It’s Over Between Us, Skyrim
Skyrim was my most anticipated game of 2011, and I couldn’t get to the store fast enough on launch day to snag my copy.
Unfortunately, I only own a PS3. Thus, my Skyrim experience has been a gimped, buggy mess for three months. The more I played, the worse the framerate stuttered. Eventually, it got to the point where it was less of an open-world, freeform RPG and more of a PowerPoint presentation on The Lord of the Rings. I’ve seen third-party N64 movie tie-ins that had a smoother framerate.
Though Bethesda acknowledged the PS3-exclusive memory issue, they released two patches which did nothing to fix the gamebreaking issue at hand (one patch actually added a slew of other bugs to the world of Skyrim. Awesome). Finally, 1.4 was released and returned the PS3 version to a playable state.
However, it didn’t take me long to run into several glitches that now prevent me from completing several quests. Ugh. For every hour of exciting gameplay, there’s usually another hour dedicated to replaying that previously exciting gameplay because some glitch just wrecked my shit. My Skyrim experience can be most succinctly summed up as, “two steps forward, one step back.”
After a while, it started to feel more like work than leisure.
I understand that a game of this scope and breadth is incredibly difficult to bug-test, but now that Todd Howard has flat out stated that Bethesda knew that there was a bug so egregious in the game that some users would be unable to play it, I’m over the whole deal. I’m over Skyrim. I’m over Bethesda. I’m just… over it.
Now, sure, I understand that the idea of delaying the launch of Skyrim for the PS3 in order to fix the bug wasn’t an option. It would cripple Zenimax’s bottom line, and would definitely injure their working relationship with Sony. The fall’s biggest game being held back at the eleventh hour… but only on PS3? Yeah. I can see why they didn’t go down that road.
I get that.
But how about full disclosure, Mr. Howard? How about getting the word out to potential PS3 consumers that the game they’re forking over sixty dollars for MAY NOT FUNCTION AS ADVERTISED? Why not be honest with the people who help keep you in business?
Sure, admitting that the game may not work correctly at launch may have caused several potential consumers to hold back on an immediate purchase, but they’d still have bought the game once the issue was ironed out.
But by NOT saying anything, Bethesda has just made me very nervous about buying any of their products in the future. I understand that Bethesda’s games usually have some bugginess, but never to the point of crippling the game. There was a three-month period where I couldn’t play a game I already paid for.
I gave you money for a video game, not for the opportunity to do your QA testing at my expense. My responsibility to your company begins and ends with me slapping money on a counter.
It’s not even the memory-glitch that pisses me off, it’s the fact that Bethesda knowingly foisted a broken product upon an unsuspecting public.
So, we’re through, Skyrim. You’re awesome… when you want to be. You’re immersive… until you glitch out. But playing you is like dating a biplolar chick. The highs are unforgettable… but, unfortunately, the lows are even more so. Trying to experience the best you have to offer has just become too trying.
So get your shit out of my spartment, you crazy, unstable slag. And leave the key on the table.
P.S. Real talk… I’ve been hooking up with this other chick, Amalur. She might not be as deep as you, or as pretty, or as interesting…
… but at least I know she makes good on her promises.
Also, I don’t have to worry about her trying to stab the shit out of me with a plastic spork because she didn’t take her meds. You so crazy, Skyrim.
I actually preferred Amalur to Skyrim. The combat was much more fun and the plot was way more engaging in my opinion.
The combat was fun (e.g. better than Skyrim) but I found Amalur somewhat devoid of … I dunno, “Charm” in a way. To each their own though, I certainly enjoyed the time I’ve spent in Amalur, I just didn’t find myself investing as heavily in Amalur’s world.
Yeah, Amalur is decidedly more bland than Skyrim, in both narrative and atmosphere.
Despite the sheer aggravation associated with my Skyrim experience, I’ll still remember the good times I had with the game in five years.
Amalur? Not so much.
It’s just that, in the here and now, Amalur is an open-ended fantasy adventure that actually, uh, runs for me.
But ultimately, I agree…it lacks any substantial personality.
Sorry got distracted halfway through the post by a scantily clad woodelf flinging enchanted spears at a flaming dracolich from the back of a battle-cat. Mmmm PC Skyrim.
Arrrrgh, I wish my computer wasn’t so…disagreeable towards high-end games.
In addition to the PC platform actually running Skyrim in a reasonable fashion…there are the mods. Glorious, glorious mods.
Honestly, the creativity of the hardcore PC community in terms of mod-development ends up increasing a game’s shelf life ten-fold.
