The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Announced for November 2011

Bethesda took advantage of the Video Game Awards this weekend to announce the fifth installment of the Elder Scrolls series, titled Skyrim. The game is planned for November 2011, and a teaser trailer has been posted on the Elder Scrolls website. Details are sparse, though the game will apparently run on an "all-new" engine.

Comments

What kind of name is Skyrim?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Skyrim?" Is that a high altitude rim job?

Re:What kind of name is Skyrim?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it is the place that the Nords live in the Elder Scrolls universe.

Also, I heard about this on 2ch a few hours ago and thought I was being lied to. Fucking nips, you should be more trustworthy more of the time so I would believe you when you are telling the truth.

Re:What kind of name is Skyrim?

[gman003]

By the Nine Divines, we've got an imbecile on the loose. If you paid attention to the series lore, criminal scum, you would knot that Skyrim is the northernmost province of Tamriel, north of Cyrodiil, east of High Rock and west of Morrowind. The main inhabitants are the Nords, but ruins from when the land was in the hands of the Aldmer remain. Major cities include Winterhold, a major center of learning, and Solitude, famous for it's role as the fortress of the Wolf Queen, Potema.

Also, this is the same game series that thought "Elsweyr" was a good name for a province. You get used to it.

Re:What kind of name is Skyrim?

[Anonymous Coward]

A few hours ago? On an otaku magnet?

You should be ashamed since this news was first broken on the redneck TV channel. aka the channel you're meant to watch

Re:What kind of name is Skyrim?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't watch BAKA GAIJIN terebi you... you... you BAKA GAIJIN!

Re:What kind of name is Skyrim?

[Anonymous Coward]

RIMSHOT!

Re:What kind of name is Skyrim?

[SharpFang]

IIRC, the whole lore sprouted from a homebrew RPG the original authors/developers played among themselves. And it was quite tongue-in-cheek in places.

What about the forest elves, who live in such a harmony with the forest, that they are strictly carnivorous, consider eating plants a blasphemy and even brew alcohol from insects?

Re:What kind of name is Skyrim?

[Hojima]

Thanks for posting that I lost my Tamriel map that came with Oblivion. Sucks that it's where the Nords live, I was hoping that it would be located in the Summerset Isles, I bet the high elves have some awesome cities. One thing I really have to berate Bethesda for is the lack of variety of the environment. The game would have been twice as good if they kept some environments like the Dwenmer ruins (steam-punk ftw) and the cool plant-like cities that the Telmora grew in Morrowind. If they combined the best aspects of Morrowind with Oblivion, it would have been one awesome game (not that it already wasn't). Oh, and quit feeding the trolls.

Re:What kind of name is Skyrim?

[Tapewolf]

So, hopefully it should be something kind of like Solstheim in Bloodmoon, only much bigger... (Or maybe the same size, if the trend of shrinking the world down continues)

Please can we have a game where the wolves behave semi-sensibly and don't all have rabies...

Re:What kind of name is Skyrim?

[Raumkraut]

Just to pedant: The Telvanni were the ones who lived in and grew the mushroom-cities; Tel Mora being one of those cities.

Well, I say cities, but they were more like villages. There are far too few people in game worlds, generally.

Re:What kind of name is Skyrim?

[Anonymous Coward]

RIMJOB!

Re:What kind of name is Skyrim?

[Anonymous Coward]

And it was quite tongue-in-cheek in places.

Tongue-in-cheek? Isn't a 'skyrim' the very definition of tongue-in-cheek?

Re:What kind of name is Skyrim?

[Philomage]

With all the in-game rumours about "syndicates of wizards leading a boycott of imperial goods in the land of the Altmer" I was certain that the next game would be set in Summerset Isles too.

My primary character was an albino altmer atronach and I was really looking forward to playing with "psijics" and learning "the old ways".

If "all-new" means Gamebryo on DirectX 10...

[Anonymous Coward]

then it's not all-new.

Sorry, slashdot isn't as gullible as kotaku and other console-bred journalist sites.

Re:If "all-new" means Gamebryo on DirectX 10...

[Lanteran]

In context I'd say they meant they're not reusing the oblivion engine, which wouldn't have been quite as enraging as it should've been in these days of console-induced graphical stagnation.

Please fix the pathing/animations this time.

[orphiuchus]

They have been unacceptable since Morrowind. Seriously, its almost 2011. Allow your damn characters to move their legs on a diagonal.

Re:Please fix the pathing/animations this time.

[plague911]

No! Ps. I seriously recommend you try role playing a character besides a bishop

Re:Please fix the pathing/animations this time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, playing a knight isn't easier. They can't think straight.

Huzzah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Subby, if you're trolling us, I will personally reach through your monitor and throttle you. Just so you know.

And the working is expected

[Seakip18]

Sometime in February 2012 after fans and Bethesda patch and finish the content!

I am actually pretty happy about this. I enjoyed morrowind and oblivion a lot and hope they can expand on the great stories just waiting to be told.

Re:And the working is expected

[lgw]

If the trend over the past 3 games continues, the new game will have 7 NPCs and the world will be a single village. One would think they could get that working out of the box. (Daggerfall had 750000 NPCs, 15000 towns, 184000 square miles - Oblivion had 16 square miles).

Re:And the working is expected

[SharpFang]

Actually, if Bethesda keeps its usual TES schedule, it will be released somewhere between christmas 2012 and summer 2014. Then another half a year for a massive fan-made patch fixing all the content bugs and an official patch fixing most of the engine bugs, and sometime around 2015 the game should be actually playable and fun.

(remember, NO TES game has been released on time, and some delays were years long)

Re:And the working is expected

[Fjandr]

And then there was Arena, which I wouldn't even hazard a count on NPCs, towns, and square miles. Each game has gotten smaller since then, when the game spanned the entire continent.

Re:And the working is expected

[FrootLoops]

TFA includes a number of quotes from a Eurogamer interview with Todd Howard--executive producer at Bethesda--from August 16th of this year. One was

One thing I can say is that from when you first hear about it to when it's out will be the shortest it's been for us.

. He was actually responding to the question

You've been working on something secret now for two years. Do you have any sense yet of when you will be able to talk about it or even say what it is? Are going to be sat here next year answering the same question?

So, TES5 has apparently been in development for years and we're now up to the "you first hear about it" bit. I read the rest as Bethesda trying to pull a Blizzard inasmuch as they want to either meet a release schedule or not give one, to avoid raising and crushing hardcore fan expectations. Maybe they'll be timely this time?

Re:And the working is expected

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/605/

My

Re:And the working is expected

[Haeleth]

Daggerfall had 750000 NPCs, 15000 towns, 184000 square miles - Oblivion had 16 square miles.

No, Daggerfall had about 8 NPCs, one of which was then copied and pasted 749992 times; about 15 towns, each of which (again) was copied and pasted 1000 times; and basically no land at all, because there was absolutely no reason to set foot outside a town except to fast-travel to the entrance of another dungeon (which would also be identical to all the others, but with the same corridors and rooms arranged in a slightly different order) to do a quest (which would be one of the same three basic quests, with the same goals and the same twists, and just a few details tweaked at random).

Having lots of "content" is meaningless if it's all the same handful of places you've been before, populated by the same people you've talked to before, repeated over and over again by a pseudo-random number generator and occasionally given a slightly different texture or a palette swap.

Oblivion was too small, I will agree. But Daggerfall was even smaller in terms of actual variety.

Re:And the working is expected

[Shanrak]

while variety is good, there is still a much better sense of atmosphere in a daggerfall city filled with actual living people rather than an imperial city with a handful of people and buildings. When I first played daggerfall, I was blown away by its size. I'd be willing to give up 100% unique citizens and variety for a better atmosphere.

Re:And the working is expected

[geekoid]

And Daggerfall was a disaster of nothing.

Bethesda needs to make a ay to sue the content that is better then they have ever done. Also, maybe actually finishing a game.

Gah, they're horrible. I want a good game company to create games in this niche. Valve for instance.

Re:And the working is expected

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Which is why I stopped playing Daggerfall after probably less than 20 hours due to sheer boredom & frustration with the repetitive environments and almost nonexistent AI.

On the other hand, I not only finished the main Oblivion story line, but continue to play the game occasionally even now, years later-- despite its (many) shortcomings, it's still the most overall enjoyable game world I've ever explored (and I've been gaming since the C64). I'm glad there is still plenty of room for improvement regardless... this gives me many reasons to await Skyrim eagerly.

Re:And the working is expected

[IorDMUX]

greed. Which is why I stopped playing Daggerfall after probably less than 20 hours due to sheer boredom & frustration with the repetitive environments and almost nonexistent AI.

Daggerfall did come out in 1996, you realize. Is that when you played it? 1996 is the same year as MoO II, Duke Nukem 3D, and Diablo. Given the contemporaries, it is not half bad.

Re:And the working is expected

[cavebison]

Having lots of "content" is meaningless if it's all the same handful of places you've been before

Depends on the game, and what you mean by "content". Thief, for example, had small levels you had to revisit often, very few types of NPCs, and you basically did the same thing (sneak, kill, steal, buy stuff) over and over. The "content" was all in the storyline and the "mood". You could add more unique content to Thief but it wouldn't increase enjoyment of the game, just make it longer.

With Wow, the content is in the maps, items, quests and player interactions. There's no storyline. But they have a recipe of content and gameplay which is addictive to a lot of people. You could add a million more unique items and places to Wow and far from improving the game you could damage it. Wow's content directly affects gameplay and has to be balanced.

The original Tetris has perfect content for its players; random and repetitive. Notice how more elaborate versions of Tetris (3D for example) never outshone the original.

So repetitive content can suit a game, and more content doesn't always make a game better. It's about achieving a good "content recipe" for that particular game and its audience.

Hell. It's about time.

[locopuyo]

Hell. It's about time they get a new engine. But that has to be the most underwhelming announcer trailer I've ever seen. It doesn't get my juices flowing at all. The only reason my pipe burst is because the liquid froze.

Re:Hell. It's about time.

[Clandestine_Blaze]

It doesn't get my juices flowing at all. The only reason my pipe burst is because the liquid froze.

O_o

You're doing it wrong.

Re:Yay Bugs!

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, welcome our buggy overl*falls through floor*

improve ranged combat

[__aaeuwj6541]

i just hope that they make archery more powerful, in oblivion if you wanted to make a archer you were basicly making a weak fighter, or and obvious rouge.

Re:improve ranged combat

[Fallingcow]

On the contrary, I thought archery was too powerful. I got through most of the game on the strength of multiplier-bonused damage from sneak attacks with my bow. IMO it's the easiest way to play the game, with magic-focus being a close second and melee combat lagging as a distant third, and a last resort for archers and mages for the rare occasions that they don't destroy their enemies at range.

Re:improve ranged combat

[CFTM]

Have to agree, the high level sneak multiplier was insane, it was like 6X as much damage. One shot kills FTW!

Re:improve ranged combat

[js_sebastian]

On the contrary, I thought archery was too powerful. I got through most of the game on the strength of multiplier-bonused damage from sneak attacks with my bow. IMO it's the easiest way to play the game, with magic-focus being a close second and melee combat lagging as a distant third, and a last resort for archers and mages for the rare occasions that they don't destroy their enemies at range.

Triple-effect poisons on the arrows were also fun, if you have high alchemy skills and enjoy gathering herbs...

Re:improve ranged combat

[zach_the_lizard]

In Morrowind a Mage could easily be the deadliest of characters. With alchemy, one could make a potion to fortify intelligence, take it, and make a stronger potion with that effect. Keep going long enough, and the game becomes thoroughly broken, especially with the Atronach sign; your magicka will be insane. Casting that 100 damage in 100 feet spell will be a blast.

Re:improve ranged combat

[zach_the_lizard]

6x was for blades, it was 3x for ranged weapons. At master level sneak you totally ignore the enemy's armor, which is very nice.

Re:improve ranged combat

[rokstar]

Keep going long enough (intelligence in the 1000s) and you can enchant weapons that were more crazy than any spell a mage could do. 25ft 100pt Drain life type stuff. Hit one guard and half a town falls down dead.

Re:improve ranged combat

[Lordnerdzrool]

Yeah. But still, sneak arrows would frequently single hit kill most enemies, in particular sneak with poisoned arrows. You get a nice poison effect going and launch a sneak attack with a poison tip, almost everything dies to it. Worse, should they not die, just cast an invisibility spell, wait for their alert to go down, then repeat. There are some things I think they could have improved with bow-arrow mechanics, such as being able to shoot in the head for critical hits, but for the most part, bow-arrow was really one of the most powerful things in TES IV.

