Beautiful Vanilla Skyrim

[Retro Gaming Boss]

I know there are a million mods which enhance the visuals of Skyrim to some seriously epic levels. I happen to think it's a beautiful game in its own right, in its vanilla form. This is subjective, and highly dependent on what you're looking at in the game and your PC specs, but for a game that was made back in in ancient times (2011, haha), I still get the feels sometimes. Check out a few vids and tell me if I'm wrong?!

This of course says nothing about bugs, storyline/writing, broken quests, stiff characters, etc.

https://youtu.be/F2JRfZgJSw4
https://youtu.be/Z6GkCFTAEv8

[no1schmo]

No, it was sort of ugly even then. It's fine from a distance but everything becomes a muddy, low-res mess as soon as it's close enough to actually matter. Even your weapons and shields look like plastic toys. The design was good but the execution was poor. And I'm not really a big graphics person, generally, but considering SO much of this game's appeal went it's design and attempts at immersion, it really hurts the experience. I played this game originally on 360 and honestly was sort of bored. I only got into on PC because I had Fallout on PC and modding made that such a better experience, I tried it with Skyrim. I don't use ENBs, and I don't have a strong enough rig to make everything 4k, but still, the difference between my modded game and unmodded Skyrim is the difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Festival.

[no1schmo]

Yeah, any new player walking out of Helgen for the first time is likely to be like "Whoa". It seems awesome. But when you are running around Whiterun for the 10th time selling loot, and realizing you're probably going to do this a 1000 more times, and you start to notice everything looks like plastic or styrofoam, and the people are kind of muddy, and the lighting is bad, you start to lose that sense of wonder. I guess, for me, this genre is one of the few where it really matters how good it looks.

[shoopy]

I like to make it look "vanilla but better"
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1916305205

I really can't go back after so long. Modded became the new normal for me.

[Siddha]

Yes I agree; vanilla Skyrim is gorgeous (which means I like the way Bethesda made it)

Special Edition is even more gorgeous. I switch-off all the new special effects and crank up the view distance and detail to the max with Bethini and it looks awesome.

I tried lots of the texture packs and I didnt like any of them.

The mods I use are all just QOL fixes and additions; nothing that alters the vanilla gameplay.

[shoopy]

Originally posted by Veinslicer:

Nice. What graphics mods do you like best?

It's almost vanilla except for Caffeine ENB, Enhanced Vanilla Trees, some improved LODs, Static Mesh Improvement mod and Natural Lighting Vivid Atmospherics. Looks really good without being too intrusive. I often forget it's modded.