PhoneLobster Hates Skyrim

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Here. Please keep all bitching to this thread.

[DSMatticus]

3) OK so I don't know anything about programeratiation. But it's [flight] unpossible for balance!

Yeah, we didn't stop talking about the technical aspects of it because anyone conceded the point. You just gave me the juicier target of outright declaring that all melee characters should go obsolete and that's okay in a game where melee is and always has been the most common PC and NPC archetype.

1) The engine uses marker-based triggers for things. As in, you step here, X happens. It does this in sometimes subtle ways, like consider an interior cell in Fallout 3: you can mark an area to basically not exist (for performance reasons) until certain conditions are met about marker/line of sight to a marker. I.e., you can be in Room A, and Room B is not even being considered yet. And then you move into a certain position, and magic happens and suddenly the event triggers and now Room B exists. If you approach an open doorway where this has been done slowly, or from far away, or from the right angle, you can actually see that the other room does not exist yet, and you are looking outside the map.

Flight changes the way you handle those, because you are no longer considering these transitions as 2d, you are considering them in 3d. Mistakes means someone flies out of the map. This makes level design and level testing harder.

2) Collision detection is sometimes taken for granting. After all, the wall is graphically complete, how hard can it be to make sure the wall is collision complete? The answer is that it's actually kind of tricky, because they're entirely different processes. It wasn't too hard to fly out of an interior map in Morrowind if you knew what you were doing, and I did it on accident a few times in different caves. Again, this really comes down to testing. It's a fixable problem, but you have to actually catch it and adding 3d level tests is a non-trivial decision.

It's easier for good ol' 2d foot exploration because that is how the game is actually played 99% of the time, so collision detection mistakes in the level design get caught (you can still run yourself through the occasional corner if you try hard enough). Now you may look back at the good old days and say that didn't used to be a problem, and in the good old days videogames were collision maps with graphics. Increased graphical complexity really has had lead to complexity in other parts of the engine.

3) Exterior flight has a lot of the same marker-based problems, but also; remember Skyrim does lots of partial rendering of far-off graphical cells. You can actually see the mountains in the distance. The more cells you can see, the more busywork it has to do to draw far off sights.

Now you hand-wavingly dismiss a lot of this shit as, "they should be able to optimize for it and test for it!" But that is not how it works. Optimizing and testing are not expense free endeavors. They eat money like everything else you do, and if a feature requires further engine optimization or further testing, that means there are other things that aren't getting done with that money. Just because it's not an impossible feature doesn't mean it actually isn't difficult, and if you've actually spent any time working in software you are already aware of this and your bitching doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

This is before we even get into the balance encounter issues that actually existed and you ignore because I guess you think "30 second invulnerability to melee" for a cheap magicka potion you would have had to probably use anyway is totally okay. Nevermind the total feasibility of constant effect or cast on use levitate enchantments. Also ignore the existence and relative cheapness of levitate potions. The fact that it sometimes costs magicka or money means it's hard!

[PhoneLobster]

Do we need a thread for this? because I thought I was done talking to this idiot on this topic.

His grasping of the realities of programming as per this last post is just ludicrously fantastical. The entire thing basically amounts to "They can't program 3D! Events, collision detection or rendering! It's Unpossible!"

WTF? I need to address this? Really?

It is simply blatantly bald faced STUPID. These are not technological limitations. These are structural choices the designers made over a five year development process that are basically bad choices.

And that's what makes this guy a fucking idiot because he seems to think things like 2d event markers are mandated, required, unavoidable limitations, or even a good thing in their own right.

How fucking stupid can you be?

[Josh_Kablack]

PhoneLobster Hates Skyrim

Yes, he does.

[DSMatticus]

What the fuck, PL? Seriously? You said you were an IT guy. How the fuck do you not get software development?

These are not technological limitations. These are structural choices the designers made over a five year development process

That is the entire god damn point. Every feature has a time and budget attached to it (in design, in implementation, and in testing). Their time and budget are necessarily finite. There are a fucking huge number of things that are technologically possible and still didn't make it in their game. The fact that there are things which are technologically possible and didn't make it into the game should surprise or offend exactly zero fucking people, yet you manage to get hung up on this point.

