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

the reason

[Anonymous Coward]

The rootkit takes up too much disk space on the drive.

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?

[Cinder6]

Well, Bethesda themselves released Shivering Isles on the PS3, and that was a rather large piece of DLC.

As someone who owns the PS3 version of Skyrim (wasn't paying attention and ordered it instead of the PC version, said "screw it, I'm impatient" and played it instead of returning it, and now I'm regretting it more and more each day), I can't tell you if Dawnguard is more complex than Shivering Isles.

I spoke with Gamestop a couple weeks ago, and they offered $23 for Skyrim. Right now, they have a +50% trade-in bonus going on, making the trade-in value $34.50. I'm tempted to take advantage of it, and then watch Cheapshark for deals on the PC version of Skyrim. I've seen it for $30-$35 in the past.

Re:Is it Bethesda or the PS3?

[ildon]

At one point during the Steam summer sale, Skyrim was ~$30. I'd expect a similar (or better) price drop on Steam either during Black Friday or just after Christmas.

Re:Is it Bethesda or the PS3?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that Shivering Isles isn't a terribly useful comparison. It's fairly large, in terms of quests and art assets and whatnot; but it is only modestly more demanding than any other part of Oblivion in terms of other resources.

For the PC versions, the minimum-recommended specs for Oblivion GoTY(Oblivion+all official expansions) are fairly modest:

Processor: 2 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent

Memory: 512 MB

Graphics: 128 MB Direct3D compatible video card and DirectX 9.0 compatible driver

Hard Drive: 4.6 GB

The minimum recommendation for Skyrim, no DLC, is substantially higher:

Processor: Dual Core 2.0GHz or equivalent processor

Memory: 2GB System RAM

Hard Disk Space: 6GB free HDD Space

Video Card: Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512 MB of RAM

And, if you actually want it to look nice and play properly at higher resolutions, the recommendation is double that on both system and GPU RAM, and a punchier processor.

Obviously, direct comparisons are a bit tricky, since the Cell is sort of an oddball; but the PS3 only has 512 MB of RAM total, which must be a nasty constraint to work under(and it seems likely that Bethesda is having some trouble coping, even on the PC side, they cut the various battles in the civil war questline right down to the bone, with barely a handful of soldiers on each side and magic fast-disappearing corpses, in order to keep things running).

I am a trifle surprised that Bethesda can't get a gimped version of Dawnguard running on the PS3(ie. no improvements to poly counts, texture quality, environmental detail, etc. over the original release; but with the new items and quests and arrow-crafting); but I'm rather more surprised that Skyrim ever managed to be released for the PS3 at all...

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:Is it Bethesda or the PS3?

[VGPowerlord]

No, but it could be due to RAM or processor issues.

Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 have roughly 512MB RAM.

The Xbox 360 has 10MB of eDRAM embedded on the graphics processor die, plus 512MB GDDR3 system RAM. My understanding is that it can allocate some of the system RAM to the video processor as needed.

The PS3 has 256MB XDR DRAM for its processors and 256MB GDDR3 RAM for its GPU. Yes, you read that correctly: the PS3 has as much video RAM as it does regular RAM.

If it wasn't clear, this means that the Xbox 360 has more RAM that games can use.

As for the processor, the PS3's Cell processor (and its 7-8 SPUs) is harder to optimize for than the 3-core PowerPC processor used by the Xbox 360.

Consoles are at their limit

[AdmV0rl0n]

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.

Re:Consoles are at their limit

[Anonymous Coward]

Woah woah woah! Didn't you get the memo? The desktop PC is dying! Everyone is going to be playing FPS' on their touchscreen tablets.

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:Consoles are at their limit

[Colonel Korn]

Eventually, devs will move back to the PC

No, eventually MS/Sony/Nintendo will release a new generation of consoles. But do keep dreaming.

In terms of sales the PC is the largest and fastest growing game platform every single quarter.

Re:Consoles are at their limit

[RogueyWon]

The move back to PC is already happening. The proportion of games which aren't single platform console exclusives which don't get a PC port is shrinking fast. And if anything, the number of single platform exclusives on the consoles is shrinking even faster; one lesson of this generation has been that development costs are so high that you can't afford to limit your market unless you're getting a very, very high degree of financial support from the console manufacturer.

We're also at the point now where even the shoddiest and most rushed of PC ports are significantly better than the console equivalents. I recently played Spec Ops: The Line (great game, don't be put off by the title and box art, it's not a generic modern military shooter) on the PC and felt pretty hard done by. The port's an absolute mess, with all of the rubbish around lack of graphical and control customisation options that drive PC gamers up the wall. Then I saw the 360 version running on a friend's console. And all of a sudden, I felt rather better about the PC version, simply because it was so much easier to actually see what was going on with a decent resolution.

The true next-gen is probably still 18 months or so away (the Wii-U doesn't really count, in hardware terms). Developers know they can get a head start on it at the moment by working on PC development - particularly with all the indications that the PS4 will go for a more PC-like architecture.

We've been here before, actually. Just as "PC gaming is dying" is a cyclical thing, so is "console games have been left in the dust". The PC actually moved into a very commanding position at the end of the SNES/Genesis cycle, when there was a long gap before really credible console successors emerged in the form of the Playstation and (to a lesser extent) the N64. That was a great time to be a PC gamer and a terrible time to be a console gamer.

