Skyrim is worse than Oblivion in every way

[markec]

haha... just watched a comparison between Skyrim and Oblivion and the guy basically said the same thing I mentioned previously: if he got the choice to play one of the games for the rest of his life, he'd go with Oblivion, because of the more fresh, green appearance of the environment.

Whoever thinks that Oblivion is better then Skyrim is a moron.

 

[DraQ]

Well then, show me some preceding games with as pretty environment as Oblivion's.

First thing first - what do you mean by "pretty"?

Do you mean aesthetic, or technical aspects?
Because I can grant you that - oblivion looked new when it was new. It nevertheless didn't really look good - indiscriminate bloom, covering indiscriminate specular, veiling already insufficient resolution textures and bumpmaps plus blurry and 'dull' water reflections.

In that case HL2 would probably be a good counterpart. It's not "pretty" as it goes for different kind of aesthetics, but it's an opposite of Oblivion in the sense it actually strove to make the best of its tech and it shown.
If you wanted an open world game, you have STALKER, although it released later, partly due to development hell. Overall a much better looking game, also featuring dense vegetation and bumpmaps, but also having stuff like really accurate lighting.

If you mean just aesthetics, adjusting for older tech, then Morrowind already had Oblivion trounced soundly, before it even started development.

Sure they put some effort into making it look nice

Well, no.
Not spending even the amount of time required to come up with the idea that horses shouldn't have that plastic sheen pondering selectively applying specular doesn't qualify as effort. Neither does just copypasting the same shit over and over to cover 16 or whatever number it was square miles of the game. And that's what oblivion is - a huge copypasta of already bland content. Everything in this game, from minute aspects like application of given kind of special effect to entire geographical regions is antithesis of effort.
The only thing putting effort into oblivion was your comp sweating fucking solder over running this unoptimized turd.

OTOH Skyrim, while never exactly looking new, just oozes effort, at the very least in terms of visual design. Visually pleasing and, more importantly, distinct vistas dot the entire fucking place, and continue to look good with changing lighting or weather, even the dungeons, rightly criticized for their linearity, manage to remain distinct and memorable despite asset reuse.

they remade their shitty engine far more than they did for Skyrim.

Maybe that's because Skyrim had to run on the same antiquated Xbox "red ring of death" 360, genius?

All the more reason to compare them side by side without needing to account for tech progress and while some minute technical aspects, like character model polycount or light source placement are a step backwards (presumably for performance reasons - running a 2011 game on half a decade old hardware), overall the game just crushes oblivion.

I can only think of Gothic 2 as being a nice open world as Oblivion's but it's not as pretty looking (forests and meadows in Oblivion are better than Gothic's)

Better in what sense? Greener? In that case games on c64 had even more saturated colours.

The Dunmer in the screenshots is literally just a human with blue skin.

Have you ever seen a human?

 

[Lemming42]

Have you ever seen a human?

Filthy creatures, I hope to never see another.

 

[Onholyservicebound]

What he means is that it looks like an Oblivion "human" with blue skin, and it does, it's pretty much identical to my first imperial character.

 

[Lancehead]

Bethesda did a good job of differentiating the Holds visually, including terrain, flora, fauna, and weathers. The game's landscape is very pretty to look at and pleasing to walk through with a lighting overhaul mod that reduces or removes the bloom and brings a better balance to the colours.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

What he means is that it looks like an Oblivion "human" with blue skin, and it does, it's pretty much identical to my first imperial character.

That's mainly because that dunmer is using the default imperial male hair. Unless you made a really feminine looking imperial dude, he probably looked different.

For comparison:

default imperial guy

Default dunmer guy

default altmer guy

-

bonus: dunmer through the eras

and a prosperous Imperial male

 

[Onholyservicebound]

Your default imperial dude is 50, I was probably 15 when I played this game, I had age slider to the lowest or close to.

Still just looks like a mongoloid blue person, although it's understandable, I'm pretty sure every humanoid race in game uses the same mesh/textures/etc; all characters are limited to shades of potato.

Skyrim look best, Morrowind okay, Dark elves in my game tend to look more like the Morrowind ones.

 

[Turjan]

What he means is that it looks like an Oblivion "human" with blue skin, and it does, it's pretty much identical to my first imperial character.

Not really. The main feature Oblivion used to define "mer" is the eye slant. So that Dunmer doesn't look like an Imperial. It's this "deer-in-the-headlights" default look on his face that makes him look so weird.

