ideas, just as the AC team did. Beth has refused to do so, and instead just cut what isn't working from each successive game, leaving the few things that either A, haven't been cut yet, or B, do work as is, or C, are completely new. Ubi didn't do this (With the exception of AC3, which, as I said earlier, I think was more because of the new engine) and instead did the complete opposite.

 

The amount of content in either of the games is irrelevant. Beth has been doing these large-content games for years now, just as Ubi Montreal has been doing small-content games for years. The amount of content became irrelevant to the progression of mechanics once they already established they could even deliver a game of that size at all.

 

-I can get most, if not all of a full set of iron armor right in Seyda Neen.

 

-Someone isn't thinking very much. All of the incomplete armor sets in Morrowind share some kind of similar or exact material with another set. And this is completely ignoring that not every piece of armor needs a matching set.

 

-In morrowind you pretty much can, as spellmakers are all over the place. In Oblivion you couldn't, but that didn't matter. If you even remotely knew how to travel efficiently, it wasn't hard to get in front of a spellmaker/altar within a few minutes, if it even took that long. Sure, it didn't help when you were deep in a dungeon, but thats a good thing. Gods forbid the game present me a challenge where I'm not prepared and can't exactly just scamper away and come back.

 

-In morrowind I can create thousands of different spells, and more than that, I'm not stuck with them. If you augment your fire spells in Skyrim, you're stuck with what they do. If I don't like what my spells are doing in Skyrim, I'm out of luck. But in Morrowind, I can just delete that spell and start from scratch.

 

And I can create a fire spell that does fire damage, can stop someone cold and root them to the spot, cause them fear, calm them down and do whatever I want. You say you're giving more in Skyrim, but yet I can do everything Skyrim can (excepting physical stuff, but that's not doesn't outweigh what Morrowind spellmaking could do) and more. And on top of that, I have the complete and total freedom to do as I please. To take back a choice and start over, and all without any unnecessary and redundant back-travelling to some god awful realm from a DLC.

 

-That was the point. Touch spells cost the least at the cost of putting your mage in danger. Touch spells were the bread and butter of the sorcerer type of player, who used heavy armor defensively and spells offensively. Someone who was good at the game could easily take advantage of the extra power touch spells can give a mage.

 

Fact of the matter is, spellmaking (among other things) allowed for being a mage to be one of the most creative playstyles ever, as you could very nearly create just about any kind of mage you wanted. This is not possible in Skyrim, no matter how hard you try to overblow small mechanical differences.

 

-Now whose the one being cold and calculating? And besides that, again, its a matter of creativity. For instance, weakness spells make it completely possible to only need 1-2 points in a spell effect (especially the high cost ones) for it to come out to having to same power as one you set to be 20-20. And then of course, 1-21 is better to have than 20-20, and allows for more effects while maintaining much of the same power. And as for armor enchantments, a lot of effects only need 1 point in them for them to work just fine, and those that don't can be combined between all of your armor pieces for the effect desired. And this is all without breaking the game using RVM to get 10-1 enchants.

 

And the thing about Morrowind's enchanting was that most items had way less EP than they should have, namely because enchanting had no limits otherwise. (the fix should have been to limit enchanting, not make items have absurdly low EP numbers)

[sajuukkhar9000]

snip

-Firstly, to say that Skyrim runs on the same engine as Morrowind, with "just some tweaks" is disingenuous, it's like saying that Half-Life 2 runs on the same engine as HL1, with "just some tweaks" because they are both the source engine, by your logic Half-Life 2 runs on the quake engine also, because gold-source was just the quake engine "with some tweaks", but is doesn't. Just because engines are built from the same base does not mean that the end result is the same engine.

 

Furthermore, I have never had problems in Skyrim with multicore processors, or multiple video cards, I recall having issues back in Fallout 3, to the point of needing to change my .ini to ignore my CPU's other cores, but Skyrim has worked wonderfully for me on multicore, and multi-GPU, computers.

 

-Secondly, an all new engine can mean many things, the HL2 version of source was an "all new engine", despite being built on top of the gold-source engine, which was itself built on top of the quake engine.

