I don't understand the allure of a gaming console. Consoles are like VHS to the BluRay of PC gaming. Better controls, better graphics, better utility, easier(possible) to mod. It's a sad reflection on the state of our society that console games sell better than those for PC.

Had this discussion many times and polycount isn't your real game killer. Artists should use best practice like avoiding hidden faces, etc. but I've dropped enourmously dense meshes in OB like http://www.tesnexus.com/imageshare/images/544857-1271730593.jpg (250K polys)with little (no) impact on FPS. Visible geometry does not have the same impact as collision, lighting, or AI/scripting. What OB lacked was a decent culling system and limited CPU/memory support. Add culling + better LOD management + better CPU/memory support and you should easily be able to handle multi-million poly scenes.

This isn't a console bashing thread. Let's keep it that way, please.

If you must know, the reasons are convenience, price, and low management requirements. The better controls and utility things are preferences, the graphics thing is based on the power of the PC, not all people think some shinier graphics are worth a few hundred extra dollars (U.S.), and not everyone cares about mods for a few hundred extra dollars (U.S.). Also, the funny thing with your anology is that PC games don't use Blu-Ray technology, but PS3 games do. The good part is developers are forced to optimize better, and quite frankly, just as I did two years ago, I still think seventh generation console graphics look great. Considering I still play games such as Baldur's Gate, the older Civilizations, and Daggerfall and considering that I still remember my good, old SNES (and I'm sure many people here remember much more outdated graphics than this 16 year old), graphics such as those us seventh generation console players have (360 and PS3) are good enough. No, scratch that, they're far greater than good enough.

As for my opinion of the graphics, I don't want to see graphics quality decrease in any way from Fallout 3, but any improvement is more than enough for me and I just want the same type of scale as shown previously.

Really.

I don't know... it seems like if improving the efficiency of the engine was as simple as adding culling and good collision detection, that they would have done that already.

Stating facts is not bashing. <- and neither is this opinion.

Well then,
I dont want flat surfaces faked to look like 3D. The roads, walls and most objects need to be tesellated, thus we need DX11. Rain and snow effects should be realistic too. Snow in Oblivion is just various size of white dots streaming down the screen. So easy to notice it's fake: move left or right, the white dots move with you... Tree leaves are 2D. Grass and flowers dont't cast shadow and lightning effects are not visible on them. Let's say you go out hunting at night, light up a torch and first thing you'll notice the ground is illumined but the grass is dark...

I'm really hoping that Todd meant it when he said that their current iteration of the engine looks "next-gen". Some things such as occlusion culling are a must-have. The old fog-based renderer is so outdated, and even Fallout 3's render portals aren't too great. Nowadays we have the tech to automatically trace and create these portals, it shouldn't have to be a shoddy manual job.

Oblivion's graphics never really impressed me. The buildings and NPCs seem so smushy and "inflated" compared to their rigid Morrowind counterparts. The specular mapping ensures that everything will either look like it's made of plastic or cake icing. Sometimes it's brighter inside of dungeons than outside, just because of all the tasteless ambient lighting. The Speedtree leaves don't blend well with the fog, and you shouldn't be able to see that far from one end of Cyrodiil to the other anyway. The field of view must've been smaller in Oblivion or something, because everything felt bigger and closer to the screen. Hated it.

Oh, one more point. You run like a schoolgirl in Oblivion. You run like a robot in Morrowind. Robot is cooler.

Really, So you think it's a fact that consoles selling better than PCs is a sad reflection of society?

Wow, you read my mind.

As a next-gen game Oblivion fell way short.

I also agree about how Morrowind structures felt "solid" or rigid, compared to Oblivion's feeling "inflated".

TES just needs better animations all around.

I think this has to do with the exagerated edge chamfers used thoughout. And don't get me started on the OB fat suit armors. Dimensions on weapons, armor, buildings were all a bit overscaled. FO3 was better about this (except for power armor) but thats not the issue. There are technologies that permit much higher polycounts 'and' programming to handle more NPCs on screen as I think thats what the OP is after.

Of two terrible options, why bother to decide which was less awful?

Okay. First off, hi. I haven't posted in years, I think.

Now, let's talk facts.

Fact: Consoles sell astronomically more units than PCs.

This one isn't really hard to figure out. It amazes me that PC gamers don't get this. A gaming rig costs at minimum three times the cost of a console, for starters. Second, you can be smug about this all you like, but some people are just not computer literate enough to handle PC gaming. You have to tweak and customize the experience, which is one of the joys of PC gaming, but also a barrier to entry for 99.99% of the population. A console just plugs in and works. Third, don't kid yourself that PC gaming was ever "mainstream". At best, it was once the juggernaut of the gaming scene, but that was at a time when gaming was decidedly outside the mainstream. The first generation that grew up with home video game systems, ie my generation born in the 70's and raised in the 80's, came of age and into money in the mid-to-late 90's. Console gaming took off then because the kids that had to save their allowances or beg their parents to buy a couple of Nintendo games a year could finally just go get whatever game they wanted, and there was nobody to tell them when to go to bed. Until then, games were divided more or less along the lines of consoles for kids and computers for grownups. But the console kids grew up and kept playing consoles, rapidly outnumbering their older and/or nerdier PC gaming counterparts. PC gaming's golden age was marked by the prevalence of in-depth RPGs, flying and driving sims, and turn-based strategy games, three genres that continually try and continually fail to find a foothold with the wider public. The rise of consoles has been fueled by platformers, which have never been popular on PC, and FPSs, which have. And Madden.

Okay, end rant.

Another fact: TESIV has WAY better graphics than DA:O.

I have both for PC and frankly it isn't close. Sure, the Oblivion characters have sad, ugly faces and move like bizarrely effeminate marrionettes. Still, it's better than the robotic/anorexic Dragon Age characters. And the world isn't even close. Seriously, take a look out from the wall at Ostagar and tell me that the distant countryside looks anywhere near as good as the view from the Imperial City in Cyrodil. Worse, in DA:O you can't even go there! It's a good game for what it is, but you see something interesting? Too bad, you can't go there because there's an invisible wall holding you back. I played Oblivion for over a year before I found an invisible wall. The scale of Oblivion simply dwarfs Dragon Age, and frankly, if they did away with that to make rendering easier I wouldn't play it. The open, seamless world is the one thing that TES does better than any other series out there, including GTA. It's the defining feature of the games.

For the next game, what I want to see is more variety of usable items, as at least one poster above mentioned, and better character animation. The latter we will definitely see, while the former I doubt.

Agreed, and props for realizing that. However, unlike you, I think I prefer quality (or rather detail or uniqueness) over quantity. The weapon and armor selection in Oblivion was nice I think, and the clutter available was much more diverse. I do think we could have had less diversity in the architecture department - does each city really need its own set? I think the graphics upgrade in the next game will come primarily from improved technology (better _n maps, parallax, DX11, etc.) rather than more polygons, etc.


Completely agreed. I addressed polycount solely because thats what the topic was about. However, just because we can theoretically make a million polygon house, doesn't mean we should. The eye makes up for a lot - after a certain amount of subdivisions it just becomes superfluous. I remember I ran into trouble with both Rihad and Taneth with clutter-related lag. Part of that was Havok, of course, but when forced to choose with a 250k house only and 250k in house + clutter, I'll take the later.

Again, I think the physical models/textures in Oblivion are just fine (well, except for the needless hidden faces and weird mesh holes that show up occasionally). What Beth needs to focus on in terms of graphics is improving the engine.

consider:

MineCraft

graphics==poo
game==gold

if TES 5 looked and played much like MineCraft it would still be awesome.

I always liked how the first two TES games, Arena and Daggerfall, felt so large. And was a bit disappointed in Morrowind as it was noticeably smaller and had a lot less people walking around. It made the game feel less "alive", which is something I value in a game very much. That said, Fallout 3 and New Vegas did a pretty good job at being "alive", kids playing on the streets and so on. Even if they still were more empty than I would have liked.

The Doom games sort of had the same issue. With Doom 1&2 there's a bloody carnage with lots of mosters everywhere. With Quake there was suddenly no room with more than 5 enemies at once, and the same with Doom 3. Something I always felt was a bit unfortunate, so I don't mind cutting down the graphics to get more things going on, on the screen.


Indeed. The engine doesn't make the game, the developers do. There is absolutely nothing that says that Bethesda would be better at using another engine, it could see the similiar performance issues there. Just switching engines doesn't make something suddenly perfect, which some users seem to belive.

While Bethesda maintained the amount of "clutter" items between MW and OB, the number of different armor sets dropped dramatically (I'm trying hard not to go into a rant about the linear progression of stats on them), and the number of different tiles in a set of architecture fell by a lot. No, we don't need a unique style of architecture for each city, but when you limit the variants so that every stone stairway has the same broken tile on the same step as every other stone stairway, it starts to become glaringly obvious that it was done that way because there were no "alternate" pieces to choose from. In this case, overall visual "quality" is a function of both the quality of the individual elements in the set AND the quantity of elements to choose from. The sheer amount of time (and the cost of that time) again becomes the limiting factor.

I never thought of myself as a graphics wh*re but DA:O's bothered me a great deal. It looked like PS2 game to me.

After replacing all the textures in Oblivion with much larger ones (BTQ4096, Q4096normals, QTP3, as well as item and NPC textures) as well as RAEVWD, Oblivion looks spectacular even now. If it looks even 25% better than I have it looking now on my machine, I'll be extremely satisfied.

Worse, DA:O is viewed in a strategy game view, most of the time your character is tiny and you see everything from 4-10 meters away, yes it looks good, however if you look close up as you would do all the time in a first person game if actually look more like Morrowind than Oblivion, far less details than Morrowind, however characters and effect looks far better.
Totally unsuitable for a first person game where you would see vegetation, walls and furniture at one meter range or less.

"Dramatically" and "a lot" are hardly the words I'd use.

• Both have 13 full armor sets.] Morrowind did however have more individual armor pieces that did not constitute a whole set.
  
• Oblivion had 9 city architecture sets (multiplied by 3 for each class, thats 27 different looks of buildings), plus the lower class and farm tilesets which were limited (11 total); Morrowind had 6 (redoran, hlaluu, telvanni, imperial, nordic, velothi) city architectures, plus the shack set (7 total).
  
• They both had 4 dungeon sets (I'm not counting the Velothi set in Morrowind, as it was already counted under settlements). I can't exactly calculate the number of tiles, but just from memory they seem roughly the same, with Oblivion having more specialized tiles.
  
• Morrowind had about 110 items of equitable clothing, Oblivion about 140 (when you consider that most of the clothing comes in both male and female, thats about 330 unique clothing items). Of course, the changes in the clothing system make it less customizable, creating the illusion of less choice.

Oblivion fell slighly in the armor department, increased in the city architecture, stayed the same in dungeon architecture, and increased again in clothing. (Disclaimer: based on UESP count. Documentation varies between games, and I'm doing all this while trying to eat lunch, so I can't guarantee that this is 110% correct)

The problem here, again, is that the ammount of detail in the meshes makes them seem less unique. You could use the same velothi tomb piece 12 times in a row and not notice, but the added mesh and texture detail of the fort tileset makes repeated use more obvious. The detail also made it a bit harder to use the pieces in really creative ways. Same goes for the clothing - many of the outfits in Morrowind were generic enough in their blobby brown-ness to be used over and over, but the more detailed, more unique items in Oblivion are easier to pinpoint.

In other words, Oblivion did cut a bunch of content, but models, over all, actually increased in both number and variety since Morrowind.

tl;dr: can we just stop blaming Oblivion already?

Is this why while playing Fallout New Vegas, I'll get random slowdowns inside buildings... even though all I'm looking at is a wall?

:-)

while I do not disagree that Ob could have dropped poly count left and right. I would not drop bevels on pretty much most things. sure face count increase, but Vertex count is what matters most. for example a square pillar. If you bevel the edges, you will not be using split edges at the corner. if you split the edges, which is what you will do everytime to avoid shading errors, the vertex count is the same. So you don't actually gain much at all. imo the pay off of what a bevel can do is worth it nearly everytime, Especially since this type of mesh will likely use a tiling texture, and likey is not going to be baked from a high poly to fill in for the lack of beveled edge.

for another example, any object with baked normal maps, if you bevel an edge, you will not need to split the UV shells at the hard edge to get a correct bake. Splitting UV seams also increases vertex count.< I will say there is at least 1 shader in existence that will allow baked tangent space normal maps to render correctly without using any hard edges on the real time mesh what so ever, or splitting its UV shells appropriately, regardless of the any face angles, which in every other case, would have shading issues. But afaik it is not implemented in any engine yet. (3 point normal map shader, Beth go license it! )

poly count will only increase in the future. And rightly so, as current gfx cards can fire so many onto the screen at once it's silly. with the implementation of a couple optimization techniques it would run so much faster. Lighting, shader, AI, are probably the worst offenders. and the shear amount of clutter objects, it is a very detailed and interactive world. There is zero point in actually making LOD versions of 90% of those items. the fact that gfx card even has to make a draw call at all to render the object is going to impact the performance more than it's poly count. most of them are under 300tris, which is the amount gfx cards at the time of ob would barf onto screen in a chunk, lowering that count for a LOD version would only impliment a system where the engine tests if the object is a certain distance in the zbuffer, then removes it, and the renders yet another object. I bet you that actually hits performance rather than saving any fps what so ever.

LOD is up there too, though I do not have a better solution in mind, F3 already improved the algorithm, I just don't really like the whole system, but I can't think of a better one atm. properly use some culling features like portals. also instanced geo ftw.

to anyone going one about tessellation, if you guys are artists, go check out the workflow you have to use to make assets that will tessellate, the hoops are many, it's like normal mapping x10. So the workflow is imo much more difficult, and if you don't understand how to get an error free bake off a complex highpoly and understand the requirements of that, it's a no hoper. in a way I am kinda glad that is probably not happening in Tes5.

Graphics and stuff are heavily dependent on the skill of the coders and programmers, and the game engine (and engine add-ons) being implemented. TESIV svcked at having lots of actors and clutter on screen, and I think that is a huge problem when a goal is to "immerse yourself in a fantasy world" (with a population less the size of your university undergrads).

Gamebryo has its strengths (supposedly) and its deficiencies. I'd prefer for the devs to use a different engine. While keeping track of every object and how you moved it is sort of cool, I'd rather have re-setting clutter if it means I can walk through a bustling city with 20 NPCs in the cell, or explore a forest with towering trees and lots of undergrowth and critters. And birds, don't forget the z-axis!

As for polygons - mesh detail goes hand-in-hand with texture quality. You can have an ultra-high poly count, but it'll look like crap if your textures are lo-res and bland. There's a balance in there somewhere, and at some point I just stop caring about poly-count. As long as it looks okay most of the time, and I only notice some low-polyness infrequently, then I don't mind if the poly count is mid-range. You can disguise a lot of that by just making the textures pretty and using texture detail to replace fine poly details - my eye can't casually tell the difference.

How does re setting clutter affect this? In Oblivion clutter position is decided by merging the master file against the savegame on cell load, so it does not affect graphic performance at all. Only cost is a larger savegame and the cpu load merging them.
However fixed meshes would be cheaper and give the same visual effect, however clutter is important, Fallout 3 would not be the same without the junk on the floor, yes sound of kicking things over should affect stealth.