Alright, this topic has become seriously derailed. I've contributed to that as well but it's time to get back on track. The Great and Never-Ending Fallout Debate would belong in Series Discussion anyway.

Back on topic and holding my tongue, I've been noticing some of the gaming sites around the web putting up galleries from the E3 footage so now we can get a better sense of what the game's going to look like without video compression.

Personally, I'm really psyched by what I've seen. The fidelity is clearly much higher than in Fallout 3 and everything looks to be literally packed with detail and specificity. When I was learning 3D modeling characters still had blocks for hands. You only ever had so much memory to work with for textures so you had to employ some common tricks like using low-res textures for minor elements and reusing texture maps on objects that wouldn't necessarily fit. And you can still see those tricks in use today (in Fallout 3 you will find rock faces where the texture map is stretched and items like water bottles will have low-res textures, for example.)

Looking through these stills, elements where you'd expect to be seeing low-res textures are much higher fidelity (often with lots of detail on their own, even) and while no doubt they're employing some smoke-and-mirrors wherever possible to keep performance up these stock tricks are very well hidden where they're in use at all.

That's going to have a big impact on the visuals when we finally get a chance to see the game running on our own screens. A lot of people were initially remarking on F4 looking "cartoony" but I think a lot of that's to do with the compression we've seen in the released videos. The Vault Suit, for instance, did look kind of plastic-y in the videos but if you can find a good screengrab there's actually a ton of fine detail in that suit. And that's also something I've always enjoyed about Bethesda's art direction - they're big on attention to detail.

I don't personally have an issue with the art style at all. The game just is not graphically competitive with other similar open world games on the market. Whether it's Dragon Age Inquisition, The Witcher 3, Far Cry 4, Assassin's Creed Unity, Grand Theft Auto V, Star Wars Battlefront, there are a lot of games that just look better from a visual fidelity standpoint. That's not to say Fallout 4 doesn't look decent, it's just not on the same level. For PC gamers, it won't be an issue as we'll be able to include HD texture mods as well as ENB and other 3rd party software, but it limits the visual fidelity on consoles.

This isn't exactly surprising as BGS always keeps graphics a rather low priority for their games (none of them have really been cutting-edge visually since Oblivion).

when I played Skyrim one of my first thoughts was I cant wait to see fallout 4 on this engine...what Ive seen it at least is living up to that expectation and Ive certainly not seen anything that would be "Immersion breaking" and TBH that's all I really care about. In other words it looks "good enough" to me.

Looking at the screen grabs, it's still pretty high fidelity textures. I don't see this as something where everything's going to be "magically better" with just an HD texture pack (as the textures are already high res, from what I've seen.)

To my tastes I'll take visually distinct art direction with attention to detail over straight-out "graphics" any day, but tastes will differ. I'd never argue that Bethesda leads the pack in terms of raw graphical power or animation. But what they do with the tools available I think is pretty interesting. They do very good level design, for instance, and really know how to tell a story through environment alone I think.

For an example, I remember back to Fallout 3 at the time I thought it had decent enough graphics. When Bioware put out Mass Effect a year later, I thought that really raised the bar in terms of character design for these sort of games. And the game had some really good art direction as well. But boy were some of those levels and areas bland in comparison to even Oblivion. Go into some guy's house in a Mass Effect game and it's pretty spartan, with a small handful of stock, static elements inside. Pick any room in Oblivion and you're going to see a lot more detail and visual storytelling done with far less available horsepower.

Anyway yeah - I'd agree that Bethesda isn't exactly the industry leader in terms of pushing the technology to it's limits. But from what I've seen it's still quite a jump up from Skyrim and certainly a pretty big leap forward from Fallout 3. Which is all that I cared about anyway as far as pure "graphics power."

Textures are merely the skeleton of the visual set piece. There will be many other graphical improvements that will need to be made to truly transform the game.

I agree that BGS is one of the best in the industry when it comes to level design. It's far better than anything else they do in their games, in my opinion. Part of the reason BGS titles are so timeless is because the world, itself, is alive and an actor in the experience. Many games have static and lifeless worlds that really detract from the immersion and experience of the game.

Just a slight correction, Mass Effect was released winter 2007 on the Xbox 360. It was released early 2008 on the PC. Fallout 3, of course, was released in late 2008. Dragon Age Origins came out late 2009. Character design was definitely one of Mass Effect's strong points. The environments were often less than desirable. There was certainly more detail in terms of items in Oblivion, but nothing really looked "pretty" per se. The potato faces of Oblivion still haunt me to this very day...

I agree that gameplay improvements matter a lot, but I also believe graphical fidelity is crucial as well. Especially for a BGS game, we are meant to be transported to these other words to get lost in. The better the visuals are, the more immersive the experience. Obviously console hardware limitations and the like will somewhat limit what is possible, but there really isn't any reason why the visuals shouldn't at least be close to on par with other open world competitors on the market.

One can do quite a lot with low rez textures, with foresight and careful design. https://vimeo.com/35470093

The one thing I know that I like in FO4 (by having seen it), is the attention paid to the some of the visual details.

Agreed - I always liked their insistence (at least in regards to Fallout) that every nut and bolt (at least appear to) serve a purpose. And say what you will about their design priorities I still maintain that Bethesda puts more thought into the ceilings of their least interesting houses than a lot of other developers put into entire levels.

But yeah, as far as texture resolution goes - I mean a lot of older-gen games have not aged well. But there's PS1 games I still think have better visuals put to good use than a lot of current-gen releases.

And my opinion is that from what I've seen F4 is pretty on-par with recent releases. Even if it's not blowing the competition out of the water, I think it's close enough that I highly doubt it's going to be interfering with my enjoyment of the game. Personally, I still find even Skyrim's visuals to be rather engrossing and compelling (I'll still find myself stopping at the summit of a cliff to enjoy the view sometimes.) The main thing that's generally detracted from my "immersion" in Bethesda titles has been animation more than anything else.

So this is where we'll have to just agree to disagree.

off topic: That is pretty, and damn Unreal is a nice engine

back on topic. That is a good showing that you dont need high-res textures to make good looking things. Those are very good materials, and there is no doubt in my mind that the person knows how to utilize Unreals materialsélighting properly.

However, also, that is a walkthrough and he only shows us what he wants us to see, could be much different if we walked through it. There were multiple times I was working with an engine and the beauty shots I took looked nothing like some random screenshot.

I'm just glad F4 has the skin-tight outfits of F1 and F2 back. It looks and feels right

I couldn't care less about graphics in a fallout game. I'm not saying I wouldn't prefer it to be pretty, but we must remember that it has to run on consoles. Also, and way more importantly, a good fallout game could be a text adventure for all I care, as the thing that made fallout great was writing. Take that away, like in fallout 3, you end up with something that might be a good game but is absolute crap as far as fallout goes.

Because "Fallout 4 is not really Fallout" discussion..."Fallout 4 is not really Fallout" discussion never changes