Game News Oblivion Screenshots

[Ortchel]

Of course, surrealism is based on the artists interpretation of 'real life', whether that seems nonsensical is irrelevant, thats what makes it 'art'.

If you say 'clocks don't drip off tree branches' then you'll just enter into philosophical territory where I can counter with 'why can't they?' 'what is life?'.

So lets not go there.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

The one thing I noticed about the screenshots is that, for some reason, nothing actually looks "hard". The armors, like the platemails, look like they're made of some kind of padding. The tombstones in the church look inflatable and the church also gives a slight inflatable impression, though it does have hard edges.

The terrain looks great.

PS. Why are people saying Guild Wars looks so great? The graphics didn't really look that impressive to me, but I liked the animations.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Back to Oblivion's screenshots.

It would be nice if the textures on the Cathedral had more grain to them, and looked like actual pieces of brick. At the moment, it looks a bit like styrofoam padding.

The knight indoors looks like he's wearing some sort of polyfibre or kevlar padding, too. There just don't seem to be any reflections on his armor. The knight in the outdoors shot with the reflective armor looks very nice, though.

Overall the graphics do look a little too soft. There's just no other way to put it. Even Guild Wars, which has light bloom, has a LOT of shinyness from metallic objects that they stand out and give the armor and swords a hard look on top of the bloom.

I think that one way to remedy the issue is to give the game a little more contrast. I'll photoshop one of the images and explain what I mean.

 

[Ortchel]

Over bump mapping, I think. Thief 3 had the same look.

 

[Sol Invictus]

This is how I feel Oblivion should look.

 

[Sol Invictus]

The armor's not how I actually want it to look. It should be reflective. But you get the idea.

 

[Brillo]

Over bump mapping, I think. Thief 3 had the same look.

Yup, either the bump maps or displacement maps are too strong for their resolution, or someone got a little bevel-happy on the meshes cause their poly budget went up.

 

[Nicolai]

As long as you've got loads of gore, I can live with the generic art style. \o/

 

[Mendoza]

As the former 'official Bethsoft fanboy' I can say; yes, probably anyway. As long as the game remains within Cyrodill's boundries or unless they have you tapping the heart of a dead god in a side quest or something, which might change the scenery a bit.

Oblivion is going to get a lot of 'generic' remarks, because thats just what Cyrodill is; generic. They even have dragons

I'd be very surprised if there weren't any Dwemer and Daedric ruins in Cyrodil, since they seem to be all over Tamriel, although I think they're far less concentrated than on Vvardenfell. Plus everyone loves more hints at what may have happened to the Dwemer. I think there's a reasonable chance of non imperial architecture, in the same way Pelegiad's architecture was all imperial.

And since we're going to Oblivion (the official faq states so, even if the title wasn't enough of a hint) they'll no doubt be some crazy architecture there, though exactly what is highly dependant on which bit we're in.

 

[Elwro]

I'm with Exitium here. Great work! I think that your cottage looks much better. In the original picture it glows with some strange inner light.
Of course, maybe it only looks like that because of eye accomodation - e.g. you were looking at something dark and you turn around only to see something like that... maybe, but it's hard to analyze such things.

All in all, the screenshots are pretty and leave me hungry for more .

 

[MrSmileyFaceDude]

Of course, you'll be able to adjust gamma, contrast, brightness, etc. on your machine when you have the game, too. And I wouldn't be surprised if there are other sliders for the various shader effects, as well.

But again, all the shader stuff undergoes a lot of tweaking -- all of the screenshots that have been revealed so far are actually a few months old. Nothing's final until the game ships

 

[Wysardry]

This may be a really dumb question, but what's wrong with just rendering at realistic brilliance/colour levels and letting the player's built-in human eyes do the reacting when there's an abrupt change?

 

[Ortchel]

And since we're going to Oblivion (the official faq states so, even if the title wasn't enough of a hint) they'll no doubt be some crazy architecture there, though exactly what is highly dependant on which bit we're in.

I didn't know it was official yet, but thats what I was hinting at with the tapping a dead god's heart and all.

 

[Brillo]

This may be a really dumb question, but what's wrong with just rendering at realistic brilliance/colour levels and letting the player's built-in human eyes do the reacting when there's an abrupt change?

Computer screens aren't bright/dark enough. Going from a black screen to a white screen just won't do it the same way as walking into a dark building after being out in the snow. Computer screens just don't have the brightness for your eyes to do that.

