Modders have put a lot of effort into making Skyrim feel as immersive and realistic as possible in the eleven years since it was first released into the world.
These efforts have brought everything from destructible furniture to gear-equipping animations and dynamically-learning NPCs to the game, helping ensure that, on PC at least, it hasn’t fallen too far behind the times.
However, even their greatest attempts at revamping the game’s cities might struggle to match an iteration of Dawnstar which is currently taking Reddit by storm, having used Unreal Engine 5 to make the settlement look as realistic as possible.
Have you ever managed to make Skyrim look anywhere near this good with mods?
The thread containing this creation on the Skyrim subreddit began with a post from its designer, user liontowers3d, who shared a clip of the snowy port town looking very cold and graphically impressive, captioning it: “I made Dawnstar in Unreal Engine 5!”
The majority of the Elder Scrolls stans in the thread seemed pretty blown away by the re-creation, with user hiyooo12345 asking: “How long did you work on this?? Looks absolutely stunning!!” and Buglepost declaring: “My GTX 1650 just threw its hands up and ran away.”
In response to hiyooo12345’s query, liontowers3d replied that the project, which you can get a great look at in the video below, took them “a couple of weeks in between other projects.”
Meanwhile, a couple of users discussed whether this work had fallen into the same trap which has affected a lot of similar concepts, with Kalocin saying: “A lot of these Unreal 5 recreations lack the artistic style of the games they came from, this just looks like it's from the game, but better.”
At the same time, some debated whether striving for a similar level of photorealism should be a goal of future entries in the series, with user dragon_stryker saying: “I do hope (The) Elder Scrolls 6 comes close to this.”, while Taxosaurus argued: “Graphics and visual detailing eat too much time. I think it's unhelpful to expect this much.”
Regardless of what you’re hoping Bethesda will prioritise during The Elder Scrolls 6’s creation, make sure to follow us for more updates on the interesting world of Skyrim modding.