And levitate turns out to be a non-trivial addition. It would require that they rework instead of reuse parts of their engine code, and level design and testing strategies. Which means other things aren't getting done instead. The decision to not make levitate a core game mechanic is a cost-benefit analysis. Having played Morrowind, Oblivion, and even recently giving Daggerfall (shudder) another go since this Elder Scrolls discussion started, I am seriously not seeing what levitate has ever been used to bring to the game of any consequence.

But fuck it, we're done. I am completely out of patience for your posts. The last few have nailed the magic ratio of stupid things and insults that makes you insufferable.

[PhoneLobster]

And levitate turns out to be a non-trivial addition.

It's a trivial add on if they hadn't written lazy code that doesn't account well for three dimensional space.

The setting for Skyrim is mountains it's theme is fighting flying monsters. The benefits of having a robust three dimensional engine are massive for such a gain before accounting for flight. The level design and cut scene benefits alone...

But, sort of, yes. If you decide not to include flight and spend five years reinforcing that with bad engine design the result will be an engine that "can't" accommodate flight (though even that is... rather a stretch and you don't fucking know you idiot, you don't actually know shit about their code or engine do you? Niether of us can say what their engine is strictly capable of and how much rewriting it needs to stop sucking so fucking much. What we CAN say is what it should be capable of based on actual technological limitations, and it's rival first person sand box engines.

And in the mean time OTHER sand box games ARE accomodating flight. The GTA series has had it pretty much since forever. Assassins Creed has it, Saints Row has it, every god damn first person engine except for the one Bethusda uses does flight.

ALL OF THEM.

EVERY LAST FUCKING ONE.

Well. Close enough to all of them anyway. Maybe Bully didn't have flight? Mind you. Unlike Skyrim it was pretty awesome...

[Gx1080]

PhoneLobster Hates Skyrim

A good question is: Does PhoneLobster likes something?

*ba-dum-tsss*

Couldn't resist.

[name_here]

I'm pretty sure Bethesda's engine is theoretically capable of supporting flight given sufficient processing power and proper level design, seeing as how it supports being knocked around and jumping. You'd just have to fiddle with the gravity settings and suchlike.

But structuring a game to permit flying wherever and whenever the fuck you want is not free, both in monetary terms and in terms of what else you can include without bumping up the system requirements. Which would be why Assassin's Creed has only a handful of flying missions. And the way Elder Scrolls game are structured doesn't really support having a small number of flying missions because it doesn't have a mission structure and so if they gave you a ring of flight for the duration of one quest you could simply not finish the quest and carry the ring around.

[Lago PARANOIA]

and even recently giving Daggerfall (shudder) another go since this Elder Scrolls discussion started,

To me, Daggerfall is like Wizardry 7 or Shadows over Riva. I have genuinely fond memories of playing that game (I can't even remember all of the lols I have had by freaking myself and friends out over showing the DEAD HEAD ROOM NOOOOO) there's no denying that even though the games have a lot of charm to them they're also genuinely awful.

Well, actually, I have a lot darker feelings towards Daggerfall than I do towards those other two games because the problems that really galled me about Daggerfall even at the time (overly difficult quests, completely unbalanced shop system, completely unbalanced character creation system, bugs out the wazoo) they should've recognized as bad ideas even then. I can forgive Shadows over Riva's disease-happiness or CotDS's unidentified demonic spiders because they at least seemed like they could've been cool ideas.

Even then of course Daggerfall wasn't the first game that I genuinely hated. As in the first game that brings back cold, hateful feelings when I think about it. Like, caused me to sneer and want to snap the cartridge in half even if I got yelled at by my parents. Those games came a bit before I played Daggerfall. That would be either Lord of the Rings SNES, Musya (also SNES), or Porky Pig's Haunted Holiday. I can't really remember, the days of Blockbuster Weekend Roulette kind of bleed together.

[PhoneLobster]

Assassin's Creed has only a handful of flying missions.

Assassin's Creed has fairly extreme vertical movement. Constant sweeping flying camera views. The ability to dive off tall places and land in hay stacks and such. And lately the ability to base jump and glide from basically anything tallish.

