:what:
---------- Updated at 08:42 AM ----------
ALL TES games are a broken mess without their respective UOP's. W3 is in much better shape than the final vanilla versions of any TES game.
Seriously. Wow.
I guess we've reached an overall milestone in game development. Technology has just become so wide and varied that it's getting harder and harder to support multiple platforms. Here's the way it seems to have gone:
Computer technology and video games are introduced in the 1940's. By the 1970's we have the first personal computers and the first established arcade games, but the technology really doesn't mix. By the 1980's, arcade games are brought into homes as consoles, but still, they don't mix with PCs. In the 1990's, personal computers are powerful enough to emulate entire consoles within their OS. Companies begin porting titles between PCs and consoles. It generally works fine because the games are relatively small compared to today: lines of code number in the tens of thousands for "huge" titles. Processing power begins exponentially increasing around the same time, allowing programs to become more and more complex. By the 2000's pre-built engines (Quake Engine, Unreal Engine, CRYENGINE, Unity, etc.) are being endlessly modified by companies to form the foundation of their title, resulting in drastically larger and more complex titles than were possible even a few years before. Game code quickly reaches hundreds of thousands of lines, plus separate rendering engines, plus separate scripting engines, plus reliance on specific API's...and consoles do the same thing but head off in their own direction with their own hardware, rendering engines, scripting engines, API's...and this is wildly different between different consoles.
Today, we have games that are getting into millions of lines of code. Porting is likely not going to be even remotely reliable in the future unless someone creates engines that specifically port software from other platforms onto their platform. The number of variables involved in 1,000,000+ lines of code is just too much for human minds to reliably keep track of. And the more individuals you have working on the project, the more you exponentially increase the chance of a mistake being made.
It does seem that patches for modern titles are just as likely to introduce new problems as fix existing ones. I've noticed it's been getting steadily worse since the Path of Neo and Gears of War were released on PC. Those were the first two titles I ever owned that made me wary of patching.
---------- Updated at 04:26 PM ----------
Computer technology and video games are introduced in the 1940's. By the 1970's we have the first personal computers and the first established arcade games, but the technology really doesn't mix. By the 1980's, arcade games are brought into homes as consoles, but still, they don't mix with PCs. In the 1990's, personal computers are powerful enough to emulate entire consoles within their OS. Companies begin porting titles between PCs and consoles. It generally works fine because the games are relatively small compared to today: lines of code number in the tens of thousands for "huge" titles. Processing power begins exponentially increasing around the same time, allowing programs to become more and more complex. By the 2000's pre-built engines (Quake Engine, Unreal Engine, CRYENGINE, Unity, etc.) are being endlessly modified by companies to form the foundation of their title, resulting in drastically larger and more complex titles than were possible even a few years before. Game code quickly reaches hundreds of thousands of lines, plus separate rendering engines, plus separate scripting engines, plus reliance on specific API's...and consoles do the same thing but head off in their own direction with their own hardware, rendering engines, scripting engines, API's...and this is wildly different between different consoles.
Today, we have games that are getting into millions of lines of code. Porting is likely not going to be even remotely reliable in the future unless someone creates engines that specifically port software from other platforms onto their platform. The number of variables involved in 1,000,000+ lines of code is just too much for human minds to reliably keep track of. And the more individuals you have working on the project, the more you exponentially increase the chance of a mistake being made.
It does seem that patches for modern titles are just as likely to introduce new problems as fix existing ones. I've noticed it's been getting steadily worse since the Path of Neo and Gears of War were released on PC. Those were the first two titles I ever owned that made me wary of patching.
---------- Updated at 04:26 PM ----------
Life is simply one, big, proverbial scarf tied around the neck of the little Zoltan in each of us...
yeah, and Earth is flat.
seems to be many parrots here.
well, enjoy your perfect & patch-improved W3.
TW3 is far from perfect, but it's not really bad.
Over a year after Skyrim's release, without mods, we had:
dragons flying backwards; mammoths/giants spawning in the air (still happens today); NPCs spawning with partial/no clothing; broken Dawnguard/Vampire attacks; Thane quests broken by Papyrus quests; crafting/improving/enchantment not applying properly; followers not joining/following/leaving (still happens today); horse disappearing on load/fast travel (still happens today); missing textures on world/NPC assets (still happens today); translucent/invisible textures on snow trolls/bears/wolves/frost spiders due to transparent AA (still happens today); Papyrus script errors by the thousands; dysfunctional NPC dialogue triggers; cyclic dialogue bugs; misplaced geometry; weather failing to update properly; time of day failing to update properly (still happens today); broken main/randomized quests; misplaced journal entries; unlootable/undroppable items; broken weapon/armor/spell stats (still happens today); skill advancement system errors; perk errors; control unresponsiveness (still happens today); hard locks/crashing due to world assets, NPC assets, LOD assets, texture assets, sound assets, and script assets failing to load/loading out-of-sequence; performance degradation/save-game corruption due to inventory/Papyrus bloat; crashes on entering/exiting certain dungeons; shadow striping/strobing (still happens today); horrible z-fighting (still happens today); and the FREAKING DIALOGUE OPTION TO SHUT HEIMSKR UP DOES NOT TRIGGER (still happens today). There's plenty more, but that's what I can recall off the top of my head. It's been almost 5 years.
Only four months and 16 FREE DLCs after Wild Hunt's release, and we have:
pretty severe texture pop-in;
approximately 20 broken quests (does not occur for all users);
some animation glitches with dancers/haulers;
NG+ containers occasionally unlootable (does not occur for all users);
performance throttling in certain, focused areas on each map;
fast-travel not functioning in Skellige (does not occur for all users);
overall poor performance issues on select GPUs (does not occur for all users).
I'm...not seeing how CDPR fails to utterly destroy Bethesda in every single aspect. Their work is more solid, more reliably updated, offers more for the money, and is completed in literally 1/4 of the time.