Screaming into the void

 

I sat down thinking about what it was I had to write today. What it was I wanted to write today. And what it was I was going to write today. And to be honest I ran aground with all three scenarios. Why? And do you know what I felt? I felt anger. And frustration. Why? And where were these inexplicable feelings directed? I'm glad you asked because the answer is pretty direct- I was LIVID at Bethesda game studios for scuppering my latest attempt to play through Skyrim by just being their unfathomably annoying selves. What do I mean by that? I mean that the company won't stop making it difficult to be a fan of their older games! I know, this is hardly the first time I'm kicked up this exact same fuss, but damn it if it won't be the last either! I'm going to explode if I don't talk about the damned updates- so sit back and grab a bag of chips as I unload my hated upon this rake-stepping machine of a developer.

So I understand how much of a privileged position we sit in as lovers of a game that has an evergreen footprint upon the gaming landscape. Skyrim was foretold to me as a game I could play for the next ten years, and I'm still trying my hand at the thing coming close to year 13; the hype did not lie. Not everyone could get abroad the train, and that is their loss because as far as I'm concerned there are only a couple of games with a modding community to match the sheer ferocity of Skyrim's, and those are the Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4 teams. Actually, for the rest of the month I'm going to call New Vegas the most extensively modded game currently doing the rounds... that hasn't already spun off into it's own standalone. (Let's not bring DOTA and DAYZ into this- muddying the waters and all that.) And that privilege can make us a bit protective.

At this point the amount of modded reconstructions that the game has renders literally every copy of the game as personalised, right out of the Mario meme. We decide the way that the game plays, where it starts, how combat works, the flow of the economy, the make-up of the enemies, the distance of the engine LODs, the visual hue, the extent of the God rays- and it's not uncommon to throw a few body mods and skimpy armour mods ontop of that for literally every other Skyrim player in the world because I remain the sole being in the universe that still only plays a male character when they boot up Skyrim. It's actually a bit worse than that- I always end up playing roughly the same male character, no matter how much I force myself to change their race, hair colour, anything- it always circles around to the same archetype. (Not someone who looks like mr, thank god! I only do that in Fallout 4...)

What I'm trying to say is that the game is functionally ours at this point, more so than 99% of other games in the market which developers feel likely totally within their rights to throw in a little change here and there to keep the product running smoothly. (But if it's Rockstar knocking up to try and rip licenced songs out of my GTA game- they can go dunk their head in a river! Starting the beginning of Vice City without 'Broken Wings' playing is tantamount to committing a war crime!) When it's one of Bethesda's old games, however, they're more like deadbeat parents kicking their way back into their abandoned children's lives to screw everything up, beg them for money and then leave them broken and non-functional. That is the state of Skyrim every few years after a Bethesda visit.

Here's the damage- Bethesda recently added a brand new storefront from which they instead to flog mods. But through some strange trick of fate- Bethesda decided to kick off this new initiative with a worse slate of mods than what Creation Club launched with. (I think you can tell that a lot more planning and build-up went into the Creation Club. All of this kind of feels chucked together.) This new attempt to centralise the modding scene by integrating official mods into the in-built Bethesda.net organiser is misguided, but well intentioned. It speaks to a decision making committee that doesn't quite get what the personalisation of the game means, but I know all they're trying to do is make modding easier. They have done the exact opposite though, so my understanding can only stretch so far.

First off, obviously, the change to the version number broke the SKSE which breaks every game that uses scripts. But of course it's a bit worse than that. Waiting for the still-active contributor team to fix the SKSE download is par for the course- but not every mod connects through SKSE. Some of the significant gameplay changers have to perform their own version checks, and those mods aren't typically maintained in a timely manner. Some aren't maintained at all. Every frivolous update for nonsense is a strike directly murdering large swathes of mods that would otherwise work fine, all to add another house mod from Eleanora. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate her work- but why couldn't this have been a creation club update?

But you want to know what grinds my gears? Oh this is the cherry on top of the cake, let me tell you! Part of providing access to a modding site through the game is having the functionality to run those mods- and that means having to build in basic features into the game such as a load-order manager. (Basically it tells all mods what order to load in- which prevents code running in the wrong order and mistakes from occurring.) But uhh... yeah, we've all already got our own one of those in our personalised mod building set-ups. Every modder in the world uses LOOT with inbuilt special-case exceptions, right?  A delicate placement of orders and rules to make sure the 500 mod mega pack runs precisely as it should... and the Bethesda tool overwrites it.

