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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.
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.
I, for one, welcome our buggy overl*falls through floor*
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.
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.
Looks like it'll just be Fallout 3 with swords!
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.
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
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...
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).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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?
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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)
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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.
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.
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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
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.
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!"
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.
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.
Needs co-op so my girlfriend can play it along with me, or I'm not going to be allowed to play it.
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.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Will Naugtius Maximus be a major character in this one?