Skyrim is worse than Oblivion in every way

[codexian reject]

For example cell system is from morrowind time where upon reaching different cell you were greeted with loading screen, oblivion sometimes did it too on consoles or slower pcs.
Bitcher2 engine for example has streaming at its core and there are no cells to load, thanks to progressive and eddicient modern design Bitcher2 looked vastle better on consoles than skyrim.

Why the codex is full of ignorant fucks, that have no clue what they're talking about ?

Bitcher2 has similar streaming system to cry engine, where level assets are assigned to layers and level designer have to set up by hand trigger areas, to load/unload layers data. Remember these laggy, intestine corridor sections everywhere ? Where you had to walk for 20s and with slow as fuck contextual animations open two doors, or climb two rock ledges, or the intestine corridor/ pathway was just long as fuck without other atractions, or when upon entering an interior you had a moment of fade to black after sloooow animation. Yep, this is the "streaming system at the engine core, without loading screens" in action. Actual loading screens would be preferable over of this bullshit, since they are passive experience and with fast enough hardware, can be done away quickier

The very reason why Bitcher2 could look better on consoles, is due to lack of open world and cell streaming, which is best for an actual open world, where you are free to go wherever you want.
But since it's impossible for the devs to predict where exactly player will be 20s later, you have to store bigger area in the memory, hence the lower quality assets and more repetitive texturing.
BTW, you would never saw loading bars in Morrowind on PC upon cells transitions, even on release, if you had recommended amount of RAM and new HDD.

 

[Grinolf]

Hmm I remember reading somewhere that Oblivion's Rectal AI was so complex and advanced that the NPCs would live their life and interfere with the gameworld too much so they had to scale it back, is there any truth to it? I wonder what happened.

Standard PR bullshit? And gameplay footages, over which game journalists drooled so much, were probably scripted. Even now such claims would look too good to be true. And there is a difference between "scaled back" and "worse than in the first Gothic".

 

[hakuroshi]

True, it worked only as long as you (the player) could fill them yourself. Still when it worked player may have a blast not attainable even in MW.

The problem is that (unless you're the kind of person that posts oblivion roleplaying ideas on UESP) you didn't really get enough to work with.

I have to slightly disagree here. While mine best moments in DF were admittedly of somewhat LARPy nature, they were based on stuff actually present in the game however cursory. The game did not try to work against that experience. LARP in Oblivion requires doing things completely unsupported or absent from game concept

Because

True, at its best Daggerfall is monumental gameworld full of mystery, with deadly diseases, rich background mechanics (banks, diseases, holidays, trials, hidden witch covens, diurnal cycles, weather and seasons), labyrinthine dungeons you could get actually lost in, branching MQ with a lot focus on pretty low key stuff, like politics, awesome character and item creation plus delightful mechanical stuff like fireballs that were capable of knocking targets back and inflict additional damage by slamming them into walls (making Daggerfall's physics more relevant to gameplay than Oblivion's could ever hope) or climbing.
It was easily THE most ambitious TES game and one of the most ambitious cRPGs aver created.

So it boils down how jarring is for the player the other part of your statement:

At its worst, however, it was a massive chunk of nothing, with no detail nor any point to the existence of overworld, with the same handful of cities randomized and pasted all over the place, with dungeons being pointlessly contrived mazes of twisting passages all alike (with some aggravating trial and error lever puzzles thrown into the mix), majority of quests boiling down to going to X and killing/bringing Y regardless if this made any sense in given situation, sketchy background lore, and isolated bits of mechanics reduced to pointlessness (language siklls, all of them) or pure flavour (diseases via relatively easy healing spells, seasons not doing much to begin with, horse being carryable in your pocket as scale walls) surrounded by massive amount of nothing and bugs.

They happen to only irritate/amuse me, but individual mileage may wary up to the point of hating the game's guts (which a lot do). For me the worst DF offenses were gamebreaking level scaling after level 10-15 and post-Mantella disappointment.

