This...and they still have time to polish it, so time will tell what we'll get in the end...

the game generally looks better.
better shaders,palette,and geometry.
what seems that could be better is texture quality at SOME of the textures.
Most of the textures are really better,really good,but some of them seem that need somewhat more detail.

I like Skyrim's vegetation better than Oblivion's.
In Skyrim you can actually see branches of trees as you walk next to the trees whitout having to turn your head 90 degrees up.
And their geometry looks more realistic. Just take a good look at pine trees.
At Skyrim they seem more like the ones I see at the park near my house.
:thumbsup:

At first glance the graphics don't seem to impress much, yes it has dynamic lighting, improved particle effect, better physics (I hope), and many other technological improvements but overall it definately won't make/have a great impact graphically like Oblivion did over Morrowind, the main reason being the present limitations of the console hardware which in turn hold back the PC.

I guess we will have to wait for TES VI to have the same impact graphics wise like Oblivion did over Morrowind, by this time we will have the next gen consoles, but thats going to be a very-very long wait.

Yep Oblivion was waaay a ahead of it's time graphically in 2006. I don't understand how someone could even say that it didn't look that good in 2006. Heck, it still looks pretty good compared to newer games. The character models and textures are the only things that look kind of dated now.

The biggest difference I see, is from an artistic standpoint, rather than a "Quality" standpoint. The world just seems a lot more inspired. Also, I will point out that the forests seem to have a lot more contrast, rather than just sort of a muddied green look. Let's hope that's inclusive in all the environs.


Honestly, I think the difference is night-and-day, mainly because of how the art is presented. It's sort of like FO3 and NV, NV actually has a little better "Quality" but I thought the art was much better in FO3, making the world seem much more believable. It's hard to be inspired by dirt though.




Consoles don't hold the PC back, the PC holds itself back, by being such an unfriendly platform to market for. Every screenshot for the PC needs an asterisk, that says "Only if you invest 2,000$ dollars", at least, if we're talking on a graphical sense.

Consoles do hold back games in a much more intrusive way, game systems designed for multiplatform, favoring the marketability of the consoles, tend to stifle a lot of the potential we could see on the PC, but to blame consoles is to just be blind and stupid, since if PC was more favorable, it would be treated as such.

I don't agree about the forests at all.
The Skyrim forests are realistic looking, Oblivion ones are more fake and slightly too perfect in a kinda cartoon looking way.

That was just one pic, how about the autumn looking one with realistic looking Birch trees?

Also, one thing is draw distance, in Oblivion there was texture pop-in galore and mountains was a blurry mess.
This game has a lot bigger draw distance and perhaps a lot less texture pop-in.
In Oblivion you had this weird contrast with an awesome looking game up-close but pretty bad at distance (mountains and grass/trees gone or blurry) and the annoying pop-in of the grass/foliage.
This Skyrim might have an overall look that is coherent and cohesive.

Considering the trailer is Xbox 360 footage and that Oblivion was on the 360 as well it IS a huge improvement, people need to factor in those things as well.
PC version might look even better and it should with higher resolution, I hope they utilize some PC specific GFX features but I'm not counting on it.

Clearly though Skyrim has the more realistic and gritty look.

Only thing I reacted to, or reacted the most too, is the waterfall look.
The water seems to white and textures aren't exactly clear water.

Witcher 2 as some mention is currently a PC only developed game, it clearly utilizes PC power so it WILL be better looking.
I don't see that reflecting poorly on Skyrim though, it is a larger open world game and yes it does have to fit with consoles in mind from scratch.

In my opinion Skyrim looks great, another thing, if a PC player we will get mods that will "fix" or create higher rez textures etc anyways.
Love Bethesda for keeping the modding alive like they do.

If nothing else I think the Skyrim forests will be far superior because each tree is hand placed as opposed to a lot of computer generated forests like OB. This also allows for independent dynamic tree limb physics to give more interesting and unique nuances to environments.

I'm glad that you said that! I never heard something stupid like that, that the graphics of Oblivion weren't good for it's time, Sir they were AMAZING! :trophy: And the graphics of Skyrim looks very good so far in my opinion :celebration:

This.

It's especially the shadows that are a major improvement. I mean, if you look at the transition from Morrowind to Oblivion there was barely any improvement shadow wise. Lighting wise, yes, shadows, not so much. Character shadows in Morrowind, better character shadows in Oblivion. Oblivion's self shadowing was best left off.

Now look at Skyrim. Shadows on everything. In the trailer as the Nord runs towards the edge and looks down, he sees the shadow of the mountain he's on. http://gamestage.com.br/temp/town.jpg. http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/114/1149185/elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-20110211094601315.jpg. Oblivion's tree canopy shadows weren't accurate, they were just a shadow effect rendered straight under every tree with no regard to the sun's position or the shape of the tree. Try setting the timescale to 1000, the shadow's position won't change. Then there's shadows on objects in interiors too, and good self shadowing (as seen on the troll).

I'm also glad that they're no longer using billboarded trees anymore.