 

[MrSmileyFaceDude]

This may be a really dumb question, but what's wrong with just rendering at realistic brilliance/colour levels and letting the player's built-in human eyes do the reacting when there's an abrupt change?

Computer screens aren't bright/dark enough. Going from a black screen to a white screen just won't do it the same way as walking into a dark building after being out in the snow. Computer screens just don't have the brightness for your eyes to do that.

Right. You'd have to have your hand on the brightness control, and when you turned towards a bright light turn it WAAAY up, and then gradually turn it back down again. And even then, that'd do it for the whole screen, not just the parts that need it.

 

[Flarnet]

The "bloom" in Thief 3 and Deus Ex 2 is a cheap hack to simulate the "bloom" they are using in next gen games like Oblivion, Unreal 3 etc.

The action game Far Cry recently released a patch where there is a beta version of the next gen type of "bloom". Check out this video to see it in action:

http://personal.inet.fi/atk/kjh2348fs/f ... dering.avi

 

[MrSmileyFaceDude]

Yep, that's an excellent demo of the technique and effect, Flarnet.

 

[Flarnet]

The technique will come in handy in a game where you pop in and out of dungeons often (too often?)...

Any game that needs to render a mix of really dark areas and well lit areas will benefit from this technique that dynamically operates to constantly make the most of the limited brightness output of our monitoring systems. Thief comes to mind as the killer app for HDR/Eye simulation.

Games where the impenetrable qualities of darkness are a gameplay component will off course benefit a lot less (Doom 3 for instance).

 

[Dhruin]

So the lighting effect I see in alll the Oblivion screenshots is only temporary in certain situations or did I misunderstand?

Whether the effect is technically called "bloom" or is something else there certainly seems to be a movement towards games having an effect that creates a supernatural glow around everything (DX:IW was the first I noticed, Fable, Guild Wars, Oblivion? so on)...and I find it off-putting.

 

[Otaku_Hanzo]

I just want my Daggerfall gameplay back. Graphics mean nothing to me with the exception of pissing me off because I can't afford a god system to run some of the newer games even at low detail. Valve made promises about HalfLife 2 that I hope they can keep.

 

[Ortchel]

For better or worse, the glorious days of Daggerfall are long gone.

For many reasons. As an example, if skills like climbing/swimming ever made a return, I'd be blown away. While they were nice, since they allowed players to create characters with very specific abilities, the sheer number of skills caused mammoth issues with balance. Is a player who creates a character majoring in language offered an equal chance of success as a player who majors in the combat arts? Of course not. Besides that, it would probably confuse Xbox owners if they didn't swim as fast as their friends.

The kind of testing time that would be needed to balance every skill wasn't possible then and it's most certainly not possible now.

Besides all that, Daggerfall had boats, horses, carts, houses, banks etc. and then theres the ever controversial randomized quests and dungeons, as well as a seemingly infinite number of handmade ones, most of which I've still never found, let alone played. This is just scratching the surface of Daggerfall's many joyful details, details which take up precious development time that would be better spent dumbing down their product for the console market. Though, having said that, I applaud Bethesda's resistance to the call for multiplayer.

Daggerfall was the work of developers ambitious to a fault, ambition being something publishers just aren't interested in. They want graphics, violence and babes, in that order.

But I digress, and weep for the days of Daggerfall.

R.I.P

 

[Sol Invictus]

I'd take Morrowind over Daggerfall any day of the week.

 

[Ortchel]

Well, I would too. As sentimental as I can be about Daggerfall, Morrowind is a much more balanced and stable game.

They used to call it 'Buggerfall' and with good reason.

 

[LlamaGod]

Daggerfall and Morrowind were both terrible. Morrowind's 'click and hold' combat and Daggerfalls' 'hold the button and swing your hand like a retard' combat.

The screenshots look boring. A shack and a church and they arnt very detailed or interesting (out for the church atleast, I dunno about the stain glass though).

 

[Otaku_Hanzo]

I played Daggerfall many countless nights. Sure it had it's stability problems, but none of them were game killing in my opinion.

Morrowind, however, I installed and three days later was uninstalling it. Sure, it looked pretty (with the exception of the people themselves), but it lacked something. A something I cannot put my finger on to this day. It just did not grab me by the balls and refuse to let go like Daggerfall did.

But that is me. Doesn't make me an idiot. Doesn't make me an asshole. And it sure as hell doesn't make anyone who preferred Morrowind over Daggerfall wrong.

I love Daggerfall and will always love it. Still play it to this day. It is the one game I can honestly say has always been a required install on any system I've owned.