It only gives out a few tacked on actual flying machine missions. But THAT is doable because the engine can handle "being high up" and the benefits of it handling that are actual very broad.

If we believed DSM those features are all unpossible and the tacked on flight missions should be unpossible because hey you CAN'T add stuff to a program!

[Kaelik]

I bet if Skyrim allowed you to climb mountains and jump off them it would also be like a game that let's you be high up.

Oh, wow, that's retarded. Because being high is totally flying in games that you like, but not in other games.

[Dominicius]

I came here expecting the first post to be one of PL's long and hilarious rants.

I was disappointed.

[Avoraciopoctules]

My main problem with Skyrim is that the modding tools haven't been released yet. Like Neverwinter Nights, more than half the reason I bought it was the possibility of creating new stuff using the engine.

It should be interesting seeing how long it takes for some kind of flight to be added to Skyrim once Bethesda finally releases the part of the game I'm most interested in.

[PhoneLobster]

Oh, wow, that's retarded. Because being high is totally flying in games that you like, but not in other games.

DSM is specifically stating the Skyrim engine is incapable of rendering views from "up high".

If you are saying "actually I think the rendered views from up the mountains are pretty good", then you are agreeing that DSM is bat shit crazy and knows nothing about 3D graphics technologies including the one he is specifically talking about and using.

Because if the views rendered from up the mountains ARE acceptable... then there is no graphical impediment to implementing flight.

[name_here]

DSM is specifically stating the Skyrim engine is incapable of rendering views from "up high".

[quote="What DSM actually said]The more cells you can see, the more busywork it has to do to draw far off sights. [/quote]

The resultant implication is that the more far-off sights are displayed, the less can actually be going on before you take a performance hit. I'm willing to bet that somewhere in Skyrim there's a massive fight where mages are throwing particle effects at a dragon while stuff is on fire, and furthermore I'm willing to bet that said fight does not take place on the very peak of the highest mountain in the game. Because there's only so much power in the lowest-end graphics card the game is listed as requiring and the combat has to share that with the scenery, and the less of it you're devoting to scenery the more you're devoting to combat.

This is before getting into the bit where every NPC you're close enough to interact with has a rather large chunk of RAM associated with and flying means a giant fuckoff wall won't keep you from interacting with people on the far side without going through a loading door.

[hyzmarca]

DSM is specifically stating the Skyrim engine is incapable of rendering views from "up high".

[quote="What DSM actually said]The more cells you can see, the more busywork it has to do to draw far off sights.

The resultant implication is that the more far-off sights are displayed, the less can actually be going on before you take a performance hit. I'm willing to bet that somewhere in Skyrim there's a massive fight where mages are throwing particle effects at a dragon while stuff is on fire, and furthermore I'm willing to bet that said fight does not take place on the very peak of the highest mountain in the game. Because there's only so much power in the lowest-end graphics card the game is listed as requiring and the combat has to share that with the scenery, and the less of it you're devoting to scenery the more you're devoting to combat.
[/quote]

Morrowind had a draw distance slider. It worked.



Anyway, a bigger complaint in Skyrim is that no choice you make actually matters. The main quest railroad plays out the same no matter what you do and the sidequests don't really have any significant impact on the plot. Morrowind and Oblivion have the same problem and they would have been better off focusing on that issue than improving the graphics or adding dragon shouts.

[PhoneLobster]

Morrowind had a draw distance slider. It worked.

Indeed it's a pretty standard setting for games of that sort in general. So much so that Skyrim's most immediately similar competitor, a mysterious game known as Skyrim has a NUMBER of draw distance and object distance sliders.

It's so crazy it just might already work.

Anyway, a bigger complaint in Skyrim is that no choice you make actually matters. The main quest railroad plays out the same

This became most noticeable to me when I tried restarting the game and decided to see what different things happens if you run off with the OTHER guy during the opening sequence.

The answer, fuck all. You even escape through the same damn caves, fighting the same opponents, end up at the same village and end up doing the same main quests for the same Jarl in the same damn town.

