I'll give you Mount and Blade... but Skyrim and especially GTAV were at the highend of graphics (and budget) for open world AAA games when they were released in

I'll give you Mount and Blade... but Skyrim and especially GTAV were at the highend of graphics (and budget) for open world AAA games when they were released in 2011 and 2013. They also both had very long development cycles, the release of GTAIV was 2008 and Oblivion was 2006. Assuming similar development cycles, the next games in each series will be due in 2018 or 2019. The bar for "great" graphics is going to change as new hardware comes out, but its a stretch to say those games were not pushing rendering on their target minspec systems (Xbox 360 and PS3) at the time of release, there aren't any examples of open world games that looked better than either of those games and ran on that hardware. I know it's fun (although tired) to jump on any thread about game graphics and say "Graphics don't matter, games with great graphics don't have good gameplay!", but sharing knowledge about how to tune and implement postprocess to get better image quality isn't hurting gameplay quality and can lead to games both looking and playing better.