• Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    14·
    1 month ago

    I felt a great disturbance in the Steam Statistics, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly reinstalling Skyrim. I fear a new mod has dropped.

    • TotallynotJessica@lemmy.blahaj.zoneMEnglish
      10·
      1 month ago

      From what I can tell, there’s a bit of buzz about a new community shader mod that makes it have the visual fidelity of a more modern game. Understanding its significance requires a bit of background on the Skyrim modding scene.

      Tap for an infodump

      Basically, there was a similar modding project called ENBSeries, which exists not only for Skyrim, but for other games. It delivered unbeatable results for Skyrim, updating the visuals for the games it exists for by a couple years, and likely helped Skyrim, a game from 2011, look on par with current generation games for about a decade after it’s release.

      Unfortunately, ENBSeries was very closed source, meaning the entire community was beholden to this one team for good visuals. This was usually not an issue for Skyrim as it was their biggest project, but ENB was largely broken and outdated for games like New Vegas. On top of that, the main guy behind ENB, Boris Vorontsov, is an absolute piece of shit; threatening and intimidating anyone building off of his work, or even working on parallel projects from scratch. He’s also a staunch Russian nationalist, supporting Z, a bigot, and a generally unpleasant person.

      Thankfully a talented modder named doodlum decided to rebuild the same sort of mod from scratch, only with blackjack and hookers (open source and permissions). After years of development, it finally seems like a comprehensive replacement to ENB, so if I ever get back into Skyrim, I’ll definitely be using their suite of visual mods instead.

      TLDR: Community Shaders is an open source alternative to an impressive, yet problematic visual overhaul.

      That said, I think there are probably other factors involved in this uptick. Might just be an exciting time for Skyrim mods in general.