And considering how much content is in Skyrim to begin with, it’s hard to fathom when PC Skyrim players will actually run out of things to do…
Well there’s always Morrowind. People STILL make mods for that, including hi-res texture packs and performance tweaks. The lack of voices is actually a boon, people are more willing to make quests and boy do they.
I still play it occasionally myself.
You should honestly build your own PC when the next time you get one comes up.
Going strictly on the tower, its innards, and an OEM copy of windows, you could probably get a decent/good rig in the $700 range, $800 if you want something with pretty graphics. $600 if you want something that can just play the games with medium or less graphics.
Sure, it’ll cost you more than a cheapo pc, but if you consider the fact Steam has sales every freaking day and that you’ll ALSO be using it for your other pc activities, it’ll pay for itself eventually.
Then again…with all those Steam sales, you’ll be buying more games so…
Can I get an RSS feed of just the comic, not the blog?
Yeah, that’d be nice.
Ditto
It’s not the simplest thing to do, especially since the way they do archives here seems to mess with it, but we can actually do that from our end. Just use this feed instead.
http://guildedage.net/feed/?cat=-1
That will remove all posts in the “Blog” category (Category #1 on this site) from the main feed.
Belatedly, thank you!
For clarification, the way they do archives seems to mess with the NORMAL method for doing it (a direct feed of the Webcomics category). The above link works fine.
The blog posts should be easy enough to spot in the RSS list. They’re the ones that don’t say “Chapter X – Page Y”. Just like… don’t click them if you don’t want to read them.
That’s why I prefer to play these games on the PC, I can mod the fuck out of them and DL player made patches that fixes most of the bugs and memory issues. My only gripe with Skyrim is all the baby hand holding. I don’t need a huge ugly arrow telling me where to go next. Fortunately there’s a mod to get rid of that. :3
Yeah, one should never play this type of game on a console unless there’s no other choice. Still, too bad about the bugs. Things needn’t have gone that way. Company hiding the fuck-up-dness of its game is nothing new though. In the land of the low, bottom line is king.
As for dear Amalur, she be as bland and generic as a 16 year old, blonde cheerleader. A one night stand at best.
Yeah, the GameBryo engine never really played nicely with consoles. Sure, they’d eventually get the job done after numerous patches, but it was clear that the fixed hardware assembled on a budget back in 2005-6 was never really up to the task.
As for Amalur…if open-world, high-fantasy games are my drug, then Amalur just happens to be the dealer that gives me my fix when he says he will, without dicking me over. I’m just not sure I’d want to deal with socially…
I got Skyrim on xbox, because I wanted to be able to access my PC sometime in the month after I bought it, and my housemates were rather keen on playing Skyrim 24/7.
While it’s not as buggy as PS3, there are lots of small interface or mechanical irritants that I know my PC-playing compadres can jsut mod out of existance. (For example, I hate that I can’t buy all the perks with one character, but instead have to level other characters to get all the cool shit. My PC-playing friends just installed a mod that lets you buy perks for dragon souls)
PS3 memory issue has been around Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas. These games are all based on a very similar engine to Skyrim.
The Xbox360 just lasts longer, but ultimately encounters the same issue.
Even on the PC it’s recommended for the more complex mods to apply a “large address aware” hack to let the 32bit game use 4GB of memory on a 64bit system because it needs more memory. Obviously platforms having 256mb(PS3) or 512mb (X360) are going to have issues.
Yeah, it’s apparently the bizarre way in which the PlayStation 3 allocates its memory.
As I understand it, while both the 360 and PS3 theoretically have 512MB of RAM, the PS3 has 256MB of RAM, and 256MB of VRAM…where the 360 simply has 512MB of unified RAM.
It’s the reason why the first couple of years of this generation’s multiplatform games would run smoothly on 360, but perform like choppy dog poo on the PS3.
It’s also the reason why Gabe Newell spent the first four years of the PS3’s lifespan throwing up his hands and muttering, “fuck that noise.”
Yes, how the PS3 does memory management, and the nightmare that is a heterogeneous CPU makes for spec which on paper look good, but end up being much harder to work with.
It really doesn’t help that Bethesda games are buggy at best few months after launch. Worse, is the utter denial that the lack of memory is a known issue (for the Gamebryo engine) and the “all is fine” public statement.
Bethesda games are the best, as long as you hold out a few months for the fixes. Add a few months to the release date and you’re golden.
