Actually, in all technicality, the Xbox 360 version of Oblivion doesn't really support higher resolutions for the game. The resolution of the game itself isn't changed, but rather, stretched out to fit the resolution of 1080i or p. A pseudo (or fake) HD, really.

Also, the PS3 version is rendered at full 720p (1280x720) by default, where as the Xbox 360 version is rendered at 1024x600. So I'd rather have a system that outputs the game in true HD with no problem, rather than a system that stretches out pixels to make it seem like it's in HD when it really isn't.

When is this gen going to stop being "next" and start being current. It seems to me that many people still talk like the 360 and PS3 just came out when they talk about graphics. They keep saying next gen this and that.
I'm probably an idiot, but that is just my thoughts on it.
I agree with you though, the the graphics look fine to me and I am excited to see more.

Pretty hard to find this information, but the only source I'm finding is one that says the 360 version is running at 1024x600 upscaled, but with 2x AA (not surprising given that the 360's GPU allows for that with what is more or less no performance impact on the whole). PS3 appears to run at full 720p but without the anti-aliasing, which... well, given the choice I'd take the upscaled resolution with the anti-aliasing, since the gap in resolution isn't especially large and the gains from even a minor bit of anti-aliasing tend to be nice. But the main point I was making (that the 360 supports resolutions of 1080i/1080p and that neither console broadly uses either resolution) still stands.

And more generally, the PS3 version of Oblivion does look better on the whole (something I already noted earlier in this thread), but that's after a full year of additional development on the port. It's fairly rare for that sort of thing to result in a drop of quality, and most games that are released across multiple platforms do tend to look or run better on the 360. More than a partly because the 360 is almost invariably the lead platform, but the point still stands and (getting back to the topic at hand) that does seem to indicate that Skyrim will probably look better on the 360 as well.

Some of you seem to know sweet **** all about video game design, or 3D environment design.

Hi! My name is Brood and I am an environment design nerd. I have fiddled with many different engines, I have hand-crafted things and generated a lot as well and almost everything looks better hand crafted. Except for height-maps. Getting the erosion just right is the hardest part, making ancient looking mountains is difficult. The scale is quite hard as well and placement of naturally occuring geographical features has to be spot on in this day and age, it's expected. Mountains have rivers that run down into valleys, floodplains/swamps/deltas and ending at seas/lakes/oceans. This sort of geographic progression is expected in video games these days, it's not like 10 years ago where you would have a snow level, then a jungle level, then a desert level just because it was convenient.

Getting Erosion right is the hardest part and handcrafting a mountain range in any engine I have used is just pointless if it allows for importing of heightmaps. You can work faster with heightmap creation tools and achieve a more realistic result. Some are very powerful, I personally use a combination of photoshop and "worldbuilder" to get my heightmaps done. You paint out a basic terrain in photoshop, then use modules to simulate Erosion, river systems and so forth in Worldbuilder. It also does so with much more detail than I possibly ever could have.

[censored]ing about Bethesda not handcrafting is useless when there are tools that make the whole thing easier. Don't think that heightmaps are easy to get right, Environment design is a fine art and a good heightmap can take a week to finalize.

;tldr Quit [censored]ing about aspects of game design you have no clue about. If there is a tool that makes something easier and produces a better result the last thing you should do is complain about it.

But is seems everyone in this forum the past few days just wants to [censored] and whine. Same thing happened with Morrowind and Oblivion.



TES is inspired by Conan and it is no secret. Todd has outwardly said that he is a fan of the Conan series. Personally I am not complaining, there is no good Conan RPG out there. Skyrim is a cold place full of Nords, Sounds like a place that exists historically here on Earth also. Which, surprisingly, is what Conan is actually based on.

well technically the xbox/ps3 fall under the sixth or seventh gen (can't quite remember) if you want to get technical =)

Also, RDR upscales from 580p (480p on PS3), stop using it as an example of how we should transition between exterior and interior environments for a game that, on PC, should be native 1080p.

since like, forever.

-sidenote-
are you a modder, you seem familiar. you frequent the nexus?

