That's right. But TES is becoming arcady so high graphics might be closer than we think. I prefer hardcoe rpg gameplay over innovative graphics but it doesn't hurt to have some of that too. In terms of gameplay and graphics, I find Morrowind a good balance of the two.

Morrowind had some of the best immersion I have ever seen in a game. A lot of people don't truly understand what immersion is exactly. They either go "Hey, awesome story!" or "OOOO shiny graphics!", and don't realize that a good balanced combination of the two can take a good game and make it game of the decade.

Here is an example of what good immersion will do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILshDiN0We8&feature=relmfu

I guess I'll just quote this for truth. Well put

LOL-OLO-OLOL....
LOLOLLOL [censored].

High graphics have always been the biggest part of the tes games. skyrim - is an exception.

Agree OP.

I love this game but i want the highest detail possible. To do this i have to spend endless amounts of time in the inifiles messing with things that cuase problems. Trying to find a way to get Ultra settings that are...Ultra. It's been a headache.

When you select ultra via the ingame settings then you would think that thats as far as you can go. But no.

So badly optimised for Pc it's untrue.

Shame because it's one of the best games iv'e ever played. If only i could spend more time playing it.

High graphics yes, innovative no. Although, the water shader in Morrowind was considered as a masterpiece and critics were in awe when they saw the water. That was the last time Bethesda had a graphical technique that other companies were just dumbfounded. In fact, it still looks good somewhat and specially when it rains, the ripples looks just perfect and atmospheric.

I have to agrre with you on this. I started with Oblivion and got hooked with the graphics. Started taking classes on how to make mods and got totally intothe game. Heard that I was missing out on Morrowind and got that game. Graphics left a lot to be desired but the story line and quests were terrific. I thought, probably wrongly, that if gamesas really wanted to knock our socks off it would be a combination of both.

I'm in Skyrim about 85+ hours and when it runs without cTD or god forbid my first ever bluescreen on my 2 year old win7 64 bit system its starting to get boring. Some parts will just take you breath away and then seconds later have you cussing a bluestream.

My biggest concern at this point is since we're all being treatled as lowly pirates just what hoops are we going to have to jump through to make our mods.

Avadon is this year. Daggerfall was really ugly compared to its contempories (cut out NPCs anyone?) despite that it's still my favourite TES. Skyrim is nothing like in the poo department graphically compared to those games in their time. Is it good enough looking that the graphics aren't a distraction? Absolutely - The Witcher 2 is the only other RPG that beats it, all other RPGs released this year and over the last few years have been worse looking.

Er.. it was ugly in it's time too. So is Avadon. So are most of the RPGs released in the last year. Doesn't make a jot of difference to their appeal to RPGamers.

I wouldn't say TES is becoming arcady - Arena was meant to be arcady from the start remember, and Battlespire was pure action. But I agree graphics don't hurt, they just aren't necessary. That said, Skyrim is still the best looking RPG aside from TW2, and the scale of the games isn't anything like comparable. I vastly prefer Daggerfall to Morrowind - the latter had a great story, but it had one of the least 'alive' worlds in the TES series.

See, I didn't think Morrowind had that good an immersion - it had a great story - the best of TES, and it had the best weather effects, but that aside I found the world very lacking.

Again, no - Daggerfall was well behind its contempories, certainly compared to Skyrim and it's RPG contempories (TW2 aside).

And does that matter? - not to role players. Skyrim has some of the best role playing opportunities of the series - you can just play the way you want.

All great points, however with the matter of Skyrim, it has less immersion than Morrowind. Their 'new' engine is simply better water detail (which nowadays I have seen as good as if not better in other games) and dynamic snow, which honestly isn't too hard to do. I mean, there's the Dynamic Lighting mod for Oblivion, and modders aren't paid to do their work, unless people donate to their work AFTER its completed.

