TESV: Skyrim preview

[Vympel]

Magazine scans posted elsewhere

Radiant Storytelling? Oh no.

[General Zod]

Let me know when they have some sort of demo available. Considering the devs I'm not going to bother getting hopes up until at least then.

[Mr Bean]

To be fair with the Radiant AI. It's not bad AI, I've seen modders use it to impressive results even if Bethesda failed to do so.

However these new screen shots do not impress. New engine? Awesome lets look at the first pictures... it's like HD Oblivion. Seriously Bethesda?

[Stark]

The radiant storytelling just sounds like typical branching stuff, just driven by more than dialog. Emergent quests or options shoudn't be expected.

[Vympel]

However these new screen shots do not impress. New engine? Awesome lets look at the first pictures... it's like HD Oblivion. Seriously Bethesda?

The one face we can see does look way better. But in order to fully judge improvements to an engine you need to see it in action.

[CaptHawkeye]

Luckily i'm into explore-em-ups so i'll be watching. Even if not exactly hoping.

[Mr Bean]

However these new screen shots do not impress. New engine? Awesome lets look at the first pictures... it's like HD Oblivion. Seriously Bethesda?

The one face we can see does look way better. But in order to fully judge improvements to an engine you need to see it in action.

Bethesada faces have always looked fucking terrible. As in "OMG what the hell is that? for Morrowind faces and Oblivion had faces which were a step up, in that they less resembled roadkill on shoulders and more resembled soulless cold eyed dolls. Something the modding community fixed and using less polygons than Bethesda to boot (Wish I still had the guy who did Better Face's images of his work VS Bethesda's with poly counts and wireframe breakouts)

So yeah maybe after Morrowind and Oblivion and Fallout 3 they hired him to do faces for Skyrim, maybe.
Also OAN I was disappointed because the initial leaked trailers led me into belief this was a possible Empire building game ala-Morrowind with the dragon refereed not to Mr Dragon slayer but Mr Dragon blood and the next Septim, there being no Septim's except bastards around.

[Eleas]

Bethesada faces have always looked fucking terrible. As in "OMG what the hell is that? for Morrowind faces and Oblivion had faces which were a step up, in that they less resembled roadkill on shoulders and more resembled soulless cold eyed dolls. Something the modding community fixed and using less polygons than Bethesda to boot (Wish I still had the guy who did Better Face's images of his work VS Bethesda's with poly counts and wireframe breakouts)

So yeah maybe after Morrowind and Oblivion and Fallout 3 they hired him to do faces for Skyrim, maybe.

Possibly. But a large part of what made Redd's heads so good might not translate all that well to more plastic models with bones and stuff. The Morrowind heads were essentially inert, with no moving parts at all. The "dead" impression of Oblivion's actors is (I suspect) to some degree rooted in that they don't always move as they should.

[Lord Woodlouse]

One thing I hoped about the sequel was that they worked more on the mechanics of the engine rather than making things (besides faces :p ) pretty. I'd be happy for it to look around as nice as before if the world felt more alive, NPCs knew how not to get in my way and how to fight together and if we could have maybe more than 10 on screen for "epic" battles.

[PeZook]

Beth's games suffer as much from beth's writing as they do from the graphics, so even with OMG AWESOME new faces and whatnot, the game might still fall flat on its ass by the virtue of poor writing (that ignores limitations of the engine, like in Oblivion...really, why the hell did they even write that battle like that in the first place? Kvatch felt way more epic because it worked within the limitations of the engine)

Also, they don't know how to make cities feel alive. They concentrated on giving NPCs useless and annoying schedules instead of actually making the cities seem inhabitated.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

I'd like it if they took some cues from the Assassin's Creed games, when it came to the cities. In Oblivion, Fallout 3, etc, the cities that they made felt small, sparsely populated, and didn't feel alive at all. Assassin's Creed, on the other hand... well, despite the fact it's not a roleplaying game, the city FEELS like a city. And though in reality the NPCs are just wandering around aimlessly, it looks and feels like they're actually doing things and living their lives. Heralds shouting out information and shopkeepers trying to hawk their wares, it makes the city feel alive. No Bethesda game has ever come close to that. I'm hoping they'll LEARN some.

But I can't lie. Either way, I'll probably buy Skyrim and eat it up, just like I have with every major Bethesda title since Daggerfall. But I'd really like for them to learn from their mistakes and fucking improve.

