There's dynamic shadows and people don't look bad. it's good enough for me.

PC's are better and i understand why PC users,especially those who have decent ones,want better graphics,textures etc.
Hell ,i love looking at mods that people create on PC. But i was responding to the video of the witcher 2 that was put up for people to look at,so i made a comment about it.
Close up,it looks great,but the backgrounds/distance and the water where not that special.I think skyrims backgrounds/and distance looks better.
He put a video up showing a PC game,i wasn't that impressed with it,compared with a 6-7 year gap. It was not trolling,i merely made a comment about a video.
Todd said in an interview that he felt that there was nothing really new that would push them anywhere spectacular yet in this hardware cycle. It just means that most people are comfortable with what's around at the moment...Graphically the consoles have made progress from a few years back,some games show this. PC's are always going to be better,but the amount of PS3's and xbox's that have been sold ,show people are happy enough with the current gen for now. Yes it's probably time for change,and i understand where PC user's are coming from,but untill that changes we have to accept what we have. And in a nutshell ( that isn't that bad,if we are honest ).
I mean no offence,and i am certainly no troll.

Because the big world of making games isn't always about making the better game. It's also about MARKETING, which is why they still do it on consoles.
There's one big law about business that says: "if your business doesn't make money, just close"
you want Bethseda to just leave the market? or you want them to be bought by EA and start releasing empty game? I DON'T

Now if you don't get it now, I'm not sure you ever will...



And besides, those graphics look perfectly fine! I don't see why everyone's complaining! I mean, they aren't photo-realistic, IT'S A FANTASY WORLD! It's meant to not look that real

The interactivity is a very good point, and I'll take Bethesda's interactive environment any day over a prettier looking but inert world.

However, as for hardware, although you are right that most people don't have cutting edge machines, the bottleneck is not CPUs. Shading, bumpmapping, tessellation, multiple light sources, ambient occlusion etc. all make a great difference to the game environment are processed, AFAIK, primarily by the GPU, and PPUs (or GPGPUs, nowadays) are awesome for rendering complex environments and effects. The game engine can be designed to degrade the graphics gracefully to the current "average" hardware, which would let the game improve over time (particularly relevant, considering the TES release cycle) as the hardware becomes cheaper and more people can buy it.

Of course, there's a development cost for that, and since the majority of TES players are apparently console gamers, and Bethesda needs to make money now it's likely that we're going to be stuck with an old graphics engine even as today's cutting edge PCs become commonplace in a 2-3 years, and the next gen consoles come in.

The unknown variable is the capacity of the updated "http://www.gameinformer.com/games/the_elder_scrolls_v_skyrim/b/xbox360/archive/2011/01/17/the-technology-behind-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim.aspx" to take advantage of PC hardware, which comes back to my original question....

I guess we'll see...

Quit lying


Well im getting on 360, but I may get it on PC way after realese if its really good.

heck, if the PC version were to only look as good as it does on the video, I'm happy.

I'm hoping for skyrim to look a fair bit better than that, but "Fair" bit. texture wise and model wise, i'm hoping for stones to actually be stones and not splashes on the ground.
But witcher 2... oh man how i can't wait on that topic tho... i can't help but mention one of my favourite songs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_a8Pv7grd0&feature=related

Edit: http://lyrics.wikia.com/Vader:The_Sword_Of_The_Witcher

ROLLIN ROLLIN ROLLIN

i really dig that early-'00s draw distance. the corridor-based level design is pretty impressive, too.

nothing in that video looks notably more impressive than what we've seen of Skyrim so far, and what we've seen of Skyrim so far has low-res textures because consoles are extremely limited by memory constraints. there's nothing especially good about TW2's lighting compared to pretty much any other game with deferred shading released in the last three years.

the simple fact that Skyrim pulled off a draw distance like it did in the trailer with those graphics and the freedom of travel on an Xbox 360 is pretty impressive, especially after watching this.

Morrowind and Oblivion is two examples on the opposite.
However it's not fair to compare Skyrim with shooters as they has far less content or worse pc only shooters, had Skyrim been pc only it would have a far lower budget.

As long as the game plays well, and the story is good, I will be happy. The graphics look great to me, the only time I actually care about graphics is when I'm playing a racing simulator.

as much as i love graphics it dosent bother me that much it wont look as good as the PC version, as long as has next gen graphics im fine ( next gen graphics are like ( gears 3, halo reach, mass effect 2) )

To be honest. I also found myself to be not very impressed with the graphics when I first saw the trailer.
Sure they look a bit better than oblivion's.
But the difference oblivion-skyrim seems to be much smaller than the difference we saw between daggerfall-morrowind and morrowind-oblivion.
Or to put it in other words, the graphics of morrowind and oblivion seemed to have a much larger impact when they were first showed. They were more groundbreaking for their time.

