The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - First HD Texture Pack Released

DSOGaming writes: "Great news for Skyrim fans, as the first Texture Pack for Bethesda’s RPG has just been released. According to the modder, almost all textures have been enhanced and are 4X the size of the original ones. As with most Texture Packs, some might like it while others might not. To be honest though, it seems that Solitude has tweaked the original textures instead of replacing them with some brand, new HD ones. The end result is great in our own opinion and you can find the download link, as well as some comparison shots, bellow."

[fluffydelusions]

Bring on the comparison videos

[SP3333D-O]

Preferably hi-res screenshots. Too hard to judge quality in compressed videos.

[T900]

Great i waited to play the game, going to play this in afew weeks once the modders have fixed the games looks.

[nveenio]

The comparisons that the link has up show the "upgrade" to look terrible. The spec maps are horrible. I'll stick with the default until something awesome comes around.

[FanboyPunisher]

Better with ultra default.

[Captain Qwark 9]

looks worse imo, the texture pack is brighter but seems far less realistic. just my opinion though

[SP3333D-O]

agreed...just looks like they were up-sampled and over sharpened.

[SantistaUSA]

I have to agree with you guys, it definitely looks worse. Sad that the devs held the PC version back, don't get me wrong, the game looks great but a game with open world like that using less than 6 gb shows that they had mainly consoles in mind! Again great game tho.

[bozebo]

"Sad that the devs held the PC version back"

They will have done 80-95% of the work already :(

Artists don't work with silly low-res textures of course... But Bethesda will never, ever, release them because of silly business/management/publisher nonsense and the overall ignorance towards things that big publishers seem to have taken recently as they monetise the industry as much as possible (most likely the same reason the UI sucks, and why the chatbox is so crappy in BF3 etc. and every other console port out there). I mean, they deserve to monetise things - but it always seems to make games suffer. Problem is, most of those profits go to shareholders and not the Bethesda employees, many of whom will have worked day and night in the latter months of development. As a games development student, it hurts a lot to see things like this happen; and I know why it happens. If only all developers/publishers were private limited companies, that would help things move along smoothly because more money would be re-invested into the company rather than them only getting what they need for an individual project (and that project having to be 90% concrete in design before they set out to begin development, games become good because of iteration - no designer can design a perfect game on paper or even with just a prototype, especially when gameplay is a minor detail like TES, the atmosphere; world; progression etc. are vastly more important).

I am used to games looking a lot better than skyrim does. It has affected the immersion somewhat for me. It's still a masterpiece though but my lecturers will still be referring to Morrowind all the time lol.

[RedDead]

Yeah less realistic, it's also no longer blurry ugly textures though

[Tyokio]

I agree, it does looks pretty awful. In most cases it's made things seem to fresh and new, where as the vanilla textures feel/look like they have some history to them. Another thing with the vanilla textures is they really found a way to even out the edges of the mesh with the textures, which is something the HD textures really fail at. Everything just looks too blocky.

[STONEY4]

It's still the same exact texture, it's just that this mod applies some sort of terrible sharpening filter and poor specular mapping to give the appearance of "HD Textures".

THIS is what a proper texture pack should look like. Just imagine what will be done for Skyrim.

http://www.fallout3nexus.co...

http://www.fallout3nexus.co...

http://www.fallout3nexus.co...

http://www.fallout3nexus.co...

http://www.fallout3nexus.co...

[ninjahunter]

Yea, but im thinking that a full texture pack released a week after the game wouldnt look very good. The Crysis 2 HD texture (modders) pack took months to make.

[Halochampian]

I'll pass...

[lMHl]

cool I like skyrim its fun

[VonAlbrecht]

The game has hardly been out, this guy was obviously rushing in to get it done really fast and you can tell that everything has just been batch-processed through photoshop. The rocks have the same overly grainy look as the wood does.

[LightofDarkness]

I knew it had to be a sloppily thrown together affair, the modding community's version of a "FIRST!" post.

It looks like Unreal Tournament's detail texturing. It was also ported to a variety of Quake engines in early half of the last decade. It looked ok then and was some obvious bit of visual trickery, it was a simple little filtering/shader effect that made undetailed textures look all rough and detailed. It only works on rough masonry and wood, which is what all of Skyrim is, effectively.

But for me it just makes it look more dated than it already does. Lame.

[TyrannoTaurus]

Kind of makes the wood look like cheap veneer or like plastic. Not a fan.

[bozebo]

"4X the size of the original ones"

Damn... I guess they are all still really low res then :(

lol

"Kind of makes the wood look like cheap veneer or like plastic. Not a fan."
I agree, I've never used unofficial texture mods because they never look right. It's very hard and time consuming to properly make that many textures appear aesthetically pleasing and is a difficult task even for the original developer (they only get it done because they have a dedicated professional team with job responsibilities, of course).

Also, the pixel shaders in the game are designed to look good with the original textures. Consoles sacrifice texture resolutions for pretty shaders, even in 2005 PC games had way higher texture resolutions despite 90% of gaming rigs being behind the 360 in terms of power. There are various considerations with the setup of bumpmapping and specular mapping that are tweaked until the scene looks just right in the original release (why some games look worse on PC when at the same graphical settings as consoles, like Crysis 2 - the shaders are tweaked to look perfect maxed out; in most cases).

Bethesda should release the textures themselves, I guarantee that they have higher resolution versions of the textures just sitting there (artists typically make source textures at extremely high resolutions, especially considering many of them are captured from top of the range photographic techniques in a AAA development like skyrim). But they won't do that otherwise they would 'lose face' by proving that they didn't care about catering to every platform (same reason they will never "fix" the UI). Also it probably 'requires' board meetings and designer correspondance and a technical analysis and publisher permission and EULA updates and recommended specs updates and quality assurance (see my paragraphs above ^) etc. because game developers are so bloated and convoluted by business nonsense these days.