I really think it is invisibility that broke TES IV. Even on PC running mods that make the game harder, there isn't much they can do once you go invisible. You just fight them until you are getting weak, and you throw an invisibility spell, toss some potions down your throat, reposition yourself for attacking again, and start the fight again. It'd be interesting if they at least acknowledged you turned invisible and attempt to fight you anyhow. They know where you were, they could simply assume that you are somewhere around there still. Better: if they have a detect life spell, they should use it to see you even while invisible.

Re:improve ranged combat

[__aaeuwj6541]

while i will admit the sneak attacks did help alot, i still felt that going up against 2 or more enemies was a little difficult (on highest difficulty) more the point, non magic based combat did seem to be weigted a little in the games favour. im just hoping for crossbows in V

Re:improve ranged combat

[gknoy]

Moreover, some parts of the game were BRUTAL to characters specializing in the sneaky-archer style, because there were so many room-boundary-door bits that enemies would just sit and wait at. I remember my first Oblivion Gate experience. The only way I could reliably kill enemies was by a sneak attack followed by an extended kiting session. That fails hard when you open to door and see one of the bad guys standing right there, patting his hand with his mace that weighs more than you do, and you have nowhere to go.

If the building had not been broken into room instances, you could have gotten him to follow you into the next room, or progressively snuck closer. That pretty much ruined the game for me for a long time, because it was exceedingly difficult for my character to succeed at a major component of the game (closing Oblivion gates) due to my chosen style of play. More importantly, the game's meta-mechanics ("video game with instanced rooms") was what made it hard, not any inherent imbalance of skills or abilities.

I'm already psyched

[guspasho]

With the money at their disposal Bethesda could have easily gotten another gravelly-voiced old dude for the voiceover, but they got Max von Sydow. Excellent opening move, Bethesda.

Re:I'm already psyched

[gman003]

Bethesda got Sir Patrick Stewart to play the Emperor in TES4. They know the importance of having a celebrity voiceactor.

Now, the value of having more than 14 voiceactors to do all the 900+ characters in the game, that they don't seem to quite get.

Re:I'm already psyched

[guspasho]

Actually I was thinking more along the lines of their not using an overexposed actor like Christopher Lee.

Re:I'm already psyched

[Anonymous Coward]

I just hope they'll follow Obsidian's lead with New Vegas and make it an actual roleplaying game this time.

Re:I'm already psyched

[cob666]

Very cool - I was watching the teaser and thought WOW, That sounds like Max Von Sydow. I might just try this game JUST because they used Max for the voice overs.

Re:I'm already psyched

[Fallingcow]

They didn't follow the "breadcrumb-trail main quest leading you through sidequest hubs that suck you in" formula to any great degree in Morrowind, Oblivion, or even very well in Fallout 3, where tradition would have dictated it. Nor did they make you choose skills to focus on, except for the very early game, in any of those three--they're in love with the "you're the best around at everything by the end game" school of RPGs, which sort of made sense in Morrowind (spoiler?) but didn't really in Oblivion, and certainly didn't in F3. It's also the opposite of role-playing, for the most part.

I'm guessing they'll stick with their usual style. I'm just hoping they give us an interesting world this time, but I'm starting to think that the Morrowind setting was the only one that diverse and exciting to explore on the whole damn continent and that that game's perfection won't be reached again even if everything else is right, because the other regions just aren't as cool.

Hopefully they at least won't do the completely fucking stupid leveled loot crap. I got the same quality of loot from a bandit as I did from a well-guarded chest deep in an ancient ruin, and every chest contained the same damn stuff so it never felt like I was somewhere unique. Bring back unique artifacts and distinct-looking dungeons, damnit! Copy-pasted dungeons with the same leveled chests are boring as hell. Every Dwemer ruin felt unique and like it had its own history--at least a half-dozen distinct ones stick in my mind, because every single one had its own character, its own architecture/features, and its own loot. The Aelid ruins from Oblivion are a blur to me, because all but a couple of them are practically identical. Hell, even most of the caves in Morrowind felt unique. That is what I most want them to bring back to the series.

Re:I'm already psyched

[geekoid]

Yeah, well Flash Gordon got Max von Sydow as well.

What spell did bethesda cast that gets people psyched about a game when there history is so full of crap? why the hell does anyone buy a bethesda game when it first comes out?

Re:I'm already psyched

[guspasho]

Oh is there a highly-anticipated Flash Gordon game coming out next year too? I didn't realize he managed to overexpose himself as much as Christopher Lee. The fact that he's done Flash Gordon and barely anything since adds to the impressiveness of the move of hiring him.

I played Oblivion on PC the day it came out and enjoyed it thoroughly; whatever problems it had at launch weren't so severe as to affect my enjoyment.

Re:I'm already psyched

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm starting to think that the Morrowind setting was the only one that diverse and exciting to explore on the whole damn continent

I dunno, I figure a game based in Valenwood/Elsewyr could be pretty interesting.

Re:I'm already psyched

[Sprogga]

Max von Sydow over-exposed doing two games? I don't think so. I'll buy it just because he's in it too.

Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on this is 2010, we should all know by now that 80% of those Windows boxes are stuck in offices everywhere. Nobody's using them to play games.

If we could only count home users, there's a lot more Mac users than just 5-10%.

As for console players, I wish Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo would just WAKE THE FUCK UP and allow keyboards and mouses already. They all have USB ports, Nintendo even has working keyboard support for the browser, etc. Yes I know, living room setting is bad for keyboard+mouse setup, bla bla bla... Stop apologizing for them.

Re:Windows-only game?

[gman003]

Uh, gamers don't use Macs. At all. Not because of the hardware (although even the most pimped out Mac pales before a fully-loaded custom rig), but because of the software. The drivers on OS X are terrible - significantly slower, and with many missing features. It's not a good gaming system - for people that will meticulously adjust timings on RAM to improve performance, a 20% performance cut to switch to Mac is just not logical.

And, unlike you, I will back this up with citations. The current survey (of gaming rigs running Steam) is:

• 45.50% Windows 7
• 26.29% Windows XP
• 23.05% Windows Vista
• 4.71% Mac OS X
• 0.31% Windows 2003
• 0.11% other, including everyone using Wine

That's a terrible percentage. Every version of Mac OS is being beaten by Vista alone in a landslide. There's honestly no need for them to release a Mac version. And, actually, Sony at least does allow keyboards/mice to be used in games. However, very few games are programmed to actually use them.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard that a significant amount of that 4.71% used AMD processors. Therefore, most of this percentage are actually Hackintoshes.

Re:Windows-only game?

[pantherace]

Actually, no Wine unfortunately does *NOT* register as Other, at least on the several systems I've used. I recently had to (prior to the latest steam survey) change the ID in Wine due to it bitching about w2k support ending. Other is likely mostly whatever people have hacked win2k to work(possibly some people with wine), and win2k8.

Re:Windows-only game?

[HAKdragon]

Sony lets developers use USB keyboards and mice - it's just that nobody ever does. UT3 for PS3 had full KB+M support.

Re:Windows-only game?

[TimboJones]

To be fair, Steam was released on Mac last May. Nearly 5% of the user base in 7 months isn't too shabby, especially when you consider how few of the games on Steam are available for Mac. Steam was first released for Windows in 2002.

Not that this invalidates your points about performance.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that this invalidates your points about performance.

Kudos for being honest. Many fanbois (of any topic really) would have dismissed his entire post after critiquing only one point of several.

It's unfortunate that in gaming performance > *. Really limits platform options. Can we reach an acceptable tradeoff point sometime during this decade, pls? No, the Wii isn't it.

Re:Windows-only game?

[The Great Pretender]

And I thought Macs ran on Hot Air, not Steam

Re:Windows-only game?

[Tom]

Uh, gamers don't use Macs. At all.

Don't use all-quantors, it makes it trivial to prove you wrong, because a single counter-example suffices.

I am a gamer, and there is no non-Mac computer in my home (anymore).

(although even the most pimped out Mac pales before a fully-loaded custom rig)

Which 0.0001% of gamers own. You, sir, are stuck in the 80s, when one needed a university degree to be a gamer because one pretty much had to build ones own machine and the global gaming market was a few million bucks. Today, "gamers" includes most of the population and I dare to say the top-50 or so games run perfectly well on a 5-year-old machine because they are called FarmVille and the like. Maybe WoW is on that list somewhere, but very likely it's the only game on that list requiring a 3D graphics card.

There's honestly no need for them to release a Mac version

True, most Mac users use BootCamp to run windows on their Mac for gaming purposes. For a "I want this" game, doing only a windows version will work. But, honestly, most games are in the "looks nice, maybe I'll take a look" category. If they are available for the Mac, I will buy them (I've bought quite a few indie games for the Mac, for example). If they are windows-only, chances are that I'd rather visit torrentz.com than Steam. And if it's not there, I'll probably forget about it. If you can't be arsed to make the game for my system, then I can't be arsed to get out my wallet.

Or, as someone else put it nicely - would you rather have 0.1% of the 90% market share, or 10% of the 5% market share?

Re:Windows-only game?

[jo_ham]

Given that Steam for Mac was released this year, and is already up to nearly 5% (given that Steam for Windows has been around for much, much longer), even when the library of Mac-compatible games on there is still not growing as quickly as it really should [the majority of games on the service are still Windows only, the Mac library is small but growing] (although Valve are porting their own titles as quickly as they can), I think that your numbers actually say the opposite of what you are saying.

"Bleeding edge" performance doesn't matter to as many people as you think it does - while there is a lot to be done on OS X in terms of gaming performance (the GPU drivers were really the biggest hit, and those have come on considerably in recent months), an OS X system will run most modern games just fine if they meet the specs - at least comparably to a Windows box.

I don;t want to be tweaking my RAM timings to get an extra 2fps out of Crisis, I just want to kick back after working and play a game now and again, crucially without having to reboot my machine into Windows for the convenience factor.

Not all "Gamers" are using liquid-cooled, overclocked, fan-heater-sounding rigs to play games - I would wager that most gamers are not like this any more, since the hardware pretty much caught up to the software in most cases - by which I mean, the games look good enough and play well enough on high settings on pretty modest hardware (cost wise) these days. You don;t need to buy a $600 GPU or a custom 15 fan case any more.

Any Mac bought in the last couple of years is going to have pretty decent hardware from a gaming perspective - ok, not cutting edge, but then most turnkey PC setups are not cutting edge either. Last year's iMacs were shipping with Radeon 4670s and 4850s, and the current ones have 5670s and 5750s (standard on the 27" and better specced 21.5", 4670 on the base one). They're not going to win benchmarking tests by any stretch of the chalk, but they're not miles behind any more, and the drivers are much better.

I'll follow up with a stat of my own (although will be difficult to back up as it was from the most recent Keynote - 1 in 5 new PCs sold in the US is a Mac - that's a growing market. Your argument is that since Mac is only at 5% on Steam (despite only being available to Mac for about 6 months, and still in its infancy) that there's no need to target Mac gamers - the same could have been said for designing websites that do more than just target IE, back when it was 95% of the browser market. Who needs Firefox?

Mac users have been crying out for game developers to release things on their platform for years - they are a captive and willing audience. Blizzard has been making hay on it for some time, and so were Bungie before Microsoft bought them out and took over the franchise that was supposed to be Mac-exclusive (Halo) and made it their Xbox launch title. Given that the Mac OS X user base is growing year on year, and has been since it came out (and that the numbers just cannot be old users upgrading - the base is very definitely growing quite rapidly) it only makes sense to target the platform for games, especially since the primary difficulty (the PPC architecture being different from x86) is now gone, making porting easier.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, gamers don't use Macs. At all.

I do. Last night I was playing Starcraft 2 on my Mac. If Elder Scrolls would be released for it, I would be interested. If Fallout New Vegas had been available, I would have bought it.

Looks like the next interesting big game I can buy is going to be Diablo 3 ...

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

Radeon 5670 isn't "pretty decent" from a gaming perspective. It's the absolute low-end. Good enough for Valve's Source engine (originally released in 2004), and possibly OK for Oblivion. But as far as gaming goes, 5770 is still only mid-range, and Apple's drivers aren't nearly as good as the Windows drivers. So the cheapest "pretty decent" gaming computer from Apple is the most expensive iMac, and you'll get better performance at less than half the cost (with the same hardware) from a Windows PC.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Jesus_666]

It's not a good gaming system - for people that will meticulously adjust timings on RAM to improve performance, a 20% performance cut to switch to Mac is just not logical.

