While the character models do indeed have an effect, the biggest culprit to this problem was in fact the AI. For those bigger battles they had to turn the AI off using scripts, because there is a limit in the engine to how much active AI there can be at once.

To see this in effect make a quick mod in the CS for Oblivion that drops maybe 10-15 enemies into one room, save the file and start up the game. Once you go into that room you will get attacked, but only by maybe 8 (I think, I can't remember the number limit) of the people, the rest will just stand around until somebody dies.

I find that the position this thread disagrees with, namely gameplay > graphics, is for me a tolerance of overt imagination in one aspect versus a non-tolerance for overt imagination in another.

For instance: I would not complain in the slightest if the various shaders and abilities mentioned in the first post were added in, and the story and world was fleshed out enough to convey a complex and deep non-vision-based environment.

Now, if the graphics were sub-par compared to the first post, or even if they were sub-par as compared to the screenshots we've seen (hypothetically), my mindset for enjoying TES games in particular would make me capable of extending my imagination to fill in for the visual effects, so long as the story and world were still fleshed out well. Is the imagination by any means a substitute for the visuals? No, not really. But I would be able to handle it.

If it were the reverse, however, that the graphics were absolutely top-notch and the story and world were sub-par, I would not tolerate having to use my imagination overtly to form an understanding of the world, when the world is what I play TES for.


I know that Bethesda is obviously very keen on both, and that the gameplay is not likely to suffer at the hands of graphics, or vice-verse. But that is still the priority as I see it. I would and generally do support the inclusion of more advanced features into the released title, such as god-rays and whatever else, but even then, gameplay (rather, story and world) is still far more important than the visual effects to me if I had to arbitrarily choose between them.

The clothing doesn't just look poorly textutred, the bottom section is at blunt ugly angles also.

The thing about Bethesda is that their games are usually top of the line, graphically, when they are released. It's a fairly big part of the experience of their games. However, graphical leaps are becoming less pronounced, and after the big problems are solved, it comes down to details.

At this point in their history, there are many aspects of gameplay that I would prefer over polishing the microscopic details. Things such as mounted combat, real time water travel. Bethesda should seek to excel in depth, rather than graphical mastery, which is better left to series with more focused gameplay, such as Crysis, Halo, etc...

I'm sure I didn't, but the graphics directly impact the usability, to the point where spending a sunday with a copy of DF on my right monitor and a getting started guide on my left monitor basically got me no closer to understanding.

What I mean by "Trying to do" is that DF is not trying to make a realistic looking world. Whether graphics look "Good" is not determined by how many polygons they're pushing, but how everything meshes together, and how no one part jumps out as being significantly better or worse. With full dynamic shadows, a lack of AO will look obvious - cups and chairs will cause shadows based on light sources, but they won't create edge or corner shadows. The illusion of a fluid world is shattered by any kind of loading jumps, which tessellation could remove. The game, of course, must be fun - but when I talk graphically I am not talking about the game, I'm talking about the world the game inhabits. That it can strive to be more than "just a game" and move into the realm of simulating a world.

I was talking specifically about how the game looks. No you could not pull off a game like even Morrowind on the N64's hardware, but if Morrowind or Oblivion has N64 quality graphics with the same game play they would still be great games. Again I invoke Minecraft as an example of this. Years down the road we could see a Minecraft where each cube is in fact say 64 cubes or more. Would that mean the Minecraft of today is junk? Nope! Despite that, it would still be neat to have a Minecraft-like game world made up of billions or trillions of voxels with a realistic graphical look.

This is not at all like that RAM comment (which by the way Bill Gates never made, it's urban legend just like the myth that someone wanted to close the patent office in the 1800s). I never said hardware advancements will never be needed to make more games. I said for all current games, PS2 era (or even N64 era) graphics are more than sufficient to allow user interaction with the game world, and that's 100% true. Nitpicking because Skyrim doesn't use the latest hundreds of dollars costing tech and proclaiming how Oblivion looks "horrible" and such graphics "ruin the game" is just plain over the top, even if someone loves great graphics.

I don't know why you think algorithms cost hundreds of dollars, the theories are free and public domain and the implementations would be in house. I realise that Gates never made the comment, but it's the best known phrase to describe technological short-sightedness. N64 graphics may be functionally fine for a game like a TES title, but aesthetically? Well, muddy textures making signs or small details impossible to work out, and intricate architecture impossible, may be fine by you, but I like my game worlds to be detailed - otherwise it will never be more than Just A Game.

