Did they need they nerf things??

Oh crap, not again!

IGN article with some harsh words for Bethesda:

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/121/1214016p1.html

Well, it's not a new engine. It's the same old engine with some tweaks to it.

I read a post by a FNV developer that said waiting for three in-game days helped reset items in the environment. That is, the lantern, bowl, chair you bumped in that dungeon/house/shop will be reset to their original location after three days...at least they were in FNV.

Since reading that, I've made it a point to wait for four days before I save and power off at the end of the night. Reading that guys statement about how the game keeps track of every single item's changed state was crazy. That's a lot of stuff it has to remember. There's no better reminder than seeing the dead body of a guy that died from a dragon attack on the ground in front of the bar in Windhelm. He bit it very near the beginning of the game for me. He's still there.

Here's the post I was talking about:

http://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/mza05/skyrim_ps3_framerate_fallout_new_vegas_developer/

Honestly it seems like rather sloppy implementation and coding. If what you're doing ends up causing the game to simply crash and be unplayable at some point in the future because of ever increasing needs for memory; something is designed horribly wrong.

You simply can't state, well we want to have this persistence throughout the while game for every single object. It be nice, but not at the cost of having your game turtle up at some point and ruining the experience.

Does having that guys dead body from the initial dragon attack really matter if you can't beat the final mission without the game crashing? Maybe for reviewers who don't bother finishing games anymore, but not for gamers.

FAIL on bethesda's end IMO. The whole reason of coming off the gamebryo engine was to fix these problems. Apparently they saw it as only a way to make it prettier.

I wholeheartedly agree that it's a big fat EPIC FAIL on there part. They created a beautiful game with an engaging story that's chock full of character development that becomes a whole lot of frustration after your save file gets a certain size.

Are there ways to guard against this? Yes. Are there tweaks you can make to the settings and actions you can take in the game to guard against this? Yes. Will the majority of game owners know about said fixes and use them to fix this mess? Probably not. It's easy to forget that the vocal blog poster is in all likelihood part of a very small minority...

The only way I see around it is to DO as little as possible in the game. That's kinda BS for a game where the whole point is to explore and do everything.

Every time you meet up with a character, object, or enemy that Bethesda decided needs persistence through the world, and you interact with them in any way, their state changes and the game is always reading them into memory to pull up quick. The more you meet / do, the more the game needs to track and the worse it gets.

The does explain my FO/FOV problems to a T. I'd travel everywhere, search everything, talk to everybody, ect..... which apparently breaks the game. That's bogus.

I have no idea why they're not storing these things on the HDD and just pulling them up when needed. If you need to check if some condition is triggered (say someone is dead) to trigger something else, there should be one small file keeping track of IsAlive(yes or no). Everything else should be stored in save files or on the HDD and only accessed when you're in the immediate area... you don't need always have a character loaded into memory, his health, weapons, items, state, ect... when you're on the other side of the world. That's such a waste of memory!

It's really sloppy, and apparently the only thing saving their games on PC is that RAM is cheap and abundant.

Maybe I'll just finish Batman: AC in between BF3 matches and Rocksmith sessions before I fire up Skyrim for any length of time then.

if anyone needs me, i'll be playing skyrim, which i've yet to have any real problems with having logged 80 hours.

I truly an glad you're having a flawless experience. I've enjoyed this game immensely, but it's fought me most of the way.

i do wonder if magic doesn't have a lot to do with it. because there's a lot of stuff going on when you cast spells. and when ever i get slow downs, it usually is when i'm fighting a mage or a witch.

or a swarm of bears like last night...

i was walking through the woods minding my own business, heard a growl, looked up and see a bear on his hind legs telling me to back off so i back off and try to circumvent his territory, but he didn't like that idea so he ends up chasing me along with 10 or more of his closest bear buddies and they would give up the chase.
i ran out of stamina and had to climb a rock and didn't feel like wasting 100 iron arrows on the bears so i took off after a stamina refill and the only way i could shake them was to lead them to a fort and let them fight some bad guys.

Bears always seem to materialize out of thin air when I'm traipsing through Skyrim. Inevitably they end up scaring the sh!t out of me....

By the way, patch 1.03 should have gone live last night...or maybe it's today. It doesn't address some of the lag people are still experiencing. I'm too lazy this morning to post a link to all of the changes.

Started the Dark Brotherhood questline last night. I haven't even done the first mission. Just woke up and have a choice to make between three things. Looking forward to playing these tonight...I've heard their questline was great in Oblivion.