Oblivion on 360 gets another patch thanks to PS3 development.

[Tap In]

I could see if it were slightly worse textures, but horse armor? Hows that much different from having a different creature on the screen with an expansion pack.

lol IIRC this comment comes from Garnett, whos not the brightest guy on the show(infamous on gaf for not knowing what hes talking about on the 1up yours podcast). He once said blu-ray couldnt play DVD's.

Not trying to knock the guy, because he has his smart moments as well, but personally I wouldnt go to the guy for correct information.

Well having played the game, the Horse armor (on the main character essentially) is not exactly trivial, visually (like another enemy) AFAIK but hey... you might be right. :smile:

 

[MrFloopy]

I don't want to comment on the specific implementation, however I can imagine that any DLC running on a constantly streaming world will require information about a specific DLC to be resident in memory while running to know when to "patch in" the new content. How much memory this requires of course is unknown and I would expect it would not be a great deal, however using the 256MB of system ram on PS3 would be less flexible than the unified 512MB of the 360.

 

[Bad_Boy]

Well having played the game, the Horse armor (on the main character essentially) is not exactly trivial, visually (like another enemy) AFAIK but hey... you might be right. :smile:

Any chance it has to do with the rumor of exclusive DLC? What I mean by that is there any chance that Microsoft has an exclusive deal with Bethesda for the Horse armor? IIRC theres DLC maps on COD3 that the PS3 version doesnt have. And then theres the GT4 exclusive download content. I might be wrong on that since I dont have COD3 on PS3, but its just a rumor going around that Sony and Microsoft have exclusive DLC deals going on for the Playstation Store/Xbox Live Marketplace.

I have a hard time believing that horse armor is prevented by memory. Horse armor wouldnt even have to be DLC if it were put onto the disc itself, but even then I dont see it being a issue. Theres already model/skin DLC on other PS3 games on the playstation store with no issues.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

I have a hard time believing that horse armor is prevented by memory. Horse armor wouldnt even have to be DLC if it were put onto the disc itself, but even then I dont see it being a issue. Theres already model/skin DLC on other PS3 games on the playstation store with no issues.

Well the guy had talked to the developers, and it isn't only the horse armor back that is missing, he said that PS3 doesn't have enough available memory to store all the downloadable content at a given time. There will be downloadable content on PS3 too, but there will be restrictions because of the memory issue, so basically you can/have to choose what content you want, but there isn't enough available memory to choose them all and Bethesda doesn't want to decide for you what extra content you'll get, that's why it doesn't have them all from the get go. I personally didn't get the impression that he didn't know what he was talking about, the situation seems pretty clear to me.

As for the shader thing, I think the guy did mix terms a little bit, but I got the feeling he basically meant that the shaders they are using are basically universal, so they work on both systems.

 

[Bad_Boy]

Well the guy had talked to the developers, and it isn't only the horse armor back that is missing, he said that PS3 doesn't have enough available memory to store all the downloadable content at a given time. There will be downloadable content on PS3 too, but there will be restrictions because of the memory issue, so basically you can/have to choose what content you want, but there isn't enough available memory to choose them all and Bethesda doesn't want to decide for you what extra content you'll get, that's why it doesn't have them all from the get go. I personally didn't get the impression that he didn't know what he was talking about, the situation seems pretty clear to me.

It's the horse armor and the SI expansion pack thats missing, correct? Or am I missing something else.

 

[crystalcube]

wonderful world of maxed out consoles

so anything is possible if you're maxed out I suppose.

maxed out ... probably highly misused term in terms of console specially when its so early in the game. Whenever a comparison comes out ...console is maxed out .. seems to be the easiest explanation . On the other hand you always see improvement in games after a particular console is "maxed out" . There is never a consensus as what "maxed out" really means, but sounds cool .

 

[DuckThor Evil]

It's the horse armor and the SI expansion pack thats missing, correct? Or am I missing something else.

At least the mehrunes Razor mission is missing and I believe all the other downloadable content that is available on thr Xbox live is also missing. It does have the Knights of the Nine, but I'm sure everybody knows that.

I don't believe that it was possible for the 1up guy to misunderstand that memory issue, it just doesn't seem plausible to me, I also don't believe that Bethesda has made some deal with MS so that they will spread false information about PS3. The most likely scenario to me is that it would have reguired lot's of work for a very small reward to include those extras, kind of like the rain in MGS2 for Xbox. If the end result is only marginally better and on overall is not a big deal and reguires tons of work, why bother? Certainly if the game would have been originally designed with PS3 as a main platform things would be diffrerent.

