Skyrim's latest mod tours a cartoon-like Tamriel

The latest eye-catching mod in a long history of them for The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is Toon Skyrim, which brightens its colors, flattens out its textures, and gives the game the visual motif of an animated fantasy story.

The mod is the work of UniqueUses, who explains that it's a "potato texture" mod, which is a graphics style that is sometimes used to help games run on lower-powered PCs. That said, the creator acknowledges that what he's done doesn't really save processing power, so Toon Skyrim s mainly for an aesthetic effect.

What's the net result? See for yourself here, in a scene at High Hrothgar.

And here, outside of Whiterun.

I wish I knew where exactly this was. Outside Ivarstead?

The mod isn't yet downloadable but UniqueUses says it'll become available soon on Nexus Mods, once he's QA'ed the bugs from it. It's worth pointing out that Skyrim launched almost four years ago, and mods such as this are why it remains such a long lasting and replayable game.

Fallout 4, coming in November from Bethesda Game Studios, will have extensive mod support, including cross-platform support allowing Xbox One players to use PC-created mods (though not at launch, but sometime in 2016).