mine skyrim Doesn’t look like yours. It’s not even like Skyrim I was five years ago. Thanks to a talented and prolific modding community, the land and everything in it has evolved over time, deepening detail and beauty at a steady pace for over a decade, one uncompressed 16K texture pack at a time.
In its current incarnation, running over 400 mods and combined with intricate .ini files and prayers, it’s probably the best looking game I’ve ever seen running on PC. Granted, most of these mods are for penis physics, but there are also reshading, lighting tweaks, ENBs, new flora and fauna, improved NPC faces, clothing, weapons, dungeon scenes, and of course, textures. All lovely textures. I don’t care if it’s a book spine, a street sign, or a rock on the way to Riverwood. It wouldn’t be in Phil’s Skyrim if it wasn’t at least 4K, thanks a lot.
So at this point, not only does it look almost unrecognizable from 2011’s vanilla Skyrim, but it also works harder on every asset than any commercial version has dared to do in 2022. This is possible because modders are not responsible for the performance of the game. Unlike developers who make versions of traditional paid mods, modders don’t get any flak for releasing content that turns frame rates down to a single number. They don’t try to cleverly balance your system resources or even run their stuff on console and PC platforms. They are free to simply create whatever they like – download it if you want, or not.
Well, inevitably, the version of Skyrim I created with the mod wasn’t an optimized experience. It dropped more frames than Ronnie O’Sullivan when his head disappeared. If needed to release minimum system requirements for my unstable 400 mods, they might say: ‘CPU: It’s okay. GPU: It doesn’t matter. It never goes above 37fps.
The Elder Scrolls 6 will not be free from such concerns when it arrives. This will be the biggest video game release of the year — no matter what time of year it is — maybe in a decade. As such, Bethesda will want to put it in front of as many gamers as possible, with platforms and PC specs ranging from “RGB-smeared crypto farms” to “really just a potato.”
When you think about it that way, it’s unlikely that Skyrim’s successor will visually look much better than the Skyrim we have in our minds today.
What a frustrating thought, that. Even with over a decade of technological advancements (and two other generations of consoles), the new Elder Scrolls won’t look any better than what we already have. Well, anyway, the one owned by PC gamers with holy patience and gear that makes the entire national grid flash when you turn it on.
There’s a bittersweet poetic irony: If players weren’t so in love with Skyrim, and if Bethesda wasn’t thoughtful enough to make modding relatively easy, The Elder Scrolls 6 wouldn’t be in this pickle. As long as it looks as good as most of the new releases, it blows that taupe world into a mess, with basic pretend models and furry mammoth textures popping out of the water.
But let’s not get too carried away with this idea, because beyond texture resolution and reshading techniques, Bethesda can focus on different areas to make its next scroll look very advanced and beyond Skyrim. animation, etc.
The way NPCs roamed around like hangover robots seemed a little rudimentary in 2011 – now, it’s like looking at cave drawings. And mods that improve fidelity in other areas only highlight how outdated Skyrim’s animations are right now. Of course, there are animation mods as well, but these are usually focused on combat and don’t completely change the system under the hood – it’s basically very clever keyframing.
Lighting is also a big issue. ENB and reshade work well for revamping older games, but the latest generation of consoles has helped developers achieve more sophisticated lighting, knowing that the majority of the user base has the hardware to handle it. Ray tracing itself has the ability to completely change space, and GTA 5’s various ray tracing mods are a good example. See also: Quake II RTX. With a lighting technique applied, 1997’s games look like the best things your PC has ever run.
Learning AI techniques like Nvidia’s DLSS could help The Elder Scrolls 6 improve fidelity even further. By running the game over and over on a supercomputer, DLSS generates an algorithm for upgrades, which is interpreted and implemented by dedicated cores on your graphics card. It’s much less system-intensive than running locally at a higher resolution, giving the studio some extra system resources to work with.
Will Bethesda? In recent form (if you can call Fallout 76 and Fallout 4 recent), pushing visual constraints to the brink of our gullibility doesn’t seem like a high priority. Instead, the focus has been on effectively building a huge open world, using a library of modular assets that can be remixed, generating seven different dungeons from a set of textures and objects.
Most AAA open world games these days are built on this design philosophy – it’s the only way to create them in a cost and time efficient way. But as a player, you can always say it. Maybe not in the first hour, maybe not in the fifth hour. But eventually you start to see all the duplicated assets, which take away the sense of the world. It’s starting to feel like a video game.
And for The Elder Scrolls 6’s success, a sense of place may prove to be the most critical. This is of course the beating heart of Skyrim. Now it’s a tiny world map – by modern standards – but even in a relatively small space, adhering to the principles of a winter biome, the world has vast changes, intrigue and passive storytelling.
You climb a hill and you see something you just have to investigate. You come across an overturned wagon, a dead horse and a man with a suspicious smile on the road, and you know there’s some form of road fraud here. You go back to Riverwood again and again just because it looks good. That’s why modders are so inspired to keep building and improving it in this world, bringing it to life in more vivid detail over the years.
This will be more important than the visual fidelity of The Elder Scrolls 6. So, Bethesda please: give us another such a good place. Let’s keep making it even better after you ignore it for years.
