One of the things i notices about oblivion is that its praticaly impossible to create huge wars betwen armys, or betwen legion soldiers and daedric monsters(in the case of oblivion), there can't be more then a few npcs in each side, wich doesn't sound very exciting, alot of npcs fighting each other in oblivion would cause alot of lag, and definitly it would end up on allies killing allies, since there is no way to avoid hitting your friends during a battle, i don't know how skyrim is going to handle it, the only thing we know about it is that our attacks are going to be atracted a little bit to the enemy( nothing much, just so we dont end up hitting our companions or somenthing like that) this feature is called magnetism, the thing is, if there is to many npcs, the magnetism will not help that much, and eventually npcs are going to hit each other, now for the questions, are there going to be... per exemple... 30 vs 30 (or random numbers, obviously) battles in skyrim? like on the main quest in oblivion, where we had to get reinforcements from all the cities, for NO REASON, SINCE ONLY ONE SOLDIER FROM EACH CITY WOULD FIGHT WITH US, making a total of 10 npcs(including martin septin) and me fighting random monsters, segund question: if a npc hits other npc for accident during a battle, are they going to fight till death(XD)? i mean the imperial guards are the worse piece of guards to ever guard a city, seriously... they ALWAYS END UP KILLING THEM SELFS, ITS INCREDIBLE,i doubt this "feature" hasn't been fixed in the game, but, what will happen if a npc hit each other, are they going to be like " ups sorry..."?


TESTING NEW EMOTICONS: :prod: :excl: :clap: :frog: :tes:

I'm sure they'll have upped the limit to some extent, but I doubt you'll be seeing anything like the volume of enemies in a lot of other similar (or even different) games, simply because of the AI. Though I seem to remember hearing about some sort of "combat AI" (maybe I was just dreaming? ) that could be enabled on NPCs to enable the optimization of such larger encounters.

I certainly hope that it is possible, in the sense that I strongly hope the game is able render lots of NPCs at one time.
EDIT: And I certainly hope the AI is up to par so that such scenarios could hypothetically be handled.

However, I detest the idea of outright battles in these games. It's just not the theme I wish to explore when I start up an ES game.
If they do these kinds of things in relation to big burly-man faction quests, then I guess it won't irk me too much. But if there's another battle in any way shape or form attached irrevocably to the main quest, my teeth will begin to grind. Thief-characters were such a pain to play through the MQ in Oblivion, and no MQ should favor or disfavor some playstyles over others.

Really in Oblivion, the Battle of Bruma pushed the game as far it would go. Given that Skyrim is sort of in or at the end of a Civil war tho, it would be nice to see some side skirmishes occurring here or there between the groups still wanting to leave the empire and those wanting to stay in it...

I always hoped that they could fully render 10-20, and then simply use sprites or other 2D animations around you to give the impression of a larger battle.

YEA i completely forgot about stealthy characters, i ussualy start as stealth , better saying, always, and then, on the middle, when the armies start to get really badass, i change to heavy armour warrior... BUT yea i was thinking about faction wars, not quests that take you to a war, but random wars, generated by the game, like a bunch of wolfs killing a mammoth( example bethesda them selfs used) it will occur dont matter if you are there at the time, or not... and a epic war in the end, hundred of npcs and maybe 2 or 3 dragons flying the sky, assuming they are very powerfull and 3 is already enough to kill almost all the npcs... and im sure bethesda did somenthing about stealthy players, so that they can have a good time slaying dragons as well..

If you compare the graphics in TES series and in mount and blade series, you'll find how difficult it could be to include significant battles in Skyrim. Though maybe faking part of the battle as keltic Viking says or in another way, could do the trick.

The LODs in Oblivion were pretty minimal. At a distance faces drop to about 1/3 of their origional polycount, but I don't think armor does.

I really hope Bethesda has developed a LOD generator and will include it with their mod tools.. LOD generator meaning you plug in a model file, and it creates a newer, lower detail version of it for viewing in the distance. If they could generate one or two lod models for every body, face, and piece of armor, then you'd be able to have considerably larger battles. Of course AI would still be a factor, but not too badly.

I bet on a strong computer you can experience a 30 vs 30 battle.

But that'd pretty much be pushing it to the limits.I've been saying "there is no computer that's able to handle it yet" for years,but I'm realizing it's not the case.
The thing is,what's more important:
Ultra-realistic hardware pressuring graphics,or a better game experience with acceptable graphics?
The stress being put on hardware by adding tons of shaders and sh!t could have as well been used for handling more objects at the same time.

Personally,I think Half Life 2 graphics has the best balance.Create an engine using that level of graphics while using top level hardware bandwidth,and I bet an average computer would run
a 30vs30,while top machines could run maybe a 70 vs 70.

My measurements are up to debate,but you get the idea.

What about mages and bow users?
I wonder how is magnetism going to work on them.
I think that best option is to have some sort of friendly fire, but I think that they wouldn't put that magnetism in if it didn't do actually any good.

Anyway, when it comes to massive battles, I hope that we can fight against 4-5 enemies at once.
In Oblivion it was almost impossible to win that fight if in fair way.
You would have to backpedal and hit your enemies one by one.
Really not interesting way of fighting.

I got the impression that Magnetism was for melee/close range combat, not for long ranged, I never had much issue in oblivion with spell and arrows anyway only up close and personal, what if you wanted to cast a cure spell on an ally? Would you want that magnetized to the enemy? personally I hope that spells do "curve" towards what is clearly their intended target but only at a very small degree so that a spell that clearly way off target, still misses massively, as for bows... the whole point of them is to prepare and shoot, it'd kill the whole point of it if it were magnetized.

This is going to be next gen... It has to be. I want to participate in a huge war, but i know it's not possible with current gen, unless we only have like ~20 characters on screen at a time (something like that, I'm not a programmer so I could be wrong), and the next enemies come in as the others die.

We'll have to wait for The Elder Scrolls VI: Summerset.

I wouldn't count on it.