It's better by far.


Is it just me or are the characters smaller in size compared to its surroundings this time around?

(If you compare it to Oblivion.)

Expected this, awesome!

Something is definitely different with NPC scale from what I've seen.

I just want to say Mitheledh that's not true in my case. I'm doing games design at uni and we have dev kit Xbox 360's a well as awesome PCs.
We made the game for PC with basically unlimited imagination and we tried to make our environment look as good as we could. Anyway we got
it running on an Xbox and we found we had to undo a lot of our work because it wouldn't run very well. In my opinion if we made it for the Xbox
first and then upgraded it for the PC we would have cut down a lot of work and headaches in the process.

if thats xbox 360 screenies your using for oblivion :sick: i feel sorry for consolers that had to look at that for 5 years. is it way better than oblivion.......overall yes although someone pointed out no shadows on the mammoth and the textures are obviously low rez. overall though its a dramatic improvement over oblivion.

is it comparable to a game released even a couple of years ago designed around the PC first and then scaled down for consoles....hell no! not even close! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7_M5sZhayU and that game came out in 2008.

and people wonder why PC gamers dont automatically swoon over skyrim pics even if they are leagues better than oblivion.

@regenteagle...............more confirmation that consoles are holding game design back, thank you.

The faces in Oblivion were never amazing but certainly not terrible.

The Skyrim ones are pretty awesome

But it also probably wouldn't have looked nearly as good on the PC if you had done that, would it have? Getting it only a smaller system is one of cutting away, as oppose to having to create new to fill in the gaps. No?

Of course it's better than Oblivion!!!
What did you expect would happen after 5 years of development? That it would get any worse?

The more important question is: does Skyrim keep up with high standard of graphics that is TODAY for games?

Of course it's because the XBOX 360, that's what I said from the beginning. They design the game to fit with the XBOX 360 demands. They COULD make the game look much better if they were designing it JUST for the PC. But LOTS of people have XBOX 360 (not me included) and I think it's Todd's favorite platform, as he already stated. If they can test the full potential of the XBOX 360, then I encourage them on that decision, for all the people out there that have it.

In a few years, when the new generation of consoles will rain upon us, then less people will use the XBOX 360 and then Beth will have to make their new ES game in a new hardware with amazing graphics, which would still require us to have UBER-COMPUTERS.

That right there is where you are wrong. It doesn't have to be a PC exclusive to look better. That's why I mentioned DICE and BF3. It will look better and it is NOT a PC exclusive game. It's going to be downscaled for the other platforms.

six

and

lame

that's how I would describe the difference

I was going to say Other and then explain that I always wonder why some people trash Oblivion's graphics when I think they're great. I do. I see them on PC and through an HDMI cable to a 1080p TV. They both look great to me...but then...

In your shots, now I see a big difference. Even with the trailer I thought there seemed to be way more detail and things weren't so fuzzy in the distance. I still think Oblivion looks great but I do think Skyrim's going to be amazing. Thanks for the comparison.

I still would never trash Oblivion for its graphics because it was made for the tech of the day and boy, do those days fly by now.

:tes:

are you kidding ! in OB NOT ONCE did I look at a guy/girl and said "hmmm I want to have that in my bed naked"

while in Skyrim things look much MUCH hotter even though its the coldest place in ES universe... he go figure.

It depends if we had enough time to spend on that aspect. If we had centered it around the Xbox first and then gone to PC, it wouldn't have looked as good no. For reasons like I couldn't really be bothered putting in special
features for PC players. Yeah you can have better textures and a better draw distance, but making a whole game then calling it complete on one format and not another is weird. What I mean by this is that if I had completed
the Xbox game first and it looked good, I would see no point in adding in extra work for myself by tacking in extra 1337 effects for PC. If I had a god-awful publisher breathing down my neck I probably would not of even thought
about the PC version (lets just get it out there kind of thing). It's just I can see why people like yourself have a little bit to moan about when it comes to graphics. You spend all that money on a system that only a few games will
actually utilize to it's full potential. You have also got to realize though that more demanding graphics takes more time to make. They can't churn out all these photo-realistic assets in a day. It might probably take weeks to make a
awesome looking creature for example.

