The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Dragon Age?






(yes, irony.)

 

Actually, they've just announced that it's using a new engine:

http://twitter.com/Bethblog/status/14010984884604929

 

Sky? Rim? Ive just realized how gay the name of this province is

now seriously.. TES was never revolutionary in terms of story or its theme so I dont care about if there gonna be dragons. I dont care if it is not gonna be original in any way. All I care about is if it wouldnt be as way so stupid and übergeneric as Oblivion was. So I wont prejudice until at last some gameplay is out.

And finally I am glad that Beth finally made some (technicaly) high quality render vid.

PS: I loved Morrowind and hated Oblivion and F3, but i dont want to be a "hater without cause"

 

Not so sure about "everyone else". How about Arcania?

 

Lulz. We should collectively deny the existence of this.

 

And even that will not help to convince me because they still can give you overhyped gameplay videos which do not show the "real" game how it works. Nor the reviews about Oblivion mentioned that once it was out. For example on the E3 Todd showed a game which never made it that way in the public. With NPCs interactions, dynamic dialogues (depending on your actions etc.). All those kind of things. Yet what we got was some kind of boring monologue.

I probably will not buy any TES game before I can get it for 5$.

An Dragon army of 5 vs 12 city soldiers representing the army of the land. How is that NOT epic

 

Oh just to let you know, 'Dragonborn' which was said at the end of the trailer, means a descendant of Talos. So you get to be emperor or you meet one. And to reply to sea, becoming head of the guilds is earned and you do still have a few duties. I didn't like how you became head of an order with no other members, and all you got was some armour and a new line from the Imperial Guardsmen.

 

From the news thread:

The version used in Fallout 3 is "improved", as is the one in New Vegas over Fallout 3's. That doesn't get rid of the problem that a) Bethesda sucks monkey nuts at coding properly (community fixes massive engine bugs using script injections) and b) the base of the engine is so horribly ancient that it really would require pretty much a full rewrite, except for some of the more fundamental code (similar to how the new Call of Duty games use old Quake 1 code for a few things simply because there's no better way to do those tasks). I'll believe it's improved substantially to even the standards of five-year-old games when I see it with my own eyes.

 

Most of the games you mention here are rather small studios and/or niche games. I think the market around very expensive RPGs is dead. Since Bethesda and Bioware are somewhat the dominant developers or to say that the popular ones which have enough finances for advertising in TV even.

Divinity was not "bad" but it was not "good" either. Drakensang is dead more or less, thy have been bought by a company which makes web browser games and anounced that a potential drakensang 3 will NOT feature the dark eye PNP rule and they said they will go for "more action" (vey surprising ...), Avernum is a spiderweb game and clear niche. Only New Vegas is rather a popular team and game. But Obsidian has not the resources of either Bioware or Bethesda to say that. And Vegas shows that a bit.

I gave up on RPGs a while ago even though its my favourite game. But you just cant expect the same quality from those games anymore like a few years back not when you say what they do with Dragonage 2 for example. Or the Witcher 2.

 

Still don't understand why the dragons would attack the Nords... the ones on Akavir were wiped out by the Snake-men, the ones in Vvardenfell by the Cliff-racers, and the rest are just isolationists.

 

I still have high hopes for this game, the only RPG in development that might turn out to be something I somewhat (?) like.

 

I wonder if the "new and improved" engine has anything to do with the one used for Divinity 2 DKS. I've been unable to find any info on that. If it is, then it's not so bad; DKS is a lot more smooth and good-looking than Ego Draconis which ran on some version of Gamebryo.

 

Yes and thats so fucking sad. It's the kind of rape Fallout experienced with POS...

 

Meh. I think that would only be exciting if he was dressed as a dragon. Dragons make everything better.

 

And was carrying grenades, 'cause explosions make everything more awsum.

 

The problem is kind of twofold. For one, Bethesda up to Fallout 3 did all of its animation by hand. As far as I know, one guy has been responsible for the vast majority of their animation over the years, all the way back to Morrowind (he still sucked then). Now, doing animation by hand without help from a physics engine or some sort of system designed to simulate a human skeleton and musculature is really fucking hard, and requires a huge amount of talent, time and trial and error. That's not an excuse for doing such a poor job, but it does mean that I can at least sympathise with the difficulty of it. Apparently Bethesda picked up access to a motion capture studio around Fallout 3 and used it for some of that game's animations, but even with that, it leads us to the problem of...

Two, the engine just fucking sucks at handling animations. Those dance mods or whatever are all well and good, and you can put some of the best animations in the world in there, and have them look just as awesome as anywhere else. The engine itself, though, is absolutely terrible at blending animations together. There are all sorts of stupid hard-coded limits into what you can and can't do, which is responsible for a lot of the "moonwalking" and really awkward transitions between animations you see while playing. This may have made sense when Morrowind came out, but not in any game post-2004 when Half-Life 2 raised the bar for quality in human animation. Good animations can help smooth these out a good deal (see a lot of the animal creatures in New Vegas), but you'll still never totally fix the problem unless you transition to a system which is able to either stitch together hundreds of transitional animations, or procedurally move characters between animation states (this is what Assassin's Creed, Grand Theft Auto IV and Uncharted do, and it's why they have some of the best character animation of any games).

Sorry for the long-winded rant, but yeah, it's both the fault of the technology and the animators at Bethesda. Obsidian did a lot with what they had for New Vegas and made some big improvements, but as their other games show, they're hardly the best out there at this sort of thing either. Even if they were, though, they'd still be held back by the engine - and Bethesda have shown repeatedly that they'd rather build on top of existing code rather than go back to basics and rip out the guts needed to create a fully modern game engine.

 

^^I think you guys just created a new fetish.

 

Looks like it's a new engine "built internally":

http://twitter.com/nickbreckon/statuses/14059634595729408