The art of playing a TES game largely consists of been able to ignore it's fuckups without disruption either of the game or your sanity. DF could be run pretty neat on pure imagination, as it gave ample props for it and essentially require it to be truly enjoyable. MW already could not, but it was not necessary, which can not be said about Oblivious and debatable (but I won't do that) for Skyrim.

 

[Perkel]

For example cell system is from morrowind time where upon reaching different cell you were greeted with loading screen, oblivion sometimes did it too on consoles or slower pcs.
Bitcher2 engine for example has streaming at its core and there are no cells to load, thanks to progressive and eddicient modern design Bitcher2 looked vastle better on consoles than skyrim.

Why the codex is full of ignorant fucks, that have no clue what they're talking about ?

Bitcher2 has similar streaming system to cry engine, where level assets are assigned to layers and level designer have to set up by hand trigger areas, to load/unload layers data. Remember these laggy, intestine corridor sections everywhere ? Where you had to walk for 20s and with slow as fuck contextual animations open two doors, or climb two rock ledges, or the intestine corridor/ pathway was just long as fuck without other atractions, or when upon entering an interior you had a moment of fade to black after sloooow animation. Yep, this is the "streaming system at the engine core, without loading screens" in action. Actual loading screens would be preferable over of this bullshit, since they are passive experience and with fast enough hardware, can be done away quickier

The very reason why Bitcher2 could look better on consoles, is due to lack of open world and cell streaming, which is best for an actual open world, where you are free to go wherever you want.
But since it's impossible for the devs to predict where exactly player will be 20s later, you have to store bigger area in the memory, hence the lower quality assets and more repetitive texturing.
BTW, you would never saw loading bars in Morrowind on PC upon cells transitions, even on release, if you had recommended amount of RAM and new HDD.

Those areas you speak of were mostly created to catter consoles and those "transitions" took half a second compared to loadings in Skyrim on consoles and still game was capable of displaying much better looking env + more npcs on screen. That is not an opinion this is a fact.

As of morrowind i say bullshit. If you had only strong pc at that time maybe. I had mediacore PC back then and i do remember loading screens.
Bitcher 2 maybe wasn't open world but nothing stopped it from being one. Engine did allow to completely connect all zones if developers wanted it.

But hey defend old as shit Betsheda engine. It's not like they even use occlussion culling let alone allow to load more cells without crashing engine.

 

[codexian reject]

Disclaimer, I have not touched Oblivion, or Skyrim yet. You have a point about occlusion culling if the engine is still lacking it.
I was mostly refering to the part about about supposedly superior streaming system, being a reason for higher fidelity in assets.
Where it's mostly due to the fact that W2 consist of separate small areas connected by intestine loading sections that allowed it.
There is nothing advanced about W2 streaming, neither cells concept is outdated, how else are you going to stream data in a vast open expense ?

As for quality on PC, Bethesda won't bother to make high quality assets for PC when it's responsible for 10% of their sales.

 

[Perkel]

My point about superior streaming tech is valid because TB2 engine dynamically loads and fills as much as hardware allows it where in case of Skyrim it load squares.

So in TB2 case when you go down the road streaming tech only streams what is in view. It doesn't load whole square just because you are near it, it doesn't load grass you can't see and so on. Thanks to culling also it doesn't render anything that is not in view, no geometry, no shadows and so on. It only loads as much as it needs + a little bit more in case of player actually looking there.

This is why Loading and that shitty door mechanic is completely different. Loading means whole world beside actual interior you are in is unloaded (beside few last cells of outside world) meanwhile shitty door mechanic was created becaue consoles are dead slow and their bandwidth is terrible. Upon reaching those doors culling disables (as whole city is behind wall) and city loads up and you can see it if you have slow PC.

It does it because rendering env and so many characters on screen could blow up shitty console. Still in any case be it outside world, interior and so on TB2 engine destroys Skyrim graphically on same hardware that is why modern streaming tech is important.

Skyrim with modern streaming engine would allow for way more NPCs on screen so that siege of town would actually look like one instead of 5 mofos sieges.

It would also allow for linear loading of assets not chunks like in Skyrim which is a problem in Skyrim as huge part of land before you just pops out from low details instead of gradually changing single assets according to distance.

