I'm not sure I understand. If you capture a screenshot of your game at any point, sure you lose the motion element. But it gives you a fairly good idea of how the game actually looks. By your definition, those:

http://www.gamus.com.br/wp-content/gallery/mafia-ii-2503/mafia_ii_-_feb_2010_preview_event__1_.jpg
http://ve3dmedia.ign.com/images/07/36/73623_DeusixHumanRevolution-Screenshot-06.jpg
http://www.ps3informer.com/playstation-3/2010/07/29/rage_screenshot.jpg

Are equal to this:

http://www.platformnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/fallout-new-vegas-screens.jpg

For instance, Deus Ex 3 is a game that is highly stylized and is still far more more realistic due to better lighting. You don't need to choose between realism and style, they can go pretty well together. Perhaps I shouldn't have attempted to add filters to the images to explain what I meant. But there are plenty of screenshots out there of console games doing a better job at setting the example, and they do that without losing any sense of style.

I pretty much agree only visuals won't make a game memorable, just like special effects don't make a good movie. But developers are expected to progress in both fields, technical/cosmetical and interaction. They are what define what a VIDEOgame is, a combination of graphics and storytelling. Many people are not fond of realism, which is okay. It's a matter of taste. But immersion is a big factor in pretty much any game out there, especially RPGs. The dedicated fan would play Skyrim on a modded Morrowind and he'll say it looks spectacular. Standards are raised with time and technology. For example, the original King Kong animatronic wouldn't have worked for today's audiences, perhaps only for the big fans willing to believe in first place.

I don't understand some people here. I'm a big fan of TES, I've spent over 250 hours in Oblivion in several playthroughs and I'm sure I'll enjoy Skyrim. But to call it great looking is just not realistic. Does it look bad? Absolutely not. But so far, it doesn't look much better than Oblivion and Fallout, in all honesty. Does it matter? It does to me and a whole lot of people, some of which will be playing it anyway.

I'm sure Bethesda understands the importance to remain competitive and that eyecandy is a major selling point for the casual gamer. That's the industry today, and probably how it's ever been and ever will be. Let's only hope they're hiding something then.

That is what he said.

We can assume it looks and runs at least as good as Fallout:3 and we can also assume it's better. If that isn't good enough I can't imagine what it would take for some of you. I mean what exactly are folks asking for here? That shot of the pond and trees looked so good I could smell the spruce trees. It looked like it was taken in my woods. I can't really find anything too be disappointed in,

Definitely the most true quote I read in this thread.
I mean, looking at it, it's clear that Skyrim is not going for photo-realism. It goes for style and beauty.
I'll give an example of another game that did something similar.
Anyone here played Race Driver: Grid? Basically, it didn't look real at all, the lighting was clearly exaggerated (as was the tone) and the colours were way brighter than they are in reality. Still, it looked beautiful as it had its style.

I say give the game a chance. they probably didn't show the coolest looking screens yet anyways

Yeah it look pretty good and the pics look much better than Oblivion/FO3/NV. Any I have many pretty games on PC all playing on their highest settings.

people don't seem to understand that every screenshot of this game we've seen and every shot we will see until the game is released is from the 360 build. that is their lead platform, and the platform that they will sell the most copies on.

things like the trees and rushing water and hair and [censored] being aliased are because it's hard enough getting a system with 512mb of shared memory to render a world as open and detailed as Skyrim, let alone get it looking half decent. (don't say LOL RED DEAD REDEMPTION because 90% of that game is flat desert with some brush.) the only loading screens in TES games are transitions from exteriors to interiors, or between interiors.

wait until you're running the game on a PC that can actually enable antialiasing before complaining about a lack of antialiasing, please.

also stop comparing Skyrim to games that are NOT COMPARABLE WHATSOEVER. Mass Effect is able to have stupidly high-res textures because there's nothing else to the game outside of the corridors. Uncharted 2 is able to look pretty because everything that isn't directly in front of you is either a billboard or hilariously low-poly and masked with shaders and since you can't get to it in any way you never notice. you can't do that [censored] with a game like Skyrim - LOD isn't that good yet, and even if it was it would run like [censored] on consoles. there's a reason Crysis 2 is set in a city - it's a lot easier to hide aggressive occlusion culling if there's tall buildings everywhere hiding it.

