Apparantly a leaked Oblivion video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7srHUGNma5c

It's about 5 minutes long - some of it does seem new and there is some extended footage of footage I've already seen.

heh, was a bit disappointed that they downgraded all the lighting and shadows recently. It doesn't look much like the old pretty screenshots of the past year or so.

It will hopefully be a good game still :)

I don't think the Lighting downgrade will make any difference to me. hehe.. I don't play games for eye-candy. I play them for how well the entertain me.

Eye-candy isn't very entertaining to me.. really.. I need a good story or at least a good enough story and great gameplay... Or just GREAT gameplay...

Something needs to be great other than the GFX which will look like crap in retrospect 10 years from now... even 5... or 2...

I like great gameplay, story and graphics. And am disappointed that the engine was downgraded on the PC.

I'm not arguing the worth of graphics, appart from the fact that it does add something extra to what will hopefully be a good game.

I don't typicaly play old games once I finish with them, so 2+ years from now is of no real consequence. By then there will be other great new games to play. But Oblivion is almost here now :D

Here are the Gothic 3 videos - I forgot all about Gothic 3:

http://www.worldofgothic.com/?go=download&catid=13

Why would they downgrade the engine? Why not just have a "Very High" option!?

Oh well, I still want this game XD

They probably cheaping out the PC users by having the system limited to all the bells & whistles only the XBX360 version can cope with at any given resolution just for the sake of "fairness".

That or MS or trying to up the dismal XBox 360 sales figures by paying Bethesda to make the PC version appear less impressive than the 360 version.

My understanding is the PC version will have more graphics options than the XBox version. People have to bare in mind that some of the footage and screenshots you have seen may be XBox sourced.

Where did you hear that the game engine has reduced lighting and shadows? It looks pretty good to me ... and I can't imagine them not including HDR effects which by this point aren't anything new.

Anyway, it looks really great in this video. I've never really played an Elder Scrolls game but I might check this one out.

they have removed dynamic shadows for characters etc, and some other effects, it looks very bland now.

It's been a long time since a game impressed me, That video looks fantastic. One of the things i noticed was the truely dynamic shadows, Would be a shame if it was to have gone....

The last I heard was that they'd removed dynamic shadows from everything apart from characters. Apparently it was a choice between that or making most of the objects non-interactive.

If they could find a good compromize between old and new. The old lighting was a bit dark, the new lighting is too washed out and looks old. BUT you can see more which might actually be a good thing.

I could only find these two low quality pics of the same scene.



http://www.supload.com/free/obliv2.jpg/view/

http://www.supload.com/free/obliv1.jpg/view/

Very low quality- They look like adverts :P

Yeah you can see the difference. The darker shot does look a bit better ... but not enough to wreck the game. They should definitely leave the option in. A really powerful rig could probably pull it off.

Do you think they ever had any intention of releasing the game with that quality?

Sure
But they thought that DualCore / QuadCore and more GPUs like the X1900XTX with its 48 PixelShaderUnits would be around when they finished ...

At the moment you would need one of these or a GF7900 to run it at full settings or just a XBox360

www.supload.com/free/obliv1.jpg/view/

That screenshot looks like it was scanned from a magazine. If you look at the levels in photoshop, it doesn't reach the top or the bottom of the range of brightnesses. About a quarter of the range is unused. So this is probably a scan from a mag which was too dark, and someone lightened it up to make it bright enough to see all the detail in the scene, which you probably can't see in the actual game.

Also, though I have no intention of playing this, if I did, I'd be happy to see that stupid bloom go. And from those two screenshots, I don't see any difference in the lighting, other than a bloom filter, and the fact that instead of the woman casting a shadow twoards the torch, she's now casting a shadow sideways towards it, which more acurate, though till completely wrong considering none of the apparent major light sources illuminating the characters are coming from the left side of the screen.

Here's a fast link for the video, that youtube site is way too slow:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-80675935532902762&q=oblivion

So that screenshot is taken from that video then. Well, that means either the compressor lightened the image, which Divx does for example, or they recorded the video off a TV. Or maybe the output of the 360 looks like that on a monitor. Ot the dev kit does that to try to simulate how it will look on the TV, since TV's never get blacks as black as a PC.

I don't think that is how it will actually look though, and I hope that bloom I saw in the video was from the old renderer. I'm getting sick of seeing that in every game. It doesn't look like real light bloom, it looks like someone smeared vaseline on the lens. And now that my vision isn't blurry, it looks even less like light bloom. :-)

You know another thing that occurs to me looking at that video? I'm getting real sick of enemies attacking the same exact way over and over again. Maybe it is fun when playing the actual game but it looks damn boring sitting here watching some guy just stand in front of you and swing a sword at you the same way over and over and over.

Too bad next to no games seem to have any real sword swinging mechanics, I'd kill for a sword-swinging system like the game "Die by the Sword" had for something like this. The combat system seems to mimic that of the previous games, which I was hoping they'd actually make a change too, guess I'll be stuck randomly swinging at rats with a huge sword and missing them in yet another rendition of TES.

Wolron: Seconded, especially when the link for the SwiftBOBS demo is still broken!

vinyl:
Fixed. Nobody told me the toolbox section was out of date, I didn't even know it was there. It was up to date in my worklogs.