Again, I don't see why you ask us these questions lol. I don't think anyone here besides the devs work at bethesda, and they obviously aren't revealing their secrets, so we don't know. :shrug:
And Oblivion does not lag at ALL on my 360. It's an Xbox Elite, biggest HD available for it, and the newest kind, but I don't think that has anything to do with it lagging.

You have never once had Oblivion lag at all?

No? It's stopped gameplay momentarily for a loading bar, but no "lagging" in any sense of the word, no.
Morrowind, on the other hand, lags a LOT on my 360. Running into Balmora is like running into Ironforge on a saturday night back in Vanilla WoW. Just atrocious.

You are correct. Oblivion does "push it to the limits", but not in a good way. Most of what is doing this is the poor memory utilization and many other optimization flaws of the engine.

Fallout 3 definitely showed improvement, and with Bethesda focusing on the engine more this time around, I have a feeling we will get some very pretty visuals in TES:V.

The hardware of the consoles is limited, yes, but there is still so much more possible on this generation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Kvl31g77Z8 for example.

Fallout 3 doesn't run nearly as well as Oblivion for me, but the ps3 version of Fallout 3 is infamous for that reason.

I hate those loading bars. My game doesn't lag very often(mostly just those loading bars), but occasionally, when near several Oblivion gates, a camp, several bandits, and several Daedra at once(a recent experience outside of Skingrad), Oblivion lags a bit, not severely, but a little bit. Also, for some reason, Oblivion occasionally lags a little in the Waterfront district of the Imperial City(near my house there). I have never experienced severe lagging or lagging that makes the game difficult to play in Oblivion, but I have noticed the game slow down occasionally, still at an easily playable level, but it still slows down.

Yeah, I don't know why but I don't experience those problems on my 360. Around Oblivion gates my FPS remains the same as in the middle of Chorrol. :shrug:

Just because Mass Effect and Dragon Age is newer and runs smooth on xbox 360 with better graphics, doesn't meant hat oblivion runs fine too. The thing is that Oblivions ladscape is open freely. There are no loading between the reigons like other games wich have "stages". Oblivion when walking outside a city/dungeon, Oblivions has to load the whole landscape of Cyrodiil and even the landscape outside the borders.

I playd Oblivion on 360 and remembered a lot of time when walking in the wilderness and suddenly stops for 3 secons and a text such says "Loading..." pops up. It happens several times also with Morrowind, but I don't see this as often on the PC.

One thing that needs to be fixed is the character voices. I walk by a beggar and he says something in this old wheezy voice, then I ask about rumors and his voice turns into some deep Imperial voice.

More of a suggestion, best to mention that in the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1084035-tes-v-ideas-and-suggestions-thread-%23159/ thread. ^_^
But I agree with you. It's a little silly talking to NPCS that have voice acting that is supposed to be for that specific character, either a begger, or I think theres a female in Crucible that has SUCH a different voice than every other female of her race, and ask her about rumors, and it's like a different person talking. I was like...gah. :facepalm:

It will be graphically amazing like every Elder Scrolls.

If they do come out with an Elder Scrolls 5, here are some things they'll need to do.

Bring back Crossbows, Spears, Darts, Throwing Stars, and Throwing Knives.
Separate axe and blunt back into 2 different.
Bring back Enchanting, Medium Armor, Unarmored, Climbing, and Swimming as trainable skills.
Extend Armorer into crafting Armor with Ore found in mines.
Add Werewolves back into the game.
Bring back Vampire Questlines and houses.
Bring back Levitation, Slow Fall, and Teleportation Spells(yes, keep fast travel, but Teleporting is instantanious in-game time-wise).
Bring Back Horse Drawn Carts, and Pack Animals.
Bring Back Cloaks and Capes.
Add Marriage to the game.
Add Children to the game.
Bring back all the Artifacts(Oblivion had too few)
Bring back all the in-game books.
Bring Back voices for each individual races.
Bring Back Racial Hairstyles.
Add Tattoos.
Add Piercings.
Add Dual-Wielding.
Add Mounted Combat.
Give us more than 1 province for exploration(You can even instance them).
Don't worry about going over-the-top with graphics.
Bring Back some of the Daggerfall classes.
Bring back the ability to wear clothes under armor, and robes over armor and clothes.
Bring Back Racial-type Armors(Nordic Mail, Indoril Armor, etc.)
Up the radiant AI. Some of the npc pvssyr dialogue often made no sense at all, or was ping-ponging over the place.
Make the Questlines longer.
Bring Back Nudity.
Bring back Multiple Questline outcomes.

I want the future of Elder Scrolls to be more like it's past. I want a more complex and challenging game like Daggerfall was. Oblivion quests were too short, and it seems like we really have no say in how things play out.

Dude, this is not a suggestion thread. This is a discussion on the future of graphical advancement for The Elder Scrolls : V on PC and Consoles.

Suggestions goes here : http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1084035-tes-v-ideas-and-suggestions-thread-%23159/

The question is, does the current generation of consoles support such features? It wouldn't be a problem for PC gamers as such features would simply not be available to those without the necessary hardware, however, Bethesda might choose not to include them if they can't be had on the console versions.

