selnor said:
Reasonable said:
Lostplanet22 said:
Reasonable said:
Izo said:
Skyrim deserves GoTY just like the other ones but this is a question I have. How do we show a developer that it's not acceptable to release a game in this state? You get high Tier reviews across the board, extremely high sales for a rpg (that is exciting in and of itself), and game of the year. If they release there next game in working order I would be wrong but what incentive do they have.
On a side note Dark Souls should've been on the list as well imo. Rpg's really showed they kick ass this year. What do you guys think had the least likely chance of winning. I'm going with Portal 2 not because it's a bad game but because in face of the end year releases I believe it went under the radar. |
TBH my view is Bethesda should definately not have been given developer of the year for the state the game released in. I can understand still going ahead and giving it the GOTY award but the media shouldn't be specifically rewarding the developer when they need (given the funds/time available to them) to focus on releasing better tested products. Too often their games have serious low level coding flaws which is just not on.
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Their is a reason why we hardly see any other developper making a game so huge like elder Scrolls and that is because those developpers just can't..but yeah giving an award to game that are already finished in less than ten hours or just want you to do a lot of backtracking to enlarge the game experience deserve the GOTY award =p...
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What? Have you looked into how a game like Skyrim works? It's not that difficult technically. There is no reason for the quality of the game to be poor technically. Once the engine is developed you use the tools to produce quests. Depending on man hours you can produce more and more quests. I've built quests for Oblivion, many have. The content is based on re-using pre-fabricated objects - so you see the same cave corner, corridor, etc. repeating and repeating.
Now the skill the Bethesda guys do have is producing a lot of fun quests and taking the time to develop the many routines for the NPCs. But all that runs on a a core set of tools. Those tools are no more complex than any other large, complex game - TBH the complex physics in Unchared 3 are probably more demanding from a coding point of view than anything in Skyrim. Heck, the swimming pool of water in Uncharted 3 on the boat is technically more difficult than anything I've yet encountered in Skyrim.
So... there is no excuse for the core code being so buggy. The bottom line is Bethesda appear to be code at designing a game but average at coding a game - heck their engine is still DirectX 9 based when the latest version is DirextX11 - and given the success of their games and the time they have to develop there is no excuse for this. They simply don't seem to employ good enough code development procedures - and that shouldn't be rewarded.
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Actually, Bethesda have said unlike Oblivion Skyrim dungeons dont reuse assests.
Annd the skill is not in the quests, its in designing te engine itself to be able to monitor for over 300 hours of gameplay everything the player interacts with, touches and changes. thousands of thnigs change ALL the time in Skyrim. The world is vastly diferent by games end.
No other game like it.
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I can tell you they do because I've walked through them and seen the same assets. They have hidden it better than Oblivion but I've seen the self same element with minor decortation tweaks in a number of places.
Also, the whole "thousands of things" is way exagereted in its requirements. The game does not seriously have to track that much as a piece of code. More than most games - sure. But we're not talking anything amazing in computing terms. For the most part you're talking about objects using coordinates for where they are in the world - just like Obliviion and any other game of this sort - plus the status of NPCs and quests. That's all about writting efficient code for lookup indexing and storage combined with sensible memory management.
System Shock and similar games had to track objects just the same way years ago when you could move pretty much any object and put it anywhere in the game world.
Reading the comments I have to say a lot of people posting clearly have no idea about engines, coding, assets and how they come together for a game like this - although to be fair I guess lack of technical knowledge never stops anyone on the internet.
My gripe isn't with the occasional quest/content bug - that is pretty much to be expected given the scope. It's with the engine level bugs such as the texture load on 360 - easy to check which they missed - and most damningly the PS3 slowdown bug (which has only been eased but no fixed). Those are failures of coding and QC/QA that should have been picked up way earlier in the process.
Particularly given how Skyrim is in pretty much every way just a step up from Oblivion, which had less serious low level issues, and the developers experience with 360/PS3 at this point (not to mention PC) it's shoddy to release in the state the game did - which was essentially with a serious, game breaking bug on one platform.
EDIT: as a reminder I'm not unhappy with the game getting GOTY although it is a bit iffy given it launched with game breaking bugs, but giving Bethesda best developer as well is simply wacky as that isn't about - IMHO - the game you make so much as how well you make it and support the community. In that regard currently Bethesda are simply in too shaky a posiiton in my view to get that award.
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