I actually am worried about the choices they've made, because I always thought Oblivion looked terrible from a lighting perspective. Everything was coated in a layer of vegetable oil, and made my head hurt to look at, as well as giving it a very "fairy tale" look, and besides a (somewhat) less cartoonish design, looked almost identical to Fable. Morrowind mushroom trees looked more realistic and life like than Oblivion's oaks, regardless of them being in better resolution.

You're forgetting that TES games are completely open, so they have to sacrifice some graphical elements to include things like Radiant AI and the completely open world.

That Mafia 2 screen shot was an ingame cinematic which they ramp the graphics up on because there is no user input, few camera movements, and little ai beyond animations. I think we have to wait for gameplay footage before we can judge.

Mafia 2, sandbox, lots of NPCs, all rendered with soft shadows, condensed cityscape, much bigger than any Skyrim will have. Great reflections, ambient occlusion, global illumination, nice skin shaders, overall impressive realism, even in the Xbox.

http://static.computergames.ro/cg/assassin/xbox360/mafia2/mafia2-064.jpg

To the above: The game looks great in motion.

As for being an open world: dynamic scalability. Better LOD. Better handling of memory. Better use of threading. That's actually what they've been doing, since we're seeing dynamic shadows that were impossible in Gamebryo years ago.

That made me lol.

Maybe you and I, have better eyesight than the others :thumbsup:
I don't have a problem with that picture either or any others....i stared at those two screens for 10 minutes or more ( skyrim woods -oblivion woods ).
And i have to say the skyrim one looked way better to me.
Also someone mentioned that one of the rocks wasn't casting a shadow in the middle ( forget who),but there wouldn't be,look at where the light is coming from.

I'm pretty sure they already said dynamic shadows and all of that are in.

I think this is a case of the system being so good that on some days shadows will be hard to spot because of overcast and the like. I think that's part of why we are having such trouble seeing them.

It doesn't help that screenshots, by their still nature, make it difficult to make out certain things. I'm sure it would be obvious if shadows were in the game like that or not if we saw a video, as we could see a tree's shadow (or a very light shadow, if it were an overcast day as in these screenshots) move with it. Its much harder to make out a shadow in a screenshot because it could just as easily be the the texture of the ground or the shading of that texture that makes it appear to be a shadow.

Only things I want to say are: the skyrim shots look fine. Better than the edits you did. Oversaturated red/yellow looks better than the "15yo myspace way oversaturated green"(if anyone knows what I mean by that) and it's more realistic. Also I don't like that Uncharted snow screenshot. Skyrim looks way better than that. You don't ever see that much blue saturation on a snowy surface. It's not realistic or pretty in the least. Snow/ice is white, gray and black and depending on the sun yellow/red.

Next thing I want to say is: not to start a console war, but those screenshots are indeed 360 shots. They can't have the higher res textures and shadows that the pc will have so you really can't expect too much out of the first released shots. If they were confirmed to be pc shots then I would probably worry a bit.

Sorry, but that doesn't make much sense technically speaking and as far as Mafia is concerned, just isn't true. You guys are talking as if they had to give up on AI to implement better graphics, which is just absurd. Or as if open world is entirely loaded into the console's memory and that makes it different from loading a large outdoor environment map. That's not how the engine works at all. In terms of rendering/processing power, what you see is what you get, rendering a landscape with a large degree of visibility or a crowded street filled with wandering NPCs, like in Assassin's Creed, requires the same amount of processing power. What Gamebryo lacked was optmization and features like occlusion culling, a dynamic LOD and better handling of resources.

