The Elder Scrolls VI

[nonny]

I can only assume its been through development hell.
Ill be honest, MS can have it. I have little faith it'll be in working order when released.

Personally I think it's more possible MS have discussed focusing on getting Starfield out first and worrying about this second. I realise Bethesda are still their own entity and it's separate teams but MS agenda would be to secure a release window for every exclusive.

Who knows though, it's radio silence over there after all...

[Cassius_Smoke]

I don't have much faith for Starfield either. It'll be like every Bethesda game: Good to play when it works. But a glitching broken mess which will look dated after only a couple of years.
I think owning Bethesda is a good idea on paper but in practice it runs a high risk of releasing first party games that are broken.
Its one of the great things about Halo; I'm not hearing reports of it being a mess with holes in the scenary. Can we say that with Bethesda? I don't believe MS owning them will suddenly change that.

[Brad]

It's a sad thing in software. Someone (many people) on the software engineering team will have said, and still be saying, we really need to make a new engine for our open world games and someone else, in sales, will say "what will happen if we don't"? Is it possible to make a new game on the old engine? And the truthful answer is yes and so that old pile of garbage engine gets wheeled out again. This isn't just the games industry either; I'm expecting to have that conversation next week.

[nonny]

Bethesda being owned by MS is new territory though so we don't know how that is going to influence any new title. All we can do is look at each release and what they've achieved.

I think Starfield looks very interesting this far but we've seen very little. We've seen even less if the Elder Scrolls. I just think basing the quality of those games at this point in time is, well pointless.

It could be that MS shares ideas and testing practices internally and things improve. Maybe things don't work that way at all... no-one knows right.

What I do know is I loved Skyrim... despite its flaws.

[dataDave]

It's a sad thing in software. Someone (many people) on the software engineering team will have said, and still be saying, we really need to make a new engine for our open world games and someone else, in sales, will say "what will happen if we don't"? Is it possible to make a new game on the old engine? And the truthful answer is yes and so that old pile of garbage engine gets wheeled out again. This isn't just the games industry either; I'm expecting to have that conversation next week.

It's actually a pretty good/solid engine if the content is tailored with care. Of course, this is easy if you're one guy creating a single mod, or even a series of interchangeable mods, who also isn't working towards a deadline. Think about how many hundreds of thousands of hours the community has committed over the past ten years to get things as perfect as possible. Studios simply don't have the time.

I can't imagine what it'd be like with a large team doing everything at once. For instance, if you want to make edits to the atmospheric sound effects then the changes that you haven't made to the interior lighting values will be overwritten because for some unknown reason both of these fields live within the same table - so tough luck for the guy that's just carefully placed hundreds of light sources over the past few days.

There are actually community-made tools that can merge the edits from both sources and combine into a single commit. I'd be amazed if Bethesda doesn't have something similar in-house - although, if you check the unedited game archives prior to modding you'll see scrap code and conflicting values absolutely all over the shop - so maybe they don't.

[Brad]

You can’t tell me it’s a good solid engine and then also tell me the atmospheric sound effects overwrite interior lighting values BY DESIGN. That’s an engine that has been built upon for decades and is falling apart. Bethesda aren’t alone in this but at some point you should make a new engine. That point was probably Oblivion.

[fishbowlhead]

I downloaded this recently to see what all the fuss was about with the mods on xbox. Still looks rubbish and the fist thing that happened was one of the characters in the horse cart in the opening scene flew up in the air.

Never change Skyrim.

[dataDave]

You can’t tell me it’s a good solid engine and then also tell me the atmospheric sound effects overwrite interior lighting values BY DESIGN. That’s an engine that has been built upon for decades and is falling apart. Bethesda aren’t alone in this but at some point you should make a new engine. That point was probably Oblivion.

Well, I suppose my point was that it's pretty great if you have hundreds/thousands of hours to fine-tune stuff, which the devs clearly didn't (11/11/11). It's obvious it's been built from band-aids across generations and there's little doubt it needs replacing. The best thing about them sticking with it is that the community will be able to get running with it immediately from day one and start fixing things.

I downloaded this recently to see what all the fuss was about with the mods on xbox. Still looks rubbish and the fist thing that happened was one of the characters in the horse cart in the opening scene flew up in the air.

Never change Skyrim.

That's because you're still taking the Console Virgin route:



The horse cart issue is video sync related, and never happens once you unlock the game to run beyond 60Hz.

[nonny]

I'm going to be a rare beast here but I played Skyrim and I think I only encountered one issue in my entire play through...

[Brad]

Well, I suppose my point was that it's pretty great if you have hundreds/thousands of hours to fine-tune stuff, which the devs clearly didn't (11/11/11). It's obvious it's been built from band-aids across generations and there's little doubt it needs replacing. The best thing about them sticking with it is that the community will be able to get running with it immediately from day one and start fixing things.



That's because you're still taking the Console Virgin route:



The horse cart issue is video sync related, and never happens once you unlock the game to run beyond 60Hz.

Fair play that looks amazing modded up...

But you're still left with vibrating corpses and weapons, horses' bodies merged together etc. so it is time for a rewrite, or a serious reworking at least.

All that said, I'd probably buy the next one even on the old engine. The problem is, we've all seen modded skyrim now. If they put out their usual vanilla Elder Scrolls it's not gonna stand up to current titles visually.

[Finsbury Girl]

I'm going to be a rare beast here but I played Skyrim and I think I only encountered one issue in my entire play through...

Yep looking at my steam account I have 225 hours played on a super crappy PC and I encountered very few issues though I did ensure I didn't overload chests too much

[Neon Ignition]

When I platinumed the PS3 version way back I encountered one proper bug, it was in one of the main towns and involved a story NPC not registering something was complete. Took ages to sort and I almost gave it up but eventually got past it. Broadly I tend to be quite lucky with that kind of stuff

[nonny]

Yep looking at my steam account I have 225 hours played on a super crappy PC and I encountered very few issues though I did ensure I didn't overload chests too much

I'm in the habit of manually saving every 20mins so maybe that was it, though I'm not sure I can recall encountering anything major.

[Dogg Thang]

I have a feeling some of that could be about when you played. I played Skyrim for the first time on Switch and I don't remember encountering many issues. Similarly I played through Fallout 3 on PC late and it was all fine. But I played New Vegas when it launched and, oh boy, I really got to see there the things other people had been mentioning about the other games. Upside down floating people. Missing heads. Scenes just not playing. All sorts of glitches. Maybe most of those have been ironed out now, I don't know.

Maybe some of it is just luck.

[dataDave]

My entire save history was borked because of missing NPCs and key quest items. 60hrs down the pan. Twice.

There was no way I was playing again without the command console for manually rectifying this kind of nonsense. Even with a perfectly modded/fixed game important items can still drop through the floor, or an NPC will get stuck forever, etc.