One thing one must remember when looking at Oblivion with mods though is that it is not being run on a console, all those graphics mods can only be used on PCs, and some of them will need pretty powerful PCs at that, just because computers can run them doesn't mean consoles will be able to. That being said, though, a number of games on current generation consoles look better than Oblivion, for one thing, dynamic shadows for all objects in a scene are pretty common now, even on consoles, yet Oblivion does not support them, I think that, if it is better optimized, the Elder Scrolls V could look better than Oblivion on the current generation of consoles, though I won't expect wonders, it's certainly not going to be the next Crysis (not that I'd want it to be.) Although if Bethesda is willing to develop the game for computers first and then port it to consoles, it could have some graphics that wouldn't be possible on consoles that are simply not available in the console released of the game.

I've been working with AI packages and other AI related things in the Fallout 3 GECK and I have to say it's definitely an improvement over Oblivion's. Lots of new things to play with. FO3 didn't have as many NPCs and such but there was a lot of potential there, and I'm sure it'll be even better for TES V. So if they take the time to use it to its full potential, scheduled AI (not talking about combat here) should be pretty good.

I can say from experience that OB causes some serious fps and possessing hits in the early and arcade versions of the 360...
I am hoping to upgrade before V releases, my current console may go up in flames.

Crysis (and Crysis 2 which will be a 360 game) have Specular Occlusion, and Bad Company 2 which has jsut been released for PC and 360 has Ambient Oclusion.

So theres no reason why they cant put it in TES:V.

There is allready a texture mod for Oblivion that uses Specullar Occlusion.

Bethesda always pushes the envelope. They excel at creating open-ended worlds with breathing economies and natural environments. I hope they keep to it. Mainly, my worry for this cross-console/PC gaming is that it dulls out the rich extent to which the developers' artistic flair can be used. The storyline dies in favor of mass consumption. The mechanics of the RPG class and leveling systems have to be dumbed down to allow the simplicity and flow of couch-sitting Xboxers rather than picky, complexity-loving PC gamers.

Maybe they'll find the happy medium in TES:V. They've tried with Oblivion already, so they have some feedback and experience to go on.

Just thank Akatosh that Final Fantasy XIII has provided Bethesda with more proof that streamlining and simplifying games leads to less fan appreciation.

There's a difference between pushing the boundaries of a given platform and optimizing a title to make it run smoothly on a given platform. Seeing the graphical qualities of more recent titles, or recently announced ones for that matter, for both Xbox 360 and Ps3, one can only assume there's still ample space for developers such as Bethesda to improve on past work. It may not reach the graphical finesse of whatever the mod-community cooks up over time, but suffice to say that if TES V were released by the end of this generation it would definitely look better, and probably be better optimized, than TES IV was at the beginning of this console generation's life-cycle. I don't get how this is being debated? Isn't it just logical? We've already seen this happen with many of the previous console generations... Just look at the difference in quality between FFVII and FFIX on the first playstation or the difference between the first Splinter Cell and the third on the first Xbox. Perhaps not exactly 'day and night', but it was definitely an improvement and showed devs utilising new techniques that weren't possible at the beginning of the respective console generations.

I'm pretty sure they got PLENTY of that with Oblivion.

This.

I was an avid Oblivion player for 2-3 years and then I decided to play morrowind. Despite the crappy graphics due to the fact that the game came out back in 02, the rest is simply amazing. And whoever says the ''graphics'' excuse that I hear all the time is a moron. Oblivion is 1/10 of what morrowind was. To reverse your sig, unfortunately, you dont 'live' oblivion. You beat it.

That's not true with all people. back in high school around sophomore year (05-06, around the Oblivion release), i sat in front of 2 guys in my gov't class who talked about morrowind daily, and i had never played it before. Well one of them became one of my best friends, and we started hanging out alot more, talking about Elder Scrolls and what not, but i had never played Morrowind, just Oblivion. Fast forward to now, (he didn't have a next gen system, or next-gen capable laptop until i got him a 360 off of retail loyalty about a year ago), so after logging an upwards of probably 2,000 hours on Oblivion, I'm jumping back to morrowind for story purposes (and im gonna try to figure how to play arena and daggerfall on my pc, but i can't seem to find a way to get them to boot on 7), and he's moving to oblivion after many years of morrowind... (and now, finishing my first point) after playing morrowind for awhile (and it's story is fantastic), I still live for Oblivion, because that was the first game of the series i played, just like back in the day, the first game i ever played and beat, The Legend of Zelda: a link to the past, is still my favorite in that series. (and of course my buddy's choice is still Morrowind, for the same reason)

So i guess i'm trying to say it's a mindset in some cases, and opinionated in others. to each his own.

Perhaps they wanna be one of the first games out on the 'new' PS3-D. (coming never, it appears) so that PS3 fans buy the game for lack on anything that fits their taste. Hell, that's why Oblivion sold so well.

I haven't played it, but Just Cause 2 looks amazing, and is a fairly large sandbox world. Does anyone who's played it know why Bethesda wouldn't be able to get their sandboxes looking as appealing as that? Is it merely poor optimization on Bethesda's behalf, or a better engine, or does Bethesda's games load different things that make it impractical to make the graphics look so good? Or could recent advances in technology mean that a Bethesda Sandbox look that good without suffering performance-wise? I'm curious.