In both cases improve it.

Even if a game is terrible in every aspect minus graphics atleast it's good on one aspect.

If a game is already good, better graphics will make the game itself much more enjoyable as it adds immersion and realism. Basically eyecandy is always good :shrug:

Meanwhile, the other guy I know who plays Minecraft looked at the screenshots I sent him of the 64x custom pack I'm playing with, and he replied that he preferred the 16x textures, because the game didn't look "right" anymore with a HD texture pack.




Yep.

But it also depends on the personal opinion of the various viewers. While there may be "better looking" games, I personally found the Skyrim trailer to be pretty "OMG jaw dropping" in a number of places. Guess my standards aren't quite as inflated as some. :shrug:

you misunderstoodified my post. the point was that minecraft has excellent gameplay. im willing to bet that minecraft when its release will have better gameplay that pretty much any other game out there including skyrim. as good as minecraft is though its improved 100 fold by simply using a texture mod that improves the looks. you can even pick different themes like steampunk, crayons, there is even a version that makes everything look like super mario world or zelda. i use a 128 version that is more photorealistic although ive used the supernintendo ones and they were good looking as well. the whole point of skyrim is to be immersed into that world. its hard to be immersed in a world when you see big pixels in textures or mismatched textures that tear, lighting that glares off of everything like someone was shining a floodlight in your face and what bethesda is now famous for......wonky animations. after playing far cry 2 and other games with global shadows going to a game without them is just horrible............as in i just burned my last pizza horrible.

And yes IMO a fully modded Skyrim (especially if modders fully use DX11) will be the best looking game ever :intergalactic:

This.

Sorry, but I find Minecraft to be quite boring. I can't agree it will have the best gameplay

We need to stop see gameplay vs graphics.
It's all about what the game is focusing on, what the main objective of the game is.

Take Mario or Braid for instance. The graphics look like [censored], but that's not what the game is about. These games aim for something totally different.

So that gives us the question, what does TES aim for? What's TES's main objective?

Imo, there are several main objectives that TES has. Some of the most important are: complete freedom in a huge open world, with an epic background story and lots of places to visit and lots of things to experience.
For this, both gameplay and graphics and lore/story and sound is important. Equally important.
We need good graphics in order to appreciate stunning visuals of the game; to appreciate these huge landscapes and all the different places we visit.
We need good sound to appreciate the tone of the game (Jeremy Soule's music!) and to strengthen basically all effects.
We need good gameplay in order to make all of these features and things to do in the game enjoyable and fun.
We need good lore/story to give everything in the world a meaning.

Everything matters, in other words. Pretty much equally, imo. If one thing fails, something feels wrong imo, and the game becomes less amazing.
But this thread is obviously meant for graphics (read the post #1), and why Bethesda seems to be forcingly limiting it on PCs. I find it quite strange here on these forums. As soon as there's a graphics thread, you suddenly need to start defending yourself for almost everything you say about graphics. But in all the other threads (which are like... 90% about gameplay) the subject don't get "attacked" for simply bringing something up in its area of interest.

Honestly I am far more disappointed by the gameplay limitations that making it multiplatform will mean. The world size will be smaller. There will be more loading screens. Less possible enemies on screen. All of this because the game must fit on the X-Box 360. A computer that's hardware was slightly dated when it came out 6 years ago. It's not that i'm being selfish an saying I would like console players not to be able to play it. I just dream of what the game would be like if it were PC exclusive an designed for more recent era machines.

As it is I doubt the game is really going to look that much better than Fallout New Vegas. There are improvements of course we have seen the better animations an faces in the trailer. But its no where near what it could be if they were interested in pushing the limits to where they could really go an fully utilize DX11. The way Dice is doing with Battlefield 3. An gameplay wise I just can't picture it being a big jump over Oblivion. They just don't have the memory to do much better. It just seems like they are taking a lot of the more popular Oblivion mod features an putting them in by default.

See, this is where you lose me.


Just went and looked at the trailers and screenshots on Steam. And Braid looks excellent. Very distinctive and well-done art style.

Certainly doesn't "look like [censored]".

Not remotely. :unsure2:

I simply wish it utilized current pc-hardware more.