[PeZook]

The fact you like the product and spend weeks playing it doesn't mean you can't point out the glaring flaws. I agree about Assassin's Creed: whatever the faults of the series are, the cities feel like they are actually concentrations of people going about their business, rather than backdrops for the player to look good against: proof that Beth concentrated on entirely wrong things (OMG EVERY CITIZEN WILL HAVE A SCHEDULE!!!) that didn't do anything to promote immersion (because it doesn't matter if every citizen walks back home in the evenings if there's a grand total of 20 citizens living in a huge metropolis )

It's not like the "schedules" actually did anything, since the NPCs only went through the motions anyway (stand at the store -> sit at a tavern -> sit at home -> repeat). The effect was that the Imperial City, centre of commerce and capital of an empire, felt like an oversized hamlet, whereas in Creed, there were crowds where expected, and in fact you had to plan with crowds in mind (look, here's a marketplace: there's crowds to hide in, but it's harder to keep pace when sprinting!), AND the "radiant AI" worked better (citizens actually ran to guards when they saw something horrible happen and the guards had to physically arrive at the scene) despite never being a central marketing point, crowds scattered when they saw you stab someone, gathered arond bodies "mysteriously" dropping off roofs, leapt on money you dumped...

It's so obvious Creed's devs gave their cities more thought than Beth ever could it's not even funny. I actually enjoyed just walking around Creed's cities soaking up the atmosphere - I never dad in Oblivion.

[Stark]

Because of the obsession with Radiant, everyone needed a home. This hard limits the population of anywhere because Beth hasn't heard of high-density housing; this is why there's nobody in Oblivion cities. Asscreed can just handwave and say 'see all those buildings? People live in them' and spawn atmospheric crowds as you move.

RPGs and run-em-ups have different requirements, and as Beth discovered years ago 'being any good' isn't a requirement for RPGs.

[CaptHawkeye]

Who wants to bet Beth is going to use the same ridiculous weight limits and inventory management system again?

[Stark]

You mean lists? Ugh. If ME2 taught us anything it was that absurd lists of shit were totally unnecessary.

I mean everyone but major developers knew that anyway but shit.

[Mr Bean]

You mean lists? Ugh. If ME2 taught us anything it was that absurd lists of shit were totally unnecessary.

I mean everyone but major developers knew that anyway but shit.

Says someone who does not build his own pillow fort from in-game pillows using the shitty first generation Havok physics where even light taps set small objects at 90 kph in a random direction.

Again if Bethesda would be smart they look at the top ten list over at TES Nexus and download the most popular inventory manage mod and build their in-game inventory of that example. No other game has as large and a dedicated a mod community that took your okay game named Oblivion and made it great through endless hours of feedback, trial and error and experimentation. And you don't even have to pay the modders, just take their creation add some of that special Bethesda magic (Re:Fuck it up a little) and bam your own inventory management system.

Also while your at it, look up some books on 18th century squaller if you want to build some nice lived in looking cities. Even the beggars live in huge houses in Oblivion, at least Morrowind had buildings of a more natural size and this was in a game with giant mushroom houses.

[Stark]

Do you mean 'squalor'? Because again, Radiant means that people want 'beds' that they need to 'own', and Beth were too stupid to either have people just hang around outside or have faction-owned beds to streamline the process. The Oblivion engine (Gamebryo, right?) is fundamentally broken, with poor decisions like this knocking-on into all kinds of problems. Why did levels even exist, outside of 'Bethesda are tards'? If Skyrim uses a retooled Oblivion engine (which seems likely despite what they say) expecting stuff like AssBros is futile.

This isn't entirely the fault of the engine of course; Beth games need huge open areas as well as dense cities. They should rent the Just Cause 2 engine.

[Artemas]

They should rent the Just Cause 2 engine.

Masterstroke!

Also, i'm really looking forward to the day when bethesda unfucks their games and does incorporate large generic crowds like GTA or AssCred.

[Stark]

As a thought experiment, imagine transplanting an Oblivion player into AssBros. After the initial 'whoa a lot of guys' response, the reaction will be 'holy shit these doors are textured on' and 'where are the sewers'. Different design goals are important to consider in comparisons.

That said, the Elder Scrolls games have always been sort of 'simulationist' RPGs; other games like Mass Effect etc have no problem with un-enterable buildings. If a goal of the game is to have each building be 'functional' with 'functional' people interacting with 'functional' objects and environments, obviously that's a lot harder than SPAWN 50 TOWNSMEN LOL. Its just that from a player perspective, the latter is far easier to make effective.

[Bakustra]

As a thought experiment, imagine transplanting an Oblivion player into AssBros. After the initial 'whoa a lot of guys' response, the reaction will be 'holy shit these doors are textured on' and 'where are the sewers'. Different design goals are important to consider in comparisons.

That said, the Elder Scrolls games have always been sort of 'simulationist' RPGs; other games like Mass Effect etc have no problem with un-enterable buildings. If a goal of the game is to have each building be 'functional' with 'functional' people interacting with 'functional' objects and environments, obviously that's a lot harder than SPAWN 50 TOWNSMEN LOL. Its just that from a player perspective, the latter is far easier to make effective.