That's right, if you load Skyrim with enough mods to make Bethesda pause- then their new manager kicks in to disable all plugins and require you to switch, and order them, manually like an actual madman. I don't know what sets it off, I'm yet to see anyone manage to circumvent this, which means I'm functionally incapable of playing Skyrim again unless I manage to book an entire evening off to figure out how to hard-code my load order back into Skyrim and... I just don't have the heart to jump through more blasted hoops just to play this game. We shouldn't have to keep playing this endless pointless game of Cat and Mouse with the developers- when will they just give up and make Fallout 4 their cash cow which they never leave alone? When will us Skyrim fans finally be left alone to mod in peace? When will the beast of Bethesda be overcome?

How about that Character creator!

 

One of the most intimidating first bosses that any Role Play gamer has to contend with is the character creator- that moment when you are well and truly confronted the limitless potential of eternity and told to whittle everything down to split second- life changing decisions! Anyone who doesn't spend a good ten minutes looking over the options available before even seriously getting started making their face will never understand the sheer horror of looking back on the toil of a thousand petty slider movements only to realise- oh my god, I've created the most boring/horrifying creature ever conceived- back to the drawing board! And with many games that you wouldn't expect getting surprisingly varied and approachable character creators in recent years, I wonder about the philosophy behind what such creators are even supposed to achieve.

The spurring of these thoughts came at the insistence of Dragon's Dogma 2 to launch early it's character creator for the purview of the curious. Through this we've been able to enjoy one of my favourite iterations of a slate of creation tools that I've seen in a game to date. Versatile and varied, Dragon's Dogma 2 enters into the nitty gritty of miniature slide management whilst bridging the gap for those that can't be bothered for the granular improvements by a wide slate of pre-set options making the art of coming up with a unique face a matter of a few moments work. Which I suppose is what empowered the team to fill the world with, reportedly, up to 1000 NPCs that seem to be hand-made- not just generated! I always love when the players get their hands on some slither of the full breadth of creation tools- because that is when the sky is truly the limit in character creation.

With Dragon's Dogma you start with 6 pages worth of pre- generated faces, and when you click one you'll receive a new page of faces similar to that choice, and after that selection you'll get another page of subtle facial structure alterations to pick from. From there you'll have your default character, and that is the canvass upon which you'll make the subtle tweaks to the rise of a cheekbone or the curve of a nose- as well as enjoy the decently robust scarring and tattoo system which allows for mostly free-form placement along the entire body so you can create the image from your imagination to a tee. It's this perfect meeting of complex and approachable which I can see really getting aplomb from all sides- a solution few were actively seeking but I feel that most all can readily appreciate.

Bethesda are well known for their character creators, ever since Skyrim decided to do away with the honestly mediocre systems of Fallout 3 and Oblivion and instead cobble together the most really robust slide-based system. That slide system was limited in it's functionality afforded to the player, however, which is why most people consider the commonly available mod that unlocks those sliders to their fullest potential an automatic download on even a casual playthrough. But there's a problem with that- with it's full potential unlocked, and even to some small degree in it's vanilla state, the Skyrim slate of options are just so vast- it's a bit overwhelming to be honest.

When you get to the sorts of games that offer several hundred slides for each slight tweak of a nose it can get to the point where you're just testing out what a slide does, figuring out you don't like it and immediately going back to defaults. Unless you have a crystal clear idea of exactly what you're going for, it's hard to maintain a unified design philosophy that guides your process. And when the options overwhelm you and you can't get a handle, you'll be less inclined to experiment which will lead to more generic creations. God knows I give up pretty quickly everytime I try to make an interesting player character in a Souls' like game for this very reason. Too much choice can be a curse in itself.

Baldur's Gate III on the otherhand veers into the direction of simple to such a degree that it is shocking how successful the character creator turned out! You literally only select between a small collection of faces and chuck some hair on top alongside some racial features- there isn't a slider in sight when it comes to building your character. Which to be fair is a lot more than they really needed to do given that this was supposed to be an isometric game- but Larian's obsession with making a fully cinematic RPG masterpiece necessitated high quality character models so I guess they were stuck between a rock and a hard place- and choosing to make every single character creation choice a curated 'body part' or 'extra feature' was certainly a bold choice indeed.

