# Can Oblivion look any better? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 2, 2005, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-oblivion-look-any-better/297449 "2005-04-02T22:00:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2005, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-oblivion-look-any-better/297449/1 "2005-04-02T22:00:16Z")
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is one sweet-looking piece of RPG. I liked Morrowind, but I it was only moderately good looking and fairly rough on the hardware when I got it. I’m really not sure I’m going to be able to play this one on my current card! Realease info here and screenshot links below on the left: ```auto http://www.elderscrolls.com/games/oblivion_overview.htm ``` From the desk of Tod Howard, bolding mine: > [@](#): > > One major assumption everyone makes when we do a new Elder Scrolls game is that it will be small. Everyone thought this about Daggerfall and Morrowind as well when we talked about them “being more focused.” No Elder Scrolls game will ever be small. Ever. We make 'em big folks. We super-size them. Why? This is a question everyone asks us, “Why make them so damn big? You could make it small and most people still wouldn’t finish it.” Yippee! and: [quote] **Oblivion’s landmass is larger than Morrowind’s, but you can fast travel around much easier** [quote] HECK YEAH! ---
**Author:** ![SPOOFE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c5a1d2/32.png) [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2005, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-oblivion-look-any-better/297449/2 "2005-04-02T22:46:40Z")
Oh, Oblivion looks nice. Morrowind looked nice, too, at the time, but it looks dated compared to action-oriented games like HL2. That’s the way things go… RPG’s usually get their graphics scrimped on. Not that I mind all that terribly much. And Oblivion looks fuckin’ gorgeous. The best part is that they’re likely to use the same engine for Fallout 3 (Bethesda is now developing that one, too). I’m also interested to see how their AI system turns out. ---
**Author:** ![Brainiac4](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/brainiac4/32/3534_2.png) [@Brainiac4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Brainiac4)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2005, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-oblivion-look-any-better/297449/3 "2005-04-03T00:36:05Z")
Oblivion looks fantastic. Morrowind does too if you do some modifications. The problem is less the engine than the models and artwork that shipped with it. I don’t know if it was because it was being developed for Xbox and PC at the same time, but the quality of much of the character art is rather low. There are a couple of great fan projects (Faces of Vvardenfell, aka Better Heads, as well as Better Bodies) to upgrade the graphics. The difference is night and day. I think \*\*SPOOFE \*\*hit it – usually the effort in RPGs is expended on the system rather than the art. Half-Life 2 can be as precisely crafted as it is because it’s on rails, and because there is a small set of ways to solve problems. With an open-ended RPG like Morrowind, you need to allow for a lot of different ways to solve problems, and that takes work. Since your budget is limited, you have to choose – more time on art, or more time on system, storyline, quests and so on. I am really looking forward to this one. I hope my new system will be able to deliver decent framerates. I suspect I will need to go the SLI route – good thing I sprang for the better motherboard… 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Stark\_Raven\_Mad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Stark\_Raven\_Mad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stark_Raven_Mad)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2005, 2:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-oblivion-look-any-better/297449/4 "2005-04-03T02:37:50Z")
Morrowind was beautiful as a still. I’d actually stop to admire the scenery quite often during one of my long treks through the mountains or along the coast, before I got a fly spell. The character models and animations are a completely different matter, however. ---
**Author:** ![KGS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/90ced4/32.png) [@KGS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KGS)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2005, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-oblivion-look-any-better/297449/5 "2005-04-03T05:19:38Z")
I started playing Morrowind last month and the graphics looked amazing. Of course I’m a bit behind the gaming curve, the newest games I’ve played were made in 1998 or earlier, heh. That said, Oblivion looks astounding. Every blade of grass detailed…each leaf on every tree…it’s gonna take a monster video card to run at full detail!!! On the other hand, I’m disappointed the game only takes place in Cyrodil. When are they gonna make a game that encompasses ALL of Tamriel, from High Rock to the Black Marsh?? Maybe in TESV… ---
**Author:** ![SPOOFE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c5a1d2/32.png) [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2005, 10:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-oblivion-look-any-better/297449/6 "2005-04-03T10:01:24Z")
> [@](#): > > That said, Oblivion looks astounding. Every blade of grass detailed…each leaf on every tree…it’s gonna take a monster video card to run at full detail!!! I hope that Oblivion will take advantage of the Physics processing add-in cards that should be hitting store shelves this year. That’d allow them to do a LOT more with collision-detection, interactive environments, etc. > [@](#): > > On the other hand, I’m disappointed the game only takes place in Cyrodil. When are they gonna make a game that encompasses ALL of Tamriel, from High Rock to the Black Marsh?? Maybe in TESV… Man, I fear the day that Bethesda makes a MMORPG. Almost every RPG coming out these days is a MMO… fuck that shit. Single-player all the way… ---
