How is it possible that Fallout 4 looks way worse than Skyrim Special Edition?

[stroopwafel]

How is that even possible? It's not really a small difference either. Characters in FO4 are butt ugly and every asset look cut&pasted into that empty brown void they call an open world(Bethesda even admitted this at a GDC conference). Skyrim had lush forests and atleast quite a few details that look handcrafted while in Fallout 4 everything, absolutely everything, not only looks but actually is interchangeable b/c of that shitty minecraft mode. It's peculiar that FO4 not only looks like trash but the gameplay also revolves around collecting trash to make more pre-made trash assets with the minecraft mode. You could say yeah FO4 is post-apocalyptic but even FO3 had more of a visual identity then this barren shit. It's like Todd-ler deliberately stripped down FO4 to enable Fallout Minecraft which is pointless anyway as those braindead potato NPCs will just stand in front of a wall all day no matter what you build.

In Skyrim the lighting effects actually look quite nice and the mountains have a sense of grandeur few games match. Sure, gameplay is not that great but the world is still a lot of fun to explore. I wouldn't be able to name one landmark in FO4. Espescially the glowing sea is the laziest of the laziest. That entire area looks like they stretched out one singular brown mesh. Even the potato super mutant takes the cake in a game full of potato NPCs. It looks like he was made in MS Paint. Again, in Skyrim it atleast looks like they put an effort in rendering NPCs.

I find it surprising how a new game can regress so much in terms of not just graphics but also quest design. FO4 just seems to have one quest that branches off rather than the more emergent quests in Skyrim that gave the game flavor and made you want to keep exploring those mountain peaks. The 'dialogue options' is another atrocious aspect of FO4. Not just that but having a 'dynamic' camera during conversations make the game look even worse.

FO4 has poor art design but again you could iterate another gamebryo game on a quantum computer and it will still look like shit. In Skyrim SE they were atleast able to compensate for this with some pretty effects and the game world being way prettier to begin with. FO4 not only has the detriment of the gamebryo/creation engine but also poor art design, butt ugly environmental assets/NPCs everything and a simple flat structure that extrapolates the ugliness of the game's graphics even further. It really is ugly piled on top of ugly. Kinda like the love child of meth parents who weren't lookers to begin with.

 

[sXeth]

Well the obvious one is that Skyrim SE was made after Fallout 4, and most specifically was a graphical overhaul of an existing game rather then a whole new one. If it didn't look better it'd be a pretty big issue since that was the whole point of the thing existing (other then forward porting).

Art design comes into play. Skyrim is a more traditional wilderness. Something there's entire third party products that you can buy that have been iterating for over a decade to create for you and look pretty. The bits that aren't wilderness pull heavily from real world inspirations and long running fantasy staples that have lots of material to use as concept art. Fallout's aesthetic styles had to be designed much more from the ground up. The Minecraft-stuff doesn't help of course, and the aesthetic of a dull wasteland is well, dull. I'd say you have weirdly tinted memory goggles if you thought FO3 was any better off though.

The radiant quest junk is identical in both of them, don't know what you're on about re: "emergent quests" in Skyrim. Emergent Behavior comes from gameplay elements interacting with each other unexpectedly. Both games have that sort of thing mostly suppressed outside a few pre-scripted spawn groups designed to mimic it. Skyrim's main variation is dragons that spawn onto you directly (which usually demonstrates how ludicrously stupid the AI is as villagers try and fist fight them), Fallout's main iteration is having those caravans actually exist persistently on the map so there's an off chance one will stumble into another element (and usually demonstrate how stupid the AI is by trying to fist fight a deathclaw or something).

As main quests go, Skyrim gives essentially a handful of separate main quests. Which become weird because they seem to exist in a vacuum, like some sort of parallel universe to each other beyond a brief nod to the civil war thing near the end of the Alduin line. Fallout 4 tried to fix(?) this by making some degree of them all mix together, though not particularly successfully. IT ends up being more of a weird expositionary tour before deciding on a faction proper, though at least there's some weight to the choice (unlike in Skyrim where nobody cared).

 

[crypticracer]

I feel the main art design of the Fallout series hasn't aged in such a way as to hold up in the modern generation of games. Add bethesda's unwillingness to update said style (it wouldn't make fans happy) and you end up with a lot of disparate and simple designs tossed into a classic brown wasteland. It's too whimsical for gritty realism, but not cartoony enough for the whimsy. That was okay when it was an isometric game.

This doesn't address the character models, but I didn't really have a problem with them.

 

[IceForce]

Try playing some Far Harbor DLC.