This could easily have turned out as utterly pathetic as Destiny's character creator (which still doesn't have any option to change after the tutorial despite this franchise closing in on over a decade old later this year.) Larian really honed in on all the character appearance choices that also crossed over with class building, including race and Class options, and threw in as many high quality assets as possible to give as much variation possible. Scales, Horns, pigmentation, there are even selectable genitals are in the game for some reason. The result is perhaps on the best simply character creators of all time, lacking the range of Dragon's Dogma 2, perhaps, but creating no less as memorable and unique love dolls for lonely BG3 players to vicariously find companionship through whilst convincing themselves that they'll also fall madly for some hyper interesting personality one day. 

 At it's very least a good character creator should give us the ability to conjure some rough approximation of ourselves to self-insert into a video game for the truly imagination deprived. But at it's best character creators invite players to launch themselves into tailor made shoes of their own conjuration, dreaming up a whole life to roleplay. Those who spend all those hours getting someone just right, as generic or fantastical as they ultimately end up, feel that pull of the other letting them step out of the shoes of the mundane into another life for a brief few hours. Maybe those who simply can't connect with that would be considered healthier individuals in a traditional setting- but name one mentally healthy person that's fun to have drinks with! Exactly! 

Wintersun Mod review

 Dorime

I typically am the type to gravitate to heavily story-focused topics when it comes to reviews, as writing and narrative construction are areas that I'm heavily invested in personally. It just happens to follow that I usually end up playing narrative mods for games over gameplay effecting mods, as I'm usually more trusting of modder's ability to be able to craft a fun new adventure then I am for them to totally rebalance a game in a manner that is totally fair from all angles. It takes some amount of research and debate to convince myself to try out a significant game-affecting mod, not least of which because I'm very careful with arranging my mods so that I play a sustained and stable game. I'm not a 'dip in to play this one mod' kind of guy, I like to embroil each mod I might possibly want to try into a total playthrough experience so that the new content flows in as naturally as it can. As such, it can take me a good many years and playthroughs to bring myself around to a mod as non-intensive as Wintersun.

In dozens upon dozens of serious modded Skyrim playthroughs over the years, I have never tried one with this mod installed despite it's fame and popularity, probably because I didn't think it would be the type of content I'd get value out of interacting with. Wintersun introduces gameplay mechanics into the faiths of The Elder Scrolls, so that players can choose a deity to worship and receive tangible gameplay benefits for their choices, similar to D&D. It's not all boons and bonuses though; because the favour of your chosen god must be earned through regular prayer or a specified task distinct to your chosen deity. Something to slide into your gameplay routine until it becomes part of your playstyle in an immersive and grounding fashion. It really is an elegant little concept that the mod author, 'Enai Siaion', conjured up here.

Religion is one of the most important aspects of the Elder Scrolls lore, with the convergence between various pantheons, conflicts, hierarchies and substitutes, taking up a vastly significant space in the critical questlines of all of the core games. Skyrim alone features several clarifications within it's literature about how the legend of the Dragon Alduin isn't just a Nordic variation on the Imperial Pantheon's Akatosh, the Dragon of Time. (Anyone who has played Skyrim through knows the importance of establishing that distinction) And that is just the tip of the iceberg. The cultural split between the Empire and Skyrim which spurs the civil war central to that game's political situation is due to a ideological debate about what legendary figures are viable gods for worship, specifically whether or not Talos belongs in the Nine Divines. Morrowind was all about the worship of the Tribunal, Daggerfall's multiple endings are only viable because of Akatosh's time-warping involvement and Oblivion literally turns into a clash of the Aedra versus Daedra near it's story apex. The gods and their worship are cornerstones of the lore, so why don't they have a role in the vanilla gameplay more?

Vanilla Skyrim gives us shines to the Nine Divines that players can spend a small sum of money at in order to get a brief temporary buff and a quick 'cure diseases' spell shoved on them. That's about the extent of interactions between the player and their gods in the entirety of the gameplay loop. No commitments to a certain pantheon or figure, none of the thematic offerings or rituals that you'll hear other in-game aspirants mention, and no meaningful interaction with the core gameplay loop of Elder Scrolls- dungeon diving and looting. (Beyond the buffs that vanish in a 20 minute period or so anyway.) Of course, these RPG games don't need to go into explicit detail for every aspect of the world for the title to still be 'immersive', but that's why we have mods, isn't it? To fill in the obvious feeling blanks that Bethesda left open to us.

