The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is still one of my favourite games of all time and one that I’ve sunk hundreds, if not thousands, of hours into over the course of the last decade and a half since its original release.
I actually played it last week and it’s still such a great game to play through, as I once again left the confines of the main quest to explore its more interesting and lesser known areas.
As good a time as it was, even I can admit that the game has started to show its age visually, with some of the animations and faces now a little jarring, even if they do have their own charm.
Fortunately, the game still has an immense modding community who make it their life’s work to update the game’s aesthetics and bring them up to a 2025 standard, something which we can all get behind.
Others take it even further, turning the game into an entirely new proposition that frankly looks like a different game altogether.
Modded Skyrim in 4K is a Thing of Beauty
Over on YouTube, well-known modder DigitalDreams uploaded a gameplay showcase of a highly modded version of Skyrim, with over 3500 active mods making up the Elysium Remastered modlist.
The graphics on display have been overhauled in a ton of different ways, with surface textures in cities and towns looking considerably more realistic and high resolution this time around.
Equally, the forested regions have entirely new foliage setups and the limited green areas the region has certainly look a lot more vivid and nice to explore.
Lighting is another big area of improvement, as the game’s significantly better shadows and ray tracing add particular realism to the outside areas of Skyrim, as the sun moves across the sky whilst we explore.
It is important to note that the mod setup is so broad that the final product is significantly different to what you’d expect when logging in to play Skyrim. Whilst this departure inevitably won’t be for everyone, it’s certainly a fun experiment in just how far you can push the game beyond its original intentions.
With work now really dialling up on The Elder Scrolls VI, we hopefully won’t have to rely on battering our copies of Skyrim beyond all recognition for too much longer (though I am absolutely happy to do that indefinitely).
