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.

Comments

Is it Bethesda or the PS3?

[0racle]

One way to answer that question is to ask are any other companies having problems with large DLC on the PS3?

Re:Is it Bethesda or the PS3?

[Simply Curious]

Mods. Bethesda has one of the best user communities for making mods. Any Bethesda game should only ever be purchased for the PC because the mods will extend and improve the game dramatically.

"Oh, there's a game-breaking bug for this quest?" There's a mod for it, faster than the official patch.
"I find the levelling system to be annoying." There's a mod for it.
"I want a new guild, with new questlines, and new NPCs across the world." There's a mod for it.
"I want a complete world conversion with a brand new storyline, balanced gameplay, and an in-depth world." There's a mod for it.
"I want to ride a pink zebra while casting spells that will turn villagers into anthropomorphic wombats." There's a mod for it.

Re:Consoles are at their limit

[Anonymous Coward]

*Current gen* consoles are at their limit (well past them, actually, most games can't even come close to 720p @ 30fps these days, let alone 1080p @ 60fps), but there will inevitably be a pair of new consoles out next year that will reset the clock so that instead of working with a 10 year old PC equivalent the devs are only working with 2 year old PC equivalent.

The PC will always end up ahead in terms of raw power and flexibility but game devs like the stability of consoles and the low barrier to player entry that gives them a bigger target market.

Re:Bethesda is just incompentant

[i kan reed]

Yep, I'm sure it's a problem with bad programming, because good programmers never produce serious bugs, right? It's not like quality control is actually really hard, especially with large and complex software under a single unyielding deadline. Forgive me, but it seems like you've never done professional software development in your life.

Re:Bethesda is just incompentant

[h4rr4r]

Good programmers can make serious bugs, but good companies fix their products when they find them.

What unyielding deadline? These games have been out for years and they are still not fixed.

Oh noes, its hard, so we should be able to ripoff the customer with an unfinished product that we will not take a return on nor will we ever fix.

Re:Consoles are at their limit

[Gr8Apes]

Should developers move back to OpenGL, then the API is relatively fixed, and these particular issues all go away. What's more, 1 codebase for all platforms, and then consoles will essentially die, to be replaced by commodity small form factor PCs that will perform better, are most likely upgradable regarding CPU, and just all around better. Since DirectX seems to be slower than OpenGL, there's no argument for coding to that proprietary API anymore anyway, and perhaps we really can move to a single graphics API, which would improve things across the board even if you can't take advantage of that one little hack on a specific system to get that 401 fps vs 400....

Re:Consoles are at their limit

[Narishma]

You missed his point. He didn't say consoles had better versions of the games compared to expensive high-end PCs of the time. He said console games look and perform better than they would running on PCs with similar specs.

Re:Bethesda is just incompentant

[Blakey Rat]

To give you an idea, Skyrim has thousands of quests all of which can interact with each other in thousands * thousands of ways.

There's no support in Bethesda's development tools for unit testing of quests. There's no support for fuzz-testing of quests.

They don't have the tools to make a bug-free complex game, and they haven't bothered to make them.

They did however waste tons of time writing a custom BASIC-esque scripting language (which is itself incomplete and buggy) instead of just glomming-on some JS or Lua.

I used to think the problem was simply complexity, like you. Since Bethesda has released their dev tools to the public, now I'm thinking it's 90% incompetence.