Though you have to remember, Todd Howard also said that he prefers the 360 over the PC, so of course his "vision" would work on his preferred system. The console's age may not be holding Skyrim back because Todd isn't aiming much higher than what the console can do.
To put it into perspective, targeting Skyrim (released late 2011) to run on the 360 (released late 2005), would be similar to targeting Morrowind (released early 2002) to run on the N64 (released mid/late 1996), give or take a few months and storage capacity not withstanding. Though if you wanted to wait until the 4MB RAM upgrade (making the system total 8MB, over the default 4MB), that came out much later.
This is actually pretty much the definition of consoles holding games back? By tailoring everything to a weak system, the strong ones lose out.
It's not that the Pc can runthe game more smoothly or has better graphics. The Ps3 uses blu-ray discs for goodness sakes I'm sure its more than capable of keeping up with a pc especially since you could put an operating system on there. It's pretty much a consoled Pc. The problem as far as graphics go is that they need a uniform graphic level across all three platforms so that one doesn't have a better gameplay experience. The only sstem really behind the curve at this point is the xbox because its focus was soley fo gaming with microsoft having its stake in computers well before their console. As far as open cities, its been said before, but that has nothing to do with graphics or capabiltes. It's senseless to have a huge open city during times of war and instability
it pretty much doesn't make sense at all for the time period even in peace times.
No, the size of your primary storage has nothing to do with how many pixels you can push out of your GPU. While DVD is an aging medium and is getting to be too small at times, multiple DVDs still work fine, and a hard drive is much faster than either DVD or Blu-ray (Which is why even on console you should always install your games), as well as stronger compression being viable on PC, where we have the extra power to decompress it in reasonable time and store it on the disk, wheras consoles have to be able to decompress on the fly for those who don't install. For some games this can mean a major advantage to the PS3, where less compression is necessary, though.
Seeing as these games are made for the general public, and not everybody can just drop 1000-2000 USD on a computer just for games I don't think the consoles are responsible for holding games back. I think the only thing that is responsible is that Bethesda doesn't think it's worth it to invest time into making their games so graphically awesome for the 10% of PC players who can run it on max graphics.
Also another thing for people to remember is that comparing the base specs of the XBOX 360 with your PC isn't exactly accurate. The XBOX is made solely for running games, that is it uses no other resources. But PC's are not made exclusively for running games, there are many things running on your PC taking up resources, and if your not to savvy with PC's (as generally most gamers might not be) it could be bogging your system down a ton.
Bethesda isn't just concerned with whats the best thing PC's can do these days, but more along the lines of how can we allow as many people as possible to enjoy our games.
I'm not willing to drop 1000-2000 USD on a PC, I paid about $500 (At the time, exchange rates fluctuate and so). We've actually got to the point where, for games like Oblivion, most other used resources are actually effectless. 4GB RAM is quickly becoming standard - as most games use a 32bit runtime that limits them to 2GB RAM, that gives another 2GB RAM for the OS and other applications - as in, plenty. With multi-core CPUs, and games designed for CPUs orders of magnitude weaker, even light-to-middling tasks have no effect, and for most games something reading from your hard drive won't make a big performance difference. Oblivion isn't one of those games, but vanilla, at least, drives are more than fast enough to take both.
I think if you look at it logically, it's pretty clear that games being developed for machines 6 years old with no advancement since them hold back progression. It's not really something you can argue against.
The point that making a game for decent PCs would lock it out of both lower end PCs and Consoles is a fallacy, and people should stop doing it.
edit: Oh, and pretty much any card can push 2560x1600 at your desktop, higher end gaming cards can push it in games. It's by no means a difficult resolution to achieve, but because 1920x1080 is "Full HD" (Which is a pet peeve all on its own) there's no marketing.
» Sun Jun 20, 2010 9:01 am 
I'm not too hyped up on Infinity yet though, considering how long it has taken to get this far. However, considering the size of the "team", it's one solid feat that is to be reckoned with. Suffice to say, that even if my hopes aren't through the roof, they are still higher than any Elite sequel from David Braben and co. What I loved about it was its attention to detail. For once, there was a space game/simulator that featured actual newtonian flight (rather than the arcade silliness you find everywhere today), and yes you could slingshot 
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