again
Morrowind = Net Immerse released 2002-2003 using Direct X 8.1
Net Immerse is bought out and renamed gamebryo gets Direct X 9.0 overall
Oblivion = Gamebyro released 2006 Direct X 9 but sticks to mostly Shader Model 2.0 which runs worse then Shader 3.0 on same hardware,
Fallout 3 = Gamebryo again released 2008 using Direct X9.0c some more shader 3.0 effects are used but still mostly Shader 2.0 Based
Fallout New Vegas = Gamebryo again same as above cut and dry no changes,
Skyrim = Gamebryo tweaked to allow a few shader changes on there old code, more Shader Model 3.0 Oriented, shadowing is tweaked but heres the kicker
across all the above games, shadows are cpu based, but what youll notice is shadowing they added in oblivion was removed in fallout 3 and New Vegas to an extent, because it self shadowing for instance never really functioned properly in Oblivion, after having fixed the rendering and improving it youll notice self shadowing made a come back but mostly youll notice that
Self Shadowing
Shadows on Trees
Shadows on Land
are usually disabled by default why? because it hits the cpu like a shit ton of bricks, there are some gpu aspects to shadows, but most of Skyrims shadows look like there straight out of 2000-2003 games,
even old school Rome Total War released in 2003 with 10k soldiers on screen offered better shadowing then skyrim in some regards. as well as many other games,
Gamebryo engine used by Skyrim and all of bethesda's titles dosent even properly support smooth shadows in general without filters and extras, unlike 90% of the rest of the market which does,
Gamebryo is also limited by shadow resolution over an area
example say you have 4096 shadow maps and shadow distance 8000 well as we all know setting shadow distance to 4000 improves clarity of shadows, this is because the game essentially just applies shadows like a giant texture map, 4096 shadow map gets scaled across distance, thus looks like shit, think of it as blowing up a 512x512 texture map to 2048x2048 youll notice it gets blurry edges get pixelated well same idea. In general Bethesda kinda just halfassed shadowing, in general hell Skyrim dosent even support Ambient Occlusion properly which almost all games use now to improve shadows, you have to force it via Nvidia drivers, AMD users cant even access that lol. The game engines age is apparent most of its source code is from a time when DX 8.1 was relevent. Direct X 8.1 was relevent from 2001-2003 for the most part where it was replaced in earnest by Direct X 9 game was already well into development obviously so changes were impossible but you can see how this is going when Direct X 9.0c hit well it hit stride fast, was pretty much cut copy paste from console to PC simplifying the process. This ment Bethesda just let the game engine sit with no real reason to improve anything, after all the cash cow aka consoles didnt need any improvements.
Thus why we see such old methods of game design still readily visible in bethesda's games.
, imagine running down a slope trying to avoid those damn snow that is about to plough your face XD
