Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Announced for release on 11/11/11.

But it will run on hardware from 5 (6) years ago: consoles -- and according to Bethesda it will "look the same as on PC apart from resolution and AA".

I'm not by any means saying Bethesda can't code for crap. On the contrary, if they got something like Oblivion (and what looks to be a somewhat-enhanced Skyrim) to run on a 3.2ghz in-order CPU and < 512mb of shared memory, they're doing something right.

I don't care about consoles and PC is a different beast in terms of performance, since there are many hardware combinations to think of and you can bet that no PC in 2006 would run Skyrim, as it is shown in the trailer, acceptably.
Remember that Oblivion had shadows removed due to performance reasons. Creation Engine's objects cast shadows all over the place.
 
I think it looks good. Again, we wont be able to tell until we're playing it as even a 720p youtube video has bucketloads of compression artifacts. But I'm seeing mist/fog effects, animations look improved, general level of detail and overall smoothness (for lack of a better word) is much improved over Oblivion.

There are a couple of gripes, one of the rivers looked like weird wiggly lines and a couple of plants looked copy/pasted from Oblivion. But the shadows looked improved, and were those trees moving in the wind? (hard to tell as most the shots are rapidly panning) The world on a whole looks more dynamic, which was one of my complaints in Oblivion and FO3, they looked too static.

You also have to take into account this isn't some corridor shooter, there'll be (hopefully) large expanses of landscape to cover, so some quality has to be sacrificed for performance. I dont think it looks awesome compared to other current games, but I think it looks good enough for me to be immersed. This might be one of my first release day buys for a few years.
 
Remember that Oblivion had shadows removed due to performance reasons. Creation Engine's objects cast shadows all over the place.
I'm just hoping edge-detect AA isn't going to be the only possible option for anti-aliasing. To me, gaining shading of this quality at the expense of good quality anti-aliasing is not a particularly good trade-off.

An even worse scenario: no anti-aliasing at all. Considering Oblivion was never fixed to allow for multisampling and HDR even though some hardware at the time it was released supported it, I don't think this scenario is all that unlikely.
 
I'm getting a serious Gothic 3 vibe from some of those settings and landscapes. That's actually a good thing.
 
Engine does not appear to be all that great a step up the water effects and eneviroment did not look better then Oblivion imo
 
Engine does not appear to be all that great a step up the water effects and eneviroment did not look better then Oblivion imo

While I agree that things like the textures (which still look terribly low res) and the water, the actual environment looks a LOT better and more dynamic.

Seeing those mountains, with clouds and fog, along with the actual use of real time shadows this times makes it look a looooot better then Oblivions environment.
 
Ok, show of hands.
Who else sang the theme song along with the trailer when watching this?

Oh man, looks better than I honestly expected.

I did! The part that Bovatin gave the "dragon shout" and the vocals started, was just amazing! I had to sing it :)
Plus it's a variation of a Morrowind theme, which I simply loved! I can't wait for this game. It looks so amazing!
 
I'm just hoping edge-detect AA isn't going to be the only possible option for anti-aliasing. To me, gaining shading of this quality at the expense of good quality anti-aliasing is not a particularly good trade-off.

An even worse scenario: no anti-aliasing at all. Considering Oblivion was never fixed to allow for multisampling and HDR even though some hardware at the time it was released supported it, I don't think this scenario is all that unlikely.

New engine remember ? Comparing this to what happened with Oblivion is something that no one should do at this point.
 
Did I hear Morrowind music?

No, but I heard that they took inspiration from Morrowinds music and Oblivion's music to create the music of Skyrim. It shows in the theme song which is absolutely amazing.

I did! The part that Bovatin gave the "dragon shout" and the vocals started, was just amazing! I had to sing it :)
Plus it's a variation of a Morrowind theme, which I simply loved! I can't wait for this game. It looks so amazing!

Yes amazing, I love how it sounded when he gave the Dragon shout, sounds far better then I imagined it would.

But how does leveling work?

You will level based on total skill progression and at level up you will pick a perk and chose to increase Health, Magic or Stamina. This way it effectively limits what your character can actually do. For instance a jack of all trades will be spread out and not that great where a specialized character will get much better in much shorter time the only downside being of course that they will have to stick to a more narrow field.

Now my impressions of the trailer is that they greatly improved the first person, the animations are MUCH better and they seem to have some skeletal deformation which makes them look much more natural. I'm also loving the magic effects because they now look amazing and the shouting ability sounded awesome. Also the finishing moves and sneak attacks looked much better then the prior game. I'm very impressed overall by the way the game looks in motion.

Great look, great feel, can't wait to play the final polished version. This game is definitely going to be a pre-order from me. Eh 9 more months to go...
 
