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Bethesda bashing thread

DraQ

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I'm not sure what to compare Arena and Daggerfall against, but Morrowind looks like shit, Oblivion looked good (although the horrible post processing did it's best to make it look horrible) and Skyrim looks either bad or terrible depending on the location.
:hmmm:

You're a fucking waste of eyes.

Edit:
Note that I'm addressing only the part of your post concerning visuals.
 
Last edited:

DraQ

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Sorry, yeah, Morrowind and Skyrim both look absolutely fantastic.
Well, Morrowind has superb art direction, lots of detail and at the time it impressed quite a few people with it's (fake, but convincing) reflective water that reacted to stuff like rain and characters.

Skyrim was technologically backwards from day one but it used it's tech in a clever way to create quite impressive visuals (while cutting corners wherever it could to afford that) and has art direction that's at worst ok at best really fucking good (environments, fire atronachs).

Both did a good job conveying atmosphere and surprising player with unique environments. Morrowind additionally did a stellar job abstaining from typical tokenized vidyagaem graphics to convey tons of hidden meanings (given context) with many of its meshes, textures and clutter arrangements.

In the end graphics is only as good as what it manages to convey - if it makes you"whoa" and/or makes you feel like the place it's supposed to represent, then it works and is good. If it does not, it is not (it extends to other means of expression as well - for example PS:T's Mortuary was just stellar combination of isometric environment graphics and evocative descriptive text).
Oblivion failed this test spectacularly unless it specifically meant to convey absurdly colourful and shiny place where the entire population suffers from gross facial deformities.
Then it promptly ran out of conveyable material by the time you've been to your first ruin and maybe visited a single oblivion gate.

The expansion fared much better as it had art direction and diversity capable of instilling at least some sense of wonder but it still suffered from poor use of graphical capabilities.
 

Lemming42

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We made the distinction between art direction and technological graphics earlier in the thread, the post you quoted was a response to part of a discussion spawned by my reply to Frozen82 who said:

I wasn't talking about art direction.
When each of TES game(s) (plural is kind of mandatory because its the same game over and over and over...like the engine) came out it was at least pushing the hardware of present day.
Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout and to certain extent Skyrim where visually top games of their time. They didn't look dated.

Nobody ever criticized the art direction of any of the TES games, except Oblivion in commenting on how it wrecked the technically impressive aspects of that game.
 

DraQ

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We made the distinction between art direction and technological graphics earlier in the thread, the post you quoted was a response to part of a discussion spawned by my reply to Frozen82 who said:



Nobody ever criticized the art direction of any of the TES games, except Oblivion in commenting on how it wrecked the technically impressive aspects of that game.
You said that Morrowind looks like shit and that Oblivion has ever looked good. Even setting aside art direction there is more to graphics than just polycounts, and shaders - in the end good graphics is an effective graphics and effective graphics tends to age well as well. Oblivion was anything but effective - sure it used the best and newest effects but did so with remarkably little impact on anything else than framerate and player's retinal health.
Good looking graphics needs to look good, not just have hardware requirements as if it did.
 

Lemming42

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You said that Morrowind looks like shit and that Oblivion has ever looked good. Even setting aside art direction there is more to graphics than just polycounts, and shaders - in the end good graphics is an effective graphics and effective graphics tends to age well as well. Oblivion was anything but effective - sure it used the best and newest effects but did so with remarkably little impact on anything else than framerate and player's retinal health.
Good looking graphics needs to look good, not just have hardware requirements as if it did.

I agree, but polycounts and shaders are exactly what we were talking about, or at least that's the way I interpreted it from Frozen's comment about "pushing hardware". Morrowind's art and style direction is superb and Skyrim's is good at times but I don't think it's unreasonable to say either of them were technically dated at the times they were released, nor is it unreasonable to say Oblivion was technically impressive (but ultimately looked worse than Morrowind or Skyrim due to absolutely no attempt at art direction or a style of any kind).

The argument was that people only liked TES games for graphical superiority and being cutting-edge technologically for the time they were released, which I completely disagreed with and pointed to Morrowind and Skyrim being completely non-cutting edge as examples.
 

Avin

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Spend some years out and we have a Bethesda bashing thread??????????

It's good to be back.
 

DosBuster

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Polycount really doesn't matter that much, for example, in Metal Gear Solid V the poly count is actually quite low, seriously, take another look. It's all about Effects and Lighting.
 

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