People still do that? I thought everyone stopped doing that when two year old hardware was still powerful enough to play recent games at decent framerates.

Admittedly, I won't play the latest games right when they come out and I don't play framerate-dependent games competitively but my dedicated gaming rig uses the smallest quad-core Phenom I could find, four gigs of RAM and a Geforce 8800. And that's plenty for everything I can toss at it, right up to recent Fallouts.

Tweaking RAM timings and overclocking your CPU are to the late 90s/early 00s what optimizing your CONFIG.SYS was to the late 80s/early 90s. Except you can still technically do it. It might make sense if you play professionally but otherwise it's unlikely that those extra 0.3 FPS are going to do you much good.


That said, I don't doubt that Macs make mediocre gaming rigs - even though I think their 3D performance has been slightly increasing over time. Then again, I mostly play indie games on the Mac anyway so even my MBP's IGP is plenty fast.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your argument is that since Mac is only at 5% on Steam (despite only being available to Mac for about 6 months, and still in its infancy) that there's no need to target Mac gamers - the same could have been said for designing websites that do more than just target IE, back when it was 95% of the browser market. Who needs Firefox?

Technically, half the problem there was the early versions of IE were so far off following HTML spec that "You're writing code that only works in IE" was effectively the same thing as "You're writing awful, awful code."

That aside, you're right. There is no need to cater to 5% of the market. Back when I first started using it years ago, sure, I was annoyed by sites that didn't work properly, but I understood, I was in the small minority. The same is true of macs now. Understand you are in the minority. They have little reason to cater to you. If macs ever make it up to the market share that firefox now commands, then you can demand cross platform support and reasonably expect it. For now? Well, shoulda spent less money for a better computer with a larger software base. Don't like Windows? Spend less money on a better computer and stick Linux on it. Then you can at least run a lot of games through Wine.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, as someone else put it nicely - would you rather have 0.1% of the 90% market share, or 10% of the 5% market share?

Of course, it'd be better to have 10% of the 5% market share. But considering that Macs have never, ever been advertised as a gaming platform, and any gamer with half a brain in their head realizes the gaming library on Windows is 100 times larger, chances are we're talking 0.1% of the 90% market share, or 0.01% of the 5% market share. The choice there is even more obvious.

Re:Windows-only game?

[elrous0]

If I wanted to play with the inferior mouse+keyboard I would probably, I don't know, BUY A PC AND NOT A CONSOLE. I prefer a controller that was actually designed for games, thank you very much. I'm so sick of hearing PC snobs talk about the keyboard/mouse as if it's somehow the perfect controller. The fact is that they're just used to it (and used to playing games whose control scheme was designed for it). In every way, the modern game controller is superior (and it should be, as gaming is what it was DESIGNED for).

Re:Windows-only game?

[Tikkun]

Although I do have a Steam account and have bought a couple games for my Mac (Civ 4, Gratuitous Space Battles and Torchlight), most of my gaming time is spent either on my iPad or my PS3.

I am a gamer and I don't really care about "rigs". I care about having a good time. Which, hopefully, is the point of playing video games in the first place.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Tom]

Macs have never, ever been advertised as a gaming platform,

You really need to get out of that basement more often. Several Apple conferences, Steve Jobs Keynotes and other highly public events have happened in the recent years that went quite far to bring the Mac into public perception as a gaming platform. And while the market has always been small, the Mac does have a history of great games, even some Mac exclusives like Marathon that were ahead of their PC competition.

Sure, it has not been put forth so much as a gaming platform, compared to the PC, but "never, ever" is just stupid to say, and not true.

Re:Windows-only game?

[zach_the_lizard]

The keyboard and mouse combo Is equal to or less than gamepads for most games, but the demand for the combo is for shooters, where accuracy counts. After having invested plenty of time into both console and PC shooters, give me a KB and mouse any day! Aiming is so much nicer with a mouse

Re:Windows-only game?

[Dr. Hellno]

As others have pointed out, it's tough to judge mac prevalence from Steam statistics when steam doesn't offer much for mac users. "If you build it, they will come," but nobody's built it yet so those stats don't say too much (and yes I know it's a misquote).
An alternative statistic: 31 percent of students in college or university use macs on campus. Lets agree that this doesn't mean TOO much; I'm sure lots of those students have no interest in gaming, or have more powerful computers in addition to a low-powered mac laptop. On the other hand, students are a pretty good demographic as far as gaming goes, and so I'd have to say that 5% of people interested in gaming using macs is a low estimate. Probably 15% is a safe conservative guess, and we can expect that to grow modestly as time passes.

I'll give you that macs aren't built for gaming at all really, but it's pretty safe to say that the macs made two or three years from now will have the equipment they need to achieve good performance in today's games. They just tend to be a couple years behind the curve.

Personally I just built my own windows 7 machine because after five years on a mac, I was starting to miss gaming. But if more games had been mac compatible, I probably wouldn't have switched back.

I'm convinced that there's a market for games on the mac. Does it matter? would it be profitable to develop for? I don't know, maybe not. But it's not so minuscule a market as 5%.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

tee-hee, oh, the wit

Re:Windows-only game?

[dwinks616]

A game controller was originally designed to control games that consisted of moving left/right or up/down and possibly doing a single action, such as jump/shoot. Stuff like Pong, pacman, etc. 25 years or so of progression and the controllers keep adding more buttons, analog sticks. If I'm trying to click on a control, select an inventory item, pan my screen around, or any other number of things, I'd MUCH rather have the speed AND accuracy a mouse provides. Analog sticks are far slower or far less accurate for manipulating a cursor, and they are far less suited to panning a screen around, such as in first person shooters. As for the keyboard, I'd much rather hit the J key to bring up my in game journal than Right-shoulder 1 + 2 + X or some shit, since you only have a few buttons and are forced to memorize button combinations for every non-common tasks that can't have a single button dedicated to it.

Re:Windows-only game?

[MistrBlank]

Just under 5% and Mac has only been available on the store for a few months now, not all games are Mac supported and Macs only make up a fraction of the home PC userbase, I'd say that's a pretty high number, especially compared to the "other" which includes Wine users.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, I stopped reading when you implied that FarmVille was a game.

Re:Windows-only game?

[masmullin]

Keyboard+Mouse is not ergonomic. After a long day using a keyboard+mouse at work and having sore forearms, I refuse to touch a mouse+keyboard at home... yes they are more accurate, but I dont give a shit; I want something I can relax on my couch with.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Creepy]

My two bits - the main issue with MacOS X graphics drivers isn't that they're bad, it is that aside from bugfixes they are updated only with OS upgrades and often a generation or two behind what the cards support. They also don't support graphics card upgrades on most machines, which further hinders their adoption. Of course, the driver issue can be worked around in the same way it is done on Windows, which is by including newer headers and calling the hardware directly, but Apple goes out of their way to make this difficult by going against the C standard and always including system headers before local headers, so programmers either need to replace the system header (primarily the glext.h header) or "escape it" with #defines and #undefines. On the other hand, Apple writes and tunes their own drivers, so if the specs are supported it should run faster than having to use function pointers with a lookup and callback cost.

That said, the effort may not be that much work depending on the game engine used and may be mostly a testing effort and writing a native GUI. Most engines I've worked on compile and run on Windows, Linux, and Mac and the developer of the game would not need to know much or anything about the platforms it targets (again, some native GUI support may be required, but usually that is it). Steam has 30 million active users, and 4.71% of that is 1413000 - if you could sell to 10% of that audience (which any A-list title should do), that is still over 100000 units, which more than justifies hiring one developer to write a gui and a couple of testers, IMO.

My bet is Gamebryo will not be used on this one, as it is and has been dying a slow death for the past few years (the parent is in Chapter 11 as I recall), and while it was the best choice 10 years ago for an RPG, it is not anywhere near that today. While they have kept up with technology at a high level, they badly needed a low level rewrite and cleanup and that is unlikely since they laid off most of the programmers.

idTech is tailored for first person shooters and skips a lot of necessities for RPGs, so not likely to happen.

UnrealTech is a possibility, but the 25% is probably a deal breaker.

So my bet is on something else - maybe Vision Engine (which has and is been used in RPGs and supports multiple platforms) or Source.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Antisyzygy]

You, sir, are stuck in the 80s, when one needed a university degree to be a gamer because one pretty much had to build ones own machine and the global gaming market was a few million bucks.

You can build a PC that trounces a Mac for between half and three quarters the price. Ill give Apple kudos for the Ipad, Ipods and the Macbook Air, maybe even the lower end Macbook pros, but as far as price/performance goes you cannot beat building your own or buying a laptop from HP/Asus or something. HP now has some awesome chassis that are aluminum or magnesium or half-metal and plastic. They feel very sturdy and light, and they have the same hardware for much cheaper than Apple products. I know HP has a tremendous amount of bloatware and MacOS is pretty sweet, but most people don't have 2000 dollars to blow on a computer just to use MacOS, so the smart ones put together a computer that has higher performance for somewhere around 1500. You don't need a university degree to build a PC now, just Google and a membership to Toms Hardware forums.

Re:Windows-only game?

[geekoid]

it's not a terrible percentage. only 10% of computer users as a whole use a Mac.
So, no it's not bad at all.

Of course, you numbers are meaningless in this contexts without the total numbers of steam users, the market percentage of platform owners, and games.

Mac run many steam games just fine. I know a lot of twitch gamers that use Macs.
So about 3.3 million people use steam. 4 or so percent are Macs. Considering most MAc owners aren't 'gamers' how can you conclude it's a terrible percentage?

And it's not a 20% performance hit. Stop lying.
Plus, using steam asd a metric for 'gamers' is stupid. Do you consider plants vs. zombies as a 'gamers' game?

You need to get the numbers of people who actively play the games you consider 'gamer' games.
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

It really does depend on what the interface needs.

For a lot of games, yes a joystick is easier and more natural to use.
For me, especially driving games, flight sims, and that type of control is much easier with a joystick.

However, for games where you need to get the cursor from where ever it is, to where ever you need it to be, FAST.. The fact is a joystick simply can not do that at all. It simply is not possible to do, and so you need a mouse.

Think console games that use a lightgun. That is the type of interface a mouse fits perfectly.

FPS games come to mind, as well as games such as oblivion and fallout fall into that category.
A joystick just is not capable of doing that type of control.

As for a keyboard, well yea that's just a hack.
When using a mouse, you only have one hand free so most joysticks are not possible to use, or very uncomfortable at least. There are quite a few other controllers that would work better for movement, but basically the game devs realized the keyboard was already there, plus it gave you lots of extra buttons.
But have no doubt that part is a hack.

Re:Windows-only game?

[amicusNYCL]

I'm so sick of hearing PC snobs talk about the keyboard/mouse as if it's somehow the perfect controller. The fact is that they're just used to it

No, the fact is that when you pit keyboard players vs. controller players in an FPS, the keyboard players win. It's plainly obvious why. With an FPS, you have a character, and you need to move the character and shoot. With a K+M setup, your left hand controls movement and your right hand controls rotation and shooting. It's extremely fast and easy to target your enemy when you're using a mouse. For left hand movement, when your hand is on the w/s/a/d movement keys, there are 20 other keys in range of your fingers. When I'm playing an FPS I'm not wondering which buttons to hit or looking at the controls, I'm always looking at the screen. When I set my roommate up, who doesn't play either computer or console games, with a computer to join me in some Steam games, all I had to do was tell him that w/s/a/d move, space jumps, ctrl crouches. I didn't even have to explain how to turn and shoot because it's so obviously intuitive. Even his first time in the game he was able to make his character do what he intended, not dicking around with thumb-controlled joysticks trying to find the perfect place to make your character rotate and face the direction you intend. If you think that joysticks controlled by your thumbs are somehow more accurate or intuitive than point-and-click, then I'd like you to get me in touch with your drug dealer.

In every way, the modern game controller is superior (and it should be, as gaming is what it was DESIGNED for).

