not sure why, but one thing that's jarringly breaking realism for me are shadows. even with all the tweaks i'm finding and trying.

this being my first Bethesda game, is it worth emailing (POLITELY) them about it? or is it a metric f-ton of work to fix/improve?

either way, i have. if it's worth it (and possible to improve), and if it slightly irks you like it does me, i would request you (again, POLITELY) email them as well.

What the....and I thought the shadows were damn amazing,especially the way you can hold a pot infront of a light source and the shadows cast upon the whole room and it changes depending on how close or far you move the pot from the light source....

Some people....

Edit: They are really jagged though,but its never bothered me once.

Blame the engine but I think if they unlock the shadow draw distance from the quality then they might look good. DX11 could improve them but I doubt Bethesda will go that far.

they're jagged as hell, imo.

edit: and when they move, it's quite eye-catching in a bad way.

Yeah, the shadows are great but thar jagged, there's a mod that fixes that and that came out in the first week of the creation kit, so i'm guessing it's not a hard thing to fix

ah, i'll have to look for those. would be nice to have it in-game, natively, though.

Crysis: Top quality real time shadows since 2007.

You can tweak the shadows with parameters in the .ini-file.

You can set the speed at which these get updated and also reduce the overall time scale of the game, which has a similar effect.
You can set the resolution of the shadows and make them have less edges and you can increase the blurriness of the edges, too.

See this guide by Nvidia http://www.geforce.com/Optimize/Guides/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweak-guide, section ".ini Tweaks, Part 2"

Hi sdack. Good to hear from you.
Nice suggestions. Do you think there's any chance Bethesda might somehow re-write the shadow rendering for the upcoming DLC?

You can e-mail them all you want but you probably wont get a response. But I suppose that maybe they keep it on record.

Just ask them to uncap the shadow rendering distance from quality. The shadows look much nicer when you set the shadow distance low but they render very close.

Not for this game, I doubt it. The heads of Bethesda will have already moved on to their next title. They will release fixes and whatever was planned to go into Skyrim. The DLC will contain a lot of those planned things to round up the game. I doubt that they will add a major change to the engine like a rework of the shadows. The shadows already present a move forward when you look back at Oblivion. I cannot imagine that they will now halt their current production, to rethink shadows, to change their plans and to implement them new. They will very likely only take your thoughts on shadows and consider them for inclusion into the next title, which will then come with an updated rendering engine.

Writing letters to the game maker will be in vain. Even if you get one million players to support it does it not present a problem, not major nor minor, for their game. The "ship is off the ramp" if you will. They will not just sit in their offices and do nothing or wait for players to tell them what to do next with Skyrim.

Agreed, the shadows are implemented in a strange way. The fact that it's tied to the CPU is also a major FPS killer... BUT I think most will agree that it's still better than no realtime shadows (as in oblivion). The way practically everything is shadows makes the game so much real and immersive that I'm not really bothered by the blockiness. It's much more realistic to see a fish in a stream cast shadows


I don't think emailing Beth will solve this. This is a major part of the game engine, rewriting it isn't really a economically worthwhile option for them (since most people expect the shadows to be fixed in a free patch). The shadows are somewhat fixed by lowering the shadow distance and increasing the shadow resolution. This makes the distant landscape look a little less real but IMO it's worth it to eliminate the jagginess where it matters most: the area close to you.

Now, the Elder Scrolls VI, which will probably be released in 2015 or something... THAT'S the time when we can expect perfectly smooth realtime shadows everywhere (console hardware will catch up to current-gen PC hardware by then)

The shadows are only real time to a certain degree, outside they are pretty static and don't react to other light sources. Gothic 3 has a real time shadow system but I don't think it uses per-pixel lighting like the more modern games have.

There is a thread on the ps3 section on how shadows can look a lot nicer. I'm not sure if this is the case on other platforms, but when observing shadows from a very specific angle, they look way more crisp and defined. This also seems to come at no performance hit whatsoever. It's easy to replicate as well. you have to look towards the ground at about 45° angle and move the camera around until you notice an obvious change in the quality.

This.

I realize now, after restarting the game with about 20 characters, that the shadow you see just after the dragon first attacks you at helgen, is in-fact.. a dragons shadow. It's just such a blurry mess that you have absolutely not damn idea what it is, before you've seen it a million times.

So yes, I guess the shadows could use some tweaking.

Yeah great shadow quality, LOL http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/504639410844202227/6743B11EBCA49E9404539A8514E266AE4FEBA82F/

Bethesda should change it so that the shadows are all only an outline of a hand that is showing the finger.

It will stop you from looking down onto your feet, mate.

To be honest I don't think e-mailing them will achieve anything.

Textures are just as bad, they cannot even fit textures on meshes right either and line them up to make the walls look seamless. The walls in Whiterun that have water coming out them are terrible. It's all in the detail hey Bethesda?

You can tweak shadow settings in the INI file on the PC. However, shadows are heavily CPU dependent. Any shadow tweaks must be balanced against performance, so make changes methodically and check game performance as you go along. If you have a strong enough CPU, and no back ground apps, shadows can look quite good. It all depends on what you can get away with. However, for consoles, if the shadows were improved much over stock, the game would not run well.

i've tried


(since it seems i can't post links... and i'm not going to post 1-5 word junk posts)
link 1: hardocp's "tweaking skyrim image quality" article page 2, (looks better to me than the nvidia site post. even has before/after pics and framerate measurements)
link 2: @reddit: "[Mod] ESSENTIAL INI Shadow fix to remove blocky/jagged effect! /w pics"

in incremental stages. the overall behavior of the shadows really didn't change.

i will take a 10fps frame drop (from 35-40ish) if only the shadows were smoother and blurrier.

i even took it a step further and tried the ram tweaks of nexusmods post "INI Tweaks" ~ page 90 ... which really just jacked things up the most. maybe those would help if you used more memory intensive mods (like graphical improvement)...



edit: re: my complaint about shadows to Bethesda:


heh. I'M TRUSTING YOU ON THIS ONE, BETHESDA!



edit2: seems the workshop mods are mainly to make more dynamic shadows at random parts...

man i wish they left some of the really cool stuff out so i could not do it and stare at shadows instead

Same here. I don't get why people are so upset. I noticed it once, and then moved on and played the game and it hasn't bothered me since.