News: Bethesda: Skyrim on Wii U is Possible Page 1

Bethesda: Skyrim on Wii U is Possible

25.09.2011

Bethesda: Skyrim on Wii U is Possible on Nintendo gaming news, videos and discussion

Bethesda's Pete Hines was recently quizzed on whether The Elder Scrolls V would be possible on Nintendo's upcoming Wii U.

The eagerly anticipated 14th installment of the long-running RPG series, Skyrim, is due for release on the Wii's high definition brothers Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC this November. With the Wii U playing catch-up and said to boast similar hardware specs, could a port of Skyrim be in order?

According to Hines, "it's definitely a possibility for the future", but the console would have to support the game as it was originally designed - no downgrading or major tweaking.

That said, a tonne of work is poured into making the game work across three platforms, yet alone four.

"All of the localisation you have to do... all of the testing you have to do... on every platform in every language... It's a pretty huge undertaking."

If there's an audience for it, and the project can work on the Wii U, then there's a chance Nintendo players can leap into the Elder Scrolls action next year.

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RudyC3 25.09.2011#1

Possible... and yet far from likely I will add...

EDIT : and just big LOLs at how he seems to imply (in the full interview) that bringing the game to yet another platform requires addtional translation work for every language that the game must be available in. That's right, take us for fools, Pete Hines Smilie , like you would have to retranslate the game for Wii U.

( Edited 25.09.2011 11:07 by Kafei2006 )

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Darkflame 25.09.2011#2

Funny, I thought Nintendo as part of their publishing agreements generaly did their own testing?
Its why you have "Mario Club" often on the credits of even third party games.

Or have they stoped doing that?

like you would have to retranslate the game for Wii U.

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Marzeee 25.09.2011#3

What's Skyrim actually about? I'm interested after hearing good things about it.

RudyC3 25.09.2011#4

Darkflame said:
Funny, I thought Nintendo as part of their publishing agreements generaly did their own testing?
Its why you have "Mario Club" often on the credits of even third party games.

Only for thrid party games where Nintendo is responsible for the localization and/or publishing. Example : PAL and North American versions of Tales of Symphonia on GameCube, where Nintendo is responsible for both localizing and distributing the game (which is the reason why the PS2 version didn't come to the west, because the localization would have had to be redone, since Nintendo is responsible for that on GameCube).

That would be the case for Skyrim if Nintendo published the Wii U version for Bethesda, but I doubt that would be the case. It's more likely to happen with exclusive titles, which Skyrim will never be (on Wii U).

( Edited 25.09.2011 12:09 by Kafei2006 )

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JoshSL 25.09.2011#5

This would be a really killer launch title, but the problem with WiiU getting these big hits is that they'll already be out on all the other consoles before then. Even so! It'd be a killer launch title, it's a shame it probably won't happen.

Marzy said:
What's Skyrim actually about? I'm interested after hearing good things about it.

It's a fantasy video game where you can ride dragons and have ~~lesbian~~ gay marriage basically it's going to be amazing.
Also it's the sequel to Oblivion I guess people liked that.

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RudyC3 25.09.2011#6

I remember in 2001 the French official Nintendo magazine hinting that Morrowind was coming to the GameCube. Fun times Smilie

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Stulaw 25.09.2011#7

all of the testing you have to do...

Bethesda test their games before release? That's a new one.

( Edited 25.09.2011 16:58 by Stulaw )

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crackedthesky 25.09.2011#8

14th installment? Is that a typo, or am I missing something?

I don't really know what he's talking about as far as porting goes, it really shouldn't take that much more effort. The biggest thing would be developing the game to work with the Wii U controller.

I think Bethesda would rather work on the game from the ground-up. They've been working on Skyrim for some five years, including building a new game engine for it. Porting it to Wii U really wouldn't take that much more effort, though. But I do expect Bethesda will likely have the Wii U in mind while making new games, though. I'll be happy with Syrim for my Xbox, but I'd really like to see Fallout for the Wii U.

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crackedthesky 25.09.2011#9

SuperLink said:It's a fantasy video game where you can ride dragons and have ~~lesbian~~ gay marriage basically it's going to be amazing.
Also it's the sequel to Oblivion I guess people liked that.

Wait, can you really get married in Skyrim? I actually haven't been following the game very closely (enjoyed Oblivion and Fallout enough to preorder Skyrim anyway). I'd love to see even more role-playing elements like marriage etc., especially since Fable dropped that ball so incredibly hard (you can marry anyone in the game! Too bad they're all identical except for whether or not they enjoy your farts).

