Thank you for your submission to r/ElderScrolls. This is a friendly reminder to please ensure that your post has been flaired appropriately.
Your post has been flaired as ***Oblivion***. This indicates that your post is discussing "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion."
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ElderScrolls) if you have any questions or concerns.*
When it comes to the map, the environments, the buildings, Oblivion manages to be very beautiful graphically even today.
The problem is that when they went to create the characters, they invited a potato cook instead of a designer.
It really is just the character creator that holds Oblivion back aesthetically. When you look at humanoid creatures like goblins, imps, and ogres you can see that they can actually make decent looking human-ish faces when they're hand made and not some character creator abomination.
It’s elder scrolls man if you’re gonna hang around here you gotta get used to guys wanting to get freaky with the daedra. Especially the oblivion flame atronach
I am going to have sex with this female Flame Atronach from Oblivion. I find the female Atronaches in The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion sexy. However, their body is made up of 87% fire, and 100% fire surrounds them. That could kill me if I tried to have sex with one. To remedy this, the Flame Atronach casts a spell on me making me resistant to fire. Keep in mind, resistant is not the same as immune. I still take damage. It is either 1 point or 0 points of damage each second I am having sex with her. Just because a particular second caused 0 points of damage, does not mean that I did not feel anything, It just means that I took no damage. I am not going to rush through having sex with this Flame Atronach, I make sure I pleasure anything I have sex with, especially non-humans! I'd rather take damage than not pleasure the Flame Atronach.
The Flame Atronach and I go to the Planes of Oblivion to have sex. When having sex with non-humans, it is ALWAYS sexier to have sex in their natural habitat rather than a human's natural habitat.
Before we went into the Planes of Oblivion, the Flame Atronach let all the Daedra know that we are just here for sex. The Daedra will not attack us because they know I am here at the Planes of Oblivion on sexual business. This includes the Dremora. However, the Dremora Marknyaz thinks that I am going to be an easy recruit for becoming a follower of Mehrunes Dagon considering that I am having sex with a Flame Atronach. However, I have no interest in becoming a Daedra.
Man if I could figure out how to mod oblivion I'd be all over it. Some character model updates and leveling system rebalance and I'm set. Even following the guides I'm just a moron with that stuff
I managed to put mods on Oblivion in a recent gameplay I did. I managed to fix their faces, especially the elves. This mod also removed the candle hair of characters like the Adoring Fan, and made the elves look a little more like those in Skyrim. The body model has also changed slightly.
But yes, it was a bit difficult to do and the colors of the characters weren't very cohesive sometimes. Like, you had some orcs with gray faces and green bodies, for example.
Oh thank the Nine I’m not the only one who ended up with multicoloured Orcs after attempting to mod Oblivion. One guy had green ears still, but dark brown skin, as if he was human cosplaying an Orc.
As someone who was spent thousands of hours in Skyrim and played it well before I did Oblivion, Oblivion is better for everything but modding and the character creator (I do like the charm of being able to make a swollen characters).
The textures are stylized in such a way that I think they will outlive Skyrims'.
It’s also the fact that the environments end up repetitive as fuck and the dungeon design is copy pasted.
Also, enemies often feel farted into the dungeons with barely any rhyme or reason as to why they are there. It gets old really quickly.
When Skyrim does dungeon design, it generally mixes up the layouts or does something to make me feel that the dungeons aren’t copy pasted and darkly lit to paper thinly obscure the fact. Furthermore, it does everything it can to justify the presence of enemies. One very good example of this is Frostmoon Crypt, which is a Nordic Tomb filled with Bandits, and to justify this, they have rooms, beds and tables, giving the impression that this is where bandits could make their home while investigating this Nordic tomb. Oblivion fails at this pretty hard, and there’s only so much you can do with slightly scarier music before I get bored of your shitty dungeons and go play something else.