 

-Thirdly, it is 100% FALSE to say NPCs can't use perks, if you looking the CK, you will see that NPCs have access to many of the player-character's perks, ranging from the +1handed damage perks, the increased destruction spell damage perks, spell cost reduction perks, +armor perks, and even special NPC only perks that give them X3 damage.

 

Furthermore, the different damage types based on attack style only affected raw damage, it had no special effects, and since the game defaults with the "use best attack" option on, it never mattered for most players, not to mention that said different attack damage was replaced by special effects, such as bleed/better crits/armor piercing, which actually provide more gameplay difference then just just doing differing levels raw damage, and the differing swing types were replaced with power attacks in differing directions that each have their own special power like a chance to paralyze, or extra crit damage. So nothing was lost, in fact, more diversity was added.

 

 

 

And no, I dont think Skyrim is perfect, the combat is dull, many people don't respond to many actions that you do that they logically should, weapon diversity perks are implemented like s***, NPCs are pants on head retarded, its still pretty buggy, the radiant quest system is woefully under developed and send you to places you already have been when it shouldn't, amongst a long list of other annoyances. However, when some makes a veritably false claim like "there's less NPC types/less dungeon types/less weapon diversity, etc. etc." I will point it out.

 

I know part of this new-age-gamer BS is that you either hate everything in a game, and liking/defending even one thing about the game means you MUST be a shill for the company, which was an absurdly childish remark that reflects poorly on your character, but defending games from false accusation does not mean someone likes every part of it. I defend games like Mass Effect 3, and Fallout New Vegas, two games I absolutely despite, from false accusation about its content, because they are false, and spreading false information about games is stupid.

Edited February 8, 2013 by sajuukkhar9000

[imperistan]

-The point is that the Creation Engine is still just Gamebryo and still has a lot of the original issues thats made Gamebryo so problematic over the years. (and this is only made worse by the mods Beth has piled onto it over the years) In all honesty Gamebryo should have been scrapped by now, as there are better engines out there (and better ones that could be made) that do and can do exactly what gamebryo does but better. Cryengine (Look at what Skyrim could look like using the Cryengine:

And I'm sure you've seen the actual port of Oblivion's landmax into the Cryengine 2) being a prime example.

 

The Source Engine in comparison has become better with each iteration and fixed what was problematic in the past.(IIRC anyway, I never really followed the Source Engine)

 

And my computer can handle Skyrim just fine, but it can also keep a modded Crysis going at a consistent 50FPS as well. Thing is is that not everyone has such a powerful computer, and not only that, but if you have a multi-gpu setup consisting of two or more cards that, on their own, can handle Skyrim just fine then you're not likely going to see much a difference.

 

because they are false, and spreading false information about games is stupid.

 

That goes both ways.

[sajuukkhar9000]

snip

The creation engine also fixes many of the problems gamebryo did, and Oblivion's gamebryo fixed many of the problems that Morrowind's did, and on the Source front, the newer source engines still have many of the same problems older versions of source did, even Unreal engine sill has several problems stretching back several versions. That's just a natural part of being the same basic engine.

 

 

And while it's great your computer can do that, as can mine, as you yourself pointed out, many people's computers can't, and consoles couldn't as well. The console port of Crysis 1 had to be butchered in order to get it to run to half-way decent. It's not a profitable means of making games to only cater to the elite of the PC crowed.

 

 

And as for that video, it's stupidly deceptive, like most videos of its nature are. Sure it looks pretty, and the camera pans smooth, but then again, everything in the presented game world is static, there's a lack of NPCs, or anything else that would put undue strain on the computer running it, not to mention that the landscape shown is just that, and not an entire world the size of Skyrim, which allows them to pump even MORE power into that small bit of land to make it look better.

 

I can slap a ENB mod on Skyrim, strip out all the NPCs, and disable/remove every script/function in the game, and get a very similar looking result, but when you actually add in all the things to make that more then just a static environment, and into an actual game, it all falls apart, which is why I despite it when people try to use videos like that to show "what could be" despite the fact that the video ignores everything about what makes a game besides the superficial landscape.

