Then, no hope.
i've seen better art style in barbie movies.
I guess i'll just go naked and enjoy the nice environment, no way my dunmer assassin i'll be wearing this gay looking outfit!

The World of Darkness MMO that CCP is making just released an environment flythrough of their game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPer2I4c1ns

Looking exceptionally pretty. I don't like the cartoony look either, OP. Years ago when there were technical limitations I understood the reason for blocky, cartoony graphics. We're all playing on PC. We can tweak graphics settings. We can tweak hardware. There's no need for a game being released in 2013-2015 looking like it was released in 2004. I just can't appreciate the aesthetic the team have gone for - it isn't representative of The Elder Scrolls I've come to know. Time will tell, I guess.

You might be able to find them on "one of those sites" by now. It's just that the German fanbase is smaller, naturally, so it might take longer for information to finds its way from there. There's also a French cover story this month, but I haven't heard anything from that either. Maybe it's not available yet?

I love the title of this thread.
Personally, my view on this is that no games are ever photo realistic. Every game is stylised, its just the percentage of stylized.

I give the comparison of 3 different games:

1) Crysis
Alot of people say this is photo-realistic, but its actually not so. Humans don't exactly look like how its portrayed in the game,
The game still looks very good tho, and you can almost imagine you are looking at a real scene in the real world.

2) Deus Ex Human Revolution
This is more stylized then Crysis and the humans looks less realistic then Crysis. The game still looks pretty good.

3) SWTOR / Rift / ESO.
Extremely stylized to the point that every character looks shiny like linoleum, every armor looks clean and polished.
The world just looks like a cartoon.

You have to factor in that an MMO company is going to want to make their product accessible to as many players as possible. Making an MMO look like Crysis would not be feasible, as a lot of players would have to upgrade the hell out of their PCs just to be able to play it.

Anyway, graphics don't make the game. Look at FFXIV. Amazing graphics, and it flopped hard. Now look at WoW.

In fairness though, Skyrim ran on consoles that essentially have the graphical power of a mid-range PC from five years ago, or a mid-range laptop of about 3 years ago. Furthermore, the PC version alone was the highest selling Steam title of all time; and although 10 million subs for an MMO sounds awsome, the truth is even SW:TOR (the most expensive game ever made) only needs 500,000 (or 1/20th of that) to be profitable - by EA's own explicit admission. So to summarise, we can estimate that Skyrim sold about 6-10 times as many copies (on PC alone) as TESO would need subs in order to be profitable, assuming it's not vastly more expensive than SW:TOR.

Also, consider how many people bought BF3 - it's almost purely online, has very high-end graphics, puts a lot of actors on screen at once with destructable environments and vehicles (which are both massively taxing on performance) and yet has now sold approximately 10 million. Granted, some of those were on consoles, but that supports my argument because once again we come back to the simple fact that anything running on a console can run on a PC with ease today. You wouldn't be cutting out any more of the market than Skyrim and BF, both of which are some of the highest grossing titles in existance.

The real, hard truth is that MMO marketting it built upon a few bizarre falacies: on the one hand, they have the most dedicated player-base in existance, because these players pay by the month (usually) and spend hundreds more hours on a game than a 'non-MMO' player generally would. And yet, it's pressumed in spite of this, that all of these people who spend so much money and time on the MMO hobby are just 'casual' players with dial-up net and shoddy laptops. If that were so, how is it they manage to invest more time and money than any other type of PC player into their games? This gives rise to the second falacy, being that every potential player for an MMO is already playing an MMO - this leads publishers to pressume that having higher specs than a game released in 2004 is going to cut out a large portion of that finite pool of 10 million or so players, without considering that there's a whole ocean of players outside of that little pool who buy big-budget, online, graphically-exciting titles all the time. They play online and they play with enough DLC and paid services that the concept of a subscription or F2P model doesn't repel them (consider that every Xbox COD player needs to pay more for Xbox Live per month than for an MMO anyway - so that's 5 million gamers just there) - the downside is that these gamers all feel alienated by the incredibly insular design, backwards gameplay and uninovative mechanics that they see as representing MMOs. The idea of not being able to freely aim with a reticule because of a wee bit of latency, when games in which you need nano-second response times like BF3 are selling more than any MMO since WoW, just baffles them utterly - and rightly so.

