Many of Fallout's technological refinements carry over to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but Bethesda Studios has also developed and contracted a suite of technological tools that allow the team to reach far beyond anything they've done before. Creation Engine. Though Skyrim's Nordic setting is a more rugged environment than the Renaissance festival feel of Oblivion's Cyrodiil, the new setting isn't lacking in breathtaking views.
To create a diverse country filled with steep mountain passes and dense forests, babbling brooks and violent waterfalls, glacier coastlines and snowy tundras, Bethesda went back to the drawing board and rewrote every major system powering the gameplay experience.
The result is the newly dubbed Creation Engine and Kit. Draw distances are great for creating those postcard-worthy landscapes, but the players eyes aren't always fixed on the horizon. To give the immediate surrounding a more believable look and feel, Bethesda increased the emphasis on the play between light and shadow on the entire world. Now we have it on everything. It just makes the whole thing a lot more believable when you're there.
A lot of the environments are dominated by the untamed wilderness, which look great thanks to Bethesda's overhauled foliage system. In previous games the team licensed the SpeedTree middleware to render the forests. For Skyrim, they've created their own platform that allows artists to build whatever kind of trees they want and to dictate how they animate.
Artists can alter the weight of the branches to adjust how much they move in the wind, which is an effective way of, for instance, actualizing the danger of traversing steep mountain passes with howling winds violently shaking branches. Given its northern location and extreme elevations, Skyrim's climate is more prone to snowfall than Cyrodiil. To create realistic precipitation effects, Bethesda originally tried to use shaders and adjust their opacity and rim lighting, but once the artists built the models and populated the world the snow appeared to fall too evenly.
To work around this problem, they built a new precipitation system that allows artists to define how much snow will hit particular objects. The program scans the geography, then calculates where the snow should fall to make sure it accumulates properly on the trees, rocks, and bushes. Bethesda has another ten months before Skyrim releases, but thanks to the Creation Engine the world already looks much more stunning than its predecessors.
The non-player characters also seem to be more intelligent thanks to alterations the team made to the Radiant AI technology. If you followed a citizen through his daily activities, you would likely witness him or her eating breakfast, setting out to work the land, stopping by the pub for a pint after work, and then returning home to hit the sack.
In reality, the technology driving NPC behavior wasn't overly sophisticated. Bethesda could only assign five or six types of tasks to the townspeople, and there wasn't a lot of nuance to their actions. In Skyrim, the characters have much more defined individual personalities. They gave their developers a week, and allowed them to build anything they wanted, as long as it was made in Skyrim.
A selection of these were included in the base game, while some, like the werewolf skill tree and rideable dragons, came later, in DLC. If you've ever played Skyrim VR , you'll be aware of how strange it is when it comes to dialog.
Instead of simply hitting a button on the controller, you pick floating lines of dialog out of the air, in what is something of an immersion-breaking experience. At one time, voice recognition was under consideration as a possible solution, but was eventually decided against. While a bit of a shame, I can't say that I blame Bethesda.
We've seen in the past that voice recognition in video games is dodgy at best, and probably wouldn't have helped with immersion. When you're developing for a new system, one thing that helps is getting experience, and getting it quickly. When it came time to develop Fallout 4 on the Xbox One, porting over Skyrim was a great help in letting them understand how the Xbox One worked with their brand of open-world games.
It's understandable: it's way easier to take existing assets and port them over than it is to make all-new ones, on a brand new system. It helps you compare and contrast with the old system, and makes gaining experience far easier. It might be tempting to think that development on Skyrim finished in , when Dragonborn came out, but you'd be wrong. Development on the game actually continued until , nearly two years after the game's release.
While ports followed, there have been no more DLCs released, and the base game has been left mostly untouched ever since. While not challenging for Paradox's length of support, that's still very impressive. Unlike the other facts on this list, which are mostly surprising for their large scope, this is pretty impressive for the opposite reason.
I would honestly have assumed that the crew was larger, but just people were involved in making one of the best games of recent years. The team was made up of some people who were veterans of the Elder Scrolls series, as well as a bit of fresh blood.
This combination was obviously the right one, with the game continuing the Elder Scrolls motifs we know and love while bringing in new ideas. As well as the earlier dungeon innovations we talked about, something else changed dramatically between Oblivion and Skyrim. Because the team that made Oblivion was about half the size of the one that made Skyrim , designing the dungeons in the earlier title was the responsibility of just one person.
When it came to Skyrim , eight people were drafted in: it shows, too! When you look at Oblivion's dungeons, they can get a bit samey, but when eight people are working on them, every single one looks fresh.
All told, Skyrim's 80 voice actors had to voice over 60, lines of dialog across the game and its expansions. That is insane. If you want to have a comparison, Mass Effect , a rich, dialog-heavy game, contains just 20, Metal Gear Solid 4 contains 33, The resulting script is a massive bulk of pages, each one with dialog that is definitely improved from Oblivion's.
It may not be the longest script ever, but that's still darn impressive. When Skyrim was first being designed, some people assumed it would use the same engine as Oblivion , Gamebryo. However, this engine just couldn't support what the developers wanted to do in Skyrim , and as such, the code was forked, and a new engine began development.
I also expect far more creation club disgrace and MTX, subscriptions, etc. Have you guys seen the egregious MTX and subscriptions in fallout 76? Bethesda is a travesty.
I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. There is a free next gen upgrade FYI. This blog didnt mention that and made it sound like it was just BC. I just watched the Bethesda reveal to make sure. So free next gen upgrade, 3 free pieces of creation club content..
I very much want to alternate between 2D and VR. This is a joke right? Free next gen upgrade but blog failed to mention. Plus 3 free creations. Just a simple dream of mine. I would love to attend the concert live in person, but saw that neither the Alerxandra Palace Tearter nor the London Symphony Orchestra have this on their event schedules. Both are have different events scheduled that day and does not even mention this event.
Have they fixed all the bugs in this version? Having bought this game 2 times already, will I need to buy it again? Are you going to improve mod support on the PS5 release? I assume the Creation Club content is new content. The anniversary edition seems to just be a glorified Creation Club bundle, so Bethesda must considered their existing Creation Club customers who already bought much of the older content.
Even if all Bethesda did was increase draw distance, that would go such a long way, but faster loading seems like a given. What are you on about? The ps5 version of GoT comes with the expansion content and has full 3D audio implementation, haptic feedback , improved character models, higher resolution and frame rate.
Or do you want to continue defending the abhorrent milking of Skyrim and yet another PS4 re-release of the game. Third PS4 release of the same broken Skyrim. Elder Scrolls Explore. Elder Scrolls Online. Events Characters Factions Locations Concepts. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? View source.
0コメント