Statements like that are just stupid. Yeah, a controller is great for a fighting game or side-scroller, it's fine for flight simulators. It's terrible for FPS games, RTS games, and anything decently complex. Look at a game like X3, and how many commands it has, and see if you can figure out a way to map those controls to a device with 20 buttons. Sometimes playing X3 seems more like typing a document with the number of keys you need to press to move through the menus and accomplish the various actions. It's a great game, and completely unsuited to your "superior in every way" controller. Guess what the reason is why Egosoft doesn't bother to port the X series of games to consoles. Look at Civilization on the console, and how it's completely different than the PC versions. When people fell in love with Civ, they did it on a PC.

BTW, I like how you talk about "PC snobs" and then go on to proclaim that a console controller is superior in every way, as if one device was somehow designed to be the perfect controller for any number of game genres and situations. If it's so perfect and superior, then why do we need joysticks and yokes? What about driving wheels and pedals, isn't the controller superior in every way because "gaming" is what it was DESIGNED for, in all caps?

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tweaking RAM timings and overclocking your CPU are to the late 90s/early 00s what optimizing your CONFIG.SYS was to the late 80s/early 90s. Except you can still technically do it. It might make sense if you play professionally but otherwise it's unlikely that those extra 0.3 FPS are going to do you much good

Accurate on the RAM, but overclocking a quad CPU from 3.2GHz to 4GHz will increase FPS by far more than 0.3 frames for some games.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I wanted to play with the inferior controller I would probably, I don't know, BUY A CONSOLE AND NOT A PC. I prefer a keyboard & mouse that actually provides accuracy, thank you very much. I'm so sick of hearing Console snobs talk about the gamepad as if it's somehow the perfect controller. The fact is that they're just used to it (and used to playing games whose control scheme was designed for it). In every way, the modern keyboard and mouse is superior (and it should be, as it has the ability to be accurate without software helping me aim).

See what I did there? Your just as much a snob as the people you are attacking. Why don't you shut the fuck up and use whatever you want to use? No one gives a shit about your elitist opinion, so keep it to yourself.

Re:Windows-only game?

[mabinogi]

Civilization Revolutions is not "Civilization on the console", it's "Civilization for casual gamers". There's no technical reason why Civ IV or Civ V couldn't be ported to console without any loss in functionality, it's just that whatever focus groups they talked to fell for the Wii myth that console gamers have a 5 minute attention span.

I've spent hundreds of hours playing Morrowind and Oblivion on a console, and would have loved to see a full Civilization console port.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you can't be arsed to make the game for my system, then I can't be arsed to get out my wallet."

Translates to "if you can't be arsed to make the game for a system where a great majority of the user base have no interest in using their system for high-end gaming, and you fail to disregard that it would be a complete waste of your time and effort to support such a negligible percentage of users, I will just steal your software".

Re:Windows-only game?

[jo_ham]

My goodness, what are you smoking and can I have some?

This is exactly what I'm talking about - the 5670 is perfectly fine for the majority of gamers, even in 2010. The 4670 was very high up in the 2009 list, and the 5670 is better still.

Like I said, it's not going to win any cutting edge awards, but it is not meant to.

There's no way that in 2010, a Radeon 5670 is the "absolute low end" for the majority of games though, you're just deluding yourself.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta love the twisted view that Mac users have. Marathon was never ahead of anything considering System Shock 2 was released first. Hell, Marathon wasn't even a good game disregarding everything else out at the time. It might have been "good" for a Mac game, but that doesn't say much.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Tom]

Translates to

No, it is already in english, no need to translate at all.

If you want to interpret, be my guest, but don't expect that I or anyone else will consider your interpretation correct. I think I was plain and clear in my words, and no interpretation is really required.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Tom]

You can build a PC that trounces a Mac for between half and three quarters the price.

Maybe, maybe not. There are good opinion pieces with actual numbers for both arguments on the Internet. I couldn't care less, I don't buy my machines based on price, I buy them based on my personal cost/benefit estimate. And as soon as I figure in the time I save because it doesn't crash or needs to be rebooted all the time, I'm definitely better off.

but most people don't have 2000 dollars to blow on a computer just to use MacOS,

Well, I do. As do many other people. We're a market segment exactly because we do. Your average geeky student spends all his money on the latest graphics card, but doesn't actually buy any games.

When I say "I can't be arsed" it also means that I could, if someone were actually trying to sell me something I want to buy.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Tom]

Which is why Zuckerberg and Zynga are filthy rich and you live in your mom's basement.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Antisyzygy]

Maybe, maybe not. There are good opinion pieces with actual numbers for both arguments on the Internet. I couldn't care less, I don't buy my machines based on price, I buy them based on my personal cost/benefit estimate. And as soon as I figure in the time I save because it doesn't crash or needs to be rebooted all the time, I'm definitely better off.

Windows 7 doesn't crash or need to be rebooted all the time. That's something left over from Vista and early Windows XP experiences. Its a dated argument, and I personally don't really like Windows anyway. My point isn't that Macs suck, they are quite beautiful machines and I like the OS, however Apple does a significant markup for the same hardware. It simply is not cost effective unless you have money to burn and no time to waste looking for better deals. You can get every piece of hardware a top of the line Macbook Pro has for around 1400-1500. If you want to factor in some nice features like the graphics card switching and the aluminum chassis, you may pay an extra 200-300. Thats still savings, and if you really cant deal with Windows then put Linux on it.

Well, I do. As do many other people. We're a market segment exactly because we do. Your average geeky student spends all his money on the latest graphics card, but doesn't actually buy any games. When I say "I can't be arsed" it also means that I could, if someone were actually trying to sell me something I want to buy.

College students do not spend all their money on graphics cards. Most of the students at my University have cheaper Macs, netbooks or cheaper HP laptops. Geeks like myself actually use the hardware we purchase, i.e. graphics cards. It must be nice to have that kind of money to blow irresponsibly when geeky students like myself struggle to pay rent through college.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Tom]

Windows 7 doesn't crash or need to be rebooted all the time.

I run Windows 7. On the same hardware, with no "weird stuff" (e.g. hacked-up drivers or so), it definitely crashes more often than OS X, even though I use it less. It is just as definitely a big step forward from XP, but it still has quite a bit to go before it is ready for the desktop, to quote a nice Linux-on-the-desktop parody.

It simply is not cost effective unless you have money to burn and no time to waste looking for better deals.

Or you simply like the deal you are getting. More importantly, you say it yourself: You have an under-supplied market with money to burn. Who in their right mind would not want a share of that?

It must be nice to have that kind of money to blow irresponsibly when geeky students like myself struggle to pay rent through college.

It is. It's the pay-off for struggling through college, so don't feel bad about it, with any luck you'll be in the same position in a couple years.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

Translating is not exclusive to differing languages. The dictionary is your friend. Embrace it.

translate
[trans-leyt, tranz-, trans-leyt, tranz-] Show IPA
verb, -lated, -lating.
–verb (used with object)
1.
to turn from one language into another or from a foreign language into one's own: to translate spanish.
2.
to change the form, condition, nature, etc., of; transform; convert: to translate wishes into deeds.
3.
to explain in terms that can be more easily understood; interpret. ...et cetera.

And considering the sentence prior to what was quoted--you stated you'd prefer torrentz.com over Steam for Windows-only games--it was translated quite accurately.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll follow up with a stat of my own (although will be difficult to back up as it was from the most recent Keynote - 1 in 5 new PCs sold in the US is a Mac - that's a growing market. Your argument is that since Mac is only at 5% on Steam (despite only being available to Mac for about 6 months, and still in its infancy) that there's no need to target Mac gamers - the same could have been said for designing websites that do more than just target IE, back when it was 95% of the browser market. Who needs Firefox?

The problem with that analogy is that (the majority of) websites are not the million-plus-lines-of-code juggernauts that games (of such size/complexity as Oblivion, GTA4, etc) are. In a lot of cases a website, where coded by someone at least conscientious of their users having different browsing agents, could support multiple browsers with just a smattering of some simple if/else when necessary.

Also as a side note, the "Mac OS X user base" is a gross misrepresentation of Mac desktops/laptops, as Mac OS X includes iPod Touch, iPad, all iPhone incarnations, and AppleTV.

Re:Windows-only game?

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to start throwing insults around. That Zuckerberg/Zynga are rich has nothing to do with his/her argument that Farmville is not a game, nor does his/her purported living arrangements.

Zuckerberg is rich because he had an idea that people embraced, and of which they wanted to be a part. See: Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, newEgg, etc.

Zynga is rich because they created leisure software which people enjoy using to kill time, because it's simple and does not require any thought or skill whatsoever. And it just so happens that a portion of their users see fit to spend their hard-earned (or government-dispensed) income to gain an edge. See: ...well, actually I don't have any prior examples for that one.

Which hugely profitable software or website have you created? None? Pity. Welcome to 99.999999% of the world's population.

Re:Windows-only game?

[jo_ham]

Also as a side note, the "Mac OS X user base" is a gross misrepresentation of Mac desktops/laptops, as Mac OS X includes iPod Touch, iPad, all iPhone incarnations, and AppleTV.

Where did you get this bit of total misinformation from?

The OS X installed base is just that: people using OS X on a desktop or a laptop. The iOS install base is totally different, which is where iPod/iPod Touch/iPhone and iPad are counted.

While the original AppleTV (the large one) runs a customised version of OS X 10.4 Tiger (that is not "exposed" to the user unless you play about with it, like installing XBMC on it etc), those are not counted in the install base and even if they were, would be a very, very small number relative to the desktops and laptops.

More vivid world...

[ilkensai]

My only wish is that they make sure the world as a whole feels alive, like you are not the only person there, and NPCs actually act like thet have normal lives inside the game. Becayse, all in all Elder Scrolls games are great story wise, but they lack the feeling of an alive world.

Re:More vivid world...

[BradleyUffner]

ohh, and get more than 4 voice actors. And stop making the old lady randomly switch between "Old Hag" and "Young Maiden" voice with every sentence.

Re:More vivid world...

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't played Oblivion for more than a few minutes (shocker, I know) but are you saying that the AI displayed in this E3 clip is totally fake (like, apparently, many other things in those videos)?

Re:More vivid world...

[Haeleth]

My only wish is that they make sure the world as a whole feels alive, like you are not the only person there

Oblivion actually made this worse by having NPCs discuss things the player had done; the overall effect was of a world where literally nothing happened apart from what the player did.

Then they went and did the exact same thing in Fallout 3, where the only news in the wasteland is whatever the player did recently.

No, it does not make me feel like the special Chosen Savior Of The World, Bethesda. It breaks the immersion and makes me think the game's world is full of boring lazy people who don't deserve to be saved.

Re:More vivid world...

[the_bard17]

Actually... yeah. Radiant AI was going to be *huge* when they first announced it. Then discussion of it quietly went away, for the most part.

If I remember correctly, it was "toned down", due to an unforeseen complication. The example given: a NPC has a "goal" of sweeping. They don't have a broom handy, so now they have a new goal of obtaining a broom. Oddly enough, their neighbor happens to have a broom on their front porch. The NPC wanders over to get the broom, whereupon the broom's true owner declares the NPC a thief, and initiates a fight. Guards may or may not intercede. Someone, or a lot of someone, dies. All of that over a broom.

Even after the revamp, it's fairly easy to get Radiant AI to bug out. Guards attacking other guards, due to improperly aimed arrows or melee weapon swings. Check out YouTube.

Yay!

[Quiet_Desperation]

That and the Mass Effect 3 teaser gave me a happy today. :-)

Re:Yay!

[keith_nt4]

I did not hear about that. Now I guess I have to go finish ME2. I was close. Stupid hard drives. Lost all my saves.

Dragons?

[sammyF70]

Did I understand that right? there be Dragons in Skyrim? That would actually be awesome!

I guess I stil have a year to finish Oblivion Mainquest. I've been playing regularly for nearly 5 years now (with 2 characters), and I never actually finished that one.

Re:Dragons?

[guspasho]

Hopefully, but it could easily just be the Akaviri invading again. And the "Dragonborn" is definitely the player.

Re:Dragons?

[qeveren]

I'm hoping it's the latter and not the former. I'm kinda tired of dragons being the villains all the time, not to mention IIRC they were a civilized race in the TES lore.

Looks like it'll just be Fallout with swords!

[Debello]

Looks like it'll just be Fallout 3 with swords!

Re:Looks like it'll just be Fallout with swords!

[Anonymous Coward]

instead of slash, you hear woosh

Re:Looks like it'll just be Fallout with swords!

[gman003]

That's the joke.