In all honesty I haven't actually had the chance to try out every individual religion that the mod has on offer, especially given the amount of effort it takes to really become embroiled in a few of them. But I have played around 400 hours into my current playthrough with Wintersun installed and active the entire time, so I'd say that gives me enough experience to provide a general opinion on it all. With this mod comes the power to pray, that's not an affectation the ability is listed under the 'powers' tab, and this will be the main way you commune with your deity. Every day give-or-take you are expected to pray to your god and each day you remember it will build up your conviction and everyday you forget that conviction will drop. Once you reach 100% conviction, you will be crowned a 'devotee' which will give you a distinct power to make all the praying and adherence to your god's tenets worth the effort.

Where it really gets interesting is in the breadth of pantheons open to you. I started the game devoted to Shor, a Nord specific god who grants a hero spirit from Sovengarde whether a boss enemy aggroes on you, and the various races all have their own unique gods that cater to their region's lore. There's the Yokundan pantheon, The Elven Ancestors and even the Daedric Princes. That's right, you can worship a Daedric Prince. What makes that lot an especially interesting bunch is the fact that simply praying all day hardly does anything to increase your conviction points because, true to their nature, Daedric Princes prefer you prove yourself with action in order to become their blessed devotees. Through this the basic framework of religion can actually begin influencing your playstyle by dictating your daily routine and the goals you work towards.

A few hundred hours into my playthrough I accepted the Lovecraftian-themed Hermaeus Mora into my life, and his peculiarities proved quite interesting to the way I play. True to the maddening search for knowledge that so many Lovecraftian protagonist's fall for, Mora's religion demands the player seek out uniquely spawned pages of ancient apocrypha carrying dastardly secrets in order to further their convictions. These pages are spawned at random on the corpses of slain humanoids both in the vanilla drop list and on modded bad-guys. (I think it's limited to humanoid enemies though, I haven't checked for certain but that seems to track with my 200-odd hours of playtime with Mora thusfar.) Gather enough of these pages and you can craft them into special tomes that buff your magic and shouts, and grow enough to become one of Mora's Devotees and you can sacrifice 5% conviction in exchange for a free skill point! That's some pretty powerful reward system, and certainly worth checking the various corpses of enemies who you'd otherwise have long started ignoring by that point in the game.

In my mind the best mods are one's that function just like this. Sliding in seamlessly into the gameworld in order to provide a side of the gameplay experience you didn't necessarily know you needed, but which enriches your playtime regardless. There's nothing so overbearing about Wintersun that it impedes your ability to play the game how you want to, and if even the daily prayers prove too much of a nuisance you can just shirk the whole process and go agnostic. (Although at that point it would really be a wonder why you have the mod installed at all.) If you've interest in a little bit of immersion being imbued in a woefully underloved portion of Elder Scrolls lore, I'd have to recommend Wintersun as the solution that you're looking for. Simple, immersive, fun. The best of all worlds.

I hate: Skyrim's Killmoves

 Fatility.

I have been playing a simply obscene amount of Skyrim recently, and that renewed familiarity has sparked up some dormant issues that you only really think about when 200 hours into a playthrough. Such as the killmove system: which sucks. And to be clear, I remember this being one of the most exciting things proudly postured in the marketing leading up to that initial 11/11/11 release date. Oblivion's combat was rather famously one of it's weakest aspects, with a notoriously flimsy 'chopstick' waving of swords that was considerably lacking in impactful connection and even more in strategy. Somehow even Morrowind manages to give it's players more options in the heat of combat than Oblivion did, and the magic/ archery system wasn't much more advanced. So now that Skyrim was going to be directly addressing that, people were excited to try out this fighting system for themselves. Which was when Bethesda lifted that cudgel and squarely struck the heated Iron with the Killmove trailer.

This was a trailer that consisted purely of every single moment in the game where the animations took over and the player performed some choreographed show of martial prowess, far eclipsing anything we'd seen in an Elder Scrolls game to date. It was violent, it was exciting, and I even think it might have made the cut to be included in the Trump Administration's supercut of video game violence, for those who remember that little MLG compilation vid. And we, the many who were ready and eager for Skyrim to drop into our waiting hands for months already, went crazy for it. We ate that action up to the dregs and didn't even hang around the cafeteria lady in order to beg for more, because we'd feasted heartily. All of which is to say that I was pretty predisposed towards the whole Killmove ecosystem for months before the game came out, so I was just fine ignoring any budding complications with it's implementation once the title arrived.

