Do we also get a cookie when Crysis has dragons?

And Radiant AI.

If Morrowind can have godrays, Skyrim will too.... eventually.

Yeah, I imagine over time as modders keep pounding away at the game, Skyrim will end up being able to look alot better than its already impressive incarnation now. Already, some of the mods out there have made some wonderful progress towards that effect. Actually, the forests in that video remind me alot of Cyrodiil's forests in Oblivion.

While a lot of great work has been done to make Morrowind look much better than it used to be, I don't think any of those look as good as Skyrim, especially now Skyrim is starting to get its own graphical improvments. The problem I see is that most people seem to think that making a game look great is a matter of having the highest-res textures or best shaders and longest distant land. But that is not the case if you ask me, in order for Morrowind to look better than Skyrim modders would have to do major changes to things more fundamental than textures or distant land. For example, in Morrowind a mountain is basically just a steep slope which ultimately don't go very high up where as in Skyrim the mountains actually feel as if they tower up and have rough, uneven faces. In order for Morrowind to match that, modders would have to alter a great deal of the actual shape of Morrowind's geography as it were. I find something like that example to be more important to appearances than just techical specs.

Agreed. And contrary to what somebody said before, huge maps such as Skyrim's would be much better rendered with Cryengine than with the Creation engine.
Check this video out, and note the size of the map: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0nyLS1dyyY&feature=related
Also, when I get a bit more free time, I will take it upon myself to try and port Skyrim to Cryengine, with extreme HD textures (I'm talking 4k textures here, so a resolution of around 4096 x 3112).

Well, the design of Skyrim (mountains, general water flows, etc), is much better than Morrowind, of course

The issue in the Crytek discussions seems to be the addition of everything ELSE Skyrim has going, aside from the environment. Would it play nicely together?

Seeing how we already have all of the main resources (textures, lighting, sound, models, etc), if we had an experienced team, it would play it very well together. I've even tried making a crappy little game with my friend using Unity, and we made it run perfectly with very little problem using all the assets.

Deus Ex Human Revolution, released in 2011 as well for consoles and PC had DX11 compatibility and features that made the PC version look 3x better than the console versions OUT OF THE BOX without any user added content to it. Saying Skyrim was developed for consoles so it has to look like it on the PC is a fallacy since other game companies can seem to pull off the transition just fine.

Here's a link of HOW you can make skyrim look like nothing else by tweaking some settings with ENBseries:

http://enbseries.enbdev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=17&start=10

Second page of that thread from Gionight then tell me Skyrim looks like crap ^_-

Maybe it can't look like that because it never should to look like that. Skyrim is SNOW territory and not a rain forrest.

Well, for Cryengine 2 that might be true, but Cryengine 3 is made with just the same consoles in mind (but it's probably doing a better job at graphics than GameBryo Creation-Engine).
Remember, all DX11 features were an afterthought in form of an patch released after Crysis 2 was out for some time.

That being said, I don't think that video is overly impressive. Doesn't look that much better than a modded Oblivion.

Oblivion handled trees in such a crap way that they can't really be compared seriously to the trees done in Crysis/Skyrim.

CryEngine and Frostbite 2.0 are much better at scaling up than Creation. No amount of modding will be able to close that disparity, though it can alleviate it.

And a few posts below that he says he's got 3GB's worth of texture replacers for pretty much everything...

Though I have to say it looks amazing

So let me get this straight. You want a game on an engine built to handle open world, high density, object detail areas to be built as though it is an engine designed for small, closed world, high visual detail, low density, low proximity areas?

Lol. All that is, is 10x the grass, godrays from the sun, then some higher quality stuff because the game loads a thousand times less Skyrim does at once. Open world games like Skyrim will never look as good as close worlded linear shooters, but at least Skyrim tries to not look like crap.

*Facepalm.

You are wrong, Bethesda simply cannot optimise for [censored]. Crysis 1 was pretty much open worlded and it's maps were HUGE . Plus the gpu and cpu are seperate things that do seperate tasks. The only thing that brings forth the misconception that "open worlded games cant look as good as linear ones" is That often open worlded games need to put quantity into their art assets rather than quality.

You want to talk about optimizing worth a damn, then bring up Crysis as an example? Ha! The only reason that game needed a super computer when it came out was because it was optimized about as well as a bag of rocks.

And yes you are right in some respect, open world games generally have millions of objects, instead of just the set pieces needed for a linear game, so there is far less time to make each one look good.

But still. Engines are built different ways, to handle different things. I still think Skyrim looks great. Is it a Crysis, or Battlefield? No. Is it still beautiful and does it still make my jaw drop sometimes? You bet. At least it doesnt look like crap like GTA or some other open world games. Talk about a poor excuse for quality.

Yup, Crysis maps can be huge.
Also, Bethesda's engine is a pretty big joke when it comes to distant objects, which is basically the whole purpose of this "new" engine for this open world.
The distant LOD is a joke: http://static.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/images/1598-1-1323264331.jpg
Looks exactly like Oblivion 6 years ago, but it got a few more distant buildings here and there. Not only this, but the game doesn't even stream distant lod objects properly. They pop up in huge quantities at a short distance, again a joke.

So when saying that Skyrim's open world is because of Skyrim's not-as-great-graphics-as-other-games, that's [censored].
I think it comes down to 3 things:
1) unoptimized engine as hell. TESVAL and SkyBoost has proved that.
2) Bethesda decided to spend very little time on tech, because they prioritized other things instead, like 300 hours of gameplay.
3) All the scripts for quests, AI for so many NPCs, Radiant Story, etc etc is one of the reasons due to low performance (but I may be wrong).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b-67c3JxIE&feature=related

Yep, it was your right. However what it doesn't and can't have is 10's of thousands intractable objects, thousands of persistant NPCs w/ conmplex AI, hundreds of explorable interiors and most importantly, extensive in depth RPG mechanics.

Cryengines = 90% graphic fidelity + 10% game play and content

Bethesda Engines = 10% graphic fidelity + 90% game play and content

I'll take the game play over eye candy any ol' day of the week.

Yup, basically this, the choice is between interaction and fidelity, personally I'll take interaction in this case despite being a graphics hound.

I don't know about Skyrim having a long way to go yet to get to Morrowind's beauty, they're fairly comparable (with modders having a decade to work on Morrowind, and having 2 months to work on Skyrim). But it does lack versus some other games on the market, as I said, like Deus Ex (Yes, I know. Linear Game in a closed environment, but still with included DX10 and DX11 features despite being developed for XBox360 and PS3). This was a chance to reinvent the wheel and make a better Engine, like they advertised. Instead, they polished up the same old turd just like they did for Oblivion (when it switched names from Netimmerse to Gamebryo)

Skyrim was released in 2011. Morrowind was released in 2002. Simply matching the beauty of Morrowind, even with modifications, is not good enough. It has a long way to go yet.

OB was released in 2006, FO3 in 2008 and Skyrim is a considerable improvement over both of them and that is enough. Bethesda is smart about their development and have left themselves plenty of room to make the next game even better than this one. They need only outdo themselves with each game, not the entire industry and they have done just that.

A considerable improvement? How many programs exist just to make it look like it was released in 2011? Or even give it stable FPS? Not to mention we actually had to wait for the LAA flag patch from Bethesda themselves.. They aren't improving at all.

As long as they keep developing one game for every platform, it will never look as good as it should. They should take a hint from DICE and further optimize the PC version, or, at the very least, learn a few things from the modders in this community.

My thoughts exactly. Skyrim is an amazing game, but those textures should come with a warning sticker that says "Warning- textures are extremely low-quality and may induce temporary visual distortion or vomiting".