Game looks very low res

[Steel, my beloved]

I have a 1440p monitor and I noticed the game looking very ugly. The texture quality was poor and everything looks like its being shown in the wrong resolution. Is there a way to improve the texture quality and resolution. I already cranked the settings in game to max and I edited the config files and still nothing.

[timestamp!]

No. Some say it's the art style, but in reality it's just the way this 2012 game is. Textures are very low res. You'll get used to it.

[Steel, my beloved]

Are there any mods to increase the resolution?

[Alun1]

short of fan patches to change the game files, no.

[Lord Of Dorkness]

Originally posted by timestamp!:

No. Some say it's the art style, but in reality it's just the way this 2012 game is. Textures are very low res. You'll get used to it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=May0OwVw_6k

Warning: Very~ thick accents.

So... yeah, it's an intentional art style. Love or hate it, but still intentional.

Seriously, though, it's not as if 2012 was ascii and text adventures. Heck, Dark Messiah was 2006, and that game's visuals are a much crisper & traditional attempt at photo-real.

As for OP: I haven't tried this one myself, but I've heard it well-recommended:

https://www.nexusmods.com/dishonored/mods/5

"ENB or Reshade with SweetFX for Dishonored" if the above link won't work. Basically a slight shader & color tweak that keeps the watercolor look, but makes things look a bit cleaner & crisper.

ONLY Nvida I'm afraid, but hey, seems like a start at least.

[timestamp!]

Originally posted by Lord Of Dorkness:

So... yeah, it's an intentional art style. Love or hate it, but still intentional.

It's just not the same playing the game in 1440p and true 4K as playing it in 720p or ever lower.
There is a difference between the dev's intent back in 2010 (or even 2009? when they started working on it) and this day's reality, and something painted to look lacking details and something stretched so you see fewer details in any given area of you screen.

[Steel, my beloved]

What are the fan patches?

[Night[owl]]

Originally posted by Ey Steve!:

What are the fan patches?

It depends on game as some games have a large number of bugs that devs never fix and someone or a group of modders made a "patch" that is supposed to fix most of those bugs. That is what a "fan patch" (or unofficial patch: see wiki link) mean as it not supported or provided by devs (if game stop working due to mod it is up to you and/or modder to fix it) and then there are games where a modder or a group of modder have put a large effort in improving the visual quality by working with meshes and such thing that is a very demanding task to give surfaces a higher quality and less pixelated look at higher resolution.

In general a "mod" or "modification" is meant to offer something that game didn't offer like features related to UI or better sorting of inventory. In some cases it can be something as "simple" as a key bind.

There are mods that work as "cheats" in that they offer the ability to ignore in game restriction like weight of each items for TES Oblivion or how much Gold you will get when you trade items with Merchant NPCs. In short there a big variation in what is called a mod and what is the intended way of playing a Single Player game from devs and what players wanted from a game. Game with multiplayer mode and coop mode often need to have restriction due to the way some mods change how game will behave and what is possible to do when mods have been installed.

If want to know more then I suggest you look at https://www.nexusmods.com/ where you can find most games and related mods. There are other sites which offer mods, but Nexus have been the main place I look for mods as even "old" game still have people that help when one need some information or have problems with mods (each mod have a forum section - use tabs to select right section for mod on site for mod).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unofficial_patch

_____
For Dishonored 1 there is only a few mods and those seem to work fine at least for adding Mission Stats in main Menu. You need to install DLL as this game do not offer built in feature for adding mods which some other game do. There is a explanation on front page and in the 7zip folder (compressed archive) which you download where you will find a ReadMe.txt file (can be open in MS Notepad as it is pure text).

https://www.nexusmods.com/dishonored/mods/17?tab=files

For all Dishonored 1 mods:

https://www.nexusmods.com/dishonored