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Gavin Carter Discusses Elder Scrolls
Conspiracy_Of_Doves writes to tell us Brett Thomas over at Bit-Tech recently interviewed Elder Scrolls producer, Gavin Carter. From the article: "The size, scope and sheer graphical grunt required for Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion requires gigahertz of processing power to run, good bandwidth to update and expand, and gigabytes of hard disk space to store. Things that a console didn't really have...until now." The interview takes a look at the development with respect to the two different platforms, PC and Xbox 360.
Some of the packages do: Xbox 360 info.
And interestingly, the original did as well (8 Gb hard drive, i believe).
I'm excited about this title and I am more excited because these guys are just down the street from me in Rockville, MD. A town better known for an REM song than for the fact that it's the place where they successfully mapped the human genome and more importantly, magically took away most of my winter and spring free time with this cool game.
As a gamer who hasn't bought console since SNES, I couldn't care less about precious XBox ver. 2 and the steamroller of hype.
But the issues I do care about are:
* That article includes a screenshot with an Argonian, who looks like an alien bug or something. Nowhere near the lizardy look that Morrowind had, which ruled. If they screwed up the models' heads just to make the human full-helmets and boots fit them, I'm sorely disappointed. The critter people need custom gear.
* HDR is crap. I don't care what the wankers who played Lost Coast say, it looks bad. Ambient lit places look fine, but all of those screenshots that have anything white or metal in them look like overexposures through a soap opera filter.
* From the E3 videos, they seem to think we need to zoom in on every pore of a person's face when they're in a conversation. I hope that has a toggle to turn it off.
* It was supposed to be out on November 22nd, but now, it seems XBox releases got pushed back, and now ES4 "isn't done yet." They'd better fix my Argonians while I'm waiting.
* Also from videos, they were showing off the new dungeons. While dungeons were pretty much cookiecutter in Morrowind, I didn't like how the demo seemed to be filled with gimmicky traps and such. I hope that's just for press, and I won't find myself guessing where the next 'suprise' trap is going to be. (Like how Doom 3 'scares' you by trapping every gun and spawning monsters behind you.)
* In the video, we see that digital dogs haven't progressed much. Just like in Deus Ex, when a dog turns, it magically spins about it's center. I have a dog, she doesn't turn like that.
Anyway, my $5 are already down, and it's not like I'm going to not buy it, anyway, nomatter how much they wreck things.
You can pre-order the game here: Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!