Yes, I will buy a copy tomorrow most likely.

I'm not worried about shadows. I'd assume that the shadows are missing in shot I linked because it appears to be taken from a distance. Shadows are most likely turned off or lowered in detail for objects in the distance. My concerns aren't with the shadows at all; they are with how the lighting in Skryim looks a lot like Oblivion's. Take a look at the video I linked. You will see the differences in lighting games can have.

:) I'm not sure about your question but the mag is worth checking out. There are a few screens that definitely show nice cast shadows. The ss I mentioned earlier is one, on the same page theres a shot of the player and half of his body is covered by a shadow from something. On the page of the mountain giant you can see shadows cast by his arm and club as well as shadows on his other arm cast from his body. I don't see any screenshots with definite shadows casted in nature itself, but that could be hardware related or just that they weren't added to the game world yet.

Oh and the lighting varies from shot to shot. You'll see when you get the mag.

I'm actually quite happy with the graphics of Skyrim, although they are about what I expected. Some of the environment screens and characters (the troll thing) look like an upgraded version of Oblivion (especially the lighting), but what do you expect from a "brand new engine" that is still based almost entirely around the technology from Gamebryo. Not to mention that is has to run on consoles which are beginning to age pretty badly.

That being said, I'm just glad they are taking care of the four major areas that I has issues with in Oblivion:
1. Ugly character models. The screens of the barkeep and the Nord PC show off how much work they have done in this department.
2. Animations. Using updated Havok for physics and animation should turn this are from a weak link to a strength.
3. The LOD scaling. Oblivion looked good up close, ok really far away, and terrible at mid range distance. They have said this will not be an issue in Skyrim.
4. The crappy Speedtree trees. I hated how the foliage rotated when you turned in Oblvion. Not a huge issue, but glad they have created their own foliage system for Skyrim.

Other than these four areas, I really don't expect any other visual improvements. If there are I will be pleasantly surprised, but I would be perfectly content if they made major strides in each of the above areas...

Well considering it's from 360 your entire thread is useless.

Yes they should make the engine look new, but I believe there are a couple reasons it looks similar:

#1) Todd has stated that the "brand new engine" is based around the technology used in Gamebryo. So much so, that only a month or so before Skyrim was announced, he claimed that the game was using a heavily modified version of Gamebryo. Now, apparently they must have modified things enough to claim it is a new engine.
#2) They will likely be importing many of their old assets from Oblivion/FO3. It wouldn't make much sense to create everything from scratch, so you can bet they will be reusing many of the old models and textures from previous games. If you look at the troll/yeti creature from the screenshot in GI, it look very similar to the troll in Oblivion. Also, the textures on the rocks in the snow scenes and cave scenes look very similar to FO3 textures (albeit improved).
#3) They are probably using the same artists. Artists tend to stick to what they know, so even with a new engine in place, the artists will continue to use the same techniques and art styles that they used in the past. This will lead to a bit of familiarity between games.

Overall, I''m very happy with the way Skryim looks. It maintains the ES feel, but has enough improvements to not feel like an OB expansion. I would have preferred it be a launch game for the next generation of conoles, but since they are milking the current gen ones for another 5 years (it seems), who knows how long it will be until that happens. More than anything, I just can't wait to see Skyrim in action!!!

I've been calling GameStop since the beginning of January and they still don't have it. Though the guy said that it varies from store to store. Guess I should have gotten a subscription, but hell, I'm not paying 10 dollars for a crappy "discount" card that I'll never use.

Well I most definitely bought mine from Gamestop.

... looks at screenshot

If the light is coming from a direction Lets say to the upper right, shouldnt the tower in the center be castint a shadow on the rocks to the left of it?

And shouldnt the big rock in the center (with the tower on it) be casting shadow on the rocks at its base?

And the railing on the path at the bottom centre isnt casting shadow a shadow on the path below it.

