Ya’ll are jumping to a lot of conclusions about a game that exists as little more than a CGI trailer, right now.
What do you think the odds are that the game will be a significant technological leap over Oblivion?
Pretty good considering that they have two other games (Rage, Brink) that’re looking pretty slick. If Skyrim isn’t all that it should be, the blame is on the engine. They have better engines running on the consoles and kept the same lousy engine despite jumping from Xbox to Xbox 360. The target platforms aren’t to blame.
Some info on the engine:
And a bit more (missed the edit window):
Given the recent announcement (and even before) it’s pretty clear that that TES:V is the ‘project’ in question here.
That’s the same quote I read before.
They just announced on the Bethsoft twitter that it’s a new engine.
Well, colour me surprised. Can’t wait to see some screenshots of this brand new engine, although part of it worries me a little bit - namely, am I gonna be able to run it on my compy without having to fork out megabucks for an upgrade. This is kinda why I like the fact that the years-old tech in the 360 and PS3 is hobbling PC gaming - it means every time a new game comes out PC gamers aren’t bled white.
Wonder how this’ll affect the modding community? Hopefully the new engine is mod-friendly. Given Beth’s past record and the immense community that formed around modding Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3, I’d hope so.
I guess everyone is different, but $200 every 5 years is not what I’d consider being bled white.
It’s 5 years since the last TES game. It should require a bit of an upgrade from that tech.
I’m glad for the news. New engine is something that is just a requirement after this much time. Still means that DX9 and old tech is going to rule the day on this one though, which tempers my excitement.
At least until we see brand new shiny screenies.
With the barest bits of info it does seem premature to jump to conclusions about system specs; although my aging motherboard already has the best it can handle in terms of processing, and I doubt my 9500GT is going to give TESV it’s due - which is why I’m glad the consoles are there - it’ll avoid a complete replacement at the cost of the mod community, or hold back the specs enough that I (and I imagine a lot of other PC gamers) will be able to run it at all.
Frankly, the problem isn’t so much the engine (although I get really suspicious when I see a company talking out of both sides of their mouth like Bethsoft does every damn day) but the fact that Bethsoft is terrible about using their tech. I mean, they suck. They’re awful at every aspect of the technology side of gaming, and have been for a very long time. They seem to do almost no QA whatsoever, to the point where they are incapable of even acknowledging common fixes or offering advice. Meanwhile, every game in their series has become less and less varied, stripping away more and more elements, creating games which are less and less rich.
They also seem to have utter madness ruling the day at their studios, with no idea what players spend their time looking at, let alone what’s good for the system. I recall painfull the days when I realized that every last face in Oblivion was nightmarishly ugly, while the rocks had five times more polys. This is also the company who went with one single game from “promote the use of mods” to “require the use of mods to make playable due to moronic design decisions a toddler wouldn’t screw up, while leaving the game so shoddily made that people wound up making mods so they could use other mods.”
So while I am, as always, optimistic… I’m not holding my breath. I got burned painfully with Oblivion, to the point where I wound up having more fun installing add-ons for clothing than playing the game. It was a mediocre dungeon game, and really sucked apart from that.
Yeah, I don’t care about the engine. It’s quirky, but it’s good enough. It’s the paucity of voice actors. I’m not saying the ones they’ve got are bad, although after three games with them I would not object to cycling them out. Bethesda is doing pretty well for themselves. They can afford to hire more voice talent. If they’re going to splurge on one celebrity voice, here’s my suggestion: Billy West.
Skyrim will be GameInformer’s cover for their Feb issue, out on Jan 11th - we’ll likely see some screenshots and have a bit more info.
PC Gamer now says that Elder Scrolls V is “confirmed” to be using an entirely new engine, NOT an update of Gamebryo.
Speculation is that it IS the same engine, just updated and the community manager is just referring to that update as “new”.
I guess we’ll have to wait for more info.
I agree on the voice acting instead of having ANY celebrity actors, use that money to hire a dozen unknown, but competent voice actors. Also, how about picking a set of consistent accents for the world instead of being all over the place like they were in the last game?
“Recent”? Incremental game design has been with us since the dawn of the computer gaming age-it is instead the rare sequel which exceeds its predecessor(s) by any significant margin. The EA Sports titles, just to name one, have pretty much been spinning their wheels for over a decade now.
Now, if you want to argue that this phenomenon has been increasingly common as of late-mmm maybe (Civ V and Silent Hunter V both would attest to that)-IMNSHO this is because devs, in thrall to their hidebound corporate masters (and yes a solid helping of Console Ball & Chain syndrome) have pretty much gotten timid and aren’t interested in crafting something which will truly blow you away. I still await that fully immersive multi-faceted high fantasy world, which as you said in post #20 this probably won’t be (tho to be fair I’ll reserve final judgement, for now).
I wonder if the complaint that games are all the same today is one of the perennial complaints people have about how it was better in the old days. I remember someone in the early 90s bragging to me about how some Atari game was always different and how games today were too formulaic.
In other words: In my days, we had to complete the whole level, both ways!
How about cheap games made for phones and other portable platforms, is there much innovation there?
The direct quote (from Twitter) is this:
“We can now confirm that the TES V: Skyrim engine is all-new. And it looks fantastic.” (Nick Breckon.)
That’s going to be pretty hard to backpedal from if it’s just a spit’n’polish of Gamebryo.
I wonder if ME3 or ES6 would be made at all if it weren’t for the revenue generated from consoles. They may be a necessary evil these days to give games a chance of recouping the massive development costs. It is nice when your new PC gets stressed to it’s limit by the latest games but the cost of keeping up got a bit much for me and I ended up moving over the 360.
I’m looking forward to ME3 far more than a new ES, i’ve about had my fill of the whole swords, elves and magic genre to last me a while.