The reason there wasn't a big improvement from MW to OB in terms of shadows was because there was no good way of implementing it at that time, not if you cared about performance.
However, the last few years, dynamic shadows has become something we see in almost every single game. It's standard. It's obviously an improvement over OB, but it's not really that impressive itself, since every other game has it nowadays (and for several years back) too.

Hey guys what about the system requirements for Skyrim, anyone knows anything about this?

I currently have:
W7 (64bit)
AMD Phenom X4 2.31 Ghz
4 gb of RAM(800 mhz)
and ATI Radeon HD6850 1gig version

I love the direction they took in terms of graphics, especially faces. Faces look more realistic and not just like a smooth lump of clay. :celebration:

op should add some of the fantastic links


imo

awesome

long distance rendering
fog
magic effects
animation

good, but not fantastic
lighting
water

poor
texture work
no cloth physics
dx11 being unlikey
no cloth physics

Umm the lighting and water are insane for the 360, not sure what your talking about. The only water that looks lackluster is the rapids and for what it's supposed to be representing (white water rapids) it does it well.

As for poor, the poly count of the textures are low because of it being on the 360, you have no idea if there is cloth physics or not because you haven't seen anything that would warrant it. Dx11 once again, you can't know if it's likely or not because it's the 360 version and I'm not sure why you said cloth physics again....

All your complaints in every thread seem to stem from believing everything we've seen is on the PC and you are comparing it to other PC games. You kind've have to compare it to other 360 games since everything we've seen is from the 360. Also, for a 360 game, this is the best looking 360 game to date.

1: the lighting is good- being awesome would require realistic godrays and proper refractions.

2: the water is good, but the textures need work- and i am not sure if the engine does refractions. granted we cant know if it gets tesselated on any platform (the 360 has a primitive tesselator that was used for halo:reach's water) . i need to see more water to tell if its awesome.

3: other games have workarounds for making low res textures look high res (halo,cod,gears,RAGE,crysis etc)

4: i love my cloth physics :jammasterjay: . if skyrim is going to have loose fitting clothing,huge winds,big animations, nice water and lots of exploration then cloth physics are neccesary

Which it does for you you can actually see the sun through the fog. There were only a couple scenes where you actually looked at the sun and the lighting was great, especially for the 360. Full on godrays and refractions are the realm of the PC, which your obviously thinking of.



There was plenty of Skyrim's actual water to see. The scene where the hooded guy walks into the village, the scene where the guy gets stabbed in the gut. The cave scenes, the waterfalls in markarth. It seems people don't notice/ignore the rest of the actual water and only remember the rapids that they hate so much. Also, the water effects such as full reflections are once again, PC features. Not to mention PC always has a scalable detail option for water.


All of which are FPSs that don't have to process fast vistas and huge view distance, so they can apply double layers. Also, you have to realize that the textures looked great in the video, only the large npcs had muddy textures and that is because of the limitations to the FOV loading of the console. There are too many objects casting shadows and trying to read textures to be able to have high poly count dragon textures as well. I though the dragon textures were very good for the console.



Once again, there was no point in that trailer that would've been able to show cloth physics. All the armor is leather or metal. Also, with all the options available in Skyrim, cloth physics may have been cut to allow for the processing power to run Skyrim in all it's glory on the console, there is only so much room to give and after seeing how good Skyrim looks on the console, it's amazing they even squeezed that out of the hardware, let alone trying to get cloth physics in too. If so, then the PC may have it and if not it can be modded in, especially if the engine has it built in which it probably does.

Er...not really.

Really? Who had better graphics on the console? Because that's the thing, there isn't one. Plus we haven't even seen most of the world in the right light, such as on a cliff at sunset or overseeing a landscape during mid day to see how the light plays on the world.

Cough Battlefield 3 cough

Ground Textures
http://www.co-optimus.com/images/upload/image/2010/Red_Dead_Redemption_Horse.jpg

95 on Metacritic

'nuff said.

For a hyper realistic setting yes, but skyrim is fantasy and is shooting for an art style that will last a generation while still looking fantastic and about just as good if not better than every game out now.

It also remains to be seen how while battle field looks compared to ES:V.

PC as lead platform, the footage shown might all be PC version, and it has been scarce so far.

I believe we have some hangings to do. Or shall we sacrafice to the dragons?.. Choices, choices...

Haha, on a serious note, I don't know anything about the Witcher, so I won't say anything about it. But I love Skyrims graphics I thought they were amazing, due to the fact that its going to be a massive world, and it has graphics equal to (or greater than) most linear games.

Oh look, always someone moaning in a thread about graphics, some small minded guy wining that " graphics mean nothing it's about gameplay" , well guess what graphics ARE important, let's put Skyrim back to pacman graphics and you tell me if it doesn't affect gameplay, why not open your mind a little more eh? Every game development studio has a team of people that do a dedicated job crafting the game you'll be playing, when you say graphics are unimportant you're insulting a large portion of a game developers team, the end result of a game in graphical terms is of huge importance, so please quit Trolling through graphics threads and try to appreciate bethesdas work rather than disregarding it.