An overriding theme I've been noticing on these forums is the concept of "Gameplay > Graphics", often taken to extremes.
I strongly believe this is a bad way to think. Primarily because of the assumption that one directly affects the other, and that by implementing fancier features like Screen Space Ambient Occlusion or Tessellation (DX11 on PC and a limited but still useful form on console) the core of the game - the quests and content - would be adversely effected. This, of course, does not hold true, and in some cases may actually be the wrong way around - the members of the team responsible for quest design and development are not the same as the ones creating the renderer, thus the two can be created in parallel, and by giving quest and content designers more to work with, better (or at least, more varied) content can be created.

The effect on atmosphere of properly implemented graphical effects should not be underestimated in any case, but most of all in an installment of a series which prides itself on such pillars as "Immersion" and creating a "believable world" - while morrowind may or may not be the best game ever created, there are few who would argue that the animations enhanced their experience, and most would agree that more detailed models and textures enhance the existing experience. There are projects, for both Morrowind and Oblivion, dedicated to enhancing the graphics through use of shaders - implementing these into engines where they are not natively supported is no easy task. Clearly there is demand for better visuals. Tessellation in particular would be a huge boon to the series, the difficulty of loading a bethesdian world seamlessly has not been one entirely overcome in previous titles, with Oblivion particularly suffering from jarring transitions as cells are loaded as local cells, not as distant landscape, and objects with distant forms, but not quite within view distance, vanish. This was improved, but not eliminated, in later titles. NPCs also typically pose an issue for even the most powerful of machines, as they must look good to somebody staring directly at them, and there are no lower detail models - meaning that every NPC is rendered at full detail whether you like it or not. This can have drastic performance hits, and while in Oblivion this was largely unnoticable, it is likely a large part of why NPC schedules never put great amounts of NPCs in the same place. Tessellation could solve both of these issues, by reducing the quality of objects to render smoothly based on distance, with no visual juttering or skipping as we're used to.
Ambient Occlusion has no real performance benefits, as such, however the difference in atmosphere it creates is not to be taken lightly, especially in a game priding itself on its newfound dynamic shadowing, where AO could "complete the picture", so to speak, by creating the shadows around corners and edges that older lighting systems tend to miss out upon.

Many other fancier effects are possible, some, like God Rays, are purely aesthetic, but all add to the atmosphere and how the game "feels". At the end of the day, Video Games are a visual medium, and those visuals are very important. Not more important than gameplay, not less important than gameplay, and not as important. Just "important".

Skyrim is looking good - so lets hope it *looks* good as well. As a contender for no doubt every "Game Of The Year" running, "average" is not enough, only excellence will do. Bethesda have previously shown themselves capable of such excellence, we can certainly hope they will do it again.

tl;dr, graphics are important, fancy effects could improve performance, content, and the scope of the game.

I completely agree.

I'm one of those who demand better visuals and up to date technical improvement. I don't think this and good quality gameplay are mutually exclusive. In my opinion Fallout New Vegas has much better gameplay than graphics. If New Vegas had Crysis graphics it would have been my all time favorite game.

I agree it looks good maybe except that screen with the hunter and the deer something is in my opinion very very wrong with that hunter's head it's not natural looking like a proper head I don't know...I think the head is in huge contrast with the rest of the scene where that forest looks amazingly natural.

This is the screen I'm talking about. http://250kb.de/u/110208/j/NjJH2CXXIucu.jpg
Looks like the hunter's head is not there, looks like a tree trunk is popping out of the body. The hair is forming a 90 degree angle which is very weird.

TBH, I'm one of those that assents to gameplay > graphics.
It's not that I view graphics as not adding to immersion. In fact, when it comes to what I can squeeze out of games in terms of graphical performance (i.e. Morrowind w/ MGE), I find it's hard to go back once you've got the potential to do things like crepuscular rays, and SSAO, and Depth of Field, and what have you.

It's just that I find world-building and culture and storytelling to still be far more effective at immersing me than any of the graphics, good though they may be.
I also recognize that the graphics must be up to a certain level; it would take a unique set of people to play a solidly text-adventure ES game with the most amazing story and world descriptions evar, but only a black screen with words.

So I guess if I were to fully describe how I feel, it would be...

Gameplay > Graphics >= X, such that X represents a minimum standard of improvement where the visuals don't start detracting from the experience.
For me, that X would be slightly less than what they're at right now (that we know/can-guess with Skyrim). Better NPCs, more dynamic lighting/weather systems, tweaked HDR/Bloom, etc.

I completely agree.

