Hi Bethesda. Let's be honest for a second. Great game. Shadows are terribad. Like... really, really, REALLY bad. I frequently wonder if an old 8-bit Nintendo game has been projected onto the screen and shaded to serve as a shadow. I consider trying to jump and hit one of the shadow pixels and see if a mushroom pops out. Would it give me 1-UP?

I have played around greatly with all the shadow options in the ini. The only thing which even approaches good quality requires not only a notable GPU load but reducing the shadow draw distance quite a bit.

The solution I would like to see is a balance between a "fix" and acceptance. See, I can accept shadow maps for what they are. I don't have to rub my face against a wall to try and find the flaws in the game graphics. I can just try and sit back and enjoy. The problem is the certain times these pixel shadows are just rubbed in your face and make your eyes bleed, no matter how hard you try to ignore them.

I managed to fix one major culprit of this! fFlickeringLightDistance=0.0000 in the Skyrim.ini stops all the fireplace flicker and such which makes the "pixel dance" so blatantly obvious.

The only thing I need now, and the point of this long-winded post, is the ability to disable shadows being cast ON characters (especially their own "self shadowing"). I'm fine with the shadows they are casting on the ground, but their own self shadowing around the neck and face is HORRIBLE and completely ruins my enjoyment of any interaction with NPCs, namely outdoors as it is as I mentioned "in your face" and hard to ignore. If there was a way to disable this, it would likely double my enjoyment of the game. That's it, thanks for your time.

If they do this, you'll just find something else that annoys you and ask them to fix that. Please just play the game and enjoy it for what it is.

All you deserve for christmas is a bag of coal for saying "terribad".

Not true. Although I could find things to complain about I'm relatively wiling to practice acceptance. When a graphical issue like this is just so in your face it is hard to ignore. Have you tried to play a video game that did not support anti-aliasing for example? It makes it almost impossible to enjoy because it is so blatantly obvious and jaggies in your face are very hard to ignore. These shadows around the face and neck are a similar issue. I'm not seeking out low res textures or misaligned grass sprites or anything like that, this is a very prevalent issue and I'm only asking for a reasonable feature to make it less noticeable. Not a total reworking of the shadow engine or anything. Trying to be creative and reasonable but only met with negativity... ugh, what happened to these boards?

If you can think of a better word to accurately describe the shadows in Skyrim I'd like to hear it. :tongue:

@OP: If this ever gets fixed it will have to come from mod'ers, if its even possible. I hope it is. I certainly don't see Beth spending the time to go back and fix them.

What you want for Christmas is..........shadows. Horrible waste of a present :*(

well, you're making a thread with a negative tone, and people are quick to defend against criticism they don't share.
but I do. the shadows are hideous. I have faith some modders are hard at work trying to fix that. I mean, we've got better textures and HDR lighting already. If anything those (worthy) attempts to make the game look better just make the jagged mess that is the outdoor shadow 'lurch' dancing across the screen at timed intervals look that much worse.
They'll be fixed. I booted up my xbox copy of morrowind even though it took me about a half hour just so I could see the difference between then and now and my god, ... just... my god. I wish I was a modder.

It's a little depressing to see people complaining for graphical fixes when there are more glaring gameplay problems.

Who cares if shadows aren't the prettiest, my bookshelf doesn't work dammit, my followers dont follow, my quests don't work, my sword can't be upgraded with smithing. Also there is a big list of gameplay problems preventing people playing the game, shadows aren't one of them.

I would point out that I prefaced my comments with "Great game" in an honest attempt to lead off with a positive tone. If the reality of the shadow situation is negative... that's not me, that's the shadows.

you're on console? delete all skyrim data from harddrive and clear cache. That's the closest thing you can do.
At least you don't have to reverse-hack your game back to an earlier version everytime your computer connects to the service you bought the game from.
believe me, I wish you console players had bought the PC version too, then we could all be united on the fronts that matter.
like graphics,