There's already another thread about the same thing as this, using the same image. And the image certainly looks a lot better than the white water people have been referring to, still, it's not THAT impressive, I can't see it doing anything I haven't seen water do in other games. But regardless, all the other instances of water in the trailer look worse than this, so rather than assume that the white water people complain about the most is just a poor example, if you have one image of decent looking water while the other ones look bad, rather than assuming all the bad ones are misleading, I think it's much more logical to assume the good one is the misleading one. Now, maybe in the finished game, the water WILL look good, I mean, Oblivion's water looked better than I expected it to from the first screenshot I saw of it too, it wasn't great, but it was better than I was expecting, but that one scene in the trailer doesn't really make me confident about that.
The trailer gives no real indication that water has force that moves that water wheel. Not that I completely believe that it doesn't, that water mill could even easier to just be a simple transform animation and not turning because of actual physics interaction!
Indeed, making a water wheel move doesn't require water being able to actually apply force to things. You just need an animation, I even recall there being a water wheel in one of the Unique Landscapes mods for Oblivion, and yes, the wheel turns. A proper demonstration of water interacting with the physics engine would be if some object was dropped in a stream, and it got swept down realistically based on the water current. Now, I'm not saying the water won't do that, I don't actually know if it will or not. but if it does, the trailer doesn't give us any indication that we will.
The water is nothing, the dirt looks like dirt. Why does it look like dirt? dammit my whole gaming experience is ruined because the dirt has muddy textures. Im gonna go cry now, wah wah wah. Go play Crysis if all you care about is graphics, but don't come crawling back to skyrim when playing Crysis 2 is like beating your head over and over again with a high def rock.
Really? Is that the best defense you can come up with? If it is, then no one cares about what you have to say. If you have a legitimate defense to post, then go ahead and post it. Otherwise, maybe you should be the one playing... I don't know what game, because it seems to me that you have nothing useful to contribute to this discussion. Besides, you clearly don't care about the matter, so why waste time posting in a thread about it?
But who am I kidding, we can only have people having their own opinions on things here if those opinions are that "Skyrim is awesome in every possible way imaginable and blows all other games out there out of the water in every way and anyone who finds the tiniest fault in it is an idiot who can't appreciate good games."
Really, it's not like anyone here is saying they won't play Skyrim because the rapids don't look good, I intend to play it and fully expect to enjoy it, despite the graphics not being the best on the market. We've just noticed that some things shown in the trailer didn't look to be quite up to the same standards that the rest of the game shows, at least, I am, and that's a perfectly reasonable thing to criticize.
If you look at all the water it (I think) looks great, the river next to the robed man walking in twon you can see actualy looks like a flowing river. The waterfall and stream in the cave looks great, the river where the bandit gets gutted looks great to. If you look at the rapids they look pretty good, there the best white water I've seen in most games, I think people just dont realise that all water isnt shiny and reflective. In fact you wont see a reflection in white water rapids any better than if you look at a rock.
I am quite aware that water isn't always highly reflective, but even the cases where it should be reflective don't look that way to me, and the parts that I wouldn't expect to see clear reflections in still don't look natural.
I also didn't notice a single refraction on the water in the trailer, even in the cave water people are praising, even though it's clear enough that you can see what's under it and moving fast enough that there should be fairly noticable refractions. And the spray from the rapids doesn't look natural either, the texture of said rapids also doesn't move very naturally, the lack of noticable reflections is not the only problem with the water.