Skyrim, especially on the PC with its capabilities, falls extremely short on the immersion department. I truly feel like I am playing an oversized XBox, when I should be playing a deep captivating story on my PC. The beginning of Skyrim has the best immersion in the game, after that its sloppy diahrea, and better graphics and optimization for PC systems would tremendously offset that feeling.

A few comments on this whole discussion:

- All the ini tweaks show that the engine can do a lot more than the default settings allow it to. Obviously Bethesda optimized the game to work on the broadest base of installed systems without offering settings for the highest end of PCs. One thing you might criticize here is that even ultra settings are far to conservative as even they don't enable small things like tree and land shadows or farther viewing distances. Also shadows look a bit weird with the out of the box settings.

- So far I fail to see the reason for the constant bickering about DirectX 10/11. Some people mentioned the truly great looking Crysis games as examples for how a modern game should look. While Crysis supports DX10 and Crysis 2 has been patched to support DX11, both only add rather small improvements over the DX9 version*. Almost ALL features that make the game stand out work fine in DX9 and cards that are fast enough to use DX10/11 have no problem at all running it in DX9 mode with all features enabled. (* in Crysis some features where limited to DX10 mode in the in-game settings but could easily be enabled through cfg-file changes and worked great in DX9 mode too.)
The only thing DX11 really adds is tesselation. That's the only DX11 feature that could really improve the graphics. I'm not sure how much work it is to incorporate it but you have to see that it's only usable for a fraction of the users. According to Steam stats about 25% of users have DX11 cards but that includes many low-end cards which support DX11 in theory but are in fact too slow to take advantage of high-end graphics features. That leaves a company like Bethesda with the choice to invest a lot of time and money in a feature that only a very small part of the players would benefit from. Engine developers might do that, game developers might rather spend these resources on other things.

- Textures look mostly fine to me. With a few exceptions - some armor textures, face & body textures, which you often see up close - I hardly ever notice them to be too low res unless I'm standing right in front of a wall. Again, it's quite obvious that Bethesda choose to support the broadest possible configuration as only users with lots of both system and video RAM can use ultra-high-res textures.

- Steam is annoying but compared to EA's Origin or Battle.net or the UBI-Soft launcher crap it's the least annoying option to choose from. Just register it once, set Steam offline and forget about it until you need the latest update or want a DLC.

- The only thing that really calls for criticism is the UI. And even that is not a problem in general. You might like it or not, that's personal preference. The real problem here is that it's often not working as intended when you use the mouse. It's unresponsive and many clicks are registered for the highlighted item instead of the one the mouse is currently over. Also key-mappings are a mess as re-mapping works fine for character controls but not in the menus. And finally the mouse movement feels sluggish and slow.
The last two problems can be corrected with some ini and cfg file tweaks but that shouldn't be necessary in the first place. The other problem is something Bethesda should really look into for the next patch.


Other than that I think the game is fantastic and looks mostly great. You can find some nice examples of what the engine is capable of with just minor tweaking here: http://deadendthrills.com/?cat=314
Some might argue that these screenshots rather look like fantasy paintings, not like "real life", but that's obviously the look the game goes for and I like it.

The game is also very stable, at least on my system. I only found one repeatable bug - shooting the glowing wall in Sarthaal with fire caused the game to hang - and only experienced one CTD in over 80 hours of playing.
I'm playing with a Phenom II X4@3400GHz with 8GB RAM, an overclocked nVidia GTX275 with 1.5GB RAM on Windows 7 x64. I use the LAA Patch/Loader (check: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1288276-laa-4gb-launcher/), have several ini tweaks, VSync disabled with an FPS limiter set to 60 (in-game clock is fine!, check http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34), have a few texture mods and the games runs fine and very stable at 1920x1200 with 2xAA.

All in all I'm quite happy with the game. Great work Bethesda!
I prefer this any day over a great looking but crappy single player game like Battlefield 3...

So the only question I'd have for Todd would be if they ever really tested the UI on a PC?