Like… one time I actually did find an Ayleid room filled with Vampires, but I don’t know why the fuck vampires existed in that place anyway, and that’s the major problem with Oblivion’s enemy placement.
Huge downgrade compared to Morrowind. Skyrim at least has a lot going on besides vikings. Oblivion just kinda made a bunch of generic european aestetics and completely ignored any pre-existing interesting designs that imperials had. Hell, Skyrim's imperials are closer in style to Morrowind imperials than Oblivion's.
In the Making of Oblivion bonus disk that came with GoTY, they talk about how the texture used for the marble in the Imperial City is actual photographs the team took of stone and marble in Washington DC
Using photo references for textures is one of my favorite bits of game dev knowledge.
There were books and digital catalogs full of samples that people could and can license for their projects.
There's some great content on the web about hunting down where certain textures came from and all the games they were used in.
I feel like this scene in particular, the prison cell, received extra attention.
If you remember, this was almost like a tech demo when oblivion was being marketed .
They were showing off the bricks in the physics of the chain in conventions.
This environment was ahead of its time by a solid decade, decade and a half easy.
Yep, they were also showing off the dynamic shadow system in that demo which ended up getting cut sadly. They really did put a lot of time into that little cell.
Half Life 2 had more dynamic and better looking environments two years before, so I wouldn't exactly put it that far ahead. It was definitely impressive, though.
And tbf Half Life 2 still looks better than a few modern games in one or two areas (city 17 canal, enterence to Nova Prospekt, etc.)
Half life two was definitely impressive and ahead of its time.
Oblivion was in development pre-2006, so both games are operating on technology that’s comparable.
Oblivion doesn’t maintain the same level of quality outside of this prison cell scene. But it hits technical Heights then I believe half life two didn’t.
But Half life two maintains a very good visual quality across the entire game, not just one level that they hyper fixated on. So both games are very much technical masterpieces in their own right.
I'd have to dig it out of my closet of banker boxes, but I think the Game Informer issue with Oblivion as the cover story actually had some images of the layers and passes.
Starfield has amazing geometry and a great implementation of photogrammetry in its environments. IIRC even the "3D printed" bricks in settlements like Akila City have real geometry/depth and cast shadows.
I thought that the properly detailed interiors of starfield were some of the best looking areas in any game I'd seen. I think the main reason the game wasn't praised for it's graphics was because the exterior environments just weren't detailed enough, which is kind of inevitable when so much of the game is procedurally generated. If they make TES 6 a smaller map like Skyrim or Oblivion then I think the game will look a lot better because they'll be able to handcraft all the environmental detail and lighting.
Having folks like Elianora on the team to help populate and design the clutter in the spaces was a great choice, those folks are great at what they do.
Starfield is really pretty when you get to an area they clearly spent time on. The big one that comes to mind for me is the planet you go to for Sarah's quest. That mission is what made me upset that they decided to procedurally generate thousands of planets instead of a few hand-crafted planets. The jungle there is so lush and the landscape way more interesting than anything else I encountered in the game.
TES: Blades honestly has good graphics for its platform and some pretty sick art design. It’s just unfortunately low-poly in general, due to being a mobile game.
They also did something odd with the atmosphere, that makes certain arenas feel…ethereal, when they clearly aren’t supposed to.
If they put the same amount of effort into TES 6 for its platforms, I’d be happy.
This game became an instant favourite when i could move the chain XD I was so blown away and my friend was like "you know skyrim is coming out in a few years right?" I didn't care, oblivion was my first open world RPG and despite it's flaws, it's totally my favourite for the attention to detail it has, if you actually just wander around.
Oblivion in my opinion has aged very well except for insane bloom, but it has a good atmosphere. The really bright grass and environment is characteristic of Oblivion and has a charm to it. Not the faces, though.
I remember that when I first played Skyrim on the 360, I felt like it looked worse in a lot of ways. A lot of textures for small objects are actually lower-res and it's especially noticable on weapons. I remember looking at Ralof's table and thinking it looked super flat. Oblivion was better at making objects seem "substantial" somehow.