I had not expected that. I had expected what was presented at the time as an important choice to actually BE an important choice about factional allegience rather than, you know, not be a choice at all. I mean what the hell was the point "Quickly pick where your loyalty lies, you can choose only one! But you know, whatever, it's not like it matters...".

[Kaelik]

fighting the same opponents

This is not true. You fight pallette swaps of the human enemies. Red and Blue are different colors.

(Actually, the torturer room technically presents a different combat, since Nords don't have magicians. But that one single fight is slightly different doesn't mean a lot.)

[Vnonymous]

There actually are technical limitations preventing skyrim from having flight, and those technical limitations are spelled "console". The reason it doesn't have open cities, the same reason Oblivion doesn't have open cities, is because to make the game work at all on consoles they either have to make it look much worse or use a variety of tricks to hide the performance hits, and a lot of those tricks are incompatible with flight. I can play Morrowind on my current computer with a draw distance of just about infinity and fly around wherever I want.

This applies to spells like teleport as well - you just can't do complex and branching quests on a console when everything has to be fully voice acted and blah blah blah. On a pc you'd be able to use multiple discs or a direct download service so as not to worry about filesize - but not all consoles have hard-drives and skyrim really wouldn't work with disc-swapping. If you read the developer blogs, they say that they don't have stuff like teleports because it means you can't have certain quests(which is a bullshit reason because marking some silly dungeon as unteleportable or making teleports require a crystal or something is easy), but the big reason is console limitations.

Oblivion had a whole lot of its' technical deficiencies fixed with mods(open cities comes to mind) but it is a lot harder to fix quest deficiencies like a lack of choices, a lack of branching and a lack of connectedness with the rest of the world. Skyrim is going to be the same, and until people start adding their own quests(which is a real crapshoot - many more people make sex mods and the like so you can play a Dragonlayer than decent quests) the problems with the game are still going to be there.

Also, if you care, you can fly in Skyrim - open up the console and enter "tcl". You'll clip through everything, but you can fly and see things from high up just fine.

[name_here]

Okay, point of order: computers have finite graphics power and RAM too. You can play Morrowind on your current computer with a draw distance of infinity. What happens if you do that on the computer listed under "Minimum System Requirements"? Because I'm betting the answer isn't it runs at 30 frames per second.

And branching quests aren't just a matter of file size. If you make a quest with branching that has persistent effects, you need to design and test both branches, and then you need to create two versions of every quest that you want it to have effects on. And that's if you have to do them in a specific order. If you can do the other quests either before or after the branching one, that's three versions.

[Dominicius]

Speaking of the engine...

[Vnonymous]

Okay, point of order: computers have finite graphics power and RAM too. You can play Morrowind on your current computer with a draw distance of infinity. What happens if you do that on the computer listed under "Minimum System Requirements"? Because I'm betting the answer isn't it runs at 30 frames per second.

And branching quests aren't just a matter of file size. If you make a quest with branching that has persistent effects, you need to design and test both branches, and then you need to create two versions of every quest that you want it to have effects on. And that's if you have to do them in a specific order. If you can do the other quests either before or after the branching one, that's three versions.

Skyrim's system requirements are very generous. Computers are much more powerful now than they were when the current generation of consoles was created, and Skyrim has to be able to run on those consoles. The Witcher 2 has absolutely amazing graphics, and the thought of skyrim rendered with similar technology is amazing.

And yes, branching quests aren't just a matter of filesize. Skyrim even has some branching quests in it - but filesize is the big killer. Consoles can't support it, so out it goes.

[Blasted]

Morrowind had a draw distance slider. It worked.

Indeed it's a pretty standard setting for games of that sort in general. So much so that Skyrim's most immediately similar competitor, a mysterious game known as Skyrim has a NUMBER of draw distance and object distance sliders.

It's so crazy it just might already work.

Draw distance in Morrowind only affected the cell you were currently in. Almost the same with Skyrim.
Flight could work in Morrowind because it only ever drew the single cell. You just didn't get to see outside that cell without using mods.

Having said that I suspect the reason to remove it as a feature had more to do with breaking the story and gameplay.