Btw, Todd agrees too. :bowdown:

Yea something is really weird about that hair. Not sure what happened there?

That hunter looks so bad that I cannot in good conscience include it in any argument. I simply cannot believe it could possibly make it to release.



Lore and writing make a huge difference to long term, or passive, immersion and are certainly essential to giving the impression that you aren't inhabiting a world that exists only for you to be in it, but IMO graphical fidelity is a different *kind* of immersion. Lore is the stuff you can get lost in for hours and bring your experience to a whole new level, but graphical excellence is about the moment to moment immersion. Lore, no matter how good, will never make your clock skip three hours without you noticing, but at the same time, you can't while away a long bus ride thinking about a game's graphics. Both contribute to the feeling of a natural world, but to different aspects - and both are essential.

i love to see good graphics in games as well as good quality gameplay, i completely agree. I think graphics do help with immersion. On oblivion as much i adored! that game the graphics of the npc's (now i look back) were lacking in diversity and the fact that beggars voices also changed?

It's not so much the hunter himself its the head/hair. I'm not even sure if that's hair or what?

While the hair is by far the worst bit (I mean seriously, that has a right angle in it. Hair. Right angle.) the clothes' texture looks lower resolution than oblivion, and the lighting is way oversharp. Strangely, the rest of the scene looks good - great, even,

The hair is the most difficult possible thing to pull off. Look at the Witcher. Geralt's hair is much more important than the hair of Tes characters because in The Witcher Geralt is a given, it's you, you don't choose who you are. And still his hair is stiff as dead. This picture with the ranger is in my opinion the best looking screenshot of all released so far, eccept the hair that looks like plastic macaroni.

I agree totally, I just hope that the PC version supports all the wiz-bang stuff that makes PC games great. But if the game were to look exactly like it does in the screens I wouldn't be to displeased.

I hope to GOD they have LODs for the player models this time. This was one of the main reasons why there was never any large battle scenes. You can't very well cram tonnes of NPCs into the scene when all of them are being displayed at their full high-poly high-resolution glory at all times, it's ironic in oblivion that some of the most important battles are executed with maybe 20 people at most, and even that puts a strain on your computer.

the problem is that they are developing Skyrim to be compatible with the current gen consoles. Since sony especially designed the ps3 to last for TEN YEARS, and there is no sign of a new xbox, we can assume that games will remain at the current tech level for some time- especially if they are console ports.

I have no problems with graphical improvements, but they do not mean everything to me. I would rather have a great storyline rather than fantastic graphics, but with a horrendous storyline. That said, I believe that there is enough room to have a mix of both good graphics and storyline. As unfortunate as it is, there will be some fans that just will not be happy with the choices made.

Alas I'm all too aware of this - however, many graphical effects are more than just "on" or "off". Tessellation would bring a performance /boost/, at least to the 360 which has native support, I'm not too sure on how well that would go down on PS3, and AO can scale quality and performance quite well by taking more or fewer samples. I have no unrealistic hopes of a game that looks good for 2011 - but even on aging hardware there's much room to improve.

I am a very firm believer in Gameplay > Graphics. Why? Becuase I PLAY the game... I do NOT play the graphics. Sure its great when a game looks like a movie, but you seem to think that system resource is no object, but in the real world thats just not the case. Sure, Bethesda has the personel to add all sorts of fancy graphical effects into Skyrim, and the game content will not be directly effected... but the more fancy effects you add, the more you have to sacrafice somehwere else. Ambient Occlusion for example is know to be extreamly resource heavy... yes it looks good, but its a huge resource hog and thats just not a good thing for an open world game running on 6 year old hardware.

Also, the addition of such eye candy features will have a VERY minimal effect on content creation and implimentation. I don't see a whole lot that quest designers can do with Ambient Occlusion for example. Its just an eye candy feature that makes the game look better... but again, its a huge resource hog.



Yes, there is a demand for better visuals. Why do you think cookie cutter repeats of games like Halo and Call of Duty continue to sell so well? They are basically the same game, with slightly better graphics each time and people buy them like its going to be the last one. But again, when you are dealing with an open world game with fairly solid graphics to begin with thats running on 6 year old hardware.... its just not possible to add in every possible visual effect. People might mod in new visual effects, but odds are the game will no longer run inside the minimal system requierments with such additions. Not only does the game have to run on the 360 when its released, it also has to run on 2-4 year old PCs. Modders don't have those requirements.



Bethesda already uses a LOD system (Tessellation is basically auto-LOD for this case). Yes, Tessellation would probably look better, but improvements to Bethesda's current system could also solve the issues from oblivion.