Re:Looks like it'll just be Fallout with swords!

[Anonymous Coward]

The joke doesn't work. Please insert 2 credits to continue.

Re:Looks like it'll just be Fallout with swords!

[DittoBox]

*facepalm*

The original joke when Fallout 3 came out, everyone said it was just, "Oblivion with guns." Hence the above joke saying, "Fallout 3 with swords."

Re:Looks like it'll just be Fallout with swords!

[gridzilla]

Woosh!

Re:Looks like it'll just be Fallout with swords!

[Anonymous Coward]

Look how dumb you are. FO3 was Oblivion with guns. Learn what you're talking about before you say it.

Clearly, you must be a genius.

Re:Looks like it'll just be Fallout with swords!

[elrous0]

No, obviously it's just Knights of the Old Republic without lightsabers.

Fuck yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've pre-emptively apologized to my wife for the weeks I'll spend zombified by this game.

Looks like Im buying a new PC

[masmullin]

I'll be saving up the cash for a new machine come 1week before 11.11.11

Re:Looks like Im buying a new PC

[SharpFang]

Knowing Bethesda and its schedule-keeping skill, if your machine arrives at 11.11.11, it will be obsolete and too old to run TESV when it finally comes out.

Re:Looks like Im buying a new PC

[ElusiveJoe]

...even with half of the graphic features thrown out before release.

Re:Looks like Im buying a new PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Best off playing it on console. Guaranteed it will be playable without "hardware upgrades" on a 360. I have heard a lot about the consoles starting to look aged ... but when I compare Black Ops to the PC version I don't see that, they look nearly identical other than a slightly higher LOD on the PC. Same with Fallout: NV, PC version only has ever so slightly better LOD and Anti Aliasing / Anisotropy.

Re:Looks like Im buying a new PC

[SharpFang]

Sure... who would bother writing extras for PC? Just make it use the same shit as the console.
The history of PC games being dumbed down, simplified and generally to suck, because "the console could not handle that much" is long and painful. Sure Oblivion on PC didn't look much different either. Until you installed fan-made mods that unlocked the full potential.

No, at the day of the release I'm pretty sure the PC and 360 versions may be very similar. Wait half a year and visit a friend with a good PC and knowledge how to use mods and you'll change your mind.

Re:Looks like Im buying a new PC

[Anonymous Coward]

that's why I will pick up the ps3 version.

Re:Looks like Im buying a new PC

[Vegemeister]

Hahaha! TES without mods? Are you serious?

The new engine is ID Tech 5, AKA the RAGE engine

[poly_pusher]

The new engine is almost certainly the id tech 5. Bethesda bought Id a little over a year ago and there's no reason to buy Id other than Carmack's engines. Apparently the Tech 5 engine wont be licensed outside of a very small circle.

Here's a link to some footage of RAGE which will use the same engine and the game to debut the technology:

http://www.g4tv.com/videos/46674/E3-2010-Live-Hands-On-Rage-Overview-Demo/

Re:Yay Bugs!

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps now I can play on a modern PC without throttling performance down to a fraction of what it should be!

In other news....

[makubesu]

I saw a mudcrab the other day. Horrible creatures.

Re:In other news....

[guspasho]

Greetings! How ARE you?

Re:In other news....

[Anonymous Coward]

One more coin and I can git a pair of shoes!

Re:In other news....

[sammyF70]

I'm saving up for some medicine!

Re:In other news....

[Anonymous Coward]

They say when you murder someone, the Dark Brotherhood comes to you in your sleep.

Re:In other news....

[Anonymous Coward]

*Fapfap...* what?

Re:In other news....

[Philomage]

I heard that syndicates of wizards are leading a boycott of imperial goods in the land of the Altmer.

Re:In other news....

[Anonymous Coward]

Die currr!

Re:The new engine is ID Tech 5, AKA the RAGE engin

[orphiuchus]

Actually, it looks like they are going to use a updated version of GameBryo. http://pc.ign.com/articles/111/1112464p1.html

Re:The new engine is ID Tech 5, AKA the RAGE engin

[Anonymous Coward]

There are other reasons to buy Id other than Carmack's engines. They are a quite profitable company.

Also, the Rage engine would, from what we know about it, likely be a poor fit for a TES-type game. With Id tech 5 modability goes mostly out the window. Not the kind of thing TES fans want to hear, since then it won't be possible for them to fix Bethesda's mistakes - and Bethesda knows this.

So what they'll do in stead is build it on an updated version of that stale GameBryo crap they so like, and lie through their teeth about it being "all new". Not very classy, but I guess it beats throwing mods out altogether.

Re:The new engine is ID Tech 5, AKA the RAGE engin

[DittoBox]

That article says exactly nothing about using an updated GameBryo engine.

Re:The new engine is ID Tech 5, AKA the RAGE engin

[orphiuchus]

"Id Tech 5 is the best thing in the world at doing a very static environment that looks pretty and you're going to run through. But for the kinds of things I like to do, I like the world to be more dynamic." All it actually says is that they aren't using ID tech 5, the gamebryo thing is an educated guess.

Morrowind...

[Anonymous Coward]

... has always sucked

Re:The new engine is ID Tech 5, AKA the RAGE engin

[DittoBox]

So when they say, "new engine," you think they are really saying, "updated engine?"

I don't honestly blame you, Bethsoft has an awful track record on stability and technical excellence. But that quote could just as easily mean they are actually creating a new engine, ground up designed for sandbox play. According to the devs their entire studio has been working full time since the release of Fallout 3 (save the DLC crews) on TES:V.

I guess I'm just hopeful you're wrong...unless they manage to get things kinda right this time. I can forgive quest bugs, but the overall engine quality is terrible.

Re:The new engine is ID Tech 5, AKA the RAGE engin

[TimboJones]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/32009/All_New_Game_Engine_For_Next_Elder_Scrolls.php

Let's hope they don't 'consolize' it

[Morpeth]

I really hope they focus the development with the PC in mind. So many games now are being ported to PCs as an afterthought, usually with disastrous results -- or at a minimum the game gets dumbed down for the consoles.

A lot of studios are going console crazy now, even ones that traditionally were strong PC supporters like Bioware (compare Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights to the upcoming Dragon Age II).p>

As a PC gamer it's a trend I'm very bummed about... more and more games with lots of glitz and less substance.

Re:Let's hope they don't 'consolize' it

[orphiuchus]

I hope the long term sales of these games caused by the modability on PC keeps their focus there. They may make more short term with the console sales, but they probably sell more copies of Morrowind for PC than they do of Oblivian for 360 now.

Re:Let's hope they don't 'consolize' it

[Anonymous Coward]

So many games now are being ported to PCs as an afterthought, usually with disastrous results -- or at a minimum the game gets dumbed down for the consoles.

Yeah, kind of like Oblivion. Expect this trend to continue.

Re:Let's hope they don't 'consolize' it

[Anonymous Coward]

Console crazy, or console sound? If you want to make money you have to sell something. In order to sell you need a market with lots of paying customers. Consoles provide that.

If more people bought and paid for PC games, we would get more and possibly better PC games.

I think the main problem is not piracy but the fact that almost all PC sales are notebooks with video cards that are five years behind the curve (good enough to play World of Warcraft but not much more). Why buy a separate and bulky PC for > $500 just to be able to play games? I doesn't make sense. That's going to be a very small market for game makers.

In another year or two the average notebook will beat the XBOX360 and PS3 in terms of graphics, but by then Microsoft and Sony will be releasing their next generation consoles. The Elder Scrolls V could be the last great PC game of it's kind.

Re:Let's hope they don't 'consolize' it

[Jesus_666]

Unlikely. See Blizzard. Do they cater to consoles? No (Lost Vikings nonwithstanding). Are they in peril? No. They know their games don't work on consoles so they don't even try to adapt Starcraft to gamepads. And they still make money.

Consoles are taking up a large portion of the market but the PC ist still going strong. See Blizzard. See GSC (makers of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series). Plus, a lot of console games are available for the PC as well and not neccessarily as bad ports. Fallout 3/New Vegas springs to mind (and lets us hope that Bethesda really learned that the Oblivion GUI didn't work).

This is compounded by the fact that hardware doesn't move forward anymore due to consoles not moving forward. DirectX 9 is still the main target everyone is shooting for and even mid-range GPUs have enough power to play pretty much anything you can throw at them.

Plus, even though laptops are more popular then desktops, games still buy desktops; it's not like everyone's buying behavior is the same. And gamers always have been a minority of the PC market.

And no, not all gamers are going to ditch their PCs in favor of consoles, particularly not now when the next console generation might only be a year away. Certain kinds of games don't work well on consoles and people playing them aren't going to change their preferences just so they can like consoles more.

Re:Let's hope they don't 'consolize' it

[Dakiraun]

Agreed TES4 was a very sad let-down compared to TES3. I've played the TES series since the original Arena, and TES4 was the first one where the dumbed-down controls, dynamic level system and shallow story really made it feel like a shadow of the former games. There was, as such, little sense of achievement or involvement in TES4. Hopefully they got some new writers and realized their mistakes, but I'm not counting on it. This may be the first TES game I don't get, and I'll be waiting to see what the opinion is on it. In my opinion, there has not been a good in-depth RPG of this type since TES3, and I'm beginning think there never will be. :(

Re:Let's hope they don't 'consolize' it

[CronoCloud]

They know their games don't work on consoles so they don't even try to adapt Starcraft to gamepads. And they still make money.

You never heard of Starcraft 64 for the Nintendo 64? Or Diablo or Warcraft II for the PSone? Never play any of the many Diablo clones on the PS2? Tell me that Diablo 3 doesn't look like this game: http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/rpg/championsofnorrath/video/6089192/champions-of-norrath-video-review?nonRedirectElement=1

Blizzard could release any of their games for consoles...they just simply don't do so these days.

Re:Let's hope they don't 'consolize' it

[Jesus_666]

I seem to remember that the console versions didn't work quite as well as the PC version but you're right; they did at one point release them.

And yes, Diablo 3 does look similar to Champions of Norrath. Unsurprisingly, given that Champions is a Diablo 2 clone.

I do concede that Blizzard could more actively pursue consoles if they wanted. However, they still don't, so they apparently don't see a reason to do so. Which would be an even stronger argument for the PC remaining a viable platform than "Blizzard can't move away".

Re:Let's hope they don't 'consolize' it

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, Oblivion definitely falls into that category. The entire GUI looked like they wanted you to hook a controller up to it.

Dear Santa: Better Animations?

[Spikeles]

Dear Santa, all I wish for Christmas is for Bethesda to hire some better character animators (and fire the one that did the Jumping animations), and support alt-tab, if they need help, please direct them to BioWare. Thanks.

Re:Dear Santa: Better Animations?

[Silvermistshadow]

Dear Santa, all I wish for Christmas is for Bethesda to hire some better character animators (and fire the one that did the Jumping animations), and support alt-tab, if they need help, please direct them to BioWare. Thanks.

The above is the same as my views on the matter.

Great, a whole year of pointless hype

[Nyder]

So we got a year to listen to the dev's hype the game up, listen to fanboys hype the game up.

We'll get magazines, blogs, and whomever, hyping the game up.

We'll get pointless previews, stupid conversations, and of course, dumb ass predictions (like this).

Sort of like, we always do.

Re:Great, a whole year of pointless hype

[Anonymous Coward]

And then the game will come out and it'll all have been worth it. And you'll still be a tiresome putz!

Re:Great, a whole year of pointless hype

[FrootLoops]

No marketing, no sequel. I like TES, so I'll take the marketing. How sad, though :(.

Details sparse.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like how the summary is:
"Bethesda took advantage of the Video Game Awards this weekend to announce the fifth installment of the Elder Scrolls series, titled Skyrim. The game is planned for November 2011, and a teaser trailer has been posted on the Elder Scrolls website. Details are sparse, though the game will apparently run on an "all-new" engine."

Excluding title double up:
"Details are sparse, though the game will apparently run on an "all-new" engine."

Excluding some more redundancy:
"the game will apparently run on an "all-new" engine."

Ok now lets remove non fact
"the game"

I must be new here.

Re:Details sparse.

[mr_gorkajuice]

"the game" is "a fact"? I thought it was a noun.

Re:Details sparse.

[Anonymous Coward]

"the game" is "a fact"? I thought it was a noun.

The statement refers to the fact that there is a game in development, which is fact.