In the Fallout games, every time I’d download a DLC pack, it would be unplayable for the first few days. They would forget to include the process that assigns textures and perameters to objects, turning everything into hovering traffic signs. That happened three or four times in a row, and every time they’d release a statement to the effect of “WHOA HOW DID THAT HAPPEN”.
And games that crash when you haven’t saved for a few hours are the worst. I have a whole pile of games I’ve abandoned halfway through for this reason. I’ve forgiven the Bethesda games simply because Morrowind was, and, thanks to the power of rose-tinted hindsight glasses, is, my favourite game.
I wish they’d stop making Elder Scrolls games in El Generico Fantasy Lando, though. Blackreach was easily my favourite part of Skyrim, and the Sheogorath expansion my favourite part of Oblivion. They need more giant, wandering fleas, methinks.
Concurred.
I’ve greatly enjoyed all of Bethesda’s games…eventually. Fallout 3 and New Vegas were a damned nightmare to run at launch, but once all the bugs are ironed out, there was really nothing else on the market that compared.
But I suppose it’s a bit like the old “Lucy holding the football” gag…I’ll get so caught up in the pre-release hype of an upcoming Bethesda game that I always seem to forget my previous “at-launch” experience. I always convince myself that “this time, they’ll learn from past mistakes.”
With Fallout 3/New Vegas, the problems weren’t quite as egregious, though. Sure, Fallout 3 crashed far more than I’d like..and some of the truly bizarre visual glitches in New Vegas haunted my nightmares for weeks…but nothing I encountered in those games actually rendered them flat-out unplayable. Skyrim is the only Bethesda game I bought in which I felt that I’d been duped.
I also completely agree with that the world of Nirn is somewhat…uninspired. I often find that Bethesda seems to really stretch their legs creatively-speaking, with their Elder Scrolls expansion packs, and I’d love to see what they could do if they simply threw out convention and really let loose in TES VI.
I’ve a friend who often complains that the Imperial territory in Oblivion was supposed to look like a cross between feudal China and ancient Rome but ended up looking generic like “medieval France” due to Beth being afraid to let go creatively.
“this time, they’ll learn from past mistakes.”
You say “mistakes”, but from a business perspective I think it sounds like a huge success to sell a buggy game for full price. So it should come as no surprise that they learn to repeat their past huge successes.
Absolutely. I have similar “critical bugs at launch” complaints about EA Games Sims series. Stopped giving EA my money. I buy used on Amazon or EBay. I speak up about these things in gamer forums. We need to flex our consumer muscle or none of this will change.
I’d argue against “are the best” – Diablo 3 is coming out in like, less than a month.
You haven’t heard of Tomb Raider: Underworld, have you?
I can’t help but agree with you.
I play on an Xbox 360, so my issue has never been the lag that came with PS3. Still, I got the game the day it came out, even bought a couple cases of mountain dew to go with it, and then spent what was almost (if real life hadn’t gotten in the way) 7 straight days playing it.
I got to a point in the Companions quest line, and couldn’t proceed because of a bug. Ok, I thought, I’ll just make a new character until it’s fixed. It still isn’t fixed, to this day.
My second character was a mage, so I played through the College of Winterhold. The only reason it took me a whole day to play through instead of five hours, is because of the travel time between quest locations and the occasional restart I had to do on account of glitches (at one point a quest item fell through the floor, never to be seen again. This happens rather often).
I shrugged, figuring that there was enough to do in the game that having the faction quest-lines be so short wasn’t that horrible, and went about trying to purchase a house. Because why not. Little did I know that, because I visited the house before buying all the upgrades, none of the containers would work. I left a sword I found on the floor, because the containers weren’t working, and when I came back an hour later it was gone.
Needless to say, I stopped playing the game a long time ago. I sold it to a friend for half the price. Kingdom’s of Amalur lacks the charm and narrative oomph, but the combat is quite a bit more interesting and the creator’s didn’t spend the time which they could have spent on quests, or bug fixes, doing things like making sure that every single butterfly has an alchemical use.
I didn’t have a problem completing the companions questline, but I did later encounter a hilarious bug, where a character who had died during that questline magically respawned as if nothing had ever happened. (Sans all their clothing, which I had looted off them.)
why play a PC game on a console?
Because some folks don’t have a desktop that will handle the load.
Me, I have a computer, and avoided consoles entirely, mostly because of mods – which have stretched the lifespan of my games a great deal. (I still play Oblivion….)
Skyrim felt a little flat to me, in comparison to Oblivion. The magic system lacked flexibility, ditto for magic item creation.
Fallout 3 on the other hand was wonderful, at least after Broken Steel fixed the Broken Ending. :^P
The Auld Grump