Skyrim gets jaw-dropping Unreal Engine 5 fan makeover

Skyrim modders are just a cut above the rest. The amount of time, care and dedication that has been poured into the Elder Scrolls modding scene feels truly unparalleled, and today’s example is no different.

If Leo Torres’ body of work is anything to go by, they’re clearly an extremely talented individual. Torres has spent god knows how much of their free time in the past year recreating certain towns in Skyrim in Unreal Engine 5, and I would say that it was time extremely well spent.

Torres describes this pursuit as a “test” to “demonstrate exciting new 3D technologies and push the boundaries of real-time rendering technology”, a skill they’ve developed over several years during their modding work on games such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Their latest video showcases a fully remade Riften, the most recent in a long line of Skyrim-related videos (having previously remade towns such as Falkreath, Morthal, Whiterun, Solitude, and Winterhold using the same techniques).

According to DSOGaming’s John Papadopoulos, this was achieved by using “a mix of third-party models and custom assets modelled in Blender, textured in Mixer”.

That is an unreasonably impressive amount of work for one person to have undertaken by themselves, so I hope Torres had some help with a few of those custom assets.

“The True Scale of Riften” is the culmination of all this hard work, and I think it’s more than fair to say that Skyrim has never looked better.

Of course, as Papadopoulos stated, you’ll probably never actually be able to play a version of Skyrim that does look this good, because this probably wasn’t rendered in real-time. Your PC’s fans would probably sound like a jet engine taking off if you tried to do so.

Time will tell if the next Elder Scrolls looks anything as good as what Torres has on display here, but uhh… yeah don’t count on it. For all intents and purposes, this is just a very pretty pipe dream.