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Bethesda: We Can't Make Dawnguard Work On the PS3
An anonymous reader sends this quote from Geek.com:
"PS3 gamers may now never get access to the content in Skyrim's Dawnguard DLC. That's the news coming out of Bethesda via their forums. Administrator and global community lead Gstaff posted an update on the state of PS3 DLC for the game, and it's not looking great. Gstaff explains that releasing sizeable DLC is a complex issue, and it seems like for the PS3 it might be just a bit too complex. No detail is given as to what the specific problem is, but Bethesda is preparing PS3 gamers for the reality that Dawnguard, and for that matter any other Skyrim DLC, may never reach the platform. I'd like to know what the exact problem is they can't overcome, but I'd also like to know if this is a failing on Bethesda's part or a shortcoming of the PS3 architecture. Maybe Sony should pay Bethesda a visit and see what's going on."
In other Skyrim news, a mod for the game that attempted to recreate J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, has received a Cease & Desist letter from Warner Bros, causing development to stop.
The rootkit takes up too much disk space on the drive.
One way to answer that question is to ask are any other companies having problems with large DLC on the PS3?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
With gfx, storage, cpu, mem all piling on the pressure, consoles are drowning. Eventually, devs will move back to the PC because of its more open, less limited setup - even with the headaches that brings with it.
Frankly, with steam its a good platform for devs and users. And the hardware is pretty amazing today, even in the medium PC markets, with bang for buck being quite high.
We`re all equal
The simple answer is they are incompetent. After all the issues I had with Fallout and New Vegas I will never buy another Bethesda game. The crashing, the stalling, the slowing down of the game as you get farther along.
Games are my time to relax, not be frustrated with the amateur hour programming Bethesda seems to employ.
so I'm not surprised it's too difficult for them.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
F em. the mod team put more time and effort into their free project than WB has put into....well pretty much anything since the 70s.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I am not at all shocked to see this C&D letter arrive at their doorstep. Commercial rights owners will act to protect their properties. The (any) team doing dev work on a IP other than their own and acting without a license should expect as much too. It is always best to use IP with permission or that is original no matter how 'cool' the property may seem.
I'm really glad I bought Skyrim on PC. I've got at least one "Dawnguard expansion" worth of material free as mods. (I've even posted a few small ones of my own)
"I'd like to know what the exact problem is they can't overcome[...]"
perhaps an arrow in the knee?
Yeah, but it would be nice if the receivers did not have to bow simply because they can not afford to fight back. The rights of IP ownership are often much more restrictive then the companies sending out these C&D letters with they were.. but they have discovered that they can abuse the civil system to make it behave like they have rights they do not, simply because it would be too costly for the defendant to defend themselves.
Bethesda just has less to work with. The PS3 only has 256 megabytes of RAM compared to the 360's 512 megabytes. I'd also bet this was the reason for PS3 Skyrim's performance issues.
And the hardware is pretty amazing today, even in the medium PC markets, with bang for buck being quite high.
True, PCs have enormous bang for buck with single player, long-form games like Skyrim . But some other genres tend to have shorter play sessions, and multiplayer among people in the same room can become expensive (if all PCs are owned by the head of one household) or impractical (if everybody has to bring his own PC).
game devs like the stability of consoles and the low barrier to player entry
PCs, on the other hand, have far lower barriers to developer entry. You don't have to start by making a mobile phone game in a genre you dislike in order to get a job working hundreds miles away for five years in order to build "relevant video game industry experience" in order to qualify for a console devkit.
This sounds like a gross abuse. Unless they actually used images from the films or made it look too much like the films ... the sheer amount of artwork imagining Middle Earth was already vast when I played D&D in the 80s.
There's no way Warner Bros has the rights to all artistic works related to that. They may have the film rights, but I seriously doubt that precludes anybody from trying to do artwork featuring Gandalf and Elves and the like.
Hell, the actual map was in the books ... it's not like it's a secret, and it's not like they created it. All this IP crap is getting ridiculous.
