I've been playing Skyrim lately and working on the project as well.

About Skyrim I must say the engine renderer has been improved a lot, the gameplay as well. It is indeed a masterpiece. About the graphics I was expecting a little bit more in terms of quality (in truth I wasn't expecting my laptop to be able to run it).

The polys are a lot, the renderer is great.

The Armors and weapons are a lot more detailed compared to Oblivion, nothing I wouldn't be able to do but an unbelievable amount of work indeed, which makes it impossible for an indie developer to reach.

That's normal.

Speaking of Wasteland instead, I've been studing the complexity of Skyrim landscapes. Something I'm sure Gamestudio just can't handle. I'm running this level now in wasteland which has about 650k polys in it (of course with lods so it gets a lot lower on screen). But a 500 nexus is already too small to handle the whole level.
Plus Shade-C completely kills the framerate so I have to optimize here and there.. fake as much as possible.. it's tiresome I tell you.

Now I find myself in the middle of a crysis in terms of style to adapt onto the level itself, I'm trying to find a decent combination of rocks, sand and vegetation.

As you can see from the screenshots above there's a lot of free space between rocks and grass which I don't really like, I'm trying to find a way to fill it up with some trees and brambles.. not quite there yet.

Anyway, I'll go on modeling and hopefully I'll post a new video on youtube soon