@kalniel
I was talking mainly about Oblivion and Morrowind. I never played Daggerfall. In those two, graphics were outstanding. For me it is a big deal, as much as for a lot of other people.


I hope Todd Howard reads this and will be man enough to shed some light on what can we expect in terms of graphics improvements and also optimization of the game.

Too right! Really don't have any excuse to give the pc gamer the low resolution textures . At least they could give the pc gammer a choise to set up the quality of the display according his hardware system .

So I wish Bethesda could release a high-texture pack , just like Crysis 2 , which give us an option.

See I just don't agree. I find Skyrim far more immersive than Morrowind. There is so much more for your character to get immersed in, that you as a player can't help but be more immersed as well, if you are playing it as a role playing game. Now that is of course just my opinion, and I'm fully aware that perhaps more people are playing Skyrim for non-role playing reasons than playing for role playing these days, and as a result the business (which this is, it's not a government funded project or volunteer build or anything) will have to listen to its customers. But despite that, I think they've paid a massive homage to the more old-school gamer - certainly far more than they had any business justification for.

But everyone is different. Some people require uberdazzle shader model gazzilion effects to feel immersed. I didn't in the past, and still don't now. Here's a question - if TES VI comes out on the next round of consoles and looks better than the PC version as a result of hardware/abstraction layer differences, would you get it on the console rather than PC?

Yep, I recognise that we've got a new (relatively) generation of players who value graphics more than us oldies, and that's a perfectly valid viewpoint. Just be careful of asking for something 'as it used to be' when actually some of us prefer something 'as it used to be before it used to be'

Pete is the man for that really, as mentioned before. I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope - it doesn't make sense for them to divert resources to a minority of players, but with the openness of the PC platform we really do have the tools to address a lot of things ourselves - no, that's not an 'excuse', but I think they've spent the zots in the wisest places, so that in the end, a LOT of people have ended up with a game that's really fun. That makes better sense than spending them so that a very few people end up with a game that's probably about as fun, just looks a little shinier.

I should add some qualifiers to my experience of this game:
i7 950 @3.7ghz
AMD hd4870 512
6gb RAM
Asus Xonar Xense One
Corsair F120
Win 7 x64
Dell U2311H

Yes, my graphics card really is that old. That means I'm not playing on Ultra - I'm playing on high with some sliders increased and extra shadows enabled in the ini. Despite that, Skyrim is a) so far completely stable very quick to load c) gorgeous - ALMOST as good looking as The Witcher 2 (another DX9 game, but limited to small areas) - sometimes exceeding it if you consider the beauty/art of some of the landscapes and scenery.

Maybe I'm lucky and I've got a set of components that happens to fit Skyrim really well. Maybe I've optimised CPU, Audio and Storage in a way that mitigates the seemingly strange (but commonplace) requirements of Skyrim.

But at the end of the day, I'm happy. Skyrim makes me happy, and even after owning the game not even a fortnight long, I feel I've got my monies worth, and then some.

Agree with OP.

But most of the sales nowadays are from the consoles, and developers would rather put more effort into the console version than into the PC version. Actually, it would probably be better for the developers to put less attention into the PC version.

Imagine you are a console player. The PC version of the game is completely superior(no matter graphics or gameplay) to the console version but costs the same, if not less. How would you feel? I know that most console players understand that their gaming platforms are inferior in technology than the PCs and their gaming experience SHOULD not be as good as those on PC.
But what if now they know that their $200-300 consoles can play the game exactly the same as those having $2000 gaming PCs? Wouldn't they feel much better and more likely to buy the game? If I'm a consoles player I'll definitely feel much better.

Of course this means sacrificing the PC gamers. But then, we are just the minority these days. And there are so few choices on the PC market now that we have to buy it even though it's not 100% satisfactory(unless one can completely give up on gaming or resort to pirates). I bet some of the game publishers nowadays think they are actually doing the PC gamers a favor by releasing the game on PC. And to some extend I think it's actually true.