 

Here is a picture of modded skyrim that looks just as good

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/185tv2xe524gejpg/original.jpg

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/185tv35a45ldwjpg/original.jpg

Edited February 9, 2013 by sajuukkhar9000

[imperistan]

It's not a profitable means of making games to only cater to the elite of the PC crowed.

 

That doesn't mean that you should ignore them either.

 

And I'm still waiting on your reply btw to when I proved you wrong that armor pieces had any significance to performance.

[sajuukkhar9000]

That doesn't mean that you should ignore them either.

They don't ignore us, they give us modding tools so we can make the game better for ourselves, something we should be thankful for in this day and age where every other game dev is trying to block/ban modding.

 

snip

-Since, by your own admission, your computer is powerful, it really doesn't apply to you, if we tryed it on the average PC, or even the consoles, which have less then 4 gigs of ram, and not a quad core processor, or whatever it's you have, we would get different results. If the average person had a PC as good as yours, or if the consoles were as good as your PC, your results would have some meaning, but they aren't. Your entire argument can be summarized as "if I can run it on a giant super computer, then why cant get it to run on an 1990's Macintosh". Its a simply unfair argument to try to make.

 

And no, the concept that consoles have to have the same content as PC users isn't dumb, its called being fair. Bethesda gives us the modding tool to make our PC games better, as you pointed out, but it's up to US to make the game better for ourselves, while we can treat ourself better because of our PCs, Bethesda cannot treat us better for the same reasons. Game companies have to treat all of their customers fairly, and we should be so lucky for Bethesda to even release to CK to begin with.

 

-The difference is that one implies that NPC armor pieces have NOTHING to do with performance, and the other implies that they do, but not as much as as NPC processing.

 

-Well, you dont go into detail what you meant, and based on your previous argument "more skills = more diversity" it really seemed like you use a "more number of total weapons = more diversity" type of logic, instead of a "number of things that things do = more diversity" type of logic. The former is just bloat, the later is real diversity, and the Skyrim skill system leads FAR closer to the latter, while the suggestions I've seen from you lean far to the former.

 

-Bethesda tried that kind of system in both Morrowind, and Oblivion, it didn't work. People always found a way to exploit it and get past any sort of cost increase, not to mention that putting limits on it would just evoke a "WAAA THEY MADE SPELLMAKING SO LIMITED ITS WORTHLESS" rebuttal from many, and we would instead be sitting here arguing over how limited spellmaking is, or isn't, of it not being in the game to begin with.

" I can't think of a way to design such a game atm"

That's EXACTLY the problem, Bethesda is having, really, that's EXACTLY what the quote from Todd Howard I posted before said. Again, this baseless accusation that Bethesda just went "ahh lets cut it" instead of trying to improve it goes against all known evidence, and this is what I have been arguing about the whole time. And yes, spellmaking was broken fundamentally, it was way to easy to exploit, putting caps on it would nerf it hard to the point many would find it useable, and trying to find a new way to do it is really freaking hard.

 

-Except, Bethesda did continuously develop their ideas, and when they found that their original ideas didn't work anymore, they replaced them. You seem to have this notion that its possible to just contentiously develop the same idea forever, and constantly improve on it, when the simple fact of the matter is that, that simply isn't true. Systems have dead ends, and it can take over a decade to this that dead end, and once you hit it, there's nowhere to go, so you throw it out, and replace it with something better. Assassins creed has only been around for 6 years, Elder scrolls has been around for nearly 20. Bethesda has had a far longer time to hit their original system's dead ends then AC.

 

and yes, the amount of content is TOTALLY relevant, a small game like AC can be easily improved by taking time away from one of its small list of features, and putting it into another feature,huge games like skyrim dont have this luxery, especially with the ever rising cost of game development, they already have so many features to deal with that taking time away from any of them just ends up hurting all of them more then it benefits.

 

-I'm lucky is the armor merchant spawns with half a set of chitin.

 

-First off, when you have a system like Skyrim's with matching set perks, YES, you DO need every armor to fit into that system, or else the entire system becomes inconsistant with itself, and proves to be an overall detriment to the game.

