A blog post from a couple of days back entitled 'Skyrim graphics overated' got me thinking about the importance of graphics in The Elder Scrolls. My first experience with Oblivion (which was also my first ES game) was not by any stretch of the word on a gaming pc. It stuttered, it lagged and it wasn't the prettiest thing to look at yet I was captivated and loved every tortuously laggy second of it (almost).
I eventually managed to improve the performance and visuals of the game considerably before my second playthrough and I won't deny this was a welcome change. While I was plain chuffed to be playing something which didn't resemble a really slow stop-motion animation, the big jump in the quality of the graphics really didn't translate into a similar increase in terms of the enjoyment I got from playing.
The joy I got from playing came from the fact that I could get completely lost in this totally believable world for hours and every waking moment spent away from it felt like one too many. All this was possible for me even though the graphics were pretty outdated even on the highest settings when I started playing. With all the improvements made since then; both visually and in terms of gameplay, I'm absolutely overflowing with anticipation.
I know that Skyrim won't be pixel perfect and in a game this huge, I don't expect it to be. I feel that as long as the essence of TES remains, that magic spark that got us all hooked in the first place; we really will have a gem of game awaiting us on 11.11.11.
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