Skyrim Special Edition First Impressions

DirtyOldShoe said:
I think most people are thinking a bit to small scale of "What Province" No offense. There is a scale limitation in the current engine, one thing that probably makes T.O double D, I, E a bit cranky is that the scale of their games is always off. Take Witcher for example, the city looks and feels like a city, a house will have an actual family in it. Same for the most part with Enderal. I think it will be a portion of a map. Instead of this one Provence that seems big, but is all scaled 1:10 or 1:20

I think they are going to try to go big. There was success with the big maps, DLC and main games, being trapped to those limitations can be frustrating.

Picture either Tamriel, or 1/3 to 2/3 of the map. Scale being improved to be more logical.

This will cause a number of issues of course. Learning the new system they have and coding will be easy enough for modders, but repeat assets, procedural generation of regions will be obvious.

Consider if you will that Fallout 4 is using the same game design logic as Oblivion. You get a few maps to explore, but they are separated by worlds. Imagine if those worlds where scaled more effectively and all connected. With this there are pros and cons. Exploration will have that beautiful overwhelming feel, but the asset use will be not as extensive as the mass of land. Level design will be overseen by one individual on one team of 5-10 people. Decoration at some point will become lazy and have the same failings in environmental story telling as Fallout 4. The bigger they try to make it, the more shallow it feels. I just hope they realize that having separate teams with separate leaders would greatly benefit their world design. It forces a fresh feel, and would cause a much needed conflict in design choice.

Another big hurdle will be play testing the massive world to explore, based on their current practices of allowing just anyone to test with no experience will also cause more issues then bugs. It will cause issues with continuity, immersion and flow.
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Another thing to consider is this - will Bethesda decide to carry over the voiced player character from Fallout 4 to the next TES? No one really believes they're going to increase the money they spend on voice acting by at least a factor of 10, do they? Which means they're going to have to do one of three things if they do;

1. Hire four VAs to do the female and male player dialog with American and European accents, then use post-processing and other mixing board gimmicks to alter the accents enough to apply to all of the playable races - needless to say, that would turn out even worse than it sounds here.
2. Hire amateurs and people they can drag in off the street who will work for next to nothing. Again, that'll be cringe-worthy, and SAG-AFTRA will flay them alive for it.
2. Cut way down on the number of playable races, maybe nothing more than generic human and generic elf. Orcs and beast races would still be in the game, but only as NPCs.
 
Shardik said:
Another thing to consider is this - will Bethesda decide to carry over the voiced player character from Fallout 4 to the next TES? No one really believes they're going to increase the money they spend on voice acting by at least a factor of 10, do they? Which means they're going to have to do one of three things if they do;

1. Hire four VAs to do the female and male player dialog with American and European accents, then use post-processing and other mixing board gimmicks to alter the accents enough to apply to all of the playable races - needless to say, that would turn out even worse than it sounds here.
2. Hire amateurs and people they can drag in off the street who will work for next to nothing. Again, that'll be cringe-worthy, and SAG-AFTRA will flay them alive for it.
2. Cut way down on the number of playable races, maybe nothing more than generic human and generic elf.
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I think it will be more of a hybrid. They will probably revert to the old ways but with a mostly silent protag. Meaning no scene dialogue, full dialogue control, but a Dynasty warriors style of your character talking during some actions, just not contextual dialogue. Of course I think the best option is to improve on Skyrim's style where you can have unlimited choices, not limited to VA for a player. I would like if there was a voice for each sex and for each race. Morrowind was the only title to do this, they did not expand upon this, the stripped it away. Oblivion had (Beast male/female)(Orc/Nord Male/Female)(Elf Male/Female)(Breton Male/Female)(Imperial Male/Female) and (Redguard Male/Female)
Skyrim for player Character has (Human Male/Female)(Elf Male/Female)(Orc Male/Female)(Khajiit Male/Female)(Argonian Male/Female) But not all sounds are custom as all males and females all use the same sound file when catching breath from water, Only custom ones are Orc, Male Elf, Male human, Female human, Female Orc when it comes to shouts. Very limited when you know they paid voice actors like Popeye next to nothing.
 
