I really really hope that they hired some of the modding community to design their character models in Skyrim. On every Elder Scroll game the character models are sooo ugly. It is amazing to me that such a power house developer can't come up with better character models than some guy in his basemant in Iowa....

morphable bodies+overlays+better faces+ adding stuff to faces like piercings+changing teeth= epic win

Yeah exactly.. Heck I don't even need that level of customization. I just want them to not be ugly...

faces where alright in fallout, although it was bad that age made different races

Yeah they were better than the Elder Scrolls games for sure. I really want them to get it right for once though with Skyrim. The Skyrim province is supposed to be based on the Nordic people and every one knows that there's no ugly people on the Sweedish swim team....

What about the girls with ultra-broad shoulders that always come with proffesional swimming?

HAHA yeah maybe I should have said ski team...

I want varried bodies.

Needs more fat people and old people with crooked backs. It would also be nice if body-size was not exclusive to the races you pick.

I would say children like in Fallout but to be honest I could care less if there's kids running around the world. I guess it would add something to the atmosphere but with Oblivion I was ok with not having then around.
I just don't want every single man and woman that you come across to be freaking ugly as heck. If you look at the PC mods out there for different races some of them are outstanding. I don't really want some scantly clad angelic being around every corner but just make them at least pleasing to look at.

Eh, I dig the original models. Even Morrowind's, they just have a certain charm. At least they fit in the world, unlike those ridiculous "eyecandy" mods that make females look so unrealistic. Don't get me wrong, I love me some sixy women, but I don't have to see women like that in a TES game, I have Japanese RPGs for that.

I actually hope that they'd dump that silly head-molding thing. I prefer just picking from a wide variety of different looking faces and hairstyles, at least those look decent. It's so hard to make a character look good in Oblivion.

I hope they choose well from those modders.... 99% of character modelsand outfits modded for oblivion:
have boated poly counts beyond all neccessity
have no idea how to bake normal maps from a high poly model
have texture resolutions so high that 50mb of texture sheets per model isn't all that uncommon.*
have no idea how to correctly optimise anything for games. ever
Have probably spent waaaay too long on this over budget asset, and couldn't keep up with the demands of the bosses
Most don't fit into the games art direction...saying that neither do a lot of Ob vanilla assets. F3 for me was so far superior in the assets consistency and style.

* I saw a very simple gun for fallout that have 75mb of textures, but completely wasted 30mb, yes completely wasted, on blank alpha channels...doubling the file sizes of the diffuse maps. the thing is one of the top rated files for NV, that is the most noob error you can possibly do. And mod users have no idea that it is basically [censored]. and over rate it. Hopefully all that miss placed praise doesn't go to their heads and they think they are actually good.

tbh I would like to see what they can do with real poly texture sheet budgets< I bet 99% will be owned hands down.

the other 1%... :icecream: :trophy: :bowdown:

Yeah see that's kind of my point. Not all of the NPC's you run around have to be eye candy you see on the mods. Just have some that are decent to look at. When you run around in Oblivion they're all ugly...
I don't think it has to be over the top or pushed to one extreme or the other, just every once in a while have an attractive person.

Well I have no idea what you're talking about but I'll go with that lol. I'm sure they'll be able to get it right. I don't understand why they can't just make the faces more atheistically pleasing.

To be honest, I really don't care much about character models. I'd rather just have a really amazing graphical world & environment than a really good graphical character.

Yeah I can see your point because for the most part you're not really looking at your own character but I'm actually referring to the NPC's in the game. There's another topic about custimzation of your own character going but like I said, I'm talking more about the people you encounter in the world. That to me is part of the world and enviroment.

That's unlikely to happen.
But who knows?

If they just make separate skeleton and animations for female characters I'd be ecstatic and beyond amazed. I mean just about every game our days have it - The Witche, Gothic, hey, even Assassins creed series and they are not even RPG! But even that may be to much for the poor Beth, they do prefer environment over characters approach.

I think that those people who found the Oblivion faces ugly are too brainwashed by Hollywood. I was thrilled first time I saw the character creation in Oblivion and saw that the characters won't look like Conan or a boob-girl with fanservice and way too much make-up. The NPCs don't look ugly, they look realistic. If you find that ugly, the world is going in a very sad direction indeed.

The problem with Oblivion char creation was not so much ugliness as lack of control, you could easily make a passably pretty generic face, abut if you had something specific in mind there was no way you could get it. Go try making, for example, an Asian looking face in Oblivion, and you'll see what all the complains are about. And if you wanted you char to look like someone specific (my Morrowind characters in my case) it was a lost case.

I agree completely. The characters faces looked like putty that had been fashioned into what appeared to be a hominid, not all of them though. Overall, the characters in Oblivion looked gnarred out and janky. Hope they get some new digs in Skyrim.

That is a whole other point than saying Oblivion NPCs are ugly, which is the complaint in this thread (and what I've read in other threads too).

A bit harsh but I fully understand where you're coming from and you could have been addressing this directly me. I was as guilty as any other noob modeller. Luckily for us all I stopped though.

I agree 100% with both statements, I highly doubt that ever Altmer or Dunmer is the exact same height as all of the Altmer or Dunmer in all of Nirn. I would really love to see height and weight variations.

They don't look too realistic. I couldn't get any of them to look anything close to any real person I know, and the people I know are not particularly attractive.

yeah, remember the face tattoos? from morrowind? the dunmer and nords had them, i really hope they will have the face tattoos in skyrim! :violin: