LOL right, because games like Gears of war 3 look just as good as Gears of war or Skyrim looks just like Oblivion. Right... we haven't improved at all..... It's not about the hardware improving, it's if Bethesda can truely push it to it's limits. Don't comment if you don't know what you're talking about because the graphical quality of games has improved over the years as developers learn how to push the tech that they have at hand.

It's called optimization.
Look at all of the other foliage in Skyrim - the trees, the bushes, the detail on the ground, all of those things that do NOT fade at a distance, this is called optimization. There wasn't even a fourth of the foliage in Oblivion and it's the same hardware. Bethesda just learned how to optimize their games so that what you see is beautiful, I think having a short draw distance on grass is something we can live with considering what we can see at a distance now, the mountains, I mean we saw a Dragon perched a good 300 feet away on that mountaintop. Three hundred feet away. Stop whining.

Well the problem with the grass isnt doesnt match the bushes at all, so there is a clear line where the bushes/grass stop.

Texture mods have been made for STALKER that allmost removes this distinction and you dont notice it nearly as much.

Games can be optimized, but no miracles can be made. There's a reason why a lot of companies are complaining about current gen consoles and saying they won't release any more games for the 360/PS3. Bethesda included.

My pc probably can't handle grass rendered in infinity, so I'm glad it's like this. And of course you can change the render distance on pc.

To be really honest with you, I don't need anymore realisim than Skyrim already offers if it's going to compromise game depth. There's only so much they can put on a CD.

Yep. If consoles had one good side for us PC players it's this. Developers need to optimize their game for 6 years old hardware, they can no longer be as sloppy as they were used to, the console-users can't update their hardware, so the PC hardware-race also has slowed down noticeably. A 6 years old XBox has the power of a 5 years old high end PC. Any current off-the-shelf PC is capable of running Skyrim with better graphics than the XBOX (and just LOOK at the XBOX graphics...)

If your worried about GRASS go outside and look at it in real full 1080p tru-high-def..... I'll take better gameplay over GRASS anyday.

They need to better optimise grass, it is possible on 360 all they have to do is apply a secondary LOD onto the model from the usual grass to a 2d plane then they have a better grass distance. That is all that is, for some reason I've noticed that Bethesda doesn't like using a lot of Level of Detail (probably lack of disc space courtesy of the 360) but it would certainly help.

We can do a whole lot more than that.

yeah, grass disappears in a very ubrupt fasion and it's ugly and so many games seem to have this illness, from ARMA2 to operation flashpoint to oblivion and skyrim etc etc....

i havent played RDR but Farcry 2 handles grass really really well. the draw distances in FC2 are not THAT large (on purpose. the landscape was created that way i assume) but it's still miles better than skyrim.

also the lack of details and shadows on farther objects is very apparent.

i really hope some mods can help this a bit. some of us have strong GPUs that can do much more.
if' it's an INI file change than we can expect tips on how to do this really quickly , i assume. i dont know how long it took until such a mod came out for oblivion though...

That was 2006.

PC for the win thnx.

God, why don't they just have LOD for grass? Just have basic flat grass from a certain distance onwards. That could be done easily.

The grass on the tundra section seemed a bit "funny" too. Everything before looked great. I dunno, here's hoping that everything looks grand when we get our hand on it.

Pete completely skid around answering me question, don't expect draw distance to be better on the pc than it is on the 360.

@DCDeacon Pete Hines
@Sickslol As always, we make sliders available for the PC so you can scale things. Bigger the machine, the more you can jack up the settings All he did here was confirm that there is a slider for it, but didn't say if it will allow the pc to go farther than what we have seen in the demo.

@Sickslol If you have a PC, you can scale settings based on your hardware...so yes, you can.


+1 for Pete Hines evading a question.

okay, regardless of what the vanilla sliders allow as far as draw distance is concerned, there are always mods that will take care of the rest so no need to worry.

Miracles cannot be made, perhaps Bethesda decided to sacrifice grass rendering to improve quality elsewhere.

As for all those comments about optimisations, what makes you think they haven't already?

You make it sound like you can always optimise further, as if enough optimisation could make Skyrim run on 486-DX2. Hardware will limit you, no matter how good you are at optimising the code.

I couldn't agree more. Was thinking the same thing when I read this. I play with FCOM and the draw distances are fantastic. I see it on the xbox and it's just not the same. I guess a lot depends on your vid card and memory.

But in vanilla Oblivion on PC the draw distance was much higher than on 360, so no reason to think it won't be here too.

As for what Bethesda does on current gen consoles, I'm just glad they didn't wait until next gen to come out with Skyrim.

I believe one mod fixed the whole issue of grass causing massive lag in Oblivion.

My old NVidia GeForce 6150SE run New Vegas in it's lowest settings with some .Ini tweaks. :tongue:

Lets face it---they are still stuck with old technology. The Creation engine is just an improvement (a good one, I'll admit) but it still has a LOT of limitations (no ladders, water falls through objects, physics still svcks, animations are better but still iffy, limited draw distance for groundcover, etc...)

Just pretend your dovakhiin is a druid and causes plant life to sprout up wherever they walk.

But in Read Dead the game doesnt have to deal with forks and other stuff that has to be loaded constantly. And about grass, I differ. It draws better than Oblivion on 360 and PS3. In Oblivion it was like, in front of you. In Skyrim it looks farther ahead.