When I was 16 I was a modder in the Morrowind community, I remember a few faces on here from years ago. Since then I have also toyed with Unreal, Far Cry and Crysis. I have finished my degree in fine art, I am 22 and am doing a degree in Animation, I will be specializing in environment design.

I am a student, so I'm never right about everything, but I am pretty good with Environments.

Source on RDR upscaling? Not saying you're wrong, just saying that I'd like to see proof of it. And either way, people aren't using it as an example of how transitions should be handled. They're just using it as a comparison to Skyrim in terms of the overall quality of the graphics. There's nothing wrong with that (well... there's some things, but not the things you're saying), and saying "well, it upscales on consoles and the PC version won't upscale" (which applies to... any game on PC, since there's no real need for PC games to upscale or downscale from one resolution to another) doesn't mean that we can't compare them - it's entirely possible (actually fairly likely) that Skyrim's going to upscale its visuals on the consoles as well.

did you work on tr?

Along with Killzone 3, Mass Effect, and Heavy Rain.

But the fact is, Skyrim isn't coming out for almost another year. If the graphics already look slightly dated, it's going to be one of the worst looking games (graphics-wise) on the shelf in November 2011. By that time we'll have Red Dead Revolution, Crysis 2, L.A. Noire, and lots of other games. GTA:V and Half-Life 3 could very well be announced by then and people will be drooling over those graphics.

It seems as though I was slightly off the 360 does render at 720p. The PS3 version is 640p.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/196661/anolysis_red_dead_redemption_on_ps3_vs_xbox_360.html

What I am talking about is what the game renders internally at.

No, TR was just getting off the ground back then.

(this wasn't supposed to be a new post. Looks like there is no delete button).

Game that doesn't exist.


Game that, from what I've seen, already doesn't look better than Crysis 1.


Game that, for the most part, isn't a giant leap in terms of visuals over Red Dead Redemption - they're putting what they've got into the faces and animations on this one, not into the graphics in general.


And wouldn't be getting them until a year or two later.

Skyrim's graphics, at worst, look slightly dated compared to the best-looking games on the market. Even that's a bit of an exaggeration (It doesn't look dated, it just doesn't look quite as good). That's not an issue, and with less than a year to release there's really not enough time to make it one of the worst looking games on the shelf when it hits.


Same as what I'm talking about. The PC version of the game won't upscale or downscale - computer screens don't have such a specific handful of supported resolutions and aren't required to support a minimum of 720p - so it's going to render at whatever resolution you run it at. It's very, very unlikely that the console version will render at anything above 720p. All of that means that you can't really claim that RDR is a poor comparison because of how it's rendered on the consoles, because the same is almost certainly going to apply to Skyrim on the consoles.

Graphics look amazing to me. I'm not sure what everyone was expecting. Even more bloom? :huh:

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but something that renders at 720p on a console should not be a benchmark for a game that is supposed to run at 1080p on a PC. I would have assumed that internally rendering things at a lower resolution frees up resources for other things. In RDR, the seamless landscapes and transitions from exterior to interior is a good example. Wouldn't it also affect the textures in the game? The lower resolution the game, the lower the need for high resolution textures is?

Like I said, please feel free to correct me here.

EDIT: Just in case someone reads this post and no previous post. Skyrim looks a hundred time better than RDR or any game in recent memory, I'm just talking here.

I really couldn't see anything that made me think this game is stylized.

I noticed that actually. The third person shots of the Nord (walking in Riverwood and hunting the tiger in the woods) looked slightly stylized... almost WoW-like.

Thank you. I got kinda pissed when I read that, to be honest.

And to call Skyrim the "worst looking game" graphically, is ridiculous. We havent even seen gameplay yet.

The archer in the woods, the overly-bulked warrior-type, the high craggy rocks with the angular outcrops. Looks very Conanesque to me, looks very stylized.

Am I the only one who is seeing really nice graphics here? Am I just going blind or something?

And why all the comparisons to other games? What exactly is that supposed to accomplish...? A sandbox RPG is completely different than an FPS, right? Not trying to be snide, just genuinely curious. :confused:

Exactly right. This is what Im thinking too. So many comparisons to games that arent even half as ambitious as Skyrim or the TES series in general.

