Hi,
Okey,I am the kind of freak that could spend 5 minutes watching the shadow of a tree on floor,or the height field shading (or what ever rendering technique they used) of the stones.
It is too bad that such a great game renders so badly.Specially since in that king of games it is all about the environment. Why don′t they buy the unreal engine for example.
Have you guys played gear of wars 3? Having the volumetric lighting of the sun filtering through the leafs of the trees would make a magic environment.And many many other
effects could have made this game visually incredible instead of mmmkay.
Maybe skyrim Vi in xbox 720 will get there.

ps: it would have been nice to be able to play some instruments, kind of zelda ocarina of time in nintendo 64

Am I the only one that thinks Oblivion looked better?

yes.

Yes, Skyrim looks excellent.

I think Bethesda took a correct approach to balancing the story elements, the variability of the environment and the quality of the graphics.

It isn't perfect but hardly anything is.

I'll agree that the UI is funky. I think they made a mistake in moving away from classic RPG paper-doll displays and classic inventory management.

That's just my opinion, of course.

How can you compare gears of war 3's graphics content to Skyrim's? RPG's have always been cutting edge because of their size. (with the exception of when the Final Fantasy's started becoming movies).

The main problems I have with the graphics are:

- The shadows - not only are they blocky at the highest settings, but the sun seems to move in steps or something causing the shadows to change in random, choppy intervals.
- The textures - no better than Oblivion's default textures, so it's obvious Bethesda is just using the modding community as its crutch again.
- The damn shine on actors when they are affected by magic is still there...

As someone who has worked developing games, (and has experience with the Unreal engine) I can tell you why.

Most of those gorgeous, Unreal powered games have levels. Everything is scripted. The engine only has to render or keep up with a few things at once. Get done in one area and it unloads and loads the next.

It would be impossible for Skyrim to be as big as it is, as open as it is, with as much going on, if it used the Unreal engine. And frankly, I'm tired of developers pursuing beauty over function. I'd much rather have graphics like Skyrim's (which are still beautiful, just not state-of-the-art) and a good framerate and huge world, than the small, on-the-rails experiences that the graphic-obsessed tout as their gods. And I say all this as a game artist who makes the pretty things for a living.

EDIT:
That's because Skyrim has a ton more environments and models than Oblivion. Ever noticed that all the buildings and dungeons have unique architecture and models instead of the cookie-cutter architecture of Oblivion? That can only afford to do that by keeping smaller resolution textures. I'd rather have 1000 different models that look good unless you press your face against them instead of 250 different models that look awesome all the time.

Are you kidding me? One kid in my dorm was playing Vanilla Oblivion on high graphics while another was playing Skyrim on Low-ish, and the beauty and detail of Skyrim still blew Oblivion's flat textures and excessively bright color palette completely out of the water. Unless you look at thing really close up, Skyrim beats Oblivion with QTP3 too . . .

Such a bad attempt at pot-stirring

Gears of wars 3 is a set time of the daysetting there is no dynamic weather or lightning , plus it is not fre roam ...

Bull. The dungeons are still made of cookie cutter pieces, and I can prove it when the CK comes out. It's not like every dungeon has unique models and textures, they're just built by a larger team of people so the dungeon layouts seem less repetitive.

And they can only afford to do that using low resolution textures? That's just not true. The fact is they don't really care about people with relatively high end rigs, because they're not consoles. They have a ton of more room for disk space, and they could have made high resolution textures from the beginning and then scale them down.

I agree that the graphics aren't up to par with other games, but most games aren't like skyrim. Just the draw distances and vistas alone would tear up the unreal 3 engine in terms of resources. The only logical way to keep a game like skyrim stable and accessible is to a sacrifice some visual fidelity for the bigger picture (literally). But I see where you're coming from

GoW3 does have dynamic lighting, but because the sources never move, the shadows never move.




Overall I'm am blown away by Skyrim. It's no Crysis, but it does what it does fantastically. It is not trying to be the next generation of graphics type of game, it just has a level of graphics that is suitable for what they wanted.

yes, that what I thought.
I also started working in video games as a rigger , but I left it to work in cg films, because for a rigger, video games you are very limited. ( I think they used 3d max biped for skyrim right?).
But as you know, lot of thing could be better: dust effect in the camera like in battlefield 3, etc..and the lighting is too diffuse every where.It should have more dark/light contrast etc...
Inside a tower for instance,with small windows, you can have a perfect diffuse lighting all over the space. And you don′t need unreal engine for that. I don′t know, I think that the game could have been
much more beautiful. The models look great, the environment modeling too. But I miss a good lighting.

Check Red Dead Redemption, it looks much better and it is a open environment too like in skyrim. The horse for examples, in red dead redemption they used normal maps in the texture too fake muscles
contraction when the horse moves. Why not in skyrim? It is a very cheap effects.
What I am saying is that such an awesome game deservs the same awesomeness in the graphics.

I′d rather have a world twice smaller , with graphics like in red dead redemption.

The console rendering is great! Looks nothing short of awesome!

1.) No it doesn't.

2.) No one here will ever agree to having a world twice as small, even if it ups the pretties a little. That's not what the game is about, it's not just about the graphics. Far far from it. I think it looks beautiful as is.

dont know what the hell game your playing, because skyrim defficates all over Oblivion

come on man,we all love skyrim, but let′s be objective here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl9aN3NOvzk

red dead redemption looks much MUCH better. Maybe you don′t feel like it does because of the map. Of course a forest is nicer than the desert. Just imagine how skyrim would look rendered like
in red dead redemption. I mean, just check the link above.

I didn't say Skyrim's dungeons and towns aren't made out of modular pieces. I'm trying to point out that Oblivion had 3 dungeon sets, fort, cave, and Aeyleid and every dungeon was built out of those same pieces to the extent they were all interchangeable.

Skyrim's environments are tremendously more varied, and Bethesda bothered to make unique quest models, doors, statues for a lot of dungeons, etc. So all I'm pointing out is Skyrim has a lot of unique models used in only a few places, and Oblivion had a handful of models used everywhere ad nauseum.

I am being objective. You're not, as you're the one who created this topic stating how bad Skyrim looked to -you-

Red Dead is a pretty game, there's no denying that. But it's very easy to make an exceptionally pretty game when the landscape is practically the same across 80% of the game. Some desert with splotches of grass, a few cacti and some birds overhead. RDR is gorgeous, but I still think the artistic direction in Skyrim makes it a more beautiful game. 'Course, we're just talking about definitions of words here, and how we as individuals define beauty, so we'll never agree on this one.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we'll get a high res texture pack

Get massive game with 100's of hours of gameplay, complain about graphics.

Get tiny game with 10s of hours of gameplay, complain about lack of content.

BF3? The Witcher 2? Finished them in a day, baring BF3s multiplayer (aka maps the size of a medium dungeon in skyrim).

People expecting a game of this size to look like the Witcher 2 should just stop breathing.

this game is massive, and gorgeous
plain and simple

And here we have another case of personal opinion clashing together.

Knock it off.

Why do you want realistic graphics anyway? Go look outside... it gets boring after a while... I play games for escape and to see art.. I wanna see something I've never seen before.

In 10 years when the processors are fast enough that realistic graphics are commonplace, there will still be many cartoony games for that reason - real is boring.