DirtyOldShoe said:
I think it will be more of a hybrid. They will probably revert to the old ways but with a mostly silent protag. Meaning no scene dialogue, full dialogue control, but a Dynasty warriors style of your character talking during some actions, just not contextual dialogue. Of course I think the best option is to improve on Skyrim's style where you can have unlimited choices, not limited to VA for a player. I would like if there was a voice for each sex and for each race. Morrowind was the only title to do this, they did not expand upon this, the stripped it away. Oblivion had (Beast male/female)(Orc/Nord Male/Female)(Elf Male/Female)(Breton Male/Female)(Imperial Male/Female) and (Redguard Male/Female)
Skyrim for player Character has (Human Male/Female)(Elf Male/Female)(Orc Male/Female)(Khajiit Male/Female)(Argonian Male/Female) But not all sounds are custom as all males and females all use the same sound file when catching breath from water, Only custom ones are Orc, Male Elf, Male human, Female human, Female Orc when it comes to shouts. Very limited when you know they paid voice actors like Popeye next to nothing.
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It's going to be nasty however they choose to go about it, at any rate. The TES fans are for the most part against the voiced PC (many of them vehemently so, and especially after seeing it in action in Fallout 4) while the FO4 console kiddies are pretty much completely for it. No matter what they do, they're going to piss off a large chunk of their existing fan base. The question then becomes which group will they choose to hack off, and which group they choose to pander to.

And of course, Bethesda being Bethesda, we can't rule out the possibility that they'll piss everyone off equally.
 
I don't think they'll do the voiced protagonist in the next TES. Their little experiment with that in Fallout 4 failed, they won't risk it. But maybe they'll try another TES: Adventures or Legend game that focuses on a fixed character some day?
 
Has anyone noticed the Toddster bragging to his game media pals, or Pete Hines crowing all over Twitter, about how the Shortbus Edition is "shattering all sales records"? From my end that's conspicuously absent, and they sure as hell weren't shy about waving their dicks around when FO4 released.
 
0wing said:
BGS could make another game in High Rock, but after Daggerfall it will be embarassingly funny since Daggerfall established high rock to be big, which gamebryo can't stomach. Or Hammerfall, a generic desert similar to Skyrim's icy desert. Pretty much done, other regions has far more job to do than your average BGS employee ordered to do. Black Marsh and Elsweyr are homes of humanoid reptiles and tagaziels of different kinds, your average TES game with be either ruined by Skyrimistic execution or will be a niche product, so these regions are out of play.
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Cyrrodilll used to be a jungle. Until they implemented it and it wasn't anymore. There are a tiny percent of people who get angry about these changes, but they're mostly Bethesda junkies looking for that next fix, so no worries there. The console kids can't remember that far back and couldn't care less.

Also, while I'd love to see Black Marsh or Elsweyr, they're alien and have foreign-type creature people, so probably considered a bad move by marketing. Unless they dilute everything that makes those places interesting.

DirtyOldShoe said:
I think they are going to try to go big. There was success with the big maps, DLC and main games, being trapped to those limitations can be frustrating.
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I hope not. Not from Bethesda. That would mean procedural generation and would require years of work on a new Unique Landscapes-like project to fix. It's not that I wouldn't like to see it, I just don't see how Bethesda could pull that off. without exaggerating all of the mistakes in Fallout 4.
 
Do you guise think I should just make the bug post a thread? I found a number more of them and they are awful. I think I might know the cause.
 
AgentBJ09 said:
Speaking of bricks to the head, the Special Edition got another one: the SkyUI team won't be making a 64-bit version of the mod. It's too much work they say.

https://techraptor.net/content/skyui-not-in-the-works-for-skyrim-special-edition

Can you say "sunk cash-in?"
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This made me chuckle, what a piece of shit the special edition will turn out to be. Let's rerelease a game that isn't in the hype now and which most people have moved on from and updated the ##-bit so that SKSE no longer works so that any mods that rely on it has to be remade. Surely the modders will come back to create updates, right!? Right...?

Then again, this really is just for the console players who can't use SKSE or its mods in the first place so I guess Bethesda just simply don't give a shit.

I'm sure Nexus will be fun to navigate too. Now modders have to make a disclaimer that states what version their mods are for or the mod user will have to trial and error his/her way through crashes.

What a shit-show. I love it.

DirtyOldShoe said:
Do you guise think I should just make the bug post a thread? I found a number more of them and they are awful. I think I might know the cause.
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Eh... I dunno if it really warrants its own thread. You could edit your OP in this thread, put in a spoiler tag and then just list anything you find in there so it'll be easier for people to see just what kind of issues are plaguing special skyrim.
 
Why didn't they integrate the most important mods and compensate and/or credit the modders that created the content? Without mods like SkyUI being ported to the "new" version they might as well call it the "Skyrim Demastered Edition". Seems they still haven't mastered UI real estate and convenience.

