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

Silus said:
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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I think they will meet it. Bethesda is a much bigger company now and most of their staff is working on Skyrim.

I'm very happy with the improvements they made to Skryim. From the trailer some things I noticed.

- Better first person view, now more realistic although It would be awesome if they made a viewable body.

- Much better 3rd person camera, looks like it will now be possible to properly aim a bow in 3rd person.

- Animations are just so much better. Looks like the characters skeletons are actually deforming now and the transitions between animations are smooth. I suppose that's the new Havok animations system in action.

- Bows look to be much more realistic and also much more powerful, finally it seems like a thief will be just as deadly as a fighter or mage.

- Flowing water looks pretty good, perhaps not totally realistic but the way it moved was realistic which is better then anything they have done before.

- Everything else seems to have been ramped up in a significant way. I really can't wait to try it out since what they seem to have here is pretty epic.
 
sculelos said:
I think they will meet it. Bethesda is a much bigger company now and most of their staff is working on Skyrim.

I'm very happy with the improvements they made to Skryim. From the trailer some things I noticed.

- Better first person view, now more realistic although It would be awesome if they made a viewable body.

- Much better 3rd person camera, looks like it will now be possible to properly aim a bow in 3rd person.

- Animations are just so much better. Looks like the characters skeletons are actually deforming now and the transitions between animations are smooth. I suppose that's the new Havok animations system in action.

- Bows look to be much more realistic and also much more powerful, finally it seems like a thief will be just as deadly as a fighter or mage.

- Flowing water looks pretty good, perhaps not totally realistic but the way it moved was realistic which is better then anything they have done before.

- Everything else seems to have been ramped up in a significant way. I really can't wait to try it out since what they seem to have here is pretty epic.
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Indeed! There's obviously a lot that we'll need to confirm as more info surfaces, but it would've been great to see mounted combat. Given the dragon subject (and as I said earlier), it would be great to be able to ride a horse (or some other animal) while using a bow to shoot at dragons!
Given this premise, and also dual wielding, it would be awesome to be able to use a fire spell to ignite an arrow and shoot that burning arrow at enemies :)
 
Hoping there is more time devoted to the main quest line, and not towards the notion of wandering around doing random crap.

Hoping the skill system doesn't make me want to tear my hair out.

--Animation looks wonderful based on the video.
 
Silus said:
Indeed! There's obviously a lot that we'll need to confirm as more info surfaces, but it would've been great to see mounted combat. Given the dragon subject (and as I said earlier), it would be great to be able to ride a horse (or some other animal) while using a bow to shoot at dragons!
Given this premise, and also dual wielding, it would be awesome to be able to use a fire spell to ignite an arrow and shoot that burning arrow at enemies :)
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I'm actually not sure if horses will even be in the game this time. Bethesda has said something like they are working on it but won't implement them unless they can make them really well. Todd Howard has said he would rather have no horses then horses that handle like Jeeps. :p
 
Inu said:
Hoping there is more time devoted to the main quest line, and not towards the notion of wandering around doing random crap.
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I'd love for them to put a lot of effort into making the main quest line great too, as long as they still put a lot of effort into the sandbox style questing and exploring (aka "random crap"). I'd guess I spent less than 10% of my time in oblivion doing the actual main quest and maybe 50% doing the guild quests. I'm pretty sure a lot of people liked Oblivion, and the series in general for its sandbox style gameplay.
 
I thought the flowing water looked like shit.

Sure, it IS flowing water, which we haven't really seen before (Pretty sure Divinity II had it to some extent), but it still looked pretty bad. The Texture/Shader looked flat and bland. And before you all start flaming me, go ahead and pause it on the specific scene where they show the river with the flowing water. I'm not expecting Crysis meets TES here, but surely they can make it look better than that.
 
TheOneKnownAsMe said:
I thought the flowing water looked like shit.

Sure, it IS flowing water, which we haven't really seen before (Pretty sure Divinity II had it to some extent), but it still looked pretty bad. The Texture/Shader looked flat and bland. And before you all start flaming me, go ahead and pause it on the specific scene where they show the river with the flowing water. I'm not expecting Crysis meets TES here, but surely they can make it look better than that.
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Yea, I didn't get a very good look at it. Keep in mind it is going to look like glacier water, meaning white/blue. Some people have complained it didn't look like the stream near their house...well unless you live near a glacier, I don't see how it would.
 
The flowing water is meant to look lilke white water rapids, which aren't really "clear" at all like a gently flowing stream.

The main problem with it, is that it doesn't look very "liquid" li ke, rather it looks like a flat texture flowing around, there's no real wave/movement to the water like you see in white water rapids, where the wate crashes and breaks up/splashes around, it just looks too "solid/flat."
 
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What Stiler said.

I'm aware of what mountain rivers look like, seeing as I'm surrounded by Mountains on all sides, and I understand that they're going for the white water rapid look. I'm mainly bothered by how geometric and jagged it looked.
 
