They have got to be joking. These better be 360 screenshots. And the PC version better have actual high-rez textures.

Lol you’re doing it again Alaric although these probably are console screenies I wouldn’t be expecting the PC version to be much different, if anything I’d expect to see less compression artifacts and maybe slightly more detail in the post processing (particularly the shiny surfaces) and less popup in the distance and other than that a pretty parallel experience to the console versions.

This is after all a multiplatform title not a PC exclusive and besides, you know deep down you’re gonna love it even if it looks like crap just because it’s Elder Scrolls

Look on the bright side- at least they’ve dumbed it down (sorry, i meant streamlined) so that even you grandma can play it. It’s all about making it more “accessible”, not enjoyable, after all.

Kahless, are you seriously saying that PC graphics are not significantly better than console graphics? Please, give me a break. Even when Fallout 3 first came out, on the PC it looked leaps and bounds above both the 360 and the PS3. That’s BEFORE custom texture packs and other mods. The difference was so vast and profound in fact, that I used it to bring Matthew Booth back to the PC side.

In October it will be 3 years since Fallout 3′s release. PC have made TREMENDOUS progress since then. Consoles… umm… yea…

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/06/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-pc-to-get-mod-tools-high-res-textures-and-upgraded-interface/

Going to have to go with Alaric on this. Those screenshots are horrible (if from a PC). One would think that if a developer were going to be showcasing screenshots of a new title in a series – that has always been better on a PC – they should be trying to cater to the highest-caliber platform.

I’m not saying the game won’t look good on a console. Console games are continually pressing the envelope of what they are capable of. But after the modding community has consistently shown Bethesda how to properly make models and textures, I’d hope for more from them.

I just upgraded my system – will be upgrading my video car – and if I buy this title and this is the quality of graphics I’m cursed with, I will kill a kitten. Alaric’s system is higher performing than mine so his reaction would be even more justified.

The point is that I just bought ES: Oblivion GOTY which is 2 years old and it’s almost as good looking as this. Fallout 3 with simple modding is on-par with these graphics, and that game is almost 4 years old. No one can deny that Bethesda employs artists that are capable of more which only leaves one option, someone at Bethesda is purposefully lowering the PC quality for economic or political reasons.

Alaric, correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t the console/PC versions use different game engines and rendering? In the case of multi-system releases, I’m wondering what it costs developers each time they have to rework a game for an additional platform.

The last two PC games I bought around the release date were F3AR and Red Faction. Each of those are obviously made for consoles then given a half-a$$ makeover to function on a PC. Since I can now use DX11, I’ll revisit them both to see if there are any improvements in graphics, but that won’t fix the menus and options that are obviously designed for thumbstick controllers and console-limited options.

Sorry, Alaric was correct. Fallout 3 will be 3 years old, not 4.

The PC, Xbox and PS3 versions of fallout/oblivion all use the gamebryo engine which as of fallout 3 was essentially the same on all formats (Oblivion used shader model 3 on 360 and shader model 2 on PC but Fallout uses 3 on all formats). So similar in fact it was possible to copy resources from the consoles into the PC game including save games and objects (not possible to other way around because of the 360′s authentication system and encrypted HDD)

Skyrim uses a new crossplatform engine.

The point I’m making isn’t to do with how powerful PCs are compared to consoles, that issue isn’t relevant, what is relevant is that when making a crossplatform title you want the art assets and sounds and such to be more or less identical on all the formats otherwise instead of making one crossplatform title you are making 3 or 4 different games needing 3 or 4 times the budget, manpower and time, that is just stupid.

The PC version will be noticeably less compressed, will probably have increased draw distance, will probably have a different user interface and that’ll be about it unless Bethesda are prepared to spend smegloads of money redesigning all the textures in higher resolutions, reworking all the wireframes and rewriting swathes of code in order to make less profit per unit sold on PC.

The only way this will be the way you want it is if Bethesda designed all the assets for PC and scaled them down for the console versions, which they “might” have done but even then what you’ll see will be more of a case of less compression artifacts on PC rather than a marked increase in resolution. Obviously the PC version will be able to run at any screen res you want rather than the 720p the consoles are stuck with and of course the 3rd party mod community will no doubt busy themselves adding no end of higher resolution assets that Bethesda would be stupid to do themselves.

PC exclusive titles are where PC gamers should be expecting the ultra high res stuff and the fancy shader model 5 effects etc etc not crossplatform titles.

