Gothic 3 to use crap-engine too

I have a real bee in my bonnet about substandard engines. Oblivion is really very poor in this regard (as was Morrowind before it - bad Bethesda, no twinky), and it certainly impacts on what should really be the king of all immersive games.

That said, I understand the desire to use middleware to speed development. But it's just so frustrating to have these sorts of issues when you can see that it just doesn't have to be this way - WoW being a perfect example. Imagine a single player game set in a world like WoW, it would be spectacular. And the engine is one of the best I've seen in terms of requirements and bugs. In the hundreds of hours I've put into that game, I've encountered a handful of crashes, and I've seen it run smoothly on some pretty poorly specced PC's. Now, granted WoW doesn't display anywhere near the same geometry as Oblivion, but frankly I think in many ways it looks just as good, and it certainly runs a damn sight better.

How do you know that the loss of detail has anything to do with the engine? Maybe it's just that they didn't put a detailed texture there or maybe they turned the LOD draw distance down to provide more focus on the objects in the foreground.

It's really hard to judge a game from screenshots, the biggest feature of games is that they always in motion. That scene could look totally different if you were involved in the fight. Personally, I don't really see any of the issues you point out. The biggest thing that leaps out at me is the really crappy texture used on the waterfall itself but, again, I'd have to see it in motion before I'd be willing to condemn it.

Oh, and for the record I don't have any real issues with Oblivion on my system that I can definitively say are caused by the engine. Most of the memory leaks that I see are caused by DirectX and I have them in every game that uses DX. So getting rid of the middleware wouldn't fix those problems. I also don't have any issue running DAoC or Oblivion in a window so how can you say, definitivly, that the engine is causing your issues and not something else?

I play Oblivion on the Xbox360. Visually - yes, that LOD can...lessen the majesty of some of the screen shots. Some. Not all.

As for the "bugginess". I have to call you on that. I've had it crash ZERO times on the Xbox.

When I played it on the PC, I had horrible problems that were due to bad drivers and crappy hardware. Once I fixed both of those problems, the only crashes I had were GPU heat related. Fix that problem, no crashes. The thing about some of these modern games is that they stress the hardware by asking it to perform according to spec. If the DirectX API says I can do A and expect B, then it's not the developers fault when the sound drivers pukes all over it. Especially when the driver is not "certified".

A well-implemented terrain LOD system should be barely noticable - it should give the illusion of high resolution geometry everywhere. Once LOD starts to become noticable, this impacts on the immersion.

Gothic 3 does not use the Gamebryo engine. I don't know who started the rumor that Gothic 3 uses a heavily modified Gamebryo engine but it's not true. In an interview with a German print game magazine Philipp Kraus specifically mentioned that Gothic 3's engine was completely developed inhouse from the scratch.

Heh .. i have no problem running either of these games :P hell i've got mods on Oblivion that increase the LOD texture res from 512x512 to 4096x4096.

Get a good ammount of ram with a good amount of speed, a good set of either the SLI or Crossfire dual GPU config. and a decently quick processor and you shouldn't have much trouble playing these games.

Expensive? hell yes. But you can't expect to run these games at such a high quality with a cheap rig.

Also, Gothic 3 and Oblivion are like night and day :P Oblivion is infinitely more stable then Gothic 3. My computer can run Oblivion with high+ graphics (as in mods that take them beyond factory) just fine where as it can have trouble running Gothic 3 at it's factory default highest setting in some of the cities.

So why bring up Oblivion (and even Morrowind?) to compare with Gothic 3? Hell if you had trouble running Morrowind then you shouldn't even be talking about sluggish high-quality graphics because you obviously are trying to run more then your computer can handle. :P