And nor did I really have any reason to be upset. The gameplay was spiced up sufficiently with the special little flourish moment, typically performed on the last enemy in a wave of combat, and the ability to throw on a perk that allowed for decapitations was widely celebrated by the majority of players as 'super dope'. Even playing on Master difficulty it all seemed to work out just fine. And then Bethesda added Legendary difficulty. Now to understand how these two parts of this story work together, I'm going to need to explain both how the killmoves work and how legendary difficulty works, and then you'll see why this turned into a problem so bad that I, just recently, had to cave and get the mod 'Violens' just so that I could disable killmoves almost entirely. I do not exaggerate when I say that this combination of systems makes the combat nearly unplayable in Legendary difficulties lategame, and if you don't have Violens in your load order but are trying an Anniversary Mode Legendary run; be warned about what to expect from Level 30 up!

Killmoves are triggered on the enemy when two conditions are met, namely that slaying the enemy in front of you will take the player out of combat, and that the attack in question has the potential to kill the enemy in the next hit. As in, the expected calculated damage of the hit will drain all the remaining target's hit points. At the very moment that attack is initiated, before the animation to swing has even begun, the game takes control of the action and the player can watch as an animation plays off. Archery players will know that this becomes a problem when the camera takes control for a ranged shot, and then the enemy simply moves out the way and you get a cinematic presentation of your screw up, but otherwise the system works fairly well. However, it also works on the player. Killmoves on the player can activate even if the player isn't the last enemy in the area who needs to be slain, and will take over, once again, if the attack that is about to be executed has the potential to kill it's target. Keep that in mind.

Now Legendary difficulty in Skyrim expands the difficulty of the game merely by applying modifiers to combat which, when you realise them, absolutely suck. So let me give you a warning that once you realise what the game is doing, it might subconsciously ruin Legendary difficulty combat for you in the future forever. Are you fairly warned? Okay: it's just cutting the damage that NPCs take back 1/4 of the expected damage and multiplying player received damage by x 3. Not really the 'fair world' I was shooting for when I picked the highest difficulty. I wanted to be less of a god, not become the world's most paper-thin human. Oh and yes, the buff to damage received is only on the player, meaning that if you walk around with companions they'll serve to be great damage shields with their x 0.25 damage reduction. Basically; you have to get real good at dodging attacks if you're going to be playing Legendary solo.

But then there's a issue there, isn't there? Because as I described with the way that Killmoves work, the animation takes over the second an attack is queued that has the potential to kill the target. Now kill move animations overwrite the controls of the attacker, and the target; which means that if an enemy launches an attack against you that might have killed you, but you have healing potions or, you know, the ability to move out of the way, your chance to save yourself is overruled by the game taking over for a killmove animation. This becomes an even bigger issue in Legendary difficulty, because every enemy does 3x their damage, which essentially makes it so that any level 30 or above enemy with a two handed weapon can instantly kill you just by focusing their melee aggro on you, and there's nothing you can do about it. Dodging is useless when the killmove activates before the attack animation has begun, and solo legendary play becomes effectively impossible.

And even with a huge group of companions, like how I play, it's still an impossible situation to manage. I remember recently conducting the final mission in the Civil War, and it was essentially like trying to navigate a landmine of enemies who would instantly kill me just by looking in my direction. I had to try to sneak around the enemy lines so that I could quickly break the barriers between me and the final room and just hope that the game didn't spawn 6 guys ontop of whilst I'm doing it. The problem becomes even worse who you realise that, whilst human enemies pull off the most killmoves, most other humanoid enemies do too, which makes Nordic Ruins a slog. And then Dragons can do it on top of that, so melee-range dragon fights are a no-go. Basically, the further along in the game you get, the more impossible it becomes to play the way you want to; and that's a bit of a huge problem.

I can't recall the amount of times I nearly tore out my hair from having a five minute fight totally wasted because my handy shields, Sofia and Inigo, dropped aggro for a split second; I've even had times when I've been behind a wall of companion bodies and still had the animation glitch out, thus I've been melee killed from across the room. It's quite clear we're looking at the sort of game for which Bethesda have layered so many systems ontop of each other that they didn't really realise when two glaring mechanics didn't play nice together, and I suppose now it's just too late to change anything. At least from their end. From yours you can turn off killmoves in the Ini, or download a mod to give the player killmove immunity, which sucks to have to do; but the alternative is a practically unplayable melee combat system in a melee focused fantasy game.

