If you haven’t seen Skyrim in Unreal Engine 5, you’re missing out

Having just passed its 12th birthday, Skyrim continues to take up real estate in the AAA gaming sphere. As one of the most successful RPGs in recent memory, Bethesda’s epic Elder Scrolls game is still quite pretty, but has evidently aged over the past decade or so.

That’s where artist and YouTuber Leo Torres coming into the picture. As spotted by DSO Gaming, Torres has recently uploaded a new video showing what Skyrim would look like were it built today in Unreal Engine 5.

More specifically, we get to see some incredible shots of the bitterly cold northerly city Winterhold. It looks, for want of a better phrase, pretty spectacular, which is not something many people are willing to say about TES5 these days.

What could have been

In this era of remakes, it’s fun to imagine what an aging game like Skyrim would look like in something such as Unreal. Torres’ render gives us a taste of how things could have been in a different universe. Obviously, this is just a video render demonstrating Winterghold at a “more realistic and lore-accurate scale.” It’s not a remake currently in development, official or otherwise.

It also gives us an idea of just how far gaming visuals have come over the years. That’s not to say Skyrim is ugly (far from it), merely that many of us take it for granted just how advanced graphics become given enough time.

As for The Elder Scrolls itself, we’re currently on day seventy-squillion (citation needed) and no word on the sixth entry yet. There’s a good chance Skyrim‘s popularity may drop off suddenly once TES6 comes out, but we’ll probably all be a lot older and wiser by then.