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snowdog 25.09.2011#10

Jorge B, I think you might want to adjust the text in this article to address an inaccuracy. The U does not 'boast similar specs' to the PS3 and 360. Going by confirmations from IBM and AMD the U is going to be around 4 or 5 times more powerful than the PS3 and 360.

IBM have confirmed that the CPU is a Power7, currently the most powerful CPU family on the planet. The lowest spec Power7 available on the market is a quad core clocked at 3.0GHz with 16Mb of eDRAM. Even if IBM and Nintendo give developers access to three usable cores and it's underclocked to 2.5GHz the 16Mb of eDRAM will have it running rings around the Cell.

AMD have confirmed that the GPU is a modern Radeon HD with multidisplay support. That'll mean it'll have an r700 or rv770 chipset (a 4000 series), an Evergreen chipset (a 5000 series) or a Northern Islands chipset (a 6000 series). The X1900 in the 360 is basically a Radeon HD 2000 with 512Mb of GDDR3 shared with the system, a 128 bit bus and Shader Model 3.0 support. The 7800 GT in the PS3 has 256Mb of GDDR3, a 128 bit bus and Shader Model 3.0 support.

Even if AMD and Nintendo only opt for a 4000 series with only 512Mb of GDDR3 (and I can't see them going for less than 1Gb of VRAM myself) that'll be twice as much VRAM at twice the bandwidth thanks to a 256 bit bus and it'll have the processing advantages that Shader Model 4.1 provides.

I really am surprised that so many journalists haven't done a little more research into the aging hardware powering the PS3 and 360 as well as a little research into the CPU and GPU possibilities after the official press releases from IBM and AMD.

A next gen console being 4-6 times more powerful than current gen consoles isn't a big leap in power, it's a traditional one.

( Edited 25.09.2011 22:55 by snowdog )

Canyarion 25.09.2011#11

snowdog said:
The U does not 'boast similar specs' to the PS3 and 360. Going by confirmations from IBM and AMD the U is going to be around 4 or 5 times more powerful than the PS3 and 360.

Nice post, it's good to hear that from time to time...

jb 25.09.2011#12

Well Nintendo have themselves not released any specific specs wise, so I would rather simply say "similar" then "more powerful".

Hardware is bound to change up until release so I would rather not declare anything just yet, especially with Nintendo.

I can amend the article to say "at,least on par with", however.

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SirLink 25.09.2011#13

jb said:
Well Nintendo have themselves not released any specific specs wise...

IIRC Nintendo has never released any specific specs of the Wii or the 3DS either, so we had to rely on outside sources for those as well. It's fairly safe to assume that they're going to keep that stance with the U and don't just come out and tell us how much GHz the CPU has and so on.

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jb 25.09.2011#14

Well despite knowing what types of chipsets/GPUs the new Wii U hardware would support, we still have no true indication of what they'd bring to the new console.

Going by current minimums of what's already on the market doesn't really define what Nintendo will choose to bring to the Wii U - as with past models, they'd probably go for something in the middle range, more custom configurations that *could* be of a lower spec to the baseline specs.

All we have now is speculation - the console isn't near out yet, nor have we seen any real footage of projects running on the machine - just a series of impressive tech demos plus footage running on other hardware.

There's no doubting that the Wii U will run PS3/360 standard games, but we can't just make claims that it "will be" X-times more powerful etc.

We're just putting the pieces together from tidbits heard so far - it may change depending on how the Wii U controller works out, cost implications - we wouldn't want a console that's too expensive and would totally alienate the already solid Wii crowd either.

So yes - I feel it's appropriate to say at least similar or comparable to the PS3/360 because yes, we know that PS3/360 games will be coming to the Wii U system.

I'm sorry, but if I said "with the Wii U playing catch-up and said to boast hardware 3/4 times more powerful" - I'd sound like a complete fanboy without any credibility, which I hope Cubed3 does not sound.

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Darkflame 26.09.2011#15

When people saying "X times more powerfull" its always nonsense anyway.
You can, maybe, say "double the clockspeed", but even that isnt the same as twice as powerfull.

Normaly consoles have different strengths and weakness's.

Also, personaly I'm glade Nintendo never make claims over power. For the last 2 generations Sony always embarise themselves with their claims. (The PS3 will do 4D games! 120hz! 3 times the power of the 360!etc)

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Lynk 26.09.2011#16

By this point isn't saying a game is possible just entirely redundant? Of course it's possible, so either do it or don't bother making a pointess announcement. If the 360 can run Skyrim of course the Wii U can, and there's a sizable crowd of Zelda fanatics who I'm sure would fall head over heels for The Elder Scrolls.

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