There are thousands of Skyrim mods out there, I’ve played a fair few myself, but one player has gone a step further and ported the entire vanilla game into Unreal Engine 5, completely changing the possibilities for future mods.
Greg Coulthard released a video to their YouTube channel showing off how the 13-year-old game looks in Unreal Engine 5. To be honest, I don’t think it looks better or worse, per se, but it definitely looks more real.
A visual enhancement isn’t what Coulthard is going for, though. The video’s description reads: “All assets are Vanilla. My goal wasn’t to upgrade graphics (other modders do this better), but to be able to read Skyrim’s ESM data file thanks to a C++ plugin I developed to automatize landscape generation & object placement.”
I used to mod Skyrim to death, but in the last few years I’ve settled for just playing it with the game’s built-in survival mode. There’s something special about the atmosphere of the original, those misty forests and chilly mountains. Still, a cool new mod does get me excited, and commenters believe porting the game to Unreal Engine 5 will really open up the game for even cooler mods.
“If mods could be made to work with this it would literally change Skyrim forever,” writes awaykidd4237. “No more water seams, popping textures, low draw distance for grass/trees (yeah dyndolod is good but not this good), potentially scaling to allow new categories of mods with significantly more opportunities for developers and players.”
Others think the game looks way better now. “I think people expected GTA 6 level graphics (to be fair, I did as well) and because of that they now fail to see how this still looks way better than vanilla Skyrim,” writes crqzed. “Textures look sharper, the water in particular looks great, the lighting is much more natural, and the LOD is probably the biggest difference.” What do you think?
It turns out Coulthard has also made this work for “Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 4 and even Starfield,” so there are plenty of Bethesda games you could try in Unreal Engine 5 for yourself.
One community is also working on a huge Elder Scrolls project: gettign all the regions of Tamriel into Morrowind’s engine. A playable version of the Cryodiil expansion has already been released.
While you’re here, check out our list of the best RPGs you can play right now.
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