Skyrim Forgotten Vale’s Frozen Majesty, Reborn in Unreal Engine 5

Leo Torres has done an incredible job with his new Skyrim project. He takes the Forgotten Vale from the Dawnguard expansion and essentially reimagines it from scratch in Unreal Engine 5.7.2. Anyone who has delved into this place will know it as a vast, glacial valley dotted with ancient elven ruins, those rather disturbing falmer enemies, and an atmosphere of endless isolation. He increases its scale to give it a more realistic and lore-accurate feel, completely free of the constraints of Skyrim’s original graphics engine. The resulting result runs smoothly on an RTX 3090 and has sixteen times the level of detail you would have seen in 2012.

A blanket of snow covers every surface, the drifts uneven due to the wind. Glaciers have cut out sharp peaks in the terrain, and to top it all off, massive drifts of snow have piled up against crumbling stone walls that appear to have been there for ages. Torres created the custom assets using Blender and mixed in a bunch of third-party parts. Since Nanite handles all of the geometry, the details are always clear and defined, regardless of whether you’re up close or far away.

Light streams through the dense clouds in delicate, diffused beams. Shadows sweep across the valley floor, combining the blue tones of the ice with the grey rock sides. Lumen is in charge of the global illumination and reflections here, and it transforms every wet stone and frozen puddle into a mirror that reflects the sky. A nighttime rendition would undoubtedly lend a new dimension of drama to the scene, but for this showcase, they’ve remained with daytime.

Water covers the majority of the upper valley, forming a vast half-frozen lake. Cracks may be seen growing over the ice, exposing the dark water beneath. Ripples form where streams flow from melting glaciers, and there are beautiful reflections off the surrounding peaks. Torres avoided utilizing any of those heavy post-processing procedures; instead, Temporal Super Resolution smoothes out the edges of things without going overboard with fancy effects. The result is that the water just feels like it’s alive, shifting and rippling with those gentle currents.

The ruins litter the landscape like the remains of a fallen empire. Elven arches curve upwards, overgrown with scant, hardy bushes covered with frost. The falmer lairs are hidden in shadowy recesses, their pale outlines only hinted at in the darkness. Torres extended the entire area to accommodate the lore’s great vision, creating a two-tiered valley with the lower half funneling down into those tight chasms and the higher one opening up wide around that gigantic lake. Then there are the caves, which pierce the rocks and appear to promise all sorts of dark adventures just beyond the frame.

Only minimal vegetation survives on this area, yet Nanite-packed trees sway gently in the breeze, their leaves rimmed with hoarfrost. There are no dense trees here, because the great elevation only supports low plants and lichens that cling to the rocks for dear life. Torres painstakingly designed the density so that moving through the snow seems natural and allows you to walk through it without having to push through any stiff animation. (Of course, if you included footprints, they would sink deep, but the fly-through keeps things fluid and theatrical.)