DennisK4 said:
Two Worlds II and Risen are both open-world games and look much better than recent NA RPGs.
I am sorry but the bar has been raised and it doesn't look like Betsheda cares.
It may very well be that the graphics just aren't important for sales and so Bioware and Betsheda puts their focus elsewhere....but that they are falling behind is indisputable.
Well, you still have to realize that TES is not only larger in scale, but there's so much that Bethesda has put into the game that it doesn't allow for super high quality graphics. Lots of people continue to complain about the graphics in TES, but perhaps just fail to realize the limitations of 3D meshes and textures for games and the technical obstacles of game design. Yes it's important for graphics to be at their highest, but there are only a certain amount of polygons a GPU can render at time. And since the 360 is around 6 years old, that poly count limit is very low compared to today's GPUs.
Have you ever wondered why modern non-open racing games look ungodly amazing? It's because they have such smaller/closed areas that they can bump up the poly count on all of their meshes. Now, on a game as big as TES (and on top of that all the detail put into the tiniest things like the food, the plants, the silverware), Bethesda has pushed the limits of the number of polys that the 360's GPU can render at a time. There's more to the TES games than just the weapons and armor your character is using.
On top of all that, Bethesda is limited by the disk size. They have to make the meshes and textures small enough to be able to fit the entire game on a dual-layer DVD. That includes all of the code, all of the textures, all of the meshes, all of the audio, all of the images. All of the animation bakes, all of the engines (including, but not limited to, the render engine, the physics engine, the sound engine, the lighting engine, the collision-calculation engine, the particle engine, and many more [sometimes they can be combined, but often they are not]).
You can't just say "Other games are doing it, why not TES." Other games are not as detailed or on par with the scale of TES. And you definitely cannot compare BioWare games or even the Witcher games to TES because neither BioWare nor The Witcher games utilize environment streaming like TES...in other words, BioWare games and The Witcher aren't as seamless as TES: The environments are broken off into sections rather than being streamlined as one large piece of mesh. Now, I can't speak for Witcher 2 since I am still in the middle of Witcher 1, so I don't know how Witcher 2 is built.
But anyways, I hate when people bash on the graphics/textures of TES games, because frankly no other game is on par with the scale and detail of TES games. And I think I can say that with complete confidence. And since this is all being developed on the 360's specs and then being ported to PC, the graphics/meshes will only be on par with the 360 version. Yes, they can always use higher quality textures because it's as simple as reducing the the resolution (mind you, there is a difference between actual dimensions of the texture images and the resolution.) for the 360, but it is twice the work to rebuild higher-poly versions of the meshes for the PC.
So next time you think about comparing TES to other similar games, realize that TES doesn't just have the environment and the weapons/armor and the few potion items to render. It has so much more and in much more detail, so everything has to be reduced in quality and poly-count just to be able to put all of that in the game. If you want something on par with graphics of Two Worlds 2, then play a game on par with Two Worlds 2. TES goes much more beyond Two Worlds 2 that they aren't directly comparable, other than the fact that they're both RPG's in a fantasy setting.