My Skyrim doesn’t look like yours. It doesn’t even look like my Skyrim from five years ago. Thanks to a furiously talented and prolific modding community, the land and everything in it have evolved over time, deepening in detail and beauty at a steady rate for over a decade, one uncompressed 16K texture pack at a time.
Its current incarnation, running over 400 mods and held together with convoluted .ini files and prayers, is probably the best-looking game I’ve seen running on PC. Admittedly most of those mods are for penis physics, but there are also reshades, lighting tweaks, ENBs, new flora and fauna, improved NPC faces, clothing, weapons, dungeon mise-en-scene, and – of course – the textures. All the lovely textures. I don’t care if it’s a book spine, a street sign or an individual rock on the path to Riverwood. If it’s not at least 4K, it’s not showing up in Phil’s Skyrim, thankyouverymuch.
So at this point, not only does it look nearly unrecognisable from the Vanilla Skyrim of 2011, it’s also working every asset harder than any commercial release would dare to do in 2022. And that’s only possible because modders hold no responsibility for the performance of the game. Unlike a developer making a traditional paid model release, modders don’t face any flak for putting out content that sends your frame rates into single figures. They’re not trying to artfully balance your system resources or even run their content across both console and PC platforms. They’re free to simply create whatever they like – download it if you want, or don’t.
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