Originally published at: Skyrim is ten years old | Boing Boing
…
2 Likes
Unfortunately the long legs that Skyrim has had also has contributed to Bethesda’s mismanagement and eventual sale to Microsoft. They were able to coast and take their time developing Starfield with no real progress to show for it because they had no sense of urgency, typical famous studio behavior that ends up being a time/money sink.
5 Likes
Huh. 10 years allready?
2 Likes
It may be ten years old, but I still can’t get it to bloody well work properly.
4 Likes
FTFY.
3 Likes
Great game, I’ve played through it many times. So has my wife. Mods keep it fresh and interesting, and help update the graphics to more current standards. In fact, it’s probably almost time to start a new character.
4 Likes
I’m building a new PC now, hopefully it will be powerful enough to run Skyrim with all the mods I’d like.
2 Likes
Fallout 4 was 6 years old yesterday. Which reminds me, Preston has got another trouble spot for you to check out.
10 Likes
Ooooo how I despise Todd Howard.
Prime example of corporate mealy-mouthed bland ineptitude and an uncanny ability to fail upwards.
As for Skyrim, I enjoyed it despite the systems being even more simplified than those of Oblivion, which itself was vastly dumbed-down from Morrowind.
It has a better sense of place, and there are some genuinely cool moments in the game.
It’s a shame that ultimately, no matter how you start your character, given enough time you’re likely to become an over-powered jack-of-all-trades.
I would love it if making choices in these games locked you out of other options, like if you choose to join one guild, you can’t join the others. And ideally, said guilds would have strict entry quest requirements, where if you’re unable to perform at an expected level, you’re not getting in.
Regarding the Microsoft acquisition, I’m actually more inclined to buy Bethesda games now than before.
That’s also in part due to the recent death of their CEO, Robert Altman (no, not that one; this one).
A lot of their business practices were incredibly dodgy, and focused on forcing otherwise independent companies in to selling their IPs and ultimately, entire businesses, to Bethesda.
Human Head never recovered from their encounter with Bethesda.
After Carmack left id, Bethesda stopped the practice of releasing source code for id game engines and made them non-moddable (id games! NON-MODDABLE! What the actual fuck!)
Fallout gradually decreased in quality, with the last really good entry being made by a third party, Obsidian, who incidentally were stiffed out of a bunch of money by Bethesda for the game failing to reach a certain Metascore (yet another way Bethesda would apply financial pressure in order to make acquisition by them look increasingly appealing).
And Altman forced out the co-founder of the company, who was also the creative brains of the operation, using similar tactics.
The Bethesda / Zenimax arrangement was a really nasty, toxic thing, driven by the worst type of corporate lawyer wankery.
6 Likes
I doubt that this was the only factor, given that it has been a bit of a trend industry wide; but Skyrim was more than likely also the game Mr. Howard had in mind when he made that remark about “millions of people play our games; but we have no touch point with them besides Creation Club”; and why Fallout 76 was released as a deeply mediocre MMO-grinder, rather than the fairly promising follow-up to Fallout 4 that its assets always look like they are just begging to be part of.
They got some re-releases and platform ports and stuff, so Skyrim almost certainly sold more copies per player, on average, than usual; but watching people who paid them $60 once, maybe a bit more for the DLCs when they came out, still merrily hacking around with various mods a decade later probably didn’t do Bethesda’s attitude RE: the value they are ‘entitled’ to capture any good.
2 Likes
I’m still working on Fallout 3
1 Like
The Anniversary Edition update has been tagged Capitalism
I’m not paying £16 for it.
3 Likes
Best of luck to you! Must be pretty hard getting the parts you want right now. I’ve been hoping to upgrade my video card, but it’s just not happening with the supply chain the way it is (and the crypto folks snapping them up immediately).
10 years, wow.
Makes me realize how much of a waste this last 10 years has been.
Going to the office every day.
5 Likes
It’s particularly tricky because some of the mods (justifiably, given what they do) really crank the requirements.
There was one mod pack I’d been hoping to play with once I finished modifying a server I had on hand to accept my dead PC’s GTX970, which was pretty serious power for Skyrim; and still pretty solid for the Special Edition; and then I saw “minimum system requirements: 12GB VRAM”. Oh, sorry, never mind then, maybe I’ll just use my imagination for a bit longer… Even current gen midrange-upper midrange cards still often don’t have that much.
Well, yeah, Bethesda that’s why.
The only advice I can give is keep an eye on the retailers and hope that you will be able to drop everything to buy one when they become available.
I got a new card at a reasonable price a few months ago, after taking some bad advice a few years ago that I should wait on upgrading my old one until the new cards came out. It’s not the best current gen card, but it was available and will probably keep me going for another few years (I work on a five year upgrade cycle, and I expect that it will be showing it’s age before then).
Just to check, if you’ve got a system with more than two physical cores, are you familiar with the configuration changes to make?
Back when I got into Fallout 3 I was on one of AMD’s now…slightly oddball, 3-core CPUs(I believe it was a yield thing, rather than a deliberate decision) and F:3 would hard lock or crash to desktop within 15 minutes in most cases; occasionally I’d be lucky enough to get 30; and it happened anywhere, not just the crash-on-load-zone that is just an occasional part of life in 3 and NV.
Turns out that something in 3(fixed in NV) Does Not Like, the concept of more than two cores.
Luckily you can just tell the game to quit whining and only use two cores if it loves only two cores so much:
Open up the fallout.ini file in: My Documents\My Games\Fallout3
Find the line:
bUseThreadedAI=0
change it to:
bUseThreadedAI=1
Add another line after it and insert:
iNumHWThreads=2
Apologies if this is inapplicable or already known to you; but just wanted to mention it since the change from “objectively broken” to “temperamental” was what let me play the game at all. I’m honestly baffled as to why the version currently on sale doesn’t just set things this way by default.
1 Like