I dunno how they did it, but they seem to have improved the graphics in that DLC (better lighting, god rays, fogging effects, etc). Additionally, it has a very wilderness-y design (a la Skyrim) which you seem to prefer, instead of a wasteland-y design.

 

[Paragon Fury]

While the same can't be said because of the models, Boston itself is why FO4's graphics have to suffer a little. Boston is by far one of the biggest and most detailed cities of it's kind ever put in a game, especially one of FO4's nature. Anytime you're anywhere you're anywhere in the city proper or on the outskirts the game has to load and handle SO much from Boston that attempting to keep the graphics up along with everything else would toast the consoles and even many higher-end PCs. Even when you're far away the game has to keep A LOT of Boston loaded and ready to go. Even far-away models drain a lot.

And you can't tone Boston down and make everything else look really nice, because then the game just has this jarring difference in it.

 

[Zombie Proof]

The OP sounds like a crazy person to me. I think fallout 4 is beautiful. Browns? Yeah, I saw some browns as well as some beautiful pastels and wonderfully balanced time of day lighting the likes of which Skyrim never came close to. In fact, I have serious issues with Skyrim's overall lack of color contrast.

Every red/green and yellow/blue color scheme has an amazing balance of warms and cools that create depth, atmosphere, and a used up feel that I've yet to see mimicked in any other post apocalyptic game.

Skyrim's mountains also have an annoying lack of depth to them. Mountains that big and far away should NOT be that saturated and detailed. It ruins the sense of scale completely.

Fallout 4 has none of those issues. Objects in the distance desaturate to the comparable color of whatever time of day scheme is being featured and creates some wonderfully aesthetic warms and cools that blend, create depth, distance, atmosphere and scale.

Maybe OP's monitor is broken. That's the only thing that that makes sense here.

 

[stroopwafel]

The OP sounds like a crazy person to me. I think fallout 4 is beautiful. Browns? Yeah, I saw some browns as well as some beautiful pastels and wonderfully balanced time of day lighting the likes of which Skyrim never came close to. In fact, I have serious issues with Skyrim's overall lack of color contrast.

Every red/green and yellow/blue color scheme has an amazing balance of warms and cools that create depth, atmosphere, and a used up feel that I've yet to see mimicked in any other post apocalyptic game.

Skyrim's mountains also have an annoying lack of depth to them. Mountains that big and far away should NOT be that saturated and detailed. It ruins the sense of scale completely.

Is that water or a foggy mirror?

Fallout 4 has none of those issues. Objects in the distance desaturate to the comparable color of whatever time of day scheme is being featured and creates some wonderfully aesthetic warms and cools that blend, create depth, distance, atmosphere and scale.

I like the color scheme in Fallout 4. Objects pop yet have that worn, rustic look of things that have seen better days.

 

[Zombie Proof]

Looks like we're on the same page Hansel hahahaha.

 

[stroopwafel]

I agree that picture of FO4 looks nice but I believe that is a publisher screenshot. There is no denying the gamebryo 2.0 engine is able to render some very pretty nature and weather/lighting effects and this obviously carries over to FO4 where it applies(mainly the more natural environs) but go to downtown Boston or give the characters a 'dynamic' camera during conversations and you'll notice how stiff and ugly everything looks. Point is Skyrim capitalizes on the strengths of gamebryo while FO4 on interchangeable assets and a rundown urban area that looks early PS3.

 

[Zombie Proof]

I agree that picture of FO4 looks nice but I believe that is a publisher screenshot. There is no denying the gamebryo 2.0 engine is able to render some very pretty nature and weather/lighting effects and this obviously carries over to FO4 where it applies(mainly the more natural environs) but go to downtown Boston or give the characters a 'dynamic' camera during conversations and you'll notice how stiff and ugly everything looks. Point is Skyrim capitalizes on the strengths of gamebryo while FO4 on interchangeable assets and a rundown urban area that looks early PS3.

Here are a few personal screencaps I've done. Again, what you're saying and what I'm seeing isn't adding up.

 

[stroopwafel]

I think I have a love/hate relationship with this game. Seeing those screenshots makes me itch to play it again. Re-installing!

 

[stroopwafel]

The thing about it though is even if vanilla looks too bland, there are all kinds of mods [https://www.pwrdown.com/gaming/fallout-4/best-fallout-4-mods-graphics-2017/] to add some flavour. I never really got into the Fallout series other than some of the original, but it?s one I?ve always wanted to play through if I had more time. Who knows, maybe one of these days I?ll clear my game slate completely and play FO exclusively, because overall even considering the downside of technical flaws from being so massive, the emergent gameplay seems too good to pass up.

 

[Zombie Proof]

Ha! Glad I could inspire you to give it another go-round