These imagexs may have been in magazines already, but not all of us got the magazines, or could get them, myself included, so it's nice to have these pictures available on the internet, besides, I think this is the first time seeing most of them in high resolution, so I'm glad to see them.
Anyway, as far as the individual pictures, I've already seen the first and second on in the Hub updates, so there's nothing new I could see on them, but it's nice to see them in high resolution. For the third image, the water in that pond looks really unimpressive, it might even be worse than Oblivion's, but I'm going to be optimistic and assume this screenshot just doesn't showcase the game's water effects very well, and it will look better in motion. The water fall looks nice, though, for other bad things about it, the plants near the camera don't really look much better than the ones in Oblivion, but I'm guessing that's just the game's grass effects, which usually isn't meant to be seen up close. And the rocks, land and trees in the screenshot look pretty good, I think, I'm also pretty sure I see shadows, it's most clear in the tree to the right of the waterfall, I guess those who feared that dynamic shadows were only used in interiors (At least on console versions.) must have been mistaken. I have nothing new to say about the fourth one, since I've already seen it in high resolution, as for the one depicting skills, I note that fatigue has been renamed to stamina, a minor thing, but a good idea, I say, no longer will increasing my fatigue make me
less tired. I also see "aft" at the end on the far left, I'm assuming this is speechcraft, so I guess that skill is still in, though it may be that mercantile was merged into it. There's also the names of three spells governed by destruction listed under it, fireball and lightning bolt are no big surprises, but ice spike definitely sounds a little different from what we had for frost spells in past games. The final image gives us another good look at the shadows in the game. The character models in the screenshot also look much better than the ones in Oblivion, I also see one NPC looks to be sweeping, that's a nice little detail. And it may just be me, but I think the textures in the screenshot look better than the ones in Oblivion, but of course, I could be mistaken. Because when I played Oblivion, the texture quality turned out to not be as good as I would have expected frrom early screenshots as well.
Overall, I'd say that the graphics aren't as big a leap forward as between Morrowind and Oblivion, it's definately not going to be the next Crysis, but I expected that, if the game is going to be released for the Xbox 360 and PS3. But I'd definately say they're an improvement over Oblivion and Fallout 3. In the end, aside from that water, I'd say the graphics will probably be "good enough" for me if the screenshots we've seen so far are anything to go by.
In the one with all the NPCs in it, did anyone else notice the elf on the left? Wood elf or High elf?
I don't see any obvious elves in the screenshot, but if there is one, I'd say Bosmer, because I only see normal human skin colors in the screenshot.
None, because we are getting close to the point of perfect photo-realism and thus the graphics jumps are becoming short.
No, I'd say we're still pretty far from "perfect photorealism", the main reason why the leaps in graphics quality we've been seeing lately aren't as large as they have been in the past is likely because there are limits to what the current generation of consoles can do, and with almost every (not every one, just ALMOST every one.) major commercial game being multiplatform, this ultimately limits what they can do. Once the generation of consoles that will follow the Xbox 360 and PS3 are released, I'm sure we'll see some much more impressive jumps in graphics. Because there comes a point when you know that you've reached the limits of what the hardware you have can do, and until you have better hardware, you won't see the next big jump forward. Have we reached this with the current generation of consoles, yet? I'm not really sure, but if we haven't, I'd say we're getting close, it's certainly gotten to the point where graphical improvements come in small enhancements to the overall polish of the game rather than giant leaps forward.
» Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:11 pm 
it obviously has some lowish textures there but tbh its been frozen for the screenshot, in motion this won't be noticable tbh. As well as this is most probably a beta image or something considering we have many months to go and them saying they have a lot to do, I think it will look for sure much much better on PC but at the moment the console versions will look better then in those screens.
