Critique of the game and why I don't like it (anymore).

[wolfpak360]

I think you are way too critical. This game still amazes me after 250 hrs. If u don't like it, don't play it. I love making my own armor, and weapons. Searching for the words of power. Slaying ancient dragons who can be challenging. My nord is 100 one handed, 100 smithing, 95 destruction, illusion is high and effective, alteration has been a help, alchemy is a blast and experimenting with the different effects has been fun for me. I've been gaming for well over 20 years and I have never played a game this good. Please Mr expert. Tell me where I will find a better experience bc I've played them all. I finished the main quest and still love to play and find more and more reasons to play. Mass effect 3 I started and just can't put skyrim down. Tell me what's better. Please, I would love to play a game that entertains me at this level.

[ElricOfGrans]

I believe that the issue isnt the animations per se but the animation engine that does a terrible job at blending animations in between transitions from one to another. Thats what makes animations on videogames feel organic. Unless you have animation data for each frame displayed and for every action with their respective transitions to the last vertex displacement, its going to look bad on real time (not so much in movies when you can fine tune every single thing).

 

So the solution for that is an animation engine that can "fill the gaps" between animations on the fly. Its not necessary to get to the point of Euphoria or Endorphin, which pretty much make up complete animations on the fly, BUT some degree of dynamism is needed. For example, Epic's games made with Unreal Engine have pretty good "organic" animations, Crysis 1 and 2 has an animation engine that adapts the animation data to the current environment pretty well (so the NPCs dont clip with the wall if they're too close to it, so every character steps on the surface they're on instead of clipping the landscape with their foot, etc). A good implementation does some job to adapt the animation to the current character's position.

 

All TES games had horrible animation engines that did nothing else exept run the animation data on the character's skeleton and thats it, that way every animation will look horrible given all the places in which a character could be running a particular animation on such big open world. I think the most "crazy" stuff we saw is that in FO3 they made the character's feet to adapt (a little) to the landscape they were stepping in.

 

Interesting post. I did not know about this (animations and graphics are not my thing), but it makes a whole lot of sense. I can definitely see how a better animation engine would vastly improve the game. Thanks for sharing!

[LiamNeesonsWetSocks]

The animations (all of them) have been terrible in every Bethesda game. Modders frequently have improved animations available in rather short time, which suggest Bethesda simply lacks anyone with the appropriate skills. They could perhaps get away with it in Morrowind, but by Oblivion it was a joke, and Skyrim is unacceptable. This is probably the one weak area that Bethesda could have easily resolved in this game, and the fact they did not is plain bizarre! I doubt decent animators are in such demand that Bethesda could fail to attract any to their staff.

I believe that the issue isnt the animations per se but the animation engine that does a terrible job at blending animations in between transitions from one to another. Thats what makes animations on videogames feel organic. Unless you have animation data for each frame displayed and for every action with their respective transitions to the last vertex displacement, its going to look bad on real time (not so much in movies when you can fine tune every single thing).

 

So the solution for that is an animation engine that can "fill the gaps" between animations on the fly. Its not necessary to get to the point of Euphoria or Endorphin, which pretty much make up complete animations on the fly, BUT some degree of dynamism is needed. For example, Epic's games made with Unreal Engine have pretty good "organic" animations, Crysis 1 and 2 has an animation engine that adapts the animation data to the current environment pretty well (so the NPCs dont clip with the wall if they're too close to it, so every character steps on the surface they're on instead of clipping the landscape with their foot, etc). A good implementation does some job to adapt the animation to the current character's position.

 

All TES games had horrible animation engines that did nothing else exept run the animation data on the character's skeleton and thats it, that way every animation will look horrible given all the places in which a character could be running a particular animation on such big open world. I think the most "crazy" stuff we saw is that in FO3 they made the character's feet to adapt (a little) to the landscape they were stepping in.

