Various reasons:
- BF3 uses a more efficient DX11 engine. Skyrim uses a DX9 engine, based on an engine which is ancient, relatively speaking. Skyrim was developed mainly with consoles in mind, and isn't well optimized for PC's in general.
- In a shooter there are much less things to process then in a more complex open-world RPG. It's not just the size of the world that matters or the range at which you can see in the world, it's more the complexity of that world and it's interactivity. There are way more ways the player interacts with the world in a proper open-world RPG then there are in a shooter, and there are way more ways the world interacts with itself. There's way more scripting, pathing, scheduling, etc, etc, going on in the background than in any shooter.
- RPG-players in general care much less about graphics then about immersion and story-lines. Development budgets aren't infinite for game studio's, they need to make choices, and graphics aren't Bethesda's sole intent.

But wait a while and you'll see many mods that will make Skyrim's graphics much much better. Just consider what modding did for the visuals in Morrowind and Oblivion.

You can't compare them to skyrim though.

Because texture resolution svck in Skyrim. And models are far too low poly in some places like the hair. And BF3 got much better quality shadows.

dynamic loading of new maps (cells) shouldn't be ignored in this discussion... and lots of ai scripts etc...

People also forget that there are loading screens all over the place in Skyrim. Anytime i want to go into a cave or a house or town etc I get a loading screen. Far Cry 2 didn't have any loading screens even when I went into a town or a building and had the same if not more npcs in it. On top of them Far Cry 2 had more advanced physics to deal with. Yeah i can set the ground on fire in Skyrim but it doesnt spread like in FC2. And don't get me started on Skyrim's awful shadows.

The sheer amount of physics going on in BF3 when you get into firefights dwarfs anything that Skyrim has to deal with by far. Skyrim doesnt have great physics or destructible terrain to worry about and there are barely any npcs. I used mods on my old PC for Oblivion that added almost a thousand extra npcs to Oblivion and that was on a computer I built only 2 years after the consoles were released.

The fact that Skyrim has some rpg elements means absolutely nothing when it comes to how it looks graphically. Far Cry 2 had an incredibly huge open world that was seamless with no loading screens and puts Skyrims graphics to shame and that game was released in 2008. I played rpgs in the 90s that kept track of far more stats than than Skyrim (which has even less to keep track of than previous games since they removed spellmaking, attributes et al) so that isn't the issue either, especially when stuff like that requires very little CPU processing power on today's PC systems. I say today's PC systems because the consoles do have limits on how much AI you can have and the quality of the physics in the game. The simple reason that Skyrim looks like it does and has only a few npcs and very small battles is because of the consoles being so out of date. Had they made the game for the PC first and then scaled it down you would have had a much better looking game with much better physics (still have stuff floating everywhere) and larger battles like i get when I play Mount and Blade.

Skyrim is nothing more than a console port and a very unoptimized one at that. Crappy UI, crappy CPU management etc. Good game, though modders have alot of work to do.

you obviously must not realize the difference between a rpg and a fps shooters goals and btw of course dragons definitely don't dwarf anything with the mass coding and variables and i also have made a few battles between 200 dragons multiple hundreds of stormcloaks and imperials about 200 giants and even more thalmor


obviously someone doesn't play it like they should and also try have a battle like that without a epic multi thousand computer

Ummmm.........you just made my point. The fact that you can have tons of npcs and dragons on your PC but not on console was my point. How is it that you can have these great battles on your PC but when you do the Civil War questline in the actual game you end up with a paltry 16 or so soldiers at a time and then they magically appear in front of you when enough of the other soldiers get killed. Mount and Blade i have over 200 at one time. It is simply because the consoles cannot handle that much and the game was giimped specifically for that reason. Even a midrange PC thesedays has very little trouble running alot of AI. As i said my old PC easily ran texture and npc addition mods with no problems.

I have seen the videos of the big fights on youtube and all that does is show me that the game could have been much much better had it not been so limited. I have an xbox and a Wii and a DS so I am not just some PC snob. I just happen to realize that my consoles are very very old in terms of technology. At this point I only play console exclusive games on my 360 anymore and if a game comes out on PC as well, I always get that version instead.

Nope, you can't compare the art design but you can indeed compare the graphics.

And you can compare technical points like poor texture definition and damn ugly block with awful circle artifact shadows

Maybe someone`s already said this, but BF3 is MULTIPLAYER ONLY. Where Skyrim is SINGLEPLAYER ONLY.