I think style wise Skyrim looks like Oblivions sequel, which of course it is. What I mean by that is that Skyrim looks like an improvment on Oblivions design style rather than a reinvention, as adverse to what we saw going from Morrowind to Oblivion. So people expecting things to look radically different are going to be dissapointed. However it would be stupid to say that Skyrim didn't look better, it very obviously does. It is in most cases a more detaled and refined version of what we saw in Oblivion. Some of the things that might give people concern though are things like the way terrain is placed(I.E. stones, bushes ETC) looks very similer to Oblivion I mean immediately upon seeing that shot with the mammoths or the one of the house on the hill you can tell this was made by the same people that designed Oblivion.

I don't really think thats an issue though, I'm just happy to have a new elderscrolls game to explore.

Depends what exactly you're asking. Does the art style look more realistic/better? Sure. Do the textures look better? Yeah.

Are they making a "major leap forward" with the technology being used? No, not really.

This is the way I view it. I may not be a game designer, but don't take that to mean I don't have a background in design. My background is in architecture and environmental design (which I understand is very applicable in game design).

Now, you're working with a client and that client gives you a budget for you to design around. Sometimes, though, the client will come in and tell you that they were unable to get that much money together and they ask you to reduce your design. Other times, the client might come in and tell you that they found more money and want you to increase the design.

In both cases you're forced to alter your design. In the first one, you have to reduce cost. You can do that through changing materials, such as going from teak flooring to pine or bamboo. But often it means you have to make changes to the structure itself. Cutting away from your vision is always a painful act, but at least you know where to make the cuts that will have the least impact on the overall vision.

For the latter client you have to add. That could be as simple as changing from ceramic tiles to Italian travertine. But if you have to add to the structure, that becomes a lot more difficult. That requires designing new elements and figuring out how to integrate them to the original vision. A much more difficult task. And one that takes more time.

At least that's my experience.

As a side note, I can honestly say that I didn't buy my current computer exclusively for gaming. I needed a rig that could handle hardcoe graphics. Images that use to take my old computer as much as ten hours to render don't take nearly as long now.

That makes perfect sense to me, yes. My point was that if we had finished making an awesome looking game and we had to downgrade it to work fully on a lesser system. That would cause a lot of headaches (which did happen).

It's sort of like your example of architecture, If someone said to you "I want this." You built it and work hard to make it the best you can, then they say "I have changed my mind, re-do it all!". I would say "Get lost!".
That's sort of a bad argument though because they would be probably be watching what you are doing all the time. I suppose this is where concepts come into play.

It's not that it's THAT bad with games, but you have to downgrade textures, meshes, particle effects (whatever) and hunting around for hours with a bloody FPS counter to make sure everything runs smoothly. If I made
it for the Xbox it would have been easier for us, but as you certainly (rightly) say so, the PC version would have been a lesser product. It's either have massive headaches or lose a bit of graphical quality. I know what I
would go for in the future.

Those examples do happen, though. The first one happened with a church. They weren't able to get as much as they had hoped in donations. They had to make a number of changes including cutting out some really nice skylights. The latter happened with my University's stadium. They were expanding it, then they kept finding more money so they kept asking the architect to keep adding to his design. But you can't just kick them out to the curb because you'll probably get slapped with a lawsuit for breach of contract.

I've even worked with a client (a friend of the firm's principle) that walked in with a floorplan out of a magazine and was like, "I want this, but I can't afford this many square feet. Reduce it for me somehow!" Guess who was asked to do the reducing?

I suppose this is just something we're going to have to agree to disagree on, though. As I said, by my experience, I'd much rather take away and reduce, searching for all those little areas when I can save a penny than to tack on and expand while trying to maintain the integrity of the original vision.

i just dont care too much about the grafic, i still play the unmodded deus ex and so on just because the game itself is just that damn good. grafic is nothing more than cherry on top of a milkshake

I don't think some of these comparisons are fair.

I never realized how bad the original faces in Oblivion were, or the blurry distant land textures (I never seem to notice graphical flaws until the game becomes older or more outdated). With the (greatly) improved character models, better lighting/shadows, great looking distant land, and really good animations, and other graphical improvements Skyrim is going to look awesome!

Oh gods... The creepy Fighters' Guild Porter.... mommy make the bad man go away!

I said other as I really don't give much on graphic but really like gr8 game play

To me the level of detail looks at least doubled and to me that makes me very happy.