The problem with Bethesda...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with Bethesda is they focus too much on graphics and their games seriously lack content. Which in turn makes them lack immersion.
Nice graphics are great but that is not the only thing that helps create a feeling of immersion in the player. It's a shame that the big companies don't seem to realize this. The only games I've played recently that had a lot of content were made by indies.
I'm not sure I'll buy Skyrim. I was frustrated by the wasted potential of Oblivion and Fallout 3. Just to be constructive:

Oblivion:
- Weapons were removed from Morrowind (crossbows, spears and halberds).
- Most of the game occurred inside dark dungeons. More events happening outside, in the wild, would have been great. Constantly playing in the same kind of environment is boring, and dungeons are dark, not much to see. A forest or a mountain is much more colorful and is nice to look at.
- The horses were poorly implemented. It would have been good if we could fight while riding a horse, at least so we did not need to get off our horse every time a pack of wolf was chasing us. Fast travel killed the purpose of horses.
- A wider variety of creatures was needed. A fantasy world is interesting because of all the various creatures you can encounter.

Fallout 3:
The game's biggest failure, in my opinion, was it's inability to give the player the experience of a post-apocalyptic world. As you play, you see desolation and ruins all around you. People are struggling to survive, they drink contaminated water and hunt mutant creatures or scavenge in trash for food. They build shelter out of rubble... The environment is against the people living in it. As a player, you expect to experience all this... But instead, your character does not eat, does not sleep, does not get ill... You only need two things : a gun and armor. You don't get a feel of what life is like in the Wasteland, and as a player your don't think you are really a part of that world.
The lack of weapons also makes Fallout 3 feel like a classic FPS (those games where there's only one or two pistols, SMGs, shotguns, assault rifles...). Choosing not only your weapon type, but the specific weapon model you like/need can add a lot. Sometimes you may want an SMG that holds lots of ammo but isn't too accurate. At other times you may prefer an SMG that is as accurate as can be, even if it lacks ammo... More weapons to find could also make scavenging more interesting and fun. After finding the 10th 10mm pistol the fun is not really there anymore.

Fallout 3 and Oblivion are great games otherwise, they're not all bad. But Bethesda seems to keep content to a minimum. They forget to add simple and basic things like hunger that could completely change the game experience. They also seem to think that we don't need a wide variety of items (as in "Why would the players need halberds? They have swords! They're all weapons, what's the difference?").

Personally, I don't think I'll be giving Bethesda games another shot until I hear they changed their focus from graphics to content. I'm just not really interested anymore. I "have fun" the first few days when I'm discovering the game and I think I can get the experience I expect out of it. But I soon find the limits of the game and I realize the game does not even come close do delivering what I expected, and that is just frustrating.

Re:The problem with Bethesda...

[Anonymous Coward]

Like every Bethesda game since Morrowind, Fallout 3 had numerous mod packs that enhanced the experience in every way you wanted. Several add a plethora of guns and their associated ammunition, but fact is you can't really represent many of the subtleties of different makes of guns in a computer game, and it really just becomes a pain to manage this incompatible armory. Other mods add things like bullet time as a VATS alternative. Hunger is an RPG trope, and it's one of those things that sounds like an immersion enhancer, but as virtually every RPG has demonstrated it ultimately becomes a chore to manage. But if you want it, then yes there's a mod that implements hunger. What Bethesda taketh away, the fan base giveth back.

There just seemed to be too much cash (caps anyway) floating around Fallout 3. One would think the coin of the realm would be bullets; now _that_ would make you really think about your ammo consumption.

Re:The problem with Bethesda...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fallout: New Vegas is better than F3 in this regard, in that the wasteland is more convincing, dialogues are a lot better and the problems are more lifelike. It is still mostly about badly implemented combat though.

Re:The problem with Bethesda...

[delinear]

I was going to say the same thing - food and water play a more important role (assuming you play "hardcore"), although even then both mainly have the effect of improving your "health", though if they drop too far you start to suffer interesting side effects. It makes managing radiation poisoning a lot more interesting than Fallout 3, since you have to balance the need for food and water with the benefit of running low health and instead tracking down less irradiated sources, which was an interesting aside. Much more variation in guns and ammunition, too, although perhaps a little more confusing than it needed to be meaning after a certain point it's easier to just use a sniper rifle for everything. Moderately more interesting characters and side quests, although that seemed to be an issue in itself leading to lots of scripting bugs (if you don't do certain quests in a certain order you end up unable to complete them, or people randomly treat you as hostile, etc).

For me the part that breaks immersion in this type of game is that everyone around you is struggling just to survive, yet within a few game weeks you go from an absolute novice barely able to fight off rats to being almost godlike, the richest and most powerful man in the wasteland, by doing little more than running a few quests. If it's so damn easy why is everyone else scrabbling around in their own filth? At least in NV you're not emerging fresh faced from a vault before becoming an uber being, but in a way that's even worse, if my character had to potential to take over the entire Mojave, why was he working as a courier in the first place?

Re:The problem with Bethesda...

[Dekker3D]

New Vegas did give you the option of hunger, thirst and fatigue though. Like a hardmode of sorts. It's not that much more difficult, but you're constantly aware that you need to balance the weight of your little armoury and lootpile with the weight and cost of purified water and healthy food, or spend extra caps for things like radaway. I like it. You also get to mod your weapons, adding silencers or using a different type of ammo (hollowpoint, armourpiercing, cheapo basic stuff... all made at a workbench, using your own repair or science skill.)

Re:The problem with Bethesda...

[elrous0]

You sir, are either joking or a crack-head (I'm willing to entertain "meth-head" as well). Content is the one thing Bethesda does RIGHT. Not only do they do it right, but they do it better than pretty much anyone else. If you can name a single game that has a larger world, with more varied content, than either Oblivion or Fallout 3, then you go right ahead. I guess maybe you could say Fallout: New Vegas, but that's cheating now isn't it? Bethesda spends tens of millions of $ and years of development for each game just on pure content.

Very few development companies (maybe Bioware) are even in the same league as Bethesda when it comes to content. If you think you (or you and any ten other software companies combined) can top them in that arena, you go right ahead, buddy.

Re:The problem with Bethesda...

[elrous0]

New Vegas's problem isn't combat, it's glitches. And not just any glitches, but the game-killing kind. I lost 5 hours of gameplay just the other night because I went into Vault 3 on the Brotherhood of Steel mission without realizing that this is game-save suicide.

Brave move

[Feinu]

It's pretty brave to announce a release date in a week that's been pretty much cornered by the Call of Duty franchise. If those two big titles release in the same week, things will be interesting.

Re:Brave move

[FrootLoops]

I'm curious how much the two audiences overlap. For me, I'd never buy CoD just because it's not my type of game, while I'm certain I'll get TES5 sometime.

New game systems please!

[NoSig]

I just hope that they don't make it so that the way to victory is to play a mage and then only use fighter skills (what is used improves). The game scales to your power level in your main skills, so you can push your other skills to max and Oblivion will still throw enemies at you that are appropriate for level 1. Oh, and if you choose a non-combat skill as your main skill and then level that, such as alchemy, you are in for a world of hurt because of the same mechanic - your enemies will become overpowered. The systems in TES are just awful, but the games are nice enough.

Re:New game systems please!

[orphiuchus]

That system was only in Oblivion(and Fallout 3). Hopefully they realize that scaled content has no place in a sandbox RPG, and they drop it altogether.

Re:New game systems please!

[NoSig]

True. It was also ridiculous that common bandits had daedric armor when you got to a high level. Though there were issues in Morrowind as well. In Morrowind it was advantageous to jump at all times to increase your skills even when just traveling somewhere. In both games you have to keep a careful accounting system outside the game to time your skills-ups in your minor and major skills so as to get maximum stat increases on level up. Morrowind also allowed you to be nearly invincible at level 1 through the use of potions. The systems were a mess in both Morrowind and Oblivion. I can't say how they were like before that, since I don't remember how it worked in Daggerfall.

Re:New game systems please!

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way to make the game playable at all for me, due to the horrible monster scaling AND character leveling system,
was to use the massive Oblivion Overhaul module (some Gigs of content IIRC), together with an additional mod for the
character leveling. The original game was simply broken in terms of balance, immersion, character development.

In Morrowind it was horrible as well. When I realized how I had to "optimize" stats for each level, I dropped the game.

I hope they learned their lesson; Fallout 3 is a tiny bit better, although it still suffers from some of these problems,
and has unexciting character leveling.

Re:New game systems please!

[FrootLoops]

There were quite a few "easy win" tactics in Oblivion and Morrowind. Neither was difficult enough to require them by any stretch, so saying what you describe is "the" way to victory might be a bit strong. Avoid 'em if you don't like 'em, IMO (though the underlying mechanic you describe remains stupid). One of my biggest hopes in mechanic changes is that they give me a non-tedious way to carry a whole bunch of loot. How about a feather spell that scales quadratically with player level? Simple, not overpowered early game, and makes weight irrelevant late game, assuming it doesn't need to be recast a lot. Oh, and adding a console to the console versions might be nice--big bugs you can't fix just because you're not on a PC are really annoying.

Neither will happen, but I can dream....

Re:New game systems please!

[Smegoid]

I liked that morrowind wasn't nerfed. The game created some basic rules and if you were smart to mix and match (i.e. potion quality scales with int, and int potions are additive, so boost your int like crazy and then make amazing potions) you could overpower the game. But that was the fun part. Compared to morrowind, oblivion was on rails. I still remember the sheer awesome of going into a cave way beyond my level. Realizing it and then using a cheap levitation potion to get our of harms way and rain down arrows and getting mad drops. Or using some seriously overpowered spell tricks to sneak into the underground vaults beneath vivec. And never did the game give me a "sorry this puny wooden door needs a key. Unlock 100 no workies!"

Re:New game systems please!

[NoSig]

It wasn't the only way, but I can say that if you managed your character perfectly (which is quite tricky and tedious to do) to be the most powerful character possible at max level, then... the game got incredibly tedious because while the enemies didn't have any chance to kill you, they also had so many HPs that it took a long time indeed for you to kill anything. Partly because at that level common bandits were running around with armor that would have been appropriate on a daedric prince. If you didn't manage your character perfectly and got to max level then it would be much worse than that. So I consider that the right way to play the game is to keep your level down - otherwise it's not fun. You do that by choosing your major skills to be skills you don't actually use. So for example specialize in only magic and then use no magic.

Re:New game systems please!

[FrootLoops]

Now that you mention high HP enemies, I do remember in Oblivion that I used a magic weakness + DoT combo towards the end, just to kill things without having to regen all my mana afterward. I played the game normally with respect to the tactic you mention (i.e. ignored it). I'd be happy if that bit of tedium was done away with--be it caused by too low mana regen at high levels, low magic DPS, too high mob health, or something else.

Certainly a game seemingly encouraging you not to use your main skills is... silly :).

Re:New game systems please!

[xhrit]

Parent assumes that other gamers will be attempting to maximize ease of compleation as a primary desirable attribute of said game. This style of play will appeal to the type of people who choose easiest difficulty settings and then still uses cheat codes, but some gamers actually enjoy a challenge.

I agree the system used in morrowind and oblivion could use improvement. Ideally the system would take into account not just primary skills but secondary skills as well and scale encounters instead based on character power, build, inventory equipment, etc.

Re:New game systems please!

[Canazza]

Why bother with any of that. In Oblivion just do the arcane University quest line (quite easy at level 1), learn the Chameleon spell and then enchant your armour with 100% chameleon and nothing will ever touch you, ever, even if you walk up to them and twat them in the face.

Re:New game systems please!

[FrootLoops]

If you meant my post by "Parent assumes that other gamers will be attempting to maximize ease of compleation as a primary desirable attribute of said game", I did not. There's a difference between enjoyable challenge and tedious challenge. For instance, if I made a game requiring you to move the mouse around a 500x500 pixel square without moving the mouse off a 1 pixel wide border, that would be challenging. I think almost nobody would find it enjoyable, and almost everybody would find it tedious. Waiting on mana regen due to high mob HP in Oblivion was tedious and not enjoyable, in a similar vein. I'm very happy with challenging but fun mechanics.

A poor reading of my post might give the impression you mention, since I wanted a console on the console version, and the console can be used to cheat. I actually listed the reason as fixing bugs. On Morrowind, due to dialog bugs I wasn't able to become grandmaster of Telvanni, which was just plain annoying. If I had been playing on the PC version it could have been fixed.