You are wrong, mainly because you're comparing across separate platforms. You're saying that something that renders at 720p on a console shouldn't be a benchmark for something else that almost certainly renders at (at best) 720p on a console because on the PC, where the display resolution selected by the user determines what resolution the game is rendered at, the game can be rendered at 1080p. There's no comparison to be made there. If the game's made properly then it'll be possible to have it rendering at several thousand pixels by several thousand pixels with a full 60FPS on a powerful enough machine, but that's not really a solid indication of absolutely anything in terms of what the game's assets or engine should be capable of. It's just an indication of how PC games generally work.

Basically, you can't claim that they can't be compared because Skyrim has to be able to run at 1080p on PCs, because on PCs that's something that any game is expected to do given powerful enough hardware. If you want to claim that it can't be compared because one has to run at a significantly higher resolution then you need to compare the games on a similar platform (in which case the claim doesn't work, because we don't know what resolution Skyrim's going to run at and it almost certainly won't run at anything higher than 720p).

Trying to think of the best way to put this, but... PC hardware is unbound, so "it has to be able to do X resolution on PC" means absolutely nothing.


It does, but once again the issue is that you're comparing across multiple platforms. I could say that Skyrim is supposed to run in 2160p on PC (and it really, really should be able to, unless Bethesda's made some very weird decisions with the engine), but that doesn't tell us anything useful about it.


The landscapes are. The transitions aren't, since there are no transitions. Interiors in RDR are part of the exteriors, not something separate that you transition into.


Not really. Low-resolution textures are still visibly low-resolution textures even when the game itself is running at a somewhat lower resolution - a low-res texture is going to look terrible up close even if you're running the game at 480i.


Completely disagree on RDR, for reasons I've already explained.

I guess I am really not seeing the massive leap in graphics that a lot of people are seeing. I definitely think that the characters look MUCH improved over Oblivion and even FO3, but to me, the environments only look light a slight upgrade over Oblivion. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining at all. I just don't see the visual upgrade everyone is on about. I can really tell by looking at the screens that this is still Gamebryo (albeit very upgraded), but it sure isn't an entirely new engine (although that is just arguing semantics).

Anyway, it looks like they focused on the important things which are characters and animations. That along with much improved LOD scaling (to make the environments look amazing both up close and far away) is really all I was hoping for. I am really keeping my fingers crossed on the animations though. I know they say they have been upgraded, but after the animation train wrecks that were Oblivion and FO3, I am going to wait until I witness it with my own eyes...

It's mostly the enemy designs and the color palette. The wolves in one of the shots, for example, look rather sharp. They've got very narrow, pointed snouts, their eyes are more piercing, and in general they have a very threatening look to them. The fidelity of the graphics is high enough to make them look believable, but real wolves don't look like that. That's a stylistic decision, and while it may not make things look unrealistic it does lend a certain tone to their image. Similar situation with the palette in one of the pictures, the one that's outright saturated with orange. Again, real life doesn't look like that, but it's close enough to reality to make it believable while taking liberties in just the right ways to make it carry a certain tone and feel.

Graphics being "stylized" doesn't mean they have to look like http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/111/1114435/naruto-ultimate-ninja-storm-2-20100819072027885_640w.jpg or http://videolamer.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/okami-inside.jpg or http://a.fsdn.com/gc/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/world-of-warcraft-580x435.jpg. It can just as easily mean http://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/shadow_of_the_colossus2b.jpg, and in a lot of cases that's the kind of "stylistic" that's preferable: the kind where it resembles reality, but with artistic liberties taken to support the atmosphere of the game itself. That appears to be the direction Bethesda's taking with Skyrim, and kudos to them for doing so. It means that we might finally see an RPG from them that manages to look unique without looking ugly and boring as a result.


The environments in the screenshots aren't made up entirely of lumpy carpet-like heightmaps, so they're definitely a major improvement over Oblivion. And no, it's not Gamebryo. That's been confirmed for so long, so many times and by so many different sources that I'm amazed you'd claim otherwise.

EDIT: And if we're going to be talking semantics, I might as well go ahead and point out that Gamebryo isn't the main reason why Oblivion's environments looked the way they did.