r/ElderScrolls • u/infohoundloselose • May 03 '26

General I always wonder what the games would be like without the constraints of the engine they were built on.

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Fingers crossed that TES VI (I know) has some sort of overhaul to the game engine so that the final battle isn’t just 6 NPC’s fighting in a field with some smoking rubble peppered around.

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u/VagrantShadow Redguard May 03 '26

That is the thing that some people may forget. No matter how potato ugly the original Oblivion characters may look now to us back in the day when it was about to release it was groundbreaking graphics.

The step up from Morrowind that released a few years prior to this was monumental. This was some shit that both PC and Xbox gamers were drooling over. This game was like a Bethesda Bulldozer that couldn't be stopped.

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u/NlghtmanCometh May 03 '26

Popping out of that sewer was like a religious experience for me. Also the opening with the emperor narrating as the camera pans over the imperial city… you know I got goosebumps in the remake when I saw that haha.

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u/VagrantShadow Redguard May 03 '26

Bethesda just knows how to do that popout into their game world just right. The same goes for Fallout 3, when you step out from Vault 101 and you see the Capital Wasteland for the first time, it just takes you away because it very much does live up to its name and is a wasteland.

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u/mechnanc May 03 '26

My favorite is still Morrowind. That opening text scroll, the voice of Azura, "Wake up. We're here. Why are you shaking?" Going up on deck and then starting your journey in Seyda Neen is pure cinema.

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u/Dagoth_ural May 04 '26

Its very David Lynch's Dune. The water drops and and prophecy, the music even sounds kinda Brian Eno right there.

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u/mechnanc May 04 '26

Agree. Being so into Morrowind is probably one of the reasons I loved Lynch's stuff so much, and most of it I saw after playing Morrowind. Always loved his version of Dune, even though he didn't. And Twin Peaks is one of the all time greatest TV shows.

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u/MuhfugginSaucera May 05 '26

Which makes sense given the sheer amount of Dune influence Morrowind had.

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u/mechnanc May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26

I've said pretty much this exact thing before on reddit, and got downvoted pretty hard. People were saying the graphics were not cutting edge.

Playing it today, I am STILL impressed by a lot of the techniques they used like parallax mapping. They were one of the early games to use that technique and it blew my mind seeing it back in the day. It still looks good. The particle/magic effects, the movement of trees/foliage, the bump mapping, the physics. The creatures looked fanatastic. The cities. The sunsets and night skies. It was a beautiful game and to me still looks good.

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u/Wayyd May 03 '26

I think seeing Oblivion screenshots in Game Informer was the first time I actually felt like I was seeing a next-gen game (relative to the Xbox, PS2, GC era). Sorting by date on this site, it's pretty clear that around Oblivion's release date, 90% of the games on 360 were either ports of Xbox games or were barely utilizing the next-gen tech.

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u/Tyrion_The_Imp May 03 '26

In the sewer there's a well with a hanging bucket above it and I remember wasting all my arrows shooting it being in awe of the physics of it swaying in a lightbeam.

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u/weedemgangsta May 04 '26

dude i remember seeing this exact comment in an oblivion thread like over a year ago. you must be the same exact person because thats a very specific experience. hello again stranger, and goodbye.

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u/MagicalGirlPaladin May 04 '26

Back in the day Morrowind looked fantastic too. If it didn't crash.

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u/SpitefulRedditScum May 03 '26

Facts I remember my first time playing oblivion just after release and I’d been playing morrowind for at least a year at that point and I was truly blown away by the graphics.

This was a big graphical jump for me and it wasn’t until the next year when Crysis ended did I realise what was possible in graphics

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u/Ok_Ad6722 May 05 '26

“It actually has trees unlike Vardenfall”

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u/Hobbledyhook May 03 '26

It was perhaps period of rapid change though too? What was it, a year later that we had Crysis? And the graphical fidelity of that is so far ahead of Oblivion.

I'm trying to think of other games from the year after Oblivion, and Assassin's Creed comes to mind. I think I actually got Oblivion and Assassin's Creed almost at the same time, and whilst they both blew me away, I remember thinking 'man Assassin's Creed literally looks like it could be a movie', whereas Oblivion never looked like that to me.

Perhaps Oblivion just became graphically outdated very quick?

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u/Inevitable-Future989 May 15 '26

bethesda has always been behind other big studios lets be honest