A friend of mine seems to play with ease of completion in mind. If you're going to play a game but you want to beat it easily, why not "not" play the game, since that's even easier? (The answer in his case is that he enjoys games for other reasons and is a bit inconsistent.)

Re:New game systems please!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they'd already learned from that with Fallout 3, I think only the human/ghoul enemies in that actually scaled with the player and I seem to remember them saying at the time that the reason was that they wanted to learn from the complaints about Oblivion but still keep some challenge to the main storyline. I remember first running up against this in Oblivion, playing as a rogue/thief (which was horribly crippled in Oblivion until you advanced your sneak/archery skills enough to become an uber sniper), I ran into some guy at level 4ish who I just could not beat, went away, levelled up killing creatures until I was 7 or 8, went back only to find that, because I was stuck with the same level 4 equipment and his equipment had scaled, he was actually relatively more powerful against me than when I first fought him. Absolutely awful design decision.

Re:New game systems please!

[mr_gorkajuice]

What I think is awesome about these games is how they are what you make of them. Apparently, you decided to abuse the mechanics to gain any edge possible, and you blame the game for letting you.

I can totally imagine it must've sucked. Constantly worrying about your notes, playing in the most counter-intuitive way imagineable, actively trying to avoid leveling up because you don't want the world to scale.

I designed a custom class which majored in the exact abilities I planned to use, and I didn't care about maximizing stat bonuses. Guess what? I was well able to beat the game. Actually, I even felt OP from being a master at both destruction, healing and melee combat, all while wearing armor and being accompanied by my conjured companion.

Ideally, I agree that sandbox games shouldn't scale. But replacing rats with pumas, and fur armor with glass armor at least served to keep the challenge up.

Re:New game systems please!

[mr_gorkajuice]

I can say that simply playing your character the way it made sense did not render the game impossible.

Re:New game systems please!

[kalirion]

There was still some scaling even in Morrowind, but only in regards to which enemies would show up - the same type of daedra would have the same stats, but if you're higher level you'll get a tougher type of daedra in the same ruins.

Re:New game systems please!

[NoSig]

That is true, unless you are unlucky to focus on non-combat abilities as your major abilities and then level them. Then the game becomes impossible as the enemies becomes more powerful but you do not. "not impossible" is rather a low bar to set for a game, though, especially since the rest of the game is of a much higher quality.

Re:New game systems please!

[NoSig]

What I think is awesome about these games is how they are what you make of them. Apparently, you decided to abuse the mechanics to gain any edge possible, and you blame the game for letting you.

No, I played it the way it made sense first, and then I found that the game was not fun at max level because nothing died in a reasonable time. Then I played to get any edge possible while still leveling, and yet the issue remained. So I concluded that leveling is the wrong thing to do because it makes the game not fun at max level. By the way you don't reach max level unless you play for a long time, so you probably never experienced this issue. Your experiences at lower levels are not relevant to problems that appear at higher levels. Your description also shows that you were lucky to pick combat abilities as your major abilities - if you had chosen mostly non-combat abilities the game would have become impossible after a while. You didn't have an issue because you were lucky and didn't play too long.

Re:New game systems please!

[NoSig]

Dying is not the issue, dealing enough damage to kill anything in less than 5 minutes is - at max level. In any case I considered 100% chameleon a bug and didn't want to use it. I guess my conclusion after playing the game long enough was that the leveling system itself was a bug too at high levels, even if it was working as intended by the developers.

Re:New game systems please!

[NoSig]

Apparently, you decided to abuse the mechanics to gain any edge possible, and you blame the game for letting you.

Actually, while that was not at all what I was saying in my post, I do think that games should be made to be fun when played optimally. A game designer should think through how a player can optimize their progression and then make sure that whatever is involved in that is fun to do because lots of people are going to play it that way. Oblivion's design is absurd when played in that way, so that is bad design. On top of that Oblivion's design is so broken that playing it normally can lead to unplayability if at the beginning you don't understand the absurd implications of the design and choose non-combat abilities as your major skills and then advanced them too far. Putting bandits in daedric armor didn't make them challenging in any way - all it made them was take forever to kill while they weren't actually much of a danger to you. Not fun.

hehehe

[ILuvRamen]

Based on my gamplay with Oblivion and Morrowind, they could do it justice just by putting up a 15 trailer with a black and white screen that says: "Skyrim - Like an MMORPG without all the noobs, haters, and scammers" and people would get interested.

How about a decent plot this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Morrowind has one of the most original, imaginative and immersive backgrounds and the plot is intelligent, political and mixed with a little HP Lovecraft style horror. Oblivion on the other hand regurgitated the dreary demons attacking the world from demonland formulaic crap that I've seen a countless times before in other games, books and films. I'm rather disappointed they appear to have based this next game in the series based upon the unimaginative latter of the two prequels.

Re:How about a decent plot this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Morrowind has one of the most original, imaginative and immersive backgrounds and the plot is intelligent, political and mixed with a little HP Lovecraft style horror

That's one way of looking at it. I prefer to summarize Morrowind's plot as "Evil God Builds Giant Robot To Take Over World".

Background-wise, Skyrim could be a reasonably interesting province; probably not as weird as Morrowind, but hopefully less bland than Oblivion's version of Cyrodiil. (But then Oblivion totally retconned the lore on Cyrodiil to make it bland generic fantasy, where previous games had always described it it as an interesting jungle, so maybe we're just going to get Oblivion With Snow.)

Re:How about a decent plot this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's one way of looking at it. I prefer to summarize Morrowind's plot as "Evil God Builds Giant Robot To Take Over World".

Morrowind is the biggest anime!

Re:How about a decent plot this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's one way of looking at it. I prefer to summarize Morrowind's plot as "Evil God Builds Giant Robot To Take Over World".

Third AC here: If that's all it was, you're right. If you finished enough of the side quests and figured out where the Dwemer went, your character walked into the final room with the plans and knowledge to finish the job.

I'm with the AC who described it as Lovecraftian; there was no quest in which it was all laid out for you: the player was slowly forced to this conclusion after reading every word of every book and piecing it all together based on the outcomes of multiple side quests.

My only complaint was that, rather like a Neal Stephenson novel, there was no dialogue tree that let you do the right thing: namely, attempt to replicate the Dwemer experiment or otherwise use the robot after you killed the bad guy.

(Or I'm still bitter because there's a nearby cave with 3000 pounds of Dwemer artifacts that I hauled in just before finishing the game.)

Re:The new engine is ID Tech 5, AKA the RAGE engin

[am 2k]

Considering that Gamebryo is dead, that would be rather horrific for development...

But... but.... but...

[Rone]

But Bethesda CAN'T release a new Elder Scrolls game!

Elder Scrolls has always been a single-player series, and single-player is DEAD, DEAD, DEAD! Our lords and masters at EA have said so!

Oblivion was more fun than morrowind

[js_sebastian]

True. It was also ridiculous that common bandits had daedric armor when you got to a high level. Though there were issues in Morrowind as well. In Morrowind it was advantageous to jump at all times to increase your skills even when just traveling somewhere. In both games you have to keep a careful accounting system outside the game to time your skills-ups in your minor and major skills so as to get maximum stat increases on level up. Morrowind also allowed you to be nearly invincible at level 1 through the use of potions. The systems were a mess in both Morrowind and Oblivion. I can't say how they were like before that, since I don't remember how it worked in Daggerfall.

I had more fun with oblivion than with morrowind, because in morrowind I had to go crazy keeping track of minor skills and improving enough of them so as to get good stat increases at the next level. Oblivion I played much more naturally, mostly ignoring immersion-breaking things like skill and stat scores, and managed to be reasonably successful (though I'm sure people who tweaked every last bit of power our of their characters would have kicked my ass in pvp, but then, this is a single player game, so who cares?). In oblivion I chose skills based on fun more than strategy (my top skill was the potion-making one that I largely used to poison my arrows, and I had way too many points in secondary stuff compared to the optimal highly-focused strategy).

Also, the world of oblivion was indeed smaller, but much more detailed than morrowind's, with less cookie cutter locations/npcs/dungeons and way more atmosphere.

Then my PC died, and I haven't had a gaming PC since...

Re:Oblivion was more fun than morrowind

[NoSig]

and I had way too many points in secondary stuff compared to the optimal highly-focused strategy

Because of the way Oblivion works, that actually made the game easier for you - the more points you have outside your major skills, the easier the game is. That is because the enemies scale with your major skills but not your other skills.

Re:Oblivion was more fun than morrowind

[js_sebastian]

and I had way too many points in secondary stuff compared to the optimal highly-focused strategy

Because of the way Oblivion works, that actually made the game easier for you - the more points you have outside your major skills, the easier the game is. That is because the enemies scale with your major skills but not your other skills.

Actually, I think not: I think enemies scale with your level. And at a given level you will be much stronger by concentrating on a few core skills. As I said, I didn't do any deep analysis of oblivion character building strategy, but I recall picking up an official guide to the game at somebody's house that recommended specialization in the very first pages.

Re:Oblivion was more fun than morrowind

[NoSig]

Actually, I think not: I think enemies scale with your level. And at a given level you will be much stronger by concentrating on a few core skills.

Your level goes up as a function purely of your major skills. It is true that you will be stronger by concentrating on a few skills, but since you can raise them without raising your level by having those skills be not your major skills, your game became easier by raising your non-major skills.

Re:The new engine is ID Tech 5, AKA the RAGE engin

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm kind of the opposite. I don't particularly care if the engine is crap, so long as the quests work. If I'm immersed in the story, it doesn't matter if it's a slick real world engine or a text adventure from yesteryear, but when I invest a few hours running around doing a particular questline only to have the script logic mess up and leave me unable to complete it, THAT breaks my sense of immersion like nothing else.

New Engine!?

[Sir_Dinky]

Will we finally be able to climb a ladder that doesn't end in a load screen?

Really??

[hesaigo999ca]

Does anyone actually still play this game,
WoW just came out with their expansion, watch as the might and glory takes over total online gaming control for yet another year or so.....I do not even think there is room for another game online rpg with hero content...

Re:Really??

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone actually still play this game,

Yes! I just built my new all-in-one workstation/server/gaming rig this weekend and once I had the OS up and running, the first two games I installed were Oblivion and Morrowind, despite the fact that my game option set increased in size considerably after upgrading from a P4 system to core i7.

The modding communities are still very active for both games, moreso for Oblivion than Morrowind of course. Plain vanilla Oblivion does not even come close to being the same game as when you are playing with fifty mods to fine-tune your experience and increase the 'immersion factor'.

A wide variety of complaints about the games, from the leveling system to the need to eat/drink/sleep can be addressed with mods and apps like OBSE/MWSE, OGE/MGE, Wyre Bash/Mash and BOSS/OBMM etc etc. Not to mention all of the content mods that add fully-voiced companions, quests, open up areas of the map (Elsweyr in Oblivion for example) and add new factions.

Getting everything fine-tuned the way you like it is a gold star for your nerd card. Anyone can download and play WoW - even my mother in law does! - but they can't modify and fine-tune the gameplay to give them the experience they want. This is why I keep coming back.

too compressed

[nten]

I thought the size of the game world in oblivion was fine, it was just too compressed. All of Morrowind took place on one tiny island off the coast of said region. Oblivion threw away any sense of scale by putting five or so cities in all of the largest region in Tamriel and making it so that it could be crossed by walking in less than an hour real time. Artificially limiting the scale as they did in Morrowind would have helped me suspend my disbelief a bit. I would have taken invisible walls over compression.

Agreed about daggerfall, the character generation was its strength, not the game world.

Re:too compressed

[zach_the_lizard]

Not only did they shrink it, but the pre-Oblivion lore made it clear Cyrodil was a jungle, with parts of it turning more into swampland. Plus, the lore made the Imperial City out to be far more massive than it was in game. IIRC it was supposed to continue across the lake.

I think people forget this

[Sycraft-fu]

They have a foggy recollection of games of old that had these MASSIVE universes and say "Why can't that be done?" forgetting that those massive universes were full of nothing. Like I remember the original Elite. I liked that game a lot, space shooties are good stuff and free form is a good way of doing it. And wow what an amazing game a MASSIVE universe, all on one floppy disk! They were so much better than today's programmers! Well no. What they did was have a procedurally generated world. That's cool and all but it meant no life at all to it. There were almost no human-designed quests in any of the Elite games. All there was is systems with pseudo-random distributions of ships and resources and so on. You could fly around and explore a whole lot of stuff, but none of it had anything that made it special.

