Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 already channels the spirit of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion like some medieval savant dabbling in necromancy. From its rolling green landscapes, through its charmingly weird NPC behaviours, to the fact you can break into any shop and ransack it for all its worth, Warhorse's sequel often feels more like adventuring through Cyrodiil than anything Bethesda has designed in the years since.
Now, you can further enhance KCD2's 2006 charms with the Ultra Low Graphics Mode mod. Created by Jindra1403, this mod digs a cavernous sapper's tunnel beneath the RPG's standard low graphics settings, collapsing about twenty years of graphics development into a pile of lumpy polygons.
The mod brute forces resolution to 1280x720, switches off VSync, and wipes most of the textural detail from surface geometry. In the game's description over on Nexus mods, Jindra also notes that "the preset doesn't utilize FSR or DLSS, since not only are those specific-hardware dependent, but those technologies typically do not help much at such low fidelity/resolution anyway."
As Jindra explains, the mod is designed to "maximize the game's performance at the cost of fidelity". But the results produce a strangely charming visual style in their own right, one that harkens back to that time when game visuals were constantly wowing players with their technical progress, despite being a long way from looking truly realistic. I was struck by the below image of a Bohemian countryside panorama, which has especially strong Oblivion vibes. The fuzzy rocks and lush, yet oddly flat trees look just like gazing upon a distant forest in some wild corner of Cyrodiil.
In other places, the mod pushes further back in time. Urban spaces like Kuttenberg are too texturally sparse compared to Oblivion's towns and cities, while NPCs look more like they've strolled out of an early noughties MMO than Bethesda's RPG. But now I want a mod that makes KCD2 look exactly like Oblivion. I want moon-faced NPCs, landscapes that constantly render in detail as you travel, zoom-in conversations, and way too much bloom. Chuck in Jeremy Soule's warm and whimsical soundtrack too. Maybe I just need to replay Oblivion, to be honest.
You can download the mod here. Jindra points out that you can tweak the mod's settings by opening it up in Notepad, if you want to bump up some of the settings a bit. If that sounds like too much work, Jindra has also created a very low graphics mod, designed to improve performance while more or less retaining Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's intended look.