 

[nonamer]

Well the guy had talked to the developers, and it isn't only the horse armor back that is missing, he said that PS3 doesn't have enough available memory to store all the downloadable content at a given time. There will be downloadable content on PS3 too, but there will be restrictions because of the memory issue, so basically you can/have to choose what content you want, but there isn't enough available memory to choose them all and Bethesda doesn't want to decide for you what extra content you'll get, that's why it doesn't have them all from the get go. I personally didn't get the impression that he didn't know what he was talking about, the situation seems pretty clear to me.

What you've described is nearly impossible. The engine handles DLC just like all in-game content, and loads them when necessary. Also, the game of Oblivion itself runs on like 128 MB of video anyways, so I can't see them running out of memory (unless there was a significant visual upgrade we weren't told about).

 

[Crayon]

They charge 3 dollars for horse armor.

Do the math.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

They charge 3 dollars for horse armor.

Do the math.

Yep that is of course one possibility, that the developers of the game are spreading false information about PS3 and doing it to only hide their own greed, but I'm not willing to eat that up just yet. I just think that if that were the case they could have come up with better explanation for not including them than downplaying system performance, which imo is pretty nasty thing for a multiplatform dev to do, if it's not true...

 

[Crayon]

Yep that is of course one possibility, that the developers of the game are spreading false information about PS3 and doing it to only hide their own greed, but I'm not willing to eat that up just yet. I just think that if that were the case they could have come up with better explanation for not including them than downplaying system performance, which imo is pretty nasty thing for a multiplatform dev to do, if it's not true...

I wouldn't say it's that complicated. They charged for it before. People payed. They made money. They want to do it again.


If somebody askswhy there's no horse armor included, they can pull any horseshit answer they want out of thin air. It doesn't matter. "Ohh... it's a memory thing." "It has to do with the PSN interface" "Ah... it depends on unified shaders" "Der, therewhere legal complications".

They can say anything they want to an interviewer. We can call bullshit all day but it won't matter. I you think about it, the only thing they can say taht would hurt them is the simple truth: "We aren't putting it on the disc because we want to charge for it."

I could be wrong. It appears blatantly obvious to me. "We can't use this skin because of memory."? C'mon.....

Edit: I am sorry for all the typos. =( and....

You said they were spreading misinformation about the PS3. I disagree. They really gave no information about the problem. Incorrect or otherwise. It was a pure bs answer.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

I wouldn't say it's that complicated. They charged for it before. People payed. They made money. They want to do it again.


If somebody askswhy there's no horse armor included, they can pull any horseshit answer they want out of thin air. It doesn't matter. "Ohh... it's a memory thing." "It has to do with the PSN interface" "Ah... it depends on unified shaders" "Der, therewhere legal complications".

They can say anything they want to an interviewer. We can call bullshit all day but it won't matter. I you think about it, the only thing they can say taht would hurt them is the simple truth: "We aren't putting it on the disc because we want to charge for it."

I could be wrong. It appears blatantly obvious to me. "We can't use this skin because of memory."? C'mon.....

Edit: I am sorry for all the typos. =( and....

You said they were spreading misinformation about the PS3. I disagree. They really gave no information about the problem. Incorrect or otherwise. It was a pure bs answer.

Well he did say that PS3 does not have enough available memory to have all those additions at the same time, if that is not true it certainly falls into the misinformation category and it's not just the horse armor back. He did say that you can download content for it, but not all of them, and because you can't have them all they are not including any, I know that does sound a bit fishy, but IF it turns out to be so that you have some limits on how much content you can purchase for the game, it's evident that the memory issue is real.

I'm not too deep in all these techinal issues, but to me it doesn't seem that far fetched that a PC developer has already tough time to squeeze the game into smaller X360 memory space, but then squeeze it even more for the PS3 and to do it only for a very small gain...

 

[Crayon]

I'm willing to accept the possibility that there is a valid technical reason that it can't be done. But I find it far more likely that they just want to charge for the stuff.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

I'm willing to accept the possibility that there is a valid technical reason that it can't be done. But I find it far more likely that they just want to charge for the stuff.

That is certainly fair enough. My mind is not set on the matter either, I just find it likely that there is atleast some truth in this memory issue.

 

[function]

If they implement the DLC by loading it in addition to everything that's already supposed to be there, then you're going to need more memory. If that 'more memory' is more than you have, you can't load it.

