An artist has taken it upon himself to recreate Skyrim’s Whiterun Hold using the latest Unreal Engine technology, and the result is breathtaking for fans.
The Elder Scrolls Part V: Skyrim came out on November 11th, 2011. It was released for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Windows PCs, where the Sandy Bridge Core i7-2700K was the fastest CPU you could pair with a brand-new GeForce GTX 580 or Radeon HD 6970 GPU. It wouldn’t be surprising for a new PC at that time to have 1GB of RAM, and even that dwarfed the 512MB of memory available on the game consoles.
The first two Elder Scrolls games made heavy use of procedural generation resulting in a lot of extremely samey environments, but ever since Bethesda abandoned that technique in favor of detailed hand-crafted locales with TES3: Morrowind, they’ve had a much smaller scale to the world and settlements than the intended «reality» of the fictional world of Tamriel, all due to the limitations of hardware and storage space.
But what if we could see Skyrim as it would «really» be if it were an actual place? That’s the concept behind the latest Unreal Engine 5-based remake, created by professional environment artist Leo Torres in his free time over the course of a month. This demo isn’t playable, of course; it’s really more of a tech demo than anything.