Obviously they can't afford to fight this. Sad there doesn't seem to be a link to the actual C&D letter (at least that I can see) ... I'd be curious to see what they're claiming. I'd be willing to bet they're on some shaky footing with whatever assertions they've made.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It is always best to use IP with permission
How should a non-commercial mod team go about obtaining such permission, practically?
or that is original
How should a non-commercial mod team go about making sure that what they create ends up being legally original, that is, not "substantially similar" to anything already widely published?
It says "J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth" Tolkein is dead now his family who did not create this slightly above average series of novels gets to sell his work and make millions. There is nothing that seems right about this in my mind. No one should profit from another persons work. If you aren't doing the work yourself or at the very least making it easier for the person doing the work to do their job you should get nothing from it. Money is meant to represent a person's contributions to society if you haven't contributed you shouldn't have any.
Maybe Sony should pay Bethesda a visit and see what's going on
Search 'em for hidden thumbdrives before they;re allowed in the door...
Warner Brothers should have backed them instead of stopped them. I'm sure both parties could have come out on top there. Publicity for the Hobbit movie (say an exclusive area from the new movie in the mod). I could imagine the dollars gained from hype would make up for anything lost. Although in the real world even the legalities on the WB side would be insanely complicated to allow something like that to continue.
The proportion of games which aren't single platform console exclusives which don't get a PC port is shrinking fast.
One way to shrink it faster would be for PC makers to get serious about marketing gaming PCs whose cases are designed to fit in next to an HDTV. Case in point: Mortal Kombat (2011), another WB game, is for Xbox 360, PS3, and PS Vita, not PC, despite that the engine it's based on began on PC, because it's designed for the players to plug in two joysticks, and that's an uncommon use case on PC.
These teams are better off making their own original IP - if your team (commercial or not) cannot afford to buy the rights, go make your own stuff up! Success is NOT limited to adhering to Middle Earth or any other author's universe. If you really want to celebrate J.R.R.T., do something original; he did (sorta). There is no defense for that team because they don't own the rights.
Skyrim is pretty much unplayable on the PS3, particular in the latter stages. I enjoyed the game but have since swapped to my PC and will no longer buy new games for the PS3... now it just sits there as a bulky blueray player. I think this is Sony's loss rather than Bethesda's downfall, imho.
I am not at all shocked to see this C&D letter arrive at their doorstep. Commercial rights owners will act to protect their properties. The (any) team doing dev work on a IP other than their own and acting without a license should expect as much too. It is always best to use IP with permission or that is original no matter how 'cool' the property may seem.
Its no big deal. They just have to change a few things. They'll be marching with Bobbits (make your own joke) and smelfs, fighting balsmogs on their way to Fordor.
As long as the game play doesn't include any pinchy motions, they'll be just fine.
It's a strange architecture. Most modern machines are symmetric-multiprocessor (SMP). That means programming is very straightforward - all the processors share the same memory space and each processor can do any work you like, so you just have to worry about the normal threading issues (race conditions, deadlocks, etc.) but it's otherwise just standard multithreaded programming.
The PS3 is not SMP - it has one main processor with 256MB of non-video RAM (a big chunk of which is reserved for the OS) and a lot of smaller coprocessors that have very limited RAM (256K). If you can fit chunks of work nicely into 256K, then the thing screams. If you cannot, then you have to do most of the work on the main processor, in less memory than is available on the Xbox360. In other words, you've gone from 6 hardware threads on the Xbox to 2 on the PS3. The combination of less general-purpose processing power and less usable main memory is a really hard problem to solve.
Now, for a lot of games, the Cell is great. Fighting games, puzzle games, art games, ARPGs, JRPGs, platformers. Any time you can offload individual character animation or rendering to the SPEs, you win. The PS3 can animate and render a whole lot more mobs in a scene than the Xbox360 can. If you have a physics calculation like waves on water or swarm movement that is easily separatable into small chunks, the PS3 is also superior.
