Play Skyrim in Retro Graphics Mode

By Steve Burke Published December 18, 2011 at 3:17 am

Hardware

Even with our struggle to make Skyrim evermore graphically pleasing, nostalgia still gets the best of us and hearkens back to a simpler time of blocky, spiky, pixelated graphics. If you've wanted to play Minecraft in Skyrim (or Skyrim in Minecraft, for that matter), Astal's "Skyrim Retro Project" arcade-style graphics mod certainly brews a bizarre amalgamation of highly contrasting and seemingly low-res textures to re-imagine Skyrim as a game of yore.

As the title and screenshots suggest, the Skyrim Retro Project is the 'demaking' of Skyrim with limited graphics capabilities and the artistic boundaries experienced by developers of far slimmer budgets. Installing the mod almost felt like a revisit to the 90s cRPGs increasingly fewer of us remember, but for ease of comparison, it feels akin to Minecraft -- except, you know, without those damn Creepers.

The mod is still in beta and not yet finalized, but we think it has accomplished the core objectives astonishingly well: if you feel like breaking out the NES but don't want to die from the ensuing attack of dust-mites, this is by-all-means a viable option. It's overwhelmingly pretty for the purposely-limited palette that the modders had.

Enjoy, and as always, let us know in the comments below if you need any help installing the mod. It's definitely a fun mod and has infinite potential!

You can download the mod here: http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3890

Last modified on December 18, 2011 at 3:17 am

Steve Burke

Steve started GamersNexus back when it was just a cool name, and now it's grown into an expansive website with an overwhelming amount of features. He recalls his first difficult decision with GN's direction: "I didn't know whether or not I wanted 'Gamers' to have a possessive apostrophe -- I mean, grammatically it should, but I didn't like it in the name. It was ugly. I also had people who were typing apostrophes into the address bar - sigh. It made sense to just leave it as 'Gamers.'"

First world problems, Steve. First world problems.

We moderate comments on a ~24~48 hour cycle. There will be some delay after submitting a comment.