It would also allow for real time toolset like in UE4 or Cryengine.

 

[imweasel]

I love Bethesda and Skyrim.

You deserve the title "Ultimate Bethesda Fag". It wouldn't even be a punishment, you'd wear it with pride.

 

[imweasel]

So imweasel is baronjohn?

Nyes. Maybe. Most likely.

Who is baronjohn BTW?

 

[codexian reject]

Streaming levels from hard drive and culling invisible objects, or better lod system and other rendering optimisations are different things.
Culling or LOD system doesn't mean that the asset is streamed from hard drive, it waits in the memory, if it was being loaded and unloaded each time player move, or turn around it would be a slideshow.

Gamebryo does have occlusion culling. Bethesda rarely makes use of it because rendering lower LOD objects are not extremely costly.
On consoles LOD distances and draw distances and density of objects are so small, that there is less to gain that you may think. Crysis 1 on consoles doesn't have significantly better fidelity than Skyrim for example.
Also occlusion culling will be limited when you are looking down from a top of a hill btw, framerate has to be stable too and not plummet to a single digit in such occasion because you've relayed too much on culling when designing open world.
Bethesda games are optimised for consoles and they won't bother to put any effort in making PC version better, when it is 10% of their sales and people buy it anyway.

As for cells details pop in, details of unloaded cells are available only in lowest LOD detail, there is LOD system in action within loaded cells and you can increase an amount of loaded cells on PC.
Details of neighbouring cells don't pop-in in W2, because you can't look at an equivalent of "neigbouring cell" from a distance, since areas are walled off and separated by boring intestine sections where streaming takes place

 

[Cadmus]

Streaming levels from hard drive and culling invisible objects, or better lod system and other rendering optimisations are different things.
Culling or LOD system doesn't mean that the asset is streamed from hard drive, it waits in the memory, if it was being loaded and unloaded each time player move, or turn around it would be a slideshow.

Gamebryo does have occlusion culling. Bethesda rarely makes use of it because rendering lower LOD objects are not extremely costly.
On consoles LOD distances and draw distances and density of objects are so small, that there is less to gain that you may think. Crysis 1 on consoles doesn't have significantly better fidelity than Skyrim for example.
Also occlusion culling will be limited when you are looking down from a top of a hill btw, framerate has to be stable too and not plummet to a single digit in such occasion because you've relayed too much on culling when designing open world.
Bethesda games are optimised for consoles and they won't bother to put any effort in making PC version better, when it is 10% of their sales and people buy it anyway.

As for cells details pop in, details of unloaded cells are available only in lowest LOD detail, there is LOD system in action within loaded cells and you can increase an amount of loaded cells on PC.
Details of neighbouring cells don't pop-in in W2, because you can't look at an equivalent of "neigbouring cell" from a distance, since areas are walled off and separated by boring intestine sections where streaming takes place

They certainly won't fucking bother when even people here say shit like "It looks great, shut up ,fag." "It's the best they could do with that technology."
I blame the ad machine that is Bethesda and their fucking 5 stories tall posters.

 

[Perkel]

Streaming levels from hard drive and culling invisible objects, or better lod system and other rendering optimisations are different things.
Culling or LOD system doesn't mean that the asset is streamed from hard drive, it waits in the memory, if it was being loaded and unloaded each time player move, or turn around it would be a slideshow.

Gamebryo does have occlusion culling. Bethesda rarely makes use of it because rendering lower LOD objects are not extremely costly.
On consoles LOD distances and draw distances and density of objects are so small, that there is less to gain that you may think. Crysis 1 on consoles doesn't have significantly better fidelity than Skyrim for example.
Also occlusion culling will be limited when you are looking down from a top of a hill btw, framerate has to be stable too and not plummet to a single digit in such occasion because you've relayed too much on culling when designing open world.
Bethesda games are optimised for consoles and they won't bother to put any effort in making PC version better, when it is 10% of their sales and people buy it anyway.