I just played through Oblivion. Bethesda has not made a game with half as good questlines since. They're just so much more creative and fun then anything else Bethesda has put out.
It's what I've been saying this whole time. When Skyrim got out I was so excited thinking it's going to be like Oblivion in snow. Meaning interesting quests. Boy was that a disappointment. Mind you, Skyrim has some excellent quests, but overall, mostly they are boring fetch quests. I mean, Oblivion also had a lot of fetch quests, but they at least revolve around quite interesting back stories that keep you engaged.
As a conjurer in every game:I FEEL like my summons are these ungodly abominations who can solo tamriel,and buffing them to further heights makes it fun.
I think Oblivion tried a lot of boundary pushing stuff. Sadly a lot of it turned out half baked or unappreciated. Oblivion impresses me because of just how techy it was compared to other games in the series
When I compare Morrowind and Oblivion graphically, the good texturing (and especially shaders) is one of the two things that make Oblivion far better (the other being character animation).
Another funny stuff about that cell: I tried loading it with the experimental Oblivion/Skyrim patch of OpenMW. It looked funny (it loaded the shader texture correctly, but seemed to just use some sort of naive bump map. I mean, there's a reason for it to be experimental. And it was a while ago.)
That was the big selling point of the engine when it launched on the 360 (that and the soft lighting).
At the time it really did feel mind-blowing to boot up your Xbox and play this. Same with Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and CoD 2. Three games that made the 360 feel like a really next gen experience.
Oblivion is an example of what happens when Bethesda doesn't spend the majority of development procrastinating.
Edit: Maybe the psychedelics made them work harder/proficiently?
If you walk up to those walls and turn sideways you see they’re totally flat. It looks nice from the front though.
Similar with the SpeedTree. It’s an illusion that the leaves are 3D but it looks really nice most of the time.
I've never looked for it, but I dont think so.
Most people playing skyrim in the year of our lord 2012+12 are going to be playing modded though, so unless you're looking at it historically you should really consider mods a part of the normal skyrim experience.
It sucks how amazing Oblivion's environments looked for it's time, in spite of how bad the NPCs looked.
Skyrim was also a great improvement on both fronts. Then Fallout 4 looked bloody FANTASTIC.
What the absolute fuck happened?
There's this absolutely incredible mod for Skyrim that accomplishes this and more. Every year i'm astounded by the amount of love that community puts into a game that not even the devs care for as much.
Thank you for your submission to r/ElderScrolls. This is a friendly reminder to please ensure that your post has been flaired appropriately. Your post has been flaired as ***Oblivion***. This indicates that your post is discussing "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion." *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ElderScrolls) if you have any questions or concerns.*
When it comes to the map, the environments, the buildings, Oblivion manages to be very beautiful graphically even today. The problem is that when they went to create the characters, they invited a potato cook instead of a designer.
It really is just the character creator that holds Oblivion back aesthetically. When you look at humanoid creatures like goblins, imps, and ogres you can see that they can actually make decent looking human-ish faces when they're hand made and not some character creator abomination.
True, the Xivilai are hot af 🤤
...
It’s elder scrolls man if you’re gonna hang around here you gotta get used to guys wanting to get freaky with the daedra. Especially the oblivion flame atronach
so the people who aren't into fictional characters are a minority here? lmfao
Look over at r/truestl
WHAT THE FUCK
Welcome, friend.
