What would Skyrim look like with state-of-the-art graphics and realistic scale? A video in the new Unreal Engine shows it in an impressive way

Are you in the cloud district a lot? Skyrim fans had to listen to the saying of NPC Nazeem all too often when visiting the city of White Run in the game. But what if the city was so big that you didn”t have to run into the arrogant pain in the ass?

A tech demo now shows how impressive one of the biggest places in the edge of Heaven looks when you recreate it in Unreal Engine 5 and give it the size of a real medieval settlement.

White Run in its true size

The video was uploaded by 3D artist Leo Torres, who has been working with the Unreal Engine for quite some time. Previously, he had already recreated the settlement (Twilight Star from Skyrim) in the engine, but Weißlauf turns out to be much larger again:

Those who have played Skyrim will recognize at first glance that this reinterpretation of White Run is many times larger than the original. Not only is the city supposed to look more realistic, its size of about 10,000 inhabitants also roughly corresponds to the official lore of the game, according to Torres. He also describes in more detail below the video how he determined the actual size of the city.

While you can only find a few hundred people in Skyrim, the world was naturally thought of as larger during development – after all, the edge of Heaven is an entire country.

(Weißlauf knew how to impress even in the original, but was much smaller.)
(Weißlauf knew how to impress even in the original, but was much smaller.)

Technically, of course, such a scale was impossible to implement, if, for example, in Elder Scrolls style, every building can be entered and each character should have its own daily routine. In the game, therefore, we have to be satisfied with a small version of White Run and other cities compared to realistic cities.

(On Reddit, Torres) writes that he worked on the city for about a month, but during that time he also devoted himself to other projects. A mixture of pre-made and self-created assets was used. Lumen and Nanite technologies were used to light the scenes.

How do you like the gigantic version of White Run in Unreal Engine 5? Does it remind you a bit of Edoras, the capital of Rohan from Lord of the Rings? And would you like to explore such a big city in a game, or do you prefer to travel through more compact worlds? Feel free to let us know in the comments!