As for cells details pop in, details of unloaded cells are available only in lowest LOD detail, there is LOD system in action within loaded cells and you can increase an amount of loaded cells on PC.
Details of neighbouring cells don't pop-in in W2, because you can't look at an equivalent of "neigbouring cell" from a distance, since areas are walled off and separated by boring intestine sections where streaming takes place

I don't get your point about mixing various things. LOD, streaming engine, occlusion culling, quality of assets, amount of assets etc. It is all TIED to each other.

Considering you stand on high mountain you wouldn't actually see much detail only lod2-3 details which would be less expensive than lod1 stuff you see often upclose. Occlusion Culling also works on distant details so for example thanks to OC you can actually render some shadows for far simple objects and cull rest you don't see (but i don't think there is much gain, mostly problems with flat 2D trees shadowing etc) So that example is imo bad. And in case of lower LOD object are not extremely costly. That is the point of Culling. Culling is used because you don't have infinite resources and in case of consoles EVERY bit is worth like sack of gold. If you have to decide get OC and gain more frametime for other things and more memory for other things VS not getting OC and not gaining anything i think choice is clear. Naturally OC isn't free as it needs to be implemented but for big studio working on console budget which will sell shit ton of coppies .... yeah.

Whole act 2 in Bitcher2 is full of open spaces that destroy Skyrim in complexity/quality of close assets AND draw distance, same as forest area in flotsam which also destroys comparable areas in Skyrim . This wouldn't be noticable in non streaming engine as in that type of engine everything is mostly loaded already in level but for streaming engine it is no small task and again it is on same hardware (x360) that is literally proof. Sure TW2 uses tricks like you said to mask for example city or tavern for console performance BUT so does Skyrim via its shitty loadings. So we are in situation where both games use streaming engines and both of them are comparable in cases of interiors and closes cities. And yet when you are in open area there is vast difference. In one case there is hardly any popin, great distance view, quality assets everywhere , good amount of NPCs, in other case you have clear popins of whole areas and mediacore art assets (from quality of asset not quality of art design side), and city sieges with 5 people.
TW2 already confirmed world of TW2 could be as big as they want or all acts could be connected to each other without any transition thanks to their streaming tech.

There is no doubt which game is technically better. That is a fact and it is clear as day

Skyrim does have things which are impressive like shit ton of object with which you can interact like spoons, books and so on. Or world in which you can throw a rock and there is good chance after a day that rock would lie there. That was to me always fantastic in TES series since morrowind and i wish devs would go into full ultima 7 rage mode with every item in game being destructible, salable and so on.

 

[DraQ]

You deserve the title "Ultimate Bethesda Fag". It wouldn't even be a punishment, you'd wear it with pride.

I was probably all hyped about Skyrim before it came out too.

hint

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...e-purchasing-tes-v-skyrim.65660/#post-1838014
Think again.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Various reasons. With increased size of the word bugtesting is harder, vo budget grows lineary with each npc and what is more important increased team size usually means that iterations of build slow down a lot, add communicating with team members in various time zones and you have script for disaster movie.

Nah, I've hired multiple teams in various time zones and it ain't that hard. VO buget shouldn't be that much considering Beth writes simple dialog and uses a handful of actors for an entire game... Besides, I'm not talking about expansion pack level quality of content here. That point is to release content and release it regularly. Keep people involved and paying you money. Then every once and a while you can release a big expansion pack - see The Sims 3. Though obviously not exactly like The Sims with new couches etc, but you know, dungeons, towns, landmasses, item placement - anything that's doesn't require a degree or creative writing. An American writes the NPCs and emails them the script and design requirements. Basic info for world layout is already there if they want landmasses. They have the software and the tutorials already so licensing wouldn't be an issue and training costs wouldn't be too much. Bah.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Oscuro's Overhaul or Francesco's mod.

OOO improves the main game quite a lot, but it also suffers from terrible HP bloat and constantly uses gimmicks like completely ridiculous damage reflection, regeneration and sky-high resistances when it comes to tougher enemies. It doesn't completely remove level scaling either, it just broadens the scale a bit so you don't always meet enemies that are exactly your level. Even with all the improvements it's just nowhere near enough of making Oblivion tolerable. To me Requiem seems like a much more complete and thoughtful overhaul when it comes to improving the most crucial gameplay mechanics.

