The PC and Skyrim - An Issue of Porting

[jsmith65]

I think we can all agree that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was and still is one of the best games ever created. It's certainly one of my favorites, and now, with Skyrim on the horizon, my excitement cannot be expressed...BUT with that excitement comes a certain amount of apprehension. I've been keeping up with the development a bit and I've seen a good amount of screens a previews that were taken/played on the Xbox 360. I love the 360 and have one myself, but I enjoy playing games like Oblivion and Skyrim on the PC.

My question is this: will Skyrim be poorly ported to the PC? Has there been any indicators of this so far in the development like there was for Crysis 2?

As always, have nice day.

EDIT: Oh! I just remembered something. Does anyone have any idea if Skyrim will be 3D Vision Ready?

 

[Martimus]

I dont' think it will be ported any worse than Oblivion was.

While I really enjoyed Oblivion, there are many who disliked it for the lack of polish on the main quest, and the smaller scale of the game in comparison to Morrowind or Daggerfall.

 

[darkswordsman17]

If Oblivion wasn't an issue for you (there are a lot of people that didn't like it because they feel it was "consolized" or whatever), I doubt Skyrim will be.

Have you actually played Crysis 2 or are you just going based off of the whining in forums?

 

[KaOTiK]

It's a Bethseda game, of course it is gonna be a buggy mess regardless.

I also don't share your high opinion of Oblivion. It was ok, but the lvln system was downright terrible. Thankfully mods made it into an excellent game though.

 

[smackababy]

Vanilla Oblivion was nowhere near the pedestal you're placing it on. With that said, I did enjoy it, but was massively annoyed at how "noob friendly" (carebear) it was. You can't kill characters in the main quest line? Wtf? Can't drop or sell quest items? A huge GPS tracking system? Also, I think the game felt a lot smaller than Morrowind simply due to fast travel being available. That, and the leveling system was whack and destroyed dungeon crawling.

 

[rangda]

I think we can all agree that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was and still is one of the best games ever created.

I disagree. I think vanilla Oblivion was one of the best modder toolsets ever created but was a pretty terrible game. IMO Oblivion w/o at least OOO + some sort of levelling mod (nGCD in my case) is unplayable (and to make it great you have to run a lot more than just that).

My hope (it's sad that this is the most I'm hoping for) is that Skyrim is just as moddable so we end up with another great mod engine. I'm not holding out much hope for greatness (or even mediocrity) out of the box.

 

[Majic 7]

Check out the TechReports shortbread for today. There is a list of previews in the Eight is Enough section. Even though I totally burned out on Oblivion after 200 hrs, these have piqued my interest. The Gamespot preview has an interview with a developer, with a few hints about at least some options for better graphics than the 360 videos shown so far. It does have a modding capabilities.

 

[modestninja]

Check out the TechReports shortbread for today. There is a list of previews in the Eight is Enough section. Even though I totally burned out on Oblivion after 200 hrs, these have piqued my interest. The Gamespot preview has an interview with a developer, with a few hints about at least some options for better graphics than the 360 videos shown so far. It does have a modding capabilities.

As long as the modding capabilities are there, the game will eventually be great. Before that, most likely it will be buggy as hell.

 

[Anteaus]

In my opinion, as long as they get rid of that ridiculous leveling system where everything matches you then I'll be happy. I didn't like that it was possible to beat the game without even really even trying if you beeline through the main quest line. Is it too much to ask that some areas might require me to actually build up my character prior to entry. It would make exploring more satisfying. Morrowind wasn't a difficult game by any stretch but I got much more out of it than Oblivion.

 

[TheUnk]

I think we can all agree that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was and still is one of the best games ever created.

No, we can't.

Far far far far far from one of the best games ever created imo

 

[vrait]

No, we can't.

Far far far far far from one of the best games ever created imo

Exactly, oblivion wasn't even a fraction as good as Morrowind.

But being the sucker I am for elder scrolls games. I will be getting this day one.

 

[zerocool84]

It's a Bethseda game, of course it is gonna be a buggy mess regardless.

I also don't share your high opinion of Oblivion. It was ok, but the lvln system was downright terrible. Thankfully mods made it into an excellent game though.

Skyrim will be buggy, have a crappy storyline, horrible voice acting, crappy leveling system, and boring dungeon design just like the rest of their games have had.

 

[KaOTiK]

Skyrim will be buggy, have a crappy storyline, horrible voice acting, crappy leveling system, and boring dungeon design just like the rest of their games have had.

