Dreamwriter said:One could hope, but I doubt it. Jeremy Soule in previous Elder Scrolls games has done mostly crappy ambient music, not the kind of music anyone would actually listen to outside of the game. The few non-ambient songs were good, though.
This was an article from the last issue of Edge (the one prior to the Wii U cover). I was wondering when they were going to put it online.Dyno said:Don't know if this has been posted yet but Edge put up a preview that reads very nicely.
http://www.next-gen.biz/features/setting-out-skyrim
I enjoy their preview writing much better than their review writing.
Dyno said:Don't know if this has been posted yet but Edge put up a preview that reads very nicely.
http://www.next-gen.biz/features/setting-out-skyrim
I enjoy their preview writing much better than their review writing.
Deadly Cyclone said:This gave me goosebumps.
"Skyrims mountainous landscape feels authored, dramatically rich it feels like its there for you. Oblivion was simply vast; Skyrim feels epic."
GhaelonEB said:Also, Blue Ninja is going to murder you for bumping this thread.
I loved what he's done for ambient music in the game and also in KOTOR. To each his own but I thought Soule knocked it out of the park in Oblivion.Dreamwriter said:One could hope, but I doubt it. Jeremy Soule in previous Elder Scrolls games has done mostly crappy ambient music, not the kind of music anyone would actually listen to outside of the game. The few non-ambient songs were good, though.
I have not heard of any mention but both Fallout 3 PC and Fallout: New Vegas PC have 360 controller support so Bethseda should have no reason not to support it (unless they do a Bioware and think controller support for PC games is stupid or whatever their poor excuse to not have it in Mass Effect was).Hawk269 said:Any mention of the PC version will have native 360 support? I mean, if they are not giving PC gamers higher rez textures and shit, at least give us the "OPTION" to play with a controller if we want.
Same. Watching my daughter discover Oblivion over the past few weeks has reminded me how much I loved the soundtrack, and how perfectly it coupled with exploration of the landscape. I would go out into the wilderness and just...sort of hang out, tranquilly.The Lamonster said:I loved what he's done for ambient music in the game and also in KOTOR. To each his own but I thought Soule knocked it out of the park in Oblivion.
You should go ahead and put it in so you're first in line to choose the CE. At least that's how Gamestop works.ironcreed said:I rarely spring for collector's editions, but this game is an exception. Hopefully it is announced soon, so that I can go ahead and put my pre-order in.
It was just like Zelda 64 - the sudden change in music made the combat too easy because you can never be surprise attacked.GhaleonEB said:I just hope they handle music transitions better.
10000000000000% agree. The Morrowind theme is godly. It could sustain me for many many hours of play. So good.Van Buren said:Compared to Witcher 1's ambient music, you might be right, but Witcher 2 features more "epic style" music (unfortunately) compared to the melancholic Celtic tunes from the first game. If there's one thing Jeremy Soule excels at, it's "epic" sounding music.
That said, while his Sons of Skyrim theme sounds great, his Morrowind theme still feels like his best TES contribution.
Dreamwriter said:One could hope, but I doubt it. Jeremy Soule in previous Elder Scrolls games has done mostly crappy ambient music, not the kind of music anyone would actually listen to outside of the game. The few non-ambient songs were good, though.
Dreamwriter said:Jeremy Soule in previous Elder Scrolls games has done mostly crappy ambient music, not the kind of music anyone would actually listen to outside of the game.
Dreamwriter said:Jeremy Soule in previous Elder Scrolls games has done mostly crappy ambient music,.
Dreamwriter said:Jeremy Soule
Dreamwriter said:previous Elder Scrolls games
Dreamwriter said:crappy ambient music
The worst is when you've attracted some enemy attention (cue battle music), look around frantically and can't see what the hell is after you, only to have the peaceful music cut back in after 20 seconds.GhaleonEB said:Same. Watching my daughter discover Oblivion over the past few weeks has reminded me how much I loved the soundtrack, and how perfectly it coupled with exploration of the landscape. I would go out into the wilderness and just...sort of hang out, tranquilly.
I just hope they handle music transitions better.
*peaceful music*
*combat music cuts in*
Gah! Must be something attacking me.
*looks around, whacks attacking thing*
*peaceful music cuts back in*
Darklord said:
I agree. One of my fondest gaming memories is just walking along the Golden Coast outside of Anvil as the sun was just coming up while this music played http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki6LZaT0LMoGhaleonEB said:Same. Watching my daughter discover Oblivion over the past few weeks has reminded me how much I loved the soundtrack, and how perfectly it coupled with exploration of the landscape. I would go out into the wilderness and just...sort of hang out, tranquilly.
I just hope they handle music transitions better.
*peaceful music*
*combat music cuts in*
Gah! Must be something attacking me.
*looks around, whacks attacking thing*
*peaceful music cuts back in*
Dreamwriter said:Jeremy Soule in previous Elder Scrolls games has done mostly crappy ambient music, not the kind of music anyone would actually listen to outside of the game. The few non-ambient songs were good, though.
