Thanks to the magnificent efforts of modders, Skyrim continues to amaze us despite its great age. It can even still hold its own visually against many much more recent titles.
We are going to highlight several creations from a team of modders called doodlez. Very active on Skyrim, she brings a little next-gen touch to Bethesda’s masterpiece that Cyberpunk 2077 would not deny.
Skyrim still in top form despite its great age
In 2011, Bethesda would shake up the once-small universe of open-world RPGs with Skyrim. An absolutely fantastic sandbox offering players a then rare freedom. If the basic formula was already excellent in itself, it is of course thanks to the deep love of the modders that the game still remains a reference today. As we write these lines, there is an absolutely titanic quantity of over 60,000 mods on the Nexus Mods page for the Special Edition! Along with the base version of the game, it is the most modded title in the world.
In recent days, a series of graphics mods have particularly attracted the attention of the community. This one comes to us from the doodlez team. The team first rose to prominence in 2011 with Light Limit Fix. This mod allowed you to add an infinite number of light sources to the game, for the most shimmering results. The mods that interest us today address visual effects and improved textures.
Mods that next-gen games can envy
The most notable mod to be added to Skyrim is called Wetness Effects. This adds some devilishly realistic humidity and weather effects. Rainwater therefore adopts an extremely convincing behavior, accumulating on the ground. Puddles will appear over time. To take full advantage of it, however, you must complete your collection of mods with Dynamic Cubemaps, another doodlez mode. This adds “cubes” which aim to improve the reflections and overall lighting of objects in play.
To stay on the aquatic theme, doodlez has released two superb mods aimed at improving water bodies. Water Parallax and Water Caustics add water surfaces to make them superbly more detailed than even in some recent games. Caustics is also there to make water reflect and refract rays of light on a curved surface. The result is truly stunning. Finally, doodlez has deployed a mod called Subsurface Scattering to greatly improve the quality of character skin textures, compatible with other similar mods.
To take advantage of all these mods, however, it is imperative to install the Community Shaders mod. If by chance you are tempted to try them on Skyrim, don’t hesitate to give each mod a thumbs up, to salute the superb work of their creators!