A result of pressing shift+F12 I think. Vanilla looked great, it is just that ENB has made it seem awful now imo....I pressed shiftF12 for the first time in months the other day and saw the game pre-ENB and I honestly couldn't believe it was the same game, it looked horrible. I do however remember playing the game all the way through with no mods on release and thought it looked great then as well.
Skyrim looks awful mate :/ look at the grass, look at how the rocks blend into the ground (or lack of). The water looks superb, and it's a great looking game when you compare it to what is also available on consoles, but for a Quarter 4 2011 game it is hideous, go look at Far Cry 2, there is more content on screen and it looks much better, the Creation engine is hideous, I hope they just take the Unreal 4 engine with VI and use that, because they are falling further behind than Valve are in terms of visuals with their engines.
If you are talking about without mods then both (for their time of release) looked average, not the bottom of the pile, yet not the top by any means. Mods made both look much, much better. To say Oblivion was a beautiful game when it was released is beyond nostalgia.
Oblivion was released in 2005, what else was there? It was an incredibly good looking game for it's time.
Nowhere near as impressive as Crysis that came out two years later, but as far as 'for its time' comparisons go, Oblivion is incredibly strong. Skyrim isn't.
If both are modded, both can look vibrant and great. In both cases the improvements come from the community.
Oblivion was still much more impressive back in '05 than Skyrim is for a modern game.
Yep, and I also remember that most were never used.
Back in Morrowind you had to use every spell, if not for combat purposes, then for exploration, some places just were not possible to get to without certain spells and that added a great feel to the game, it felt like you were picking up yet another tool whenever you bought a spell, Mark/Recall/Intervention/Levitate were all extremely useful and were removed for no good reason. They should have never added fast travel, it should have stayed how it was, Skyrim without fast travel is very enjoyable because it has a very Morrowind-esque travel system, sadly Oblivion only had fast travel other than walking.
I have to admit I did prefer having more armour options but again Oblivion had less choice than Morrowind too.
I know, my point was that the entire series has been dumbed down since Morrowind, when it was at it's peak for mechanics and content. Skyrim dumbed itself down from Oblivion as equally as Oblivion dumbed down from Morrowind.
Yes to Mysticism, most of which is still portrayed in game via other means. As for the AI...pardon? The AI has never been amazing in any TES game, Skyrim is no worse here, and a bit better in some regards.
I have to admit to Skyrim being my favourite TES so far in terms of immersion. To say it's been dumbed down is possibly a bit true, it has less to keep track of even if almost all the old aspects are still in game under different guises, but the same could be said of Oblivion following Morrowind.
The A.I has always been stupid, but back in Morrowind whenever you saw an enemy on the road (I remember distinctly one battlemage who stood on the bridge leading to the Dwemer ruins near Balmora for the main quest) you'd brick it and you know this fight could kill you, but in Oblivion and Skyrim it's all scaled rubbish, every enemy is equally challenging (well they're not challenging) with some generic boss at the end. 'Master Vampire' 'Ascendant Necromancer'. Great. Oh I'm on Master difficulty but my big stabby stick of stabbiness just killed it in one shot? Shame that.
Granted things like SkyRE change that a little, but you can't really praise a developer for what their game's fanbase did.
Both are great games, and I would recommend either.
Same, Skyrim is a decent game, but it's far from perfect in every single way, it's just decent all around, nothing at all shines out about it other than mods, but even then the game's engine is bloody awful and can't support all that much. I'm just a little worried about what TES VI is going to be like, if it's dumbed down in proportion to what the last two have been, we'll be running around Iraq with M16's.
. Can't recall most of them but I did install an ENB one via Nexus mod manager, although i'm never sure if its actually working as I've only just got Skyrim so can't tell the difference. I suppose this is what happens when you start with lots of mods. I'm not even sure if most the mods are working because I know no difference! 