Stiler said:
The slowing water is meant to look lilke white water rapids, which aren't really "clear" at all like a gently flowing stream.

The main problem with it, is that it doesn't look very "liquid" li ke, rather it looks like a flat texture flowing around, there's no real wave/movement to the water like you see in white water rapids, where the wate crashes and breaks up/splashes around, it just looks too "solid/flat."
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I agree with you. The water flowing is impressive in it's own right but it doesn't look all that realistic, hopefully Bethesda can improve it before release. If not well that's what Mods are for. ;)
 
I liked the trailer. I just hope the actual game won't disappoint me, like for example DAO2 demo.
 
sculelos said:
I agree with you. The water flowing is impressive in it's own right but it doesn't look all that realistic, hopefully Bethesda can improve it before release. If not well that's what Mods are for. ;)
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For all we know it's already way better. Oblivion PC water was a lot nicer than 360 water. We're probably looking at what the consoletards are getting.
 
anonmoniker said:
For all we know it's already way better. Oblivion PC water was a lot nicer than 360 water. We're probably looking at what the consoletards are getting.
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Actually I looked at some real life images of glacier water flow and it's actually not to far off the mark. I'm 100% certain that not all water will be like that however.

As for the art direction it's quite good and I'm sure PC players will get much larger textures then console players and perhaps some special effects. Besides that however it will probably still look pretty spectacular on consoles.
 
phide said:
No kidding. Though it's somewhat different, Valve's technique for water flow is really impressive. Requires quite a bit of work to get integrated into each area, but the visual quality payoff is totally worth it.
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Nice read. The debris flow for Portal 2 looks to be shaping up nicely. The page that really had me salivating was

"Future Work
• Flow height maps and use tessellation hardware
• Multiple frequencies of normal maps
• Render dynamic flow vectors per-frame so animated
objects cause flow changes
• Use flow map with our physics simulation to have
objects flow on the water surface using the same data"

We are heading towards extremely realistic environments, as well as gameplay changes. I can see dynamic environmental hazards and real soil erosion coming to games in the next year or 3.

Imagine killing a dragon, or whatever, having the corpse flow downstream, plugging off a town's water supply and making the residents sick with its putrefaction.

Or in strategy games, having a newly formed volcanic island change ocean currents and trade winds.
 
LeninGHOLA said:
Nice read. The debris flow for Portal 2 looks to be shaping up nicely. The page that really had me salivating was

"Future Work
• Flow height maps and use tessellation hardware
• Multiple frequencies of normal maps
• Render dynamic flow vectors per-frame so animated
objects cause flow changes
• Use flow map with our physics simulation to have
objects flow on the water surface using the same data"

We are heading towards extremely realistic environments, as well as gameplay changes. I can see dynamic environmental hazards and real soil erosion coming to games in the next year or 3.

Imagine killing a dragon, or whatever, having the corpse flow downstream, plugging off a town's water supply and making the residents sick with its putrefaction.

Or in strategy games, having a newly formed volcanic island change ocean currents and trade winds.
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Well graphics have almost reached a point where it's extremely difficult to make them any better so really the only thing they have left to improve is gameplay features. Heck maby someday we will get a Fallout type game with fully destructible environments.
 
sculelos said:
Well graphics have almost reached a point where it's extremely difficult to make them any better so really the only thing they have left to improve is gameplay features. Heck maby someday we will get a Fallout type game with fully destructible environments.
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I remember people saying things like that over 10 years ago. There will always be room for improvement until someone builds a star trek holodeck for gaming.
 
Disposed said:
I remember people saying things like that over 10 years ago. There will always be room for improvement until someone builds a star trek holodeck for gaming.
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I think the flowing water is a great example of how there's still a lot of room for improvement in graphics. I think several games have pretty nice looking stationary water, but I'm struggling to think of a game that had flowing water that didn't look terrible.

There's definitely a long way before graphics are really realistic, I've never played a game and thought "wow this looks real".
 
The water/rain shader effects in Arcania were pretty decent. Also, Divinity II, while not the most spectacular looking, had some decent flowing water as well.
 
TheOneKnownAsMe said:
The water/rain shader effects in Arcania were pretty decent. Also, Divinity II, while not the most spectacular looking, had some decent flowing water as well.
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I haven't played either of those games, so I downloaded the Divinity II demo. It looks better than some I suppose, but its still pretty bad IMO. Its basically two textures over each other which are moving at different speeds. It still flow into and out of rocks/walls/plants as if they weren't there, except for a couple of areas where you get "splashes" as it hits. I have seen some good rain in games though, but I was just using flowing water as one of those examples where games have a bit of work before they look good.
 
I don't care, if the game's music is like the trailer all the way to level 50, and the gameplay is fun, I won't care how well the graphics are rated. This will be epic.
 
