Better comparison:

Oblivion Xbox
http://media.teamxbox.com/games/ss/1041/full-res/1116305972.jpg
Skyrim
http://www.gamereactor.se/media/59/elderscrolls5_235967b.jpg

Biggest offender emboldened and colored. What could you possibly mean by this? Do you think tessellation is all or nothing? Do you think flat surfaces automatically become dangerously detailed without explanation?

If the artists don't want a surface to be detailed, they will sculpt it this way in Zbrush, or for the harder, flatter surfaces probably in 3DS Max directly. After making the high detail model they will make a height map which gets wrapped around the lower-poly mesh just like the color texture. Then all you have to do is write a tessellation shader to take this information and tessellate the mesh. This doesn't take years to get right. It takes weeks or months. I myself could take a few days, write a demo for you that takes a plane and tessellates it based on a bump/height map. There's nothing especially hard about doing this.

As for you saying the world looks fake with absolutely no flat surfaces... I'm sure you're aware that's a relative term. The flattest thing I can think of is tempered glass. That doesn't exist in Skyrim. Next thing I think of are desks. We use wood veneer on MDF nowadays. Have you see a real wooden surface in a while? Very imperfect and not so flat. Things like this wouldn't even receive tessellation in game. A color and normal texture would be more than enough. Unless the people of Skyrim are really big on Chinese drywall, I doubt their interior walls are very flat either. Should be like log cabins, which are far from flat.

This is already quite apparent in the fact that OB PC has AAA, a feature not found in either console. I'd say the only limit is DX9.

I'd agree. The clear message here should be 'start as you mean to finish'. This game is going to be very popular, and Bethesdas main ES title for something like 5 years. They need to be thinking about the future of this game.

I wouldn't be surprised if the trees aren't just as good as that on the PC version, however, we will have to wait and see if how the lighting is. I have to had it to the cryengine, it's lighting is just gorgeous, I love that about Crysis. If Skyrim has the same lighting as Crysis and has the gameplay value that I think it is, it will be the greatest game created to date lol.



True but it is possible to support dx9 and still support dx10 and dx11 as we saw with AvP. I loved AvP until all the constant updates through steamed ruined it for me, it was perfectly balanced and it had dx11 support, I was happy but noooooooo, had to make predators overpowered... But I digress.

First off, I love love love how NPCs look so far. I always severely disliked (I don't like to use the word hate unless I really mean it) how NPCs looked in oblivion. And to me, the bartender looks like an imperial, or maybe a nord, and the guy on the stool looks like a dunmer or a redguard.

The waterfall image looks great. Sure it may not have the best graphics possible, but I care more about stylization than photo-realism (although photo-realism is a style form, isnt it? I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm not an artist! So I'll stop talking about that).

As a side note, the flower in the lower left-hand corner of the waterfall image reminds me of spotted knapweed, which is a terrible invasive (from Europe) in my corner of the United States. Therefore, I think I will have to burn a skyrim-knapweed for each spotted knapweed I see in real life that I can't rip out of the ground.

Yep, different type of vegetation or not, in my eyes Oblivion looks better which is somewhat disturbing...

Yeah, those SpeedTree leaves that constantly turn to face you are totally realistic and not at all creepy.

Skyrims looks so much better, the oblivion one everything blended to much and skyrims is much better and its a console screen (it could get better for console yet we don't know) just wait for PC

Don't know if anyone else have noticed it, but there a few things (not graphical) that doesn't make sense in the http://www.gamereactor.se/media/59/elderscrolls5_235967b.jpg

1) The water doesn't reflect any lighting beneath the rock, leaning above the water in the middle. It shouldn't be that dark beneath it.

2) Grass grows out of "nowhere" near the shores, and it doesn't make sense or look believable.

3) A firn plant is clipping through the rock to the right?

4) The water isn't as shallow as it's supposed to be near the shores

5) The rock leaning above the water in the middle doesn't seem to reflect in the water?

6) The waterfall is clipping?

7) There is no "foam" at the end of the waterfall

8) The rock leaning above the water in the middle cast a shadow on itself, but not on the ground? Therefore making it look a bit weird with such a big destinction between lightness and darkness.

