The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remake/Remaster.

Mirin Lurker said:
My god how did they make the faces worse? How is that even possible?
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Bethesda, uh... Finds a way~
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Aurelius Of Phoenix said:
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See, I feel this video sums it up nicely: There's a lot of nice eye candy, but it also just kills a lot.

I was having this conversation with my partner earlier today actually: About this sort of technofetishist tendency to think "New = Better" that just doesn't really hold up.

Oblivion looks like a game from 2006, and that's fine - It has the graphical styles and decisions of it's time - The Opening Cutscene starts and the Emperor has a special face modeled for the cutscenes like in most games of the time, you get blurry glimpses of Oblivion but it kinda looks like an area you'll see later in the game and gets you hyped up for it - You enter the world and there are some goofy textures and too much bloom - And all that's fine - That's what graphics looked like at the time, and looking at them hyped you up to play the game even if they were a bit goofy.

IDK, I feel kinda the same with movies - Like they're clearly made with the technical limitations and stylistic decisions of the time period they were made in - And some people see that and think "Well this is outdated" - But to me, I just think - This is an aesthetic - It has the right to look that way - And the world kinda becomes a bland samey place if you take all different aesthetics from across different time periods, decide arbritrarily that later always looks better - And then just draw over how things used to look because you can do something more technically impressive and just assume that's better without thinking.
 
Jogre said:
That's what graphics looked like at the time
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No, they didn't. That's an insult to the games that at the time had far better graphics, even in the previous console generation.

Oblivion has been since release memed for its bad textures, really bad pop-in and potato faces. What Bethesda has done with the remaster is make the game look dead.
 
Norzan said:
No, they didn't. That's an insult to the games that at the time had far better graphics, even in the previous console generation.

Oblivion has been since release memed for its bad textures, really bad pop-in and potato faces. What Bethesda has done with the remaster is make the game look dead.
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I assume Oblivion's scale was a big reason for why it looks the way it does. Hundreds of named NPC's with their own schedules and hundreds of dungeons (as copy and pasted as they may be) combined with it being Bethesda's first outing with the new 360/PS3 hardware probably contributed to its cartoony look. Kinda hard to get the detail of, for example, Bioshock in a wide open environment like Cyrodill. I still think Oblivion's graphics have their charm in a way. This remake kinda looks like they just smashed Oblivion and Skyrim together with some texture mods for good measure. Silly really.
 
I'll agree that the graphics in Oblivion were probably done with limitations of being open world in mind plus hardware limitations, but it's still wrong to say that's what the graphics looked like at the time when they didn't.

But this time they had no excuse and still managed to make it look dead and somehow have worse faces.
 
Norzan said:
I'll agree that the graphics in Oblivion were probably done with limitations of being open world in mind plus hardware limitations, but it's still wrong to say that's what the graphics looked like at the time when they didn't.

But this time they had no excuse and still managed to make it look dead and somehow have worse faces.
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My point wasn't that it was high-end or that there weren't much more technically advanced looking games at the time.

The point is games are allowed to look a little old - Games are allowed to have technical limitations to their graphics - Not every game has to look 100% the most technically impressive it could.

And my point was remaking games in a new graphical format feels like a crime against art - Because rather than embracing the aesthetic that the technical limitations created - It's saying that this is just bad and not allowed to exist.

It'd be like if we decided "The Mona Lisa looks too old fashioned because it doesn't work in more advanced perspective techniques" and then just pretended that an updated version looks better.
 
Graphics are the least of Oblivion's problems anyway. I'd rather they had fixed the level scaling, combat, factions, and put back all the stuff they removed from Morrowind.
 
My initial hope after playing Oblivion was that for FO3 there was at least the option of rendering the regular game & gameplay at the quality level of the talking heads and the cutscenes. That turned out to be disappointment #1.
Resardiv said:
... can't rival 1997 claymation
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Fallout wasn't claymation; not like Clayfighter, or Neverhood. They used a digitizer stylus to import the clay head sculptures into Lightwave, and animated the models from there.
 
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