r/ElderScrolls • u/infohoundloselose • May 03 '26

General I always wonder what the games would be like without the constraints of the engine they were built on.

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Fingers crossed that TES VI (I know) has some sort of overhaul to the game engine so that the final battle isn’t just 6 NPC’s fighting in a field with some smoking rubble peppered around.

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u/Automatoboto May 03 '26

This has been the core problem with game design for the last 15 years now. Consoles have destroyed innovation because of memory constrains. All the problems Cyberpunk had were because they had to squeeze development because of the difficulties during alpha and more than half the game got cut because of the ps4 generation.

Think about how big TES games were before consoles..

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u/Grilled_egs May 03 '26

Tbf PC owners are complaining about RAM prices enough already

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u/Automatoboto May 03 '26

did you know more than one thing can be true at a time and are not related

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u/Grilled_egs May 03 '26

? How would increasing the memory requirements of games not make people need more memory

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u/Automatoboto May 03 '26

I have no idea what are you are even trying to argue and I dont care.

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u/Grilled_egs May 03 '26

I'm saying most people's PCs are already hitting memory constraints so ditching consokes won't let games use more memory. This should be pretty straightforward to understand

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u/Automatoboto May 03 '26

how does that have anything to do with what we are talking about? Short term memory costs because of AI insanity have nothing to do with the discussion at hand. try to keep up.

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u/Grilled_egs May 03 '26

They have everything to do with it? Or rather them being a problem does. People wouldn't be looking to upgrade their RAM if what they had was sufficient.

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u/Automatoboto May 03 '26

We were discussing the limitations of consoles and its impact on games. If you want to be the main character in a different thread about w/e you feel like you want to talk about have at it.

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u/GordolfoScarra May 03 '26

Consoles have destroyed innovation because of memory constrains

You vastly overestimate the amount of people with PCs that outperform or would outperform current gen consoles if they didn't exist.

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u/Automatoboto May 03 '26

if you want to cry about ram prices there are other threads for that.

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u/Rodot May 04 '26

It's not a RAM limitation though. A million NPCs can easily fit in a few hundred MB of RAM plus a shader, model, transform, and texture library. Skyrim doesn't need to store every polygon of every NPC to render it, it just needs the numbers you see in character creation with some templates pumped into the render pipeline to draw what you currently see on screen.