Gods: Lands of Infinitron
How come you guys call it Infinitron? When I played it, it was called Lands of Infinity. Good game too.
Oblivion in particular and Bethesda in general only show the power of good marketing. It also appeared in a favorable scenario for them, so much so, that people don't even mind Bethesda's generally shitty DLCs. Ultima 9 and MM9 came out when crpgs were going through a material and creative crisis in the mainstream eyes, so for them half of the battle was already lost.
Oblivion's success was a freak I don't think is explainable by any single factor.
It was a combination of hype, track history, being flagship title on a new major platform and herd instinct in the context of fending off cognitive dissonance and post-purchase rationalization.
Without this pile-up of factors it probably wouldn't have succeeded.
Then, after this bizarre Rube Goldberg machine lifted it, mods helped keep it up.
What are you guys blabbling about?! Oblivion sold like hot cakes because it had the best graphics of any game at the time. People were posting screenshots on every forum I visited and everyone was going nuts over how pretty it was. Graphics > EVERYTHING in modern gaming.
It had? Odd.
Sure, some things about it were technically impressive. Some were even genuinely good looking (Ayleid ruin(s), some outdoor vistas that managed to hide all the visual problems - in particular distant land looking hideous thanks to aforementioned low texture resolution). But overall it was all smeary, hideously low-res textures, characters looking like potato-men with renal failure suffering from severe anaphylactic shock, visibly repeating foliage, thermonuclear level bloom and tons of misapplied effects and filters (EVERYTHING must be shiny and specular). Overall it was very limited visually, with little detail and looked even worse in motion, courtesy of hilariously misbehaving physics engine.
Half-Life 2 before it already looked better, thanks to more detail, better crafted environments, clever use of effects and more robust lighting system.
So did STALKER after it with its fully dynamic lighting, crisp textures and vegetation reacting to all sorts of air movement.
And then there came Crysis.
In the end any graphical potential Oblivion had was not ahead of the curve and it mostly squandered it all on making every rock bloomy and shiny.
It's kind of opposite than with Skyrim which was technologically dated on arrival (having to run on the same Xbox "RROD" 360 that ran Oblivion half a decade earlier), but managed to look impressive because of frugal and clever use of its limited assets.
Yes, it looked good on promo shots, but few games can't be made to look good if you carefully set up your shots, even without doctoring them or using "special" game version which actually did happen with Oblivion:
Hence the "hype" part.
I can't when it comes to Oblivion. It was a turning point in gaming.
* turding point.
That's what I meant. And Morrowind was a part of that. I have a theory on all this and those two games are key to how the games industry is today.
'Your' theory... :
Time-stamped it at Polygons for you.
I personally dislike most historically polygon-based games, but that's a different topic.
It's pretty amusing in this vid how Unreal is used to showcase HW acceleration even though, while it obviously used it and used it well, it also managed to deliver almost as impressive looking graphics using software rendering (in fact I had trouble confirming it was actually using acceleration in the embedded vid) - it was just as much a triumph of HW acceleration as the last epic "FUCK YEAH!" of unaccelerated software rendering.
Anyway, any vid showcasing the development of 3D graphics is incomplete without Frontier and TN:SFC.
Also, do note lack of Morrowind - apart from nice if faked reflective water it was perfectly baseline visually, it simply looked impressive because of good art direction.