There are so many games! We ve reviewed over 25 since the year started, and we can hardly be comprehensive--hundreds more have already released. It s a downpour, which isn t a complaint, but while we talk about Firewatch and XCOM 2 and one of our new favorite metroidvanias, it s easy to lose track of games that are further off. What s been delayed? Who s doing episodic games now? Which lead writer went where?
As we approach the big spring releases and summer announcements, we ve revisited the news from the past year to give you status reports on the PC s most popular series. We left out series we don t expect regular releases from—no one s clamoring for Team Fortress 3—to focus on confirmed, or at least expected, new games coming within the next few years. Here s where they all stand as of now.
Action and stealth
Assassin s Creed
Starting with Assassin s Creed II in 2009, there s been a new one every year—until now. Ubisoft is finally taking a year off (from the main series, at least) while it works on 2017 s Assassin s Creed game, which we don t know much about just yet.
We ve heard rumors, though. A few years ago there were rumblings that Assassin s Creed 3 would head to Egypt, and that claim has reemerged for AC 2017. Kotaku reports that internet rumors and its own sources have said we re heading to Africa, which would be unsurprising—we ve done Jerusalem, Florence, Rome, Boston, and Paris, and that isn t even the full list. Why not Cairo? It wasn t true last time, but we d bet on it this time (though maybe only a dollar).
In the meantime, Ubisoft may be releasing Watch Dogs 2 this year, and we ve heard rumors that it will be set in San Francisco. Get ready to hack some cable cars and disrupt the tourist transportation industry.
Arkham series
With Arkham Knight behind us (and surrounded by smouldering debris), the Arkham trilogy is over. But Batman games are not. Of course they re not. It s Batman. Speaking with the PlayStation Blog, Warner Bros Ames Kirshen said, We don t have anything to talk about at this time, but the possibilities are endless with a character as dynamic and beloved as Batman. Batman games forever.
Far Cry
Far Cry is sticking with the yearly release schedule for now, and next up is Far Cry Primal, which came as a surprise: now we re a cave dude speaking a made-up prehistoric language and throwing spears instead of shooting bullets. With some concerns about the combat, but a general sense of optimism, we ve written and voiced a few takes on what we ve played so far: first Sam gave it a go, then Tim and Shaun went clubbing. As for next year s Far Cry, assuming another is coming, we haven t heard anything just yet.
Grand Theft Auto
Rockstar is notoriously tight-lipped, but we have to imagine that Grand Theft Auto VI is being made. It was five years between GTAIV s release in 2008 and GTAV s console release in 2013, so we don t expect to hear anything until around 2018, or even later. There are some rumors floating around, but they re pretty thin, like that it ll have a bigger map. What a scoop!
Hopefully this time we won t have to wait two more years for the PC version. While we wait, though, we expect to hear about something else from Rockstar. We're certain they haven't simply forgotten that Red Dead Redemption was their biggest hit next to GTA—not that we d mind playing Bully 2, either.
Hitman
The hitman is going to be hitting men once again on March 11. Surprisingly, the new Hitman (just called Hitman) will be episodic, starting with a Paris location. Later, in April, we ll jet to Italy, and then Morocco in May, followed by Japan closer to the end of the year. It ll be $60 for the whole deal, or $15 for the prologue mission and Paris location and $10 each for subsequent additions.
The unusual release plan notwithstanding, we re pretty into new Hitman so far. Ben Griffin said it was a return to old Hitman values in our last preview—basically, you re thrown into a location and given the tools sneak or murder your way through it how you please, which is just what we hoped. We re going to be trying out the beta soon, so we ll have more impressions from that, followed by our review of the first location in March.
Tomb Raider
Rise of the Tomb Raider was made with help from an Xbox One exclusivity deal, and then released up against Fallout 4—two facts that don t make it look like a priority series for Square Enix. We quite liked the PC version, though, and Crystal Dynamics has spent the past 10 years making Tomb Raider games, so it d be surprising if Lara rose now only to fall off a ledge.
A few years ago we also heard that Crystal Dynamics was also working on something new, though. What ever happened to that? We might find out this year, and either way, count on another Tomb Raider game in our not-so-distant future.
RPGs
Dark Souls
With the impending release of Dark Souls 3 in April, it seems we re about to run out of bonfires for good. Wes says it looks on track to be as dense and interconnected as the original, but the familiarity of the formula meant the magic was beginning to wane. There are still plenty of changes to look forward to in Dark Souls 3; combat feels quicker and more varied thanks to the addition of Battlearts, a step towards the aggressive Souls cousin, Bloodborne. Enemies change stances and behaviors on the fly. The visuals are a huge step up, and if it s optimized well for the PC, it ll look extra dark and soulsy.