This is how the world works now. Guess all we can do now is to make do and hope the modders can do their best.

See, I don't feel compelled to play the game. I can just easily quit the game after 20 minutes of playing with no desire to play anymore that day. When I played MW, and even OB, I was constantly going "Just 10 more minutes, after this quest I will go to bed" then realize I'd just spent another 2 or 3 hours playing the game, the scenery pulled me in to the game. Skyrim doesn't have that same feel to it. It's more of a "Here it is play it for an hour and you're done for the day".

Yes, there are a lot of elements in Skyrim. But it doesn't immerse me in the game. I always find myself going "Meh, I can come back to that later." quit the game, do something else, and forget I was even playing it. I will never forget the moment I picked up the strange scroll in MW, read it, and sent myself flying through the air like Eddie Gordo from Tekken, only to crash land and die. With Skyrim it's "Yea, so what. I killed a bandit." or "Oh hey another random dragon crashed on my face."

How many hours have you played the game so far then?

Fair enough. But I don't really see how PC optimisation or graphics are anything to do with that - that seems to be more a gameplay decision, and is obviously subjective - as mentioned I find Skyrim far more immersive from a gameplay perspective than any other TES game bar Daggerfall.

@ kalniel
You just happy that you dont need to spend money on the upgrade to play the new game. That is your actual reason for your blind love towards crappy Skyrim graphics and its downsizes in comparison with the previous scrolls.

Not true. I still get people to go buy Dungeon Keeper if they can find it, and if I ever find a copy of Eidos' Cutthroats: Terror on the HIgh Seas I will buy it again. I know of people that still buy and play CoD2 and CoD4. People on this forum have stated they went out and bought either MW or OB (or even both) for their PC. People will always buy PC games, console games are simply there for the time being. There are a few console gamers that have most consoles and will still play them (I myself have a NES, SNES, Sega Genesis 16b, Dreamcast, PSX, PS2 and a Gamecube, not to mention handhelds), however companies don't really make any money off old console games. For every person that bought Oblivion for the PS3 in the last month, I'd bet there were 50 that bought it for PC, just to compliment Skyrim.

@kalniel, I have put 80 hours in Skyrim, mostly because I was so excited for the game that I played as much as I could when I could. Working 2 full time jobs limited my time, and when Skyrim came out I happened to have the next 2 days off from both jobs. Back when I played OB religiously, I would come home from school/work and play OB. Now, I come home from work, look at Skyrim, and go eh.... I'd rather go vaccuum or something.

Hmm, I thought you'd read my previous posts that you replied to. Daggerfall is my favourite TES game. Admittedly I had to upgrade my PC for that as well, to a DX2 66 as my DX 33 didn't meet the minimum requirements - probably would have been fine, but I got one cheap off a friend. But actually I was hoping Skyrim would be an excuse to get a new graphics card - the wife's computer has a better one, but I keep finding that the 4870 still plays things fine, if not on ultra settings. But if Skyrim looks this good without even being on ultra then I have no real complaints. In other respects I find it odd you consider Skyrim a downsize - it's got a lot more content than Morrowind or Oblivion, and even travelling distance is larger than Oblivion (and vertically many times more than any previous TES of course). Of course, nothing touches the scale of Daggerfall, but I only really miss that in that it provided better grounding for different transport methods and regional politics. The majority of Daggerfall landscape was pretty barren.

Instead of trying to speak with him, Start an new thread with 5 questions he could answer us. I will happily bump that until he do

Excellent post and I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but also with the OP.

First off, I love this game. Truly do. I've been a fan for too long to think that BGS is selling out completely (sometimes it's necessary to provide extra TLC) just yet.

Yes, certain things have irked me about the entire process with the likes of DRM (unnecessary nothing-we-can-do-about-it-legally part of the gaming world today), Steam installation issues (get home to install and it starts to D/L entire game when I bought physical copy at midnight wut?) and CTD's (that were completely, 100% fixed through a simple as can possibly be flag through the .exe), but all-in-all, the entire process has been enjoyable for me and those issues I have gotten or have to get over. What I began to see though, is that this game, even in it's current Dx9 only form, is completely capable of far more.

