Agreed. There's only so much you can do with 5 year old hardware, and Bethesda has a track record a mile long of neglecting the PC.

This. Anyone who would claim that the PS3 and 360 can't handle graphics far, far superior to what you see in Oblivion or Fallout 3 very clearly does not use or follow either console.

I think Bethesda has been kinda knownfor pushing the graphical edge, Oblivion had graphics that blew people away, and so did FO 3. I expect the grapics to be stunning.

Even if they aren't, dude, its TES V. We are all going to spend a large amount of our lives on it.

Please look up what the term "blu ray" actually means and stop making a fool of yourself.

If you've seen Two Worlds II, you realize how capable the 360 can be. I think Skyrim could have some very good graphics. They'll have had 5 years to work on a new engine by the time the game actually comes out, assuming that they stay faithful to 11/11/11

You shouldn't. You don't say DVD-graphics either, do you?

Who cares about graphics? That's not what makes TES great for me :shrug: As long as everything is distinguishable and the content is there, it's all good.

This is an excellent read, and good information - thank you!

Its no wonder that they release these on the PCs, they develop them on PCs!

I'm glad about this. They can make it look good and people hopefully will not need newer computers to run it. That's the PC gaming industry's biggest weakness in my opinion: ballooning system requirements. If the consoles hold PC graphics back a bit, then good in my opinion. They can provide options to turn it up for people with more powerful machines and that's great, but making the game run poorly or not at all on older machines just so the minority of potential customers with new machines can make full use of their hardware doesn't make sense to me.

I remember the Crysis devs bragging people wouldn't be able to run the game on current hardware while it was in development. That's not a very smart design move business wise.

Keep in mind that articles like that tend to be very, very skewed and omissive. "There's a lot of money in PC gaming" is a true statement, but it ignores the fact that there's far, far more money on the consoles for high-budget games like this one. The non-MMO PC games market is dominated by casual games, which are extremely cheap to produce and distribute.

Have you seen the rage demo which is on xbox?? Graphics look great, so its not to say the graphics cant be good, its the limitation of the engine. So quit flaming the "crapbox" and disscuss skryim like the forum is for.

I'm REALLY getting tired of this debate. I'm saving my money for a shiny new PC, but until I see gameplay/screenshots I'm not spending a penny. If the game looks fantastic on consoles, I'll play it on my 360. If the game plays better on a nice PC, then I'll play it on a nice PC. If the Construction kit is only on PC but the game looks nice on the 360, then I will have to weigh my options carefully.

And let the speculation begin! http://twitter.com/Bethblog/statuses/14010984884604929# -- heres to hoping its not Gamebryo 5 Service Pack 7.

the game could look just the same as oblivion as far as im concerned.

as long as it doesnt have the cut&paste oblivion gates in it, ill be fine.

It isn't. Already been confirmed that it's a new graphics and gameplay engine, developed internally at Bethesda.

I think they should focus on PC development and then "shrink" for console needs.

I am with those that believe pc is still the real benchmark for game development. Consoles are alright, but hardcoe and the most advanced stuff + mods will always be in PC, thats my humble opinion.

As for those who say pc gaming is halting, well I am also one of those who just upgraded for upcoming games: i7-950, 6gb ddr3, nvidia gtx470, sb x-fi fatality...etc...

So what you're saying is that they should focus on the platform they're likely to see the least sales and profit on, and then chop down for the ones they're going to be making most of their money with.

Seems to be a lot of misinformation out there regarding game engines. According to the Fallout New Vegas title screen, it uses Gamebryo, Havok, Speedtree, Facegen, and FaceFX (possibly others). Gamebryo's copyright is 2006 which is the year Oblivion was released. Since then, I know that particular engine was updated for DX10/11 and the parent company (emergent) went out of business because of bad debt and their assets were purchased (and are for sale by) creditors. But Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas made no use of the updated libraries for this game engine sticking to the 2006 build used in Oblivion. A lot of the things people complain about like stale facial animations and physics glitches are the result of those respective engines (facegen/facefx and havok) too. I guess what I'm saying is it's not so much "the gamebryo engine" as it is "the Oblivion engine" which is what we should call it. The devs use basically a similar tool to make these games as we got with the construction set and geck. So even if they stick with gamebryo (and I'm sure they will considering it's for the same console generation and it's coming out in less than a year) there is plenty of room for improvement like we saw from Oblivion to Fallout 3 (but not really New Vegas since that was not one of the goals to that project anyways). If they can fix a lot of the bugs/physics/animations the Oblivion engine is still pretty good. I was just playing it this morning and for a 4+ year old game it's still pretty gorgeous. New Vegas doesn't even look as good to be quite honest. -I take this back, after playing Oblivion for a couple hours I went back to New Vegas and woah it definitely has a lot better graphics. Oblivion looks good still but they did squeeze a bit more out of that engine over the years

The jump from Halo 3 to Halo: Reach was absolutely phenomenal, so I thing Bethesda can pull of something similar.

I'm glad that we haven't pulled ahead on graphics .. in reality.. graphics were growing too fast and games weren't given any time to "catch up" to the graphics. How can you make a good game at all if your main concern is the graphics?
Sure graphics are impressive.. but they don't make a game. Take any fancy graphic heavy game and in your mind stick it into a game you love with older graphics. Would that game hold up to your standards of game play? That's how I at least look at it.
Would the game and game story still be fun if the game was made 10 - 15 years ago using those graphics. The answer is barely yes anymore.

The graphics will look phenomenally better because Skyrim is on a new engine for one. There are also many tricks of the trade developers can tamper with to make the quality of the picture enhanced and more fulfilling. One thing also to consider about console marketing is they never fully use the system to it's potential until near the end of it's life. Considering the consoles are supposed to last for another five years, I wouldn't be surprised to see some nice jumps in innovation, especially graphics.

Most questions should be answered with the first video showing some gameplay.




HINT, BETHESDA

considering I am often still in awe of oblivion 360's graphics,

then OP's point is a moot one.

A new engine does not equate to phenomenally better graphics. Particularly when we're dealing with a company like Bethesda (who, as far as I know, haven't made a new engine for anything since the mid-1990s), it's very possible that it doesn't lead to that at all.


Er... they aren't expected to last for another five years by most everyone. Well, except Sony, but that's more PR spin than anything - they know full well that they'll be releasing a new console well before then, but it helps sales if consumers don't know this.

People whos say that the consoles are weak dont know what theyre talking about. A new Xbox 360 with a controller cost about 500 dollars. Try to spend 500 dollars on a pc and compare it to the consoles and you will find out that the pc is weaker. So the consoles is more powerfull than the standard pc. Only the expensive"hardcoe gamer computers" can run better than a 360, and no body wants to spend 1500 dollars on apc to run the game at maximum.