Just forget it. I don't care. I get nowhere with this.

I heard the character was on god mode, basically, and what was said is that the best clips they could put together were what they put together, so it wasn't one, single, coincidentally pristine fight, but the animations and general process of what was going on were confirmed to be in the game. Bethesda isn't going to outright lie. They put a lot of work into those dragons.

Seriously, show me better dragon animations in real-time. Are you sure you aren't from the year 2050 and spoiled by the hyper-realistic animations from that time?

The last part of the trailer is "one of the most abnormal attempts at animating an animal ever". Really? Can't take any of that post seriously after that. Sorry.

Yeah, let's take it easy. This is getting out of hand over a mere introduction. It is common knowledge that more people generally enjoyed Morrowind's story over Oblivion. That is my personal take on it, from the countless people I've talked with. A simple consensus, and perhaps you know more people with the latter. Great, I'm glad. I was just using the progression of the series as a validity for mechanics. Nothing more. Sorry if things got heated, mate.

And I know Beth wouldn't outright lie.. but in-game and real-time mean very different things. The dragon reacting like that to the sword slashes looked fluid. I have no qualms with that. But again, that whole battle looked more and more like a cinematic than a real, tangible process that was done by a person actually playing the game behind the scenes. In contrast, the dragon fight, and then the dragon flying in the distance at the end of the trailer looks awful, and completely separate from each other in terms of quality.

I loved MW & OB for what they were. That was my point. All TES games suffered from iffy mechanics. I just want better for Skyrim, and to be honest things are looking eerily similar to me. Hopefully these issues will iron out. But regardless, we're all going to live with it and enjoy the game immensely. I didn't want this to derail off into a MW vs. OB debate. My apologies if that's how you felt.

Credit to Helion Tide for a great first post, at least with respect to the care and detail he/she put into it.

Having watched the trailer again after reading the OP, I do think Helion Tide gives fairly accurate descriptions of the animations. But it wasn't something I noticed before, and I doubt I would have otherwise (or, at least, not until after having seen those animations hundreds of times). Even after looking at the trailer in light of Helion Tide's descriptions, the animations don't really bother me. And that's just watching a trailer. I suspect those little wrinkles will be even further from the forefront of my mind when I'm playing the game. But I should also say that I'm generally pretty easily pleased when it comes to the visuals of a game. And the pretty obvious improvements of Skyrim over Oblivion are enough to satisfy me.

On a side note: while we can debate the meaning of "in-game" when it comes to the dragon fight in the trailer, one thing we can be pretty sure about is that the animations shown in the dragon fight are the animations used in dragon fights in the game. Even if the trailer shows them from a different camera angle, or was selective about what parts to show, or whatever.

No, it's my fault. No apologies are needed. I apologize.

As before, however, I must respectfully disagree about the flying animation. I thought it was pretty good. Again, I was almost expecting an updated cliffracer (well, really just jokingly when speaking to my brother ), and I didn't see that.

Man.. even DA:O and DA2 had more fluid dragon flight animations than that.

Yeah, sorry mate. It's all good. I appreciate that you disagree with me, and to be honest I still am quite surprised at how much a lot of the mechanics have improved.. it's just that haunting underbelly that I'm noticing is still there.

I have faith in Bethesda to deliver, and I do sincerely hope I am proven wrong.

DA's dragons don't even scratch the surface of the complexity in Skyrim's dragons. Don't make me laugh.

Not a chance, unless we played different games.

F L I G H T animations. FL...ight. Not F..ight. Refer to the actual animations I'm talking about at the END of the trailer as the dragon takes flight in the distance. The fight in the trailer is not confirmed in-game in the sense that it was recorded in 3rd person whilst someone played it. It is confirmed rendered in-game. This is most likely a scripted cinematic.. finishing animations included.

The dragon FLYING is also not the only set of animations I was bringing up.

DA is an entirely different game/engine.

I don't think it's fair to compare DA with Skyrim.

Besides, the dragons in Skyrim are in an open world...Not seperate mini world cells like DA, and the combat with them wasn't that great either. Bethesda however, spent 2 years on 'em....I think thier dragons will blow Bioware's in the dust.

The flight animations in DA are not better. Nothing about the dragons in DA is better.

Skyrim's dragons are unscripted, common enemies. DA's dragons are cliche boss battles.

I'm going to agree. The only other current-generation video game I can think of that has dragons in it is Demon's Souls, and in that game, dragons were clearly stiffly animated, highly predictable, robotic set pieces. So, Skyrim is doing dragons better than any other game I've heard of thus far. Going by what was said to be a feature of the dragons, they've been worked on for two years, they have advanced A.I., they are sometimes unpredictable, they have a crashing animation, and havok physics animation will affect them (I'm assuming the head recoiling was the manifestation of said animation system). That's what was said, not seen. What we saw in the trailer was said to be in-game. Whether one wants to believe certain parts are scripted or not, I liked all that I saw.

Personally I think...the animations are exceptionally sixy for TES game, the series sint really know for its breath taking animations. this is a step up definently.