Well, you could make something like that effective (even in the 90s there were games that did similar stuff with NPC scheduling) as long as you focused on bringing a relatively small area to life rather than the large high-fantasy areas that previous Elder Scrolls games used. Granted, this would probably annoy the established fanbase, but on the other hand, so would going the more traditional way, so any improvement will probably never really take hold.

Granted, even bringing a medieval-size city "to life" would be unconvincing without narrowing it still further, so this probably is less practical and more born from my own desires. Ah well.

[Stark]

Games like Witcher show that even in a traditional RPG sense (ie, low-population) it's not hard to bring a city to life. Beth games just take the worst option in all ways; they try to make it detailed and interactable, which means low-population and end up with empty, bland and buggy towns.

They haven't done a large area well since Morrowind anyway, and they use porting to do expansions, so the solution seems obvious.

[Bakustra]

Games like Witcher show that even in a traditional RPG sense (ie, low-population) it's not hard to bring a city to life. Beth games just take the worst option in all ways; they try to make it detailed and interactable, which means low-population and end up with empty, bland and buggy towns.

They haven't done a large area well since Morrowind anyway, and they use porting to do expansions, so the solution seems obvious.

For that matter, it's not like the "Radiant Tavern Experience" produces NPCs that do anything besides stay in one place. Really, the whole philosophy seems designed to show off the flaws and weak points of the system. I mean, going back to the (late) 90's, Ocarina of Time probably had about as many NPCs in Hyrule Castle Town as Oblivion did in a single town, and with much worse graphics, but it was far, far livelier because they all had things that they did. They didn't vary at all- the couple kept spinning in a circle, the kid chased the dog perpetually- but they had a little bit of visual personality that kept the area entertaining. Majora's Mask (late late 90s, I guess) had NPCs with their own schedules, but it limited the areas you could access in the town and kept Clock Town small. I don't know, it seems that if you've got limitations, then you should find a way to turn them into strengths.

[White Haven]

For me it comes down to a classic clash of writing versus technology. There's nothing wrong with not having the capability to do X in your game for technical reasons. Don't write it!. Can't handle enough people to make a big city feel alive? Don't set your game in the heartlands of the Empire. Can't handle scores/hundreds of people beating the shit out of each other at the same time? Don't write the finale of your game as an all-out war between the entire empire and the forces of ohfuck. Want to introduce an ammunition system in the sequel to a game that didn't have one? spend more than five minutes writing it and checking it for editorial consistency. Doom 3 was actually a really good example of not doing that wrong. The engine was horrible for anything wide-open, performance went to shit, so the level designers recognized that and built small, cramped areas with a lot of line-of-sight breaks so that the technical limitation didn't become apparent.

[Stark]

Yeah, and this is shown in F3; in a large, low-population map that has separate levels for locations, it works fine. You can't really blame the engine for the LOST ELVEN RUINS OF ANCIENT POWER AND MYSTERY being 20ft from the main gate of the centre of civilisation. If you can't do it, don't try. Technical limitations should shape the game, players shouldn't be expected to play lets pretend.

[Stofsk]

Yeah, and this is shown in F3; in a large, low-population map that has separate levels for locations, it works fine. You can't really blame the engine for the LOST ELVEN RUINS OF ANCIENT POWER AND MYSTERY being 20ft from the main gate of the centre of civilisation.

Hahaha

Yeah that's always a head scratcher. So are the dozens of abandoned forts that are all over Cyrodil. I always wonder why these forts are abandoned, where the fuck do the Imperial Legions sleep? But then the Imperial Legion seems to consist of 'a lone dude on horseback patrolling the roads'. No wonder the number of bandits, marauders, monsters and wild animals are in plague proportions.

If you can't do it, don't try. Technical limitations should shape the game, players shouldn't be expected to play lets pretend.

That's the biggest problem I had with Oblivion. It totally kills my immersion and suspension of disbelief. The gameworld feels huge, and it is, and there are hundreds of places to go (caves, forts, ruins and so on) but they all feel the same (one cave is pretty much the same as any other cave), and the cities feel more like large villages with walls around them. I can't wrap my head around it.

I don't even know if it's an engine limitation. Would it be so much of a stress on the system if they put in crowds where the market place is, or actually filled up the seats in the arena so it doesn't feel like you're playing gladiator for only a couple of dudes? The other issue is interactivity. You can talk to any NPC in the game, but you're limited to 'where are the shops' and 'hey know a good rumour?' questions. The problem is once you get an answer to the above two, you have literally no reason to click on an NPC in the game ever again, unless they're offering you money to do a job for them.