Oblivions “should” be out in the shops. “Should” because it seems the majority of the people didn’t get it, while I’m reading mixed feedback from the few who have it.

In the past weeks along with the good hype we also read some complaints criticizing exactly that part that this game should do at best: the graphic.

The perplexity seems somewhat confirmed, we already knew that Oblivion relies heavily on dynamic Level Of Detail. The clipping range in the game is HUGE, but this also means that the detail is always dynamically adjusted and that there’s a whole lot of pop-up going on. I never liked games with dynamic LOD, I prefer less detail overall, so that what I see on screen is consistent and so that if I see something on the horizon the place will look exactly the same when I’ll be there. This consistency is a fundamental part of the immersion, which is the strongest element you expect from a RPG.

Oblivion uses the same crap engine on which Morrowind was based (and DAoC, and Civ 4). The same that is now hyped at the GDC. New version, of course, but in my experience there are some flaws that have always been a constant and that I fear I’ll find again in Oblivion. In particular a very bad memory management (and memory fragmentation that makes the game slow down the more you play) and input/mouse lag when there are lot of trees and grass on screen (this due to the SpeedTree technology, also used in DAoC, the unreleased Wish and the upcoming Vanguard), along with an overall bad rendering performance of the render itself. That’s the negative side of using middleware to develop games, you spare a lot of time and resources to focus directly on the production, but at the same time there are tradeoffs and the results aren’t as good as proprietary engines.

This past week Bethesda released a set of six videos (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) and you can figure out already some of the quirks of the engine, also considering that the game will never be as smooth and polished as 30 sec videos carefully put together:

As the video shows the geography and buildings are all there and do not “pop-up”, but at the same time it’s obvious that they rely on the dynamic level of detail heavily. The camera is always tilted up but if you pay attention you can see how all the grass is drawn at a relatively close range (as in every other game, it really kills the performance with all the transparent and animated textures it has to move) and on the distance you can see how the ground textures are rescaled and appear more like a smoothed “blob”. The LOD transitions and colors on the trees seem much, much better than DAoC but it’s hard to see through the resolution of the video.

My comments go in two directions. The first is that the game looks simply amazing despite these compromises (and the light rendering is spectacular). The second is that there seem to be an incredibly huge amount of “generic wilderness” that may dilute a lot the actual game. Have you seen the clip range? You could fit five full games within it. It remains to be seen if all that ground has actually some life or if it’s just terrain you have to cross to go from point 1 to point 2.

That video gave me a sort of “desolated” look, even if it looks so great.

I also wonder at which range living beings and creatures are drawn.

Now we know that even the rocks that you see around, the fallen trees and all the details that aren’t buildings have to go through the LOD. Outside the relatively narrow distance at which the area is fully populated with grass, rocks, detailed trees and wildlife, everything else is reduced to a “blob” texture terrain and tree placeholders.

There are a couple of official screenshots showing these “glitches”. This one, for example, shows how the detail is reduced in the distance. The terrain textures are smoothed and lose specific details like the roads only to reflect basic transitions, from grass, to bare soil and the rock of the mountain, and the trees are reduced to basic placeholders with little to no detail, like stains of color (and it’s possible that they are simple bitmaps drawn at the distance). From this other screenshot you can actually see the distinction between, roughly, three different areas. The first area is the close range at which the grass, rocks, trees in full detail and characters are being drawn, then there’s a second area that you see on the left, where the texture resolution goes down and we have only an approximation of the terrain, with the trees reduced to basic placeholders. On this second level all the specific details are lost and we have just the geography, basic terrain transitions and trees. Then there’s a third area, on the horizon, where even the trees stop being drawn and we just have the bare terrain on display.

This can give you a rather precise idea about how the engine behaves. The heavy LOD is there and I’m sure it can be truly annoying if you come from games with consistent geography where you don’t see the scene slowly “fading in” as you move. This along the fact that there will be rather frequent loading pauses as you move (same as in Morrowind) and that the main city that you see on the screenshots should be a closed “zone” on its own, so there won’t be a smooth transition when you enter it but you’ll have to go through a loading screen.

All these elements could be disappointing in a game that was so hyped. The engine is going to be heavy and while there were nearly no options in Morrowind, making it look really good on every computer (the only advanced effect was the water when most of the video cards didn’t support the pixel shaders), in Oblivion you can customize nearly everything. Which also mean that you can easily turn the game to look like crap.

These are the four screens with the graphic options that you can set: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4

As you can see you can basically turn off everything, buildings included. On the official forums you can read mixed impressions, people loving how it looks like and people feeling quite disappointed about the heavy LOD. The truth is that the game can look superb as it can look shabby. This is one comment from Q23 on the positive side:

True to form, I’ve turned off HDR. Can’t stand the lack of AA in the game and bloom does a decent job. Playing on a standard clocked 1800 XT at 1920×1200 with 4x AA, 8x HQ AF, bloom, and every single in-game graphics option (except for grass shadow, which is off) maxed out. Perfectly playable for me. And the game is gorgeous, absolutely, breathtakingly gorgeous (except for the terrain LOD, which can paint distant hills with very low res textures). The game also has incredibly immersive aural feedback; donned a pair of iron boots and suddenly felt like an encumbered tank moving through a dungeon, with the heavy clocking of my boots clanking on the stone floor. A nice contrast to the wispy quietness of the leather shoes I was wearing before discovering the iron boots. Combat is also far more visceral than Morrowind’s, and definitely more involving. The ability to block with weapon or shield and the options to perform special attacks if timed correctly add more depth to the hand-to-hand combat than Morrowind’s whack-a-mole fighting.

That comment about the sound is particularly interesting. In Morrowind the footstep would change depending on what you had on, but they didn’t change depending on where you were walking, and the jumping sound was just one in total (and extremely annoying). In Oblivion not only the sounds will change depending on both conditions, what you have on and the surface you are walking on.

And this one on the negative side:

Oh my god! My Eyes! On the xbox 360, the distant textures are hideous. There’s no way any of the screenshots or videos were 360 footage. Essentially, Bethesda replaced fog with really, really low res textures. Ugh. I can’t believe how disappointed I am with these “next gen” graphics.

The distance texture issues is what I always think of, rightly or wrongly, as excessive mip-mapping, e.g. swapping in lower for higher-res textures as you get closer or vice versa as you get farther away. Of course the distant textures are supposed to look better, not blander, and the latter is certainly the case to some extent here. Maybe it was a memory issue, or just another unfortunate relic of 360 development perhaps being front and center. But you’ll also notice the game grids out areas and periodically pops up a message stating “loading area” wherein trees, grass textures, etc. suddenly pop-in a few hundred yards down the way.

In heavily forested areas, you rarely notice the loads. In huge, empty space, like quite a lot of the foothills area NE of the capital, it’s really obvious.

I’ve ordered the collectors edition from play.com, myself. The shop is in the UK and the games are usually out in Friday over there, so I’ll have to wait about a week and a half before I can see it with my eyes. I really wish I could be here giving first-hand impressions and screenshots instead of deducing from what I read around.

As for Morrowind I expect it to be a great game, but also deluding under some aspects. I can already imagine the community splitting in two, between those who love it and those who hate it.