A small, well designed, universe is far more compelling. A good example would be Call of Duty 4. It was an extremely fun shooty that was "too short." That was the one complaint just about everyone had about it. Well when you looked back and analyzed it you found two things:

1) It wasn't really that short. I mean it wasn't a long game, but not that bad for shooties. It was just really engaging as you went through it, you were left wanting more.

2) It was all new content. Everything, every level, was new. None of it was retracing shit you'd done before. New levels, new graphics, even new gameplay mechanics (like the level where you are an AC-130 gunner rather than on the ground).

It didn't pad things out by doing something like "Now you do this same level, in reverse, at night!" Made it very fun, and seem to go by quicker.

Just copy and pasting everything or padding shit out with big, empty, open areas does not make a good game. Sure it is a "big" game but that isn't a measure of how good it is. I'd rather have a small game that is high quality than a world that is massive and boring.

That isn't to say objects can never be reused, heck you see that in the real world. My master bedroom door looks the same as by guest bedroom and bathroom door because they are all the same style of door. However doing some component copying is very different from the wholesale clone stamp you saw so much in those "huge" older games.

Re:I think people forget this

[Omestes]

They have a foggy recollection of games of old that had these MASSIVE universes and say "Why can't that be done?" forgetting that those massive universes were full of nothing.

This isn't completely true. One of the things I loved about Morrowind (and which annoyed me about Oblivion) was that there WAS stuff hidden all of the massive world. Yes, there were big expanses with pretty much nothing in them, except hidden in the middle, where you would never look, was a huge cave full of bandits worshipping dremora, with some random super-magical item hiding somewhere at the bottom of a small underground river. And said cave is not part of a quest, nor ever directly eluded to in the game dialog. It made exploration fun.

Morrowind is one of those games that I played for days on end, completely ignoring the story the devs wanted me to be worrying about. I didn't even care if I finished it, I just wanted to see the whole world, and slaughter every non-essential NPC and take their pretty baubles to decorate my stolen house. To me this is the best type of game. This is what also made the original Fallout games so good, spending hours doing your own thing completely oblivious of the bigger plot.

Oblivion was somewhat lacking in this vibe. Fallout 3 (haven't tried New Vegas yet, waiting for it to not suck) was also lacking this. You could probably beat Morrowind's actual quest in around 20 hours, but I must have put 80 in exploring; same with the original Fallouts.

This is what also, originally, sold me on WoW. When it first came out, a low level mage and I spent a couple days just exploring the land, seeing if we could sneak into opposing cities, etc... It was more fun than the actual game.

I never liked the Call of Duty games, shooters got rather tedious for me (they are all pretty much the same: this may be true or I'm just getting old). They are the epitome of "go here, kill that", with very little player created gameplay. I don't like being locked into what the devs want me to do, I want to make my own story as well. (I'm going to spend two days wandering around in New Reno, wearing nothing but a purple robe, shooting prostitutes in the back of the head with my SMG, while yelling; "I AM THE BRINGER OF JUSTICE!". Instead of worrying about your damn Enclave/super mutant problems!).

Also; the real world is mostly empty space too. No problem with that, unless it gets tedious, but then again most video game worlds have a fast travel alternative.

Re:I think people forget this

[Lanteran]

Morrowind was small relative to daggerfall/arena, it was the first real elder scrolls game that was designed, every square mile, by hand. As opposed to random generation. It was also the most epic game.... ever.

Re:I think people forget this

[Anonymous Coward]

You could probably beat Morrowind's actual quest in around 20 hours

Try seven and a half minutes

Morrowind's stat allocation sucked

[Anonymous Coward]

Morrowind's stat allocation sucked. The difference between cost accounting your skill increases and playing naturally was that with the cost accounting method you kept ahead of the critters, if barely. If you played naturally, you fell severely behind (getting usually 9 points per level up compared to 13-15 if you min-maxed). And when even a lich gains 15hp/level, your mage HAD to get CON right up there or die quickly.

Oblivion mind had a problem with that and added that you were MUCH better off putting your skills in miscellaneous and spamming them up, since you couldn't get a useful level without levelling up far too fast and there was no other detriment than time taken to having good skills at misc.

Changes I'd like to see are:

1) skill changes, make Major skills better. E.g. you can get to 125% on a major skill. Minor skills max at 10+Level or something.
2) attribute bonuses. Make them less variable there's a hell of a difference in getting 2 pts per stat and 5pts.
3) nuke the stats of the "monsters". OK, an Ogre can get 30hp/level. It's big, no worries. When a bag of bones gets 15 per level and even your PC warrior maxes out at 10, something is wrong. Also problems giving them weird stats that make Drain Attribute damn near pointless

magica regeneration really was necessary because Morrowind meant that the downside of the Atronach sign was irrelevant: you needed potions of restore magica to get your magica back up, sleeping usually wasn't an option. Losing regeneration while walking about makes you weigh up the loss of it with Atronach.

However, what they did wrong in Oblivion was to put magica restore options all over the place and make it so damn easy to make. When you don't really miss regeneration (except when spamming up your skills) because you just glug a potion, hit a shrine or well, then there's no loss in losing regeneration.

What would be better would be some sort of XP system and a gain of level/skills appropriate to the selections made at character generation and the use of the skills. E.g. levelling up, your preferred attributes raise more. Attributes controlling the most used skills raise more. Major skills raise more on level up, as to the most used skills. You'd have to give XP for kills while sneaking, for pickpocketing or selling stolen goods, to make a thief workable, but the gameplay otherwise won't change much.

Re:Morrowind's stat allocation sucked

[Fallingcow]

Odd, I don't remember Morrowind having leveled enemies. IIRC, if you didn't level "perfectly" you might not be able to go to a certain area as soon as someone who did (or you might have to use more dirty tricks to pull it off) but you could always just gain a couple more levels and then do it; Oblivion was the opposite, in that failing to level perfectly meant you actually got worse with each level, relative to every enemy in the game.

I certainly don't recall ever finding that I couldn't level my way through a tough area in Morrowind, while in Oblivion leveling generally made things harder rather than easier unless you broke out the damn spreadsheets. I think Morrowind might have spawned more golden-whatevers and elemental monsters around Daedric temples as you leveled, but that's about it.

Then again, the storyline gives you some potentially huge non-level-related stat boosts about half way through, so maybe that's why I never noticed any trouble with leveled enemies (or even that there were any) in Morrowind.

Re:Yay Bugs!

[elrous0]

Don't worry, the glitches where you end up standing 10 ft in the air balance it out.

I don't know, depends on what you mean

[Sycraft-fu]

There are some downsides to games designed with a console in mind as well, but not the ones most people seem to cry about. The only real downsides I find are games with poor controls, where it is clear a gamepad is the target not a mouse and keyboard, and games with low resolution textures, where it could and should look better if it made use of modern PC graphics. However games can and do solve that. There are plenty of games where the PC version looks better and has a good interface. Dragon Age is a good example.

However what it seems many people complain about is that games are "dumbed down" or made "too accessible". Well that is silly. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a game being easy to get in to and in fact that is the way it should be. Also being accessible doesn't mean it can't be challenging it just means that the challenge is in overcoming obstacles in the game, not in learning a massive interface and mechanics.

Some "consoleization" has not at all been a bad thing. The game market is no longer something only for the geeks, it is open to all. Now that doesn't mean trying to make every game for every person, but it does mean trying to make it so you don't need a graduate degree to get in to a game.

In terms of the TES games, I think it did them some good. I wanted to like Morrowind, I really did, that kind of game appeals to me. I just didn't. I could not get in to that game, try as I might. Oblivion, however, I really enjoyed and played thoroughly. Not saying it was a perfect game, just that the changes they made, some of the "dumbing down" was able to make it accessible and fun to me.

Hopefully it is good

[Sycraft-fu]

I've been a little worried about iD so of late. Their last engine, iD Tech 4, really failed to impress. Doom 3 was very cool looking on first glance but as you played it engine flaws became very apparent (low rez textures, hard, dark shadows, extremely slow on the hardware of the day, etc). Didn't hold up that well against Unreal Engine 2.5 and then of course not at all against UE3, as engine sales show.

Then we hear about Rage/iDTech 5. Wonderful, looks like nifty features and so on but thus far nothing in reality to show for it. Then all the chatter switches to the iPhone and to Rage on it... Ummm ok, that's great guys and I'm not saying mobile (be it phones or handhelds) game are something to be ignored but I'm worried here if the engine is being spread too far, too wide and won't be as good on PCs and consoles, which is where my (and many others') interest is.

I'm hoping it is a really solid engine that good games can be built on, in particular because Bestheda's engine always seems to be been a weak point (not visually but stability/bug wise). However iD does have me a little concerned. I'm hoping they deliver a great engine for both shooties and RPGs.

Co-op play this time?

[KlomDark]

Needs co-op so my girlfriend can play it along with me, or I'm not going to be allowed to play it.

Re:Co-op play this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's coming in the first expansion pack. Along with a replacement set of balls.

Re:Co-op play this time?

[Antisyzygy]

Get a new girlfriend. She sounds like she sucks. My wife doesn't try to make me do anything as long as I help out with basic chores around the house and spend time with her a few nights a week. You don't want to marry someone who tries to control you, it already sucks enough dating someone like that.

Re:Co-op play this time?

[KlomDark]

Yes, nothing's more entertaining than watching someone else play a single player game.

Nothing to do with balls.

Yes, she'll let me play it, but I LIKE playing co-ops with her.

Is that wrong? Should I not have done that?

Re:Co-op play this time?

[Antisyzygy]

You should include that information in the original post. I stand corrected. I read that as "My girlfriend wont let me play video games in my free time".

Re:The new engine is ID Tech 5, AKA the RAGE engin

[mr_gorkajuice]

If you're gonna claim they'll use Engine B specifically, you probably should attempt to find a better quote than "Engine A might not be the obvious choice".

Excellent!

[pipboy9999]

This game should be released right around the time my son will be gaining the fine motor skills needed to operate a Dualshock controller...assuming that it is not a PC exclusive.

Re:The new engine is ID Tech 5, AKA the RAGE engin

[Anonymous Coward]

No it isn't. They developed their own engine in-house. The Rage engine was not capable of the dynamic sandbox style game they wanted to make.

can we see a few changes?

[jollyreaper]

1. Fix the leveling problem
2. Come up with a decent goddamn story for a change. Hire writers if you have to!

Oblivion was one of the most amazing, gorgeous, astounding games I'd ever seen. I'm still blown away by it. But for chrissakes,the leveling was awful and the writing was shit. Can't we have a game that delivers on all counts?

Or "Ramminus Polus" for that matter

[AmazingRuss]

Will Naugtius Maximus be a major character in this one?

Old news.

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been on reddit's /r/gaming for a few days now. Not that slashdot has ever been my goto source for gaming news, but still.

I hope it (the engine) really is all new

[Silvermistshadow]

And doesn't have the annoying AI of Fallout 3 or Oblivion with their random comments. "I hope you're not going to tamper with that".... What, is it suddenly illegal to look at things? And then there was when they annoyed you because you accidentally got your hitbox too close to something and it rolled around (or even for no reason at all) At least Fallout 3 got rid of the annoying shopkeeper comments, who you could haggle until you were paying 200% and they'd still complain. (Actually, never used the haggle system, someone check that for me.) Just... yeah. I feel better when the AI ignores me unless I talk to them, like in real life. Now please excuse me while I get ignored in real life some more.

Bethesda's current engine is still broken

[Derpnooner]

I've been playing these games since Morrowind. Oblivion was nice and so are the Fallouts (3, Zeta, Vegas, etc). My gripe is that their current engine is terrible still. Moving to a new engine when they haven't fixed the old one does not inspire confidence. Time will tell. I'll still buy it though, cause I's Luvs Dragons.

Re:Bethesda's current engine is still broken

[Silvermistshadow]

I've been playing these games since Morrowind. Oblivion was nice and so are the Fallouts (3, Zeta, Vegas, etc). My gripe is that their current engine is terrible still. Moving to a new engine when they haven't fixed the old one does not inspire confidence. Time will tell. I'll still buy it though, cause I's Luvs Dragons.

As said above, the engine would need a low-level rewrite to work again, so making a new engine from scratch is most likely going to fix the majority of the issues, provided they acknowledge them.