User blog comment:Redexx/Skyrim's many faults and upsides. **My take**/@comment-1692583-20121228042647/@comment-3492791-20121229043249

It's not about improving graphics, it's about hardware. Artist, level designers, and programers all work separately, and how much work one cell has to do doesn't affect how easy it is for another cell (well to a degree it does, but that is mostly indirect). The issue lies in the hardware. Rendering a highly detailed object is not a lot of work, but trying to render hundreds of highly detailed objects starts to put quite a strain on the processing. Eventually we'll reach "realism" where graphical improvements will stop but hardware will continue to advance, but that day is long in coming...and we've got to make it through the uncanny valley first.