i like the living environment idea.

certainly birds and other things are perfectly possible, theyve been done in other games.

not sure if beth is really upto creating someting as good as the crysis 2 engine, but you would think theyd be close given the amount of money theyve made to hire damn good coders.

Highest on my wish list would be destructible/damageable objects. I'm not talking about blowing hole in the side of houses, but a simple shrub should definitely succumb to my mages fireballs once in a while!

Also remaining on the magic side, i'd love to see the effects on trees/walls/houses etc. scorch marks, ice burns, electricity burns etc.

This: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjZc9ayGlaM

Would possibly be possible with a hyped engine... ;D

This is crazy, thanks for posting, i wish it will be like this, i would update my machine just for that

Yeah that's pretty sick. I want it.

Well i ve played crysis, and i really loved it, i believe that after 5 years the minimum graphics that elder scrolls should have must be like cryengine 2, i dont mind the update if its a game that you can play in thousand ways

Hmmm...

1) Tesselation.
2) Realistic Shadows.
3) Depth of Field.
4) Crysis-like Godrays.
5) More detailed textures. Like QTP3's textures.
6) Improved water/underwater.
7) Better weather. Like having actual snowstorms where you can barely see in front of you.
8) More random wildlife. Butterflies, small insects, birds, flies. Harmless stuff you won't really notice but really add immersion.
9) Darker nights. I don't think you should be able to see quite as well at night as you can in Vanilla Oblivion.
10) More colourful environment. Oblivion just seemed kinda dull after awhile.
11) Mass Effect 2 style film grain.

I think that's about it.

Oh sure, in fact I have two requests. Specifically Bungie's http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-halo-reach-tech-interview which will be presented at GDC 2011 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JrM4ujLY_A (it's blurry because it's in 3d) assuming they sign up for Nvidia's engineers to come in.

Seems you guys have alot of wants for Skyrim!

Well, here's mine!

-Different body sizes.
-More than just 3 eye colors per human and elf race! (In Oblivion, they were just blue, green (more like greenish-gray), and brown (more like hazel than actual brown)! I would like to see more than just 1 shade of blue (like sky-blue, navy-blue, deep-blue, lite-blue for example), more than 1 shade of green (like tourquoise, sea-green, emerald, jade-green, teal, sage-green, and other shades of green in eye colors), I would also like to see hazel, deep brown, black, voilet, and gray as eye color choices for the 4 human races, bosmers and altmers as well!
-More monster/creature variety.
-more ingredient variety.
-more than just horses as ridable mounts.
-the ability to actually climb ladders, climb up vertical things, and to be able to shimmy on ledges.
-the ability to be able to push/pull blocks(boulders) into the proper places in order to set off different things (like opening doors or passages)

That's all I could think of that others haven't thought of that they would like for TES-V!

I think if Bethesda aimed for maybe a GTX260 (2008 card) for the DX10 lower settings=30fps+ @1920x1200 and highest settings straining a GTX580 or ATi 6970 DX11@ 1920x1200. If we want advanced physics and more AI on screen a minimum of a 2.4Ghz or so Core 2 Quad seems to be appropriate. Id like the game to use as much as 6 cores though. No reason it couldn't. Many modern engines are doing that now. TESV needs to impress me the way TESIV did.
The reason for making an engine that supports all these advanced features even if many wont be present in the console version would be Bethesda would be future proofing itself. TESV will probably be their last game on current generation consoles. Making a next gen ready engine would help them be ready and make Fallout 4 or whatever all the faster. Also they can use PC as testing the waters. Next gen consoles will be heavy with tessellation and DX11 based effects, why not get some experience and feel for how to place and best use the tech now so by the time you are working on the next generation bethesda game you already have experience.
Bethesda would benefit GREATLY from supporting high end effects of the current PC. Even if they cant sell as many copies on PC. Capcom is doing this. They even said in an interview they add DX11 effects to games like Lost Planet 2 to get ready for the next wave of consoles.

I just found this picture and it would an awesome landscape for skyrim http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ldmf7r1tOb1qcjp3go1_500.jpg just vast landscape of glaciers and somewhere far away this dark tower

Shut up, know one cares. This thread is about graphics not story.

You want to get a warning Rusty?

better graphics than crysis!

and crysis is from 2007....

There's no rule saying I can't say shut up.

say what now?