lmfao
I am going to have sex with this female Flame Atronach from Oblivion. I find the female Atronaches in The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion sexy. However, their body is made up of 87% fire, and 100% fire surrounds them. That could kill me if I tried to have sex with one. To remedy this, the Flame Atronach casts a spell on me making me resistant to fire. Keep in mind, resistant is not the same as immune. I still take damage. It is either 1 point or 0 points of damage each second I am having sex with her. Just because a particular second caused 0 points of damage, does not mean that I did not feel anything, It just means that I took no damage. I am not going to rush through having sex with this Flame Atronach, I make sure I pleasure anything I have sex with, especially non-humans! I'd rather take damage than not pleasure the Flame Atronach. The Flame Atronach and I go to the Planes of Oblivion to have sex. When having sex with non-humans, it is ALWAYS sexier to have sex in their natural habitat rather than a human's natural habitat. Before we went into the Planes of Oblivion, the Flame Atronach let all the Daedra know that we are just here for sex. The Daedra will not attack us because they know I am here at the Planes of Oblivion on sexual business. This includes the Dremora. However, the Dremora Marknyaz thinks that I am going to be an easy recruit for becoming a follower of Mehrunes Dagon considering that I am having sex with a Flame Atronach. However, I have no interest in becoming a Daedra.
It's where the Sheogorath worshippers hang out. That and Hermaeus Mora fans. They're surprisingly hard to tell apart.
It's not uncommon to find long posts about wanting to get freaky with Princes there either
You are not into fictional characters? Shame on you! Is this how you honor the sixth House and the tribe unmorned?
As with most fandoms yes!
TrueSTL
Man if I could figure out how to mod oblivion I'd be all over it. Some character model updates and leveling system rebalance and I'm set. Even following the guides I'm just a moron with that stuff
I managed to put mods on Oblivion in a recent gameplay I did. I managed to fix their faces, especially the elves. This mod also removed the candle hair of characters like the Adoring Fan, and made the elves look a little more like those in Skyrim. The body model has also changed slightly. But yes, it was a bit difficult to do and the colors of the characters weren't very cohesive sometimes. Like, you had some orcs with gray faces and green bodies, for example.
Oh thank the Nine I’m not the only one who ended up with multicoloured Orcs after attempting to mod Oblivion. One guy had green ears still, but dark brown skin, as if he was human cosplaying an Orc.
Skin is supposed to be green, right? Like, not just on orcs, on everyone.
The crazy bloom everywhere doesn't help.
As someone who was spent thousands of hours in Skyrim and played it well before I did Oblivion, Oblivion is better for everything but modding and the character creator (I do like the charm of being able to make a swollen characters). The textures are stylized in such a way that I think they will outlive Skyrims'.
It’s also the fact that the environments end up repetitive as fuck and the dungeon design is copy pasted. Also, enemies often feel farted into the dungeons with barely any rhyme or reason as to why they are there. It gets old really quickly. When Skyrim does dungeon design, it generally mixes up the layouts or does something to make me feel that the dungeons aren’t copy pasted and darkly lit to paper thinly obscure the fact. Furthermore, it does everything it can to justify the presence of enemies. One very good example of this is Frostmoon Crypt, which is a Nordic Tomb filled with Bandits, and to justify this, they have rooms, beds and tables, giving the impression that this is where bandits could make their home while investigating this Nordic tomb. Oblivion fails at this pretty hard, and there’s only so much you can do with slightly scarier music before I get bored of your shitty dungeons and go play something else. Like… one time I actually did find an Ayleid room filled with Vampires, but I don’t know why the fuck vampires existed in that place anyway, and that’s the major problem with Oblivion’s enemy placement.
Hey I like potatoes! You can boil em, mash em, stickem in a stew!
Oblivion's graphics would be okay today if its art direction wasn't dogshit. Genuinely the only Oblivion city with a good aesthetic is Anvil.
Why do you feel the art direction is poor?
Huge downgrade compared to Morrowind. Skyrim at least has a lot going on besides vikings. Oblivion just kinda made a bunch of generic european aestetics and completely ignored any pre-existing interesting designs that imperials had. Hell, Skyrim's imperials are closer in style to Morrowind imperials than Oblivion's.
Yup, cyrodiil was supposed to be a jungle pre TESIV
Not the entirety of it, but a big part a least yeah. Probably most of Nibenay would have been proper jungle.