Lol what? Joke post?

Games don't just start getting developed when they announce them bro, TES5: Skyrim has been in development for about 4 and a half years.

I can't believe that you think games like this are easy enough to make in 1 year.. I WISH..

And to the people disappointed with the graphics, well what do you expect when the game is being developed mainly for 5 year old consoles that even when they were released were considered extremely weak because of the cheap budget hardware in them?

Graphics can't get better than they are in Skyrim at the moment until we get a new generation of consoles / Play it on PC and use texture packs and full 24x edge detect AA

I beg to differ. =)

http://www.wallcoo.net/nature/snow_mountain/wallpapers/1024x768/%5Bwallcoo%5D_snow_mountain_Image_AP29123.jpghttp://www.webdesignmo.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/1578705136_resize.jpg
http://www.freebestwallpapers.info/bulkupload//14/1//Nature/Snow-Mountain.jpg


Even in overcast days, you'll get a blueshish/purple tint, there's no true black in nature, and true white is very rare. Just color pick in Photoshop what you think is black and white and you'll be surprised.

couple things

1). Gamebryo isn't being used for skyrim
2). adding random filters to images makes it look worse and generally just darker
3). you can't judge the full extent of graphics from a still image
4). Oblivion and Skyrim has more interaction that mafia and assassin's creed. You can pick up and place a large variety of objects.
5). I rather they focus more on gameplay than making the graphics up to your horribly filtered standards

not trying to flame, I just strongly disagree with everything you're saying.
but mostly it just bothers me that you can't hold your tongue until some gameplay comes out

1. The Screen shots look great. (imo)
2. They are not the original screen shots so the quality goes down each time it's passed on. (Wait for screenshots on TES official site.)
3. A lot of games send out teaser screen shots that look semi good, but later on show much better screen shots as a hype (This can be good for sales, and sometimes people just like to suprise people. Considering how long Bethesda has kept Skyrim Project under wraps for so long I'm gonna go with the suprise factor.)
4. The screenshots we are seeing could be for console or (low res)
5. Lots of theories, relaxe.... maybe this time around Bethesda doesn't want you to go out and buy a brand new ultimate machine so you can play this game (Unlikely as they are pretty traditional as we've seen )

They don't need a lot of fancy buzzwords or things that you guys might read in an article exclaiming loudly. The game looks fine except for the lighting, which is something that's been lacking BGS games since Morrowind. Hey Bethesda, just use deffered lighting, ssao, fake some GI by placing lights at every window in an interior with a color value sampled from the exterior ambient term and you'll be good. Not that proper use of rim lighting or a spherical harmonic ambient term would hurt.

Not that fancy things wouldn't go amiss for the pc version. But really I'd just like to see some standard, well developed tricks that anyone can get an easy reference implementation for. Where's the shadows that cast on water, self shadowed normal maps, shadowmap adaptation to normal maps, cloud shadows and etc. Just, standard stuff, "how do I do it?" boom there's the paper, it costs less than a millisecond.

Too late for that given your choice of words.



It bothers you that people come into discussion forums to *gasp* debate? This isn't a cheerleading forum for Bethesda, not everyone will like everything and not everyone will agree about everything. Doesn't make anyone right or wrong, just different. However, I strongly suggest you avoid topics that bother you. Bethesda released screenshots, some people loved them, some people liked them and some people disliked them (I've yet to see anyone hating). Now we're talking about them. So what's the problem?




Too late, already did. Lots of other great PC games coming out this year. Skyrim is just one of them. :hubbahubba:

He offered his differing opinion, he did not get personal.


But now you gasp with sarcastically because someone disagrees. Nobody is being a "cheerleader" and to say such is not but flamebait. Obviously people here are disagreeing with you and it's not stirring a hornets nest but rather much disagreement. The problem is that you are now taking it to a personal level and telling people what topics to avoid.

Enjoy your games. This discussion is ended due to it becoming more flamebait then debate.