After tweaking my .ini alone, I've noticed that the amount of what can visually be seen on screen at any time (view/grass/tree/land/texture distance) is obscene and would be completely playable if certain aspects of the game engine were optimized in the slightest. Which boggles my mind that the "Ultra" setting is, what it is (Quite frankly, when I see that option (when it's given) I fully comprehend that, this setting will put your PC on it's knees if you don't have an uber rig and I'm OK with that). One of the main issues I see is the fact that certain details that should be rendered through the GPU, aren't.

Take a look at this http://i.imgur.com/HEGtJ.jpg and focus your attention on the "GPU usage %" in the MSI Afterburner window. I walked away from the game for a while to take care of some things and left it running. It was in it's scenic 360^o rotation "screensaver" mode. It was just up the road from from Helgen right before Riverwood. What was happening, which I realized when I hit the town, was the game wasn't rendering the smoke effects through the GPU. It blew me away as I figure that was something that I assumed you would want to. I continued to notice the same thing with fog when in dungeons. My game would slow to an absolute crawl. Now take in mind that, yes, I have been doing .ini tweaks and yes, I have increased values beyond their default settings, but if this was a "your GPU can't handle it" situation, it would be 100% usage. Trust me, I've done Metro 2033 on Ultra (hands down the most demanding game setting around today. Even more so than Crysis 2 DX11/High-Res) and know full well what that situation is like.

Would I love implementation of DX11 features like tesselation? Of course. Ever run the Unigine Benchmark program? Now imagine that with Skyrim. Would I love the optimization benefits that DX11 comes with? Again, a no brainer. It svcks that it's not in there, it really does, but I can forgive that.

What I can't forgive is, being led to believe that the Gamebryo engine was "fixed". I watched Todd Howard go on and on about how the engine was optimized and improved so much it deserved a new name (and to a degree I agree), but when I experience the same exact issues that plagued previous PC entries of the series that I assumed he was referring to when he made those comments, I wasn't mad, just disappointed. He knows full well what people are going to do to their game post launch on PC and the stresses it can bring, so not "optimizing" the engine to take full 100% advantage of the GPU or making the .exe LAA out of the box (an x64 client would be better) is completely outrageous.

If the engine was truly fixed, then BGS could easily devote some monkey to take the .ini to the max for high end users, actually call it "Ultra" and satisfy a lot of PC gamers.

As far as the whole High-Res texture debate, I'm kind of torn. There are definitely certain areas of the game where the extreme low textures make you say http://i.imgur.com/0byyI.jpg, but the majority of the game, in my personal opinion, looks beautiful. Also, we know modders are going to do new textures. It's a given above all other mods (evident on how it's already happening without the CK) and are going to happen whether we like it or not. So do we really want them to devote resources on giving us a new texture pack? Part of me says yes, the other no.

Again, I'm torn on this issue. I want my cake and eat it too, i suppose.

To much hype, to much expectations... Get over it and enjoy it.

The actual game itself has met all the hype and expectations I had for it (I've been waiting for this game as soon as I beat Oblivion back in '05).

The brand new (so-much-has-been-improved-it-needed-a-new-name!) engine;

Not so much.

When Arena was created TES still was in its primordial state, no definite direction as to what they really wanted to do since Bethesda was back then some sort of sport game developer. That background influenced Arena which came out as arcady and really doesn't represent the true TES that was to become. Battlespire was a side job from Beth just like Reguard was and those two 'experimental" games were arcady and don't really belong to the true line of TES rpg. TES will always be rpg it seems but it will take a different form in the future. Hints of that form started with Oblivion. And since the console is here to stay we have better be prepare for high pace action with no journal and potions. I think that is call "streamlining" as Beth likes to call it nowadays.