official The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

[Nagisan]

Me thinks I need to upgrade my computer. :blink:

No kidding, if the water, trees, and snow work like they say they will, we will either need to upgrade or finally take advantage of quad-cores in gaming. :p

[treemonster]

No kidding, if the water, trees, and snow work like they say they will, we will either need to upgrade or finally take advantage of quad-cores in gaming. :p

meh i wouldn't get too hype don those points in particular. devs saying trees will be affected by wind or flowing water in an upcoming game is nothing new. in most cases it's simply a mater of how good they make the animations look, but it's still basically the same old animated objects and textures, with simply new technqiues and different applications of things like shaders.

as for the snow thing, well... if say it has "dynamic weather"9rockstars games have had this for years, wow has this as well, and to an even greater effect with phasing-which is the most advanced form of environment change i've seen yet, but i'd hardly call it dynamic) which isn't new or hard to do in itself, and say you go afk at the start of a snow fall when the ground is green grass or w/e, and you come back say 15-20 minutes later and the ground is covered in snow textures... i think that might be a step up from what we see in games today and in the past, but i've seen tech demos or previews or other hype tools showing this off that have prooved to be no more than scripted events that have yet to materialize, so again i wouldn't hold my breath on this one either.

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

It looks great and I'm glad they're using a new engine. I just hope it runs well on my PC. I remember playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and being forced to run the game at low/medium settings (as well as a resolution lower than my monitor's native resolution).

[Kyle A]

Dynamic shadows... finally Bethesda. One of the first things I noticed about New Vegas was the lack of shadows, especially outdoors, which killed most of the atmosphere for me. I felt like I was really playing a game made in the 90's.

[Nagisan]

meh i wouldn't get too hype don those points in particular. devs saying trees will be affected by wind or flowing water in an upcoming game is nothing new. in most cases it's simply a mater of how good they make the animations look, but it's still basically the same old animated objects and textures, with simply new technqiues and different applications of things like shaders.

To me, "trees affected by wind" doesn't mean trees animated to look like wind is blowing through them, it means wind is implemented and pushes things around that are light enough to be affected by it. Chances are, that is not what is meant, but that is what was said.

as for the snow thing, well... if say it has "dynamic weather"9rockstars games have had this for years, wow has this as well, and to an even greater effect with phasing-which is the most advanced form of environment change i've seen yet, but i'd hardly call it dynamic) which isn't new or hard to do in itself, and say you go afk at the start of a snow fall when the ground is green grass or w/e, and you come back say 15-20 minutes later and the ground is covered in snow textures... i think that might be a step up from what we see in games today and in the past, but i've seen tech demos or previews or other hype tools showing this off that have prooved to be no more than scripted events that have yet to materialize, so again i wouldn't hold my breath on this one either.

Again, dynamic snow is something I picture as snow that actually builds up, not just a texture change. WoW's phasing is not really dynamic, just reactive, and it's nowhere on the scale I think when you mention a feature such as dynamic snow. Other games have had weather that changes, yes, but again, that's not really dynamic.....to be dynamic it actually has to change the environment as it happens, not simply replace the environment (most games with weather simply show rain by it doesn't really do anything to the environment, etc).

The way I picture this, is if it starts snowing, snow will actually pile up (NOT just a texture, an actual object that sits on top of game-world geometry, and is compressed when walked upon). Honestly, the stacking up of the snow would be simply enough, sort of have a snow model/texture rise up out of all objects while it snows (slowly), then as people walk on it, compress the snow in that area down to a certain limit. Then after the snow finishes and the day goes on, slowly melt the snow by retracting the model/texture back into to object it sits upon, removing it once it is no longer visible.

Like I said, if the game turns out like those features read on paper, it will be amazing. Chances are it won't, and things will be cut from the final game, but if it turns out how it was worded, it will be amazing and probably be quite a heavy game requirement-wise.

[ViperAFK]

To me, "trees affected by wind" doesn't mean trees animated to look like wind is blowing through them, it means wind is implemented and pushes things around that are light enough to be affected by it. Chances are, that is not what is meant, but that is what was said.

Certainly possible the way the said it though, far cry 2 did this (implemented wind that actually pushes things)

[Nagisan]

Certainly possible the way the said it though, far cry 2 did this (implemented wind that actually pushes things)

True, but along with some of the other features they are toting, I think there are going to be performance issues for many people with it (especially upon release).

[treemonster]

i think that would take incredible processing power to render all those particle like objects for your vision of snow.

that's about the closest i've seen snow build up and flowing water coming to reality, and that video was posted a year ago and no sign of anything in that video coming to reality. it's also all obviously specially scripted events and post processing effects and clever editing. is it something that can be done in a cut scene? for sure! but for in game real time as you play the game? i just don't find it realistic at all at this time, and claims of these kinds of things is really nothing new for games.

especially if the list comes from a gaming magazine, it should be treated as dubious as best. if it comes directly from teh devs then shame on them, it's this kind of thing that causes mass disappointment in games.

