Skyrim’s “Surprise” Is a High Resolution Texture Pack. Creation Kit released.

Giuseppe Nelva February 7, 2012 1:23 PM EST

Remember how I used to rant in basically every episode of my Skyrim Mod Forge weekly colum about the terribly low resolution of the default textures in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim?

I used to do so with reason, as they are really below the standards of an AAA PC game, or better, they were.

Saturday Bethesda teased the release of a “surprise” and today that surprise appeared on Steam in the form of a High Resolution Texture pack. Can you hear millions of PC gamers explode in jubilation? I sure can.

The package is completely free and weighs a little north of three gigabytes. It can be downloaded directly from Steam, together with the new Creation Kit, that was released today as well and will surely unleash the true potential of the strongest modding community of the gaming scenario.

According to the official press release to use the new High Resolution Texture pack you better have a rig that exceeds Skyrim’s recommended specs, including Windows Vista or 7 operating system, a minimum of 4GB of system RAM, a DirectX 9.0c compatible NVIDIA or AMD ATI video card with at least 1 GB of RAM and the latest drivers.

Time to get down to business, army of modders. This time around we might not need to change every single texture of the game anymore.

Bethesda also released the first three of a series of ten tutorial videos, in order to help with getting acquainted with the Creation Kit.

You can see them below and if you still don’t have the game, it’s on sale on Steam until Thursday at 4 PM Pacific time for $33.49, while its predecessors Oblivion and Morrowind are on sale as well for $9.99 each.