Imryll
1701
The Witcher taught me that I can enjoy a game with a voiced protagonist–but that part of being voiced is that the PC doesn’t feel like “my” character. For me that’s OK as a novelty, but generally (and certainly in TES) I want the character to sound as well as look the way I imagine them. And that means relying on the voice in my head.
My last one was Dragon Age. It was doubly immersion-breaking because I had just played Mass Effect 2 and the dialogue comparison seemed that much worse to me.
KWhit
1703
Agreed. I love how Mass Effect and The Witcher handle the main character’s voice.
Imryll
1704
But the price you pay in both cases is that you’re playing a pre-defined character. You get to choose skills–and for Shepard sex–but you’re playing Commander Shepard or Geralt, not your own character. In neither case do you have the range of choices that you do in a TES game (race, sex, profession). Some are glad to pay that price for a voiced character. Others not so much. It comes down to preferring a different type of game.
I’ll be buying on Steam, so no map for me.
That said, if there’s some sort of downloadable map, I could get access to our poster printer for a nice map of my own.
With respect to voiced characters, I find it immersive to listen to the voices in my head. After all, they’re my voices, not a voice someone else has imposed on me. That said, I have also enjoyed games where the characters have been voiced. I do feel, though, that the characters are a little less mine. Your mileage may vary, of course.
KWhit
1706
Yes, I like that as well.
I was responding to the person who said that Mass Effect was ruined for him.
I read in other forum a quote from Betheda (Todd Howard?) saying Skyrim would be more like Oblivion than Fallout 3 in general structure. Which i don’t like…
I think that quote was from the fan Q&A and he was referring specifically to quests.
He was referring to the quests, not the general structure of the whole game. Sidequests in Fallout 3 would sometimes ramify into different endings. In Skyrim, the quests will each tell a story. He also said there were more sidequests than in FO3.
flyinj
1710
I just read this over on RPS:
According to that, there will be no 64 bit version of the game.
That doesn’t really mean anything bad when it comes to any other game IMO… however, with Bethesda’s games, lack of 64 bit support causes the game to have extremely annoying microstutters on 64 bit systems.
I’ve heard this is a result of Gamebryo, but other Gamebryo 32 bit games don’t have microstutter on my 64 bit box. Only Bethesda RPGs (Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout NV).
There are patches/mods that “fix” the microstuttering, but they are introduce instability and other problems. For instance, if you run the 64 bit microstutter fix for Fallout New Vegas, it removes the microstutter perfectly. However, it causes half of the lipsynching in the game to go out of synch.
Bethesda has never officially acknowledged the microstutter problems in any of their titles. And every game since Oblivion has had it on the PC. This makes me very nervous.
Well, they’re not using Gamebryo at all for Skyrim, so past (bad) performance is no guarantee of future (bad) results.
Sort of. It’s heavily modified enough they felt they could say there was a new engine. Hopefully they chucked whatever rendering code was causing a problem.
Has anyone ever ‘replaced’ an engine? As Carmack said - old code never dies…
I think this scenario (where a company gets successful and scraps the third party ware they’ve been using and uses their own home brewed code) is probably not common, but it happens.
Plus, didn’t Bethesde get in bed with ID? Perhaps that’s part of where this all new engine comes from.
But in any case, Bethesda (from what I’ve read) has indeed replaced an engine.
Well… just going on the original cool-soundtrack trailer, they’ve replaced it with one which seems to do exactly what the old one did :)
As long as they nix the diagonal running, we’ll all be happy.
For the first time in several years, I’m actually thinking that I (a) want to pre-order a game, and (b) want a boxed copy rather than a download, all because of the Skyrim map pack-in. I thought I had completely cut the cord with physical media, but it appears that Pete Hines has got my number. The idea of playing my 100+ hours of Skyrim with a big cloth poster on the home office wall to look at scratches my nostalgic itch perfectly, bringing me back to the same experience I had with Ultima VI many moons ago. That is immersion.
Sell the damn map via Amazon, Hines.
I finally figured out the Google keywords to find an article related to what I remember hearing:
http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3076322
Well we came off of Fallout 3 and we’re always moving our own technology forward. Whether that’s using a piece of middleware or doing AI or things like that. We had a pretty big list of what we felt the 360, the PS3 and the high-end PCs could do, and it wasn’t like we said “we’re going to re-write the engine”; we just sort of started with “okay, let’s do this to the graphics; let’s do this to the gameplay”.
We started hitting that hard right after Fallout 3, so I’d say after the course of the next year and a half it turns out we’d re-written all of this – look how it looks; we’re not using this anymore; we’re not using that anymore. So that’s when we actually decided to brand it; we should call it something of our own.
But it wasn’t from the get go “we’re going to re-write the whole engine”. It was a priority list and we ended up re-writing more than we thought we were gonna, but it worked out.
I’m sure this was hashed out earlier in the thread. My point was it’ll probably be like The Witcher 2 and the Aurora engine. It’s so far removed from Neverwinter Nights only a wacko would compare the two, but then combat ends and it takes a second before you can click on the magic loot pouch and you think “OH GOD NOT AGAIN!”
Sorry, I got a little carried away. I just hope they only left inconsequential remnants of the old engine (like The Witcher 2 example) and not the microstutter.
Talorc
1720
Pretty sure they said already that the ID acquisition/merger into zenimax came along too late into development to provide much input into Skyrim.
Besides, Bethesda must know something about large open world graphics tech by now, they are one of the few major studios to have been doing it for over a decade now.
Certainly looking forward to the game and will probably pre order. Mightily tempted by the map, but only if the physical copy does not need disc in drive. (hopefully it is a steamworks title)
