nevermind, I was thinking of firearms.
Both Morrowind and Oblivion had a really odd disconnect in the level of craft in different components of the game. The environments in both are absolutely gorgeous, the character models are tolerable, the faces are terrible, and the animation is somewhere between sub-par and embarrassing.
ElGuapo
3203
I see a lot of Sig 550 derivatives on the back of the main character in those screenshots. My favorite assault rifle! Me likey!
Charles
3204
They don’t love Fallout enough.
Charles
3205
From what I’ve seen of their games, it’s less a problem with the animations themselves, and more a problem of there not being enough animation and not enough code systems driving the animation to make it look good.
The best walk animation in the world is worth nothing if you can’t convincingly make him stop/start/turn/run etc. And that depends as much on a good animation system and a good programmer to use it as on raw animation quality.
Too much mocap, not enough ->
Mordrak
3207
Yeah, it’s all the stuff in-between animations that makes it look natural.
spiffy
3208
Well, again, there’s a disconnect between technical achievement of the environments (trees and plants sway believably, sun shines realistically, various building materials such as stone and wood look tangible and realistic) and creative design (architecture has a unique feel and cultural expression, landscapes are designed to be sweeping and grand as opposed to mundane, etc)… and again, bethesda got the first right and the second only mediocre. Compare, say, the environments of Oblivion vs Assassin’s Creed/Prince of Persia series, and it’s night and day.
Sarkus
3209
This is my biggest concern - whether they will walk the line well enough to satisfy both sides or whether they will simply piss both sides off. The idea of a first person RPG with gun combat is interesting, but it will always suffer from comparisons to pure FP shooters where player skill determines success. Shooter fans will be upset when they line up a shot and miss because their character doesn’t have the skill. This is easy to disguise in a melee FP game because there you can hit and adjust the damage to reflect a poor skill. You can’t do that with a gun, where the expectation is there will be a certain level of damage.
I thought Troika’s vampire game suffered from this. The end result was that I shifted my character towards melee combat away from guns.
The one thing that will help will be the third-person mode. Player expectations are different when they are playing third rather than first person in terms of how they expect the character to act.
And I guess the argument would be that if you want to play a skilled shooter, you have to roll one … But you’re certainly right in that Bethesda is on the line to make that work.
Regarding animations, I think one of the big problems with Oblivion’s characters were the lifelessness of the faces. Everyone looked so bland and dead, like robots.
However, the image below gives me a bit of hope in that regard. Even while the character is intentionally a little weary and apathetic, he still looks like he has the spark of life in there.
nKoan
3211
I would argue that Bethesda got the second one right more so in Morrowind than Oblivion. But yeah, Oblivion’s creative design portion was a bit stunted compared to other worlds.
Are you really going to argue that Morrowind didn’t have amazing creative design, in terms of the landscape and environment? Oblivion was generic as fuck, no question, but there’s no way you can make that claim about Morrowind.
spiffy
3213
Sorry, agreed, Morrowind was fine.
We have come to an accord, then. Oblivion was incredibly disappointing, in terms of being Generic Fantasy World 009.
I definitely missed the bug walkers and the like.
Kunikos
3216
Fallout fans in general or just verbally incontinent jackasses like those on certain web sites on the net?
Oblivion’s mercantile skill system and speech mini-game are probably the least favorite things of mine regarding that game. Not having played any other Bethesda game seriously (Morrowind for a bit) I can’t really compare it to their previous work.
Yes, both in Morrowind and in Oblivion you will find great outdoors, stunning beautiful scenerios as well buildings that looks great. However, the art and creative direction in Morrowind was and is incredible. It clearly one man’s vision of the world should be where Oblivion’s art & creative design to me feelks like the old proverb ‘too many cooks will spoil the food’. It mean something like if you have to get everyone to agree to a design the design itself will suffer. Oh, and the
bug walkers are called Silt Striders…
Oblivion was incredibky boring, I agree. Someone need to tell Beth to tone down the bloom a bit (or much) as well as tell Beth it doesn’t help their cause going against Elder Scrolls lore. A part of Cyrodiil is actually meant to be (temperate) jungle and marshlands (the part near the Argonian region).
As for the animations, somehow the animations seemed better in Morrowind, but maybe it was because Morrowind didn’t use the Unreal Engine. On the bethblog we sometimes get a (nice) interview with one of the devs. I don’t think I have seen an interview with a animation artist at Beth - they could just be hiding them somewhere…though…
If you look at how Shepard walks in Mass Effect PC, he does walk rather stiffy as well. Mass Effect also uses the Unreal Engine…
Back to Fallout:
My interest in this game went from maybe interested to interested then to cautiously optimistic after the Fallout 3 info from E3 we’ve seen…
stusser
3218
I also hated the lockpicking minigame, although it was entirely trivialized by the unbreakable pick a couple of hours in. The minigames simply added nothing whatsoever to the game.
I hated the hacking minigame in Bioshock too, come to think of it. I just hate minigames.
Edit: Both morrowind and oblivion used emergent’s gamebryo engine. Assumedly F3 will also. ME does use unreal, so you’ve got 1 out of 3.
Could the lack of variety in Oblivion have anything to do with keeping the content level down for console media or whatever? I know Morrowind was out on the Xbox (right?) but maybe they couldn’t put enough variety in the world and maintain the quality they were looking for.
Or maybe they’re just cheap and lazy.
Yes, they were both cheap and lazy when making the best RPG of the past ~5 years with stunningly gorgeous graphics, hand-placed silverware on every table, revolutionary AI, and well-written involved questlines like the dark brotherhood, thieves’ guild, and one-offs like the living painting.
Oblivion wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was an incredible accomplishment.