 

[Turjan]

bonus: dunmer through the eras

I still have to go with Morrowind for best-looking, as weird as it may sound. The Skyrim ones all have this parchment skin and go for a somewhat strained "gritty" look.

 

[Onholyservicebound]

Totally legit fantasy race.

 

[DraQ]

Bethesda did a good job of differentiating the Holds visually, including terrain, flora, fauna, and weathers. The game's landscape is very pretty to look at and pleasing to walk through with a lighting overhaul mod that reduces or removes the bloom and brings a better balance to the colours.

Actually, I don't mind Skyrim's bloom. It's not even close to Oblivion's "nearby nuclear explosion in megaton range" one.

It's also notable for not using DoF in retarded "durr hurr popagonist is myopic" manner, instead it generally only uses DoF in menus, underwater (to a stunning effect) and as addition to merely transparent fog when weather conditions limit visibility.
It's not exactly what DoF is *meant* to do, but it beats the fuck out of usual application, and marks Skyrim as particularly restrained and tasteful when it comes to use of visual gimmicks, in stark contrast to Oblivion.

See? Effort.

I still have to go with Morrowind for best-looking, as weird as it may sound. The Skyrim ones all have this parchment skin and go for a somewhat strained "gritty" look.

I actually consider Skyrim ones a really good implementation of that Morrowind look, and you can tweak the complexion in Skyrim.

I'm not sure if there are many faces in Morrowind you couldn't recreate in Skyrim.

 

[Turjan]

Totally legit fantasy race.

Well, it is. I'm not sure why you get your panties in a twist because the character is young (those bone features usually come out with age) and doesn't have any face paint. You don't find eyes like that on normal humans.

But you already told me that it's the "imperial" hair that puts you off. I tried one of Oblivion's ultra-fancy elf haircuts, but, although I don't remember the exact reason, decided against it.

 

[Turjan]

I actually consider Skyrim ones a really good implementation of that Morrowind look, and you can tweak the complexion in Skyrim.

I'm not sure if there are many faces in Morrowind you couldn't recreate in Skyrim.

For whatever reason, they somehow don't get the same feel across for me. Maybe it's the determined look in the first face of that comparison. The Skyrim dunmer in that line-up looks like a Morrowind dwemer to me.

 

[NotAGolfer]

Skyrim's landscapes are of course much richer in variety than Oblivion's and it takes much longer before hiking through them from dungeon to dungeon leveling up your character becomes boring whereas in Oblivion there's never a reason to do so, not even with OOO because the world map is fucking empty content-wise.
There is still not enough incentive to dungeon crawl in Skyrim though, the lack of worthwhile high level loot (besides daedra artifacts, but those are not enough) and the introduction of smithing are a problem.
TES games are generally very poor at tieing together character progression and loot progression and in Skyrim the implementation of smithing completely destroyed loot progression. Surprisingly, Oblivion with its bandits in glass armor somehow managed to be even worse in that regard.

 

[Onholyservicebound]

Well, it is. I'm not sure why you get your panties in a twist because the character is young

Well..I wouldn't really put it like that, but okay. Only reason I mentioned that is because he cited how girly you'd have to make your imperial to look like a dunmer, but the only reason the imperial in that screen looked that way was because of the age. A young imperial is just as full of lip and soft of complexion:

Spoiler

more valid comparison, is what I was trying to say.

Spoiler

I'll meet you halfway and say it was primarily in the profile that my imperial looked like the elf in the screen:

Spoiler

Spoiler

Still just looks like a mongoloid blue person

But you already told me that it's the "imperial" hair that puts you off. I tried one of Oblivion's ultra-fancy elf haircuts, but, although I don't remember the exact reason, decided against it.

It's only partly the hair, they are factually the same exact head modified with sliders, as opposed to Morrowind and Skyrim which have individual assets for each race. (OCO fixes that)
Personally I'm glad the art designers on Skyrim didn't share your sentiments on Legit fantasy races, too bad the same can't be said about ESO.

 

[Turjan]

Personally I'm glad the art designers on Skyrim didn't share your sentiments on Legit fantasy races, too bad the same can't be said about ESO.

Meh, I certainly didn't want to say that I'm a fan of Oblivion's character models. The only point I made was that there's still the eyes that look different from "human" in this char, probably better visible directly from the front:

Spoiler

He looks like a brother of that necrophiliac from Skingrad.

A young imperial is just as full of lip and soft of complexion

Oh, you don't say...