Certainly possible the way the said it though, far cry 2 did this (implemented wind that actually pushes things)

i'd like to see a good video showcasing this if possible. i'll do a quick search.

showcases fire with wind. but again it appears as if depending on the dynamic weather, the animations are simply different. it's pretty cool but not quite as exciting as you might think imho.

[Nagisan]

i think that would take incredible processing power to render all those particle like objects for your vision of snow.

Not really. Obviously if every particle of snow was treated separately and it actually laid on the ground it would take tons of processing power, but what I am talking about is have a snow effect, then extrude the top surface of models that the snow would land on at a slow rate (depending on how hard it is snowing) as a separate object, that object is essentially a snow layer and gets textured accordingly. Then if someone walks on that snow layer, parts of that snow layer are deformed to appear to have footprints in them.

Obviously it would be awesome if snow was done like snow (particles that lay on the ground until there is enough to cover the ground and build up), but I am not expecting that much, all I'm expecting is some form of separate model that builds up on top of the ground that acts like snow would act. It would be quite simple to do honestly, the question is whether they can implement that on a large enough scale using low enough processing power to look good and perform good. It doesn't take much to extrude and extend a surface, that would be the easy part (to make snow build up....though making sure there are no geometry glitches with it would be difficult), the problem comes in when you start depressing parts of that model to make it appear that it has been walked on without wasting tons of available resources.

[treemonster]

meh taking your idea making foot steps in snow that look good isn't too hard with a well made texture/map. just have different textures/maps for different depths of snow relative to the base surface and i don't think it would kill current hardware. you could also add in things like something that affects your movement speed based on how deep the snow is, similar to how water tends to work in games now.

[Nagisan]

meh taking your idea making foot steps in snow that look good isn't too hard with a well made texture/map. just have different textures/maps for different depths of snow relative to the base surface and i don't think it would kill current hardware. you could also add in things like something that affects your movement speed based on how deep the snow is, similar to how water tends to work in games now.

Yeah, it wouldn't be terribly difficult, but texture maps would only work to a certain depth (if snow got past a certain depth, it would be difficult to make a texture map look like the snow is actually depressed in an area from an angle), but they could limit snow to a maximum amount (like no more than 6" or whatever) to help compensate for that. And yes, you would definitely want snow to affect movement speed, though that might be annoying depending on how many areas you would regularly encounter snow in.

It can definitely be done, it just depends on how much time they are willing to put into making it work in the game.....and in that aspect I don't have too much faith in Bethesda based on the quality of their previous works.

[treemonster]

i dunno behtesda puts alot of time and effort into strange aspects of their games. i can't name anything off the top of my head right now, but every one of their games i've played they certainly do have odd takes on things that aren't typical for american made rpg's, and i think that show especially in the TES series over the years. they don't always get it right, but they certain do try not make overt clones, even if all of their rpg's tend to be some basic form of the fps meets rpg(ibroken down to it's most basic terms)

i'm more interested in the things about having unqiue dungeons and locales, instead of the incredible amount of randomized copy pasta in oblivion. fo3 was a pretty nic eimprovement on this, every vault was little different while still being a vault, every locale had a different flavour, while still fitting in the world. if they can further improve on this it will sate my appetitie for exploring an open world and getting all those POIs, which is what keeps me playing bethesda games the longest, including morrowwind where i couldn't figure how to advance any of the quest lines so i decided to simply explore and power game my character build and kill everyone in the world instead, morrow wind is still my favourite overall, and in terms of the story i got absolutely no where. lolz.

[Nagisan]

fo3 was a pretty nic eimprovement on this, every vault was little different while still being a vault, every locale had a different flavour, while still fitting in the world.

I found FO3 to be the opposite, every vault was nearly identical except for the layout and each had maybe 1 additional room that focused on that vaults experiment. I guess this could be seen as each area being engineered and built by the same company (in game lore), so of course they would be extremely similar. But beyond that, every building had the same bland texture palette and what not. The only thing that was different was the area where the trees were growing and what not (forgot what that area was called).

NV fixed this somewhat, by adding power to areas of the game, allowing more lighting and better looking buildings (I doubt people would suddenly stop building and cleaning stuff after a nuclear war). But they also revamped the vaults a bit, such as the vault that was filled with plant life and had a cave system to it.

Anyway, FO3 is not a good example to show how things are different, the way they designed the game is they only had limited tiles to choose from and they built vaults out of those tiles, there were hardly any unique tiles between vaults and as such everything was copy pasted (essentially) into the game world and moved around so it appeared differently. Even building a FO3 mod that adds a whole new vault (two technically), we were able to change the general look of the vault by drastically changing the layout, but it still had the same elements (bedrooms, bathrooms, cafeteria, etc). The main difference is we built two versions of the vault to simulate a nice shiny new vault and its rusted dirty counterpart. They used basically the same models with different textures, all built using the default tiles that were included and used everywhere else in the other vaults.