Looking closeless the texture on the rocks and the path looks very low resolution and reduced quality.
--

Ya know thats what killed the immersion for me in Oblivion. The crap lighting, no shadows, and realy low res textures. I'm realy disapointed.

The video looks like...Oblivion with dynamic lighting. It helps, but doesn't make it look THAT much better. Skyrim, on the other hand, is shaping up quite nicely as far as I can tell from the limited number of screenshots we've gotten.

They lied to us. Its not a new engine at all. That criminal scum!

I don't care about the lighting, I'm just stoked about a new game.

Guys, you know console games can have shadows, right? I bet that screen has no shadows because its several months old.

I've heard that to buy the issue you have to buy a year subscription for $15. I don't know if that's true. It doesn't matter though since I think I could get it without that(I don't need GI when I have Kotaku. Ignoring the Skyrim issue that is) either way. I have a friend that works at an EBGames. We should really get back on topic before the mods get irritated again.

What did you expect? The game has to run on 5-6 year old hardware that was cheap mid-range parts at the time.

Lighting is the most intensive part of rendering a game. This game has to run at 30fps on two pieces of really awful and outdated hardware. The lighting is going to be pretty poor compared to a PC game; this is nothing new with multiplat games.

I remember hearing about that, that Todd said they were using a heavily modified(even more so) version of Gamebryo. That's disappointing that they are still using any part of the Gamebryo engine. It is outdated and needs to be replaced. I guess they're trying to perform a mind trick on everybody with the Creation engine. That way they can distance themselves from the Gamebryo and say that they aren't using GB anymore. Although that could back fire if it's still really buggy. Everyone will blame them directly for the [censored] engine now instead of the GB creators. One more thing, they may have been able to use some of the GB code and name it something else because the creators of GB went under(I think. correct me if I'm wrong).

I am hopeful, but that video was awesome.

Gamebryo did go under but their assets were picked up by another company and that company can enforce the IP rights. That's irrelevant though. Gamebryo is not an engine like Cryengine or IdTech in that it is only a suite of middleware that must be assembled into a working engine. The only part of that suite that actually belonged to Gamebryo was the renderer and Bethesda has written their own so Skyrim is indeed on an all new engine and has no relation to Gamebryo whatsoever.

Shiny lights.

Good graphics can make a bad game tolerable; A good game can make bad graphics tolerable. Good games are more difficult to make than good graphics.
I would tend to prefer titles that put 90% into designing the game, and 10% into the graphics ~unless the point of the game was the graphics.
If the 10% wound up looking like Oblivion, then all the better.

I would play (even buy) a game that looked like graphics out of the late 80's ~if it was a great game; (http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/products.html).

Have you seen the screenshot of the PC killing an enemy? The one where he's looking toward the camera. You can see gone are the baby faces of Oblivion, your character can now have a chiseled manly face.

This should be common knowledge, but apparently everyone who posts on this forum has been living under a rock for the last 5 years, or they are just utterly and hopelessly clueless.

It looks significantly better than Oblivion, slightly better than Fallout 3/NV. I was playing Oblivion with a Skyrim screenshot on my second screen beside it yesterday, definitely a noticeable difference.

It says in the article that the picture is from a 360.



If there is no realtime lighting (which EVERY game running on an engine yougner than like 5 years has) I will cry myself to sleep until the day I die, and probably not buy the game. Lighting is SO important and was a HUGE buzzkill in TES:IV, Fo3, and NV.

Todd Howard talked about this in an interview. The reason that the developers can't use high-quality graphics engines like Crysis or Id is because of their stringent coding that is more aimed towards shooters and linear games. The Elder Scrolls is a massive, open ended world that is supposed to be accessible to the modding community. There's no way that the developers could make Skyrim the game that we all want with the graphics of the Crysis engine. It's simply impossible. And considering things, the new engine looks DAMN GOOD on 360 graphics, and that's not even counting what it'll look like on PC.

So hold your judgment for a while man. Damn.

I don't care. Does anybody, really? You can't expect Skyrim to look like Crysis or Resident Evil 5.