Plenty of the best Skyrim mods can make Bethesda’s Tamriel look like a dream, but what about if parts of Skyrim were remodelled in Unreal Engine 5 and used the improved snow effects and lighting to really make the fantasy game‘s locations sing? While the improved engine can make most games look great – unless you’re going against style – Skyrim in Unreal Engine 5 is breathtaking.
This is exactly what developer Leo Torres has done to Dawnstar – one of Skyrim’s nine major cities – as they’ve built the location in Unreal Engine 5, and it looks simply magical. The water and snow effects are particularly impressive.
While it’s just the location itself and not with all the NPCs and such, it’s always great to see an 11-year-old game like Skyrim be a part of these fan projects. To be clear, I wouldn’t expect a full playable release, as it looks like Torres is building it to experiment and teach themselves more than anything else.
“I’ve been using this scene to practise my snow workflows – and stress testing a very heavy Nanite scene, along with difficult low lighting conditions for Lumen – and it actually went far better than I was expecting,” says Torres in the description. “This entire scene is running dynamically at around 40-45 fps on the ‘high’ preset on an RTX 3060.”
“Most of this snow is fully 3D (not just textures) and was procedurally generated in Blender to conform on top of the various assets in the scene. A mix of Quixel Megascans, third party assets and custom modelled and textured assets were used. Volumetric clouds and fog allow for that moody, Arctic atmosphere, especially where it covers the top of the mountains.”
Now, will Elder Scrolls 6 use Unreal Engine 5? That’s unlikely, as Bethesda’s Creation engine has been the studios home for development for years. Even so, it’s fun to see Tamriel in UE5.
If you want more on games like Skyrim, we’ve got curated lists of the best open-world games and the best RPG games as well. Alternatively there’s a new and upcoming Skyrim mod adding Nvidia DLSS support, or another Skyrim ambient sound mod that overhauls the audio of the game.