@Kahless – Given what you said about FO3 and it’s engine, that explains why most of the multi-platform games that I’ve purchased for the PC seem like console games with a keyboard and mouse. Honestly, I’ve never taken the time to dig into the details of what engines a game uses – until recently. I typically just set the video settings to as high as possible while still maintaining an acceptable framerate.

I was reading about the Frostbite 2 engine for Battlefield 3 and it sounds like that engine is designed to be scaled between PC and consoles. But I assume that’s just mostly different settings for things like environment destruction and on-the-fly rendering? Whereas the model textures and wireframes are essentially the same between the different platforms?

I’m playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution now, and at 2560×1600 with all the graphical settings maxed out, it looks nothing like the console version. You’d never even be close to confusing the two. Same engine, yes, but it was heavily modified for the PC so it included a lot of DX11 bells and whistles, as well as the high resolution textures etc.

Sounds like I’ll be playing Deus Ex then. The console demos at E3 weren’t that hot.

With any rule there’s always an exception and Deus Ex is one of those, but you still can’t expect every developer to do the same, it depends a lot on which version they invested the most of their development resources on, sometimes this is the PC other times it’s one of the two major consoles. Deus Ex was very much a PC aimed title (even though they decided to change the FOV last minute) and it’s predecessor was a PC exclusive title with distinctly PC focussed gameplay (although the PS2 version wasn’t all that bad albeit an after the fact port)

In regard to frostbite 2 it will likely have better destructible environments because the CPUs in modern PCs can handle more calculations per second than their console counterparts (if you have PhysX then that effect is magnified again) textures are usually one or two notches up the LOD scale on PC and the “less looked at” areas get better textures too because the PC has more available texture ram (what you don’t get is double the resolution) and suffer less compression for the same reason (texture compression is still used on PC but PCs have access to better algorithms for this resulting in less loss of colour etc etc) and you can usually expect more detail in the post process effects on PC due to PCs having more capable hardware for this feature (as well as more memory for the shaders to run in and more shader cores on the GPU to process them) Wireframes are generally identical since the triangle draw rate of GPUs hasn’t increased all that much in the last few years with greater emphasis being placed on pixel shaders, the 360 can render 500 million triangles per second at peak rates (can’t remember the PS3 spec for this but it wont be much different) and most PC GPUs don’t do much more (although with hardware tessellation now available in Dx11 class GPUs geometry rendering will go up again) in fact they don’t even bother to tell you the triangle render rates on the packaging of GPUs anymore.

Frostbite 2 however and it’s flagship title Battlefield 3 is a PC baby, it’s a PC game that is also on consoles but it’s home is definitely the PC so I’d expect Frostbite 2 to push the boat out a bit on the PC, Oblivion and Fallout were both made with consoles squarely in mind and I can’t see Skyrim being much different, it WILL look better on PC no doubt but not that much better.

Did you miss my link up there Kahless? It says that Bethesda will have higher res textures and a redesigned interface and all that good stuff. And I don’t think it’s costing them “smegloads” of money either since other companies have done the same with the PC versions of their games (Crytek with Crysis 2 and Bioware with Dragon Age 2, they both had hi-res texture packs released for the PC).

Then in would appear Bethesda’s dev focus was the PC after all, it still wont be that much prettier though, it’s still a cross platform game.

Crytek only released a high res pack because of consumer pressure, they wouldn’t have bothered otherwise, Crysis 2 was a flagship for their cross platform engine and so they wanted it to be relatively uniform across the board (which it was although the console versions had more clever tweaks which provided pretties with less resource use such as the dynamic shadows cast by trees) in a similar way to the Unreal engine 3, the PC version of Crysis 2 and it’s updates will have lost Crytek money but their show of support will have improved consumer relations in the PC community which “might” help them make more money selling Cryengine 3 to other developers (the whole point of the endevour)

I like consoles because you can sit on a couch, use a 52″ HDTV, have a beer, and then fall asleep if you wish. I agree that PC graphics are much better than any console currently, but it gets quite uncomfortable playing games such as Rift, four or more hours in a row. My tailbone starts to hurt, and trust me, I have a very comfortable chair. Also, my right mouse hand starts to ache after raiding for an hour. I guess you give up eye candy goodness for being comfortable.

