A Guide to Skyrim’s Screenshots

Okay, admittedly, the title I choose isn’t the same guest contributor Duncan Harris (known by some as “Dead End Thrills”) chose for his guest article on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, but I think it conveys the intent behind the letter. Here’s a snippet:

An occupational risk of Christmas is that the great mead (Jaffa Cakes) hall of my in-laws’ living room will inspire me to reinstall Skyrim, post a few fancy screenshots, and sure enough get a few emails asking for some mythical mod guide. Then comes the abuse: (He doesn’t want anyone to have his secret sauce!) Or: (His Skyrim doesn’t look like that *snort* those are Photoshopped.) Only they don’t capitalise Photoshop because they didn’t have to sit through that publishing meeting, lucky old them.

They’re almost right about one thing: my Skyrim doesn’t look like that. Likewise, when someone asks me what English weather is like, I don’t answer: ‘˜It’s like that evening drive between Dorset and Wiltshire when a torrential downpour gave way to just the best sunshine that lit up the faces of distant historic buildings and cast painterly shadows across dale and field.’ What I tell them is that, nine times out of ten, ‘˜it’s shit.’

What posters of modded Skyrim shots fail to mention is that their game only looks like that 1 per cent of the time, from 0.01 per cent of the vantage points on the map. The numbers are only slightly better for any videogame screenshot worth a damn. Whether you’re an industry screenshot artist or a Steam Community superstar or whatever, what you’re doing is marketing. Selling. Lying by omission.

What the posters also don’t mention is that the mountainous challenge of taking those shots is precisely why many people play Skyrim now more than ever. Alduin is dead but the quest for ultimate graphics goes on. and on. The fallacy of asking ‘˜how to make Skyrim look like that’ is that you simply don’t know what Skyrim might look like whenever you fire it up. That’s the point. Two years after it came out, when I climbed up a mountain and started bashing in the console commands, I had absolutely no idea I’d see this:

Do note that the article is more focused on the efforts necessary to come up with visually excellent Skyrim screenshots, rather than how to make it look for actual gameplay, so this inevitably appeals only to a small amount of gamers. Everyone else can, however, enjoy the results of this work online, perhaps by visiting Dead End Thrills and checking out Duncan’s screenshots in full resolution.