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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.
They have been unacceptable since Morrowind. Seriously, its almost 2011. Allow your damn characters to move their legs on a diagonal.
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.
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.
import system.cool.Sig;
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.
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.
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I, for one, welcome our buggy overl*falls through floor*
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.
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.
That and the Mass Effect 3 teaser gave me a happy today. :-)
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.
And, unlike you, I will back this up with citations. The current survey (of gaming rigs running Steam) is:
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.
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.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
Looks like it'll just be Fallout 3 with swords!
I've pre-emptively apologized to my wife for the weeks I'll spend zombified by this game.
I'll be saving up the cash for a new machine come 1week before 11.11.11
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/
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.
I saw a mudcrab the other day. Horrible creatures.
Actually, it looks like they are going to use a updated version of GameBryo. http://pc.ign.com/articles/111/1112464p1.html
That article says exactly nothing about using an updated GameBryo engine.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
"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.
Sony lets developers use USB keyboards and mice - it's just that nobody ever does. UT3 for PS3 had full KB+M support.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
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.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
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.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/32009/All_New_Game_Engine_For_Next_Elder_Scrolls.php
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.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
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.
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
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.
Be seeing you...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
And I thought Macs ran on Hot Air, not Steam
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
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?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
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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.
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.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
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...
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.
Considering that Gamebryo is dead, that would be rather horrific for development...
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.
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!
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.
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...
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.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Will we finally be able to climb a ladder that doesn't end in a load screen?
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...
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.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
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.
Don't worry, the glitches where you end up standing 10 ft in the air balance it out.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
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).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
And it was quite tongue-in-cheek in places.
Tongue-in-cheek? Isn't a 'skyrim' the very definition of tongue-in-cheek?
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.
Needs co-op so my girlfriend can play it along with me, or I'm not going to be allowed to play it.
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.
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".
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.
Yeah, I've got nothing...
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
SSC
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%.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
Will Naugtius Maximus be a major character in this one?
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.
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.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
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
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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.
Advanced users are users too!
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.
Any comments made by the owner of this signature should be disregarded as irrelevant, uninformed, and idiotic.
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.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
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.
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.
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
In Soviet Russia, road forks you!
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.