its not that I think graphics take away from the game play

its that I just don't put much value on graphics as much as I put on gameplay, so for me if the game play is amazing and the graphics are good or even average I will play the game, so if skyrim has lets say morrowind graphics but with better animations for example I will play it.

No, that's not a fact - it's held true so far because nobody has had significantly more power to play around with. "640k will be enough for anybody" thinking smacks of nothing but ignorance, and to say that there is no possible use for additional power shows naught but a lack of imagination. Even without any great enhancements, running games at higher resolutions lets you pick out more detail - essential for, for example, a puzzle game that does not with to rely on the player hitting a button to get a clue. Importantly, your thematic tools are limited in many areas with PS-2 era graphics - for example, while the "Super Realistic" theme may be getting old, it's an impossibility with such resource constraints. Showing large worlds is also almost impossible without pre-rendering, significantly weakening the gameplay opportunities. To think that "Nobody has done anything more, so nothing more can be done" is a way of thinking that has existed for a very long time - come the 1900s we had "discovered all there was to know about science", for example.

A video game doesn't need much to be good. Tetris stands the test of time, pong is almost farcical in its simplicity and yet can captivate for hours. However, we can do better, and we should do better. Bethesda's vision of nirn does not include pop in, muddy textures, or a lack of many NPCs in one area - and now we have the technology and resources to eliminate, or at least mitigate, these issues. They may not be essential for a good game, but they are essential for realising their vision, and they are essential for creating an absolutely believable world, instead of a sort of believable world.

Your third paragraph specifically makes me wonder whether this is a kneejerk reaction or whether you actually read my post, especially in light of me specifically fingering Yoshi's Island as my "Best Looking" game of all time.
Just because we have reached a "Good Enough" does not mean we should stop striving for better things, especially when some of those better things have benefits outside of pure graphical fidelity.

Once we hit pure realism, there will be nothing else to work on but gameplay.

We're a very, very long way off from that, and that's also a fallacy. Pure realism is not the end of the line, and the end result of "video games" is not to emulate reality. Game design is hard too, you know - it's not a case of just requiring you to dedicate time into programming it. Making something "fun" is hard - video games that aren't fun are not fun because the game design failed, not because they look good.

When i first play a game i rate it based on graphics, if a game has beautiful graphics than i'm usually hooked to it from the start. I really hope the graphics from Skyrim will be an improvement like they went from Morrowind to Oblivion. Personally, i enjoyed playing Oblivion a lot more than Morrowing because of it's beautiful graphics at the time. If i look back now i see so many flaws in Oblivion's graphics, so if they've managed to improve those then it will be a legendary game for me .

Man, if only this forum has a "thanks" button. This particular post deserves at least A THOUSAND of it.

Great graphics certainly doesn't amount a GOOD game. If ultimate graphics is what people need, Famicom won't endure the weather. However, saying we don't want better graphics is a lie either.

We want to see things that look good. That's one of the reasons we have better GPU with each passing day, the other reasons being it's profitable business and because they can make them.

It's not about Gameplay > Graphics. Each needs its own attention: you can't compare the two as if one is more important while the other is not.

We want something that is fun, but looks nice to help us enjoy it

Well, good for you, but don't blame those who need them. Or who like them (like me ).

Gameplay > Graphics but that doesn't mean I don't fancy top edge graphics. It's just if I really need to choose between them. When I played Morrowind its graphics were already dated, but that didn't prevent me from enjoying it greatly. When I played Planescape: Torment the graphics looked so last century, but the exceptional story svcked me in like a narcotic.

That's my entire point, you can't choose between them, neither of them are optional and the quality of one does not affect the quality of the other.

I agree with everything that the OP cited.

About the image of the hunter, I'm not a bit afraid, you know why?
A game that is more than four years in the making, do you think these pictures are really recent? Furthermore, I believe that all screenshots are of the XBox360, in which the textures are not the same as the PC.