Remember that these screenshots are very low-quality pictures.

Since when was 591px × 331px considered hi-res?

There we go, Skyrim beats Oblivion in that comparison by quite a bit. This just goes to show people the HUGE difference between graphics capabilities of the console and PC. People just can't say "Well Crysis looked amazing in full detail and this looks terrible compared to it." Well of course it's going to look terrible compared to it, the graphics and effects are toned down due to the fact that the consoles are many generations old compared to the PCs, if Skyrim looks this good (look at every 360 screenshot in the GI mag but the foliage one) on the 360, we can only imagine how amazing it will be on the PC.

You'll have to click on st?rre bild (bigger image) to see the large version of the pictures!

You linked to a small version of the picture so I assume that you didn't see the bigger versions.

They're http://www.gamereactor.se/media/59/elderscrolls5_235967b.jpg. Which is as high-res as the console images are likely to get.

All these complaints are the result of 6-year-old-hardware. PCs of today fix all of these problems. Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering, High Res Textures. That's why the PC version will be superior.

Are you a real bosmer?
To me as i've said, that picture looks better than the other,it looks more life-like,even the lighting looks better.
To all: Look at the scans again too.Look at the dragon,look at the muscle detail compaired to oblivion.
If you look at all the pic's properly you'll see a big difference.

Yeah I hope so too. The lighting was stunning in Crysis. In Skyrim, based from the screenshots I've seen so far, Bethesda should work/tweak it further. It's a very important feature.
And about "If Skyrim has the same lighting as Crysis and has the gameplay value that I think it is, it will be the greatest game created to date lol." I couldn't agree any more

Okay, didn't know the link in the lower right corner was to a higher-res image. I don't read moonspeak.

I agree...lighting/shadow's can have a huge impact on how the game looks.

Oblivions forests doesn't look better than Skyrims. Come on, in Oblivion everything looked like a fairytale. Skyrim looks so much more mature.
Edit: Bethesda should buy CryEngine 3 for their next Elder Scrolls game It's a shame they didn't before developlement on Skyrim started.

In defense of Beth those images are from 2009 so chances are the details hadn't been added yet. I think they purposely released dated images to start with so that we will be impressed again when they show us recent pics.

People certainly look better although I'm sure that barmaid has a false eye. I must say that whilst the descending water of the waterfall looked good, there are no impact splashes nor any rippling from where it drops into the pool. That's a disappointment considering what they've reputedly been doing with dynamic snow.

To be honest, CryEngine... it's great. But if you look at other games that have bought it for use, it doesn't look even nearly as good as Crysis, which makes me believe that it's not all about the engine
I have no idea how this stuff works, but I guess the engine defines some limitations and possibilites of what you can do. I believe what really makes a game look good is what and how you take use of those possibilites.

I'm really glad Bethesda created their own engine. Can't wait to see how they develop it further

1) Well the lighting is toned down in that picture, most likely in an effort to conserve processing.

2) Possibly just a quick build and they will come back later in development and clear out foliage that doesn't fit. The terrain may not be generated by grassy foliage like that is, otherwise it is massively time consuming and annoying to trying to hand place all the foliage in a giant world. (trust me.....it's annoying)

3) Possibly. Probably also a generation mistake and will be cut before it is shipped.

4) It's shallow. You have to look at the orange band around the shore (also realistic as deposited clay, I give props to the devs for that detail). It probably doesn't look shallow if you don't look at it just right because of the opaque water due to having lower quality water effects as it is on the console.

5) It does, just not very clearly, also a reduced water effect. Quality reflections in the water are a big process eater so they would really have to tone it down.

6) Don't think it's clipping. They announced that they had realistic water physics in Skyrim so it is probably just spray.

7) Also probably a water effect reduction for the console.

8) Not sure how to explain that one, probably still something to do with console settings.

You made good points about what you saw on the picture but I really think they are just issues in development right now and/or are just the quality reduction needed to keep Skyrim within reason on the consoles. PC should work out just fine.