Even if you think the scenes were scripted, it doesn't follow that the animations shown in the trailer won't be the animations we'll see when playing the game. Yes, the trailer was heavily orchestrated and choreographed. But it sounds like they were making use of the very same animations we'll see when playing the game - unless you think Pete was making a subtle distinction among the visuals rendered in game (textures, models, shaders vs. animations, or something like that) when he said the trailer was in-game. I see no reason to believe that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwTsZHGQ6FE&feature=player_detailpage#t=112s

I'm just skeptic, is all.

Sure, they are unscripted in the sense that they spawn randomly and they react with the world in some sense. But this does not mean that they are not bound by the same programming laws that make them rigid recreations of mystical creatures, in a video game world. And in order to have a dragon ransack a town, or do anything randomly for that matter, it still needs to be scripted into the gameplay to some extent. Otherwise, the dragon would have no commands to even do such things at its disposal. See what I'm getting at?

I do not doubt that Bethesda is going to surprise me. I am just critiquing what I saw, and bringing up its similarities from OB and MW in terms of how the creatures and people looked while moving. Leagues better than previous TES games, but still with that same awkwardness, if you know what I mean. That's the short version of it anyhow.

And DA's dragon animations were done quite well considering how static the battles were. I'm not talking about complexity in behaviour, I'm talking about movements. Specifically when Skyrim's dragon flies at the end of the trailer. No more, no less.

But for now, I'm going to bed.

Actually no, I don't agree that animations in past games were mediocre as they were great for their time and people need to stop comparing them to now. Animators in the past had to hand animate each skeleton, which is time consuming like you would never believe. Nowadays, we have new animation software, so now animations are smooth, fluid and realistic because of these tools and also fast and economic. I think the animations I've seen for Skyrim so far are top notch but I will reserve final judgment for when we see actual gameplay video.

I only have one question, now. When fighting dragons, will that glorious music heard in the trailer be playing the background? It's going to feel so anti-climatic without it.


I disagree with this. I popped in Spyro 2 for the PS1 (from 1996) a few days ago and it had roughly equivalent animations to Morrowind... and certainly better animations than Daggerfall, which was from the same year.

I don't see any glaring flaws in the areas the topic starter pointed out, really, and I just watched the trailer again specifically to see if I would notice them. Now, there were a few problems I could name, the bad water, for one thing, but that's a problem with the water effects, not the character animations. And the lack of any reactions from the other characters in the tavern during the assassination was odd, but that's AI there, it has nothing to do with animations, and it may be tht we would have seen a reaction if the shot was held for longer. Now, the one problem I noticed that really might be an issue with character animations is in the third person combat scene at around 1:36 in the trailer (I mean the original unaltered trailer, not the video linked to in the first post.) it looked like there were parts where the swords didn't actually connect with the target and blood was spraying out of thin air, or the shields, but that could be an issue with hit detection rather than animations. Aside from that, it looked fine. Certainly, the animations are by no means the best I've ever seen, but in the quick, short scenes that are in the trailer, in fact, it seems like an improvement over past games in the series, though that's really not hard to do. Of course, my thoughts on the matter might change once I've actually played the game, in part because I could see the animations much more closely, and in part because even if the animations look alright on their own, that doesn't guarentee they'll flow naturally in gameplay, but I'll judge that when the time comes.

Now, I'm not actually especially confident in Skyrim's animations, because past experience with Bethesda's games has really not given me much reason to be confident in them, I won't hesitate to admit that animations are not one of the strong-points of Bethesda's games, but that's fine, because the animations weren't what I was playing the games for, the other aspects of the game more than made up for what they lacked in animations, I felt that way of Morrowind, I felt that way of Oblivion, and of Fallout 3 as well, and I'd also say that the animations have been steadily improving since Morrowind, it's just that ultimately, they're still not up to the standards of other games on the market at the time, I expect the same will be true for Skyrim, however, at least so far, I can't make any well founded criticisms on the game's animations, and regardless of how the animations are, I still expect to enjoy Skyrim, maybe not for the animations, but certainly for the game world an gameplay.



You never know, it's possible that the main theme will also be played during gameplay, in Morrowind, the main theme would sometimes play while exploring, though Skyrim's theme really needs to be combat music if it plays during gameplay (And I'll laugh at the inappropriateness of it if I hear that epic theme song while fighting rats

Great post. Finally someone at least nit-picking close to a degree that I was. I agree with you on almost all things, except when I really paid close attention to the trailer animations they still reeked of Oblivion and Morrowind in terms of feel, and for me, that is a set back of sorts. Not a be all, end all set back, but it still counts for me to some degree. Which is really the only thing I was trying to bring up and address.

Okay for one, nobody is gonna slow the game down to frame by frame level when playing to look at the animations. The whole reason they flow in the first place is because it happens smoothly in front of you, and quickly. So that argument doesn't make any bit of sense.

And as for the troll scene, in first person, of course it's idle. What do you want it to do? Move around like an idiot. Or maybe not on the screen at all? The way it is now looks miles better than OB's animations, and if you stop slowing it down and just look at it normally, you would see, like normal people, that it flows perfectly fine, and fits on screen in a fashionable manner, which I personally think doesn't look awkward at all.

The animations won't be the best I think it's safe to say so I'll probably be disappointed especially after enjoying RDR so much, however they'll probably be a step up from past BGS games