 

Also, in Morrowind's light armor, the complete sets of light armor are glass, chitin, fur, and netch leather. Where would the bearskin armor go? or the imperial leather? or newtscale? imperial leather isn't anywhere near the same a netch leather, neither is bearskin or newtscale.

 

-I was pointing you that the statement "you can do it everywhere" was wrong, not that I wanted to be able to do it everywhere, so I dont really get your comment on the game posing a challenge.

 

-But see, that's the thing with your argument, all you talk about is making new spells, not being able to manipulate the ones already in the game, which is what I have been discussing this whole time. while you have to go create a 100% new custom spell in order to get multiple effects. Skyrim's perk system does that by default, without the need to make new spells, just augment the existing ones, and on top of that, it isn't so broken that it allows for stupidly powerful exploits, and when Bethesda finds a way to put spellmaking back in, it would will take the manipulation of beyond anything Morrowind could ever hope to do.

 

And I do agree perk rest should have been in the base game.

 

-But any half-decent mage has enough magicka, and enchanted gear, that the reduced cost of touch spells was meaningless because you could cast all the normally spells just as well, and not put yourself in danger. The only mage who needed to use touch spells was a bad mage, who didn't know how to use the rest of the mage systems to their advantage.

 

-Well that's a problem with Morrowind's enchanting system at its core, a simple 1-2 point enchant shouldn't be able to do jack squat, and trying to use broken game mechanics to support the inclusion of an equally broken game mechanic really doesn't make for a good argument.

 

And while I do agree that enchanting needed to be nerfed, majorly, in Morrowind. I feel that the perk system does this quite well, not perfect mind you, but well, without the need for EP on armors. Unless you use the resto exploit, or spec heavily into the 13 point enchant tree, which 13 perk points it quite a bit considering less then 22% of the game's playerbase makes it to level 50, enchantments are nerfed to being pretty weak.

Edited February 9, 2013 by sajuukkhar9000

[imperistan]

-A game shouldn't have to be modded to be enjoyed. As I've said, there is no other game like Skyrim that isn't made by Beth (or based on work by Beth, in the case of NV), so if we want a fully open world game with the level of freedom and life that an Elder Scrolls game has, all we have is an Elder Scrolls game. And if that ES game isn't stacking up, then we're screwed out of an experience we've come to love until such time that mods have completely changed the game into somethi. Nbetter. Not only should that not have to be the case, but it also means that for someone whose waiting for those mods to be fully, they ed, they are going to be waiting for several before it happens.

 

-In this case, the power of my computer is irrelevant. If its a 5 FPS difference on one computer, thats what its going to be on another when the variables changing are not dependent on hardware. 100 bandits with armor and 100 bandits without armor (presuming vanilla assets that is) are going to take up the same resources regardless of hardware.

 

-Please oh please point out where I said actual content would be locked out because you're on a console. A different number of generic NPC's in large battles is no different than the textures being different, and if its unfair that pure graphical options are different between platforms then the High Resolution Texture Pack shouldn't exist because it isn't fair to consoles.

 

-Semantics.

 

-You're missing the point. Again, I am not suggesting pointless addition of pointless crap. And I'm going to cap it for you: I WANT MORE, I WANT MORE THAT DOES MORE, AND I WANT MORE THAT MEANS MORE. Don't straw man me by saying I just want a 1000 pebbles when I very, VERY clearly want a 1000 iphones.

 

-1. People who whine like that are irrelevant.

2. If you do it right, you can limit spellmaking and balance it out and maintain its usefulness at the same time. These things are not exclusive from one another, and the very basic point of doing so is acknowledging that games shouldn't be a pushover. You should have to WORK if you want to be powerful, but you shouldn't make that work something that makes you have to grind either (IE, by the end of a playthrough one should be either very near or plainly crossing that threshold into being powerful). And do note that I didn't suggest that a new mechanic for it be created, but that the same mechanic be, simplistically speaking, re-skinned.

 

And besides, there will always be people who look to cheat, exploit, and do whatever dirty trick they can to win. You can't change that, and ruining mechanics trying to prevent it just makes things worse. The point is to stop these exploitations from being able to be achieved by someone who is just playing, not meta-gaming. Thats what you refuse to see about this. They're trying to combat meta-gaming by limiting what you can do when you're just playing, rather than limiting what you can do when you meta game.