**Author:** ![Brainiac4](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/brainiac4/32/3534_2.png) [@Brainiac4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Brainiac4)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2005, 12:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-oblivion-look-any-better/297449/7 "2005-04-04T00:27:32Z")
> [@KGS](#): > > On the other hand, I’m disappointed the game only takes place in Cyrodil. When are they gonna make a game that encompasses ALL of Tamriel, from High Rock to the Black Marsh?? Maybe in TESV… IIRC, Arena (the first one) did span the whole known world. The problem was that most of it was auto-generated and thus repetitive and boring. I prefer the Morrowind approach of hand-crafting the entire world. Yes, it’s just the one island – but you can spend hundreds of hours playing and still not see all of it. I hope Oblivion has the same loving attention spent on it. I’ll wait. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![SPOOFE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c5a1d2/32.png) [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2005, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-oblivion-look-any-better/297449/8 "2005-04-04T01:25:16Z")
Morrowind’s biggest lacking was view distance. They had this lush, well-designed world, but you could only see about a hundred feet of it at a time… Far Cry showed just how a huge draw distance could instantly make a game sickly immersive. I hope Oblivion’s distance is improved. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2005, 3:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-oblivion-look-any-better/297449/9 "2005-04-04T03:04:07Z")
> [@](#): > > On the other hand, I’m disappointed the game only takes place in Cyrodil. When are they gonna make a game that encompasses ALL of Tamriel, from High Rock to the Black Marsh?? Maybe in TESV… The day they get a staff of 1000 people and spend three years doing it. ---
**Author:** ![SolGrundy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bbce88/32.png) [@SolGrundy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SolGrundy)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2005, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-oblivion-look-any-better/297449/10 "2005-04-04T05:13:28Z")
> [@smiling bandit](#): > > The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is one sweet-looking piece of RPG. I liked Morrowind, but I it was only moderately good looking and fairly rough on the hardware when I got it. Put me down as “cautiously optimistic.” When I first saw the screenshots for _Oblivion_, I had the same reaction, “That looks great!” Then I started having flashbacks to the initial screenshots for _Morrowind_. And remembering that while the environments were as nice as you could find in a game at the time, the character models looked like ass. And that while many of the environments were just beautiful-looking, an awful lot of the game was spent amidst a bunch of gray rocks in the middle of a sandstorm. What worries me about _Oblivion_ is that as pretty as the buildings look, they also look very standard. Kind of like a Thomas Kincaide painting. We’ve got some old castles and churches, some pretty standard medieval weapons (all with that bloom effect which seems to be this year’s equivalent to the lens flare fad), and a minotaur which looks just plain goofy. And a couple of characters that are a lot higher-poly, but still have that same blank stare. I don’t see the equivalents of the weird shell architecutre, or the giant beetles, or any of the fantastic stuff from _Morrowind_. Love or hate _World of Warcraft_, you’ve got to admit that it has a sense of style to it. It’s fairly traditional orcs and elves and fantasy stuff, but looks interesting. I’m not getting that from _Oblivion’s_ early press. “It’s a really big game world” isn’t enough to impress me. If I’m going to be spending as much time in _Oblivion_ as I did with _Morrowind_ (around 40 hours, if I remember correctly), I want it to be interesting. ---
**Author:** ![SPOOFE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c5a1d2/32.png) [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2005, 7:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-oblivion-look-any-better/297449/11 "2005-04-04T07:34:00Z")
All I know is that I’ve never seen a forest as beautiful as those in these early screenshots. That’s good enough for me. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2005, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-oblivion-look-any-better/297449/12 "2005-04-04T13:03:37Z")
> [@](#): > > What worries me about Oblivion is that as pretty as the buildings look, they also look very standard. Kind of like a Thomas Kincaide painting. True, but if you notice, we’ve only seen actual screenshots yet from one dungeon, one village, and one ruin. I’ll give you the Thomas Kinkaid look, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing. It is true that it seems this will be a slightly more generic fantasy setting than Morrowind, graphic-wise, but the strength of the elder scroll series seems to have been in making the world come alive rather than exotic housing tastes. Besides, you now Ald-Ruhn was always covered in sandstorms so you never saw anything anyway. We haven’t seen diddly from the capital of Cyrodil itself yet. I’ll give you the minotaur, but have you seen that deer?