Nividia has announced their new 1080 graphics chipset and I just watched the roll-out video on YouTube. What struck me is how they repeatedly recognized games as a new art form during their presentation.

This brought home to me the essential reason I still enjoy Oblivion. I see the game as an interactive, constantly changing painting. My current character, Prisoner, is more of a tourist than a hero. The quests and jeopardy are subordinate to simply being in this moving, changing world. Over time, I've jacked the graphics out quite a bit through better graphics boards and modifying the ini file and the difference with how it looked in 2006 is stunning.

I am curious how others see the game. What's more important for you, the graphics or the 'winning'?

I have to say, neither.

If winning was the important thing, I wouldn't give my characters limitations that make the play more interesting.

If it was the the graphics, I'd be spending all my time making screenshots, and replacing the textures on chickens.

For me, it's the open-world game-play, and the chance to write my own story as I go along. Graphics can help the credibility of that, but good animation beats textures, depth-of-field effects, and all the other irrelevant things. NPC's that sandbox appropriately, and interact with each other. Dogs that have fleas. Those are the world-builders, not high-resolution snowflakes. But you do animation on the CPU, not the GPU, so Nvidia ignore that.

My answer is "neither" as well.

I play Oblivion (and all Bethesda's games) in order to create characters that fascinate me and to tell those character's stories. Instead of using a word processor to tell a story on a piece of paper or a computer screen I use the game assets provided by Betheda to tell stories in a 3D digital world.

The tech aspects of graphics mean very little to me. I'm interested in the style of a game, in its creativity, its ability to draw me into its world and inspire my imagination, but I am not interested in how many pixels it pushes through my graphics card. And I have never been interested in "winning."

i agree with nvidia about the "art" part (i'm going as far as to say computer games are the highest form of arts there currently is), except in that they're a couple decades late about the "new" part maybe...

and i agree with ghastley and pseron wyrd: art != graphics.

any of bethesda's rpg's i've ever seen (= all since morrowind) are pieces of high art, no matter what hardware they run on.

better hardware may improve the experience, but not the piece (i know what i'm talking about, i'm shortsighted as a mole. lo-res eyes if you want - legions of over-fx'd crap titles tell the tale. (definitely not saying it doesn't pay to improve the experience though)

...like, i'm currently playing far harbor (fo4 dlc), and i hardly get to play the actual game at all, because half of the time, i just stand there staring into the woods in astonishment. radioactive? what do i care. it's BEAUTIFUL. )

anyway, i'm glad computer games are finally accepted as the art form they are, or in more progressive parts of society anyway.

it's been high time.

And to take this all off in another direction. There's also a distinction that's often overlooked between the lore-building with an outline of a story that Bethesda does, and the fully-fleshed-out stories a lot of other developers create.

I like the fact TES games give me a base story-line, but don't (completely) railroad me down the one true path. It's a game, not a movie.

Another vote for neither.

Honestly I would prefer not to have a main quest or any other "questlines" at all, just a bunch of repeatable radiant quests, and maybe a few quests that would have in game consequences, like a quest to cripple a rival guild in some fashion that would actually cripple the rival guild. I'd rather see a game with a lot of back story, a lot of factions some of which did not like each other and some of which you could advance in, but not necessarily to the point of guild master.

I find all the story-line crap just gets in the way of a good roleplay.

Good answers. I was not too happy with the way I put that question but I couldn't think of anything else at the time. I really just wanted to kick off a discussion of how important (or not) the art quality of the game is. My main hobby for many years was drawing and painting even though I never got very good at it. I also tried my hand at computer 3D modelling programs with only http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=90455&page=2. It was enough for me to learn how difficult it is and how much time is invested in even simple models.

Well, I think it is pretty important, although tastes may differ and resolution is not necessarily the biggest factor in art quality of a game for me. The most artistic of the Elder Scroll games to be Morrowind, and despite the older graphics I find it overall more artistic and pleasurable to look at, even with vanilla textures. Lately I've been playing it with Peterbitt's water colored vanilla textures (http://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/43375/?) which I find hauntingly beautiful.

Oblivion is artistic in its own right too of course.

I played Oblivion on a literal potato at the time and loved it, I look forward to playing it again with the new PC I'm getting a few months to experience it better.

Hey, nice stuff on your part. I spent many years making 3D objects and sticking them into scenes with my models in Poser and Daz. When the doomsday clock ticks down on these forums, I going back to wasting my time over there. Some stuff from 2008, about when I made the transition to full time gaming:

http://i.imgur.com/lhI55wh.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/12uxa2g.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/HPlvlF9.jpg


As to your question of how others see the game, well, I see it as a place where my characters can run around roleplaying and making some pics to remember it by … and every once in a while stopping long enough to stick some extra 3D models into a screenshot.

One thing I found with my original graphics card was that if I liked the look of a scene, I could temporarily set all the graphics sliders to maximum which turned the game into a slideshow with about 1 frame per 2 seconds but gave me a chance to see what it could be like and maybe capture it with a screenshot.

Since then, learning to tweak the ini file along with the sliders and better graphics boards took everything to a whole new level. My board is a middle-of-the-road nvidia GTX 790 TI and at max settings with vastly extended grass visibility, she cruises along at a steady 60 FPS.

Not sure what you mean with "winning" but I must say graphics are important. Let me explain: In every game I play I want the graphic settings at max. This doesn′t mean that every game have to look silk smooth though. I can enjoy Arena as much as Oblivion, as long as the settings are at max and the gameplay is smooth then I′m happy. I don′t need Arena in the same resolution as Oblivion