 

Its literally putting out a fire by lighting another one, except the other fires still roaring as much as ever and the new one's now burning more homes than the other one was.

 

-I don't think you understand that certain systems can in fact reach a point where they're more than adequate and DON'T need to be developed any further, and more than that, that Beth actually reached any of these dead ends. All of the excuses they've given since Morrowind came out for cutting things either amounted to:

 

A. Being legitimate because it wouldn't be feasible to develop that mechanic. (This really only happened between DF and MW. Namely the axing of a lot of skills that, to develop them, would require 3x as much time as they had)

OR

B. Being completely illegitimate because they fall apart once you sit and think about it.

 

Fact of the matter is, much of what they cut could in fact have been fixed and/or developed more. Few of these systems couldn't have had anything done for them, and for the most part those systems that couldn't were all axed in between DF and MW.

 

- Problem is that most of the mechanics since Morrowind were pretty much just fine the way they were. Yes there were problems, but they should have been fixed. It is plain bad game design to cut mechanics just so you can spend all your time on graphics and new mechanics. (or 2 years on one specific creature, which, while worth the time spent, obviously shows how much more time was spent on them compared to the rest of the game)

 

-Gods forbid the game doesn't just hand things to you.

 

-No, you don't. If said armor isn't affected by said perk, then too bad. If you can't afford or find a fully matching set, then deal with your mismatched set of armor until you can. RISE AND OVERCOME. ;)

 

- Netch and Imperial leather are types of leather, thus they're leather armor. They go together. Fur and bearskin are the same thing, just one's a bit hairier. They go together. Newtscale is a form of lamellar armor (or at least, it looks like it) it goes with Imperial armor. (or leather. That works as well)

 

-The spells already in the game are boring. And more than that, again you use the argument that you can augment spells in Skyrim, but yet refuse to acknowledge that you're stuck with these augments unless you happen to have Dragonborn. Not so with spellmaking, where spells can be changed as you need to and that you're never forced to be forever stuck with that spell, regardless of whether you want it to work the way it does or not.

 

-Bad mages are mages that can't tough it out in the thick of battle, even without a wall of iron between you and your enemy. Not ones that make the most efficient use of spellmaking.

 

-They weren't broken.

[JimboUK]

Armor has nothing to do with how many NPCs can be on the screen at any one time. That is all about AI processing.

 

A modder over on the beth forums wanted to be able to do massive battles in morrowind. He was able to get upwards of 100 NPC's on screen at any one time, simply by stripping out most of their AI. They were not running around naked.

 

But, I should know better than to try and argue this point with you, after all, you are obviously a game designer, and know more than all the rest of us combined.....:rolleyes:

 

This^^^^ I managed to spawn 150+ NPCs in New Vegas, the frame rate dropped to below 5, entering TFC1 and thus pausing everything bought the frame rate back up above 30. The game had no problem rendering all those NPCs, it fell apart when those NPCs had to think. As Skyrim runs on a tweaked version of the same POS engine that the previous games ran on it shouldn't come as any great surprise that it suffers from the same issues.

[HeyYou]

The 'creation engine' IS just a slightly modified version of the morrowind engine. Sure, beth fixed SOME of the issues, but, they left in the glaring problems that restricts how well the engine runs. Like rendering EVERYTHING in your field of view, whether you can see it or not......

 

Gamebryo is outdated, and has been 'adapted' so many times, with half-fixes, that it really is NOT a good engine anymore.... Beth needs to completely re-write it.

 

Sure, you may not have problems with multi-core processors, or multi-video cards, but, you don't get the full benefit of them either. The game runs just as good on dual core, as a quad core, (of the same clock speed/architecture) The game engine has NOT been optimized........ Quite frankly, it is outdated technology, that has outlived its usefulness.

[JimboUK]

I think a lot of the issues come from Bethesdas "fixes", Divinity II uses Gamebryo and doesn't have the same issues. In that game you can run along the ground, change into a dragon, take off and have huge aerial battles, imagine trying to do that with one of Bethesdas efforts.