Haven't tested Fransesco's mod.

OOO got a recent update (dec 2013) from people who picked it up after the author abandoned development so maybe it'll see some improvement.

Have you tried Tamriel Immersion Experience? Forgot about this one. Uninspired name, but the description makes it look like a more focused OOO.

 

[Carrion]

Have you tried Tamriel Immersion Experience? Forgot about this one. Uninspired name, but the description makes it look like a more focused OOO.

Nope, no Shivering Isles. That does look like it might make the gameplay more interesting than OOO, although it might also just become "Sneak Attack: The Game" based on that description.

 

[DraQ]

no Shivering Isles.

SI is the only thing in OB that isn't *terminally* boring.

 

[Carrion]

SI is the only thing in OB that isn't *terminally* boring.

Maybe I should get my hands on the Oblivion GOTY Edition as soon as possible then?


(Seriously, though, I read one Codex Let's Play of SI and it convinced me to never touch it even with a ten-feet pole.)

 

[DraQ]

SI is the only thing in OB that isn't *terminally* boring.

Maybe I should get my hands on the Oblivion GOTY Edition as soon as possible then?


(Seriously, though, I read one Codex Let's Play of SI and it convinced me to never touch it even with a ten-feet pole.)

Well, you have already touched the game proper.


It's like complaining about stale bread in your shit sandwich.

 

[imweasel]

You deserve the title "Ultimate Bethesda Fag". It wouldn't even be a punishment, you'd wear it with pride.

I was probably all hyped about Skyrim before it came out too.

hint

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...e-purchasing-tes-v-skyrim.65660/#post-1838014
Think again.

I guess "Ultimate Skyrim Fag" would actually more suitable, because you didn't like Oblivion for some reason. By the way, your exquisite taste for shit is quite remarkable.

But oh well, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I'll leave you to your white knighting. Carry on.

 

[DraQ]

Joined:
Jan 7, 2013

 

[DalekFlay]

No one, DraQ included, is saying Skyrim is the new RPG incline for a new generation. What we're saying is the game is much improved from Oblivion's utter shit looks, world and gameplay, and if you like action games it's worth playing. Anyone who disagrees with that is trying way too fucking hard.

 

[Zewp]

I guess he's gotta earn his KKK somewhere.

 

[AW8]

OOO improves the main game quite a lot, but it also suffers from terrible HP bloat and constantly uses gimmicks like completely ridiculous damage reflection, regeneration and sky-high resistances when it comes to tougher enemies. It doesn't completely remove level scaling either, it just broadens the scale a bit so you don't always meet enemies that are exactly your level.

Yeah, the ridiculously OP gimmicky enemies sounds like a correct description of OOO. I remember a friend telling me he had to cheat to defeat Mannimarco because of his immunities or something similarily OP. Still, as you say it improves the game an incredibly lot. The loot is also awesome, with handplaced unique items added hidden in various places, that really rewards you for searching through every nook and cranny.

I haven't played Requiem but it seems a lot more ambitious, with things like locking you out from using Aedric shrines if you're a thief or killing you instantly if you try to play Meridia's quest as a Vampire. Which is for the most part simply logical and what Bethesda would have done if they had catered to hardcore players instead of people uninterested in playing an RPG.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I don't consider the big bad boss of the mages' guild questline being immune / resistant to a bunch of stuff to be a gimmick. Besides by that point in the story the player really have some way of debuffing the enemy, or at least resisting the shit he'll throw at you.

btw, high infamy prevented you from using shrines in vanilla Oblivion (they even released a DLC with a shrine for evil characters)

 

[Commissar Draco]

Which finaly gives you reason to not steal everything which is not bolted to the flour and murdering NPC for shiny stuf; add the mod which makes the penalties for serous crimes in thousands of Septims and this game finally has some C&C worth speaking.