A Skyrim player has shared an interesting series of images, in which a visual bug has turned the game into a scene from RuneScape. Skyrim‘s graphics haven’t always been the strongest part of the game, but this issue takes it to a whole new level.
Over the years, there have been many weird and wonderful Skyrim bugs found that have given players plenty of laughs. Most of the truly game-breaking issues are gone from the game, meaning that harmless visual bugs can be laughed at rather than lamented. One Skyrim bug even made a child float away, which is just so ridiculous that it becomes hilarious. At this point, bugs are part of the charm of Bethesda games, and come part and parcel of the experience. When creating games at this kind of scale, it’s simply impossible to catch everything that pops up, and it’s likely the same will ring true of The Elder Scrolls 6 and Starfield, too.
Redditor Metehankaan posted the images, which show much of Skyrim‘s world completely devoid of all detail. Bizarrely, it just looks really smooth, with the lack of textures really impacting it. Some of the buildings are completely unchanged, while others look like an Old School RuneScape building. According to the user, this happened after installing an ENB, a visual mod that helps create some incredible lighting. However, in this case it seems to have had the complete opposite effect.
Even the more experienced Skyrim mod users in the thread were genuinely baffled about what the potential issue could be. One implied that the ENB could be causing issues with level-of-detail meshes, causing it to load the low-poly ones instead. At this time, this seems like the most plausible cause of the problem. Others encouraged Metehankaan to play the game like this, as it could be a unique experience by itself. It certainly won’t be for everyone, but there are definitely gamers out there that could enjoy this, especially those playing Skyrim on low-end PCs who want a few extra FPS from their game.
While modding Skyrim can result in some of the most amazing games ever, this shows why less experienced users should take caution at times. When not done properly, it can cause issues that may be quite difficult to fix, even for experienced modders. That shouldn’t scare anyone off, though. For many, modded Skyrim is now the definitive version of the game, and they simply can’t play vanilla anymore.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim – Anniversary Edition is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