And... I'm playing Skyrim again.

I'm starting to dream in Dragon.

We all have those onerous backlogs of games that we swear to ourselves we'll get around to one day. One mythical day where we just pull ourselves up and play more hours than are physically within the day in order to complete literally every single game we've ever had a passing interest in, and it's a lie. We know it's a lie. Most of us are lucky if we've even played all the games that we own, let alone finished them; but it's a falsity that harms no one. Yet even that becomes hard for me to tell myself when I'm going around wasting valuable off-time playing my fifty thousandth Skyrim playthrough on Anniversary edition! (Someone stop me, I can't do it myself!) So I think it's fair that if I'm going to talk about gaming as it currently exists for me right now, it only makes sense that I bring everyone into my ongoing love affair with Skyrim and overmodding to just-unhealthy degrees.

First of all, I've just played through Skyrim's main story on Skyrim Special Edition, which Steam is telling me is the first time I've done that... ever. Which goes to show the amount of times I've dived into a playthrough and just gotten lost on the innumerable side activities, and large questmods that characterise playing PC Skyrim. Currently I'm playing with exactly 312 active plugins in my Skyrim game, and I've touched upon maybe half of those mods in a lot of playing time. Most of which I started the game with and a few I picked up along the way are mostly patches or appearance mods to replace one's that broke or which I forgot; all of which is the sign of a modder who is a little too experienced. Knowing pretty much exactly what I wanted to have in my game, what I needed to have installed right away, what I probably wanted to leave until the future is all recommended knowledge, of course, because mid-playthrough modding is typically ill-advised.

So what sort of mods am I rocking? Well I'm actually rather conservative when it comes to modifications to the core gameplay experience simply because I really like the way that Skyrim plays. It's not particularly dripping with pitch perfect weight or complexity, but it has enough going on to sustain a playthrough and at least feels impactful on swings, which is all I ask for. That being said, I do have a couple of gameplay effecting mods in there from CACO (an alchemy and cooking overhaul which I'd never tried before and figured would be worth checking out) and Wintersun. (a really cool mod that brings religion into the game as a meaningful mechanic.) And there are the tons of companion mods I download, because I love making friends, which almost necessitates mods like OBIS (Organised Bandits In Skyrim) otherwise I would just roll through every combat encounter like a train. (Because I need to have Inigo, Sofia, Lucien, Aurlyn, Vilja, Lydia, my Armoured Mudcrab I call 'Harry', a modded version of Meeko that's a white Husky and some rando NPC from 3DNPC that I stumbled on and liked their backstory, all in my party at the same time.)

My visual overhaul mods aren't too numerous, although I've very happy with the few that I've chosen. Jk's Skyrim does an incredible job remixing all of the settlements across the region to create something feeling very much in the spirit of Skyrim but with more personality and sensible scale to them. One of my favourite additions being the way the mod adds a whole graveyard of ruined houses around the back of Winterhold, using the environment to tell the canonical story of the city literally fell apart, as in- off a cliff, under dubious circumstances. Plus there's Obsidian Weather, which adds some small seasonal rotation to the game, but also just improves the sky box so much that there are times I'm just left stunned looking up at the celestial wonder of the sky. Which is very important, because with the many mods of Anniversary Edition I spend a lot of time walking the roads.

'Skyrim: Survival Mode' is one of the most enduring inbuilt mods I've kept in my playthrough rotation and only now, that I've completed the main game, am I starting to get annoyed by it. (New Vegas still maintains the best integrated survival mode in a Bethesda published Role Playing game.) Why disable fast-travel, no seriously- why? Fallout 4's Survival Difficulty is a hardcore challenge, a Souls-esque weighing of risk and reward where the brutality of travelling to objectives is a large part of the fun. But Skyrim, even with Survival Mode, is just not that. Having to eat and sleep feels like natural addendums to this world and the rate they build on you against the amount of ready food there is within the world doesn't feel the least bit imposing to me. This isn't one of those games where the struggle to survive desperately outweighs your ability to have fun and do what you want, the meters just add value to the otherwise ancillary food items which litter the game world. So forcing walking everywhere feels totally out of left field and leaves we wondering if the makers of this little plugin even understand what the purpose of the mod that they made is. (I had to install a extra-carriages in Skyrim mod just to resist the temptation not to turn the mod off.)