Actually. F3 and Ob both have enviroment maps. Ob however seems to be using sphere mapping. tbh the whole system is wack in Ob. But what is wrong with fallouts implementation? they had environment mask maps.

actually there is a technique having the actual environment map stored per location. so in effect a mesh with the reflection map shader enabled would swap out what map is rendered depending on where it is. for example indoors and outdoor the reflection map changes. didn't Ob do a very crappy version of this, and had a different env map for each?
anyway tbh I have my reservations of this system, and might just want reflection maps to be sorted by the map itself like F3. Then you just slap the appropriate map into that meshes material.

Why would you ever need bump maps when there are normal maps? Both do similar things except normal maps are better in every way.

I have seen so many technologies and ideas when i comes to graphics I wouldn't know where to start. :angel:
But I don't think this has been mentioned- Directional Lights. Essentialy all there are currently is omni lights. Which diffuse in all directions.

Water, godrays, HDR, dynamic shadows like this please: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SwPlb8SebE

If people say "I don't care about graphics, gameplay is more important!" I think they lie big time. Not about gameplay being more important, but that they say they don't care about graphics. Find me one honest person who doesn't care if the game looks like the video above, or like a cartoon game, like this: http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2006/features/hardware/oblivionmip/NENMLODoff.jpg


I think graphics is exceptionally important for Skyrim. Here's why:

- Morrowind and Oblivion had really good graphics for when they were released, perhaps one or the best.

- Fallout 3 unfortunately failed at this since Crysis was released about 1 year earlier with completely outstanding graphics. Fallout NV didn't even try to improve the graphics. Both of these games are awesome, but I believe it was a let-down for many people, especially for those who looks at the graphics of the game at first sight, which I think a lot of people do.
b]I think of graphics kind of as looks with a person. They are the first impression[/b], and the first impression is quite often the most important one. I think that's why Skyrim really needs to have great graphics... to attract more people that haven't played TES or Bethesda's games before, and of course to satisfy we who already know TES is awesome ;D
If Skyrim has bad graphics, I think it will have a lot less sold copies (especially from people, as I said before, that aren't really familiar with Bethesda's games), than it would have otherwise.

- With other games looking really really good, like the Crysis video I stated above, our "need" for graphics increases as well. If you've played Crysis at very high, I'm sure you'll think other games look really bad afterwards, and you'll think extra much of graphics then.
With Fallout NV being really behind in the "graphics development" for when it was released, I think Skyrim needs to make it up for that by having great graphics.

I really see no reason not to focus a lot on making the graphics good. I'm sure they'll sell more games, I'm sure it will be popular and better liked by us fans. But at the same time, of course, it's very important to focus on gameplay and story as well. They've done a outstanding job here before, so I don't doubt they won't the same here

Crysis would be impossible to run on a console. By a lot. comparing that to any game on the xbox is pointless. you are much better off trying to find a large open world space game that appears on the 360 to make your comparison.

and before anyone mentions, cryengine3,just look at its demos on the xbox and you will see how much of the renderer and graphics had to culled and stripped back. the view distance nearly pathetic. now add in 100s of extra npc and ai packages from them and see how it fairs..

That's a good point. But I still think Bethesda should and could do a lot better in terms of graphics than they did with Fallout 3 and especially Fallout NV.
The consoles can handle pretty much, but not as much as a good PC. A "reduced" version for the consoles only should help with this.
And you must not forget that the better the engine, the better the performance as well (compared to the great possibilies of graphics "received" of course).
It should also take some really wicked graphics to seriously "hold back" the PC. I'm not expecting something like that, and I don't think Bethesda will do this. But that doesn't mean it can still be hugely improved.

Has anyone mentioned http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGL4qTATJqs?

edit: yep, post #40 did.

Also, in keeping with the "First person, not a movie" theme of the series please base glare effects off http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~ritschel/Papers/TemporalGlare.pdf and not a camera. That and remember, if you have blood spatter/water "on the camera" then blur it. I know Crysis made it look like water was running down glass, because in Crysis you have a transparent faceplate in front of you so it was the right effect. I don't see the same thing when I'm swimming unless I hold a sheet of glass in front of me for some reason.

Wishful thinking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2EG5J05048

Maybe Elder Scrolls VI.

yeah been mentioned. I saw a demo implementing volumetric clouds into gamebryo. was it called silverlight? ...ah silver lining > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHWdvvpVE6k

Some of us actually do care. It's happened very often when a game developing company makes graphics their main priority, the rest of the game suffers for it. I for one don't buy a game just to play a pretty movie on rails.

Edit: about the only graphics issue that would be a priority for me is frame rate. Making sure it's fast/ smooth enough that it doesn't jitter/ interfere with gameplay.

I don't want photorealistic.
please keep it artsy.