Howard: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim voice acting much better than Oblivion
The voice acting in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was plagued by some small issues, and it impach on gamer's immersion in its incredible world. Bethesda however seems to have learnt from their mistake and so assured fans of the franchise that Skyrim wont suffer from the same problems.
Todd Howard, executive producer at Berthesda Game Studios said, "The actors have gotten better at it over time,"
"Theyve done more videogames, and they understand this isnt a back- and-forth scene this is: Youre going to read a bunch of responses that could happen. Were doing a lot more in Hollywood now, recording over there.
There were technical issues as well that didnt help the performances in Oblivion: It used to be an issue with disc space; on Oblivion we were literally running out of room on the disc for voice, and weve since solved that there are better compression techniques."
So were not really limited by the physical media as much as how long it takes to record it," Todd Howard told Edge. "And the issue actually becomes you know were doing the games in five major languages? So the amount of time it takes to record in English and French and German and Italian and Spanish its a pretty major undertaking."
"Ultimately at the end of the day its time and money, and were spending more time and spending more money on it."
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The last game in the Elder Scrolls series, Oblivion, was released in 2006, a year when the graphical and processing power of the Xbox 360 was defining the current generation of videogames and sprawling games like the PlayStation 2′s Ōkami were stretching the previous generation to its limits. Oblivion presented an open world, traversable for hours by foot; and a high-fantasy backdrop involving trans-dimensional gates, an ancient covenant, and magical things like that. The game was praised for its beauty, size, and ambition.
Skyrim, the fifth Elder Scrolls game, is about dragons. Set 200 years after Oblivion, its landscape is enormous and variedBethesdas vice president of marketing Pete Hines estimates it is three to four times larger than the post-apocalyptic Washington, D.C. the studio built for Fallout 3and its explorable dungeons number in the hundreds. But its apparent from Hines lengthy demo that this game is deeply about the appeal of slayingand being slain byflying dragons, which are returning in droves to the land. You play a Dragonborn, a hero gifted with the power of dragon speech (Shout Magic, they call it, arcane words spoken by dragons when they breathe fire and lightning) who thus has a special bond and fraught relationship with dragon-kind.
Toward the end of the demo, during which he has climbed mountains and careened through caves to battle wolves, undead swordsmen, woolly mammoths, a giant spider and a frost troll, a dragon swoops down from above, stealing a beast away in its claws before coming back for the climax.
Thats an event that has been scripted especially for this demo, to great effect; the dragons entrance wipes a somewhat busy slate clean and returns this sword-and-sorcery epic to the elemental fantasy of watching your big sword glance off a bigger lizards scale. The dragons in the final game will be entirely unscripted, meaning unpredictable: lost in the wilderness, you might watch the sky in the way that Red Dead Redemption players learned to watch their backs while riding through grizzly-bear territory. You might spot a dragon in the distance giving grief to some of Skyrims other wildlife. Before our demo ended, a second dragon made an unrequested appearance, perhaps overhearing the shouts of its cousin. Our Dragonborn hero slays both, and we watch their hides evaporate into embers as he absorbs their souls, gaining new powers for his exploits.
There are various moments in an Elder Scrolls game when the limits of technology challenge the games ability to top the imaginative heights of a Tolkien-esque or tabletop fantasy. The game either passes the test or is exposed as a contorted body of illusions, like a marionette whose strings are prone to tangling. In Oblivion, you might mistake chatting townsfolk for a pair of tape recorders, or wince as a character runs stiffly away from you, inexplicably, his body popping up and down on little rocks as it slowly recedes. The technology on display in Bethesdas new Creation Engine is considerably more convincing, though it remains to be seen whether dueling dragons can feel much more dynamic, or naturalistic, than standing in place and mashing buttons.
But Skyrim is a subtle step forward in other ways. The demo still has bugs, but it feels aesthetically precise. An animation-blending system makes moving bodies look alive and muscular. A swung axe lands with a terrible, momentous thud on a trolls forehead. Magic powers pop and crackle, frightening and forceful like oil in a cauldron. The games engine simulates weather and cloud movement, and one spell actually changes the weather as far as the camera can see, bringing down storm-clouds and rain and thunder on a now-harried dragon. And there are cinematic kill moves, in which the action slows down or the camera pulls back to show you finishing off a monster with a flourish.
Those kill moves may sum up the new feel of Skyrim, which streamlines normally clunky RPG conventions like inventory, dialogue, and dungeon crawling into a more fluid and seamless experienceeven as it continues to expand in scope, so much that Bethesda admits the game is probably bigger than it needs to be. Rather than sifting through goods in a virtual backpack, you flick and scroll through elegant lists of your weapons, swords and spells, mixing-and-matching them in your two hands, and alternating or combining your powers with quick pulls of the gamepad triggers. Conversations with quest givers are handled similarly. A new feature called Radiant Story allows Skyrim to pull strings you didnt realize existedadjusting which characters give what quests, and deliberately sending you to dungeons the game knows you havent yet seen. As you play, little pop-ups continually apprise you of what skills youre advancing, like subtitles to the main feature.