I don't care about consoles and PC is a different beast in terms of performance, since there are many hardware combinations to think of and you can bet that no PC in 2006 would run Skyrim, as it is shown in the trailer, acceptably.
Remember that Oblivion had shadows removed due to performance reasons. Creation Engine's objects cast shadows all over the place.

The point I was trying to make was that any game that is developed first for consoles, then ported to PCs will have employ inferior base technology to a game that is build with PCs in mind. It's like a souped up Honda vs. a Ferrari. The Honda might go fast, but never as fast as the Ferrari and will never be as pretty.
 
New engine remember ? Comparing this to what happened with Oblivion is something that no one should do at this point.
It was Bethesda's decision not to patch Oblivion to allow users to enable both HDR and AA, a feature supported by a wide array of GPUs at the time Oblivion was released (including the one I owned at the time). That was not an engine limitation (as evidenced by the simplicity of the ATi "Chuck fix") but was a limitation placed upon users by Bethesda. Unless I'm severely mistaken, Bethesda is also developing Skyrim.

The comparison is perfectly reasonable, and the suggestion that Skyrim could be similarly crippled is not by any means out of the realm of possibility.
 
It was Bethesda's decision not to patch Oblivion to allow users to enable both HDR and AA, a feature supported by a wide array of GPUs at the time Oblivion was released (including the one I owned at the time). That was not an engine limitation (as evidenced by the simplicity of the ATi "Chuck fix") but was a limitation placed upon users by Bethesda. Unless I'm severely mistaken, Bethesda is also developing Skyrim.

The comparison is perfectly reasonable, and the suggestion that Skyrim could be similarly crippled is not by any means out of the realm of possibility.

It was a feature supported by like one cpu when it was reeased...
 
Every ATi X1000-series card, actually. Once NVIDIA GPUs (all G8x-series GPUs and later architectures) began supporting HDR with floating point blending and MSAA, Bethesda still did not enable the functionality.
 
Every ATi X1000-series card, actually. Once NVIDIA GPUs (all G8x-series GPUs and later architectures) began supporting HDR with floating point blending and MSAA, Bethesda still did not enable the functionality.

Did they enable it? Oblivion never supported AA in game. You had to force it with CCC or nHancer out of game before running.
 
Only with HDR. AA worked fine with Bloom :(

Why was that anyway? If it could be so easily forced and work correctly, what was their reasoning for not allowing HDR and AA together? Were they worried that it would be too much for the hardware available at the time?
 
game looks epic. I could care less if it has HDR, AA, DJD, or CCIC. It looks FUN. (something I think some people in this thread stopped having a while ago)
 
Why was that anyway? If it could be so easily forced and work correctly, what was their reasoning for not allowing HDR and AA together? Were they worried that it would be too much for the hardware available at the time?
Bethesda claimed that the renderer would have to be completely rewritten to support both HDR and AA. Why they claimed this I don't know: I find it extremely difficult to believe that was actually the case. I do believe some modification would have to be done to the renderer, but there's also the possibility that it would have worked perfectly were it not for the launcher simply not allowing both options to be selected.
 
game looks epic. I could care less if it has HDR, AA, DJD, or CCIC. It looks FUN. (something I think some people in this thread stopped having a while ago)

Hell yeah it does.
If my school schedule permits I'll be buying this the second it comes out.
Loved all the ES games up to this point.
 
Trailer looks really good.

It's really too early to tell, but in the few segments of the trailer that showed a brief moment of in-game first person gameplay, they STILL don't have ANY head bobbing motion at all? I'm sick of the "look ma, no legs" movement of all of Bethesda's games since, well, every game they've made. I know some people like it more or less or not at all, but they should at least have the OPTION.
 
Trailer looks really good.

It's really too early to tell, but in the few segments of the trailer that showed a brief moment of in-game first person gameplay, they STILL don't have ANY head bobbing motion at all? I'm sick of the "look ma, no legs" movement of all of Bethesda's games since, well, every game they've made. I know some people like it more or less or not at all, but they should at least have the OPTION.

No the first part of the trailer was in-game and that was him sprinting. I don't think you will have much head bob when walking slowly like the other parts of the trailer.
 
The gameplay trailer looked really cool, they have my money. Most of it looked awesome, a few parts could use some improvements (the shot of the shield when the dragon breathed fire on him, the shield looked blandish), but I'm hoping that's just a 360/youtube thing, and that the final on PC will look even better.
 
No the first part of the trailer was in-game and that was him sprinting. I don't think you will have much head bob when walking slowly like the other parts of the trailer.

