The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Also there are some videos showing the first 25 minutes of Skyrim, i'd rather not spoil myself but if you are interested you can probably google them out.

The game doesn't actually look all that impressive to me. In fact, I'm not impressed by the graphics at all.
It looks nice, but you can definitely do more with the current technology.

Name one open world game that has better graphics than Skyrim, must've missed it...

Finished Bloodmoon today (Hircine questline was fun), really enjoyed it. Time to finish off the main quest of Morrowind now, if Skyrim is even 50% as good as Morrowind I will be very very pleased. Graphics can be fixed with mods, but as long as they don't fuck up the Nord lore out there I'm happy!

Think its 500hrs of gameplay by the time I'll finish it, and I still skipped 3 or 4 quests that I know of (no idea which I've skipped that I don't know of ).

Hoping the additions of perks, dragons and their focus on combat won't derive from the story. Would love to see some references for Solsteim as well, especially the mead hall in Thirsk.

How about Battlefield 3? The open maps on that game are what I call stunning.
From what I've seen, I don't find Skyrim's landscapes to be evocative at all. I don't know if it's the engine that is not good enough for the kind of game, if their environmental artists suck or if the art direction is simply too dull (probably all of them), but the graphics of the game just don't impress me.

Oh, the fact that BF3 is not an "open world" doesn't concern me. The tech behind a game is of no interest to the end user when it comes to judging the graphics. I base my impressions on what my eyes see. I watch a video of BF3 and I'm impressed by the graphics. I watch a video of skyrim and I'm not.

Constructive arguments please.

Typing "SRSLY!!!!!" and other related nonconstructive replies doesn't help your argument.

/edit

EDIT: I didn't think I needed to make an argument whatsoever... My point is too obvious.

I'll try to explain. Battlefield is despite having pretty big maps, linear. If you look into the distance in many of the maps or places/objects they are sprites you either cannot shoot or reach. Have you ever looked at the sky in Battlefield, it doesn't move.

All of the graphical prowess in Battlefield is covered in illusion or effects, if you strip those away very little is left. That also takes its toll on the GPU power needed for such a game, because lighting, shading etc all requires a lot of raw power. If you'd try to put that into a game like Skyrim the map would be far too large especially if you include all the small dungeons and all the 3D models of objects and NPCs.

Battlefields destructable environment is nice, but is very limited as well since everything is scripted.

2nd: it's a shooter, there's no need for story, only very limited (CoD like) ''progression''. There's no need for swimming (yes I brought it out). A game like Skyrim would be nothing without your character's stats, progression and story. BF3 doesn't need to worry about any of that, just kill people.. Also BF3 has the added benefit of being placed in present time, so artists have it easy as they can reconstruct already existing area's, weapons etc. In Skyrim pretty much everything is fictional, perhaps with the exception of ground/vegetation textures at some places but even those were always very unique in The Elder Scroll series.

3rd: it's a multiplayer game versus a strictly single player roleplaying game..

4th: totally different engines, but both a sandbox. Neither BF3 or Skyrim are the best possible graphics a PC is capable of either, they are both despite looking better on the PC still catered to consoles.

If they totally stripped away the idea of consoles the games could be better optimized or you could even end up with a fantastic looking game and take the path that Crysis took and it would take 2/3 years before next gen PC's would run it smoothly. (I would love that, but many would be pissed off).

And I agree with Gekido, why are you even trying to compare these.. I would even disagree with you if you'd compare Fallout 3 to BF3, because you can mod fallout 3 and you cannot mod BF3 therefor Fallout 3 wins on graphics department

ever thought about having different expectations? That may be a factor. Or 1 video might show more than the other. You wouldn't base your assumptions of purchasing a game solely on a CGI movie either I hope? If you're going to call artists crap, you may want to have played the game extensively first without sounding prejudged. I also haven't played Skyrim yet and I have played BF3, but I do know how Bethesda puts their TES games together after playing them for years and a Frostbite 2 Engine and graphics approach would not add much to the game at all. All Bethesda's engine needs is a bit more stability and they needed to work on the animations, they did so I'm happy.

I still find funny though how Oblivion and Skyrim are both coming out for xbox360 after all these years with totally different graphics.
Cant help but asking myself if they were just lazy to get the best from the console back then, or just didnt have the capabilities.

EDIT: i also understand that comparing the 2 mentioned engines might not be the best, but there are several instances where FPS focused engines end up being used by third parties in different genres.
The farcry engine for Aion for example, or the Unreal engine for TERA etc, just to name a few.
FPS has always been the most resource heavy genre, the engines might not be optimized for open world type games but apparently they are still the best choices for MMOs, which can be considered semi open.

Also i would suggest you google some Caspian Border's images, the playable map is like 1/5 of the actual map, the landscape you see with forest fires are actual places that you can visit by flying, and not just some background textures.

Actually, comparing it to anything is besides the point. Point is, I don't think the game looks impressive. From both an art and a technology point of view, it looks incredibly uninspired to me.

