The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim game engine detailed, new screenshot

A lot has changed in the five years since Bethesda unleashed The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion on a relatively young and pasty faced Xbox 360 crowd. All the things that made Oblivion an instant classic, such as the gigantic and highly detailed open world, the cutting edge graphics and the very clever and versatile AI, are all now standard in most games. Luckily Bethesda hasn’t been sitting idly around letting the gaming world pass them by, and instead are intent on pushing the boundaries once again with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, according to the latest coverage by Game Informer.

Taking a step forward, the old GameBryo engine, used in Oblivion and Fallout 3, is discarded in favor of the brand spanking new Creation Engine. This new engine was specifically designed to create all the diverse areas you will be encountering in the new world of Skryim, everything from rocky mountains and dense forest to snowy tundras and glacier coastlines. In fact, Bethesda literally rewrote every major system powering the gameplay experience, including draw distances and shadows, as Bethesda's creative director Todd Howard explains:

"The big things for us were to draw a lot of stuff in the distance so we have a really sophisticated level of detail, more so than what we've had in the past for how things stream in and how detail gets added to them as they get closer to the camera," explained Howard. "Because our worlds are so big all of the lighting has to be dynamic. That's something we had a little bit of in the past with shadowing, but not on everything. Now we have it on everything. It just makes the whole thing a lot more believable when you're there."

The new engine also incorporates overhauled foliage and precipitation system, which enable artists to play around with detail such as the individual weight of certain branches which will eventually affect the way they move in the wind, as well as define how much snow will fall on a particular object, creating more realistic snowfall, something you will be seeing a lot of given the northern location and extreme elevation of Skyrim.

Character animation and interaction has been boosted with more defined individual personalities. NPCs will have various believable tasks to occupy their day, such as farming, mining, chopping wood and many others, giving the world a more realistic feel. You will also been able to form somewhat meaningful friendships with NPCs, and if they like you, you will be able to take certain liberties such as eating their food or pitching up at their houses in the early hours of the morning without being chased off.

For improved character behavior, Bethesda enlisted the services of Havok’s new Behavior flexible animation tool, specifically to give both characters and creatures a proper sense of movement. This includes the animation done on the mighty dragons, making flight and fire breathing less mechanical.

"We looked at a bunch of [animation solutions], and this is about the tippy-top state-of-the-art stuff out there," Howard said. "I think we're the first real big game to use it."

Although many quests will still be plotted out, Skyrim will utilize a dynamic system for side quests, dubbed Radiant Story. This will help tailor side quest to each individual player based on who your character is, where you are, what you’ve done and what you are currently doing.

“Traditionally in an assassination quest, we would pick someone of interest and have you assassinate them,” explained Howard. “Now there is a template for an assassination mission and the game can conditionalize all the roles – where it happens, under what conditions does it take place, who wants someone assassinated, and who they want assassinated. All this can be generated based on where the character is, who he's met. They can conditionalize that someone who you've done a quest for before wants someone assassinated, and the target could be someone with whom you've spent a lot of time before.”

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is still a long way off, 11 November to be exact, but if what we’ve heard so far is anything to go by, it seems Bethesda is on their way to reinventing the RPG wheel once again. In the meantime, they've deemed to grace us with a small taste in the form a single screenshot (below) just to reel us in like the Skryrim crack addicts we are.