I don't think that explains why Farengar looks like a puppet when you're talking to him. Look at the way he moves his hands during the conversation (perhaps more easily spotted in 3rd person view). The hands themselves are completely static. They retain the same 'pose' the whole time. This is not the only case where animations look unnaturally stiff. Heck, I've seen robots that are capable of more lifelike motion than Bethesda characters. The engine being unable to blend animations is not the only problem here. Bethesda sucking at creating lifelike and natural motion is a major part of the issue.

[Thoreai]

I think its just about the priorities, so far in all of their games they followed the same old pattern...make a big explorable world, quickly put some generic items in, junk that noone cares about, wich makes them loose time, set up generic quests, then guild quests, make basic combat and animations and let the modders do the rest and carry their game for another 4-5 years.

That way they dont have to put much effort for combat/companion system, balance, interaction etc...they do the core elements and the rest finish modders.

Some people think they do us a favor by porting skyrim to pc, but they know very good that modders will carry their game, making it sell even after many years, while they can continue focusing on consoles...its a good strategy.

Edited April 18, 2012 by pavy

[eltucu]

I don't think that explains why Farengar looks like a puppet when you're talking to him. Look at the way he moves his hands during the conversation (perhaps more easily spotted in 3rd person view). The hands themselves are completely static. They retain the same 'pose' the whole time. This is not the only case where animations look unnaturally stiff. Heck, I've seen robots that are capable of more lifelike motion than Bethesda characters. The engine being unable to blend animations is not the only problem here. Bethesda sucking at creating lifelike and natural motion is a major part of the issue.

Yep, you're right. Body animation on some places is awful (the whole intro scene and the little interactions afterwards when you're inside Helgen's dungeon are very awkward). I should have worded it differently. I meant that better animations wont fix everything if they dont use a more dynamic method for displaying them in real time. They could do a better job on both the animation aspect and the implementation in the engine, those are the two halves of the problem though the second one often gets unnoticed (like some issues in the LOD and lighting that 747823 mentioned).

 

For example, if im not mistaken, the head motions of the NPCs arent made out of pre recorded animations but they're movements that the engine calculates depending on at which direction the NPC should be looking at. A better animation engine can make all those little things look way better, it should be designed to smoothen up all the rough spots in the animations and transitions. But as you said, it cannot fix what its not animated at all lol (or what it is essentially a bad animation)

Interesting post. I did not know about this (animations and graphics are not my thing), but it makes a whole lot of sense. I can definitely see how a better animation engine would vastly improve the game. Thanks for sharing!

I should thank you for reading it heh You can look up this around YouTube

its an indie game, yet it has a very dynamic animation engine. Its basically a fighting game with rabbit martial arts masters :P Have in mind that its updated constantly so there are a lot of videos of old alphas. If you want something more "pro" you can look up Euphoria and Endorphin tech demos for some examples of things being animated on the fly. Edited April 19, 2012 by eltucu

[Raiden8]

There's a serious lack of buildings, with the capital of Skyrim having a total of about 15 different buildings. Considering the size of the game world, I think that's quite lame. Many of the other "hold capitals" have 10 or less. How are these hold capitals? They're basically tiny towns. Also, the amount of "towns" and rural settlements in the game is extremely low. With a world so huge and full of empty space, why aren't the cities larger, and why aren't there more settlements? I'm sort of blaming the building sizes. It was similar in Oblivion - Buildings are about 2-3 times the size that would be realistic, presumably to make third person camera views more comfortable. They didn't do this in Morrowind, and the game had decently sized cities and third person worked fine. At the least, they could've made interiors slightly larger than exteriors (maybe they did already?). I would expect the amount of buildings to increase with each game, not decrease..

from the OP, the above point stood out to me the most

[thefinn]

I doubt too many people who actually read your post will disagree, with the exception of one point - this is what mods are for ;)

 

I have little to say that's nice about game companies. They constantly try to lord it over us that we can either buy what they are selling or ... what? Go elsewhere? Not buy it ? Who else makes skyrim after all ?

