But the character models are so bad, so awkward, that it leaves a far stronger impression than any of the other stuff. Maybe the bits of really interesting stuff, especially in Fallout, makes up for the bad or bland stuff. Sure, there are brief moments where the blandness looks pretty because of lighting effects, but the majority of the game is spent in the day with a clear view of ugly textures and horrid models or in the night where everything is murky and gross.Īnd here’s the thing, maybe you don’t mind the poor textures and the sometimes overwhelming warm tones of brown and grey and Forrest green. I’ve seen screen shots in here with a sunset or something like that, and it’s a totally disingenuous way to portray the game. The dwarven stuff is cool, but even that can feel very blah after a while, especially since the graphs are.not good.Īnd while the dungeon or semi-dungeon areas are a YMMV situation, there’s a lot of space in between that’s pretty bland. Think the dwarven ruins or especially caves in Skyrim. Not the most generic fantasy/dystopian stuff, but due to how their games are designed there’s a lot of very similar versions on dungeons/buildings that are cool and unique except for when it’s the 20th time you’ve been in almost the same place. I think there are moments are really cool art design - moreso in Fallout honestly - but there’s a lot of fairly basic design as well. Are they really spending as much as they could be on improving these things? Maybe they are but I don't see it. Performance on day one is garbage every time. Set pieces still feel cheap or non-existent.
The positional audio is still garbage and pretty had the exact same flaws for almost a decade.
The animations are still poor and way behind the competition. I have a lot of the same issues in Fallout 4 as I did in Oblivion. What I am talking about is my experiences with playing all their games over the years and every time I have the same isaues. Did you play Fallout 4 and come away feeling like that was an extremely impressive 2015 game? Certainly didn't. Skyrim is their best modern game to me so that felt like a decent leap. Obviously none of us really know how games are made unless you're an actual developer so we're talking about our experiences when playing. I mean of course under the hood they're better each time especially between generations. I'm not even going to touch on Morrowind to Oblivion as that's even crazier. Like, if this isn't a huge leap then what is? They managed to do what Oblivion couldn't in 3.5 years. There's loads more I could include here but I'm not gonna bother. Create their own foliage rendering system to bring the game world to life.Revamp all ten races with completely new character meshes and textures.Completely overhaul their Radiant AI system and introduce Radiant Story.Implement an entirely new lighting engine.Develop an in-house engine by forking Fallout 3's Gamebryo codebase with an emphasis on increased draw distance.Within the span of three years, BGS were able to Skyrim is the game that Oblivion wanted to be and I'd argue that the biggest factor why it's a large leap is because BGS had a base to work with. IIRC they didn't even know how much ram the 360 had for most of the game's development. I mean, BGS originally wanted to implement dynamic shadows for Oblivion at launch but the development was rushed and features were cut.