But what brings me back to the act of modding Skyrim again and again are those quest mods. Good lord do I never get tired of taking my Dragonborn on some of the craziest and grandest new adventures cooked up by the endlessly talented creatives all over the community. Terminally unbalanced, all of them, but still incredibly exciting. And just as with Morrowind where I spent weeks walking the streets of the mainland, or that communities interpretation of Skyrim, and fell absolutely in love with places like Necrom and the Hammerfell-Skryim border; the promise of great 'New Lands' mods also excite me. I haven't had the opportunity to explore a great many of them quite yet, but I'm enthused everytime I bump into a character who's a hook for Moonpath, or a recruiter for Vigilant, or get jumped scared by the lead-in to 'Gray Cowl'. (It feels uproariously wrong spelling it that way.) 

Of course, juggling a load order like that there are some precautions to take, and if you don't mind I'm going to turn this into a little bit of an advice corner for a second. Firstly, research all of the mods you're about to install extensively, obviously, so that you know what each of them does and if any of them have any special install requirements. Use a current mod manager, manual installation is absolutely out of the question. Check the 'LOOT' sorter tool, it tells you about any well known patches you might be currently missing in order to make some mods work better together. (And LOOT comes included with Vortex Mod Manager, by the way) And most importantly of all, turn off all autosaving and never quick save. Even if you don't have particularly script-intensive mods, autosaving and Quicksaving are going to get things tangled up and sooner or later you're going to get a corrupted save. Oh, and read the heck out of requirements. (That really screwed me for one mod in particular and had me scratching my head for hours.)

I remember a very long time ago when I was just dipping my toes into the RPG world and I used to follow someone online who seemed much more into all of this than me and was hyping up every insignificant news drop leading upto Skyrim. A lot of the marketing material was really cool on it's own merits, but this guy could blow it up into a dance number and sing the news straight the way into Valhalla with his endless praise-fuelled rants. When talking about decapitations, as shown in the combat trailer, specially, I remember him stating something along the lines of 'this will be a game you'll play for ten years.' And at the time that really stuck with me, as I pondered on it and thought: "I mean maybe, but isn't that kinda optimistic?" We're past the ten year mark, and look at me. Because of Bethesda, because of re-releases, but most of all because of an unbelievable community, here I am falling for Skyrim in 2022. Some things never do change.

Skyrim Anniversary Edition? Really?

 When there's no more space in your back catalogue; the Skyrims will walk the earth.

Okay, I'm not entirely sure how I'm supposed to get past this. I mean as a society, as someone who prides themselves in championing progression in the human race, I cannot fathom a world in which Skyrim will receive another rerelease. I don't know who's worse; is it Rockstar Games or Bethesda? Both have tried to fleece their fans for nearly ten years using the same base software, both are showing no signs of stopping. At least Bethesda pretended that they were working on something else to fill the void, even though at this point I'm convinced that The Elder Scrolls Six is little more than an animated wallpaper for Todd Howard's Macbook. But then in some ways doesn't that make this worse? An even bigger betrayal of trust. They promised their next TES game would be a new one, and they freakin' lied! Bethesda lied, because unbeknownst to us, and spitting in the face of all we hold dear, Skyrim Anniversary Edition is barrelling towards us for a 2021 release. (Good god, no.)

Now let me start by saying that I like Skyrim. Heck, I'll go so far as to say I even love the damn thing. It numbers in my top 10 favourite games of all time, (or at least it did; this announcement might cause quite the shake up) I still consider it the gold standard for open world fantasy games and there's few other titles out there that trigger my full 'roleplaying mode' switch like Skyrim does. When I sit down to play that game, I become a Nord in the frigid northern climates of the reaches. I endure the harsh realities of survival mode, descend into the pantheon against hardy snowy creatures, and persist the heavy debugging process of fixing my 100 mod playthrough. (Actually, 100 mods is a light playthrough for me, I'm usually around 150.) So when I say, nay scream with the fury of Star Platinum's Ora when he threw that one tower in the OVA, (you know the one) that I am sick to death of Skyrim; know it's from a place of utmost authority.

