I still remember the day The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim came out back in 2011. I bought it on Steam, realised after about 20 minutes that I was never going to be able to get it to run on my horrendous PC, refunded it and bought it on Xbox instead.
Ever since then, I return to the the homeland of the Nords pretty regularly, and there's always something new to discover or explore.
That longevity is pretty well known by now, and it has led Bethesda to release several versions of the game over the last 14 years, with changes and additional content peppered in for good measure.
In addition, the community continues to keep the flame alive through their own immense ingenuity and effort, with thousands of mods that update everything from the smallest items to the most consequential storylines.
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Nexus Mods remains the best place to go through those, and there's one that stands out right now as really bringing one particular area in the game forward, visually speaking.
Skyking Whiterun updates the major city at the centre of the country, bringing in some impressive aesthetic updates that really do bring it forward to 2025.
"Skyking Whiterun is a complete texture overhaul for the City of Whiterun. Features include 1k, 2k, and 4k complex parallax textures, green and yellow grass options, 3d trellis meshes, and building meshes fixing some uv mapping issues, texture file paths, and the holes in front of War Maidens," the mod's description reads.
The mod makes the specific decision to not mess around with the city and keep it as Bethesda wished it to be. As such, it doesn't add any flora or fauna, and it doesn't affect weather, NPCs or anything like that.
As purely a retexturing, it shouldn't upset the Skyrim purists while allowing them to live and operate in a world that's just a little more pretty.
Over the years, almost all of the major settlements have received retexture or redesign mods from dedicated mod authors and teams.
Those became such a major part of playing Skyrim in the modern day that Bethesda released the Anniversary Edition of the game in 2021, to celebrate the tenth year since it's original release. That version of the game came with a ton of player made content from quests to dungeons as part of the Creation Club, leaving the game in a totally different state from the one that tottered onto our screens in 2011.
Topics: Skyrim, Mods, Bethesda, The Elder Scrolls