I wrote a short thing in 2012 about a copy of Skyrim that was running 100 mods at once, and it went on to become one of the most popular stories to have ever been published on the site.
There’s a very good reason for that: people love Skyrim, but people also love seeing other people trying to make Skyrim better, or at least different. There’s something about the scale of the game’s popularity, the degree to which it can be modded, and the fact folks can still wring impressive results out of it nearly ten years later that means, at least for me (and millions of other people), it’s as interesting to be watching Skyrim mod videos in 2021 as it was in 2011.
So when I saw this over the weekend you bet I was into it. Look at those trees! Look at that lighting! Look at that, uh, framerate!
That video, uploaded by ShoddyCover, is using a whole ton of mods and 2K/4K textures loaded up at once. The mods doing most of the heavy lifting are:
- Vivid Weathers (“It revamps the colors and weathers of the game to achieve a stunning effect.”)
- Natural And Atmospheric Tamriel (“A complete weather, lighting and visual overhaul for Skyrim SE.”)
- Enhanced Lights & FX (“Enhanced Lights and FX has the goal to create a more dramatic and realistic mood to the Skyrim lighting.”)
- ENB (The go-to shaders download for anyone even casually modding their PC games)
If you’re wondering what kind of specs were the baseline for all that stuttering in the video, ShoddyCover was playing on an Alienware laptop with an Intel i7-10870H, 16GB of RAM and an RTX3070, though they note that by turning off depth of field and lens flare they got “an extra 15FPS.”