I know Skyrim. Heck, I have it's burlap map on my wall from 10 years ago, I can just about make it out from the dark of a room lit only by my computer screen; because despite learning of this new edition at 2:00 AM I knew I had to get my thoughts down when they were as raw as possible. This is the kind of game I'll think back on in my death bed, whether that be a year away or twenty, because it's impact on my life has been that significant. The way a lot of folk out there think about Baldur's Gate- that's Skyrim for me; a game which defined what it was to Roleplay. And I've finished it. I've finished it countless times. I've finished it with mods. I've finished it vanilla. I've finished it on console. I've finished it on PC. I've finished it Legacy edition and I've finished it in Special Edition. I can't do it anymore. I just can't. For the love of god, Bethesda; GIVE ME SOMETHING NEW TO PLAY! I'm begging you guys, scratching up my knees, wearing down my prayer beads, desperately praying for SOMETHING NEW! ANYTHING! Wait- no I take that back. Not anything- NOT ANYTH-

So the reason that this Anniversary Edition is coming our way is not, as some might have assumed, in order to stick a new engine in it and prolong it's appeal to the new age. Because if Bethesda did that then they'd have to give it to people who already own it for free again, and they ain't skipping out on profits like that again. No, this time Bethesda are giving us what I can only assume is a repackaged version of Special Edition only reloaded with 500 pieces of Creation Club content, and good lord I don't even know how there is that many Creation Club pieces. There was absolutely not that many entries in the store when they retired the system in the wake of the Pandemic. (and not because of the widespread bad press it was constantly generating, warranted or otherwise)

My only guess is that Bethesda are counting each individual item in the various Creation Club mods as their own piece of content, which is technically true, if misleading. Or heck, maybe they've been busy during the year-long hiatus, hiring more contractors to make Creation Club content which they then... didn't sell... for some reason... (I'm sticking with my first explanation for now, it makes more sense) Whatever the case, this is going to be Bethesda's big ploy for justifying selling this Anniversary Edition to people who've already bought the damn game enough to cover Todd Howard's car insurance for the year, like I have. And yes, it's not yet confirmed that this is the case, but I pull up evidence A: This is modern Bethesda we're talking about, that's obviously what they're going to do.

Hmm? That's not true? It's free? No hidden costs? I don't believe you. I don't believe anyone. Moreover, I can't believe you, because if I did than I'd have to accept that there's no good reason on this earth why I shouldn't play it. Even if they slapped a £2 price point on the thing and shoved it at me, that'd be my excuse, but if it's genuinely going to show up in my download list without me having to lift a finger; then that's another Winter of mine sacrificed to Skyrim. You can't do this to me, Bethesda, it isn't right; it's cruel. Moreover, it doesn't even make sense. Isn't the plan to port Skyrim to everything from Last gen to Switch to VR to Alexa? Well, why not phones? Don't tell me that your average phone can't run Legacy Edition of Skyrim because I will insist that you're wrong. Or are Bethesda waiting until next year for Skyrim Mobile Edition? Spreading their growth portfolio out, are they?

To think that currently we're looking at two remasters from the industries most prolific homework copiers, and if rumours are to be believed (and I'm thinking that they are) then Rockstar are actually the guys who have a more interesting offering on their plate. Churning spittings off the rumour-mill are saying that Rockstar are looking to remaster their 3D era of games (III, Vice City, San Andreas) for the new generation, and that sounds genuinely interesting and like it could herald something really special. Meanwhile what can we expect from Anniversary Skyrim? A new update to the graphics to slather onto this aging engine? (I swear to god if my computer can't run the new Skyrim that just might be it for me, I don't think I'll be able to take that humiliation. I might just off myself.) Oh, wait; no they're adding a fishing module into the game... Which I actually want to play... dammit.

I can just see Todd Howard right now, pacing around in his black and white jumpsuit, swirling his cape as he plots. "Oh Anniversary Edition is real all right. Real enough to drag pathetic fans like you back into our active player figures! And we bought you back without ever having to resort to 'making a new game' or 'promising an impending sequel'. You're not getting Elder Scrolls VI, you're not getting Starfield; I'll give you Skyrim. And not just that, I'll give you most spectacular Skyrim you've ever seen, on every device you can access! And when I'm old and I've had my fun, I'll sell the code for porting Skyrim; so that everyone else can keep porting Skyrim to new systems! Every new Bethesda game will be Skyrim. And when every game's Skyrim..."

"No game will be."