Have you ever played Zelda: Ocarina of Time? The dungeons are far more intricate than any seen in Oblivion (and probably Morrowind too), despite the fact that both of those have better graphics.

Hunter's head aside, I think that the forest looks positively amazing. Especially those birches - and the fallen birches on the right and the birch stump, it's awesome!! Maybe finally a forest will look more wild, natural, with all sorts of fallen, putrid tree trunks, etc., more like ancient, deep woods and less like an orderly park that's been labeled "a forest".

What could be even more immersive would be if, for instance, certail random weather phenomena (think: thunderstorm, gale) could permanently affect a forest. Imagine: you walk into a village inn for the night, there's a storm coming. In the morning you walk through the forest to get to a nearby ruin, taking a route you've walked before, and there are fallen trees here and there that weren't there yesterday.

Maybe not yet in Skyrim, but I hope we're getting there...

So basically the OP could have just said..............Theres an extent to how bad graphics can be but redeemable with great gameplay. But graphics does not take away time devs need for gameplay. And graphcs help gameplay seem immersive and show a wonderful atmosphere through lighting, shadows, and other techniques.

Could have just said that.

The dungeons are, not the architecture. I'm talking houses, and temples. N64-era graphics cannot do realistic looking scenes, primarily because of the texture resolution. It's very hard to do any readable text, and if you honestly can't think of a gameplay use for being able to pick out large details on objects, well, then there is no discussion to be had.

@mumatil; I prefer to elaborate upon my points. I even put a tl;dr section if you're scared of reading.

I got bored of Minecraft so I'm not going to talk about that game. However, I'm a huge Legend of Zelda fan and A Link to the Past was indeed one of the greatest games of all time, but I disagree with you that a game can have terrible graphics nowadays and get away with it. I don't look down on older games for having lesser graphics because I know that they were limited at the time but if any new game had those graphics, I wouldn't enjoy it. The thing is that people think that you have to sacrifice gameplay for graphics or vice versa. That's just not the case. How much time you have at your disposal to spend on any one aspect of the game is the only limitation and with a game such as TES, 95% of the time spent is making the amazing gameplay and the world with the rest on graphics. TES always comes out with amazing graphics that are always at the cutting edge of their time and this time will be no different. Now if BGS had more time, they could take their graphics even farther and make the massive world the best graphics of any game until the next TES game but that's just not in the cards. Skyrim will have some of the best graphics of any game to date, don't worry people. If you can't see that the graphics are some of the best on the 360 and will be even better on the PC, then take my word and the word of countless gaming magazines and BGS, the graphics are going to look fantastic.

This whole debate makes me think back to the early days of gaming.

There was this game called Zork. It was text-based, so yeah, it didn't really have any graphics. As PhYoshi said, though, they were good enough for what it was trying to do. I never played the game much (probably because I wasn't old enough to enjoy a text-based game yet), but my father did. It was a good game.

Then there was this game called King's Quest. It was essentially a game like Zork, but with a graphical interface. It still used text commands for many actions, but now instead of reading about the room, I could look at the room. This provided a whole new challenge because now you had to visually find the objects you were looking at. Even more, you had to figure out what that object was called. That meant that sometimes you'd have to type in multiple commands trying out different names until you found the right one. As much as the graphics did for the game and gameplay, though, they were rather blocky with a limited color palette.

Then game out numbers II, III and IV. They weren't really any different in terms of gameplay, but each time their graphics improved. The blocks got smaller and there was more color. This made the game environments much more detailed. It made it easier to distinguish things and hence easier to figure out what they were. It also allowed for more varied and more interesting environments. The gameplay was still just as fun, but it was enhanced by the improved graphics.

Then, of course, came King's Quest V, where the gameplay turned to point and click, and it wasn't nearly as fun anymore. The improved graphics didn't help because then you could just wave your mouse over the screen until something was highlighted. It was a lot less challenging. Though I did enjoy Conquest of the Longbow, which used a similar gameplay interface.

The point? Each of those early games had pretty much the same gameplay, and similar stories. In my mind, though, each step up in graphics helped the game improve. So while gameplay may be greater than graphics, they do not and cannot exist independently of each other. If the gameplay is designed around a detailed visual word, then it needs to be as detailed as possible, otherewise the game suffers.