BF3:

1.Most of the graphics and processing power can go to the mechanics of the game such as how things work and look.
2.Also everything is pretty much one map per battle which is tiny compared to Skyrim ergo it can process more to graphics.
3. Only People play the game, there`s no AI soldiers, therfore more processing power can go to help graphics along with the graphics card.
4. It`s easier and less brain-aching making a multiplayer game with no soldier AI than a game with soldier AI. Doing lovely graphics is easy compared.

Skyrim:

1. Has to process not just a landscape continuously, but everything that appears in it. All this takes graphics and processing power.
2. It has to then figure out who is around and kick their AI into action. CPU Processsing power being used again.
3. The only thing it doesn`t need to use much cpu or graphics for is your character. If you`re in 3rd person it`ll need some and if you`re 1st person it needs almost nothing (because your character barely shows.
4. However, it still has a huge amount of graphics it needs to display all the time continuously.
5. It`s hard work making AI work in such an environment. We should `see` that, not just the graphics and be grateful.


This is why BF3 graphics is better than Skyrim`s graphics. Because BF3 doesn`t have to process hardly anything at all except graphics and basic little AIs like when a mine blows up or if that rpg actually hit someone. The Human player does all the work. Skyrim on the other had has processers and graphics working FULL TIME to bring you a working single player game.

Nonsense. I guarantee you that there is much more going on in the backgound of BF3 than there is in Skyrim. All you have to do is look at the CPU requirements which are higher for BF3 simply because of all the physics going on. Skyrim's AI is by no mean advanced or groundbreaking and in fact its very weak when you compare it to other games. NPCs don't even take cover in Skyrim like they do in other games.

As i mentioned Far Cry 2 was just as open and seemless and had more npcs on screen at once during gunfights along with better physics and graphics. The difference was that FC2 was designed around the PC platform and then scaled back for the consoles.

BF3 does have a singleplayer campaign albeit very short.

Mount and Blade i can have over 200 AI on screen at once, BF 1942 (the good ol days when they actually had bots) I and my friends played against several dozen bots at once. There is nothing spectacular going on with Skyrim's AI. They are just following scripted patterns just like every other video game out there which is why after awhile you can accurately predict what they will do. IE the dragons which are supposed to be the pinnacle fo the AI in the game are very predictable.

The only machines affected by AI are very very old computers and of course the consoles......even there do we know whether the consoles are limited to a small number of npcs because of the AI or because they simply cannot render that many polygons. My four year old computer ran oblivion with tons of graphics mods along with FCOM and Tamriel travellers and TIE4mods (which adds almost a thousand npcs) so AI has absolutely nothing to do with this at all.

So I can't play BF3 on my console?

You can't even compare the two games as there are so many differences in the style of play and how the game worlds are made and what happens there. For instance in Skyrim I can go out in the middle of nowhere and drop a mug in the woods and leave it and come back weeks later in game time and the mug will still be there. Now multiply that by hundreds of objects and you have a game world that has to be flexible enough to keep up with all of that. Something like that doesn't need to be addressed in a game like BF3. These two games have to be designed around a totally different set of priorities.

This.

I don't particularly care about shiny graphics. It's a bonus when the graphics are good, but serviceable graphics will do if the game is meaty enough.

This is the way I look at it also. Maybe BF3's graphics are better, I don't really care. Maybe the graphics on a PC and the Xbox are better than the PS3. Don't care about that either.
All I know is, the graphics on my PS3 are perfectly fine and I am happy with them (to me they are more than just "serviceable"), I'm not gonna get my panties in a bunch becasue some game/platform I don't play with or use has better graphics.

There is a big difference between building a FPS map and an RPG world.

Skyrim is built in a way that every object is place into the world, FPS maps are often build as a single mesh, or several large meshes. This allows them to cut down on the amount of unseen vertices. In Skyrim the meshes are reused over and over which means quite often vertices and faces will be hidden from view in certain places, which limit the overall quality.


To put it in simple terms, FPS game don't need to render the other side of that rock if you can't go round there.....in Skyrim it does still, cause that rock is reused many times in different places.

Because Shooters need to be pretty, because graphics is all shooters have to set themselves apart from each other.

Eh, I'd say that ultimately that doesn't matter.

