Go play unmodded Morrowind again. That statement is ridiculous.

Skyrim's graphics are probably the worst thing I've ever seen. I mean, you can look at http://www.geforce.com/Active/en_US/shared/images/articles/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-five-fast-tweaks/Skyrim-TreeSelfShadowing-Off.png, for instance, and see how bad they look. Now compare them to http://superhypeblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Screen-shot-2011-09-25-at-2.12.59-AM.png from a fine piece of media from 2 whole years ago. And the designers for that other thing were stuck using http://www.speedtree.com/avatar/. Obviously Bethesda doesn't care anymore, or else the http://www.geforce.com/Active/en_US/shared/images/guides/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweak-guide/Skyrim-MinGrassSize-20-SliderComparison.png would look more like http://www.avatar3trailer.com/images/avatar_3_trailer/avatar_screenshot_024.jpg that other developers could make 2 years ago. Just because one was done on http://vcscompunet.com/images/serverroom114.jpg and the other done on http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/xbox-360-new.jpg shouldn't matter.

On a more serious note, when I first started playing Morrowind, my water looked like http://www.realmofconfusion.com/leif1.jpg. Then I finally updated my rig enough to support the http://www.ixbt.com/video/itogi-video/bugs0204/r9800-morrowind-nobug1-2.jpg, but to be honest it looks more like http://wordpress.mrreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/DSCF0197.JPG than water. Say what you want about http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/632983187991157637/AE06B02AD887D8D478BBB0A692F1694E040FA7D8/, but I see a clear improvement over Morrowind's mercury and http://images.bit-tech.net/content_images/2006/03/elder_scrolls_oblivion/water2.jpg.

What do you mean? That looked nothing as good as Skyrims water...That looked very cartoony.

skyrim's water looked great to me, as did many other details. Yes it's been consolized, so what? They knew the modding community would remake the graphics for the PC generation.

People, from where are you getting the notion that Modded Morrowind is better than Vanilla Skyrim? Really, enter the best house of Morrowind and take some pics, then come back and take a pic of The Hall of Elements at Winterhold's College. It may be a shocking reality.

Modded Morrowind is great (I myself play it) but to say that it's better (overall) than Vanilla Skyrim is a stretch of imagination and a bad use for those rose tinted glasses.

Morrowind's modded water shader does look better. It does not switch to a lower quality water without reflections at far away distances. And some of the later versions have 3D waves instead of being completely flat. http://www.tesnexus.com/imageshare/images/57416-1281636214.jpg It also has underwater caustics.

http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/3811/birdvvardenfell.jpg

http://static.tesnexus.com/imageshare/images/57416-1279671967.jpg

Skyrim looks better on pretty much all other fronts, I agree, but not water. Especially distant water.

Still looks like the satin-y water from Oblivion. My biggest complaint (which isn't that big) about skyrim's water is exactly the coastline edge effects, which do look unrealistic. Probably blend a different texture into those areas?

I'm sorry to say this, but the water (reflections specifically) looks better in EverQuest II.

It's the other way around. Modded Morrowind had water looking like that (actually better, due to 3D water waves) before Oblivion did. Unless you're saying MGE/XE's water looks like Vanilla Oblivion's; if that's the case, http://www.pcgameshardware.com/screenshots/medium/2007/11/oblivion.jpg.

Anyway, here are the screens you asked for:
http://img545.imageshack.us/img545/9207/mgescreenshot28.jpg, http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/4002/mgescreenshot57.jpg, http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/5830/mgescreenshot52.jpg, http://img837.imageshack.us/img837/6130/racerh.jpg, http://img803.imageshack.us/img803/8959/roadyr1.jpg, http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/4826/mgescreenshot12.jpg, http://img542.imageshack.us/img542/412/mgescreenshot8.jpg, http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/9812/mgescreenshot6.jpg, http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/5511/mgescreenshot4.png, http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/2279/indoril1.jpg, http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/1931/daedric1.jpg, http://img806.imageshack.us/img806/7113/mgescreenshot96.jpg, http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/1224/mgescreenshot92.jpg, http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/6039/mgescreenshot85.jpg, http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/764/mgescreenshot78.jpg

Here's a list of things TES3 fully modded does better than vanilla Skyrim...
-Higher resolution textures
-Better shadows
-Better, less finicky and more realistic HDR w/ eye adaption
-Higher quality, less overstated bloom
-Support for high quality SSAO
-Support for sunray ''sunglare' shader
-Support for high quality circle bokeh depth of field
-Much better looking distant LOD (technical)
-Grass reacts to the player as they move through it
-Higher quality fogging
-More photorealistic water, including...
--Better depth based water rendering
--Light caustics projected onto sea floor
--3D water waves (the water isn't 'flat')
--Weather based water states
--Better underwater shader/effects