I doubt it was lazyness, and I also doubt it was the lack of graphic engines at the time. It has more to do with people's talent and focus on certain development area's, for example having a company like Obsidian Entertainment work on Fallout New Vegas for a while added a lot more fluid and interesting animations to what Fallout 3 by Bethesda offered.

The thing is, these sandbox games need to be filled up, and tbh they are large enough as they are, so obviously effort is laid there and certain graphics had to be left alone. Also don't forget that lots of software that allows you to model faces, edit textures etc have come out between the years. There's face scanning software that is miles better than what we had years ago, despite that it is also expensive to buy this professional software. I can understand if Bethesda spends a certain budget on these things and it may be too limited.

At the time Oblivion was also a very big benchmark game on graphics, that Skyrim looks so much better is due to many different reasons. And a modded Oblivion to todays standards may in fact look better than what some of Skyrim's textures etc will look like, simple because you have many different minds free to adjust anything to their own liking.

About different engines for different games, while the Farcry engine was imo quite good for MMO's. I felt that the Unreal 3 engine had a few negatives to it as well, and one of them was that everything was forced to be more linear (more locked off area's), animations that were very sudden and much like Unreal Tournament 3. (DC Universe comes to mind). Now it may not have anything to do with the engines, Bethesda has their own obviously and it would again come into their expense department were they to change it to another.

Thing is though, how can you compare an artist of existing world to artists of fictional world graphics? I just don't see how you can do that. Imperial City in Oblivion looked amazing at the time, and so did all the small towns with the Gothic style churches etc. How can you compare that to a BF3 map like Paris which imo looks quite amazing but it is all present time stuff? Totally different way of judging artists...

Glad I stopped caring about what others think about a certain game or I woulda missed out on alot of incredible games.

Each of us has a right to like or not like a certain style or certain games. By what criteria is your thing, and only yours. If you're a graphics whore and don't care about good gameplay or a living, breathing world, that's totally your right. But that shouldn't be your only argument when judging on a game. To be honest, I'm a bit tired of all the discussions going on here lately about why a game sucks or kicks ass and people judging games based on their personal preferance. Oh my, Skyrim doesn't look as good as BF3!? That clearly makes it the inferior game for me and EVERYONE ELSE..... (attention: sarcasm)

As for me, I'm really excited about Skyrim. Bethesda has fed me with some of the best games I have ever played and I fully trust them to nail this one as well.
If you like RPGs, you should proly give Skyrim a try, it might suprise you.

Cheers

You might want to read what other said clearly before you get all defensive. I never claimed the game will be inferior to any other game because of the graphics. Nor did I claim that mediocre graphics make a game bad.

As a huge Bioware fan I have to say that both Witcher 2 and no doubt Skyrim will blow DA2 away. Looking forward to Skyrim a lot as number 3 in my can't wait list for 2011.

1. SWTOR
2. BF3
3. Skyrim

You might want to rethink that last post

Why? He's clearly referring to me, and he's putting words in my mouth that I haven't said.

eh? you might want to re-read his posts. He says in his opinion, he's not impressed. Nowhere does it state in the quoted text that the graphics that he deems unimpressive make the game inferior to another game, nor he make any wide statements that not having amazing graphics automatically makes a game bad.

Hmm... He just clearly stated that graphics are not good enough, that enviroment artists suck and that BF3 is clearly doing a better job at that. I dunno how about you but it sounds to me like he's sayign that BF3 IS better because of graphics. I know it is his opinion, but at the same time it's critisizing with made up grounds... imho(see what i did there?).

Stating that one part of the game is worse than the one in other games doesnt really translate to: then the whole game sucks. Hell, i think we can all agree that the main story in morrowind or oblivion wasnt really top notch.

If i now state that "i dont think the story in Skyrim is that good compared to The Witcher 2 or Dragon Age 1/Mass Effect series", it doesnt really mean that i wont be enjoying Skyrim nor that im not looking forward to it.

Skyrim is an open world RPG and not a story driven linear one, comparing the stories is yes acceptable but not really a fitting parameter. Pretty much like comparing the graphics with BF3, which is the Crysis of this generation and has set a new milestone. Whatever game will come out from now on, it will be compared to BF3. FPS or not.

Nope, you're just making stuff up in your head. I don't even know how you can come to that conclusion when I haven't made a single comment about gameplay. Not to mention, I wouldn't compare the overall quality of two games that have completely different gameplay.
By the way, I haven't even played BF3, nor do I plan to. I've just seen the game, and I find it to be a great example of what you can do with today's technology.

I think Oblivion was one of the first games to make massive use of normal maps and modern graphical effects. At the time I thought it was an impressive looking game. Six year after, I expected a similar quality jump from its successor. But from what I've seen so far, they weren't able to pull that off.

Can you say that for a fact? Never heard DA2 or F3 F:NV being compared with Crysis... it's like comparing bacon with apples.

Why are we even discussing it then? You can't even have an objective opinion since you played neither of those games.

"The game doesn't actually look all that impressive to me." is a generalization and that tells me that you either write stuff for god knows what, or you're not sure about what you're talkling about, if you're trying to prove that you wrote something you didn't and that you didn't write something that you did....