But think about an open-world game - especially one with the sort of wide-open spaces and anyone-can-go-anywhere gameplay of Skyrim. We did open-world games and we constantly had trouble because physics and AI could interact over a long distance. We broke the world up into cells and aggressively limited the range of some computations to avoid this problem, but still, a lot had to run on the main processor because once the size of a physics calculation or a pathfind exceeded 256K, you couldn't do it on the SPEs. And believe me, pathfinding data alone in an open-world game is always going to be larger than 256K! AI in modern games is expensive, and we know that Bethesda takes their AI very seriously.
Maintaining a large, persistent world also means keeping track of lots of stuff, and that means memory. On the PC, you have practically unlimited swap and tons of main RAM, so it's not an issue. On consoles you have limited RAM and swap space and fragmentation can kill you if you dead. To be honest, I'm surprised the game runs as well as it does on the Xbox360, but again, you have more memory there and they have the ability to "steal" RAM from graphics if they need it, whereas you can't on the PS3.
So while I wish Bethesda had overcome the technical hurdles and made the game workable on the PS3, I can hardly fault them for coming up short. It's just not a platform well-suited to the type of game Skyrim is.
Plus it would have been good PR for the upcoming Hobbit movie.
Now instead we get storied about the big bad WB being mean to the underdog dev.
Either have the money to buy the rights you want
Where does a startup come up with such money?
make something up from whole cloth. JRRT did, why can't these folks take a REAL page from JRRT and do something original
Because JRRT and those who followed in his footsteps have already laid claim to various concepts. I am aware that copyrights are not identical to patents. But under copyright, the combination of "access" and "substantial similarity" implies infringement, and courts have held that "substantial similarity" includes similarity of nonliteral elements.
On average, how many owners of copyright in a fictional universe will decline a non-commercial license before one allows a non-commercial license?
Really? Are they saying they could port that main game itself, but a little extra DLC has them complete bamboozled? I've never seen another developer say they Can't Do it On the PS3. Hell, Bethesda has done open-world DLC on the PS3 before, but all of a sudden they are stumped?
And saying, oh, we could develop for the Xbox and the PC! means absolutely nothing, as the Xbox was designed to make it easy to port games back and forth. They just are too lazy to redevelop it; all that extra work will reduce the massive profits they make off DLC.
... I'm more alarmed that MERP was nuked by WB. Does WB even have the right, when they didn't even create LOTR to begin with?
I'm more surprised that they own the IP in the first place. It's been 75 years since The Hobbit's release, the author is dead, and it's owned by some mega company?
Everything that's wrong with the IP system is right here.
"we are working together with Sony to try to bring you this content."
It's obvious that the person writing the summary hasn't even read the post from Bethesda, thanks for your useless commentary.
How many of those games are loading save files with as much persistent world state as Skyrim has?
Zero? Right then. You just have no idea what you're talking about. The PS3's design is fundamentally bad for a game like Skyrim. It's too complicated, too RAM starved, and the SPUs have access to so little memory that you have to use the main CPU for far too much stuff. Trying to cram more data into it now is what's breaking things.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
No.
It's a shame that PC games don't allow the user to control everything with a gamepad. I'm talking about starting the game, configuring settings, etc, just like in consoles.
Is there a best practice for doing this? PC gamepad APIs can see the number of buttons on the gamepad as say "button 1" through "button 10", but they can't see where they're positioned. And not all USB gamepads compatible with a PC have the same buttons in the same order as an Xbox 360 controller. So until the user configures the controls, which buttons on the (non-360) gamepad should the game use for OK and Back?
What unyielding deadline? These games have been out for years and they are still not fixed.
For one thing, it costs the publisher money to have developers work on a change to an already-paid-for product for which the publisher won't see additional sales rather than a new product that's already getting preorders. For another thing, it costs the publisher money to have the console maker certify a patch; see what happened with Fez. The effect in practice is the same as that of an unyielding deadline: any bugs not fixed within the first couple months won't get fixed because they won't make more revenue.
They could release a PC fix and say the console fixes were not financially viable.
Has this tended to happen in the past with other titles from other publishers? Because if not, there might be something in the contract with the console maker requiring patch parity with other platforms, just as (for example) Amazon requires price parity between an online seller's Amazon listings and the listings on its own web site.