Spoiler

But that's enough of this now. I don't think it's a big secret that I like the Oblivion character models least.

 

[theSavant]

Skyrim's landscapes are of course much richer in variety than Oblivion's.

They are a bit better, mostly through the use of rocks and cliffs which allowed "more adventurous" appearance, but the dominant brown-gray color tone got old very fast. Also when I made a roundtrip I saw not much difference in at least 3/4 of the map. So ultimately it wasn't much better than Oblivion. Maybe Bethesda should make smaller maps with more distinct environments, e.g. paradisic places opposite to buttfuck ugly places etc.
Also the size of Skyrim's mountains was... uhm... small. Like irish mountains. They looked O.K. though, but never gave me the epic feeling which you see when looking on pictures with a Himalaya background.

 

[NotAGolfer]

Forests (both northern taiga and mixed woodlands), plains, tundra, Arctic climate with huge glaciers, swamps that actually look like swamps, that slough area, not to forget the mountainsides with their gradually changing climate. All these zones looked very different from each other, and also very real. There are landmarks too, like ponds, groves, castle ruins, wooden forts, shrines, tombs with large exterior areas, mills, farms, Legion and Stormcloak camps, inns, you name it. Also impressive natural vistas like that waterfall you can cross by balancing a fallen tree. Like in the Gothics it payed off to use all 3 dimensions for world-building.
The problem with Skyrim never was environmental diversity, but utilizing these landmarks in interesting, non-generic ways story-wise.

 

[Xeon]

There is a swamp area near Solitude where one of the Dark Brotherhood quest line takes place, Also the snowy areas especially where the Shrine of Azura. The hot springs[?] in your way to Riften. Also probably the hills[?] to the west

Also if you go the top of the world and use the clear sky shout it will look amazing IMO.

Edit:
What NotAGolfer saud!

 

[DraQ]

For whatever reason, they somehow don't get the same feel across for me. Maybe it's the determined look in the first face of that comparison. The Skyrim dunmer in that line-up looks like a Morrowind dwemer to me.

But there are many faces in Morrowind and there are many faces possible in Skyrim.
Saying that random face from one game doesn't match a random face from the other isn't really a convincing rebuttal.

There is still not enough incentive to dungeon crawl in Skyrim though, the lack of worthwhile high level loot (besides daedra artifacts, but those are not enough)

It's still vastly superior to Oblivion, though, with it's level scaling doesn't repeat the mistake of Oblivion and doesn't shower you with high level loot once you advance far enough, it merely allows you to find some, while still incentivizing being thorough.
That's vanilla - and then there are the mods.

 

[Turjan]

But there are many faces in Morrowind and there are many faces possible in Skyrim.
Saying that random face from one game doesn't match a random face from the other isn't really a convincing rebuttal.

True, but it's not a rebuttal, anyway. It's not about objective criteria in this case (and there sure is at least one butt-ugly Dunmer model in Morrowind), just a taste statement. It's mostly in the skin, as I said. Not sure why, but Bethesda overcompensated. Skin in Oblivion looked thin, smooth, puffy. Even the wrinkles looked very thin and superficial. In Skyrim, skin looks thick, with a deep texture, and pretty much always slightly dirty and frozen. You will probably be able to find an exception, but as a general rule, that's how it looks to me. The "rough and gritty" drove once over the faces. It's fine as an artistic statement. I'm not a fan, though.

 

[Lancehead]

Also when I made a roundtrip I saw not much difference in at least 3/4 of the map.

Plains of Whiterun, foggy weather of the Rift, sulphur pools of Eastmarch, swamps of Hjaalmarch, wrecked coastline of Winterhold, Dwemer ruins, Nordic ruins (especially the larger ones that house Dragon Priests), and more have distinct visual signatures.

That Oblivion bloom must have blinded you if you did not see much difference in at least 3/4 of the map.

 

[G.O.D]

Skyrim Dunmer generally are fine. Worst thing that happened to them is their VA ( "Ello guvnah. I sweah ive got nuffing to do wih it" ). Of all the shitty ones they had; what was wrong with the one from MW? I thought it fit them well.

 

[bloodlover]

What's the big fuss about how characters look anyway? Most people play the games 1st person and you can mod the shit out of Oblivion/Skyrimjob if you don't like the default options.

 

[Bahamut]

And a little reminder, Skyrim had actualy a fairy competent concept designer

Go check some Obivion art, theres only few of it, and it mostly standard banal shit boring