Shadows by themselves tank performance in some games. A good way to increase performance in the past was to reduce shadow quality.
Those draw calls are not too high are they?
For reference, in the densest part of Riverwood, with shadow distance @ 8000 + tripled wilderness & enemy spawns + parallax maps (adds at least one extra draw call for every object in the scene), I was getting 3.5k draw calls.
I think this is an exceptional case of lazy artists that didn't combine textures into atlases; all their previous games were a complete train-wreck in that regard. Some meshes had combined textures, others didn't, with no continuity in regards to what was combined, and what wasn't.
For example, the body is made up of several meshes: The torso + limbs = 1 mesh, the hands = 1 mesh, the feet = 1 mesh and the head = 1 mesh, for a total of four meshes. The torso, however, shares the same texture as the feet, whilst the hands have their own.
And rather than combine all the facial texture overlays into one texture (seriously, it ain't hard), Facegen keeps them separate. Each scar overlay has it's own texture, each tattoo, each dirt overlay, etc.
*RantRantRantRant*