Skyrim - Dev Diary: Completely Blue Sky and More

[Dhruin]

Bethsoft has posted a dev diary on the conceptualisation of Skyrim called Completely Blue Sky. Across a 16 minute podcast interview with concept artists

Ray Lederer & Adam Adamowicz and game director Todd Howard, they discuss how Todd told them the game would be set in Skyrim and they wanted a "gritter, dirtier" experience and then set them free to experiment:​

“It was a reaction to what Oblivion was as a game,” said lead artist Matt Carofano. “Oblivion was a very classic medieval setting, and we felt some of that was a bit generic. We wanted to do something that showed a lot more of the culture of the people who lived there.”
“Skyrim was all about creating a world that seemed believable.”
Finding the perfect tone for the rugged-yet-fantastical province of Skyrim was a challenge initially. Though Skyrim’s Nords share some similarities to real-world Vikings, the likeness is superficial – the Nords have their own distinct cultural history that needed to be detailed from the ground up.
“It was completely blue sky,” relates Adamowicz. “Todd said, ‘Sit down and draw a bunch of cool, weird shit, and we’ll look at it and decide what’s worthwhile and what’s really stupid.’”
Early on, the artists were given freedom to explore radical concepts, with the team leaders only stepping in to provide a general direction.

There's also a video that compares several conceptual scenes with the in-game result and, finally, a slideshow with 40 pieces of concept art. Well worth a listen and look.
Sticking with Skyrim, IGN has a video of an unboxing of their review copy, which appears to be a retail X360 edition. Interestingly, they only received an X360 copy - no PC or PS3. It appears you also get a (paper) map in the standard edition, which is pretty cool.
Lastly for the moment, GameSpot has a humorous video titled Planet Skyrim that patches together a video tour with a mock Richard Attenborough voiceover.
More information.

 

[jhwisner]

They also posted a story describing their introduction to the Dark Brotherhood (contains spoilers.) It does seem more interesting than how they did it in Oblivion, and by quite a bit.

Warning, contains significant surprise-ruining spoilers:
http://games.ign.com/articles/121/1210801p1.html

Actually I should probably stress that if you're interested in doing the Dark Brotherhood quests and want to be surprised by things you should not read that article. While what it reveals is encouraging, it will probably have more impact if you just experience it yourself in the game.

 

[Khalus]

Good to know, I won't be reading it then. Pretty much what I've been doing with almost every article.

With massive RPGs like this, I like to be constantly surprised every step of the way, because if you know how something will happen, it'll be on your mind the whole time, whether you encounter it 4 hrs in or 80 hrs in.

 

[Ford Taurus]

Pretty interesting to see from the concept artist's perspective. Made me think of things I've read about the concept artists that worked on the original Star Wars. Lucas had a very basic derivative story, without much fleshing out - it was the artists that really brought that universe to life.

I still have high hopes for this game, although I expect the reason they only got a X360 version is that the ports for PC and PS3 were (are?) still not complete.

I will probably wait till Christmas, assuming by then some high-res textures packs and various patches will be available. And likely will go Steam with it from day one as I have Oblivion and Morrowind on both disc and Steam and never open the boxes anymore.

(/ramble)

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

"Dark" & "gritty"". Yeah, follow that trend.

 

[Thaurin]

"Dark" & "gritty"". Yeah, follow that trend.

Sigh. Facepalm. Expected this.

 

[DarNoor]

I'm glad they admitted that Oblivion was too generic. They should have stuck with the lore description of Cyrodil.

 

[vurt]

Oblivion sometimes reminded me of those Tiger Wood Golf games, not something you want to be reminded of in a RPG.

I'm happy to see they've been inspired by Conan... I hope they played Age of Conan too, some pretty impressive level design and architecture in that game. I've always disliked how small they've made their structures, 4x the height or so would make some buildings way more impressive and interesting..

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

Sigh. Facepalm. Expected this.

Sorry, I was in a bad mood when I wrote this.

I'm happy to see they've been inspired by Conan…

The way the blood was flowing as well ??? If they do it, then I won't buy it.

 

[vurt]

The way the blood was flowing as well ??? If they do it, then I won't buy it.

It seems to be more brutal than Oblivion at least, with decapitation etc.

 

[Thaurin]

Sorry, I was in a bad mood when I wrote this.

It's okay. There's just something that gets to me about how the wrong combination of words seems to send some people into a frenzy these days. Dark & dirty doesn't necessarily mean cookiecutter nor a cheap cash-in, and sounds appealing to me when it comes down to it.

 

[tolknaz]

Dark and gritty are nothing more than buzzwords these days and more than half of the so called "dark fantasy" games are actually nothing more than run of the mill heroic fantasy. Dark fantasy originally meant fantasy with horror elements. With the rise of Martin, Abercrombie and similar authors the term has seen more use describing fantasy stories with morally ambiguous protagonists. The thing is, there is nothing morally ambiguous about say Hawke and judging by Bethesda's previous games i doubt they'd even grasp the concept.

 

[Thaurin]

But from what I've seen of Skyrim, grittier/dirtier does describe it pretty well, at least compared with Oblivion. Not sure if they want to ride the hype word train here.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

"Dark & Gritty" would be okay - if it just hadn't this feeling of "following a trend" down to it.

A "dark & gritty" game would be interesting for me if it was produced within a time when "colourful & lighthearted" was the trend. Because, if it was produced *then*, I think, it would or could mean that the developers really indended it to be "dark & gritty". As a kind of … artistic principle (don't know any better words for what I mean right now).

There's a different feeling, imho, if the artistic vision was carried out regardless - Skyrim might even be such a case - but if too many do the same thing at the same time, the feeling of "uniqueness" is just gone - or at leased watered down.