@Jud:
There was a recent article talking about how superfluous Crytek’s DX11 + high-res textures pack for the PC was. In most part it dipped frame-rates with few apparent visual benefits and appeared to have been done more as a favor to their partner nVidia.

@Stryker:
The HDTV argument doesn’t count with regards to the PC/Console preference. Most graphics chips support multiple displays and with an HDMI connection you can play your PC games on an HDTV. Most of the cross-platform games support the 360 controller (or you could use a wireless KB + mouse on one of those Japanese tea tables). To me it makes more sense to have a PC as an entertainment center because then I don’t have to worry about file formats and what is supported by the firmware.

@Alaric:
WRT DX11 pimpage on the PC, John Carmack made the comment recently that touted features like tessellation need to be a part of the design from ground up (model mesh design etc) and not bolted on later or they’re more like a bullet point on the box than a truly integrated feature a la Crysis 2. DXHR for PC may have had a different team, but are all the art assets actually different? It’d be cool if you could do a separate article on direct comparisons between console and PC versions of recent games where the developers claim to have done special things for the PC.

I just watched an interview on youtube with the fella at Bethesda directing the development of this game.

Apparently the “high res textures” on PC are barely noticeable except in direct comparison screenshots because “you sit 6 to 8 feet away from a TV but 1 to 2 feet from a PC monitor” so because of the extra scrutiny PC games get they by default ship with slightly “better” textures and that’s all Skyrim will have.

I’ve been looking at the screenshots above again and I’ve noticed that they’re not horrible at all really, there’s a very nice depth of field effect going on, the models have normal maps (RGB bump maps instead of grayscale) POMs (parallax occlusion maps which create depth from a flat surface depending on the angle of view, the “poor man’s tessellation” effect) the dog has convincing fur (very hard to do, but it’s eyes look “odd”) the “humans” have a convincing skin tone (except the female one clearly liberated from Fallout) There are nice specular lighting effects and the foliage texturing looks very good. In fact the only really bad thing I can see at all is the texture and it’s associated normal map on the shoulder pouldron of the Elf with the sword in the 7th screenshot which looks blurry.

The other thing is these are relatively low res screens and of course they’re not moving which makes a huge difference to how much of these models you see, I’d imagine some motion blur effect will be in play as well (seems ever more popular in games these days) so I think lot might be being a bit unfair in saying these screens are “horrible”.

@Ravenus, I agree with you that comparisons of consoles to PC games especially one with supposed PC extras might be nice but I suspect Alaric wouldn’t touch a console with a barge pole, however (and I wont advertise another games review site here) you can find such comparisons by searching for a game’s name and 360 or PS3 vs PC and there’s a very good side by side video of Crysis 2 running on PC with DX11 and 360 that’s easy enough to find.

I don’t see why any of you are complaining. So what if the graphics aren’t up to par with what you usually play? Graphics shouldn’t matter in a game like this. What should matter are the atmosphere and the gameplay, both of which look to be highly prevalent and addicting. Even if it’s not the graphics you would prefer, just wait for graphics mods. The graphics aren’t even that bad; at least, they certainly don’t make the game unplayable. I don’t see the point of complaining. Video game companies won’t cater to PC users just because of superior hardware. Enjoy the game as it is, and when mods come out, use them.

@Ravenous
How many people do you know that have a computer tower next to their entertainment center and HDTV? I have a PS3 and do Netflix streaming, but I would never take my tower (which is upstairs and on a bridge), and put it next to my TV to play video games. Not only would my wife beat me senseless because my printer isn’t wireless.

Hands down the PC can be built to have far superior graphics than any console that comes out (I’ve built hundreds). But I see it as an “entertainment experience” to have a console with my HDTV (you hold a wireless controller and aren’t required to enter boatloads of input to get to where you want to go).

My PC is used more for the “singular gaming experience” for Rift, and business applications. Maybe incorporating more motion based technology such as the PS Move or Kinect, would improve the PC experience? Look at the success of the iPad, with touchscreen technology (the new Wii will be utilizing a touch based controller that is portable). Just some thoughts on bridging the gap to make technology more consumer friendly.

@Mr.NickG
You do realize you’re talking about a Bethesda game, right? For top-notch developers, like Bethesda, good gameplay is so— passé.

Why not both? I play on the Xbox for immersion, I play on the PC for modding.

Perks to both; if there weren’t we would clearly see one or the other go the way of the Phantom.