If they cant make it to PS3 then they are not worthy of being called a developer!
So much Jokes U will cry!
In my experience, there are relatively few things a good developer can't do. There may be lots of things he doesn't want to spend the time or money to do. If the Bethesda devs are really telling the project managers it can't be done, it's time to bring in some fresh talent.
it is not a lack of creativity or originality, but rather a passion for a setting or story. It is actually a lack of creativity of the IP holder (especially if it is being held by non creator) that they can just sit back and profit of the work of others, or block others from expanding the work rather than actually themselves create content that's worth while.
how many owners of copyright in a fictional universe will decline a non-commercial license before one allows a non-commercial license?
And why should that stop them asking?
Because if there are 100 different universes, and a developer knows that 100 out of 100 owners will decline someone's proposal for a non-commercial project, that saves the time of formulating 100 proposals before skipping to plan B of trying to come up with something that someone else happens not to have done before.
For another thing, please define "nicely". What are the best practices for formulating such a proposal?
I think the parent post was to harsh, but it has some true. I have seen previous game save files of Bethesda games and it amazes me how big their save files are. I don't think a single save file of more that 10 Mb is a good design. I know the PS3 has hardware limitations, but there are always solutions.
An example, not necesarilty the solution for Bethesda coding problems but it shows that you can solve things thinking outside the box (if you want, something Bethesda doesn't want to do, I think), Little Big Planet had problems with save files sizes too, because they store very bug user made levels, add to that that they allow gamers to import textures with the PS Eye Camera. What did they do to solve loading the save file to RAM and saving big files each time? They decided later with a patch to store everything on the game data area and not as save files, this allowed them to stream contents and save only part of the information instead of overwriting the save file. If you need a save file for backup, you use the menu to export all your profile data as a standard save file
I'll just pirate the PC version then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sony_rootkit
never forget, never forgive
Is that the RAM is divided on it.
So consoles don't have a lot of RAM compared to PCs anyhow. I mean even when the 360 and PS3 launched 512MB wasn't a ton, and now of course it is just minuscule. However consoles have two tricks that PCs don't that help:
1) They don't have nearly as much overhead. A full blown desktop OS takes up quite a bit of RAM just to run, never mind all the background processes most users add on (IM client, virus scanner, etc). While consoles do have an OS these days, it is cut down a whole lot. So it needs much less RAM to run.
2) The GPU and CPU share RAM. On computers it is separate. Discrete GPUs have their own RAM onboard, of course, and even iGPUs don't share system RAM in terms of actual data, they grab part of it for their own use. With consoles they share the units share the RAM, so you don't end up having a copy of something both in main and graphics memory.
Well the PS3 doesn't do #2. It has 256MB for the CPU and 256MB for the GPU. They are separated. That means that while it technically has as much RAM as the 360, in reality it has less available.
This is because Sony honestly thought the Cell was going to be the GPU for the PS3. I have no idea why they thought that would work, but they thought that would be the case. Then midway through development they realized it wouldn't cut it, so they went to nVidia to get a GPU. nVidia was happy to accommodate them, of course, but given the short timetable couldn't customize the GPU fully. So more or less they got an nVidia 7900, which of course uses separate RAM.
Battlefield 3 is a good example. It is substantially better on the PC. Better graphics (low-medium on the PC is like the console with the extended graphics pack), more people in multiplayer, good controls, and so on. They put in some serious work on the PC version to make it better than the consoles. It wasn't an afterthought, a quick port, it is the premiere version of the game.
As you say this isn't surprising, just more examples of what you are talking about. Some devs put some serious work in to PC versions these days.
Though I'm not so sure about the "PC is dying" thing with the next gen of consoles. With the last gen, they really pushed the high tech. The GPUs in the consoles were very high end when they came out, particularly the 360. You had to spend serious coin to get an equal PC GPU. I don't know that they are willing to spend that kind of money this time around. If the graphics processors are more mid-range, well then they will be less impressive compared to PCs and it may be a case of them catching up, more than a leapfrog.
