Move AWAY from high fantasy? I want them to move towards high fantasy, and that's precisely BECAUSE I want the setting to be more creative and less bland, though when I think of high-fantasy, I don't automatically think of Lord of the Rings, granted, that is commonly classified as "high fantasy", to me, high fantasy is pretty much what it's name implies, it's fantasy that goes rather far into the realm of the fantastical, which leaves room for more creativity as you're not bound as much by the laws of reality. I'd actually argue that Morrowind is higher on that scale than Oblivion, despite resembling Lord of the Rings less (I'm refering to just the default game here, if you take Shivering Isles into account, that's pretty high too.), because the world as a whole feels like a greater departure from real life, most of the animals that populate the world are alien, and the environments as a whole are a lot more exotic, the cultures themselves are also stranger.
I mean, when did you ever see thousand year old wizards who live in mushroom towers that you can't reach the top of without levitation in Cyrodiil? Or in Middle Earth, for that matter? And what about councilors of a noble house who live in a giant crab shell? I bet you don't remember THAT in Lord of the Rings. When I think of "high fantasy", this is what comes to mind. I actually consider Lord of the Rings to be reletively low on the high fantasy scale, though still clearly high fantasy, and this is mainly because there isn't really all that much in the way of obvious magic in the setting, and the setting itself looks a lot like Medieval Europe when you ignore the elves and orcs and hobbits and tree men and all that, if you ignore those parts, of course.
But anyway, the recent trend in gaming in general seems to be to make things darker, it's just what's popular these days, probably because of the notion that something has to be "dark" to be "mature". Of course, I could name a number of examples of things where "dark" does not translate into "mature" and could actually equate to its opposite. But regardless, Bethesda probably wants to take advantage of this trend, although it sounds to me like the original poster is not refering to the setting having a bleaker, more brutal tone, but rather means dark in the literal sense, refering to the visuals of the game being less colorful, but that's kind of a trend in gaming too, just look at how many developers seem to think that brown equals realistic (I can only assume these developers don't go out much because if they did, they'd realize that colors other than brown and gray are not original to the realm of fiction and do in fact exist in real life.) But regardless, the color pallete of Skyrim doesn't really seem all that dark from what I've seen, not unreasonably so, anyway, I actually expected to see more snow covered wastelands than the screenshots and trailer lead me to expect, so I'm not too worried about the visuals of the game being too bland, in fact, they actually strike me as more interesting than the ones from Oblivion.
Regardless, though, as is said, Skyrim is not "Oblivion 2", it's the Elder Scrolls V, and the past Elder Scrolls games each often had their own feel to their worlds, and that makes sense, because with each game taking place in a different provinces, with different culture and environments, naturally, they're not going to feel exactly the same. so I don't mind if Bethesda goes with a different feel from Oblivion, I just want the feel they go for to work well for Skyrim.
I can fully agree on that, really, that should be basic logic in games, dungeons should be dark, if there are no light sources nearby, hand-held or ambient, and you're not using any kind of magic to lighten the environment or help you see in the dark. Anyone who fails to understand why this is should perform an experiment, find a room with no windows, if there is such a place in your house. Than close the door fully, and switch off the lights. You may notice that you can't see very well, or even at all, now, caves work the same way, if you're away from the entrance and there are no lights about, it's going to be pretty dark, I want this to be reflected in games at all, dungeons which are supposed "pitch black" should not have visibility equivalent to a cloudy afternoon outside.
Interesting ...from what little we've seen of the world of Skyrim so far, the sense I have is that the art direction is much more naturalistic than what we saw in Shivering Isles, Morrowind and even perhaps Oblivion. IMO this is a good creative choice for Skyrim.
» Sat Mar 05, 2011 11:35 pm 
