Bought Skyrim on release day. First impression was that Skyrim looked and played amazingly well. Played about 50 hours and then received RAGE (id software) for Christmas. Been playing RAGE on and off until yesterday. I started playing Skyrim again yesterday and thought I warped back in time about 10 years. Skyrim felt clunky and the graphics looked extremely dated. It was unreal how different and awesome constant 60 FPS and id tech 5 looks and plays.

This leads me to wonder... since Bethesda now owns id Software and only Bethesda can use Id tech engines... what is the chance that future Bethesda games will utilize IMO the best graphic engines in the industry, id tech engines?

Imagine Skyrim running at consistent 60 FPS with Id tech 5? Megatextures? OMG.

Fallout 4? hmmm

Pretty much zero. What Bethesda use suits their own needs much more.

Just imagine the file size of that game. The RAGE game world is much smaller than the Skyrim game world, yet it take up more than 4 times the file size. Not to mention the many extra years it would take to build the Skyrim game world with the id tech Studio, you wouldn't be able to play Skyrim until 2016 or so.

RAGE is a game built to showcase a new engine. Skyrim was made on an older engine with some tweeks so that it would work on older platforms. Comparing the two is kind of pointless. I'd expect the next TES to use RAGE's engine after some refinement.

Rage is very linear, if you put the huge world of Skyrim with the graphics and animations of RAGE you would have 1. an amazing game, 2. something only rich people could afford the machines to play

Yeah I know... chances of it happening is pretty much zero but...a boy can dream can't he?

I couldn't help but notice how cool and realistic the towns felt in RAGE. No one repeated the same line 20 times when you pass them and the towns felt alive. Very cool game.

I enjoyed RAGE quite a bit as well; however, the NPCs do repeat the same lines many times.

I kept going back to talk with Loosum or other NPCs in the towns near the beginning in the hopes that there would be some new quest relating to Dan Hagar's mysterious absence and no one ever had anything new to say. Not to mention, Skyrim's engine is equipped to handle thousands of NPCs, hundreds of factions, 550 unique locations, hundreds of quests, etc.

As for the megatexture tech, AMD seems to be gambling on the notion that this will be implemented in more upcoming games by incorporating hardware acceleration for partially resident textures in its new Southern Islands GPUs, so who knows if it might end up in a future TES game engine (although it seems unlikely considering the size of the TES game worlds).

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1323793-amd-implementing-hardware-acceleration-for-megatextures/

http://images.anandtech.com/galleries/1601/PRT0_575px.jpg

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review/6

I thought Skyrim was visually stunning, I don't see how anyone could call it dated.

Skyrim is a very good looking game. But the technology is dated. And compared to what id Tech 5 can do, it is extremely dated.

Play it on PC then, you can have 60 FPS and texture mods plus other graphics enhancements.

Oblivion came out in 2006, and Skyrim came out in 2011. Morrowind in 2002. TES VI is probably gonna be 2016. You make it sound like we already don't experience long wait times .

Rage is for the visual experience. Skyrim is for the content.

Don't get me wrong here, I am a convinced member of the "gameplay over graphics" crowd and I think Skyrim's graphics are quite satisfactory, but I really can't see how anyone who has played any games released in the past two years or so can call Skyrim 'visually stunning'. It looks nice enough, but there are much better looking games out there.

And before anyone starts to repeat the "such graphics are not attainable in such a large gameworld due to technical limitations" again, yeah I know that and I have no problem with that. Still doesn't change the fact that Skyrim does not look particularly impressive compared to other games out there.

Just speaking about the technical aspects of the visual experience here, the art style is a completely different discussion of course.

Everyone says that RAGE looks good but when I played it on on release it looked horrible. Also RAGE was definetly incomplete (at least for me it was) and for me was the worst game of 2011(some sounds where horrible,no graphics options,forced auto configurations,crashes,texture poping and visible lines,etc.) Skyrim's graphics are decent (but with mods they can be enhanced and mods such as SkyUI can make Skyrim feel less clunky).

From what I hear the RAGE engine was broken for some ATI graphics card users....so I don't think the RAGE engine is all that great.

I think you need to wear glasses, its visuals are extremely dated, ugly low res textures, ugly low res models (people still have no toes), terribly stiff animations. Compared to other TeS games its gorgeous, but compared to other games, like Crysis, The Witcher 2, and RAGE (despite the very low res textures, it still manages to be stunning, especially the animations and the character models), its very dull to look at.

That's because there are so few people in RAGE (50ish), while Skyrim have lots and lots of them (over 1000). Writing a lot of unique lines for every person would not only take up a lot of time but also a lot more voice acting work and disc space.

There is no need to be rude