As someone else points out, it's possible to cram games into the PS3 if you architect them so that the independent parts of the computation are organized to fit in the 256K Cell processors. Converting a game that wasn't designed that way is a huge headache. Conversion will probably affect gameplay.
Even Sony now admits that the Cell was a dud. The PS4 (if Sony ever gets it out the door) will have a more conventional shared-memory multiprocessor plus a GPU. The extra year or two required to make something run well on the Cell CPU means the Cell-based console lags the market.
He said console games look and perform better than they would running on PC
Ever played a console port on PC? Most console=>pc ports were done with the minimal amount of work, that means barely tolerable controlls and almost no optimization. So you can't get more redundand than that statement.
Well, you know what they say: if you want to really play a real game, use a real computer. I can only imagine what hell it is to attempt to control skyrim with joysticks. I assume archery is impossible, if they even left it in the game in the first place.
Do keep in mind though that back in N64 days, they had to 100% complete 100% of the game, test it until it was actually perfect, then release it and there was no way to patch it. Maybe they should bring back those sorts of standard.
If you're EA, or some other major developer with huge amounts of money, power, and influence (but I repeat myself), which would you prefer? A platform that has high barriers to developer entry, or one with low barriers?
It could be argued that arcade has the highest barrier to entry, as you have to manufacture and sell your own console and monitor for each copy of the game. Otherwise, EA has expressed a preference for a single open platform.
its just as easy to plug 2 wired xbox controllers into a PC
before the Xbox360, there was no 'standard' PC controller.
Other than, you know, the keyboard and mouse.
How many PC games support two distinct keyboards on one PC, where Space on one is distinct from Space on the other? How many support two distinct mice apart from Rag Doll Kung Fu?
We had HTPCs which were meant to be part of the stack of stuff by the TV with the proper black box and small LED screen as an option from HP and Dell for a couple years. Not many people bought them
Did not many people buy them because not many people knew they existed? I never saw commercials for them on TV. Perhaps they failed solely for being underpromoted.
Maybe it is for the better because the best option might be just building one's own.
I don't fully understand what you're saying. More casual gamers aren't willing to spend the time to learn to build a PC. Is the publisher of a video game supposed to build such a PC and sell it in a bundle with the game, like the "plug-and-play TV game" consoles that Jakks made a decade ago?
Fallout 3 on PS3 is a lock up fest. This sets in after a certain amount of play time. After getting the GOTY I managed to get past 1 DLC and by the time I was in the 2nd I LITERALLY spend more time getting up and power cycling the PS3 to clear the hard lock, than I do playing the game.
Fallout NV: same problem.
Skyrim: I didn't buy this one. As I understand it has the same problem.
I say thank you to Bugthesda for refusing to sell something that will not work, it sure took long enough. They should have started not selling a broken PS3 product with Fallout.
It should also be noted that with a rich modding community it would be less than optimal to buy theses games on anything other than a PC.
I think Ars? had an interview with their devs saying that their games would never work right on a PS3.
I somehow feel smarter after reading a slashdot post, curious.
They're actually starting to address that with XInput. If the device isn't compatible with that, that's the controller manufacturer's fault
I was under the impression that it cost controller manufacturers substantially more to license the patents and encryption keys associated with XInput from Microsoft. At the moment, I can't dig up the Slashdot story about Xbox 360 not recognizing controllers without a cryptographic handshake, but Microsoft has sued Datel for making unlicensed Xbox 360-compatible controllers. This means budget controllers won't have it, nor will controllers manufactured before the fourth quarter of 2005 when the Xbox 360 was first sold.
For the new side quests of course.
Are you kidding? I'm at level 57 and over 300 hours in, my save file is over 9MB, and I have never had any problems. Only three loading screen crashes ever. Started at the first version, and installed every update. Yes, that means I had the crash-by-going-in-the-water bug, but I simply deleted the game data (not my save files) and reinstalled, and it worked fine. My wife has been playing along with me on a separate profile, and even longer than I, and she has never had any problems either. This is on a PS3 slim with a 500GB 5400rpm hard drive.