TheOneKnownAsMe said:
The water/rain shader effects in Arcania were pretty decent. Also, Divinity II, while not the most spectacular looking, had some decent flowing water as well.
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Yeah, I never said it was amazing, it's just one of the better examples. In Arcania, when it rains, the water appears to flow downhill and pool in low spots in the terrain.

We're still a few years away from "smart" water that flows around objects dynamically. In Skyrim, it looks like they just created a small waterplane and rotated it, scaled it, etc. to create the appearance of flowing water, when it's really just a flat piece of geometry with a flat texture moving across it. It's the industry's prevalent use of flat water planes that's hindering progress. It's far easier to make a good water shader than to come up with a new way of realistically simulating water that doesn't have a gross impact on performance. Tessellation is definitely a step in the right direction. Particle-based water is an even better step in the right direction, it just has a pretty big effect on performance.
 
Parmenides said:
I don't care, if the game's music is like the trailer all the way to level 50, and the gameplay is fun, I won't care how well the graphics are rated. This will be epic.
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Am I the only one who thinks the re-interpreted theme is embarrassingly bad? It's as if someone at Bethesda told Soule to take the theme and "just turn it up to 11".
 
phide said:
Am I the only one who thinks the re-interpreted theme is embarrassingly bad? It's as if someone at Bethesda told Soule to take the theme and "just turn it up to 11".
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Meh, it's alright. I'm pretty sure Soule himself is going to knock this out of the park.

What I'm concerned about is if DirectSong again becomes the only way to get that soundtrack because I've had nothing but problems with them since October. Two support tickets bumped daily, zero responses via any method of contact and that includes phone...it's a real shame because they used to kick ass and be very reliable.

15 days from now or so Pay Pal is going to get involved on my behalf and maybe that might get someone's attention but probably not.

Of course then again, if it's like the other games I'll have the soundtrack on my computer right in the Data-> Sound -> Music folders or some such.
 
phide said:
Am I the only one who thinks the re-interpreted theme is embarrassingly bad? It's as if someone at Bethesda told Soule to take the theme and "just turn it up to 11".
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Well, are you talking about re-interpretation in general? with Mass Effect 2 for example, it wouldn't be Mass Effect without redoing their signature music themes.

Or are you thinking this re-interpretation falls short of what it once was? I could definitely see marketing exclusively using this in all of their marketing efforts from now until 11-11-11, and that wouldn't be good. But if Soule hits this with a Morrowind sound with Nord twist, I'm sure the game's soundtrack will be awesome.
 
...:rolleyes:

So now the problem is in the water flow ? It's hopeless...I really need to stop reading these threads.

No wonder developers are avoiding the PC market more and more.
 
Silus said:
...:rolleyes:

So now the problem is in the water flow ? It's hopeless...I really need to stop reading these threads.

No wonder developers are avoiding the PC market more and more.
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We were just talking about how games in general have bad looking flowing water and its an area where graphics could improve ;)
 
What Tudz said. It was a statement aimed at games in general, it just so happened that Skyrim was the game that brought it up.
 
The theme sounded okay. I was mainly just pleased to hear some Morrowind undertones, but it does indeed sound like they just turned the theme up to 11.
 
Looks better than I thought it would judging by the video above.

It does look very much like a Gamebryo game engine however, animations are still pretty stiff and unnatural. Lighting is still pretty flat and insipid

More Dragon's, inspired by Dragon Age perhaps?

Looks like it'll be big, fun and immersive no matter what the visuals are like.
 
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tuaarita said:
Played Oblivion recently? It looks like shiet without the graphic mods.
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I've recently gotten into that scene and it's amazing what some of those mods have done to that game. Astonishing even.
 
I'm really interested in knowing more about the lore in Skyrim. I wonder if we'll see Hircine return, like we saw in Bloodmoon.
Also, if we're going to get vampires and werewolves. From the video it seems we'll get werewolves and vampires were always part of the latest installments. But I wanted to know if we're going to get proper quests for each, if we end up being turned to one.
Vampire quests were especially interesting in Morrowind, but very, very hard!
 
Why can't people understand that the quality of animation is dependent upon the animator, and not a trait of the engine? You can't look at some random Animation and instantly say "Yup, that's running on blah engine".
 
phide said:
Am I the only one who thinks the re-interpreted theme is embarrassingly bad? It's as if someone at Bethesda told Soule to take the theme and "just turn it up to 11".
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No! And I'm glad you said it. It was borderline obscene the amount of over-the-top embellishment they threw in.

Also, I thought the dragon scream or whatever it was when the guy yells, then the music transistions into a bombastic masturbatory mess in the trailer was something even a 13 year-old would find cringe-worthy.

Hopefully, the actual in-game music and pacing will be more subdued and subtle.
 
Of course the music will be more subdued at times. It won't just play that song on repeat. No one would want that.
 
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