The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has in its short life won many awards and fans, especially amongst the Role Playing Game – RPG – public.

For the uninitiated Skyrim is a fantasy open world game developed by Bethesda Game Studios, with lush graphics and absorbing game play it has quickly become the world of choice for fans of fantasy based escapism. Released on 11/11/11 Skyrim sold 10 million copies by mid-December, breaking sales records on its way. Since then it has scooped award after award, including 3 awards at the Annual Interactive Achievement Awards.

Now Bethesda has joined forces with Steam to bring the art of mod’ing to the world’s most popular role playing game. The art of mod’ing generally revolves around applying patches to modify a game, often unofficial patches. Now Steam has made this process official, painless and accessible to all through their Steam Workshop, giving the dark art of mod’ing a legitimate home.

After releasing the Workshop to the public the response has been enormous with over 1200 mod’s already available, in a little over a week. Bethesda even took the opportunity to add their own mods to the Workshop, getting the ball rolling. Most impressive is the Creation Kit made available by Bethesda. The kit assembles all of the level design tools used by Bethesda itself into one easy to use application. But that’s not all, Bethesda has also made available a high resolution texture pack to improve the visuals and the Skyrim community is busy at work making their own custom content available.

Skyrim’s massive success was by no means an accident. Bethesda got the mix for Skyrim just right, a beautiful lush environment to explore, missions and characters that drag you into the landscape, an addictive character building model that rewards instead of punishes. The storyline itself isn’t overly complicated but it gives the game a great framework, revolving around the players efforts to defeat Alduin, a Dragon god who is prophesied to destroy the world. Skyrim continues the Elder Scrolls tradition of non-linear gameplay, letting the player decide on missions, quests and the evolution of their character.

Just as the arguments over Skyrim’s status as the greatest RPG ever have started to die down Bethesda have found a way to bring back the buzz. Mod’ing or customization of games is something normally only the hard core gamers attempt. With the requirement to copy this, edit that and generally tinker with the back end of a game many have steered clear of this most satisfying of pass-times. As with all mod’s the updates can alter any aspect of the game, from altering the textures used to adding new characters to the game. Bethesda working with Steam have taken away the technical barrier, making applying mod’s or patching as easy as clicking an icon. The Steam Workshop provides access to the patches and other downloadable Content – DLC – along with a simple mechanism for installing, removing and managing the patches.

In many ways Steam is going back to its roots with the Workshop. Steam itself started life as a patch manager for Counter Strike 1.6 before evolving into a digital distribution system. The brand new Workshop was first opened to the public back in October with Team Fortress 2 being the first game to get the Workshop treatment. While Team Fortress is a fairly popular game the Workshop has been a much larger hit. Since opening for business Workshop has seen nearly 4,000 mods for Team Fortress 2 submitted and a huge community come together to rate and comment on their favourite entries. Skyrim appears to be even more popular with over 1200 mod’s listed in the first week.

The Workshop has steadily evolved since its opening in October. January 24 saw a complete facelift of the main Workshop. A major update was then released on February 7 in the build-up to Skyrim joining the Workshop. This improved interface allows better tracking of mod usage and an easier system for adding your own mods. On Feb 8 Skyrim, the Creator Kit and Bethesda’s Hi-Res texture pack were released to the Workshop. This week Steam improved the search and filter facilities of the workshop to allow easier navigation through the already multitudes of mods.

While most of the attention surrounding the Workshop is concentrating on in game modifications it actually serves a broader purpose. The workshop is a central point for all downloadable content – DLC – for Skyrim. Anything that you can download and use, that relates to Skyrim, will be available in the Workshop.

One of the most impressive downloads from the Workshop is Bethesda’s Creation Kit. A downloadable and free application that allows anyone to create objects and levels for Skyrim. These are in-fact the same tools used by Bethesda’s level designers. Not only is it available from the Workshop but it is fully integrated with the Workshop, to the extent that when your creation is completed it can be automatically added to the Workshop for everyone in the Skyrim community to enjoy. The Creation Kit probably isn’t going to be used by everyone, it does require a knowledge of 3D modelling but the tutorials are all straight forward, it could be a good introduction to 3D for those wanting to learn. The Kit will be huge amongst Skyrim fans with a love for 3D design.

Along with the release of the Creation Kit Bethesda comes their High Resolution Texture Pack. A great place to start for new mod’ers this new texture pack will become one of the standard patches that everyone uses. Textures in a 3D game are applied to the 3D surfaces within a game, giving it it’s look and feel. The textures that come with a game are by nature a compromise. Designed to work on the minimum specification mentioned by the games designers the standard textures need to work on all machines, from the slowest to the fastest. The new texture pack raises that minimum specification, at the same time allowing them to increase the resolution and size of the textures. The new minimum specification includes Windows Vista/7, a minimum of 4GB of system RAM, and a DirectX 9.0c compatible NVIDIA or AMD ATI video card with at least 1 GB of RAM and the latest drivers. This patch is a must have if your computer can handle it.

Creation Kit Tutorial Series – Episode 1: Introduction to the Kit

While the Bethesda textures are a huge improvement there is an even higher resolution option available for the extreme mod’er. Dedicated to extreme visual quality with seriously high resolution textures is the Skyrim HD 2K Textures by NebuLa1. With some textures 8 times higher resolution than the original these textures turn Skyrim into a visual feast able to test even the fastest machines. While these textures are an easy install they are not for everyone. To be able to actually play Skyrim with these textures loaded, as opposed to watching a slideshow of the game playing, you will need a powerful computer. The two main hardware recommendations are you will need a video card with more than 1GB of RAM, 2GB recommended – to hold the textures -, more than 8GB of system RAM and a reasonably fast quad core processor. Machines with this specification or better are able to play with amazing visuals and playable frame rates. Trying to run Skyrim with this texture pack and a low spec computer will at the very least cause unbearably slow frame rates or at worst constant crashes of the game. If you are also using other mods at the same time you may encounter crashes.

The HD 2K texture project is an ongoing project that eventually hopes to replace all textures used in Skyrim to the much higher resolution equivalent. So far only the initial levels of the game have been converted but they are already making a huge difference to the visual quality of the game. Not for the faint hearted the HD 2K pack does provide impressive results when done properly.

There are also a number of other notable patches for improving the in-game visuals of Skyrim. Enhanced Night Skyrim by CptJoker adds an interesting sky-scape to the night time visuals of the game. Skyrim Flora Overhaul by vurt introduces some of the most stunningly detailed visuals to all of the plants in the game. Just a little touch but when combined together with the other visual upgrades Skyrim becomes an example of next generation gaming, with visuals well past all current generation games.

If you have ever enjoyed an RPG and don’t own Skyrim get a hustle on, the birth of a legend is well underway. Other large game companies should take a leaf out of Bethesda’s book, if Skyrim were a Sony game you can guarantee all of this extra content would come with a fee. Bethesda has used common sense over accountancy practice. Charging for every little piece of extra software isn’t encouraging the games long term viability, it kills it. The growth in the Skyrim community is going to be exponential as the amount of user generated and additional content from Bethesda are released to the workshop. Skyrim is the place to be.

Source: Steam Workshop
Source: Skyrim
Source: Nebula1 HD 2K Textures

Skyrim: Mod – HD 2K Texture Pack