Let's leave to discuss the graphics after the release of the video containing the first gameplay, then yes, we have a game in motion with the graphics running 'true', so we can complain or applaud. :goodjob:

I agree with the OP. Graphics and gameplay are not as mutually exclusive as some say. The only place where they affect each other is when there is a discrepancy. If the company allocates to much money into graphics and physics and the story and dialogue fall behind then you got a problem. But that's not because the graphics itself, it's because the politics of that company who neglected the content and tried to sell the game on graphics merits only. I'm yet to find a perfectly balanced game though. They all seem to favor one or another, even if that's not the developers intention.

that day will go down in history as the greatest day OF ALL TIME

Think it depends. The more games are trying to be and becoming realistic in a graphical sense the more they're prone to trigger a kind of uncanny valley effect. As soon as a certain amount of realism is achieved, the lack of key features of reality (e.g. shadows in Oblivion) diminish immersion the more. If you are going to take a more artsy approach or are trying to appeal to feelings of nostalgia rather than realism it doesn't really matter how realistic it looks as long as the overall impression is coherent and believeable. What's more, a certain limitation of graphics in the old days (and still today) required a lot more compensation through imagination and thus maybe enabled the player a deeper linkage to the game world. That's why minecraft still has a lot of beatuy despite its obvious nonrealistic graphics. All of its world and its inhabitants are rather a projection screen for one's own imagination while still retaining a beauty of its own. If games get more realistic, they are more likely to lack these projection screens as there's not much room for one's own imagination left which, of course, is not in itself a bad thing, it's just harder perhaps to achieve the same amount of emotional impact when you're more of a watcher rather than creator of imagination.

Of course, Gameplay>Graphics. If they kept Gamebryo, we'd play Skyrim and enjoyed it anyway if the gameplay was worth it. But Bethesda has funds to make graphics simply GREAT. I know that there's tech limitations on consoles, but adding DX11 features for PCs don't affect consoles, it just makes the tech longer to develop. And making the hair at least slightly better than that plastic-looking spaghetti we've seen isn't THAT resource heavy (Look at FFXIII, its hair animations isn't so great, but it doesn't look like crap). So dont be lazy, Beth, work harder :dance:

By the way, the thing that broke immersion in OB for me sometimes was its animation. THANK YOU Bethesda for making animation not like it was (at least I hope you did, heh). I can imagine dragins moving like that cliffracers from mw :shakehead:

i looked at that screenshot and have concluded

there is no cloth physics

low polly modes
terrible textures
animation bends characters unrealistically
grass looks bad

Thats your opinion.but not mine.

People try and compare this to crysis,which in my view is alittle unfair.

If you actually look at some screens of crysis ( which i've done ),you will see not all screen shots show.what it really looks like.
Some do,but not all,then when you've done that,look at footage of the game ,it's much better ( in my view ) seeing it moving with sound effects etc.
My point is not all screenshots show everything well.
When we see the game running,with sound effects etc.....then we can judge.
My opinion.

Amazing how you managed to assimilate so much of an image. :banghead:

I also agree, ive seen the screenshots and im not happy.

This battle is as old as the original Sega and NES. People have always been saying gameplay is more important than graphics. And yet have you ever seen graphics stop improving? No. So what does that tell you? The greatest graphics possible would equal REALITY. But I'm sorry, the quest does not even end there. Because the REAL Holy Grail of immersion is REALITY + IMAGINATION combined. We are all heading toward Virtual Reality universes owned by Mega Corporations and I'm sure Bethesda will one day be one of them if they haven't been merged into someone else by then. One day in the near future there will be a Tamriel you can walk around in yourself inside your "avatar" in digital space. It won't ever stop.

Did anyone's argument about gameplay being the best ever stop the graphics revolution from advancing? Ha! There are new graphics cards being finished every 6 months now. And when a gaming company hires its staff, they hire what they can afford in order to make the best game they can afford. If they are little poor, do they skip out on gameplay? No. What they skimp on when they can't afford much are the artists and the graphics, because those are very expensive. Good gameplay can always be made by clever people, but good graphics are always the thing being improved upon with every generation and thus, if you simply look at the numbers, you can see where the greatest value lies to the most people and to the industry itself: on graphics and art.

