Reddit user ArmoredCalvalry was messing with the graphics settings on his copy of Skyrim when he made an amazing accidental discovery. Somehow he'd managed to shut off all of the game's textures, leaving a kind of blocky, flat version of the game that he dubbed TF2 mode.
As you can see from the above video (courtesy of Household Gamer) the results are, rather surprisingly, not too shabby to look at. Sure, they don't have the same gorgeous fidelity of the game's intended graphics, but there's a lovely sort of lo-fi charm to it reminiscent of the early Pixar shorts.
If you've got an Nvidia card and you'd like to give your own copy of Skyrim a TF2 makeover, here's a step-by-step how-to, thanks to another redditor, foogles:
- Go to your Nvidia Control Panel
- Click Manage 3D Settings on the left
- Click the "Program Settings" tab, then add the path to your TESV.exe file (Probably "C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\skyrim\TESV.exe")
- Click Apply, or just close the window
- Download the GeForce SLI Profile Editor by Nvidia
- Run it, click Export SLI profiles, save the text file in Documents or your Desktop
- Make a backup of this file so you can easily reverse these changes!
- Open the text file in Notepad, do a search for "skyrim"
- You should have a Skyrim section in front of you. If you see this line: "Setting ID_0x00738e8f = 0x00000000 UserSpecified=true" Change it so it looks like this: "Setting ID_0x00738e8f = 0x00000050 UserSpecified=true" If that line does not exist, add it in the Skyrim section. Make it look like the other ones. Be smart about it.
- Import the text file you saved with the GeForce SLI Profile Editor
- Skyrim now plays in crazy 1995 mode!
- To undo this, import the text file that you backed up to in step 7. Or change the 0x00000050 back to 0x00000000 in the file you saved in step 10.
As always, be extra careful when you're modding your game's files. You don't want to mess up anything important, and GameRanx is in no way responsible if you do.
