And they were saying the water looked bad. It looks great!
No, it really doesn't, it looks no better than Oblivion's water, in fact, I'd argue my current water in Oblivion looks better, although I've used a water enhancing mod and have enabled full water reflections in the .ini (By default only the landscape, sky and city walls are reflected, I believe.) so I'm not going to say the water is a downgrade from Oblivion's on that basis, just as it would be unreasonable to say that Skyrim looks worse than Oblivion because the textures aren't as good as Qarl's.
The water doesn't actually look like it's reflecting the surroundings at all, even though it looks like it's under conditions where it should have noticable reflections, it looks like there's a bit of sun glare in the bottom left corner, but that's about all, I'm not noticing any refractions either, though that could just be since it's static, I'm certainly not sure it doesn't have them.
In fact, I just did a Google search using the river, and found a lot of photographs that look a lot better than the river in the one screenshot here, and I don't mean that as in more realistic, that's obvious, since they're actual photographs, I mean more attractive, and while they're not all highly reflective (That goes back to what I said about the conditions, water tends to be more reflective under certain conditions, and these are conditions I'm seeing in both the river screenshot and the forest lake or pond or whatever it is, and while you could argue on that point if you disagree, game's rarely take such details into account anyway, and if none of the screenshots of water we've seen show visible reflections, then there's a good chance the game doesn't have them at all, at least not on the Xbox 360 version. Maybe the PC version has an option to enable them, but right now, we can only judge the game based on what we've seen of it, for all we know, Skyrim could have pink polka dotted elephants in it, that's very unlikely, of course, but the fact that we haven't seem them doesn't automatically prove they're not in the game. And yet, we can't judge Skyrim under the assumption that it has pink polka-dotted elephants, similarly, there's no guarentee that Skyrim, once finished, will not have better water than the screenshots and videos we've seen would lead us to believe, but sincwe we haven't seen that, we can't judge it, we can only judge what we've seen.
Now if you want to see some water that does look good in games, try http://www.webwallpapers.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/image_red_dead_redemption-11738-1780_0002.jpg, from Red Dead Redemption, I wouldn't say it's actually the best water I've seen in any game, but I choose it because I played the game on on Xbox 360, so not only is it released on that platform, I know it actually looks like that on it, so you can't say "The consoles couldn't handle that." It's also an open world game with a world which I'm pretty sure is larger than Skyrim's. Now, I'm certainly not saying Skyrim's water has to look like that, however, it hardly seems right to call Skyrim's water effects good, based on what we've seen. You can say they're okay if you like, you could even say you don't care if you want (Just don't expect me to decide they're fine as they are just because
you don't care.) but that doesn't change the fact that better effects have been done before, and many times.
Aside from the water, though, the screenshots seem pretty nice, I especially like the details I'm seeing on the characters as that's something that past games needed work on, and aside from the water, the scenery manages to impress, the distant views of mountains wrapped in clouds or fog in particular keep getting me, also, when I examine the river screenshot, if I look beyond the uninspiring water at what lies under it, I think I might be able to make out water weeds, I could be wrong on this of course as the water isn't extremely clear, but if I'm seeing what I think I see, this may be a sign of less barren underwater environments, I hope it is, anyway.
Also, in the screenshot showing the player character with his back towards the camera facing an undead enemy, I think I see some sort of harness holding the weapon to his back, if I'm correct on that, then it will be welcome change as in Oblivion, while most one handed blades had sheaths, two handed ones generally just floated on your back, hopefully this time around, all weapons get something visibly keeping them attached to your character when sheathed.
The wolves also look much better than their Oblivion counterparts, finally they look like they have actual fur rather than just a furry looking texture, even if it's just a few pieces of geometry sticking out from the mesh with transparency enhabled, as it looks like it may be. Let's hope that Khajiit also get this kind of detail.
Overall, I'm pleased with most of what I less, it's just that some aspects of the graphics we've seen aren't up to the standards I feel the game should be able to maintain.
» Wed Sep 01, 2010 5:18 pm 
