“TES VI won’t be nearly as good”: the artist impressed players with the dark beauties of Morthal from Skyrim on Unreal Engine 5

Australian 3D artist Leo Torres continues to share impressive videos showing off locations from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in Unreal Engine 5.

Image source: Leo Torres (ArtStation)

In a new video from The Real Scale series, the artist presented his version of Morthal, the capital of the swampy domain of Hjaalmarch. Despite its status, the city is practically cut off from other settlements and looks more like a village – there are only a few buildings (including an alchemist’s shop and a tavern) and almost no fortifications. The Jarl of Morthal, Idgrod Ravencrone, supports the Empire.

According to Torres, “nobody likes Morthal” – it is just a “dull and depressing town in the swamps.” It suffers from the same problem as Falkreath – it doesn’t have a strong visual identity. The artist solved it in his own way – he tried, as far as possible, to enhance the atmosphere of a “Viking settlement in the swamps.”

The author focused on reconstructions of real Viking settlements

The author used Unreal Engine 5.4 with Nanite micropolygon geometry (all models and vegetation) and Lumen global illumination. He created and textured some of the models himself in Blender and Mixer, and borrowed some from other enthusiasts. The scene was run on a PC with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 video card.

As always, users highly appreciated the artist’s work and expressed hope to someday see a full-fledged remake. “I want these videos to be turned into a game,” wrote anon78747. “A major project like this remaster would be the release of the decade.” “What makes me sad is that TES VI (which will be released in five years or later) will not be nearly as good as this video,” said seanchew8021.

This is what Morthal looks like in the original The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

As part of The Real Scale project, the author creates “remakes” of Tamriel locations, reproducing them on a realistic scale and changing them to better suit the features of the game universe. In the past he has published demos of Dawnstar, Markarth, Blackreach, Whiterun, Solitude, Winterhold and Falkreath. Work is currently underway on the Imperial City, the capital of Cyrodiil. Riften is also on the list for the future.

Torres creates scenes for his portfolio and has no plans to share them publicly. You won’t be able to play The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim like this either, but the graphics in the original can be significantly improved with the help of a huge set of more than 3,100 mods – how it changes the picture was recently shown by the owner of the YouTube channel Digital Dreams.

In June, user Unorthodogg released a series of mods for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that restore cut content.