True beauty

Skyrim looks like crap without mods. Actually, Skyrim looks good until you add mods. lol :) Hopefully this is what the next one looks like! TES6 will be great! :)

Skyrim looks like any other game released in the early 2010s. It looks like fucking reality with the right mods, but it doesn't look bad without them. Some animations could be better (AC got it right), but textures, collision map, meshes, lighting, etc. are all the same quality as most other games from 2012. Most of the games that looked significantly better than Skyrim at the time were considered next to reality.

Forgot to log in. That's me who wrote that comment. Anway, as you say, Skyrim looks great until you add mods, and I agree. It does look awesome until you find something that's better, and when you go back to vanilla it looks like crap, but it's like that with everything. If I get a job taht pays twice as much as my previous job but requires a bit more education/experience/whatever for the same amount of work I'm not going to throw that job away just because someone else can't have it because of too little/wrong education/experience/whatever.

That isn't really what I was trying to say. I've played ultra Skyrim vanilla and it looks far better than MOST games released at the same time, BUT, it isn't that fantastic. For a game of its scale, it's pretty impressive. However, base game can't hold a candle on a mile long pole to realism mods/ultra shaders/the hi-def makeover pack. All I'm saying is that TESV with those mods is.. Well, exactly as you see in the pictures

I actually have a folder full of screenshots from Skyrim (mostly my own, but some I've downloaded) just because they're so damn beautiful.

It's like someone took the advert graphics and put them in the game.

Third one here. Well, I didn't know for sure, but I knew something was fishy, because it reminded me of Skyrim. After that it was a piece of cake (the last three I've actually seen before).

I could tell by the first picture because I saw it on Steam once.