Much of the reason for doing this guide is that I’ve used several neat tricks along the way that do much of the work but are either taken for granted or dismissed.
Myth number one about Making Skyrim Pretty is that it takes ‘hundreds of mods’.
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It’s not a guide to taking good screenshots, either, so much as knowing how to look for them. This isn’t a guide to playing Skyrim with mods, then, as I would probably use a very different setup if I wanted traditional gameplay.
Two years after it came out, when I climbed up a mountain and started bashing in the console commands, I had absolutely no idea I'd see this: The fallacy of asking 'how to make Skyrim look like that' is that you simply don't know what Skyrim might look like whenever you fire it up. Alduin is dead but the quest for ultimate graphics goes on. What the posters also don’t mention is that the mountainous challenge of taking those shots is precisely why many people play Skyrim now more than ever. Whether you're an industry screenshot artist or a Steam Community superstar or whatever, what you're doing is marketing. The numbers are only slightly better for any videogame screenshot worth a damn. What posters of modded Skyrim shots fail to mention is that their game only looks like that 1 per cent of the time, from 0.01 per cent of the vantage points on the map. Likewise, when someone asks me what English weather is like, I don’t answer: ‘It’s like that evening drive between Dorset and Wiltshire when a torrential downpour gave way to just the best sunshine that lit up the faces of distant historic buildings and cast painterly shadows across dale and field.’ What I tell them is that, nine times out of ten, ‘it’s shit.’ They're almost right about one thing: my Skyrim doesn't look like that. Then comes the abuse: "He doesn't want anyone to have his secret sauce!" Or: "His Skyrim doesn't look like that - *snort* - those are Photoshopped." Only they don’t capitalise Photoshop because they didn’t have to sit through that publishing meeting, lucky old them.
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This is the latest in a series of articles about the art technology of games, in collaboration with the particularly handsome Dead End Thrills.Īn occupational risk of Christmas is that the great mead (Jaffa Cakes) hall of my in-laws' living room will inspire me to reinstall Skyrim, post a few fancy screenshots, and sure enough get a few emails asking for some mythical mod guide.