Sounds like a challenge for the PS3 game modding community. They've done a lot with other games, such as GTA4.
We're not talking about the 360, we're talking about PCs.
Are any gamepads that are XInput-compatible but not licensed for use with Xbox 360? I was under the impression that there weren't any.
I was under the impression that both MP3z and fan-made game mods based on a non-free fictional setting were copyright infringement, that is, unauthorized use of copyrighted works, in a not-for-profit scenario. If severe statutory damages are available to the copyright owner in one case, why not in the other? It's obvious that you're seeing some fundamental difference between the two cases that would affect the outcome of a copyright infringement lawsuit. The only such difference I can see is that MP3z is literal copying and fan fiction is nonliteral copying, but from how I read the copyright statute, I don't see how nonliteral copying alone is enough to rule out statutory damages.
I agree with you that noncommercial copying of a whole work and noncommercial copying of nonliteral elements are different things, and the fact that they're banned to the same degree hurts the public. But any change that diminishes the scope of copyright owners' exclusive rights would require somehow going around the copyright industry's stranglehold on the mainstream media through which the the majority of the public get their information on candidates' positions, which ends up amounting to politainment more than anything else.
Going by the logic of this comment, is it that PC popularity increases when console popularity decreases and vice versa? Since it is always due to limits of the tech inside consoles that cause this effect, could it be that we are getting near a peak of the PC gaming sine wave?
The following statements are in my view extreme
All of your statements are just stupid.
Thank you for agreeing. Now that we have some common boundaries set, we can discuss the details.
Now, if you want to phrase the statement as 'All writers should come up with his their own story', then the answer is an unequivocal true.
What steps should a writer take to make sure his story is not too similar to any existing story?
Make up your own imaginary place if that is what you want.
What steps should a writer take to make sure his imaginary place is not too similar to any existing imaginary place?
Even under today's copyright laws, Shakespeare's works would have been out of copyright for over 300 years.
So we have established an upper bound on the acceptable copyright term. Do you believe that the current copyright term in effect in the United States is optimal, too long, or too short?
If I'm going to make an XInput-compatible gamepad a system requirement, I have to express it in the list of system requirements in a way that the user understands. Do XInput-compatible gamepads say "XInput-compatible" on the box? If not, how else is the end user supposed to figure out whether a particular PC gamepad is XInput-compatible before buying it?
Bethesda dumbed down Skyrim for platforms considerably over Oblivion. If my PC @ 6x3.4GHz Cores, and GTX590 w/3G Video mem and 48G main mem, it's obvious that a next gen game that had to be dumbed down for the console in order to increase content, is experiencing problems related to size.
If you want to play a reality simulation, get a reality engine, not a toy box (not that my PC is a reality engine -- but ... it's alot closer than a toy box.)...
They already dumbed it down too much for it to work on my setup -- requiring 'Steam' (who doesn't support proxies).... so I never saw the PC version working. But from reviews and scenes/videos, I can see .. still used XP-era DirectX 9 graphics when DirectX 11 had been out for 2-3 years. Bleh.
that the game was close to state of art for a 10 yr. old console. But way lacking compared to video in Dragon Age II.5 -- and even a major step down from Oblivion in graphic realism.
Disagree [...] Unless 100% of authors throughout history deny permission for shared settings, which they haven't (some explicitly set out to create shared settings)
In other words, there exists another shared setting that is free. Thank you for explaining your rationale. Based on that explanation, I can proceed to explain my point: It appears that Middle-earth is non-free, while at least one other shared setting is free. So in which comparable shared setting should hobbyists create their mod instead?
Even so, there may be some argument that the estate has continued to curate the universe continuously between then and now, unlike Shakespeare's estate.
I agree with you that continuous curation is an aspect of trademark law that I would like to see introduced to copyright law. There was once a proposal called the "Public Domain Enhancement Act" or "Eldred bill" that would require copyright owners to pay a small property tax on copyrights in U.S. works starting 50 years after publication, which would have a similar effect of encouraging continuous curation.