Past Events

It will cost 10 million Nintendo coins. Better start saving up with SMR and Miitomo.

No power adapter for you Jon!

But will Nintendo make enough of them to keep up with demand?

Yeah, the ability to patch after the fact is a great advancement but it also seems to have lead to less complete releases. It may not be causal, but I'm with you. I want to wait.

I will get it at launch day if possible. I will do a CG Switch tour where I will bring it to all your houses to try out. :)

That would not be surprising. It might actually get people to use it!

A subscription service to their back catalog! Hopefully a better friends list. Friend codes suck.

Will it have 3D for 3DS games?

scrypt, /r/writingprompts needs you.

I'm waiting for Shovel Knight to release on my toaster at this point. It's everywhere!

My sources, which are really reliable (they aren't in my head, I swear), say that the Switch will have a snow cone maker feature!

No snow cone maker!!!!

Breath of the Wild looks amazing.

I'm stoked about the new Diablo stuff. The necromancer is great but the D1 remake? That's just cool and unexpected.

Actually the more I read about the D1 remake the less interesting it sounds. It's not a remake, just a filter over an already existing map it seems. :/

But this new armory is really amazing. People have been wanting a way to save builds for ages now.

I wouldn't buy it for full price but since I'm getting it for free, woo!

Saves should transfer so that's good: https://twitter.com/DCDeacon/status/743170497752371200

And both consoles are getting mods, PS4's are just more limited because Sony has crazy restrictions for add-on content like this. They can't include any new assets, just modification or re-use of existing ones.

Physics issues are just par for the course in Bethesda engine games, but this is a newer engine so some may be fixed.

I went pretty far in Skyrim and sort of stopped playing it.

Thinking this might get me back in it.

I have played Skyrim as various races and classes, but I can't honestly remember what most of them were. I know I went stealth archer once and that was my favorite way to play.

My Steam play-time on it is very low, but that's because I transferred my Xbox 360 save over to PC. Nearly all of my Skyrim time (and it's a lot) was on the 360.

I still have yet to play the last DLC. Generally by the time the last DLC is out I've mostly moved on and can't get back in the mood for it.

Make a punch cat. A Khajit will kick ass in melee. Follow this (hilarious) guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhBiNx749Zw

Language warning on that video, but I love it.

You edited the start time to later this month. I think you want the end time then right?

I get that, that's what I'm saying. I mean is that game release "events" here have historically started when the person creates the post, and ends shortly after release. As it stands, this is a 30 minute event. Take a look at the Civ event-- it's months long. The "event" is us discussing it before launch, typically.

But ultimately I guess it really doesn't matter since it's here for everyone to chat about til then anyway. Whether you start the event now or 5 minutes before it ends. Game releases don't lend themselves well to the timeframe portion of the event system since it's a countdown where people talk about it. There's no clear spot for the event to start. Something we play together has clear limits. Something like Blizzcon has a set start and end. Countdowns are always going until they stop.

Actually, I said "have historically started when..." but that's not true. There's no real clear precedent for either. Some are months long, some are a couple of days.

Yeah game event times are strange but even a 30 minute event works when we can discuss it all the way to the launch.

I finally just looked at the system specs for it. I have the recommended on everything and only just on the video card. So it should look pretty good!

Initial impressions: Wow it's pretty. And somehow loads faster. I have no idea how but it seems to perform better than normal Skyrim.

The models don't seem to be improved from normal Skyrim but the lighting, shaders, shadows, depth-of-field, that's all obviously the Fallout 4 engine. The colors seem to pop more.

The same crappy either/or thing with keyboard/mouse and joystick applies. You can't do both. So if you have a controller connected it can tell and you have to turn it off *with* the controller before you can use the KB/M. But that's just a Bethesda thing that probably won't change. Maybe with Elder Scrolls 9/Fallout 8.

Weird, Alt+F4 doesn't exit. I always quicksave then alt+F4

Do you think they put it on the Fo4 engine or just updated the Skyrim engine a bit? Seems like a ton of work to upgrade engines unless they are super compatible.

@jon -- they said in early interviews about Fallout 4 that the first thing they did to start making Fallout 4 was to bring Skyrim to next gen. Back then it was just to get a handle on the new tech, they hadn't planned on releasing it.

But this new Skyrim has identical mod download functionality as Fallout 4, and if you've looked at the lighting effects enough in Fallout 4 you can kinda start to spot them.

But also, I don't think it's a NEW new engine. The Fallout 4 engine is just a new iteration of the Skyrim engine, since they ported Skyrim and its engine to next-gen and then built Fallout 4 on it. Same as Oblivion -> Fallout 3 I guess. Iterative changes.

@greg-- I think you misread that comment a little. ALT + F4 exits Windows programs by default, unless the developer has overridden it. I know F5 quicksaves, Alt + F4 exits Fallout 4. It does not exit Skyrim SE. My habit is to hit F5 to save, wait a couple seconds, then hit Alt + F4 to exit.

It's possible they are overriding that because people were quicksaving then not letting enough time pass before Alt + F4ing and corrupting saves.

Alt+Tab too? Huh. I know there are some games that break when you Alt+Tab.

Oh, it looks like there's a patch for Alt+Tab. Maybe it fixes Alt+F4 too.

Well don't take my word for the Alt+Tab patch. I just saw someone on Steam say that alt+tab was working now.

This is another game that Geforce Experience just balks at on my system. The game itself autodetected Ultra quality, and it runs flawlessly with everything maxed, even maxing things *past* Ultra. But Geforce Experience wants me to turn everything down to low or medium.

That's exactly what I was doing-- using the same save file and checking the differences as I went to different locations.

