As you've probably noticed, Skyrim's flowing water looks kinda strange. The non-flowing water looks good (You can see it in the trailer when he finishes that guy with a dagger in the stomach) but the flowing water is almost fully white! The waterfalls and streams are white and I think the solution is pretty simple. Remove most of the white in the flowing water to make it clearer.

The ugly flowing water (I call it rapids) is well known. There have been several threads about it, but that was a pretty long time ago.

Imo, it looks like this white, plastic, flat texture that repeatedly rolls the same way over and over and over. In order words, it looks like a white rolling rug instead of real water. In addition, the supposed foam looks more like steam from a machine. The problem I have with this is that it detracts from the rest of the view. It looks so bad that you notice it more than other things. It's the direct contrast between ugly and nice that's the thing for me.

This http://i801.photobucket.com/albums/yy297/b_harrison/skyrim/skyrim_gameplay_whitewater.jpg in the trailer is what we're talking about, just to be clear. It's not any of the other water. The other water looks fine. The water at 1:25 is a completely seperate mesh.

The Red Dead Redemption rapid/waterfall looks like this, which I think looks pretty good. Not perfect, but definitely better than Skyrim's I'd say:
(A few videos are kinda bad quality, so that's why I post many examples)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G_-a-L80eA&feature=player_detailpage#t=243s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5QTEs4IlEg&feature=player_detailpage#t=30s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx5qbtE7LfM

I hope Bethesda will change this waterfall/rapids/flowing water we see at 1:25 in the trailer before 11/11/11.

Yeah, already TONS of threads/complaints on this. I don't even think it looks bad, and there are better water scenes then that.

I'll say the same thing that I've said in the other 100+ threads on this; Graphics don't make a game. (Look at Crysis.)

It looks fine. It is a rapid so it is white/foamy. I hope they keep it exactly the way it is in the trailer.

Graphics don't make a game of course. Just as a flashing Hollywood-movie don't need to be better than a black/white movie from the 50's. Bad graphics can be better in some cases, like Mario.
But in games like TES, which tries to be realistic, better graphics is always better than worse graphics.
They don't make the game alone, but they do make the game better, at least in games that tries to be realistic-looking. Good graphics make things more believable, and you can "immerse yourself" even more, imo.

In my opinion, the water looks bad. So thought my brother. We immediately reacted on it the first time we saw the trailer, and said "Eh... that water there looks bad". So when the graphics of something is so bad that it detracts from the rest of the game, then I say, FIX IT.

We're still 8 months from release. Sometimes they don't have the finished textures in there. Even if it's rapids, I'm surprised there are no particle effects splashing up or anything. I'm sure someone (and if no one does, I) will mod it. All it needs is a lower opacity just a touch, and a good sharpen.

But remember that the rapids do not look bad to everyone as evidenced in all the threads about water. Some people think it looks good like me. Just like you want it changed, I don't want it changed. So, what's the right thing to do?

So you're saying you would mind having improved rapid effects? That doesn't seem right.

hlvr, that water from Red Dead Redemption looks AMAZING. If Skyrim water looked like that, it'd be so awesome.

I think it looks great as is. That's what I'm saying.

Hm okay, I see, you think the water looks good.

But if we put it this way instead: Do you think the water at 1:25 can look better?
If your answer is yes, then it should be changed. At least from a utilitarianistic point of view.

Another solution is that SkyrimViking starts a poll, asking who think the water should look better or not.

You say That graphics don't make a game and you give crysis as a example?? The ONLY thing crysis had going for it Was it's graphics...hell it Was what crysis became known for.. So yes graphics can make a game...

I agree. Pretty game to look at it, but no thrilling game play. Really average at best. It's an average FPS.

Yes, the water looks weird, but I won't judge it. Why? Because it's from a screenshot of a pre-rendered video made about a game 9 months before its release.

I think the Holy Grail of graphics, Crysis, can look better too. Definitely certain things could at least. So we're at the crossroads then aren't we?

That's not at all reassuring. The rapids do look odd, but it's not so distracting for me. If I had to choose between better looking rapids and more content (clothes, etc.), I'd go with content.

Just curious what do you mean with a pre-rendered video?
The video is in real time.

And also, the game is going through its final stages now. 9 months isn't that much to be honest. But yeah, on the other hand, the time that's left is still well enough for Bethesda to improve it. I think they will do so as well. When the trailer was released there were several threads about it that discussed this waterfall-issue non-stop. That must have gotten some of Bethesda's attention.


Well... as long as you think the water can look better in Skyrim's trailer at 1:25, then it's nothing you should worry about, is it? Because it really can look better (look at the RDR videos for instance). And those who think the water looks good already, will simply thing the water looks better if it's improved to how the rapids in the RDR videos look like.

My exact point; Crysis is only known for it's graphics and nothing else.

To be honest, that doesn't make a game.

Skyrim releases in 7 1/2 months. If they feel the rapids need to be tweaked then they will tweak it.

When they recorded it, it was in real time, yes.

But we don't have other videos about the same place, in a different perspective, at a different time, with different lightning.

Everything can look better. The water in RDR could look better as well and they still released it like that. I'm not trying to be smarmy, I think you are one of the better forum members around here, but we'll agree to disagree. No game gets everything right graphically and that's a fact, but they have to be released at some point.

