I've been playing the Witcher 2 lately, I will admit that they cutscenes graphics could be ALOT better, but the gameplay graphics are pretty good.

They are not one in the same?

*The reason I ask is that I play the game a decent enough settings (for me), but were I to max the settings for a time, the title cutscene (being in-game for some reason) gets choppy, and unwatchable.

They are the same, but in the cutscenes the camera is closer to everything so the textures don't look as good as in gameplay where your camera is further away.

all of u saying its a shame they are not using directx11 and now the game would look bad...
so here is a list of awsome graphics in games there is no directx11:
call of duty black ops told to have a similar character graphics as it will be in skyrim...
crysis and crysis 2(before the patch that realty didnt changed much...)
even project offset 2007!!!(search in utube or google...) didnt had directx11 and just look how
much details they manage to do with every single creature or achitecture...
and beside im pretty sure that if a game will run only on directx11
it will screw half of the gaming community...cuz not everybody have a directx11 compatible card
and beside the graphics and effects they are awsome!
and yes im saying it again...lets not forget the modding communty of the elders scrolls
made oblivion one of the most seccesfull games ever and skyrim is not diffrent :celebration:

That's my main concern with Skyrim at the moment. Future proofing it. Most games you pick up, play for a month, then never play again. Not TES games. People are still playing and mod'ing OB after nearly 5 years and with mods it still looks pretty decent.

With a new console generation (hopefully god please) on the horizon devs might actually start taking advantage of current technologies again. In 5 years are we still going to say "Skyrim looks pretty decent"? I'm not so certain about that, assuming of course the new consoles actually use DX11 and games get made for that and dev's work on developing techniques and technologies for it.

This is a game I still want to play in 5 years and think, man this looks good. Without any sort of eye being put to the future for the game in development though I'm not so sure that is going to happen.

I don't think anything's gonna happen until the game and system companies stop being obsessed with the almighty "casuals". Word is that the Playstation 4 wont have much better graphics than the PS3, it'll be catered more towards getting everyone gaming. (source: http://sonyps4.com/playstation-expanding-target-audience-with-ps4/)

So developers really just have to realize that the PC will always be 10 steps ahead of consoles (no offense to consoles, they're still good for "the casuals"), and start developing higher end games specifically for PC. Or do what DICE is doing and make it primarily for PC then scale it down for consoles, rather than the other way around.

I was REALLY hoping Bethesda would be on the forefront of this movement with their huge PC fanbase, but unfortunately it looks like they're selling out and jumping on the "all hail the casuals" bandwagon.

That can't be. If they can't offer hardware too much beyond the PS3's, there would be no reason for me to buy a PS4 when practically any half-decent PC (and I mean any half-decent PC, not one even built with gaming in mind, but simply the average laptop or desktop bought at Best Buy for a few hundred dollars) will easily trounce it. I hope Sony doesn't jump onto that bandwagon. I liked their consoles primarily for the serious, generally "hardcoe" experience they've sought to provide with the PlayStation brand since its inception. :confused:

Yeah we're on the same page there. But from that article it might be true. Basically what I'm saying is, consoles seem to be locked into the "casual gaming" zone, that's what all the developers are obsessed with nowadays, even Bethesda. So I think it would be a good idea from developers to go ahead and make their casual games for consoles, but also offer more complex (both graphically and with content) games for PC gamers. Right now we're locked into an era where most games are cross platform, and usually developed with the lowest common denominator in mind. I think game companies should stop looking at Xbox, PS, and PC as the same generation, because they're not. We could easily have "next-gen" games right now. Even "next-next-gen". But only if those games are developed on the PC, then scaled down so the consoles can run them. And I think Bethesda missed a tremendous opportunity to make a next gen Elder Scrolls game by doing just that (developing on PC like DICE did with BF3, then scaling down for consoles). Unfortunately, for whatever reason, they didn't, and it's a real shame.