Although I agree that graphics aren't the most important factor in a game, it seems like it has been so for bethesda in the case of morrowind and oblivion.
I believe I even recall an interview with Todd Howard saying something like they always strive to push the graphics to new heights. Develop next gen graphics, set new standards,...

I'm not sure, but I think that the xbox was fairly new when morrowind came out, and the 360 was also fairly new when oblivion came out.
I guess in this case they are indeed bound by the 360 which is beginning to show its age, and the graphics will be far less impacting.
Another disadvantage of the muli-platform gaming market which seems to have become so enevitable for most publishers/devs.

Ah well, lets hope that this means they will put some extra effort in the more important game factors.

I noticed some very low poly rocks and some jagged edges around, though the people looked good.

I think something many console users miss out on is that even console-level graphics look better on PC, with significantly higher resolutions, at a better framerate, with heavy AF and AA. That's even without considering any possible quality settings that can now be moved above low/medium.

But fine, you don't want to talk about graphics?
How about where Skyrim is really being hit - the RAM. 512MB shared between graphics and main memory is almost nothing. A 4 year old graphics card has that. A modern graphics card has double that. The average PC has four times that. The average gaming PC has eight times that as well as twice that in the graphics card. The paltry amount of RAM is holding back how detailed the world can be - you can say you don't care about graphics all you want, but I damn well want a detailed world, and I can't have it.

All right, I've watched the video and you're right, it looks impressive. But we didn't see that kind of slow-paced sightseeing from Skyrim yet, we've only seen short glimpses of action scenes that go too fast. Maybe Skyrim looks equally good or even better when we get a substantial gameplay video.

I think the exact reason for the difference in style of trailers is the quality of the graphics.
In morrowind and Oblivion, they had jaw-dropping graphics for it's time. So they could show them off in the trailers.
Letting the camera slide slowly over the amazing landscape and such.

In this case, I guess the devs know the graphics will not be their big selling board, and so they made the trailer more action oriented.

Well, they did show the dragon flying above and that looked pretty good to me, plus that shot at the end. Scenic shots don't need amazing graphics anyway, but I thought they did a good job of showing it off.

What some people need to realize is that this is a 6+ month pre-release trailer. The trailer is a FLASH video, recorded on XBOX360 rendering, in only 720P. And It still looks great, considering how much time they have to fine-tune the game. I'd count on a good 1080P trailer showing off PC before release, but much further down the road. These graphics are going to kick some serious tail, IMO.

I restate, graphics are not what make TES.

Very nice video on Witcher 2. I didn't see terrain/plant geom popping so much as I saw artifacting from the crappy limits youtube forces on hi def video. Now if Skyrim has those kinds of godrays........

and hair physics...and mature dialogue...and choices & consequences...

Well you are not right graphical impression was an major part of tes always thats was combination of new technologies and design.
Dagerfall true 3D

Shader water and weather effects in Morowind

Shader 3.0, HDR and Bloom in Oblivion nextgen Xbox 360's launch

Skyrim will have dynamic snow better animations handling real-time shadows
So decent graphical technologies always was part of TES, thats not positioned like Crysis or similar games where graphic have even more higher factor, but still have major value.

Personally I see some nice improvements in Skyrim graphic thats hard to be done by modders (like real shadows and those mountains) other changes like better textures can be modded without problems.

I went to systemsrequirementslab and it shows me that i can run Batman Arkham City and Portal 2 on Minimum, how High will Skyrim be if i cant even play these Games on My PC http://i54.tinypic.com/2na6u7b.jpg

Im not made of Money, so why must i Constantly Upgrade my PC for Games, where are they even going with Next Gen.

Real People in Games have been used since the 80's, so what are Game Companies trying to Accomplish now.

I am on the PC as well as PS3 and I thaught the new Rage trailer looked sensational? Not sure what you are looking at? Graphics looked phenominal and the developers of RAGE stated that with the new engine they can do things that they only dreamed about before with the consoles?

Its a generalisation that consoles don't have good graphics, go and check out GT5 or Uncharted 2, Halo on the Xbox or Forza 3, thats a cop out from lazy game developers that can't be bothered programming properly to take advantage of the consoles hardware. Yes I can crank up the detail on my PC but your not playing your Xbox or PS3 from 1 ft away are you? I play on my 52 inch screen from at least 3M away.

Who knows, but it's pretty lame. I think the same thing happened for Oblivion, right? They had higher end graphics originally but had to tone them down. Thanks to the modders for correcting the issue, in any case.