We kind of missed out on this at the end of the last cycle because, to be honest, the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube probably had a year or so of life in them when they were replaced by a new generation (indeed, the PS2 carried on doing quite nicely for ages after the PS3 launch, getting some of its best games during this window). But that was in a different economic environment, when there was felt to be a lot of customer demand to spend money on new consoles and when it felt like a genuine race to market. This time around, the PC's had much more of a chance to come into its own.

Of course, 6 months after the next Xbox and the PS4 launch, the gaming headlines will be full of "PC gaming is dying".

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

[Zaphod The 42nd]

You've just demonstrated a large ignorance of games, consoles, and hardware.

If gfx, storage, cpu, mem were the issue, we wouldn't be seeing Skyrim on PS3 at all.

Skyrim is already on PS3. This is purely adding a small DLC. There's no way that its memory or gfx or cpu limitations.

Maybe, MAAAAAYBE I could see an argument for RAM limitation being the limiting factor here, but I still feel like there'd be tons of workarounds. Most of the new content isn't stitched into the existing world, and I don't think they're that maxed out on RAM budget all the time, they could just cache to disk more, and the game already has to have to cache to disk. Most of the new areas are separated from the overworld, and so allow you to unload the overworld from memory to load the new areas.

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.

Obligatory

[bazorg]

"I'd like to know what the exact problem is they can't overcome[...]"

perhaps an arrow in the knee?

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.

Barriers to whose entry

[tepples]

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.

Re:I've played Bethesda games

[h4rr4r]

You don't have to be able to better yourself to state facts about flaws.

Do you think Ebert makes better movies? Do you think you should not be able to sue GM when your new car burns up in your driveway because you could not make a better one?

Unplayable

[symes]

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've developed for the PS3.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I've developed for the PS3.

[crossmr]

http://www.cracked.com/article_15748_a-gamers-manifesto.html

I've been posting this link since it came out. This was originally written on a website called "pointless waste of time". I guess cracked bought them. Anyway, point 1, 5 years ago called this:

Two, as developers have lamented, the guts of the new consoles are geared to make the gaming equivalent of dumb blondes. It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.

Re:I've developed for the PS3.

[non0score]

While I can attest the parent poster did actually develop for the PS3, I am sadden by the fact that he/she didn't get a chance to learn the tips&tricks of PS3 SPU programming that will, in all honesty, apply to all sorts of performance optimization work. Now to the parent:

For one, if you're worried about SPU local store memory size, there are tricks to do double/tripple/etc... buffering. There are also libs doing software caching if you're inclined. At the end of the day, you just have to realize that local store latency to main memory isn't all that different from an L2 cache hit on a "normal" CPU - they're both around 500-1000 cycles. Only difference is that for SPUs, it's manual work to DMA it over from main memory and syncing. But really, that's only 4 extra lines of code that you can wrap up into two macros.

But I think the real trouble isn't the hardware architecture, but your project's data layout. If the code accessing data all over the place (e.g. "over long distances"), then you're getting crappy performance anyway. It's not like the CPU has great prefetching (that you can't unwrap and do in the SPU anyway) or any out-of-order execution. So if you're just getting L2 misses all over the place (in your PPU), you're just stalling the CPU for those 500-1000, plain and simple.

If anything, the SPUs make you VERY concious about your data layout. At the end of the day, you're going to get much, much more improvement in speeds via good data layout (as a first step anyway) than, say, doing super-low-level assembly programming. The L2 latency wayyyyy outweighs the 10 cycles you're going to save on your tight inner loop after going to ASM. The real benefit of ASM is if you have all your data laid out in a way that you don't stall, then the throughput really matters.

For reference, people at my workplace have done AI updates on the SPU. They've also done full screen SPU post processing, animation (like you said), physics, etc...and even pathfinding! I'll even take your example. Do you need all 256k? Can you not cull out data on the PPU that you know won't be needed off hand? If you already compartmentalized each cell, then you certainly have enough information to work for a while on one cell. Then you can grab the potential references to each adjacent cell as you path to them and stream them in as you continue working. You can even predict which cells you need ahead of time and prefetch them, and discarding them when it doesn't look like you'd need them as you process more of your current cell. It's not like your A* isn't operating on triangles anymore, so you always have a finite set of triangles that you have to compute through before you can do anything else.

It really is all about the data, man.

Re:The RAM is the issue.

[RaceProUK]

The PS3 only has 256 megabytes of RAM compared to the 360's 512 megabytes.

It's not as simple as that - PS3 has 256MB CPU RAM and 256MB GPU RAM, where the 360 has 512MB shared by both CPU and GPU. In real terms, the memory available is more or less equal.

Re:Bethesda is just incompentant

[Moheeheeko]

The real problem here is both of those games are on console, and if they fixed the pc version they would be forced to also patch the console versions, and console patches are HUGELY expensive.

Re:Bethesda is just incompentant

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

In fairness to h4rr4r, Bethesda is notorious for releasing sprawling RPGs with absurd numbers of bugs(and not just technically challenging 3d-engine-developer-wonk stuff, bugged quests, faulty item stats, broken dialog trees, etc. are also quite common and can persist through multiple patches even after being conveniently cataloged on the assorted fan-wikis or even systematically cleaned up by 3rd-party mods...)

Software quality is definitely a hole with no bottom, into which even the smartest can fall; but Bethesda is undeniably a standout for "AAA big-budget titles from people who should know better that are crawling with bugs you can discover just by playing through once, never mind actually doing any QA".

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.