Instead they are maxing out console and barely scaling up for PC, instead of maxing PC and scaling down to console.


The end result is a mediocre looking pc game, but great looking console game // as opposed to a great looking pc game and great looking console game.

Well, being a console gamer (the only reason for that is that I cant afford the NASA super computer required to run most modern rpgs) I think that at least keeping them moderately even isnt to big of an issue, is it? And anyways, the PC guys/girls always have modders to polish up there games.

That would be excluding a vast amount of the gaming population. As previously stated, not everybody can afford the computers required for these games, I have to worry about things like food water and electricity bills first.

They also have to make sure the game runs on low and mid range PC's. Not every PC player uses the top of the line hardware.

Thumbs up for missing the whole point. But if we are to focus on what you nitpicked on, which is pretty much irrelevant, but just for the laughs: If you can't tell the difference from BF3, Masseffect, Oblivion, Crysis blabla kind-of-graphics and 2D paint-like-cartoon-graphics, and can't see how those graphics aren't meant to be as stunning, amazing, great, incredible, then I'm not really sure what world you're living in.

[pretentious]Actually, NASA uses fairly low-tech machines for their work. Even if they do have a good processor, the GPU is crap in most instances[/pretentious]

Anyways, speaking as a PC player, I will say I'm disappointed that Bethesda isn't fully utilizing the potential of the PC platform to graphically improve the game, but I'm not too upset about it. Oblivion is still one of the most beautiful games I've played, and from what I've seen, Skyrim will blow us away. It's not all about the fancy rendering techniques. Art is what makes TES games stand out to me, no matter how outdated their graphics are.

EDIT: Also, you can build a pretty nice PC, definitely capable of running Skyrim, for about $500-700



EDIT2:

*Sigh*



You do realize you can scale the graphical settings in every single PC game, right?

I have no idea why people are worried about graphics. The gameplay trailer blew me away, personally. It looks great. It'll be a lot of fun. This is Bethesda were talking about here. Geez louise.

Couldn't agree more.

Yeah, all these people looking at that amazing trailer (which will, of course, only look better on PC, what with higher levels of AA & AF/etc) and then throwing around words like "mediocre" just makes me :facepalm:

I think it's simply a universal fact of forums. People get their hopes too high; they look back with nostalgia glasses and see the past games as monoliths and masterpieces, and expect the new game to fit the highest tier of their imagination. They will always be disappointed.

Very well said.

I think it has more have to do with the rising minimum system requirement. It is a valid thing to worry about since fore example everybody's favorite BF3 won't be able to run on Windows XP.

FPS games will always look better, no matter the console, mostly because they're more simplistic, they tend to show less, but with greater detail.

The whole DX11 features, just sound like pretty gimmicks to me. Yes, tessellation looks nice (and if used improperly it could cause a giant lagspike), but you can live without it. It has been said before, that what tend to matter is the artstyle and presentation. For example Mass Effect might have the best graphics nowadays, but I still think it's one of the better looking games out there, mostly due to the cinematic perspective they tend to use.

1000x this.

DX11 is a huge leep from dx10.

Shader tech
lighting
tessellation

The thing is a game has to be designed to USE dx11 from the ground up....example

If a game is designed with only tessellation in mind and not high poly models but extremely tessellated low poly models then you get massively increased graphical fidelity at minimal performance hit.

Yeah it's cool stuff, but you only see the benefit when you only USE dx11 and design the game around the DX11 API and GPU's that work with said api

Not really they just see the graphical leap from morrowind to oblivion, and then they go "HEY guess what graphical technology has advanced faster and farther from oblivion's release to today than it did from morrowinds release to oblivions release WHICH means the next ES game should look that much better," instead it improved in some spots but stays the same in other spots.

Really considering the massive improvements in graphical API's (dx11 and opengl 4.1) and hardware since 2006....well relative to that the trailer really isn't anything special.

Also cryoblivion show's crysis 1 level graphical fidelity can be done on oblivions scale.


The most important thing is if modders can actually add in DX11 features that are not present ingame.

Do me a favor and watch the side by side video comparison on youtube. Difference between Oblivion and Skyrim is massive.