DirtyOldShoe said:
Do you guise think I should just make the bug post a thread? I found a number more of them and they are awful. I think I might know the cause.
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The whole game is a bug with as much as it seems to be gathering.
 
Well this is something alright:

https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods...kyrim_special_edition_features_a_significant/

This is relevant to people both as players and as modders and mod authors.

I launched the Special Edition last night and began playing, but something about the audio seemed... off to me. I couldn't tell whether or not it was a placebo effect since I was going out of my way to analyse everything that could possibly have changed in the SE, but I couldn't help but notice that the audio seemed... muddier. Less crisp. I assumed I was imagining things, so I extracted the Sound .bsa file for the vanilla game and the one for the remaster.

Nope. I wasn't imagining anything.

The vanilla game has sound assets (other than music and voiceover) in uncompressed .wav format. The Special Edition has the sound assets all in (very aggressively compressed) .xwm format, which is a compressed sound format designed for games. This isn't so bad, necessarily - it's possible to compress audio to .xwm without significant quality degradation unless you crank the compression way up to insane levels.

What did Bethesda do? They cranked the compression way up to insane levels.

Here's a comparison I put together using the level up sound as a test. The first sound is from the vanilla game, the second is the exact same sound in the Special Edition:

https://soundcloud.com/lasurarkinshade/skyrim-special-edition-audio-downgrade-comparison-level-up

For greater clarity, I uploaded the comparison in high-quality .wav format as well. Find it here at the new Mediafire mirror (Google Drive and Dropbox both fell over): http://www.mediafire.com/file/qm5v9sq9jkftj27/ui_levelup_comparison_wav.wav

(Note that Soundcloud itself compresses audio quality somewhat - the vanilla audio file sounds even better when played raw or in-game rather than after being uploaded to Soundcloud. Nevertheless, I think the comparison is quite stark).

To be clear, though, I don't want this to read as an indictment of the remaster as a whole. The audio butchery described here - and the awful approach to texture upscaling described here https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/59toto/upscaled_official_textures_wth/ - are major issues that need to be resolved, but the actual meat and potatoes of the remaster - the engine upgrade - is a very significant boon that modding could never have achieved.

Further information:

The new audio was compressed at the default xwmaencode bitrate. They could easily have compressed to xwm at higher quality... but they didn't. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comm...ecial_edition_features_a_significant/d9bkf6h/

There is a spectrogram here that visually represents the audio quality loss (new, low-quality one on the right). You can see how much detail was shaved off the top-end. http://i.imgur.com/GDTB3r5.png Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comm...ion_features_a_significant/d9bk3m2/?context=3

Thanks to /u/withmorten for the above info and spectrogram. UPDATE: Bethesda have responded to the issue here. They mention that they have a fix being prepared. They haven't yet specified whether this will bring us PS4-level audio quality (the PS4 version of the Special Edition has audio at a much higher quality level than the original release of Skyrim) or simply revert the PC/Xbox One audio back to its pre-Special Edition state, however. https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods...ecial_edition_features_a_significant/d9btgdu/
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Wow so it really is a Skyrim Demastered Edition, upscaled textures AND extremely compressed audio that sounds even worse then the original version's. :lol:
 
Mr Fish said:
I'm sure Nexus will be fun to navigate too. Now modders have to make a disclaimer that states what version their mods are for or the mod user will have to trial and error his/her way through crashes.
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I thought I read somewhere that Nexus was going to set up a separate section for the Shortbus Edition.
 
Mr Fish said:
You could edit your OP in this thread, put in a spoiler tag and then just list anything you find in there so it'll be easier for people to see just what kind of issues are plaguing special skyrim.
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Done, added two more and decided not to share the cause of the "out of bounds" issue on all platforms and the solution, because I would rather the ship sink.
 
MercenarySnake said:
Well this is something alright:

https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods...kyrim_special_edition_features_a_significant/



Wow so it really is a Skyrim Demastered Edition, upscaled textures AND extremely compressed audio that sounds even worse then the original version's. :lol:
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GG Bethesda, for fucking up the one thing that really didn't need much "improvement".

Supposedly Bethesda's looking at a "fix" for this - http://www.gamespot.com/articles/bethesda-fixing-reported-skyrim-remastered-audio-d/1100-6444930/. How many GB will that download be?
 
What are you guys talking about? Skyrim Remastered improve the game so much by brighting the game by 3 percent!
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Why I don't know how I ever played Skyrim as it was in the original! I now see that its was inferior! I am now a shill for Bethesda now thanks to the epicness of Skyrim's Remastered! Thank you Todd "I'm going to climb that mountain" Howard! :V
 
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