Or in other words: You have Oblivion running. It needs a certain amount of memory. You load in the horse armour - now it needs more, because that's the way the game works. The PS3 doesn't have as much memory available to games as the 360. It follows that you can't have as much 'DLC' running on top of the 'standard' game as the 360.

It's not worth the dev's time to rework the game and the assets, so it gets cut.

 

[BoardBonobo]

1. The PS3 is benefiting from us continuing to develop our core technology that drives all our Elder Scrolls games. Some of that is noticeable on the screen -- like all the new graphic shaders -- and some isn't. The best examples are those new shaders we have for how "near detail" and "far detail" blend together on the landscape. You no longer have a harsh line cutting across the two levels, they blend together seamlessly and the distant detail and land looks much nicer.

2. Knights of the Nine comprises all the new content we've worked on for the PS3.

3. Downloadable content is something we'd like to support on PS3, but right now that's really in Sony's hands.

4. It's done very, very well for us on X360. It is our hope we can do it again on PS3.

So it would seem in summary that:

1. The new shaders blend the near and far draw distances better so that the dividing line dissapears. Not that I've noticed that much on the 360 or PC version (Sad, I know, to own both copies!). But there may be some other improvements that are not graphics based based. Methinks probably better AI and or physics, courtesy of the CELL.

2. As it says. I think mainly down to response 3.

3. Depends how Sony set up the online element. If it's a 100% free service then how will Bethesda profit from releasig extra content. They can't do it for free now that 360 owners have had to pay for it. Or could they

4. On noes it seem like not!! Here we go, the pure porn money shot. Basically saying we got lots of extra cash from 360 owners and now we want money for nothing from PS3 owners (Having already been paid for it once).

All stripped from HERE. Seems to make sense really. Well seems to make more sense than the 1Up thingy.

It's all down to $$. DLC will be available if they can find a way to charge it.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

So it would seem in summary that:

1. The new shaders blend the near and far draw distances better so that the dividing line dissapears. Not that I've noticed that much on the 360 or PC version (Sad, I know, to own both copies!). But there may be some other improvements that are not graphics based based. Methinks probably better AI and or physics, courtesy of the CELL.

2. As it says. I think mainly down to response 3.

3. Depends how Sony set up the online element. If it's a 100% free service then how will Bethesda profit from releasig extra content. They can't do it for free now that 360 owners have had to pay for it. Or could they

4. On noes it seem like not!! Here we go, the pure porn money shot. Basically saying we got lots of extra cash from 360 owners and now we want money for nothing from PS3 owners (Having already been paid for it once).

All stripped from HERE. Seems to make sense really. Well seems to make more sense than the 1Up thingy.

It's all down to $$. DLC will be available if they can find a way to charge it.

Umm... That interview is rather old... and Besides as similar as it might seem it's not really what we were talking about here. The issue is not whether there will be downloadable content that costs money, the issue is whether you can get/purchase as much downloadable content on PS3 as you can on X360, in essence can the PS3 version handle as much extra content as the X360? That old interview didn't bring anything to that table.

 

[Bad_Boy]

At least the mehrunes Razor mission is missing and I believe all the other downloadable content that is available on thr Xbox live is also missing. It does have the Knights of the Nine, but I'm sure everybody knows that.

Ok you have a mission, horse armor and the expansion missing, but what is the "other downloadable content" that is also missing?

I don't believe that it was possible for the 1up guy to misunderstand that memory issue, it just doesn't seem plausible to me,

I didnt think it was possible for him to misunderstand blu-ray/dvd but I suppose he found a way...

 

[scooby_dooby]

I wouldn't say it's that complicated. They charged for it before. People payed. They made money. They want to do it again.

Any evidence of this?? Horse Armour is now an infamous example of DLC that did not work, that customers largely rejected, so if you're claiming Bethesday actually made a signifigant amount of money off it I'd like to see the numbers.

It's probably as simple as this, they know they don't think Oblivion will sell all that well on PS3, being a year old, and are probably only dedicating very limited resources to the port, the 360 on the other hand is their bread and butter and they're probably trying to milk that as much as possible.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Ok you have a mission, horse armor and the expansion missing, but what is the "other downloadable content" that is also missing?

well there is the Wizards tower, Thieves Den and the Vile Lair, go check www.Xbox.com
If you need more data on those. I don't know the details about this Blu-ray/dvd thing, but I wouldn't hang him completely for one mistake he made about new technology.