What does Todd think of Breath of the Wild? Nintendo basically made a Japanese Skyrim with mountain climbing...

I am sure he would be honored they are imitating his great works in a fresh new minimalist way.

I think the ghost shader was impressive, although I'm unaware if one as good existed at the time, art direction in the game is absolutely excellent, better than most games, application is about standard though, things like the architecture is excellent.

It's a texture with some transparency and glow, how can it be impressive? It's pretty, does a fine job and certainly looks better than Oblivion's ghosts, but it's pretty standard in terms of shaders.

youre right, i just kinda prefer the old formula for dungeons.
shrines are usually small because theyre numerous, but numerous because they want to tempt you to explore.

You're simplifying it a bit much, it also has this really nice transparency gradient from top to bottom as well as a faked fresnel that just makes them pop, I'm not impressed technically just visually, it looks good, and I hadn't seen better ghosts in a game beforehand to my memory.

It was pretty bad, speaking as someone who actually enjoyed it somewhat

The weapons are big foam paddles and the armor looks Forgotten Realms inspired. Insane high fantasy works great for somewhere like Morrowind but Europe inspired provinces like Skyrim should veer in a more historical direction. And the vanilla graphics are just awful for their day and age

I misspoke for a second, when I said art direction I meant designs, for the most part, their lead concept artist was easily one of the industries best, better than the turds at CDP, not a single place in Witcher 3 is as dreamy or as atmospheric as most places in Skyrim, even with it's low quality graphics.

Witcher 3 is probably one of the few games more overrated than Skyrim, it's execution is good but it is not an ambitious RPG, or even a particularly ambitious world, only thing it does better than ES is world scale and technical graphics, also writing and story, unless you know ES lore in which case speculation makes the Skyrim story intersting, you effectively play as the good guy trying to do something noble and condemning multiple realities to a permanent death, but also the possibility that the dragonborn slowly realizes their true power and solidifes Talos' divinity absolutely.

Kys retard

I just called it one of the most overrated games, you're the retard, I don't even think it's a good game.

Concept art should have no bearing on the game itself. Those pics look better than anything in the world. And it's not surprising that it's more "dreamy" or "atmospheric" than Witcher, it's an high fantasy setting vs "realistic fantasy". Witcher's ambient isn't supposed to wow and amaze you, it's supposed to look believable as a medieval fantasy setting.

I like both types of styles depending on the game, but I don't believe Skyrim did high fantasy that amazing to begin with, there are several games that look far better for that kind of thing (Guild Wars, both 1 and 2 for instance) while Wither 3 actually did quite an amazing world for that.

And gameplay too. It's basically better in everything that an RPG has to be good at than Skyrim. I'd even argue that the very first Witcher is already a better game and RPG than Skyrim.

That's not exactly clear. Sure, the current timeline is now missing the element that ends it. Maybe.
Maybe it's inside the Dragonborn (since he devours dragon souls) and he will eventually finish the job since he inherited it.
Or maybe the Dragonborn will go to consume every Dragon soul and once he has them all, Akatosh is complete and reincarnates. Wether he ends that kalpa or not is up to speculation.

It's also pretty easy to imagine that kalpas don't last forever anyway, they degenerate with time, Alduin just ends them before or while that's happening.
Or maybe there's something else out there that can destroy kalpas. Or maybe there are multiple realities at the same time, starting and ending in a multiverse. This one won't end but maybe it's not the only one in that situation and it's inhabitants will inevitably start traveling outside of it unto other kalpas.

That's basically what the Hist Tree did anyway, proving you can either survive outside of a kalpa or that the next one exists before the previous one expires.