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Skyrim Creation Kit Now Available on Steam, Modding Madness to Follow

Brandon Fenty — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:00:41 +0000

Ever want to mod Skyrim? Now you can, because the Skyrim Creation kit we reported on yesterday lives on Steam today!

Thanks to Bethesda, all the weird stuff you’ve wanted to do in Skyrim is possible. Modders are a creative bunch, and it’ll be exciting to see what they’re able to come up with in such a vast world as Skyrim. If you’re interested in modding yourself, check out mods.elderscrolls.com.

There were some hints of a surprise included with the release of the Creation Kit; that surprise is a high resolution texture pack that’s available today as well. If you thought the game looked good before, wait until you install the new texture pack – It makes a huge difference, as long as you’ve got the hardware to support it. Bethesda recommends these specs:

Windows Vista or 7 operating system

Minimum of 4GB of system RAM

DirectX 9.0c compatible NVIDIA or AMD ATI video card with at least 1 GB of RAM

Both the mod kit and the high resolution texture pack are available via Steam for free.

SWTOR’s Stephen Reid Clarifies Issues Surrounding High Res Textures

Jensen Walker — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:34:20 +0000

For quite some time, players of Star Wars: The Old Republic have noticed that changing your texture quality from Medium to High has no effect on the game’s graphical output and assumed high resolution textures were in fact bugged. Now it appears that SWTOR was intended to only have two texture settings – low and high, and that the medium setting was an oversight. However, ‘high res’ textures aren’t actually of the quality which has been presented in screenshots and at various points during the beta, as well as during cutscenes.

SWTOR Senior Community Manager Stephen Reid took to the official forums today to explain in a lengthy post why BioWare elected to enable only two texture presets outside of cutscenes, with the long and short of it coming down to the fact that high res, cutscene quality textures were found to have negative performance issues even on high end PC’s when employed in the general gameworld.

While it’s disappointing to learn that we won’t be seeing the texture quality we receive during cutscenes any time soon, Stephen did have the following to say regarding the possibility of including them in the future:

“With that said, we’ve heard your feedback here loud and clear. The development team is exploring options to improve the fidelity of the game, particularly for those of you with high-spec PCs. It will be a significant piece of development work and it won’t be an overnight change, but we’re listening and we’re committed to reacting to your feedback.”

Some good news to round out the bad. In the grand scheme of things, high res textures probably don’t matter to a significant portion of the player base who are running the game on older machines, but they would certainly be a welcome addition to those of us whose rigs are able to handle the increasing demands.

For a more in depth look at the issue, head over to the official forums and read Stephen’s post.

Bioshock Bioshittiness Fiasco Finally Over?

Sam Naylor — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:57:43 +0000

You may have been following our coverage of Bioshock PS3′s texture problems, in which case you will know that 2K have been doing everything they can to resolve the issue, including releasing a post-release patch to fix the texture problems.

Well, now that the game and patch are out, we can finally see what the fuss was about. Hit the jump to see the updated Big Daddy texture.

Before

After

So what do you think? Was it worth the effort on 2K’s part? Did it even make much of a difference to you? Let us know in the comments!

Source: VGTilt

2K Responds Again to PS3 Bioshock Complaints

Chad Lakkis — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 17:51:59 +0000

A few days ago we reported that 2K Community Manager, Elizabeth Tobey, had responded to complaints voiced by gamers on their forum regarding the visual quality of the company’s PS3 Bioshock demo. Specifically, there were concerns that the textures in the PS3 version were not on par with that of the 360 version.

Last night, Elizabeth issued an update to her initial post, following up with readers and giving them some additional insight into what was being done to resolve the issues.

Her full statement, complete with in-game screens presented to help better illustrate the final state of the game, is available after the jump.

A message from the team about the visuals in BioShock PS3

Hi there,

Last Friday some of you expressed some concerns and asked me some questions about the BioShock demo, and how BioShock would look on the PS3. I promised that the team was looking into all the issues brought up on Friday, and now I am reporting back with the latest news. Everything below is directly from the team – they took the comparison screenshots for me and we talked at length about all of these issues, and those conversations are exactly what I am reporting to you now.

Many of you wondered about BioShock’s graphical performance on the PS3, and whether it was comparable to the 360 version. The team wanted BioShock to be the same experience on the PS3 as on the 360. Of course, the PS3 is a very different machine to code a game on, and so the team used a combination of optimization and filtering to maximize the overall visual experience of the game. These optimizations improved frame rate and added the slight “blur filter” that some of you have pointed out in comparison screenshots. This solution offered the best performance benefit with minimum visual cost or change from the 360 version.

When making the decision on how to balance game performance and visual quality, the team did a lot of research, which included looking at implementation strategies and gamer reactions for other games that had brought a title to the PS3. One of the major goals for the team in creating the PS3 version of BioShock was to match the visual experience of the 360.

Below are a few comparison screenshots of BioShock on both the 360 and PS3, taken by the team. I have included the Big Daddy texture that concerned so many of you on Friday. However, the Big Daddy texture is not a good measure for the entire PS3 experience, and so I have a handful of other comparison shots of the 360 and PS3 version of BioShock.

Another issue people asked about was the appearance of “white bars” when using certain settings on certain TV configurations. This is a legitimate bug, and we are currently working to fix this issue and plan on distributing that fix along with the Additional Content game update. For the short-term, some have recommended changing the TV’s overscan setting as a workaround.

Also, some of you asked about the resolution of BioShock PS3. The team decided to include 1080 support for the game specifically for the benefit of some older-model HDTVs that don’t correctly respond to 720 and force the user to play on 480 instead. Our 1080 implementation is a scaled version of what you see in 720p, so therefore, the discerning gamer may notice the visuals are a bit less sharp when compared to the 720 mode. We did investigate rendering to true 1080 mode, but were not able to support it given the game’s memory demands.

We believe the BioShock PS3 demo fairly represents the performance and user experience of the full BioShock PS3 game, and is an accurate representation of the final product. We will continue reading and looking into any new comments that come up on this forum. I hope this post and the following screenshots help clarify some of the questions asked last week. Again, thank you for your diligence and devotion to the game.

The images shown above also came with the following note:

Note: These images were taken from the final game. There is a slight discrepancy in some shots because for the 360 version the images were taken before the patch was applied, which means they are using the original widescreen format, but the PS3 version ships with the 360 patch’s widescreen change.

Another user on the forum then asked for clarification regarding the “blur” overlay that many have noticed on the PS3 version, to which Tobey responded:

i’m sorry if i didn’t explain this well enough in the original post, but it’s not just a blur “filter” applied to the graphics. based on how this game works with the PS3 hardware, and our desire to make the best graphics without sacrificing gameplay or framerate, these graphics are what resulted. when compared to the 360, you will notice it looks slightly “blurred” but this is not a simple blur “filter” that we overlayed on the graphics. it is just a result of how we developed the game on this new and unique piece of hardware, trying to keep framerate, gameplay, and graphics optimal and true to the game’s vision.

Personally, I think the game looks great, and as a PS3 owner myself, I would have no problem picking up the title when it hits stores. That said, it’s refreshing to see 2K taking the time to respond to the concerns of their community with such a high level of detail.

Afterthought: What say you? Was this a non issue in your opinion, or where you grateful for the response?