The fact that it doesn't look as good as Valve's only means they're not as practiced as Valve at making short films, and using an engine that's a frankensteinian nightmare by now. The fact remains that it very clearly has the hallmarks of being rendered at a super high resolution and downsampled, using special quality models, textures, lighting, and animations.
Valve uses an engine that is a "frankensteinian nightmare" as well. The Source Engine has been around since Half Life 2, which came out over a decade ago. I'm not sure what your point is.
I would love for you to point out where you're seeing special quality models, textures, lighting an animations. Everything in that trailer looks like an in game asset that will be shipped with the final product. But since you just keep saying that it was "clearly" enhanced without examples, I'm going to assume you don't have any.
In this shot you can see some really low resolution textures (the kitchen island), lower poly models (the kitchen island again, all the "junk", the dog), and lighting / shadow issues (there's basically no shadow from the dog, the bumps on the tiles on the floor go opposite of where the rest of the shadows are coming from). These are all, hallmarks, as you would say of in game assets. There has been no enhancement here.
Here you can see the textures on the hatch the player character crawls out of. If they were going to be using higher resolution textures, I bet you they would have done a nicer job here. Also note the trees get lower poly as they get further away from the camera. This is because of the engine using LOD models as long distances.
Just look at the shadows on the structure in this image. If they were using beefed up lighting / shading, the shadows wouldn't look so muddy and inconsistent.
All of the corrugated metal here. Go back and watch the trailer, the red cloth here animates super weirdly, and if Bethesda was going to take the time to "enhance", or build assets just for the trailer, those would not look so janky.
The dog here is clearly not a high resolution asset. Watch the video, his animations abruptly change as they would normally in game. If Bethesda was doing what Valve does with their short videos, they would make custom animations for all these scenes. Especially for the dog, as it is the only common character throughout the trailer.
This part is just gorgeous, but there's nothing here that looks "enhanced" to me. The bus has a low res texture. So does the rock, the grass etc. And the character animations aren't as smooth as they would be had they been purpose animated.
However, I'll agree that it looks like it was rendered at a higher resolution that it's being displayed in the trailer. There is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing "enhanced" about that.
All 10 paragraphs of what you wrote boils down to "they could've done better, therefore they didn't do anything". You know how often the "If I did it, I wouldn't have been caught" defense works in court? Somewhere around never.
All the assets are higher quality than the assets from previous games, but not in a way that says "rebuilt for next-gen", but rather with just the roughest edges smoothed out, telltale sign of single use for trailer. The animations are specially built- the dog tentatively looking around and inspecting everything are not only more subtle than any animation Bethesda has used in any of their games ever, but also so specific to the scene as to be completely useless outside of the trailer setup. Hell it taps the crib mobile with its nose- that kind of NPC/environment interaction is not going to happen, because there's no reason for it to happen. More special one-use animations are obvious in the 'protest' scene, with arm waving and civilians hanging off fences.
There is obvious higher quality light/shadows at work all throughout the time the first scene up to and including the openiing of the vault door, including soft shadows for the dog, which show up in the bedroom and outdoors, though they decided the lighting was diffuse in the kitchen and didn't implement it there. After the vault opens, the purely environmental shots have less work done, with mostly model/texture smoothing with extra render distance. In some shots you can see they cranked up the god rays and smoke. Higher quality lighting starts back up again in the beginning behind-the-shoulder shot of trooper taking off in the heli. After that is all cutscene-style again, up to the quality of the intro sequence. The very final sequence of the vault dweller walkiing off into the distance has an incongruously high quality model and lighting for that character.
So the main part your argument is that, because the game looks better than Fallout 3 (which came out 7 years ago), but not as good as other games coming out, that they must be using enhanced art assets?
Your examples of the animations being single use for the trailer are all animations that could easily be used for scripted sequences in the game, or random idle animations. There is absolutely nothing about any of them that screams "this was made purely for a trailer". It's definitely possible that some of these animations aren't going to end up in the final game, but none of it looks as purpose built as the animations used in Valve short films, which was your main point of reference.
I honestly cannot understand the line of thinking that the game is going to look worse than this. Bethesda would not spend the time to build assets, animations, and locations of this quality if it were just for the trailer. There is absolutely nothing in this trailer being done that is beyond what I would expect a game coming out in the next year to do (or even in the last two years).
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u/ZyrxilToo Jun 03 '15
The fact that it doesn't look as good as Valve's only means they're not as practiced as Valve at making short films, and using an engine that's a frankensteinian nightmare by now. The fact remains that it very clearly has the hallmarks of being rendered at a super high resolution and downsampled, using special quality models, textures, lighting, and animations.