It's still really weird to me that SE performs better with better effects. They obviously aren't going to re-make all those textures so the real differences are in lighting and shadows. The God Rays, just like in Fallout 4, are killer on the video card apparently but mine is handling them like a champ.

My GPU fan isn't even noticeably speeding up. The 960 runs so cool, it's amazing how far they've come with keeping the chips cool.

There are a few settings in-game that you can change that aren't in the launcher, that's what I was talking about boosting past ultra.

Looking forward to either or both of you reviewing it. I decided to pass on getting this for now but am looking to in the future.

It's kinda hard to review. I mean it's just Skyrim with a shiny coat of paint. But I'll definitely write up some thoughts.

What will be interesting to see is whether they treat this like a game release and fix bugs and stuff that have been around since the original release, or add new things to it. A patch released long after the game's release added horse combat, for instance.

One thing I read about why things might run better is the benefit of the Fallout 4 engine. Because of the new needs in Fallout 4, Skyrim can handle way more going on at once.

I just have base Skyrim on steam so I didnt get the HD version. Reason I didn't pick up the DLC is that I have a couple other games I'm playing right now and if I was going to play a larger open world game I'd finish up Fallout 4, which I've been wanting to do lately.

That said the rest of the DLC was like $28 bucks so I imagine I can pick up the new version at that price when I'm looking to play it again.

Skyrim is a really special Elder Scrolls game so it's nice they upgraded it this way so it can be enjoyed for long into the future.

Yeah, I was hoping for Morrowind or Oblivion as well but their reasoning makes sense. With Skyrim, it's just a matter of porting the game. With the others they'd have to re-create the textures and everything, and it would be nearly the same time investment as a new game, at least for some departments.

Plus honestly, some of the charm of Oblivion is those faces, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bja-UQTsgQw

Looks like they are going to fix some issues. http://kotaku.com/bethesda-says-its-going-to-fix-skyrim-special-editions-1788365568

@Greg "I noticed the volume is too low."

The audio in general is overall worse quality now, not just too low. It seems (as the article Jon posted states) they compressed the hell out of the sound files. It isn't very noticeable if you haven't gone back and forth between them but it's definitely not the quality of the original. It's just weird that the PC version is the one struck by this, since it's the one where disk space matters the least.

Doesn't look like the console port is going well:

http://kotaku.com/skyrim-special-edition-is-too-janky-1788491838

FWIW the PC port is also janky according to some reports. It seems a lot of the bugs on console are similar to bugs on PC when the framerate is uncapped.

Thought this was funny: http://i.imgur.com/IIVGGCo.jpg

Everyone wanted to bash that kids face :D

Run doesn't mean the same as sprint. Run is on, shift makes you un-run. It's weird terminology that I've always hated in Bethesda games.

Sprint is alt I think and uses your stamina.

Yeah I think shift was sprint in Fallout 4. It threw me off when going back to Skyrim.

Curious what the first version of Civ everyone played? For me it was the original DOS version. I loved rushing to and using nukes. Somehow I thought it was hilarious to turn the world into a post apocalyptic wasteland where everyone feared me. I also played a fair bit of Civ III and Civilization Revolution on PS3.

@jon I just noticed the title text says IV instead of VI.

True, but I didn't create the event so I can't edit it.

Ah, you were the first in the list so I figured that meant you created it. oops!

Recently released system specs don't look too bad.

http://kotaku.com/your-pc-must-be-this-powerful-to-run-civilization-vi-2-1786997177

Yeah those are very meager system requirements for a brand new game.

Seems like many new games aren't targeting the most CPU melting specs. Even Doom ran fine on my older PC.

PC, assuming the beta goes well. If not... well, there's always next year.

No, not a case where it didn't meet my expectations. Since the beta is multiplayer only I won't form reasonable expectations.

My case is whether my PC runs it. If not, I won't be getting it for a while.

So has anyone bought it?

Me neither. I'm waiting for someone to put out a video showing that it can perform reasonably on my card.

Yeah that's the weird thing. My CPU and GPU are worse than yours but I got the multiplayer beta to work passably even without custom graphics options (since those were disabled in the beta). Yours should almost definitely work but you couldn't even get it to launch.

BUT I read about people with beefy Greg-level rigs having those issues, so I doubt it's related to what hardware can run it but some weird software thing.

I read some success stories from people with my video card, so I bought it. I got a boxed copy for that sweet alternate cover.

Buuuuuuut... I can't install it. My PC has been going strong for years now. I upgraded from Windows 7, to 8, 8.1, and now 10 without ever reinstalling, and had no issues whatsoever but it's just totally hosed now. The problem is apparently either a bad SATA cable (I replaced it), a bad SATA port (I tried a different one), a CMOS misconfiguration (I reset it), a failing disk or a disk subsystem issue in Windows that can't easily be fixed without reinstalling. So now we're down to disk or software.

So, I'm currently resetting it (basically wiping it to a fresh copy but keeping all my documents, one of the truly amazing features of 8 and 10). I'm going to be quite upset if this doesn't work and I have to buy a new drive. Well, I can cope with a spare for a while but it's slow.

OK so my PC is back in business and I fired this up.

Modern games really don't benefit that much from resolution changes. It used to be that the best way to get more performance from your game was to lower the resolution. That's not the case anymore. With modern hardware and games, there are advanced settings for various GPU burning features that you can turn off to improve your performance without sacrificing pixels.

However in this case I'm running in 720p just to get an extra couple of frames per second. Lowering the resolution was definitely not what helped the most, but it helped a little. This is the first game on this PC that I've done that for.

Still, even with the dips in quality I have to take to get it to run smoothly, it still looks quite nice. And it feels like Doom. Doom 3 got a lot of criticism for various things. I loved it but I never really thought it felt like Doom. This definitely does.