What...? What!?

The rapid streaming water looks amazing..!

http://i801.photobucket.com/albums/yy297/b_harrison/skyrim/skyrim_gameplay_whitewater.jpg

Just picture yourself jumping from rock to rock to cross the river, the water is roaring at you like a rainstorm, the constant pressure of falling down and getting pushed downstream. Thats part of the dangerous wilderness that makes it so fun. It'd be even more exciting if you were doing that in order to run away from a giant, which is about to throw a tree at you.

Couldn't agree more!

True. Everything can look better. The lighting can be better in Skyrim. The textuers resolution and the depth of the textures. That goes for Crysis as well, and any other game. Development in terms of graphics and all that goes under that broad definition never stops. Everything keeps developing.

But, imo the water looks pretty bad. It can look a lot better, and if Bethesda's graphics-guys have more time to improve it, I think they should. What it needs the most is reflections and "shallowness".

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Off topic: anybody else have noticed the big amount of distant blur Bethesda has started to use in Skyrim? You can easily see it at http://i801.photobucket.com/albums/yy297/b_harrison/skyrim/skyrim_gameplay_whitewater.jpg

What do you think of the distant blur?
Personally, I really like it. Blends very well in with the fog.

But if Bethesda doesn't realize that there's a problem (Which could happen if say, no one acknowledges that they need improving because people just figure "It will look better when the game is finished.) then they won't feel that they need to be tweaked.

And if you ask me, what the rapids need is not "tweaking", they need to be completely reworked from the ground up, because let's face it, those things are hideous, they don't look any better than the flowing water effects in Oblivion, from what I can see, and it's not just the rapids either, the non-flowing water we've seen also looks pretty uninspiring, it might have looked presentable if the game were released in 2005, but this is 2011 here, there's no excuse to have that in a game when the developers clearly expect us to be impressed by the graphics. The only water that looks decent for a 2011 game is the cave water, and even then, I've seen better, but it's better than those rapids. If the rest of the water were on similar standards, I could live with it, I'm not sure if it would impress me, but as long as it doesn't look too bad, I can live with it.

And don't give me that "Graphics don't make the game" nonsense, there are a lot of things that I don't strictly need to enjoy a game, but that doesn't mean I don't want to see them. I don't need a good story to enjoy a game, but if I can have one in my game, I certainly won't complain, I don't generally NEED my games to have an open world to enjoy them, but do you think I don't want Skyrim to have one? And yes, I'm sure I could enjoy the game if the graphics weren't that great too, but if Bethesda has the technology to create graphics that do look good, of course I want them to take advantage of this. After all, I have to look at the graphics every time I play, and I'd rather look at good graphics then bad ones. I want Bethesda to deliver a product that has a certain standard of quality in all areas, whether it's gameplay, story, graphics or sound, I don't want a game that excels in one area but is bad in every other one. In this case, though, the problem is not that the graphics as a whole are not good, it's that the overall graphics seem to mostly be reletively good, not the best, mind you, especially if you compare them to PC games that take full advantage of the capabilities of the latest high end hardware, but for what they are, they're pretty good, mostly, yet there are a few parts here and there that simply aren't up to the standards of the rest of the game. Of course, it's common in games for some things to be less detailed than others because they don't need to be, maybe you're not going to be seeing them as closely most of the time so the reduction in quality won't be noticed, maybe they even NEED to be lower quality, like say, the low detail models and textures used for distant objects and landscape, but that's not what we're dealing with here. We're dealing with the kind of thing that is so far below the standards of the rest of the game that it simply can't be ignored, and due to this, I'm sure that every time I see that water, it will take me out of the game far more than it would if the rest of the graphics were on the same level. It would be like if you were playing Crysis and at one point saw a character with a model on the same quality of the ones in Morrowind... okay, probably not quite so jarring, because the game we're playing here doesn't look as good as Crysis (Keep in mind I'm only talking about graphics here. While I don't dislike Crysis in any way, I would never say it's better than I expect Skyrim to be in any way other than graphics, so there's no need to burn me at the stake here.) and I'd say that this water isn't QUITE as bad as the default Morrowind character models, but you get the idea. The point is I'm not criticizing Skyrim for having bad graphics, like I said, taken as a whole, the graphics look good enough to me, not the best I've ever seen, obviously, but I haven't gotten to the point where any game that doesn't use Dirext X 11 looks like crap to me, what I am criticizing is some aspects of the graphics looking much worse than the rest, which I feel the game has no excuse for, and which I think really aught to be fixed. And you can't just say "leave it to modders", it's really not that easy, models and textures can be improved easily enough, but if the visual effects aren't good, then that's much harder to fix, as that may stem from an engine issue, if it was just a simple matter of "mod it in", then we wouldn't need a very complex external program to use modern graphical effects in Morrowind.



I fail to see how to anyone who has not been completely absent from gaming that can look "amazing", I just don't see a single thing amazing about it. It looks like a simple, flat texture that is animated in a completely unrealistic manner, and I had felt that Skyrim should have been able to do better than that.



I didn't notice that before, but now that you point it out, yes, I'd say it's nice, it's somewhat of a realistic effect, and also, it helps to make the lower detail models and textures used in the distance less noticable, and I'm sure we all remember how bad those looked when Oblivion was first released.