Concerning the screenshot of the creek:

@DCDeacon http://www.oxm.co.uk/viewer.php?mode=article&id=17301 That an early build of game? Love everything but water looks meh.

@MrTissueBox Yes it is, and you're nuts. Water in the game looks fantastic.


It's an early build screenshot. Therefore, I'm betting Pete is right, and the water does look fantastic in the most up-to-date build.

I've heard the contrary: that the Xbox 360 has been designed so that AA can be enabled with no appreciable performance penalty. See http://techreport.com/articles.x/8342/2 for instance.

Then again, there's also this: http://www.joystiq.com/2009/09/02/microsoft-lifts-xbox-360-minimum-720p-anti-aliasing-mandate-for/

Maybe developers have found a way to use the processing power that would otherwise have been used for AA to instead do something else?

Thanks for the info. Though we don't really KNOW it will feature that. I hope so, though. It'd greatly improve it I reckon.

Good work! Good to hear that it is from an early build - hopefully some of those slightly odd features have already been fixed.

I just hope that when Pete said "you're nuts" he didn't mean your opinion of the water in the screenshot.

:thumbsup:

The plants look meh, to me. What is it with plants in video games? They always look fake as if they are one of the most difficult things to properly make in a video game. Perhaps they are... perhaps partially due to their abundance, meaning they can't individually take up too many resources. However, that's just my guess. Why are plants so difficult to make properly?

On the other hand, I think the picture with city surrounded by stone and with waterfalls in the distance looks beautiful, as does the one with the snow, protruding rocks, and dragon. The skin on the NPCs looks like plastic, to me, and, therefore, makes the people look cartoony, though, in my opinion. People also seem to be a bane of graphics design, in addition to plants.

Yeah, I got that implication too. Maybe he has a different perspective having seen that build of the water in action.

PC users will be able to use AA. If there's no option to enable it in-game, then you'll be able to force it from the control panel from your GPU's drivers.

NOTHING NEW

these were gameinformer pics and 99% them are concept art

I want gameplay pics

He's right. You're nuts. The water looks fine there. Huge improvement over Oblivion. The reflection is blurred, which is maybe why I see a lot of people angry that there are no reflections or whatever. I bet in motion it looks even more fantastic. Crysis quality, no, but I would even take Fallout's much improved water (without the post-apocalyptic grunge).


Doesn't matter if you can't turn the AA on. Games like Crysis 2 have to come up with their own antialiasing solutions like Temporal AA because of their rendering approach (deferred shading), which makes it impossible to use the hardware AA. If the Xbox was DX10/11 it would support AA on the G-buffer (what deferred shading uses to accumulate the scene data).


It's that the resolution of the billboards is extremely low, in combination with a lack of transparency AA on consoles. It's no consolation for console users, but this can be remedied with transparency AA turned to "On" in our control panels along with higher-res flora texture packs. I will work on improving the flora myself, if I have the time.

...

And for all the people coming in just to scream NOT NEW... Quit being childish, and read what he wrote. He's right in that some of these shots have only been available in non-illegal-scan form for only about the past 24 hours. Scans honestly don't count as a high quality source of in-game images.

Shadows still worry me. After all the talk of "Shadows on everything" and a completely new engine, I have a hard time believing that they didn't just throw the same shadow tech that they removed from Oblivion back into Gamebryo with new trees, character models and textures.

All that "early build" talk is nonsense too. Games generally look best pre-Alpha, from there graphics features are often trimmed to make a product that actually works (See: Crysis, Doom 3, HL2, even Oblivion, all took graphical steps back as they moved toward release).

Well, it defaults to 2x AA, but that's still a jagged mess as seen in the picture. Consoles can use up to 4x AA but it's hard enough to optmize a game to run on a decent framerate, so it varies according to the game's nature. What really helps with the plants, is to apply transparency multisampling, which is also a big no no.

I hope you find a good next gen game to play. The graphics are fine, if they are as good as FO:3, they are fine, and I believe they will be better. That said, to me graphics are far less important than many other aspects of a game.

It would require global illumination and subsurface scattering to remove the "plastic" look, which is impossible on current-gen consoles.

Does that technology even exist? For some reason, those sound like science-fictiony names you pulled out of thin air.

Nah, just ignore my horrible sense of humor, but do any games currently make use of that technology on the PC? Could you show me any pictures of such games, if they exist?