To be fair, here are the things Skyrim does better than fully modded Morrowind:
-Parallax maps
-Reflect maps
-More impressive looking distant LOD
-Higher poly everything (with a few outliers on both sides)
-Nicer looking NPCs, including heads/bodies
-Animation smoothing
-Smoother lighting
-Nicer sky box by far

That's everything I can think of off the top of my head, anyway. Could probably add plenty of things to both lists.

The problem with Skyrim's water is the same problem with Skryim in general. Bethesda have allowed lazy design in the knowledge that modders will eventually make their game the game it should have been off the shelves. Oblivion was the same. What's worse is Bethesda won't care. Skyrim has flown off the shelves and they will claim success. All we can do now is wait for the modding community to fix this console port piece of crap.

Aren't modded games always better than vanilla?

I mean seriously who cares that much for slick morrowind screenshots, when the animation is crap, the combat is lame, there is minimal to no AI on the NPCs, and 100 other complaints?

I'd take a moderately graphic intensive game that played better than a good looking game that played like doo doo any day of the week.

And then we are going to have the all that morrowind modding has to offer for Skyrim as well. Actually we are going to have the best from Morrowind, Fallouts, and Oblivion as well.

I get that Morrowind was a phenomenal game for its time, but that focusing on how an extensively modded game looks better than a new game that was designed for consoles (a fact that does matter) is silly. With those Morrowind screenshots you aren't seeing morrowind - you are seeing modder work.

Pff with all these graphic mods i think the game needs proper use of gpu usage.. My gpus are only at 60% and i get micro stutter when I change 180 degrees of field. Really it can be better than that

Edit:

come to finish the movie and I think skyrim looks better and yes even when its vanilla. I find morrowind missing a lot of ambience eg smoke, cloads, splashing water, birds etc..

While I understand the sentiment and agree with you, that's not really what the discussion is about.

Whenever nerds on the internet gather to discuss computer graphics and start comparing games based on graphics fidelity, there is always going to be one or two or five people who point out that graphics don't make a game and that in the end how the game looks is not important so long as the game is fun. While you're not wrong when you say that, the remark isn't exactly relevant to the discussion; anyone in their right mind would agree with you on this, but it doesn't change the nature of the discussion or make any points in regards to which game renders things prettier, which in the end is what the discussion is about, not which game is better or which game deserves our love and praise more.

I think Skyrim is a very fun game. I also think it is beautiful. I also also understand why OP is disappointed with a trend in devs catering to outdated console hardware as the current console generation drags on.

Knots-

I think it does and here is why.

Morrowind can handle very graphic intensive mods because there is scant AI or scripts running. The fastest way to bottleneck Oblivion was to add more and more spawns and NPCs each with their own AI packets for various levels of activity and schedules. Morrowind has far less of this activity going on than Oblivion did. Which is why it is like a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrege_egg - very beautiful to look at and it can afford to be good looking because it does little else.

That Skyrim is a console port is another huge factor in this. Someone above posted a video for water in Just Cause or one of those games. It looked great, but then to remember that the environment is less interactive than anything in the TES string of games. So less meshes, less random spawns, likely less AI.

So it is a huge balancing act they have to do to appease playing well on X-Box - a 6 year old machine. They had to cut corners in some areas and graphics were very much one of those areas. I was afraid my 4 year old computer with a 1 gig ATI graphic card would have trouble running the game as it does with my heavily modded Oblivion game. Not so - not at all. Even putting in as many 2048x2048 textures as I can find and the only thing I need is 4gb patch.

So factors like AI, everything that you can pick up having meshes, random encounters, scripts galore - they all have an impact on things like fps and stuttering. If Morrowind had those things - we would not even be having this conversation at all because folks would not have gotten so narrowly focused on just graphic enhancements for a game that is 10 years old.

We could easily have a thread that says - why is Oblivion combat still play better than Skyrim combat ... only to open the thread and find the argument is about modded Oblivion versus unmodded Skyrim. ... Modded Oblivion combat is better than vanilla Skyrim. Even though they stole some top drawer mod ideas for the perk trees - the modded oblivion combat is better. They should be paying Duke Patrick for what they used. But even with that argument it is still silly.

