Marketing grammar aside, comment threads and forums have been alive with praise and condemnation in what seems to be about equal measure. However, one note that caught my eye was variations on the theme of "lazy console port". It's ironic that the phrase "lazy console port" is a result of lazy thinking. This is the kind of knee-jerk condemnation that the PC gaming crowd loves to go in for, but it's not helpful. So why is it a lazy console port, and why is it not? A lot of these are things I've said on forums and comment threads myself, so if you've been following me around like some creepy stalker, 1) you've probably already read most of this, and 2) don't make me call the police.
The interface - navigation
Now, I'm not going to defend the interface. It's terrible. However, while I have not played the game on an Xbox 360, I have played it on the PC with an Xbox 360 controller, and let me tell you, that's just as bad as trying to navigate it with mouse and keyboard. If they've designed this for a console, they've done a poor job of it.
In fact, the UI seems like it would be a lot more at home on an iPad. And this is the problem with the interface: they've designed it for aesthetics before function. It looks lovely, but it's a pain to use. In their aesthetic design of the interface, they've quite clearly taken notes from tablet interfaces (which are very cool) and not thought properly about how that would impact the function of the interface on a different device. It's bad interface design, but it has nothing to do with consoles.
The interface - dual wielding
The only interface issue that I think might be a console problem is the dual wielding thing. On a console, see, the item in your left hand is bound to the left trigger, while the item in your right hand is bound to the right trigger. On a PC, this is reversed; the item in your right hand is bound to the left mouse button, and the item in your left hand is bound to the right mouse button. That sounds confusing, but it's gaming convention to map primary attacks to LMB and secondary attacks to RMB. Skyrim just assumes that your character is right-handed, so the dominant hand is mapped to the primary mouse button. In console conventions, the right trigger is often thought of as the 'primary' one.
That's all ok apart from how it's represented in the interface; when you equip items into your hands, they're marked with a little 'L' or 'R'. Does that refer to which hand is holding the item, or which button you should press? It actually refers to which hand is holding the item, but that's not clear. I hesitate to call this a console design issue, though. I think it's more just that console players are lucky their conventions don't raise any ambiguity here, rather than that the interface was designed with that in mind. Denoting into which hand your weapon is going is an established RPG convention, and it seems likely that the design of Skyrim is just following that rather than contemplating too deeply how that applies to the control system.
Mouse sensitivity and acceleration
Ok, let's start with mouse acceleration. It is the very devil, and I'll give you that it's a problem with console ports. However, given that it takes more effort to implement than not, I don't think it's a problem with lazy console ports. I don't understand why games persist in using it. Everyone hates it, and it's easier just to not implement it. (Update: Apparently I'm an idiot. Mouse acceleration doesn't, in fact, take more effort to implement than to not implement. If you use Windows' mouse input, you get mouse acceleration. To get around that you have to do your own hardware calls to the mouse, which is more work. But the corollary to this is that mouse acceleration isn't "to make it feel more like a controller" but "to make it feel more like the cursor in Windows", which still indicates that it's not a symptom of consolitis.)
Then there's the mouse sensitivity. For some reason, the mouse sensitivity is set incredibly low by default. That must be because it's designed for gamepads, right? Well, no. Although Skyrim appears to only give you one option for sensitivity, it actually has two; one for mouse and one for gamepad. It only shows you the option for the device you're currently using, but mouse sensitivity and pad sensitivity are stored by the game independently. If you switch devices, the sensitivity option will change to whatever you set for that device. This sensibility to the potential of using multiple devices is a purely PC thing; it can't be said that it's an artefact of a console port. So why the mouse sensitivity is set so low by default is beyond me, but it's not a console thing.
My one gripe is that the mouselook sensitivity also affects the mouse sensitivity in the lockpicking minigame, so having a reasonable sensitivity for looking around makes lockpicking very fiddly. But that has nothing to do with consoles. I will say that Skyrim's lockpicking with a mouse is seventeen times infinitely better than Oblivion's lockpicking with a mouse, but it's basically just the same as Fallout 3's lockpicking.
The 2GB memory cap
This is something that's come up less commonly, but I have seen it. Skyrim, you see, will only ever make use of 2GB of memory, even if you have more. "This must be because it's a lazy console port," comes the cry, conveniently ignoring that the Xbox 360 and PS3 both have 512MB of memory (including video memory) and nothing like 2GB.
No, it's not because it's a lazy console port; it's because it supports Windows XP. Windows XP 32-bit can technically address 4GB of RAM (including video RAM), but it limits individual programs to using 2GB (this can be raised to 3GB by a switch in the bowels of the system, which involves editing boot.ini in a text editor and so is not for the casual user, but this can cause instabilities and so isn't enabled by default).
There are still people out there who refuse to upgrade to Windows 7, insisting that Windows XP is "good enough". One of the advantages of PC gaming is that it can be; PC games can run on a wide range of hardware and software setups. But sometimes, ensuring compatibility on a broad range of systems entails compromises. It's ironic, though perhaps not unexpected, that a decision that was made to service one of the advantages of PC gaming is blamed on consoles. Although Bethesda could conceivably have made the 2GB limit XP-only, the point is that it's not a lazy console port; it's lazy XP compatibility.
Update: To clarify, without the large-address-aware flag set, 32-bit processes are limited to 2GB on all versions of Windows, not just XP. The reason it's an XP thing is that XP doesn't even support LAA by default without editing boot.ini. (Technically speaking, even 64-bit processes are limited to 2GB without LAA, but they have LAA on by default; you would have to manually turn it off when you were compiling, and, although you can, I don't know why you'd do that.) Incidentally, the Xbox 360 is 64-bit and the PS3 is 128-bit, so I'm not sure how making it a 32-bit Windows process could possibly be a concession to codevelopment for those machines. (And, according to the latest Steam hardware survey as of March 2013, about 25% of Steam's install-base is still running on 32-bit machines.)
Default FOV
Ok, you can have that one.
So there. Skyrim's not without issues, but very few of them have anything to do with its console development, and those that do are relatively easily fixed. I haven't addressed the complaint of "it's dumbed down" because (1) I've talked about how idiotic I think that phrase is before, and the people who blame it on console development are doubly idiots; (2) I surprisingly haven't heard that complaint much, excepting from the people you just knew were going to call it dumbed-down anyway; (3) that's a subject for a future post, and (4) I was too busy checking my surroundings for creepy stalkers. Go away.