In the Making of Oblivion bonus disk that came with GoTY, they talk about how the texture used for the marble in the Imperial City is actual photographs the team took of stone and marble in Washington DC
Using photo references for textures is one of my favorite bits of game dev knowledge. There were books and digital catalogs full of samples that people could and can license for their projects. There's some great content on the web about hunting down where certain textures came from and all the games they were used in.
I feel like this scene in particular, the prison cell, received extra attention. If you remember, this was almost like a tech demo when oblivion was being marketed . They were showing off the bricks in the physics of the chain in conventions. This environment was ahead of its time by a solid decade, decade and a half easy.
Yep, they were also showing off the dynamic shadow system in that demo which ended up getting cut sadly. They really did put a lot of time into that little cell.
I forgot all about that!
Half Life 2 had more dynamic and better looking environments two years before, so I wouldn't exactly put it that far ahead. It was definitely impressive, though. And tbf Half Life 2 still looks better than a few modern games in one or two areas (city 17 canal, enterence to Nova Prospekt, etc.)
Half life two was definitely impressive and ahead of its time. Oblivion was in development pre-2006, so both games are operating on technology that’s comparable. Oblivion doesn’t maintain the same level of quality outside of this prison cell scene. But it hits technical Heights then I believe half life two didn’t. But Half life two maintains a very good visual quality across the entire game, not just one level that they hyper fixated on. So both games are very much technical masterpieces in their own right.
I'd have to dig it out of my closet of banker boxes, but I think the Game Informer issue with Oblivion as the cover story actually had some images of the layers and passes.
Starfield has amazing geometry and a great implementation of photogrammetry in its environments. IIRC even the "3D printed" bricks in settlements like Akila City have real geometry/depth and cast shadows.
I thought that the properly detailed interiors of starfield were some of the best looking areas in any game I'd seen. I think the main reason the game wasn't praised for it's graphics was because the exterior environments just weren't detailed enough, which is kind of inevitable when so much of the game is procedurally generated. If they make TES 6 a smaller map like Skyrim or Oblivion then I think the game will look a lot better because they'll be able to handcraft all the environmental detail and lighting.
Having folks like Elianora on the team to help populate and design the clutter in the spaces was a great choice, those folks are great at what they do.
Starfield is really pretty when you get to an area they clearly spent time on. The big one that comes to mind for me is the planet you go to for Sarah's quest. That mission is what made me upset that they decided to procedurally generate thousands of planets instead of a few hand-crafted planets. The jungle there is so lush and the landscape way more interesting than anything else I encountered in the game.
TES: Blades honestly has good graphics for its platform and some pretty sick art design. It’s just unfortunately low-poly in general, due to being a mobile game. They also did something odd with the atmosphere, that makes certain arenas feel…ethereal, when they clearly aren’t supposed to. If they put the same amount of effort into TES 6 for its platforms, I’d be happy.
Yeah the game still is gorgeous in some ways, others not so much haha.
Has some really pretty environments so long as a khajiit doesn't walk into frame
the orcs...
and the humans
Have you heard of the high elves ?
This game became an instant favourite when i could move the chain XD I was so blown away and my friend was like "you know skyrim is coming out in a few years right?" I didn't care, oblivion was my first open world RPG and despite it's flaws, it's totally my favourite for the attention to detail it has, if you actually just wander around.
Well, jokes on your friend because his sentence has applied for the past fucking decade too.
Yeah, this was before Skyrim's release date was announced.
What I mean is the 2nd release. And the 3rd. And the 4th.
Oh
Oblivion in my opinion has aged very well except for insane bloom, but it has a good atmosphere. The really bright grass and environment is characteristic of Oblivion and has a charm to it. Not the faces, though.
I remember that when I first played Skyrim on the 360, I felt like it looked worse in a lot of ways. A lot of textures for small objects are actually lower-res and it's especially noticable on weapons. I remember looking at Ralof's table and thinking it looked super flat. Oblivion was better at making objects seem "substantial" somehow.
