Skyrim Next-Gen Overhaul Proves This Game Will Never Let Us Go

The latest next-gen overhaul for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is promising some big things, but has it managed to deliver?

Bethesda’s games would likely still be popular regardless, but I think it’s more than fair to say that their outward support of the modding scene for titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4 is one of the reasons that the developer is as big as it is today.

That’s why it’s unsurprising that, even 14 years after its release, the modding community behind Skyrim is still going strong. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this game is still getting next-gen style overhauls in another 14 years.

As detailed in an article by Dark Side of Gaming's John Papadopoulos, what is arguably the most popular graphical overhaul for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim just got a huge update, resulting in something that looks like it was released during the PS5 generation, as opposed to a fourteen-year-old game that first dropped on the PS3.

Community Shaders on Nexus Mods is an “open-source SKSE core plugin for community-driven advanced graphics modifications” for Skyrim, created by the Community Shaders Team.

As the name might imply, the mod is a compilation of shaders and graphical modifications from a bunch of the most famous names in the Skyrim modding scene. It is easily one of the most popular mods for the game on Nexus, and for good reason.

A couple of days ago, the team behind the mod released Community Shaders version 1.4.0, which introduced a whole slew of improvements. These include stuff like "more reliable Complex Grass detection", improvements to terrain blending smoothness, HDR water, and several performance-related updates.

It does, however, come with a few downsides.

A quick scroll through the latest posts on the Community Shaders mod shows that, unfortunately, a lot of people are running into some very similar technical issues. This is the Nexus Mods community we’re talking about though, so you can’t rule out the possibility that most of these folks just didn’t read the installation instructions.

The latest update has also seemingly removed a lot of features for Skyrim VR that were present in the previous build of Community Shaders, which understandably has upset those who updated to the latest version already (and assumedly didn’t read the patch notes).

Hopefully, the team behind the mod will release a further update in the near future to address this, but, in the meantime, you can track down the previous build of the mod.

That being said, the improvements to 1.4.0 do look extremely impressive. Just make sure that you check that your PC is up to the task before installing it (unless you want your fans to sound like a Boeing 737 at takeoff).