Because it's their intellectual property.
Digital Millenia Copyright Act.
The game is. The screenshot isn't. That random sites simply cave with every DMCA request doesn't mean it's a legitimate request.
Rant:
It's also disturbing that a publisher doesn't want screenshots to be out in the open prior to release. If anything, the screenshots will increase hype, people will see them and think "yeah I want to play that game!", but as they don't want this to happen, it's clear they know all too well the screenshots don't really make the game look like the game they
sold to the fans and fear people will cancel their pre-orders.
If a company spends a lot of energy to fight free publicity and hype you have to be very careful. The shots shown in the TS are 'ok' but only when you view them scaled down. When I click open the shot of the ghouls for example, the texture work is absolutely way too low-res. I understand why Bethesda doesn't want gamers to see that before they buy the game, but it's absolutely key gamers do see that kind of shots before buying.
Anyway, it's not as if Bethesda didn't lie in the past about their engine and how they rewrote everything from 'scratch' for this game (like they said about the gamebryo version used in Skyrim): it's an improved version of their old, buggy, slow, inefficient mess of an engine and it's no surprise the end-result doesn't look great. I guess they used the same old cruft because their employees know how to work with it, the tooling is in place and they can get up and running fast without waiting for teh engine team to come up with a new engine/tooling etc. They forget that they have to make that step eventually, if it's not with this game then it's for the next or the one after that.
CDPR made that step clearly, they spend a lot of time migrating their tech to modern standards so their engine could deal with the vast open world of The Witcher 3, without load times, ever. I can move from:
to
Without a loading screen, while I'm in the first shot in a swamp and in the second I'm in a big city.
We all should stop making excuses for Bethesda and what they try to sell us at a very premium price. It's not the graphics if they're super great or not that great, the graphic quality are a
sign that the underlying technology is old as well. They polished it up a bit with better lighting, but e.g. texture work is still very bad. I doubt they did that on purpose or that they couldn't find the right people to come up with proper textures. The only explanation I can think of is that their tooling (and thus the engine) is simply not up to it and they refused to update it with systems that do. I wouldn't be surprised if the same memory leak aspects, corrupt world data (so the game CDTs when you go to a specific part of the map), and an endless stream of buggy quests which can't be completed are present at launch. Especially considering they try to hide the state of the engine so furiously by take-down notices of screenshots.
/Rant.
