


And this extends to the shader work too, where snow and ice surfaces glisten more realistically, and where water more accurately reflects the surrounding world – not to mention flowing more realistically around bends in the stream, also reacting with changes in velocity in and around obstructing objects. In-game shadow work receives a substantial alteration, for example, with a far more diffuse appearance – more in line with how shadows actually look in real-life. It’s as though Bethesda is veering away from the often-harsh, more CG look of the original game when you consider some of the other changes made to the presentation. Beyond the texture work, the actual enhancements come from tweaks to the Creation Engine that affect both level of detail and the post-processing pipeline. Indeed, modders aren’t too impressed at all with Bethesda’s approach to the art, suggesting that the original top-end assets have simply been put through an upscaling filter. To begin with, in terms of artwork quality, the remaster appears to retains the core ultra quality texture seen in the original release, but enhancements beyond that seem non-existent.

Testing this with the cell borders on might prove useful.The good news is that in virtually every regard, Bethesda has managed to bring the top-tier PC experience to the current generation of consoles and has indeed delivered the range of enhancements promised, but there are some limitations. See the videos showing this effect here: The solution is to move fShadowDistance out farther to 4000 or more. There is a bug with vanilla shadows where there is an obvious change in the shadow quality at low fShadowDistance values that I believe is hardcoded (the shadow LOD settings appear to be non-working).