And I would suggest you learn a little bit about a technology before you try and sound smart. Direct X is not a bolt on module; it is core level machine code. You would have to...

1) Successfully reverse engineer the entire game executable, then decompile it into code you could manipulate (and let us just say that there are legal ramifications, should you succeed. And the odds say you won't).
2) Write and debug the Shader Model 5 shaders to replace the current Shader model 3 shaders. And if the case of things like the compute shader, you would have to -design- exactly how it would interact and respond to the existing codebase.
3) Re do =all= lighting code to take advantage of the DX-11 lighting modes.
4) Take every mesh you want to tesselate into a modeller and decimate it, so as not to run into the issues you get with comparatively high poly mesh pushed through a tesselator. And if the winding order, of kind of polygon is wrong for the T code, you would have to remodel that piece. Again falling afoul of that nasty EULA and its legally binding conditions (in most cases).
5) Delete every light out of every nanounit of the game world and recreate it, as some of the DX-9 lighting tricks would not mesh well with the DX-11 tricks.
6) Recompile the code and recreate the game executable. And one that actually works.
7) Debug each and every light, affected mesh object, dungeon, etc, until you get it right.


Yeah, I can just see the weekend modder tossing off something like that......

You sound like you know a lot about this stuff, so do you think Skyrim can look as good as, say, Crysis, with enough mods? Because as someone else pointed out, Crysis is DX9, not DX11. ANd if so, how long would it take? Would it be as simple as taking Crysis textures and putting them in the Skyrim game? I saw a YouTube video where someone did that with Oblivion (though it was just a fly-through video, I don't think it was actually playable).

Forgive my ignorance, I really don't know the first thing about PC tech, I'm just a PC gamer.

The whole "OMG Casuals" thing is really overplayed. It's a silly term, and it's annoyingly vague - generally meaning whatever insult the user feels like at the time. (Depends on what they're complaining about - lower difficulty, lower system requirements, console users, whatever.)



translation: until they stop being obsessed with making money...... which, honestly, I don't see happening any time soon. Since, you know, making money is what they're there for. :shrug:

The vast majority of companies, if given the choice between selling 3mil copies of something to the wide market, or 1mil copies to a more niche market? They'll take the 3mil sales, thanks. This is especially true at the "big budget" end of things, since they really really need to sell lots to make back all the money they spent.

Yes, there will always be exceptions (just like there are in other mass media, like movies & TV), but they're not common.

It's a useless idea to do it, restricting a TES games graphics given the ini settings are open for tweaking would only waste Bethesda's time and money on creating some sort of hardware restriction.

Honestly, I'd prefer an X64 executable over DX11. Once a bunch of mods are piled on, I can see there being a problem with the 2GB limit.

I would love isometric view games like Baldur's gate to be made nowadays with actual 3D graphics. I don't need to zoom in and see every detail of every NPC's face...

Same as that.

Life is too short to wait for Microsoft and sony to come up with new hardware. PC's have new hard ware now. Why can't developers take charge of the situation?

Yes but companies don't help them selfs here either. If they made games to take advantage of the PC then they might just sell More PC games.

Short answer is 'No'. Crysis is a typical shooter, in that it has levels, and those levels are designed to limit exactly how much of the world you can see and get to at any one time. That frees up resources to pour onto making things look better, or add more details to. The Elder Scrolls is a sandbox world. Could you technically add the lighting model Crysis uses? Possibly. The Xbox 360 does not support true DX-9, but more like DX-8.55, as it is customized to not kill the actual hardware and take advantage of a couple of things only that console has under the hood. Would you get a useable framerate? Not a chance, save in those dungeons that limit you viewing range. Or unless you had an overclocked nightmare of a computer.....and even then, out of doors on that wide open tundra where the dragon attacked the giant in the E3 footage, you would be lucky to get one frame a minute.

