I had everything maxed and it looked amazing to me, for an MMO that is.

Yeah, remember how awesome this was: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb3L7Odrcdo

Overall I think the graphics are fantastic for an mmo, specially one that can have 200+ players in a PvP siege battle. It does have a gritty oldschool RPG feel to it (read, Oblivion, etc) but I wouldn't trade that for the comic hues of Warcraft or Final Fantasy.

Things could actually get pretty crazy during some of the more popular FATEs. If I had to guess, I remember upwards of 60 people before everything went to hell and characters stopped showing up.

Yes. I think the things that are standing out in my head are smaller things like spinning wheels, the giant Ebonheart mushrooms, and some of the clutter lying around town.

With due respect to whoever I downloaded this from, this is the best example I could find, and is actually a lot worse than anything I remember: http://i124.photobucket.com/albums/p26/AeonBlue42/13210732734_29ff4ce757_h_zps0640655b.jpg

I LOVE the old school coloring and texture. Somehow it's subdued and vibrant at the same time, without being gritty or colorless. (Skyrim)

As most have said, the graphics look pretty good in this game. I personally prefer how the dark elves look in this game than any modern TES game since Morrowind. The way their red eyes refract when a light source penetrates them is one of those little details that really bring the characters to life.

I do not, however, like the character lip synching animations. It reminds me of the terrible job Bethesda did when they made Fawkes the Super Mutant talk or Parthunaax. It's like a ventriloquist dummy with bad hinges.

Quite a few monster models and environment models have been pulled from Oblivion and Skyrim. They've recieved a better poly treatment and under a newer engine, they feel quite new.

Coming from http://h11.abload.de/img/tera_screenshot_20120ggj9p.png and prior to that, http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/6101/126930482.28/0_6e175_bd0675bf_XL.jpg, I'm quite impressed with how this game looks!

Graphics are better than vanilla Skyrim for sure. My only complaints are the character designs but not the quality of the work.

Good graphics doesn't make a good looking game

I am realizing that FF14 may have had an advantage in that it was cartoonier and thus had more colorblocking and less detailed textures.

graphics are fine

FFXIV might have been busy and colorful and pretty, but if you ever played and got within a few feet of a character, the texture resolution was abysmal.... just saying.

For an MMO - no. There are very few who can pull off the level of photorealism that ESO has while being able to render the amount of players that ESO is capable of.

For games in general - yeah.

But, I expected this situation. I imagine people who were expecting modded HD skyrim are sorely disappointed, but then again I think that expectation when the game is supposed to render 200+ people at a time in siege situations id's silly in the first place.

ROFL I remember him, wasn't his name 'S H I T S-In-Pants'?

Looks like he took an arrow to the posterior.

Make sure you have subsampling on high or the game looks fugly no matter what your other settings are.

Thanks, I will keep that in mind

Remember the game is designed to allow up to 200 players on screen at once, for big Cyrodiil battles. Giving the models greater detail would possibly make people's computers explode

people have far too high expectations. This is an MMO, and mmo's cannot have as high of quality graphics as single player titles. It just cannot happen, else we would all require a super computer to run the game. This is by far the best looking MMO on the market.

IMO the main thing that is holding back the graphics are the hair and "cloth" models, instead of actually using physics of any kind we have the same "blocks" for hair and cloth that just "Stretches"when you move, it makaes things look very dated, especially compared to newer games that use physics on these things (hell even Fable: The lost chapters used physics on clothing, and that was over a decade ago).

The lack of hair phyiscs really messes up the "long hair" options when you get in game and it doesn't move and just clips through objects and your character model (IE the long mohawk style dreads that are long and go down your back a bit literally stick to your back and when your character turns their head the hair doesn't "move" and simply clips off,like you're wearing some kind of strange back-hair stitched to your back).

The environment and actual character model sans hair looks fine imo.

Graphicgs is ok to very ok. Content and addictivnes is not so ready. Too many bugged things. We need addictivness - not so much graphics.

The graphics are stunning...but not if I compare it to my heavily modded Skyrim. I'm looking forward to some high-res texture upgrades and perhaps a ENB (if it's possible)!

The graphics don't look dated to me at all. They go above and beyond my expectations for an MMO, and I can still play on medium to high settings on my not-remotely-top-of-the-range, non-gaming laptop.

The character animations, though, don't look quite right. 'Dated' is one word to describe it.

Again, single player vs mmo comparison is silly. Mmos require so much more cpu power AND gpu power to generate sometimes hundreds of people.

It is not the same thing!!!

Landscapes look stunning, character graphics are still very nice in my opinion ... animations could use some work. The way female characters hold 2handed weapons ... ugh ...

Not as bad as the restoration staff animation. I feel like a princess waving my wand around.

I got impression that (may be becuase of performance) textures are washed out, like someone came with the brush and cleaned everything.

No distand land view.

All can be performance related, so I do not expect more - beside on all top settings it is better then in many single player games.