[Farid]

Some are new and some are probably not. But I didn't remember seeing them posted here, anyway here we go:





No hate, no snide remark, no spin...
It was hard to accomplish, though...

[pc999]

Incredebly really.

PS:
Mods-can I post here the new ss from Too Human Because I dont know if it will be relaesed in PC too, and I am not sure here (if I can) should I put it.

[Ostsol]

I think they're going overboard on the bloom. . .

[Crusher]

I don't trust any screenshots out of that company. Morrowwind looked pretty good too, until I played it.

[John Reynolds]

Originally Posted by Crusher

I don't trust any screenshots out of that company. Morrowwind looked pretty good too, until I played it.

??? I don't remember any huge disparity between pre-release screenies and the actual game.

Looks like they haven't yet implemented whatever shadow tech. they're shooting for.

Edit: the pissed-off demon emerging from the herpes-scorched vagina screenshot looks good. 8)

[Diplo]

Originally Posted by Crusher

Morrowwind looked pretty good too, until I played it.

Morrowind looked great (for the time) when I played it. I remember being in awe of the water effects and the real-time weather cycle.

[Crusher]

The graphics in the game looked just like the screenshots, and if the only reason I played morrowwind was to take screenshots to look at, that would be fine. Unfortunately it was sold as a "game", and the "game" aspect of it I found to be severely lacking.

As good as characters and NPCs looked in the screenshots, the animations made all of them look twice as bad. The fighting was ackward. And worst of all, their "do whatever you want" approach really made it so that all of the development effort seemed to be put into duplicating bunch of generic content that you can do over and over, but has very little overall depth or meaning. You might stumble across a storyline they threw in haphazardly somewhere, but they didn't want to limit your experience by providing anything too interesting that would encourage you to actually progress towards some kind of goal.

[John Reynolds]

Heh, so much for 100% hate free. :P

[Crusher]

Originally Posted by John Reynolds

Heh, so much for 100% hate free. :P

Well, at least I'm not hating on the game in the topic

[Richard]

Originally Posted by John Reynolds

Looks like they haven't yet implemented whatever shadow tech. they're shooting for.

The game is still scheduled to have shadows, right? :P

Some of these I've seen before but it's always a pleasure to look at them. I agree with Ostol but I'm sure we'll be able to toggle the bloom.

[ANova]

Looks good, but not incredibly impressive. I still have not seen anything that's as good as UE3's demos have been.

But again, graphics are only one third of a game imo.

[Farid]

Originally Posted by ANova

Looks good, but not incredibly impressive. I still have not seen anything that's as good as UE3's demos have been.

Well, you have to consider the fact that Bethesda continue to use the Gamebryo Engine (Version 2 now), which is, arguably, far from being the best engine around. Everybody still remember Morrowind and its Back-to-Front rendering.

[jvd]

Don't forget that this tittle will be out on xbox 360 and pc in november / december . The first unreal 3 engine game isn't supposed to hit till 2006 march time frame and the next one in that summer .

[Guden Oden]

UE3 games may look purtier, but if one was to make a game the size of Elder Scrolls with the detail level of the gfx seen in UE3 demos so far, it would take hundreds of manyears worth of artists to finish it.

I really like the dynamic equipment system on enemies, one goblin with a leather facemask and chestplate, the other with what looks like that chitin armor from Morrowind... Now, if they could stop clothes (hair, beards etc) from clipping into one another or armor details, that'd be even better.

[poopypoo]

/me excited!!!11

though... here's my little bit of hating. morrowind was big and immersive, for sure, but the game really didn't come into full bloom until the mod community fixed all the generic NPC dialogue with unique (or semi-unique) speech. Remember Ultima, back when it would trudge along every year, looking like absolute rubbish, but chock to the brim with good dialogue (not that it was ever perfect), and we loved it, just cos that's how RPG's were? I really wish they could adhere to that more. I really don't want to have to buy a new graphics card to play Oblivion. I want to just be happy to find new towns in the far reaches and not be like... ahh, so town Z has clothier B, armorer D, and enchanter A...

[Diplo]

Originally Posted by Crusher

Unfortunately it was sold as a "game", and the "game" aspect of it I found to be severely lacking.

Morrowind, without doubt, had plenty of flaws but the sheer scale of it's ambition won me over. Oscar Wilde once said, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars". Morrowind was looking for those stars. Gimme failed ambition over generic averageness any day!

[Farid]

Originally Posted by Diplo

Gimme failed ambition over generic averageness any day!

Give me successfully realized reasonable ambitions over botched and half-assed sky's the limit dreams, any day.

No hate! No spin zone!

[Chalnoth]

I enjoyed Morrowind. It had its flaws, but it was still a hugely addicting game for many people (myself included). The expansion packs also tackled many of the biggest problems of the original game, thus making it quite a bit more fun as a whole.

The reason I'm pretty loyal to these developers is that they really seem to be dedicated to producing games with the same core purpose, but iteratively improving upon the weakest parts of the previous games.

Morrowind, for instance, did away with the randomly-generated content in Daggerfall (this was the single largest difference), while updating the game dramatically.

The Tribunal brought with it a much more involving storyline, as well as a couple of side stories, fixing one major flaw of Morrowind (the majority of the content was rather generic). Bloodmoon expanded upon this and really creates a new world to explore (albeit smaller: it is, after all, just an expansion) that really has a whole lot more personality than Morrowind.

And now, with Oblivion, it seems like the developers are again tackling the largest shortcomings of the previous game: the world was sterile, the combat was boring, travelling could take a long while. The developers have been pledging to directly tackle these shortcomings, and past history tells us that they'll do a good job at it.

But, I'm sure that Oblivion will have its own share of shortcomings. At the same time, it should still have a whole lot going for it, just as Morrowind did and Daggerfall before it.

[L233]

Morrowind was an abomination of hyperlinked boring and repetitive dialogues, worthless quests, a broken character system, non-existant game balance, a unbelievably bad combat system and shoddy artwork. But it was one of the first game that had DX8 pixelshaded water (aka mercury water), which really showed off Bethesda's mad sk1llz at copy&pasting code from Nvidia's dev rel page.

I like the screenshots. They look great, but given the Bethesda's track record of truly shitty and buggy games, the quality of the visuals prolly won't help.

[passby]

Now let's not get too worked up here. Elder Scrolls offers a type of gameplay that some people really like, and some really hate. I belong to the latter. However I think the 'other camp' certainly have a right to their preferences. I'll suggest not debating whether it is 'good' or 'bad', since this is very much a personal preference thing.

[Windfire]

I loved Morrowind and Oblivion is without-a-doubt the #1 game I'm looking forward to.

I was a big fan of the Ultima games (clear back to Alkalabeth, Ultima I & II on my Apple ][+) and it seems like these games are logically where that franchise could have been if it continued--at least in terms of fun.

Later,
Steve

[egore]

According to the Elder Scrolls web sight those are XBOX 360 screen shots. I wonder how smoothly that game will play on the XBOX 360.

[Sxotty]

I loved morrowind simply because it was big and looked nice. I felt like I was exploring. I tried gothic2, but I didn't get far enough to get a viewpoint. Anyway I do agree that morrowing suffered from terrible animation, and bad dialogue. But to me the environment is one of the most important aspects so I was ok with crappy npcs.

[Moloch]

I thought morrowind was gonna be awesome, but I was bored out of my mind.
NWN Oc was the same way, but the expansions fixed the boredom, the morrowind expansions were still boring to me.
But I'll give Oblivion a look.

[jimpo]

I just don't get HDR. A heavy performance penalty for an out-of-focus soft porn look? I hope it goes out of fashion soon.