The part you're referring to looked like a scripted sequence, just done from the first person perspective. Note the part where he skids towards the cliff and precariously balances... that's definitely a cinematic type scene.
 
The part you're referring to looked like a scripted sequence, just done from the first person perspective. Note the part where he skids towards the cliff and precariously balances... that's definitely a cinematic type scene.

I'm pretty sure that was in game sprinting, although I will agree that the cliff part looked scripted, I suppose we will all know what happens when the game launches.
 
Looks good for a 5+ year old console generation. Kinda sad to think that it's going to be another good 6 years before we see a proper generational advancement to Oblivion. For most games graphics &#8800; gameplay, but for open world games having 5-10 times the system resources definitely facilitates things in gameplay that would otherwise not be possible.
 
Looks good for a 5+ year old console generation. Kinda sad to think that it's going to be another good 6 years before we see a proper generational advancement to Oblivion. For most games graphics &#8800; gameplay, but for open world games having 5-10 times the system resources definitely facilitates things in gameplay that would otherwise not be possible.

Yea due to how hesitant they seem to be about releasing new consoles now I wouldn't be suprised if it took till at least fall of 2013 before we see any at the probably the earliest. :mad:
 
Yea due to how hesitant they seem to be about releasing new consoles now I wouldn't be suprised if it took till at least fall of 2013 before we see any at the probably the earliest. :mad:

Can't really blame them. They're making tons of money off current consoles and new consoles are very expensive to develop. You figure with every new generation, they're essentially cramming the power of a high end gaming PC in something the size of a lunch box.
 
Yeah they always lose a ton of money with each hardware generation, that and they'll want to milk this motion control crap for at least another couple of years.

BTW, that video gave me some heart palpitations.
 
It was Bethesda's decision not to patch Oblivion to allow users to enable both HDR and AA, a feature supported by a wide array of GPUs at the time Oblivion was released (including the one I owned at the time). That was not an engine limitation (as evidenced by the simplicity of the ATi "Chuck fix") but was a limitation placed upon users by Bethesda. Unless I'm severely mistaken, Bethesda is also developing Skyrim.

The comparison is perfectly reasonable, and the suggestion that Skyrim could be similarly crippled is not by any means out of the realm of possibility.

Anything is always a possibility, but such pessimism given what we have seen, is not warranted IMO, but suit yourself.

You started out with how bad the graphics look based on console screenshots, that even animations could be determined by looking at screenshots and even that it didn't present any meaningful improvement over Oblivion (...). Now you're complaining about a hypothetical situation where Skyrim doesn't support AA natively like Oblivion didn't. Seems to me that you're trying to find reasons to complain, when there's really no base for them (yet/if ever) :p
 
game looks epic. I could care less if it has HDR, AA, DJD, or CCIC. It looks FUN. (something I think some people in this thread stopped having a while ago)

Epic indeed! I do care about graphics. They're one of the reasons why I rarely replay some older games. But these graphics look very good. Not the best ever, but these graphics "double standards" are really annoying, since if one developer pushes the hardware limits, they suck because no one can run their game. If a developer doesn't push hardware limits, they suck because they...er...are not pushing the hardware limits.

It's damned if you do and damned if you don't.

All this, at the same time that almost ALL of these complaining people are buying the boring feast of action and sub-par graphics: Call of Duty...:rolleyes:
 
All this, at the same time that almost ALL of these complaining people are buying the boring feast of action and sub-par graphics: Call of Duty...:rolleyes:

Im willing to be most people complaining about this possibly being gamebryo etc. wouldn't wipe their asses with the call of duty franchise. But if anybody is nitpicking this and buying that piece of trash they should use a blender for a hat and turn it on.
 
Wow, some of these comments are amazing. Seriously, when did we buy games based solely on graphics and not gameplay? A lot of you need to remember why you started playing games.

The game looks damn fantastic and I don't think I could be anymore excited for it than I am at the moment. The only thing that concerns me is the release date. I am hopeful, but not confident that they will meet it.
 
Wow, some of these comments are amazing. Seriously, when did we buy games based solely on graphics and not gameplay? A lot of you need to remember why you started playing games.

The game looks damn fantastic and I don't think I could be anymore excited for it than I am at the moment. The only thing that concerns me is the release date. I am hopeful, but not confident that they will meet it.

Delays can happen, but it's still 8 months away, so they should have plenty of time for testing.

Plus, this is a big year for Bethesda. Their main franchise is going for the fifth game with Skyrim, the first game by id under Bethesda name and Brink, which is getting quite a lot of traction.

So 3 huge titles for Bethesda coming out on the same year and they already committed to dates on all 3, which surely indicates their confidence.
 
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