Yeah I suppose however you cant really expect a drastic leap in quality like there was in Morrowind to Oblivion as the game is still on the same platform and has the same hardware limitations.

This.

Well, I'm quite liking the aesthetic side of what I've seen so far, that's for sure. I'm never the one to be amazed by the technological advances anyway, so it's the design that's more important to me, not simply how realistic they look.

Metro 2033 didn't run on 6 year old hardware and it still wasn't a huge leap either.



Why can't people tell when shadows are on a character. Look at the bar maiden on the other side of the room, apparently she is only a redguard on the right side of her face....

will look better on pc, but still very good for consoles considering the game style.

Compare This: First Oblivion Forest Screenshot
http://media.teamxbox.com/games/ss/1041/1098469156.jpg
To This: First Skyrim Forest Screenshot
http://www.gamereactor.se/media/59/elderscrolls5_235967b.jpg

I like the one that looks like a forest.

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f386/vtastek/Skyrim/misc/armveindetail.jpg

They must be using some advanced parallax mapping technique, it sticks out. On the other hand the polygon count on that arm is really distracting.

http://www.gamereactor.se/media/59/elderscrolls5_235970b.jpg

This looks a lot like Morrowind. Look at the fog(!atmosphere!) and Morrowind bottles.

With some mods to enhance certain things:
http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f386/vtastek/Skyrim/misc/MGEskyrim.jpg

The Oblivion screenshot looks better. Seriously.

About tessellation... I actually know the way the technology works on a graphics hardware level, and I don't understand how you could ever imply it as being "randomly adding polys". It just shows that you honestly don't know what tessellation is and what it is good for. The way bump mapping appears to add detail must be completely random too. Not based on a bump or normal map or anything, using a lighting equation. :rolleyes:

We may as well get rid of bump mapping too because the only good solution for you must be the original 1M poly meshes straight out of Zbrush. The reason tessellation is so great is that you can simplify the base meshes, which saves an incredible amount of bandwidth, and lets you perform all transforms (rotation, scale, translation, animations) on the lower quality meshes. Then, after the fact, the tessellation uses the height map to apply the higher detailed geometry, which will look nearly identical to the original source mesh from Zbrush. It's an impressive technology, and will eventually be like what normal mapping is to us today.


Yeah, I really don't understand why everybody thinks the bartender is a Redguard. It's a Nord, end of story. He's in the dark, his face is in shadow. You can even see his beard, which would be pretty hard to see on a Redguard. And he has a mullet which typically goes against the Afro-centric hair styles of the Redguards in Oblivion. His face shape is also not Afro-centric.

Look again, that's just a rock on the ground.

The polygon counts are RIDICULOUSLY low on all of the screenshots of Skyrim I have seen so far. <- just pointing out a fact. not an opinion. just a fact.

By the way, if you take a close look at that water in the forest screenshot, you'll see that they are still using a flat texture for water. I see no improvement whatsoever over Oblivions water. And oblivions water was rubbish to say the least.

End of rant.

So you prefer a bland, monochromatic, randomly generated forest over a hand-crafted, detailed one?

The reason some of you are disappointed is because this is a game, and not reality.
We did the same mistake with Oblivion, imagining it to be this über realistic simulation where you plug your brain into the game and seeing the visuals on your visual cortex directly, in 3d of course.

Do you want to see a forest?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2c/Cryengine3_screenshot.png is a forest.

IMO Oblivion with all of the graphics mods does look better. But you gotta remember these are low setting shots.

Bland as it may be, but looks easier to the eyes, compared to the Skyrim one. Which looks a bit of a mess, to be frank.

Again, that's detailed and hand-crafted, not the not the randomly generated garbage found in Oblivion.

Nicely said. I didn't even notice his comment or I would've mentioned it lol. Tesselation affects the the meshes.

I can't say that I'm impressed by the water, trees, or "grass." But the character models and interiors look wondiferous. :hehe:

It's also from the PC version of the engine with transparency antialiasing. It's not even a fair comparison. I would say that on PC forests will look just about as good as that CryEngine 3 shot. Especially after graphics mods to up the resolution of all the flora and fauna textures.

This is the hardware you are seeing in the screens.
http://img227.imageshack.us/img227/6609/specs1mi.jpg

I think tessellation was confirmed to be out, I can't remember where exactly. At least I doubt Skyrim will feature it, since the engine is using DX9 which isn't capable of tessellation. They've noted a few times that they're comfortable with the visuals they can create using DX9.

A natural forest is a mess - so Skyrim wins ;P

Yup, and that's why the picture that akvisuals posted is not a fair comparison. CryEngine 3 made some serious concessions to be put on consoles. That forest image is from a PC demo, at a probably much higher source resolution and then downscaled. So it's effectively supersampled. The image is only 800x450, which is not like any playable resolution. The forest images we've seen of Skyrim so far are from the Xbox 360 at a direct 720p, probably with little to no AA, especially not on transparency. Which makes the foliage look worse.