It isn't the textures that are truly important; I have so wanted to slap every clueless twit who parrots that 'but the PC people get a high res texture pack!' garbage. It is the lighting model, and how accurately is simulates real world lighting. Textures are a good starting place (or ending place on the cheap), but when you use them as simple foundations, then add shaders, things begin to shine. Shaders are simply script that tells the GPU to do a certain function at a certain time. That is why you can suddenly do water. It isn't magic; water reflects light in a mathematically specific way.....and a combination of the math functions in the right order creates a shader that turns the applied surface into 'water'. But the effect you get depends on the kind of lighting model used. And the shader has to be specifically written for the effect you want. That is what makes them so powerful. From the few scenes we've seen, Skyrim lacks any kind of subsurface scatter shader. You can tell by the plastic looking skin on the figure meshes. SSS is one of the key effects for realism. Look at your palm. All those color variations are not from the skin, but from the underlying flesh. The epidermis is pretty much a translucent gray, and passes light easily. But it doesn't pass it like a window does; the light bounces around and reflects and refacts all over the place. That effect is what makes skin look 'real'; the light reflecting back at you from another person's skin is not coming just from the absolute outer surface, but from as deep as half an inch inside, or more depending. That is the source of the 'healthy glow' effect; light reflecting off of a good bloodflow, and adding a reddish tinge to the skintone (and no, I am not going to even begin to get into the complexities that arise with the variations of skin tone out there. The math is...significant). And it is not limited to skin; anything that partially passes visible light has some kind of SSS effect to it. Such as leaves. You can do the leaves as partially transparent, but without that subsurface scatter, they simply will not look 'lit from within' like a real leaf does when the sun shines through it.

I'm sure I'll get some disagreement here, but.... what the heck, this forum's all about charging ahead with one's own opinions.


The way I see it?, the PC market for a game might be divided like so:

A - People who won't buy it anyway, they're just not interested in the genre

B - People who'll buy it (and sure, some of them may mutter that they wish it looked better)

C - People that would buy it, but can't run it because their hardware's too weak

D - People that would buy it if only it were more pretty.


Obviously, the divisions between groups vary by system requirements & game genre. (Crysis 1, when it first came out, group D probably didn't exist, and group C was large. Bejewelled probably has a very small group C, since it has low reqs.... and almost no group D, since puzzle games isn't really a big target of graphics nuts).

Groups A & B don't matter - they'll buy it or not, no matter what.

C & D.... maybe it's just me, but would you really want to cater to group D? People so shallow, that the only thing they care about is how pretty it is? That don't actually have any interest in your game beyond "Oooooooh, shiny!"? Are they really fans that you'd like to have? (Crytek's answer is obviously Yes. ) Also, group C seems like it could easily be the largest source of potential sales (at least my faith in humanity - hah - makes me hope that group D isn't terribly large in the grand scheme of things....)

Let's do a good old fashioned boycott!!!!!!!!!!!!

Group E - People who would buy it if only it got better reviews (the magic Metacritic 'Universal Aclaim').

Group F - People who would buy it if only it was better value for money (longer, more content etc.)

Group G - People who would buy it if only word of mouth was better (forum rants about sloppy combat, rubbish voice acting etc.)

Ok, these aren't specifically to do with graphics, but I'd suggest there are a lot of people who can run a game, like the genre, don't care that it's not beautiful, but won't buy it anyway.

Agree. A 64 bit exe would be much more important to me than DX11. I don't see why they would be mutually exclusive though. :thumbsup: Of course we aren't getting either of them so I suppose it is irrelevant. Todd's answer in the Q&A made me feel like he was genuinely surprised anyone even asked about a 64 bit exe, like it is some weird out there request or something. :blink:



I seriously doubt group C is a very large group. This game is being designed to run on a 360. You haven't been able to build a computer that weak in quite a number of years. I would guess any computer built in the last 5-6 years that isn't using on board video is going to be able to run Skyrim just fine. In fact I won't be surprised at all if older computers end up running it better because of issues with multi-core optimization and the like.