This game looks astonishing in 3D! The open world mechanics and environment is perfect for it. The game uses depth well (obviously) and watching arrows flying towards you is quite unnerving. Brilliant!

Gaming in 3D is hard to describe but 3D gaming and 3D cinema are DIFFERENT animals. Forgive the anology but I think any 3D gamer would agree with the following:

Imagine, for a bet, you had to view the world from the lense of a video camera (perhaps an ipad2) you were holding in front of your face. It's fun at first using the ipad's camera and screen as your eyes but would probably become annoying once you got used to it ...
Once the duration of the bet is over, imagine the difference being able to put the iPad aside to view our depth filled world using your eyes.

That is exactly what gaming in 3D is, especially when playing games like Skyrim! Apart from you need to put on glasses... It can sometimes be more challenging because you have had to disable the crosshair in some games but after 5 minutes of hitting parts of trees for bow and arrow target practice (seriously :/) I am a pretty good shot. It is so immersive.

Basically even though Bethesda publicly did not support 3D, because they rendered most things in 3D and allowed people to configure aspects of the game that weren't 3D. Even though this game blatently could not care less for 3D; it is astonishing.

Nice one Beth! AGAIN!

Andy

3D threads on this forum seem to end up locked due to flames faster than threads about gay marriage, but I agree, this game looks great in 3D. Looking at the perk constellation skills menu, I can't help but think some of the developers were avid 3D gamers, that thing looks amazing. And it's funny, TES games do seem consistently good in that regard - I thought Oblivion did a better job of inducing vertigo in 3D than Mirror's Edge, though that might just be due to depth and convergence settings.

3D is a lame fad industries try to push on us every few decades. Each attempt has failed. So will this one.

Good on Bethesda for making a game that's good even in 3D, though, I guess.

Eventually games will advance to the point where real VR becomes more and more viable, and good 3D tech is a big part of that, and vital to making it feel "real" Games played on 3D monitors are a logical step between games we play and games we inhabit. I agree with you when it comes to films, but in terms of gaming, I tend to disagree.

Yeah. Im totally going to buy a 1000 dollar tv for 3d.

But in all seriousness, im going to wait at least 6 years. 3d tvs will be less expensive then.

Yep, true VR will be a thing we will see very soon.

That kind of expense doesn't even work for some of us. My left eye has always been so poor compared with my right that the only 3D I could see was IMAX and occasionally those theatres with the moving chairs. Even then it only worked if I sat in the right spot. Right now a surgery to save the bit of vision in that eye has left it filled with liquid silicone that's hard to see through. No 3D for me.

Never having seen anything in 3D except movies (no, I can't do it IRL), is there any gameplay advantage, or is this just an awesome visual experience? I have never found the lack of 3D vision in games to be frustrating like it is IRL. Maybe that's because I never have to light candles in games.

The gaming advantage would be minor (although 3-dimensional sound would do wonders for spatial awareness in fights), but it would just give you a bit of depth perception. The main advantage would be immersion and visual excitement.

I'll not get involved in a long, complicated discussion about this, because it would be long and complicated and the weather where I live is hot, wet and sticky, so I really couldn't be arsed to force my brain to work ... ... so I'll just say I disagree.

Guttin for you

I would not rule our 3D in games though. The 3D is far FAR more effective compared to the cinema. This is seen quite clearly by the vergence (separation between an object for each eye) which is barely noticable in the cinema but blatent when gaming
.
I took my setup to my school last year and both my collegues and students were blown away. The media teacher who is a gamer confessed to being a complete 3D sceptic (almost anti-3D) after watching 3D movies but after about 5 seconds (yes that quick) of playing Portal 2 he relented. That's all it took for him to realise gaming in 3D is TOTALLY different to watching a movie. He saw the bit right at the start where you wake up in the room.

Don't take my word for it - if you can go to a vendor and see for yourself. It is also not too pricey. Monitor and glass kit cost less than ￡300. That will be a better set than mine.

Yes I am a 3D fan-bwoy but I have been gaming, multi formats since the ZX Spectrum in 1984 and going 3D has easily been the best thing that has happened to gaming (IMO) - I sadly cannot play games in 2D now because they look rubbish (beyond low budget rubbish) and I can't get into them.

Bethesda games have consistently been a showcase example of devs doing it right! And they don't even care. Love it.

Nice1!

It seems to make it a little easier to tell whether jumping off of something is going to be high enough to hurt you, and it can make things with textures that blend into the background stand out more. The above poster is also right that sitting in front of a PC monitor makes for a better 3D environment than sitting in a theater, the monitor takes up more of your field of view, you're always centered on the image, and you can tune the depth and convergence settings exactly the way you want them (they have a huge impact on the quality of the effect.) Video games also have another advantage over movies - the entire scene is in focus (well, unless you're using depth of field). With movies, even though the whole scene is in 3D, the camera is focused at a single depth, so if you start looking around the scene objects at other depths will be blurry, which can be annoying and immersion breaking.

@andysonofbob -

Portal 2 was a pretty good pick for demoing 3D, for some reason that opening scene looks 100% photorealistic, and the fact that you spend much of the game hurtling through the air doesn't hurt either.