Contrabardus, looks good. I have never played skyrim. I have always favored FPS...but those screenshots like others have posted make me think I might give it a shot one day.
Day late, but...
Those screen shots of Skyrim really don't do the game justice as there are some really nice areas of the game that are like WOW! Especially with some of the lighting and special effects.
These are even more impressive seeing them in game than screen shots here....
Graphically, Skyrim looks damn good. Especially if you install the game's optional High Resolution Texture Pack -
Skyrim High Resolution Texture Pack
Actually, the screenshots I posted are all heavily graphically modded. Much more so than the Skyrim High Resolution Texture pack. I actually have that disabled because I've replaced everything it retextures with bigger and better textures than it provides.
I didn't pick scenes like the ones you posted because while they look cool with all the neat lighting effects, it would be difficult to actually see the textures and mods I used in those areas, an open well lit area was the best place to show what I had done to the game.
I'm running a bunch of 4k textures and quite a few 2k textures as well, not everything is available in 4k. The 'High Res' pack only contains 1k textures. Just to name a few things, I have better snow and ice, Vert's Plants, the Water Mod, and a rather large assortment of mods that alter pretty much every single texture in the game, including weapons, clutter, armors, items, potions, buildings, interiors, rope, walls, wood, the ground, rocks, blood, the sky, etc.
On top of that, I've got the ini settings at about +75% over Ultra settings on quite a few of the settings including shadow textures running at 4k resolution, more grids to load [7], the various distances well beyond the maxed out GUI settings, actors, grass, trees, etc. Plus grass density, number of trees, particle effects, better lighting effects and shadows [ENB], the number and persistence of decals [blood splatter effects and such], shadow distance at 35000 [vanilla ultra is 8000], and all sorts of things are actually pushed beyond the highest possible settings on the GUI sliders in the Loader menu.
So despite being cool looking places in the game with lots of pretty effects, they aren't actually on the same level as what I showed in my screenshots graphically speaking. Because of the lighting and darkness in the areas in the screens you posted, you'd actually need to be playing the game to really notice the differences the mods I installed make in those areas. There is either not enough light and/or too much light from bloom to see much of anything.
I picked the scenes I did because they did a good job of showing the various textures I replaced in lighting you could actually see them in, and the greater distances when various objects in the scenes appear at, as well as a few of the non graphical mods installed, such as the triceratops you can see in one screen and the bottom screen shot shows about 20 npcs fighting on screen at once because of another mod I installed. The way I have the game modded you can run into as many as 60 NPCs in battles that cover quite a large area, not even the siege battles in the Imperial/Stormcloak quests come close to that number.
If you go to those exact same places with just regular Skyrim installed, even with the High-res pack in and running on Ultra, you'll notice there is quite a large difference between what I posted and what you'd be seeing in the standard game.
Here's a couple more anyway...
This is the same place in the vanilla game with the High Res pack running, even though my screenshot is darker, you can still see the higher level of detail.
One of the new Dragons I mentioned gives the scene some better light. He's actually bright orange and yellow, it's not his breath that's making him look that way. He's got a friend in the background. There are actually three Dragons attacking in this scene, but I only managed to get two into the shot.
Another shot from the vanilla Skyrim...
The exact same place in my game...
This is a nice shot of High Hrothgar at night that shows off some nice lighting...
I played the first one on PS1 but didn't like that lol.