Hey Patrick Stewart rocked as the king for those first 10 minutes!

 

[bentheman939]

Hey Patrick Stewart rocked as the king for those first 10 minutes!

Aww hell ya. I would kiss that man on the mouth if we ever met.

Skyrim will be buggy, have a crappy storyline, horrible voice acting, crappy leveling system, and boring dungeon design just like the rest of their games have had.

I hate when people bash Bethesda games like this. The deliver a really decent RPG experience. Their "bugginess" has sometimes been really annoying, like save game corrupts (I played FO:NV 3 times because of this), but their immense complexity and non-linear play style goes a long way towards justifying the minor bugs I have experienced. The voice acting is quite good! Oblivion had something like 60,000 lines of dialogue. They can't all be winners.

I agree the levelling system is absolute shit, but the dungeon design and generic high fantasy story I thought was quite good. Why the F**k are you (and others) so critical of a fun game?

 

[Arkaign]

Aww hell ya. I would kiss that man on the mouth if we ever met.



I hate when people bash Bethesda games like this. The deliver a really decent RPG experience. Their "bugginess" has sometimes been really annoying, like save game corrupts (I played FO:NV 3 times because of this), but their immense complexity and non-linear play style goes a long way towards justifying the minor bugs I have experienced. The voice acting is quite good! Oblivion had something like 60,000 lines of dialogue. They can't all be winners.

I agree the levelling system is absolute shit, but the dungeon design and generic high fantasy story I thought was quite good. Why the F**k are you (and others) so critical of a fun game?

Hmm yeah. I did enjoy Oblivion, FO3, FO:NV quite a bit, and got a lot of enjoyment out of them. I also think the voice acting was for the most part quite good. A lot of improvement could be made with the voices you hear all_the_time though, which I expect to see in Skyrim.

I've been very lucky with the bugginess of their games, I've had maybe 2-3 crashes total in all of their games combined, which I understand that many people have a lot more trouble.

The leveling system of Oblivion was incredibly bad, from what I understand they're making it much more like Fallout series, which I think will work out great. At least the mods were there to make Oblivion more like it should.

I vastly prefer the big sandbox world of games like Fallout 3/NV/Oblivion to more 'on-rails' rpgs that I've tried of late. I bought Dragon Age and wanted to stab someone in the face after about 30 minutes. Just not my cup of tea, though I did like Mass Effect 2 pretty well.

 

[shortylickens]

Who were you before you were banned?

 

[zerocool84]

Aww hell ya. I would kiss that man on the mouth if we ever met.



I hate when people bash Bethesda games like this. The deliver a really decent RPG experience. Their "bugginess" has sometimes been really annoying, like save game corrupts (I played FO:NV 3 times because of this), but their immense complexity and non-linear play style goes a long way towards justifying the minor bugs I have experienced. The voice acting is quite good! Oblivion had something like 60,000 lines of dialogue. They can't all be winners.

I agree the levelling system is absolute shit, but the dungeon design and generic high fantasy story I thought was quite good. Why the F**k are you (and others) so critical of a fun game?

Voice acting in all of them is terrible. Voice acting can make or break a game and it broke all of them. Plus when you reach the retardedly low level cap, everything is too easy to kill. So what if it had a ton of lines of dialog, if it sucks it doesn't matter how much there was. All dungeon designs are terrible too, they're all exactly the same with the same layout. The only good thing about their games is the "open-ness" of them. Everything else is average or below average.

 

[Bateluer]

What is the OP smoking? Oblivion was terrible.

 

[bentheman939]

Who were you before you were banned?

You talking to me? This is the only account I've ever had...

Voice acting in all of them is terrible. Voice acting can make or break a game and it broke all of them. Plus when you reach the retardedly low level cap, everything is too easy to kill. So what if it had a ton of lines of dialog, if it sucks it doesn't matter how much there was. All dungeon designs are terrible too, they're all exactly the same with the same layout. The only good thing about their games is the "open-ness" of them. Everything else is average or below average.

Could you give an example of a game that had "good" voice acting (genuinely curious)? Especially at the scale seen in Bethesda games?

I don't think voice acting "makes or breaks" games. Its nice if its good, and I always thought Oblivion had perfectly adequate voice acting, but its not the most important feature in an RPG. Maybe that's why we seem to have such radically different views when ranking Oblivion.

The dungeons were not clones of each other, and I don't even know why you would say that. What 2 were alike? All of the "realm of oblivion" dungeons were kind of alike because you needed to climb the central tower and take the stone, but they were not identical, and frankly none of the others were even similar afaik.