After Morrowind's success, the first thing Bethesda did was to upgrade their graphics engine. And the first thing the modders did when that game came out was to upgrade the Textures and Draw Distance and LOD. And those Modders were the first ones to get the most love from the community and garnered huge names for themselves because of their reTexture mods. When people want to show off their computers, they use to use Crysis to do that, not a game known for its great "gameplay" ... because the person wanting to see what that computer is capable of doing wants to see the visuals, not the computer's gameplay capabilities.

Why do some guys like average-looking girls with great personalities while others want only the hottest girls with no personalities? How can either side ever convince the other of their position's value to the other? It's impossible. But what we can see is that it is beauty that continue to inspire the industry to advance. And because of the love of it, people are willing to shell out billions every year to upgrade their computers just to play the next Crisis game because of the immersion, and that game was made by 100's of artists working 16 hour days, and 65% of their work (rough guess) was on the game's graphics and art.

Hey, I'm not sitting advocating graphics myself. I'm trying to ask you to look around and see what society as a whole has invested ITSELF into, and then I simply ask us all to stop banging our heads against a wall that won't ever be changed (no matter what any of you gameplay enthusiasts say) until the Holy Grail of Reality + Imagination is finally reached. You can't fight the crowd folks; the crowd always prevails unless you can placate it. That usually involves making concessions and giving in to it in some way (or least SAYING you will) hahahahaha....

Crysis has amazing gameplay as a FPS. Its campaign is not a Half-Life or a Halo though. I can just fire up Half-Life to experience the "calm before the storm" beginning and its lengthy campaign or Halo just to do the final run with its awesome music one more time. Crysis couldn't match them unfortunately in those aspects but I play Crysis regularly for its gameplay which is top notch on all accounts, stealth, physics, vehicles, AI... I recommend Stalker and Metro 2033 which have stealth gameplay to them too. Yes, they have good graphics too but it is just a coincidence. :biggrin: I really don't enjoy enemies running at me, stopping and shooting then coming closer and shooting and so on gameplay of certain games.

I enjoy Minecraft and Thief very much for their graphics because graphics affect gameplay in those titles.

I am enjoying Morrowind with better graphics again and again, it only gets better. I think in Morrowind, it is about atmosphere. The world needs consistency, graphics complete that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZLpo5Tv0ts

Until you make graphics that makes real life look fake. :laugh:

I feel that the graphics don't make too much a difference to the game, not as much as gameplay does. If I found a copy of the Xbox version of Morrowind I would still play it today. Even though the graphics of Oblivion are outdated by now, no other game gives me the sense of immersive atmosphere as I sit in a cosy, wooden house by the fire reading an in-game book.

If I had to really choose between these two games, Skyrim and Dwarf Fortress, well, I'd choose Dwarf Fortress. Deep, complex, immersive (text). Gameplay>>>Graphics for me. They are called videogames, yes. But many really misunderstand why they are called that way. Video = Monitor/TV, not Video=Awesome Graphics. Graphics for me is a surpluss, I will never buy an annoying, mediocre game that has great graphics. I'd probably enjoy a lot of Commodore 64 games even now However, as long as we have good gamplay along with good graphics, it's even better.

While I think your example is flawed (Dwarf Fortress? Oh, that game that looks brilliant but every time I try I have no idea what's going on!), Dwarf Fortress' graphics do what dwarf fortress is trying to do. Skyrim is *trying* to create a realistic, light-and-shadowy, first person, fluid world, and would appear to be not using technologies that could help it get closer to its aim. Not because they're pretty, because they fill in the gaps.

Fantastic assumptions based on a still image of a game that (at the time of posting) is still nearly a year from release.

I think a lot of what makes this image look a little wonky is that the subject in the image is very close to the camera creating a depth of field distortion. Plus it's a still image of a subject during movement, so things look a little "incorrect" when compared to a pose.

I have to agree that the textures look a little low-res but again, a game in motion looks A LOT different from a game's screen capture... especially one that is still a year from release.

Let's all relax a little and put some faith in our friends at gamesas...

You didn't play it enough.


What does that mean? It could have had the same graphics as Skyrim's and keep doing what it is doing.


Fine, as I said, that's even better, if they make a realistic world around a solid gameplay.