It's not the same shadow tech. It is 100% without a doubt new. The shadows in Oblivion were a joke, and they're http://s659.photobucket.com/albums/uu320/shademe/shadows/, but it's the best we can do. shadeMe is doing a fine job adding shadows back to the game, but you can tell why they were taken out. Their implementation svcked, and leads to lots of issues.



But it's easy to fake both, with most of the same look as doing it "for real". CryEngine 3 has pseudo-GI on consoles, and I think skin shaders as well. You only need to save the results of SSS to a texture, which is easy to do.


CryEngine 3 has both. They at least have skin shaders as far as I know, which attempt to do SSS-like things. They have multiple things which result in something like GI, but the number of bounces is limited.

What I don't understand is, why would Bethesda release early-build screenshots of the game as their first-impression when they could use current-build screenshots that look better??

Sorry, that's way over my head. It sounds like you're saying that the claim that AA is "free" on the XBox 360 is a little misleading. It would be better to say: AA is "free" on the XBox 360 provided you can get AA at all. Is that right? And if so, why might there be an issue with getting AA working on Skyrim (using the Xbox's hardware AA)?

Graphics account for like, 5% of the game to me. Graphics don't make a game. And I don't need any smart asses saying "So you wouldn't care if Skyrim had Morrowind graphics?" *removed comment about posts which have since been removed*


The graphics in the screens look fine to me. It will look better when the world is living with you anyways, as in when your actually playing.

What? I've seen much more realistic skin on consoles. Ever seen Uncharted 2?

They're not difficult to make. They're more difficult to render. They only require a good transparency multisample to avoid the jagged edges, sub-surface scattering (which simulates how life difuses inside translucent materials), large enough textures, a decent lighting and dynamic shadows applied to them. And then they will look almost photo-realistic.

http://h-2.abload.de/img/2pblu.jpg
http://www6.incrysis.com/screenshots/1uyne.jpg

Crysis, for one.
http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/2006/086/931665_20060328_screen005.jpg

Some of you lot judge way too early,in a negative way ( and yes you have the right too ).
But give the game a chance for [censored] sake.
I've liked everything i've heard or seen about this game so far ( apart from auto-targeting ),but i'm over that now.
I think some of us have fair concerns,( and thats understandable,because it's a game series we care about ) but some things are way over the top.
With 9 months left till release ,do you really think bethesda are going to show the best of the game?....NO!
Some of you should know better.I think people will see things differently when we see gameplay footage and up-to-date screen shots.
Anyway that's what i think.
Just think for a minute:Imagine your tod howard/the dev team,you've worked years on a game you love,and tried to improve what you can.
Across a multiplatorm,and you've only shown bit's of what you've done.Only for people to turn around and slate things too early.
Ask yourself.....would that piss you off?

All I have to do is look at pages 52 and 57 of the Game Informer issue and imagine them in motion to not worry about the lighting in Skyrim. People have differing standards, though.

Do you have any other examples that aren't from perhaps the most gorgeous game to grace gamers on its highest settings on a monster gaming rig?

I mean to question what's wrong with how most other people, or especially Bethesda, seem to handle them. I was playing an Uncharted demo, the other day, and thought it handled the plants really nicely. They even moved when I bumped into them, and this was a game from 2007, and it's a console game, so what's the excuse for Bethesda's, and really most other game developers', fake-looking, 2d plants?

This. Good graphics svck. Why would anyone want better graphics in an RPG? Us true RPG-ers are disappointed that the graphics are as good as they are. /sargasm.

Seriously, why can't people realize that there multiple aspects involved in determining the quality of a game? Just because some people (myself included) find that really nice graphics add immersion and make a game more enjoyable, doesn't mean you have to get offended and make them out to be shallow, casual gamers that don't care about the story or gameplay. BTW, you state that atmosphere is very important to you, but what part of the game portrays atmosphere more than the graphics and art style? Sure, sound can play a role as well, but you have to admit that graphics are the biggest single factor that determines a game's atmosphere.

Besides, where did anyone say that for every polygon/texture they add, it will cost you 2 hours of dialog? I'm pretty sure the art people are different than those writing the story, who in turn are different from those designing the combat and magic systems. Sure they overlap in some areas, but having a nice looking game does not mean the story or any other aspect will suffer. I just can't understand why gamers don't want a game that excels in ALL areas. I don't get upset when someone talks about wanting a better magic system (which I probably won't use much), or adding spears (which I never use). If they do spend time on that, it will just make for a better game, even if I never touch them...