Bethesda: We Can't Make Dawnguard Work On the PS3 371
An anonymous reader sends this quote from Geek.com:
"PS3 gamers may now never get access to the content in Skyrim's Dawnguard DLC. That's the news coming out of Bethesda via their forums. Administrator and global community lead Gstaff posted an update on the state of PS3 DLC for the game, and it's not looking great. Gstaff explains that releasing sizeable DLC is a complex issue, and it seems like for the PS3 it might be just a bit too complex. No detail is given as to what the specific problem is, but Bethesda is preparing PS3 gamers for the reality that Dawnguard, and for that matter any other Skyrim DLC, may never reach the platform. I'd like to know what the exact problem is they can't overcome, but I'd also like to know if this is a failing on Bethesda's part or a shortcoming of the PS3 architecture. Maybe Sony should pay Bethesda a visit and see what's going on."
In other Skyrim news, a mod for the game that attempted to recreate J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, has received a Cease & Desist letter from Warner Bros, causing development to stop.
Is it Bethesda or the PS3? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Consoles are at their limit (Score:5, Insightful)
*Current gen* consoles are at their limit (well past them, actually, most games can't even come close to 720p @ 30fps these days, let alone 1080p @ 60fps), but there will inevitably be a pair of new consoles out next year that will reset the clock so that instead of working with a 10 year old PC equivalent the devs are only working with 2 year old PC equivalent.
The PC will always end up ahead in terms of raw power and flexibility but game devs like the stability of consoles and the low barrier to player entry that gives them a bigger target market.
Re:Consoles are at their limit (Score:2, Insightful)
Yikes.... I cant even stand playing an FPS on a console, let along on a tablet o.O
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, I'm sure it's a problem with bad programming, because good programmers never produce serious bugs, right? It's not like quality control is actually really hard, especially with large and complex software under a single unyielding deadline. Forgive me, but it seems like you've never done professional software development in your life.
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant (Score:5, Insightful)
Good programmers can make serious bugs, but good companies fix their products when they find them.
What unyielding deadline? These games have been out for years and they are still not fixed.
Oh noes, its hard, so we should be able to ripoff the customer with an unfinished product that we will not take a return on nor will we ever fix.
Re:I've played Bethesda games (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't have to be able to better yourself to state facts about flaws.
Do you think Ebert makes better movies? Do you think you should not be able to sue GM when your new car burns up in your driveway because you could not make a better one?
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Warner Brothers has exclusive rights to make Lord of the Rings based video games. It is fully in their right to protest someone making such a game without their agreement. Before they bought Turbine, WB only had rights over a large subset of LOTR video gaming potential, now they have all of it.
Re:Consoles are at their limit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Consoles are at their limit (Score:4, Insightful)
If gfx, storage, cpu, mem were the issue, we wouldn't be seeing Skyrim on PS3 at all.
Skyrim is already on PS3. This is purely adding a small DLC. There's no way that its memory or gfx or cpu limitations.
Maybe, MAAAAAYBE I could see an argument for RAM limitation being the limiting factor here, but I still feel like there'd be tons of workarounds. Most of the new content isn't stitched into the existing world, and I don't think they're that maxed out on RAM budget all the time, they could just cache to disk more, and the game already has to have to cache to disk. Most of the new areas are separated from the overworld, and so allow you to unload the overworld from memory to load the new areas.
Re:Consoles are at their limit (Score:5, Insightful)
You missed his point. He didn't say consoles had better versions of the games compared to expensive high-end PCs of the time. He said console games look and perform better than they would running on PCs with similar specs.
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant (Score:5, Insightful)
To give you an idea, Skyrim has thousands of quests all of which can interact with each other in thousands * thousands of ways.
There's no support in Bethesda's development tools for unit testing of quests. There's no support for fuzz-testing of quests.
They don't have the tools to make a bug-free complex game, and they haven't bothered to make them.
They did however waste tons of time writing a custom BASIC-esque scripting language (which is itself incomplete and buggy) instead of just glomming-on some JS or Lua.
I used to think the problem was simply complexity, like you. Since Bethesda has released their dev tools to the public, now I'm thinking it's 90% incompetence.
Re:Is it Bethesda or the PS3? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Oh, there's a game-breaking bug for this quest?" There's a mod for it, faster than the official patch.
"I find the levelling system to be annoying." There's a mod for it.
"I want a new guild, with new questlines, and new NPCs across the world." There's a mod for it.
"I want a complete world conversion with a brand new storyline, balanced gameplay, and an in-depth world." There's a mod for it.
"I want to ride a pink zebra while casting spells that will turn villagers into anthropomorphic wombats." There's a mod for it.