In Skyrim, the characters have much more defined individual personalities. Bethesda could only assign five or six types of tasks to the townspeople, and there wasn't a lot of nuance to their actions. In reality, the technology driving NPC behavior wasn't overly sophisticated. If you followed a citizen through his daily activities, you would likely witness him or her eating breakfast, setting out to work the land, stopping by the pub for a pint after work, and then returning home to hit the sack. The Radiant AI technology introduced in Oblivion went a long way toward making the NPCs act in realistic ways.
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The non-player characters also seem to be more intelligent thanks to alterations the team made to the Radiant AI technology. The program scans the geography, then calculates where the snow should fall to make sure it accumulates properly on the trees, rocks, and bushes.īethesda has another ten months before Skyrim releases, but thanks to the Creation Engine the world already looks much more stunning than its predecessors. To work around this problem, they built a new precipitation system that allows artists to define how much snow will hit particular objects. To create realistic precipitation effects, Bethesda originally tried to use shaders and adjust their opacity and rim lighting, but once the artists built the models and populated the world the snow appeared to fall too evenly. Given its northern location and extreme elevations, Skyrim's climate is more prone to snowfall than Cyrodiil. Artists can alter the weight of the branches to adjust how much they move in the wind, which is an effective way of, for instance, actualizing the danger of traversing steep mountain passes with howling winds violently shaking branches. For Skyrim, they've created their own platform that allows artists to build whatever kind of trees they want and to dictate how they animate. In previous games the team licensed the SpeedTree middleware to render the forests. It just makes the whole thing a lot more believable when you're there.”Ī lot of the environments are dominated by the untamed wilderness, which look great thanks to Bethesda's overhauled foliage system.
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“That's something we had a little bit of in the past with shadowing, but not on everything. To give the immediate surrounding a more believable look and feel, Bethesda increased the emphasis on the play between light and shadow on the entire world.“Because our worlds are so big all of the lighting has to be dynamic,” Howard says. “The big things for us were to draw a lot of stuff in the distance so we have a really sophisticated level of detail, more so than what we've had in the past for how things stream in and how detail gets added to them as they get closer to the camera,” explains Bethesda Studios creative director Todd Howard.ĭraw distances are great for creating those postcard-worthy landscapes, but the players eyes aren't always fixed on the horizon. The result is the newly dubbed Creation Engine and Kit. To create a diverse country filled with steep mountain passes and dense forests, babbling brooks and violent waterfalls, glacier coastlines and snowy tundras, Bethesda went back to the drawing board and rewrote every major system powering the gameplay experience.
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Though Skyrim's Nordic setting is a more rugged environment than the Renaissance festival feel of Oblivion's Cyrodiil, the new setting isn't lacking in breathtaking views. Many of Fallout's technological refinements carry over to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but Bethesda Studios has also developed and contracted a suite of technological tools that allow the team to reach far beyond anything they've done before. In the five years since Bethesda last visited Tamriel, the studio honed its chops with the post-apocalyptic hit Fallout 3. Taken in combination, these technologies created a fantasy setting that felt more alive and vibrant than any role-playing predecessor.
![bethesda creation kit randomized tree placement bethesda creation kit randomized tree placement](https://assets.atlasobscura.com/media/W1siZiIsInVwbG9hZHMvcGxhY2VfaW1hZ2VzLzAyMjkwYWI1LTU5NDQtNDY2OS05ZmYzLWNhZjA4OWM4NmIxMGQ0YjU1MDQ5NjY3OWY5ZTIyNV8yMDIwMTAxMF8xNDA5NDAuanBnIl0sWyJwIiwidGh1bWIiLCJ4MzkwPiJdLFsicCIsImNvbnZlcnQiLCItcXVhbGl0eSA4MSAtYXV0by1vcmllbnQiXV0/20201010_140940.jpg)
The vast and impressively detailed open world of Oblivion won over critics and gamers alike with cutting edge graphics, high dynamic range lighting, and the innovative Radiant AI technology that endowed non-player characters with decision-making abilities and daily routines. The Xbox 360 launched in November 2005 with a handful of titles, but it wasn’t until The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion released in the following March that gamers truly understood the power of next-generation consoles.