Not only does AO not have a performance benefit... it comes at a large performance COST. Almost no open world game has used it and those that do, use it sparingly. I would imagine the PC version of Skyrim will have light AO... but its unlikely to make na appearence on the console.



Well thats your opinion. My opinion is that graphics don't matter so long as the gameplay is fun. There does become a point at which gameplay will suffer under the weight of graphical system cost... and thats a line that is crossed way too often. I made a reference to COD before.. each and every COD game has the exact same gameplay but better graphics. Why? Becuase all development effort and free resource goes into graphics. If the developers spent more effort/resource on gameplay COD might well have larger maps, vehicles, and physics driven destruction by now. Yet, they just keep bogging it down with new effects that change the gameplay exactlly zero. So its hard to seriouslly argue graphics are just as important.

It would be one thing is Skyrims graphics looked like they were strait out of Morrowind. However they look just fine for a game in 2011 and thus Bethesda does not need to bother trying to cram all sorts of new graphic effects on top of them.

Naturally, I agree with you. A combination of great graphics and good gameplay is the best for a game to be great, so I don't understand those people who says Gameplay > Graphics (as I don't understand those ones who say Graphics > Gameplay). Maybe Gameplay is a bit more essential, as a game with nice gameplay can still triumph even if it hasn't good graphics (Minecraft), but any game who aims to create realism (aka, Skyrim) simply must take good care of them, and (wisely) use as many techs as they've avaliable.

Plus, what are techs like DX11 and OGL 4.1 for then? If they're avaliable, use them

This is true, in some areas. As you can see with the new engine, there are some areas (especially in regards to character animation) that are being further delved into, but as far as texture resolution and polycount goes, you're not going to see a big difference.

From FO3 to Skyrim? Not so big.
From OB to Skyrim? HUGE!

http://thewormhole.nfshost.com/OblivionSkyrimCompare.png

I would like to agree with this, but as previously stated, the game still has to run on 6 year old hardware. It's unfortunate because the pc can handle these new technologies, but the 6 year old hardware that was mentioned likely cannot handle it...until the next gen is released, then we might see more of these technologies being used in even more games.

I think you're mistaking what I'm saying. I'm not saying "Shove every effect under the sun in, screw the consequences", and I'm not even saying that released screenshots aren't good enough. I'm saying that striving for better graphics doesn't automatically incur a content hit. Obviously if you're of the mind that taking stuff out to fit more graphics in is fine, then yes, content will be removed - but bethesda aren't, and *we can do better*. Light AO isn't all that performance heavy and adds a lot to the scene, and while bethesda already have an LOD system, no static LOD system will ever be as good, and by having a static LOD system they're using up space on the tiny, tiny DVD that could be used for content or dialogue.

The COD games don't not get better because they're focussing on graphics, they're focussing on graphics because they don't need to get better to sell. While yes, many developers take this route, it does not mean that endevouring to have better graphics means you don't care about the gameplay. I'll be quite happy to seriously argue the importance of graphics until the dragons come home - any world that's trying to convince me it's not just an abstraction of dice rolls and statistic checks is going to have to look the part. Consistency is more important than pure fidelity by a long way - you'll notice that at no point did I call for higher poly meshes, nor higher resolution textures, and instead focussed on the techniques that would complete what's already there. Tessellation to smoothen the open world, and AO to finish the illusion of light and shadow. Graphics not using the latest technology aren't bad, bad graphics just don't flow - and having full dynamic shadowing without even trying to simulate edge shadows will simply never look the part.

Graphics are Important, as gameplay is Important. Not in a way you can compare them, because they're important for different reasons - but if you want a game to be more than just a game, if you want it to create a believable world - a window to Nirn, so to speak - then yes, looking the part is every bit as important.

edit: Not, of course, that I wouldn't like more polys and larger textures, nor would I complain if we had any number of nice graphical touches - it's that I'm not crusading for graphical advancement for graphical advancement's sake, rather for bethesda to use existing techniques to create a better representation of their universe.

Besides character models and other details, the game so far looks to be about the same as oblivion/fallout 3. It seems like they haven't implemented proper lighting yet either (which is NOT an advanced tech). It honestly looks like heavily modded oblivion to me.

Yup, but bad graphics kills inmersion. You can have fun with the game, but you'd never feel it (i.e. suspension of disbelief).

Those are actually two different things, which I like both. I like playing Super Mario World for the fun of it, and I like to play Crysis for the fun of it + inmersion.