So I just watched the trailer AGAIN (this has got to be my 100th time or close to it ) and I noticed that when the guy shoots the wand / staff thing in that cave, you notice a sort of opening. Now one could argue that that is simply just an opening to a bigger, more well - lit room of the cave system, but I personally think it looks like a cave opening, where you might be able to step outside.

Does this mean that caves will be part of the open world? No more randomly placed wooden doors in a pile of rocks with loading screens to go through?

I doubt it. If they have separate buildings in different cells they'll probably do the same thing for caves.

that would be very cool, but I would like some caves to have wooden doors(without loading time to enter), naturally. I doubt this, but it would be very cool nonetheless.

Well, even in Oblivion, cave entrances were "lighter" than the other parts of the cave, to give it a realistic effect. The light could even be seen sometimes when turning corners of the pathway leading to the exit of the dungeon. This could be the same thing.

true, but still I can't shake the feeling that (if you pause before he actually fires the orb of magic awesomeness) it looks so much like the mouth of a cave leading outside

Short answer, probably not going to happen, ever. It's not really feasible for a game with so many interiors and such a large exterior.

Long answer: All terrain is done on a flat vertex plane with a height-map applied to it. An engine like Cryengine 2 and 3 have the ability to drop and extrude a vertex mesh which can be used to "dig" caves into terrain, but that is a laboriously complicated process and requires a lot of disk space to save that kind of info; since it cannot be saved in a Z axis grayscale heightmap. It's easy to occlude terrain behind solid geometry because of the way it's all linked together in a repetitive pattern, but occluding geometry behind vertex meshes is a process that generally requires more processing power just for the occlusion than you'd save by not drawing the geometry. Interior cells generally have their own ambient light values to create atmosphere, it's not easy (to say the least) to have a seamless lighting transition between caves and an environment-lit exterior. If caves and dungeons were seamless, there also be big loading issues. At some point the navmesh and static mesh placement of the cave would need to be loaded when the player comes within a certain vicinity, and you'd probably wind up with a loading screen anyways because there's a lot of info to load in at once.

I've pitched a solution a number of times, but even if the developers of the game didn't think of it already, I doubt they'll see it. I think having "animated doors" would be a good solution, there'd still need to be a loading screen, but at least you could get a cinematic and realistic entrance for any door in the game. It'd actually make you feel like you walked through a door, instead of teleport against it. On the exterior side, you reach down and turn the knob, a loading symbol would come up, after its done loading, you'd open the door and see and enter the interior, and the door would close behind you. Some of you may remember this from far cry 2, it was a good system. You look down, turn the knob, open the door, and then the door closes behind you before you can turn around.

One thing I love about the game minecraft is all the cave's you can find an entrance to on the surface - Skyrim, pound for pound, has much heavier restrictions, but I would like to see some natural caves, some without even a door. They would by necessity have to be smaller than the instanced caves of course.

I'd love for it to be open as well, but it's not. I'm pretty sure it's actually been confirmed via twitter that cities are open, and dungeons/houses/buildings are separate cells.

It has not been confirmed yet, but it seems like it is very likely interior and exterior cells with be different and require teleportation between the two.

It has been confirmed. And it's completely understandable.


Omg omg

Seriously, that's great news if it's not a misquote. there wasn't much of an excuse for not having open cities. You've only got like 5-6 cities, you can spend the time to optimize them enough to be open.

probably fake exterior its interior but acts like exterior or maybe its a small cave who knows

I could be just the cell transition, after all New Vegas had invisible doors to get into caves.

It does look like it extends outside, and if that's the case I would think only a few caves are like this, and it could very well be that this cave is small. What appears to be the outside, could also very well be where the "door" or transportation marker is.

It was also my first impression that you were at the mouth of an underwater stream becoming a waterfall over the opening.

What people havent considered is that this may not be a dungeon. THis could in fact be just an open cave area in the environment.


It was confirmed in one article at least that some animals have a "den"--which may or may not include caves or other open entrances underground.

And yet none of this has prevented the Gothic series from having 100% seamless worlds through 4 separate games now. It can be done, done well, and without all the problems you're talking about. Having played all 4 games in the series, I can tell you firsthand that it's quite a sight to behold and the lighting and everything handles itself just fine with no load stutter or anything.

So yes, the scene where you see what might be a cave opening to the outside may in fact be just that. We really don't have any idea what the true capabilities of the new engine are yet other than the awesomeness we've all seen in the trailer.