What matters is that BF3 (the PC version, anyways) is built around a technically superior engine. One that incorporates the latest capabilities available on the PC

Skyrim does not. It was built on an old and inefficient engine around antiquated hardware. There is no reason whatsoever that Skyrim could not have incorporated the same technologies that BF3 did. If it had, Skyrim would not only look better on the PC, it would also run better. The only reason it didn't is because Betheda didn't want to take the extra time to do it.

Umm.....because they're developed by entirely different companies and use entirely different graphics engines and have entirely different designers and graphics artists and company policies regarding games development.

Why aren't apples the same colour as oranges, they're both fruits after-all?

Not nonsense at all. What you say about far Cry 2 comparing it to Skyrim IS nonsense.You are so reaching here. I have played all these games and am well experience in them so you can`t miss bits of important info out and get away with it with me.

FarCry 2 while it feels like a Bethesda type game is actually not. It is a far emptier game that any of Bethesda`s offering and also ends much quicker. Apart from the random jobs you get and scripted scenes there is literally nothing else except the frequently spawning men at posts and jeeps that drive around. Anyone playing a Far Cry 2 game will see this. There are literally no animals around giving the AI anything to do at all for example and no random NPC questlines to follow. Now I like Far Cry 2 I played it to the end, but it has nothing like the content of Skyrim.

BF3`s campaign is not only short but heavily scripted which means far less work for the soldier AI. Most people find the linear SP campaign rubbish, as I did. But, interestingly it slows down more on maximum graphics than the MP mode does. Why? Because in SP the CPU has to work more on the AI. This actually proves my point.

You can`t compare Mount and Blade because the graphics are a major step back from Skyrim and are more like Morrowind graphics. BF1942 you are so reaching with these examples. This is an OLD game, the AI is almost nothing, it never follows orders, goes its own way, can`t go up stairs, etc, etc and the graphics again are quite basic. Hey why not look at the LATER BF games after wards where, as the graphics increase the number of AI decrease until we now have no AI? See the correlation?

It is you who talk nonsense my friend, not I.

Mount and Blade has superior shadows (minus the blue ones in taverns) by far and I use mods which make the armor even better than Skyrims. Remember that MB is an indie game so if they had the same tools as bethesda it would definitely look much better in every category.

My Far Cry 2 comparison wasn't about gameplay which pretty much everyone agrees that was it's weak point. Far Cry 2 had more npcs on screen than Skyrim in most cases and at the same time had much better graphics and better physics as well.....and that game is 3 years old now. It was to point out that. There is literally no difference between FC2 and Skyrims npcs except that in the case of FC2 they would actually try and flank you and take cover......something that never happens in Skyrim. FC2 had better AI than Skyrim when it came to actually fighting. All Skyrim has is some dialogue which is not taxing at all.

Skyrim's AI is awful. In fact it's worse than many games out there. As i mentioned they don't take cover and they get stuck or do stupid things just like any other game. There is literally no reason you can't have a game that looks like BF3 and plays like a sandbox game. Today's PCs are more than powerful enough to handle it. If you want to simply compare just RPGs then the Witcher (both of them) look better than Skyrim and also have more npcs in the towns. The same could be said about Two Worlds 2 as well.

Bot removal in the battlefield games has nothing to do whatsoever with processing problems........that doesn't even make any sense because CPUs are dramatically more powerful now than they were just like GPUs. They were removed because they discovered that the vast majority of people barely used them and just played mulitiplayer. They didn't want to bother with something no one uses and they have said exactly that on several occasions and programming bots is time consuming especially when you are dealing with flying etc. I modded my BF2 and BF2142 to play with over 60 bots and it worked just fine......and once again that was on my old computure from 4 years ago.
The only reason that Skyrims is the way it is is because it was designed around the xbox first. Nothing more.

Tons of people used mods which increased the number of npcs in Obliivon as well as monsters and also used texture mods and all the extra AI and texture ran just fine on most PCs.

Yeah you can put due to the limitations of the console you can only have 24 players in a map which is woeful.The maps are also smaller if that is not a clear sign consoles are on their last legs what is?

A few reasons, I believe.

• First (correct me if I'm wrong) but Skyrim had been under development far longer than BF3, and therefore had more limited hardware at their disposal.
  
• Action games are pretty linear in nature and can therefore handle much more detailed and complicated graphics
  
• The map sizes compared to Skyrim are tiny
  
• Action games don't rely on story elements like RPG's do, and can therefore focus down on graphics

possibly having 1/1000th the content helps.

Art and aesthetics can be better than graphics a lot of the time Skyrim has that in spades as does a way older game Star Ocean: The Second Story.