And the dungeon we saw was more colorful and eventful than a cave ought to be, with a spiders den leading into an ancient burial chamber, a hall of swinging pendulum traps, and a snowy chasm. Moving at a faster clip than previous games, ones first impression of Skyrim might be that too many ideasentire shelves of a wizards libraryare being compressed into half-hour chunks of gameplay. The dungeon is a kaleidoscope of trouble, every other room having some backstory or evocative detaila Dungeon Masters fever dream. Its a bright future where both the magic and math of dragon-slaying can be performed with a couple of buttons and levers.
TheVampire said:What I really liked about Oblivion was outside the main cities they had small towns/settlements. I hope they have that in Skyirm.
Dude... that's... that's...wit3tyg3r said:I own and listen to the Elder Scrolls music outside of the game. The entire Oblivion and Morrowind albums are set to my alarm clock (on my phone), so not only do I listen to it out of game, I wake up to it every single morning. It's purely epic and just plain awesome!
wit3tyg3r said:I own and listen to the Elder Scrolls music outside of the game. The entire Oblivion and Morrowind albums are set to my alarm clock (on my phone), so not only do I listen to it out of game, I wake up to it every single morning. It's purely epic and just plain awesome!
TheVampire said:What I really liked about Oblivion was outside the main cities they had small towns/settlements. I hope they have that in Skyirm.
The Lamonster said:It's okay to still use "epic" if it's related to fantasy.
BigJiantRobut said:An alarm clock cannot and will not ever be epic.
unless it has Faith No More on it
Evolved1 said:What if it wakes you by reading you The Odyssey every morning...
The Lamonster said:What if it turns into a dragon and uses it's head to position you onto it's back and flies you away through your bedroom window and takes you over mountains and oceans and into the clouds where you find the god of thunder himself and battle him to death while shouting war cries and casting spells you never knew you knew????
Wtf is that Jack from MadWorld?BigJiantRobut said:
c'mon y'all
Also I definitely agree with the camp that thinks Mr. Soule is a bit... boring. I dunno, I love the Elder Scrolls themes but the music feels so sparse and delicate, even during combat. It usually sounds like a four person ensemble playing music designed for a full suite, if that makes any sense. It lacks texture.
Easy_D said:Wtf is that Jack from MadWorld?
Turn off the music. Immersive games are much more immersive when there's not some imaginary speakers following you around.BigJiantRobut said:Also I definitely agree with the camp that thinks Mr. Soule is a bit... boring. I dunno, I love the Elder Scrolls themes but the music feels so sparse and delicate, even during combat. It usually sounds like a four person ensemble playing music designed for a full suite, if that makes any sense. It lacks texture.
Ugh. No way. I could never play in virtual silence for that long. There really isn't enough ambient sound in Morrowind/Oblivion for it to feel immersive.Seanspeed said:Turn off the music. Immersive games are much more immersive when there's not some imaginary speakers following you around.
Anyone? I've never played a Bethesda game on PS3 (or any system) and I just want to make sure it's not like a Bayonetta situation or something. I'm really looking forward to Skyrim after reading all the previews and I'm hoping it looks as good on PS3 as, say, the trailer for it on PSN (which may or may not be made with actual PS3 footage).Neiteio said:I've read like a half-dozen preview articles now. One thing I want to know about Skyrim is how well will the PS3 version hold up? That's the system where I would be playing it. Do we have reason to believe the PS3 version will be just as pretty as the XBox 360? (Or better yet, confirmation?)
Neiteio said:I've read like a half-dozen preview articles now. One thing I want to know about Skyrim is how well will the PS3 version hold up? That's the system where I would be playing it. Do we have reason to believe the PS3 version will be just as pretty as the XBox 360? (Or better yet, confirmation?)
Gah, I HATE screen tearing. Worst thing ever.NBtoaster said:I wouldn't get your hopes up. I expect similar to their previous games; 4xAA on 360 and none on PS3, screen tearing on 360 and none on PS3 but worse framerate.
Hmm... The PSN trailer of Skyrim looks gorgeous. But that's not necessarily made with PS3 footage, is it?NBtoaster said:I wouldn't get your hopes up. I expect similar to their previous games; 4xAA on 360 and none on PS3, screen tearing on 360 and none on PS3 but worse framerate.
Neiteio said:Hmm... The PSN trailer of Skyrim looks gorgeous. But that's not necessarily made with PS3 footage, is it?
I wonder if, this being a new engine and all, all rewritten with more next-gen knowledge, if the two console versions will be more similar than best Bethesda efforts? At any rate, I just want to see what it looks like on PS3.Gravijah said:Nearly positive that it's 360 footage.
You genius.wit3tyg3r said:The entire Oblivion and Morrowind albums are set to my alarm clock
Neiteio said:I wonder if, this being a new engine and all, all rewritten with more next-gen knowledge, if the two console versions will be more similar than best Bethesda efforts? At any rate, I just want to see what it looks like on PS3.