You've also got to take into considerration the open world nature of the game. Whilst games released at the sametime like Half-Life 2 and Call of Duty 2 had better looking characters and models, both were very linear in scale and didn't have to stream as much data as Oblivion. Also, we can see a lot of emphasis was placed on landscape over characters.

Meeh, I wouldn't try and defend the games graphics, I think there are better looking PS2 games if I'm going to be honest.

Even for a game on such a large scale the graphics are still pretty poor.

1,000x better than Oblivion. Nice.

Still not amazing but that doesn't really matter.

Bathesda should use kinect capabilities to photo my actual face which I can use for the character!!
I demand my beautiful face as my character!!

Pfft, you lie.

I bet you would end up looking like the Oblivion characters :P

dude thats a low blow for me

The human ladies still look bad. I won't date women who look like that. Way too mannish. Like that female elven guard in Dragon Age 2. Urgh.

Are we talking art-style or technically? Because the landscapes still look quite nice for me. Characters are horrible, but the views from the high points are still pretty.

It uses Level of Detail. Like I said, emphasis was on landscape rather than characters. That and the fact that it was the first time they'd animated NPCs probably didn't help.

Ehh, both really. The landscapes were pretty empty and all looked the same.

As for technically, it was like the game had texture streaming issues, but it didn't, that's what the graphics were like. At long distances there was no detail in the grass, it was just a big green blob.

I am talking about the console version here though, not PC.