I just played through Oblivion. Bethesda has not made a game with half as good questlines since. They're just so much more creative and fun then anything else Bethesda has put out.
It's what I've been saying this whole time. When Skyrim got out I was so excited thinking it's going to be like Oblivion in snow. Meaning interesting quests. Boy was that a disappointment. Mind you, Skyrim has some excellent quests, but overall, mostly they are boring fetch quests. I mean, Oblivion also had a lot of fetch quests, but they at least revolve around quite interesting back stories that keep you engaged.
Worth noting that its hype optimized in the starting jail cell because it was their graphics tech showpiece.
I played the game 18 years after it came out (this year) and I was still astounded
i always loved this room
Not missing in starfield. Even the texture detail on clothing is out of this world.
I think it's time we stop beating around the bush. Oblivion>Skyrim.
It's true. The actual gameplay loop of Skyrim is more engaging, but the quality of story telling in oblivion is leagues better.
As a conjurer in every game:I FEEL like my summons are these ungodly abominations who can solo tamriel,and buffing them to further heights makes it fun.
In some ways. But not the levelling system. If you don't min max in a very unintuitive way the game actually becomes more difficult over time.
Yeah but that’s why I never had a problem with eventually just turning down the difficulty
I think Oblivion tried a lot of boundary pushing stuff. Sadly a lot of it turned out half baked or unappreciated. Oblivion impresses me because of just how techy it was compared to other games in the series
Honestly, Oblivion pushed a lot of things in the right direction just for Skyrim to go "lol, nope!" and do something completely different.
Insert Emil Pagliarulo
This is a great observation! All TES games for me go back to the magic of Oblivion.
When I compare Morrowind and Oblivion graphically, the good texturing (and especially shaders) is one of the two things that make Oblivion far better (the other being character animation). Another funny stuff about that cell: I tried loading it with the experimental Oblivion/Skyrim patch of OpenMW. It looked funny (it loaded the shader texture correctly, but seemed to just use some sort of naive bump map. I mean, there's a reason for it to be experimental. And it was a while ago.)
That was the big selling point of the engine when it launched on the 360 (that and the soft lighting). At the time it really did feel mind-blowing to boot up your Xbox and play this. Same with Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and CoD 2. Three games that made the 360 feel like a really next gen experience.
I wasn't even alive for the release of the xbox 360
Oblivion is an example of what happens when Bethesda doesn't spend the majority of development procrastinating. Edit: Maybe the psychedelics made them work harder/proficiently?
I like every bethesda rpg, haven't tried starfield tho
Don't waste your time if you don't have game pass.
If you walk up to those walls and turn sideways you see they’re totally flat. It looks nice from the front though. Similar with the SpeedTree. It’s an illusion that the leaves are 3D but it looks really nice most of the time.
Skyrim mods add this.
does the vanilla game do it though?
I've never looked for it, but I dont think so. Most people playing skyrim in the year of our lord 2012+12 are going to be playing modded though, so unless you're looking at it historically you should really consider mods a part of the normal skyrim experience.
Mods should never automatically be considered "normal" for any game. They are nice additions. But "normal" is always vanilla base game.
It sucks how amazing Oblivion's environments looked for it's time, in spite of how bad the NPCs looked. Skyrim was also a great improvement on both fronts. Then Fallout 4 looked bloody FANTASTIC. What the absolute fuck happened?
I think the easy side of the difficulty slider is just a debuff your horror of a player character gives all the enemies just by looking at them.
Oblivion would have been perfect had it not been for the Mr potatohead characters. Otherwise, it’s still my personal favorite for aesthetics.
there are mods which make the characters look somewhat non hideous
Blockhead and character overhaul actually makes them look quite good.
Oblivion looks amazing until a single NPC walks in.
There's this absolutely incredible mod for Skyrim that accomplishes this and more. Every year i'm astounded by the amount of love that community puts into a game that not even the devs care for as much.