Everything else is average or below average.

WTF are you talking about!? For its time, Oblivion had the best graphics available on the PC, besides maybe Farcry. The music was great. The cities were gorgeous and each had a cultural flavour which was unique and interesting. Many of the side quests were exceptionally creative and interesting (ie the one where you go inside the cursed painting), and not just go fetch (aka Witcher). Spell crafting, item crafting, guilds, and skill system were all also extremely well done.

The only "average" parts of the game, imo, were the arms-race levelling which literally everyone hates and that has been well discussed, and the somewhat generic high-fantasy main story line, which could have been better.

 

[Zenoth]

What is the OP smoking? Oblivion was terrible.

He's probably smoking what we call personal taste.

About the "issue of porting", it's not porting a game from a Console to PC that is the issue, but if it's done correctly or not, and if changes were made specifically for the PC port during the porting process, for instance changing the GUI and/or adding/modifying in-game settings (screen resolutions for example), or adapting new controls options for they keyboard and the mouse (bare minimum).

If a Console game is "well ported" to the PC, there should be no problems, then the rest comes (I.E if the game's actual game-play is good or not, and if the port in question is a bad port then even if the game-play on the Console version was good then it's going to be bad on the PC due to lack of what PC gamers would consider bare minimums). In the specific case of Oblivion it was mostly a direct Console-to-PC port with barely any changes made for the PC, outside of "new" options for the graphics and sound I can't recall anything being significantly different, even the GUI was - as far as I can remember - exactly the same on the PC as it was on the 360 version (which I played some).

If you enjoyed Oblivion, you shouldn't have problems with Skyrim, simply because Skyrim cannot really be... let's say... "more badly" ported over the PC than Oblivion was in the first place, what Oblivion ended up on the PC was under my own estimation a 90% Console-to-PC port (10% being those graphics and sounds changes they made to support more options for the PC, but that's pretty much about it, and of course the controls I guess). I don't actually expect Skyrim to be a "better" Console port than Oblivion was, but I do expect it to be more stable of a game for the simple fact that finally Bethesda left that dinosaur of an engine that was GameBryo and created a completely new one, which let's be honest can't possibly be worst than GameBryo, it IS a step forward.

 

[KaOTiK]

He is right about the dungeons, there was like 4-5 different ones that were used over and over and a handful of ones used only once I think.

 

[NoSoup4You]

Oblivion was a phenomenal game, I invested countless hours into it both in vanilla and OOO plus all the awesome visual mods. Really and truly a great game, but I did eventually burn out on it to the point that I'll never play it again. The voice acting is ATROCIOUS. That annoying wench that voiced the nord and orc females... argh!!! I will never forgive her or Bethesda for unloading that beotch on us (me). Truly bad.

As for a game with good voice acting, how about Mass Effect 1 and 2? Doesn't get much better than that. One thing though - ME is greatly helped by the fact there's actual acting going on with the in-game characters, they have great facial animations to convey emotion...etc.

 

[zerocool84]

Oblivion was a phenomenal game, I invested countless hours into it both in vanilla and OOO plus all the awesome visual mods. Really and truly a great game, but I did eventually burn out on it to the point that I'll never play it again. The voice acting is ATROCIOUS. That annoying wench that voiced the nord and orc females... argh!!! I will never forgive her or Bethesda for unloading that beotch on us (me). Truly bad.

As for a game with good voice acting, how about Mass Effect 1 and 2? Doesn't get much better than that. One thing though - ME is greatly helped by the fact there's actual acting going on with the in-game characters, they have great facial animations to convey emotion...etc.

Mass Effect games, Mafia II, Half Life games, Metal Gear Solid games, Prey, Batman: AA, too many to list. Voice acting can make or break a game and those games had some real good voice acting because if you're going to have voice acting, it has to be good or it can break the mood of the game. The only thing that's kept me coming back for more is how "open" their games are.

 

[MustangSVT]

i hope it's a good port with higher settings available for pc. I hate EA games where they don't even have mouse support and all the weird key to control menu. (right shift?!!!!$%^&*()

dragon age2 was a disappointment (demo anyway) so its skyrim or back to risen.

 

[Monster_Munch]

Oblivion was great, I played it all the way through without mods. I maybe enjoyed Morrowind slightly more due to the grander scale of the main quest, but Oblivion did improve many gameplay aspects, especially the combat.

The leveling system in oblivion didn't really bother me that much, I like that you can play a jack of all trades class instead of having to min-max your character like in most RPGs.