What a company needs to do at E3 - or one of those events - is stand up in front of the dozens of millions of non-MMO players, and say "we have an MMO for you guys too." Because MMO just means a lot of people, and online. Many SP games now are online already (D3 for instance - the highest selling PC title ever) and people still buy them at 5-10 times the rate at which new MMOs have been selling since WoW. And the reality is this - TESO won't sell more than Skyrim. It'll do well and (probably) have the benefit of subs, but the chances are tiny that it'll sell ten times more than The Old Republic, when that game has inifitely larger brand recognition. Accordingly, why not ask : "why did Skyrim sell so bloody well, and how can we reasonably translate that into an online game?" Does it work with 200-player PvP? If not, don't scrap the Skyrim part - scrap the 200-player PvP. Does it look like TES with hundreds of people in the same field farming respawning wild animals, or speaking to the same quest-giver? No? Then phase it a la something like Dark Souls, whereby you just see a few people in your 'cell' (spawning range), who are around roughly the same level, but with a more social ability to invite and connect with these players anywhere, any time. Dark Souls intentionally cut off interaction to make the gamer feel isolated - you can scrap those restrictions but keep the visual phasing (just one or two adventurers in sight, like in a real TES game), and allow to join games, be joined, and be 'invaded' if it's a PvP server by enemies in your 'cell.' Add banks, auction houses and guilds, add arenas, add PvP zones if it's a non-PvP server, enable co-op and lastly add public areas like cities (they're already instanced in single-player TES, so it's no big deal in an MMO) where you can see and meet more players than in the more heavily-phased wilderness, and shout out for some help. Bingo, everything Skyrim had plus the massive multiplayer bit. Oh yeah, and it can look pretty sweet because there'd be less on-screen players than even BF has, and can also use just as minimal a UI as Skyrim (ie. none, except a chat box I suppose). Why? Because that's selling better than any alternative in recent years has. Even Dark Souls has 3-4 times as many players as TOR needs subs, and it's a small-budget game with zero brand recognition by a Japanese developer working in a genre and market they have no historical experience in - and it required paying for the Xbox Live access, once again, which most of them were happy to do. It really says something about what gamers want to play - not just 'gamers currently playing WoW,' but all gamers.

Just read my signature.

I think that TESO would end up being much better if they used Unreal 3 engine.

I support the stylized art approach for MMOs. Stylized art ages much better than photorealistic art. This year's photorealistic games will look dated compared to next year's photorealistic games, whyle this year's stylized games will remain relatively unchallenged by next year's stylized games.

It's different with the Elder Scrolls series, where Bethesda expects to sell a new game with every incarnation. But TESO will be one game that expects to retain commercial viability indefinitely. Taking the route that keeps the game from looking dated for an extended period is a smart move.

I would rather play a game that does not require me to go out and buy a new system just to have it look acceptable. With Stylized art, the base graphics can look passable, and if I happen to have a good video card, I can turn on a variety of shaders and post-processing effects that make it look even better.

When I played Guild Wars for the first time, I played using a mediocre grapgics card and it looked pretty awesome. Then I eventually got a new computer in preparation for Oblivion, and Guild Wars looked even better. They didn't change their graphics. My new card could just see a lot of functions that GW was supporting that my old card couldn't.

I figure that if you are using a machine that you got nearly five years ago, TESO will look awesome. If you are using a brand new system with cutting edge graphics tech, TESO will look phenomenal, and you won't worry about whether it's stylized or photorealistic.

Graphics may sell MMOs, but they do not retain players for MMOs. Content and gameplay options do that.

Wut? Which games had photorealism? Rage? Because it sure as hell wasn't Skyrim. Skyrim's characters are stylised and not really photo-realistic at all.