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Skyrim - The World of Skyrim

Welcome to SkyrimWatch…we'll resume our usual programming shortly…
CountChocula sends word of a new Skyrim dev diary titled Reaching New Heights: The World of Skyrim, which further discusses the world design and art direction with several developers through a podcast, video (linked earlier today) and slideshow:

Quote:

Every facet of Skyrim's aesthetic was influenced by the world itself, making environment design an early priority.
“It helps define so much of the game for us,” explained lead artist Matt Carofano. “That's sort of our main character of the game – what is the world?”
After taking a hand-crafted approach to the world design of Fallout 3, the art team set out to double their efforts in bringing that level of detail to the more expansive and varied acreage of Skyrim.
“We found by doing Fallout 3 that making a completely hand-done world just looks a lot better; it's more interesting, it just feels better. So we ramped up the landscape team and worked on that from the beginning.
“Every rock, every tree, every ingredient plant, was all placed by an artist or level designer to make sure the world was well-crafted.”

..and I'll just toss in this short and somewhat trite Elder Scrolls series respective at Beefjack:

Quote:

Arena took absolutely no prisoners – hell, getting out of the first dungeon alive was no mean feat. Alhough earlier text-based adventures would think nothing of abruptly shredding your hapless hero with a horde of Grues, it came in the sterile, homely format of DOS text. Arena’s strength came in harnessing the real-time element. A wrong turn wouldn’t be instantly damning, but instead hurl you headlong into a desperate fight-or-flight reflex test. Survive, progress, and overcome.

More information.

Skyrim has furry cows? Yay! Sold!! :p

"Arena’s strength came in harnessing the real-time element. A wrong turn wouldn’t be instantly damning, but instead hurl you headlong into a desperate fight-or-flight reflex test. Survive, progress, and overcome."

Sigh. They don't make it like this anymore :(

Take out the real-time aspect and they do indeed still make them in the form of Dugeon Crawl: Stone Soup, Jade/Adom, Legerdemain, Dungeons of Dredmor, Angband or the many many variants of Angband. If roguelikes aren't your style then Frayed Knights, Eschalon 1 or 2 or KOTC.

Add in the realtime aspect and Fallout New Vegas would be a lot like that. Try taking on those dang scorpions too soon and you may survive or you may get your butt handed to you on a silver platter. Try going to a radiation ghoul infested area and again you may survive and thrive with all the goodies you're bound to find or you may get eaten. Try helping the miners too soon and the deathclaws may laugh in your face while they rip it off or you could survive. There is also the super mutant radio station. Try going up there too soon and say goodbye to breathing or survive and once again thrive.

Risen and The Witcher 1/2 would also be a contender for exactly what he just described. Hopefully Risen 2 will be similar. There are others, but I've listed enough to make my point that devs still make them like that and better.

Wow, that video really showed the voice improvements. They look incremental from New Vegas, but definitely head and shoulders above Oblivion.

At least they're aware of the shortcomings of OB's randomly generated terrain and earlier Todd bashed OB's renfaire artstyle/look. Beth manages to be more critical of its own games(in hindsight - when trying to sell a new one) than so-called professional critics/reviewers.

Quote:

Originally Posted by KapitanUnterhosen (Post 1061104745)

Or for instance, they learned new ways to do things with incremental games. Oblivion was released 6 years ago and was great at the time…it is showing it's age now.