Skyrim - First "In-Game Look" Coming

[RPGWatch]

Hmm...there's a countdown at Bethsoft's Elder Scrolls site promising "the first in-game look at The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim".

There's a desktop wallpaper, while you're there. Only 2.5 hours to go!

[Topken]

Heres the video for people who cant get on the site.

[YOUTUBE]JSRtYpNRoN0[/YOUTUBE]

[Taluntain]

Not bad... shame there's so much reused material and relatively little gameplay shown, but it's a start.

[Topken]

I like the whole dual wielding a staff and sword bit personally. glad to see you can do that. the magic system interests me as well considering you can now combine your right and left handed spells into a new one.

[Rawgrim]

Graphics looks amazing. Sounds like Max von Sydow is doing the narrating for this game.

[henkie]

It's gratifying to see that Bethesda are continueing their proud tradition of making the ground textures look like complete ass. Rocks (for instance at 0:38) and the pavement look the same as in previous games (and not even then could they be considered good), and the water (1:25) looks positively terrible.
I wonder if the animations will also still be terrible; it's sort of hard to tell from this trailer.

Graphics are not the most important thing, but considering the direction they've taken their gameplay to in their previous games I'm not too optimisitic about that either. And it's basically all we've got to talk about at this point - aside from what seems to be a rather generic fantasy story.

[Morgoth]

Good thing no one is stopping you from writing your own shaders and animations then...

[Marceror]

@henkie, in spite of the fact that I have 20/13 vision, I'm simply not seeing the "complete ass" in the ground textures that you are. Perhaps I just have lower standards, but I paused on those ground textures for a good while, and they look fine to me. At 0:38 I see snow covered ground with some patches of grass visible and a fine layer of mist over it all. Were it not for your comment, I never would have given that environment a second thought.

I seem to recall some pretty significant negativity from you toward the visual appearance of Dragon Age 2 also, which I'm personally becoming increasingly pleased with. So either you have unrealistically high standards, or I've just never lived, where good graphics are concerned at least.

Can you cite an example of a game that looks fantastic to you, so I can take a look for my own comparison? Really, there must be some class of game out there that I've not played, and therefore, I don't know how bad I have it. I don't touch FPS games, for example, so maybe there are some graphical phenomena’s out there that I'm not paying attention to.

[henkie]

My negativity on DA2 was mostly centred around the poor UI and the apparent lack of zooming out option. UI can be very bothersome because it is in your face the whole time, but is not directly related to the graphical prowess of a game. The zooming out is for me more a gameplay enhancement and I must admit I do like to look at the action from high above, it just looks better to me that way and you have more overview of what's going on.

As for the graphics of Skyrim, I must admit that if I were playing the game, I would probably not even have noticed the things I mentioned previously, with the possible exception of the water animation. It's just that I read about people mentioning these things (in general, not just this trailer specifically) and so I start to notice it myself as well, which leads to what probably could be called overanalysis of these kind of trailers.

Another aspect is that the more realistic the graphics become, the more the differences to real life become noticeable, the so-called uncanny valley effect. For me, this is especially strong for animations. That's why Oblivion's wooden animations bugged me out and that's why it always bothered me that in DA:O mages would have the same walk animations as fighters, which made mages with their weapon out look like geriatric bandy legged sailors.

However, if the graphics are not as good, the animations don't bother me that much anymore. For instance, I can play Deus Ex and not be bothered by the wooden animations one bit, because the it's not that realistic.

I can't really point out a game that I think looks fantastic. Probably because I don't play many new games nor do I play the games that have the best graphics. The closer it gets to realistic graphics, the more I compare it to reality and so see the flaws. But as an example, I can say that STALKER: Call of Pripyat has very good lighting, but conversely has poor animations.

That reminds me, actually, the trailer shows a shot in a valley, but it all seems rather evenly lit. Like there's a very diffuse light source somewhere. I guess terrain throwing shadows won't be in Skyrim either?