5061

You must be playing a different game than I am.

5062

Do you understand where someone is coming from when they say “Godfather 1 & 2 were classic, but Godfather 3 was garbage?”, and can you make a distinction between the Star Wars prequels and their 70s-80s counterparts?

It’s like that, except in this case the sequel outshines its predecessor.

5063

A bit late but, i bet your companion said the same.

5064

That’s what you get for taking Astrid on as a companion.

5065

So, yeah, I’m playing this for the PS3 and it’s one big bug-riddled disaster for the PS3. Patch 1.02 came out yesterday which was supposed to “improve” the crippling framerate slowdown issue. I admit it’s slightly improved, but although Bethesda denies it, I agree with other posters on the official forum that it looks like Bethesda turned down the graphics post-processing details and shadows in order to gain a more acceptable framerate. To me this is a hack-job. Also, reading a new alarming thread that it looks like all magic resistances are no longer working post-patch, which is game breaking to be sure.

Anyways, I’m terribly disappointed at the buggy mess Skyrim is for the PS3, for the way they handled the framerate issue (by turning down the graphics?!), and by the new bugs (potentially gamebreaking) they have introduced with the latest patch.

5066

That sounds bad, drish311. Did you have any experience with Bethesda’s past RPG games on the PS3?

5067

Well, no, I don’t understand where someone is coming from when they say “Godfather 3 was garbage”; I’d say they’re being blinded by Sofia Coppola’s performance and ignoring a lot of splendid filmmaking and acting, and I would feel inclined to point them to some movies that actually deserve the name of “garbage.”

As for the other analogy, if you think Skyrim : Oblivion as Empire Strikes Back : Phantom Menace, then we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

Overall though I am making a plea for moderation in critical language, I suppose.

5068

I personally don’t. I played Oblivion and Fallout 3 on my PC but it is not longer up to spec for Skyrim so thats why I got it for my PS3.

However, I have read in many places that Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas for the PS3 both had the late-game framerate issues that was also affecting Skyrim and that Bethesda simply never got around to fixing them. Articles and blogs have prognosticated the same issues that FO3 and FO:NV had for the PS3 would happen in Skyrim and unfortunately they turned out to be prophetically correct.

5069

If you played Fallout 3 on PC, you should be able to handle Skyrim, unless you were right at the minimum before. Of course, it sucks that you’d have to buy it again, but maybe wait for next year’s Steam sale?

Yeah, that was the only reason I asked. I just wanted to know if you had played the previous games on PS3 and had not experienced any major issues. Oddly enough, I know that some people had no complaints on PS3 with FO3 while others had huge issues with memory leaks, stuttering, and crashes.

5070

Yeah, I played FO3 on PC with medium settings so I guess I could have gotten Skyrim for my PC but I just didn’t want to take any chances. Go figure I actually thought I’d be getting a solid experience by playing it on the console, haha… and the last thing I want to do is reward Bethesda’s ineptitude by giving them even more money… sigh.

5071

Tom’s response on the front page to your version of this post in the comments suggests he isn’t really interested in having a meaningful discussion on his Skyrim review.

5072

Eh. It’s a accurate and nicely written review (‘narrative loom’ is an awesome phrase), he’s just trolling with the mark.

Given the 7-9 scale, I’d guess he picked that very deliberately, too - as low as he could get without being absurd.

5073

Yeah, Tom’s basically admitting he’s trolling right there.

5074

Hey, in high school English class we had to provide examples to support our position. I’d genuinely like him to expand on his complaints and wrap that back into a clear point, just like he did in the well-written first half of his article.

5075

It’s just as good as Elemental!

5076

When your livelihood comes partly from pageviews there’s no harm in being uh provocative.

But Tom’s always worth reading, even if you disagree with his overall conclusions he’s nearly always spot on with his observations.

5077

Did you read the two quotes that Blackadar linked? I honestly wonder whether Blackadar did either, because it doesn’t expose any sort of inconsistency in Chick’s thinking. It explains exactly why he loved Oblivion and didn’t like Skyrim:

Michael Fitch was telling me about the way some developers are great at systems, but not so great at experiences. It’s a developerspeak thing that might sound like something you’d read on Gamasutra, but it makes sense. Oblivion immediately came to mind for me as the inverse of this. It’s a wonderful experience, but a terrible system.

And I got about thirty or forty hours out of the experience before it broke for me. Bruce Geryk and I did an article for CGW in which I intentionally tried to break the game’s system. And boy, did it break! It’s a very brittle system, and if you want to push it, it’s going to give way and completely collapse. Once this happened, I really had no desire to go back to Oblivion. It was like tearing the curtain down and seeing the little man running the show. After that, I was no longer impressed.

So as long as you leave the curtain up, Oblivion remains a really awesome experience. I’m glad I got that out of it. I can understand Naked Lunch’s complaints – as shrill and out-of-proportion as they may be – but I feel pretty strongly that Oblivion deserved the praise it got, as well as the money it made for Bethesda, as well as the spot it’s almost certain to find on my list of favorite games of 2006.

But, yeah, I don’t think I can bring myself to play it any more…

-Tom

So he came to think of Oblivion’s system as brittle and easily broken. Skyrim’s system is very easily broken… you might describe it as brittle.

5078

I thought it was a typical Tom review. He articulates the game’s problems nicely and I agree with him that they are genuine problems. Where I disagree, as per usual, is with his perspective. He considers the problems the game has to have such a deleterious effect as to drag down the overall experience severely (hence the “Good” rating), whereas I think this severely undervalues what is great about the game. It’s not that he’s even bad at articulating the good aspects - the incredible sense of place etc - he just makes them into an aside with little overall weight.

I get the impression that Tom thinks such nebulous delights simply cannot make up for the more objectively poor mechanics. As I say it’s a matter of perspective: I’m happy to play games with some egregious mechanics and problems if those games do something unique and wonderful in terms of gameplay or setting; for my money they are some of the finest experiences gaming can offer, so its a pity to undervalue them.

It’s not that the negative aspects should be downplayed, it’s that the uniquely positive aspects should not be marginalised and overshadowed by the criticism. Games criticism is useless if it doesn’t appreciate what games get right, at least that’s my feeling.

(The whole “broken” thing I find amusing. I recall trying to make the point to Tom - on his calling ArmA 2 “broken” - that the thousands of players who aren’t experiencing a “broken” game and are having a unique and engaging experience, means the term has dubious value. In other words, that it’s quite possible to be highly critical of a game’s problems without effectively dismissing what the game does well. I can’t have articulated it well though, because I think he called me a dick.)

5079

Arbit, you quoted the exact issue Blackadar pointed out - that despite that brittleness Tom still says Oblivion “deserved the praise it got” and says its one of his favorite games of the year. So when he takes a shot at Skyrim for the exact same problem, and then gives the game a relatively low score, he needs to explain why something that was not enough to downgrade his Oblivion grade in 2006 is enough to downgrade his Skyrim grade in 2011.

It may be, as others have speculated in this thread, that Tom has different expectations now, but as he doesn’t say that we have no idea.

5080

Not anymore, really. On both counts.

Tom has slipped bigtime when it comes to this whole writing about games thing. I think he’s just totally burned out after all this time. His emotional meltdown and subseqent forum suicide, as well as the, oh, year or two of passive agressiveness on these forums, pretty much confirm this.

The guy hasn’t had a valuable insight or impressive piece of writing for years now. He’s just not a significant presence in games journalism anymore. Aside from the QT3 Cult of Tom, which has rapidly faded ever since he blew his forum brains out, he’s pretty much (and rightfully) considered a troll by the gaming world at large.