@Psy

I have to apologize, it didn't even occur to me that you were literally answering the question in the thread's title. Sometimes I forget what a thread was about originally when debate springs up over details

No need to apologize.
Well I was answering the whole thread, but yeah mainly the OP.

I appreciate what Morrowind modding has done - because I have a thing for modded games, but the other limitations of the game are such that one could get fooled by Morrowind screenshots into thinking that they could play it. Well one could if retro gaming was their thing.

I for one cannot say that morrowind is a good looking game even modded when after putting in the water, the 200 mods, and so on - the character chicken walks across the well modded landscape and then gets into combat with creatures with minimal to no animation - the combat is character centric not player centric - Then talks to people who stand in the same spot all day - Then has those horrible hit shader effects and magic effects.

I've heard the story is good and it can look pretty, but you can't mod well the parts that I find important - the combat and AI stuff.

MGE led to OBGE for Oblivion and we will have that and the best modding has to offer from Oblivion and Fallout mods as well.

I just don't see the point in comparing a modded game to a console port. You can blame bethesda all you like for console porting, I know I don't like it. yet, wait till we have mods for both games. Lets see this thread even be at all relevant when there is a full functioning set of tools, SKGE, etc.

Well, the modding community always do it better.
But wait some time, and we will see a huge graphical jump in Skyrim...

bad joke reference FTW

Halt your tongue knave!

You can't possibly believe that a rendering farm with dozens of ultra-high end computers dedicated to the sole task of rendering theater quality 3D graphics is something a game meant to render on an Xbox is ever going to come close to competing with. There isn't a single one of us who has a PC capable of doing anything even remotely close to what Avatar pulled off.

As far as the rest, Psymon more or less covered it. Morrowind can be made to look stunning but none of that can make up for stilted animations, low frame rates, and a 10 year old engine incapable of processing simple AI and that gets bogged down on even moderately complex scripts. Even then, I am not convinced by the various example shots of Morrowind showing flat textures and frilly colors when compared to a modern 3D game like Skyrim that has all those fancy bump mappings and everything else that goes into making the world detailed and NOT flat as a pancake.

Sarcasm on the internet is a difficult thing to express.

And no, that was not sarcastic.

Let me ask you a question; Have you played Gothic 3 or Gothic 4? If not I can tell you that was the worst graphics I've ever seen in these two games. Sometimes it was even worse than a plain vanilla in Morrowind without MGE.

IMHO I don't consider the graphics in Skyrim to be bad or anything, because I know when the community get their hands of CK then will see really stunning graphics in Skyrim. So far I'm impressed with the water in Skyrim and I must say I'm blown away by the landscape.

The vanilla Morrowind water still looks better than anything else

I'm afraid that microstutter is always the GPUs' fault, not a game's fault, though games with more dynamic render elements will make it more obvious. There's an excellent http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stutter-crossfire,2995.html.

I think the real argument here is that it's surprising that, after all these years, Bethesda still can't keep up with the modders. Even when you're talking about a brand new game versus one released in '02. Mods or not, a game in '02 shouldn't have anything over one released in the latter end of '11. There are a lot of years of technological advancements there.

The thing of it is is that in Morrowind, due to mods, you have reactive water, shorelines, and things that you would expect. Thanks to mods, yes, but these things are sorely lacking in Skyrim and I think that some people are a little confused about this. Realistically, Skyrim should blow a modded Morrowind out of the water. I think that Skyrim's engine is perhaps still too outdated without heavy work, too outdated even for shorelines, and they didn't have the time and/or resources to update the engine that much. That's why Skyrim looks, at the same time, both visually amazing and yet very limited and visually dated.

They did the best they could with an ancient engine which they really should have retired by now. They may call it the 'Creation' engine now, but everything about it still behaves as Gamebryo ever did. (Including horses not particularly caring about the laws of physics, but I'm amused by that, so I don't mind those bugs).

Now, for an example of a modern game running on a modern engine and on a console, let's take a look at Risen...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=uvy5cxgmYZQ#t=67s.

I think we just need to accept that until they retire the engine, the graphics just aren't going to match up to other games in this genre.

Now, I don't mind that, though, because I don't think that any of the Elder Scrolls games were ever about graphics. And Obsidian's New Vegas was built upon the Gamebryo engine, too, along with Dragon Knight Saga. And those games were truly amazing. So the greatest graphics known to man aren't necessary. But all I'm saying is that we shouldn't be making a big deal out of Skyrim's water, because compared to Risen it's four or five years behind.