Like many of you, I'm very excited about the announcement of Skyrim, and I'm sitting here dreaming about what it looks like.
I figure there will be some screens posted within the next few weeks, but I really can't help but wonder what other people are expecting to see, with Fallout as our only reference.

Since the last Elder Scrolls there have been some incredible representations of outdoor environments in video games- Crysis and FarCry 2, Assassins Creed 2, and Uncharted 2 come to mind - all very smooth and clean, nice textures, effects, skies and distances, some crazy bonus treats like actual volumetric clouds... I was playing Red Dead Redemption tonight and I was thinking to myself, surely Skyrim can't look as good as this. With Fallout as our only reference, how much could they have improved in the last two years?

The Fallout graphics please me just fine, and of course it's going to look better, but could it possibly be something completely unexpected?
For example, the first released screens of Oblivion were shocking. I think these days that would be very difficult to repeat.


My restlessness has been brought on in part by the strange contradicting 'new engine' business.
I read the interview with Todd Howard a few weeks ago that explained they have greatly improved their usual engine, and now 'New Engine' is posted all over online magazines and forums...?
"It's new and its spectacular"? Are they just saying new engine as a marketing thing? I think Rage looks great (not Oblivion great- it's different) but not using Tech5 makes me very curious... curious that they have something equally impressive up their sleeve.

Basically, if its a "new" engine then it's gonna have to blow my fecking mind.

It will have the graphics, animation and physics of Avatar (the movie). Trust me. I have connections.

When it was released, Oblivion was notoriously merciless when it came to system specs. I imagine Skyrim will be more of the same.

I think it would be hard at this point to really WOW us like Oblivion did when we first saw the graphics just because this console gen is old now and they're reaching the limits of what they can achieve to make graphics look better.

However, I would LOVE it if they did, when I see that gameinformer cover I want to think it's CG only to find out it's the game. I want to find out those snowy mountains behind Todd in the reveal weren't random CG mountains but were actually the first shown screenshot of what skyrim looks like. I want that moment of is this really a screenshot from a videogame? to happen all over again. It used to happen a lot more when PC gaming was more popular, and I think it still could if we weren't limited by this console generation now.

They said that the graphics are better because of the new engine, so much that it will feel like you have a new console.

sorry for such an uneducated response but IT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND!!!

That's been the most exciting news so far. I was very happy when I read that interview.
That's why this 'new engine' stuff is throwing me off.

Developers always say stuff like that, take it with a grain of salt.

I know what you mean but it tells you at least that the graphics will be a fair bit better than Oblivion. It'll probably look like your average PS3/XBOX360 game in terms of graphics.

If you guys remember when Oblivion was released it was awesome, I had never seen such a thing before.
And I guess it will be the same here.

How will that work with the current generation of consoles, though? This game will have to run on the same, exact hardware Oblivion did.

They've probably developed methods by now to heavily optimize the game to have better visuals on consoles even though their hardware hasn't improved, that's why you always see graphical improvement over the course of a console's life cycle even though they don't improve in any way. Optimization can go a long way towards improving how high poly stuff can be, and how much you can show onscreen at once. The other thing they could do would be improve PC graphics by using techniques that only DX11 cards can do, like tessellation. That wouldn't work for consoles though so I doubt they'll do much, if any, of this kind of thing.

I'm not expecting ground breaking or as I was thinking before I went to sleep I'm expecting Evolutionary not Revolutionary (wheres a revolution emotion when you need one)

I'm aware of optimization, but how are they going to blow my mind with graphics akin to being "almost like a new console" that still runs decently? Oblivion lags and slows down quite a bit on my PS3. Fallout 3 does the same, although it generally runs, and looks, a bit better. I know they can optimize and improve graphics as well as keep up, or improve, a decent rate of running, but it's still the same hardware. How could they squeeze so much more out of the same hardware? Will it run like Oblivion, or perhaps even better? I'm rather sick of framerate drops and would sacrifice graphics for a smoother gameplay experience.

Oblivion still slows down at weird places on my gaming rig built 3 years after Oblivion came out. The engine was never properly optimized, it didn't even have occlusion culling (if you're looking at a hill with a forest on the other side of it, oblivion renders the forest - some engines actually only render what's visible), and there were just a lot of bad programming choices that made the game buggy and slow. A lot of it's not related to the hardware at all in Oblivion's case. A newly coded engine has a lot of potential to be leaps and bounds better looking than Oblivion/Fo3/NV just because it's not hampered by all the bad design issues of the Morrowind engine.

That being said, I'm not sure they WILL be able to produce a game for us that looks like a new console gen, which is why I've already told people to take that bold claim with a grain of salt. I do wish it were true though, it would be nice.

Current generation consoles are very capable. I have listed several games that look incredible. Fallout runs better than Oblivion. Red Dead Redemption runs and looks better than both of them. My question; is Bethesda capable of competing with these games? They've only had two years to improve the look of Fallout, and in that case there would have to be some extraordinary progress at the studio to make the same impression Oblivion made when it was first shown.

Im expecting some graphical enhancements but nothing spectacular, they can't squeeze too much more out of the hardware by the nature of Oblivion being a big game with lots of scripting going on etc.

This. The current engine is not very optimised at all. There are plenty of ways it could be made better.

But FWIW my Oblivion on PS3 only ever lags in large battles or if I've drunk a lot of Skooma and it has to load extra area quickly.