[treemonster]

yeah that's what i mean, shiny and rusty vaults. it was a big step up from oblivion's clone dungeons.

[Buio]

New info up on Game Informer, this time about the game engine, for example their new animation middleware Havok Behaviour. Also the first screenshot posted.

Game Informer

http://www.gameinformer.com/games/the_elder_scrolls_v_skyrim/b/xbox360/archive/2011/01/17/the-technology-behind-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim.aspx

The original screenshot filename on Game Informer is "Markarth01.jpg" which indicates the screen is from Markath Side, as city in western Skyrim.

Havok Behavoir

http://www.havok.com/index.php?page=havok-behavior

[treemonster]

looks really nice

[Pajter]

I'm not sure yet whether I really like that screenshot. There are some things which I had expected to be.. different.

I'm confident it will be much better when I'm actually playing though. Some exciting news in that article too!

[Nagisan]

Not as "awesome" as some people seemed to think it was from the low quality magazine scans, it looks good, much better than TES:IV, and at least on par with modern MMO graphics, but I have definitely seen better (also we still haven't seen any up-close graphics, so it's possible it looks as good as it does because things are being seen at a distance).

I'm interested in seeing how the character models look compared to IV considering the terrain and general model improvements from IV to V.

[Corris Veteran]

If that is anything close to the console screen shot, then it is awesome, Oblivion/Fallout 3/NV had some terrible looking textures and character models, let alone animations.

I have Oblivion on the 360, and the land textures from any distance look terrible, which they improved slightly for the PS3 version a year later, but still not great.

[Holey]

The whole series is amazing, Fallout always felt very 'plasticky' to me, the guns didnt feel like they had weight..

Idk there was just something about it.. Oblivion and Morrowind on the other hand were hands down the best RPG's i have played (except for Crono Trigger, and dont any of you dare say any different) in that you could build your character however you wanted.. I agree with all the criticism though, level scaling was stupid, what you did in one area didnt affect any other areas, and it was far too easy to ruin things by accidentily clicking on something owned by someone else property and small stupid things like that.

THIS game however, words cannot describe how much i am looking forward to this, preordering on steam for SURE!

I would like to see a 'skip tutorial, character creation' button built in, that was always the first mod i would download haha. Personally i think that they should look at all the great mods that were released for Morrowind and Oblivion and incorporate those into the game.

Also, Flying Mounts.

Just saying.

[Andre S. Veteran]

New details about the engine at IGN.

Very disappointed with what was presented in that article. They're again going for that "perfect RPG engine" and think that this is the center component of a good RPG, when it's not. This is what I mean:

there is a template for an assassination mission and the game can conditionalize all the roles (...) All this can be generated based on where the character is, who he's met

Yeah for doing the same assassination mission 50 times with random variation of parameters! I thought they had learned their lesson with Oblivion, with the endless copy-pasted/randomly generated dungeons and square kilometers of forest... ugh. It's like playing an MMORPG but alone, and one that's particularly void of personality and intrigue at that.

Since day one Oblivion gave me the distinct feeling that I was merely messing inside a game engine designed for consistent repetition, not unraveling a mysterious plot with intriguing characters, twists and locations. The levelling system, which made leveling pointless, was but an example of that.

Based on what we've seen so far of Skyrim, they're basically re-doing Oblivion but with better graphics. Hopefully they can make remotely believable character faces this time, not the randomly generated mess we got in Oblivion, it would already be good. But a proper dialogue system? You know, one where conversations are actually conversations, not a glorified talking menu system (50 hours of it at that)? I guess not. An actually original plot, where you don't start off as yet another level 1 no-name who's supposed to save the world from some terrible evil, and for some unexplicable reason, only you can do something about it? I guess not. Moral decisions? Meaningful character leveling?

Oh and *facepalm* they're going for that Radiant AI again.

The overhauled Radiant AI will deliver more believable NPC behaviour , with distinctive personalities being played out in the actions of Skyrim's inhabitants.

Please no more of this! The only thing Radiant AI ever did was to destroy any semblance of immersion Oblivion could have cast on me, by being unbelievably stupid. An "overhaul"'s not going to do it. Look, The Elder Scrolls series never had real PC-NPC conversations in the first place. Why not start by adding that, and scrap the whole NPC-to-NPC thing?

[Tzeentch]

Ive played through Oblivion and Shivering Isles about 5 times now. Assuming it is a direct sequel to Oblivion i hope they dont bring the Oblivion gates back i REALLY hated them.

haha same those things were so annoying

[Buio]

New feature up on Game Informer.

Skyrim?s Dragon Shouts

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2011/01/20/skyrim-s-dragon-shouts.aspx

[Buio]

Some new screenshots from http://www.ign.com

[LingeringSoul]

The screenshots looks fantastic. I'm also happy to see that they've finally created female character models that aren't hideous. Now let's just see some Khajiit and Argonian characters :).