 

They really DO rip us off at every turn.

 

I was laughing with a friend the other day beause I bought Legend of Grimrock for $15. I said it was ironic that I buy this retro style game for $15 which I will possibly get months of gaming and trying to work out the puzzles for, where if I spend $100 I get a game that lasts 2-3 days sometimes.

 

Currently my skyrim runs about 140 different ESP's.. it looks and feels completely different to vanilla.

Edited April 19, 2012 by thefinn

[JD1]

There's a serious lack of buildings, with the capital of Skyrim having a total of about 15 different buildings. Considering the size of the game world, I think that's quite lame. Many of the other "hold capitals" have 10 or less. How are these hold capitals? They're basically tiny towns. Also, the amount of "towns" and rural settlements in the game is extremely low. With a world so huge and full of empty space, why aren't the cities larger, and why aren't there more settlements? I'm sort of blaming the building sizes. It was similar in Oblivion - Buildings are about 2-3 times the size that would be realistic, presumably to make third person camera views more comfortable. They didn't do this in Morrowind, and the game had decently sized cities and third person worked fine. At the least, they could've made interiors slightly larger than exteriors (maybe they did already?). I would expect the amount of buildings to increase with each game, not decrease..

from the OP, the above point stood out to me the most

 

 

Same here, and everything else in the OP's post is pretty pointless or non-sense (especially with the graphics part being crap... whaaaat?)

But the lack of buildings is indeed VERY lacking, you can't expect big cities to be like villages, cities are not villages and villages in Skyrim look like... microtowns or all fishing villages or something, this is something that marked me the first time I played Skyrim, I visited 2 "big" cities the first day and I wasn't impressed at all, so on the second day I thought to myself, dang Dawnstar and Solitude must be huge let's walk up there... to my disappointment they were even smaller or not much bigger, but it doesn't make Skyrim a bad game, I'm still on my 220 hours character and still loving the hell out of this game ! :thumbsup:

[yota71]

But the lack of buildings is indeed VERY lacking, this game ! :thumbsup:

 

Skyrim is considered a savage frontier then i am not surprised of the lack of city (forgot the imperial capital, forgot the big city of the imperial province) consider skyrim the northern savage west (the harsh climatic conditions dont permit the coltivations then no coltivation no settlers) and considering that the half of skyrim in constituited by high mountains and glaciers, marsh and snowy landscape the only place that permit colonization i already colonizated (the plains of whiterun, the plains of Riften [very suitable for agricolture] the plains of Falkreath [too much savage]) no other Hold are suitable for live in, then dont be surprised by the lack of cities

[RedRavyn]

I don't know about Morowind, but one of the things that really struck me as odd when I started playing Oblivion was how utterly small the world and the cities were. Did you know that you can drop all of Cyrodiil into one of America's larger cities and still have room left around the edges? The Imperial City, the largest city in the Empire to my knowledge, isn't even a respectable neighborhood in my hometown. Give me a good sniper rifle and high ground near Bruma and I could pick off many of the residents of the Imperial City.

 

Skyrim is no better. The world isn't as big as it looks. Really, how long does it take to get from city to city? I'm not talking about in-game time with the inflated rate of speed at which time is flying by (1 minute real time equals 20 minutes game-time). The time it takes me to get from Whiterun to Morthal is about the same time it takes me, in real life, to walk from my home over to the next neighborhood.

 

You can't have large cities in such a tiny world. If cities were of respectable size then they would just about abut each other, with only roads separating their boundaries. And do you really need hundreds of homes for all the people you know have to live in Skyrim? Sure, it would be a wonderful, immersive gaming experience if Tamriel was the size of Australia, with everything else scaled appropriately, but we really don't have a hundred years to wait for Bethesda to create such a place. ES games are based upon abstractions of reality. I just suspend my disbelief when I walk into a city with a total population that can fit into a school bus.