But even FromSoftware President Hidetaka Miyazaki knows the Souls series is running out of steam. He told GameSpot "I don't think it'd be the right choice to continue indefinitely creating Souls and Bloodborne games. I'm considering Dark Souls 3 to be the big closure on the series. It may be a hard truth to swallow for fans, but at least Dark Souls comics are on the way before Dark Souls 3 hits. Sit close to the fire, friends. This may be it.
Deus Ex
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is out August 23, and it s got us in a cheerful mood. Tom Senior said it could be the best Deus Ex yet, and he isn t one for hyperbole. We also had a nice chat with lead writer Mary DeMarle, who talked about her views on transhumanism and how the end of Human Revolution leads into the new story.
As for the future of the series, there s little doubt we ll see more. While also pitching in with whatever Crystal Dynamics is up to next—Eidos Montreal helped with Rise of the Tomb Raider—we expect it ll be working on more Deus Ex for the foreseeable future. It s a prestigious series for Square Enix, and Mankind Divided is also a showcase for the new Dawn Engine, which they ll want to get lots of use out of.
Diablo
Last year we noticed that Blizzard was hiring an art director for an unannounced project—except, directly under unannounced project, the job listing said DIABLO. So that s a bit of a hint, but no guarantee that Blizzard is working on a new Diablo. We don t see why they wouldn t be, though—it s been almost four years since Diablo 3 released, and while Blizzard plugs away at Hearthstone and Overwatch it could very well be dungeon designing as well. That s unfortunately all we know for now, but it wouldn t be a big surprise to see an announcement this year or next.
Dragon Age
Last year, BioWare s Mike Laidlaw said that they re not sure what's next for the Dragon Age series, though they ve probably got some idea by now, as we speculate that the next Dragon Age is scheduled to fill the gap between the next two Mass Effect games—so a 2017 or 2018 release. The last Dragon Age: Inquisition DLC contains some hints about where the story is going, but we won t spoil any of that.
One development of note: The series lead writer, David Gaider, left BioWare last month. Gaider has been at BioWare for a long time, all the way back to Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn. It s hard to say what to make of it: a fresh lead may turn out to be a boon for the series as much as we re sure Gaider s experience with the universe will be missed.
The Elder Scrolls
The announcement of the next Elder Scrolls could happen as soon as this year s E3. We haven t heard anything, but it s a reasonable prediction.
Last year, Bethesda surprised us with Fallout 4 seven years after it developed Fallout 3. When we get to E3 this year, it ll have been about six years since Skyrim released. It s about time for a countdown clock and teaser with swelling choral music, isn t it? Seems probable. If not this year, we expect a new single-player Elder Scrolls to be announced before the end of 2017. If Bethesda follows its Fallout strategy, it ll be playable within a few months after being revealed, too.
Fallout
With Fallout 4 DLC still on the way, it s too early to speculate much about a sequel. We do know that, if given the chance, Obsidian would be up for taking another crack at the series. It makes plenty of sense for Bethesda to have Obsidian build another in-between game like New Vegas while it works on whatever Fallout 5 is going to look like, so fingers crossed for that.
Final Fantasy
Square Enix seems set on eventually porting the entire Final Fantasy back catalogue to every platform available, including the PC, which is fine by us (although we d prefer if they didn t make them so ugly. New games aren t quite a sure thing, but we ve seen a few signs that a PC release is likely for Final Fantasy XV. And the Final Fantasy VII remake is coming to PS4 first, but a multi-platform release seems inevitable, especially as Square Enix works more with western technology. Kingdom Hearts 3 is using Unreal Engine 4, after all.
The big question is when these games will come out. We look forward to playing Final Fantasy XV in 2030, and the Final Fantasy VII remake shortly after.
Mass Effect
Mass Effect: Andromeda will supposedly release before the end of the year. We tend toward skepticism when it comes to release dates announced as far out as this one—lots of games announced for the holiday release window get pushed into February of the next year—but EA often hits deadlines. There have been a few exceptions recently, though: Battlefield Hardline was originally meant to release in 2014, but ended up coming out last year, and Need for Speed was recently delayed on PC.
Whether or not it makes it out this year, it s happening, and so far we know that it s taking us to the Andromeda galaxy and may involve settlement building. During last year s E3, we pored over the trailer and rumors to suss out any other details we could, and there s quite a bit there. We expect to see a lot more at this year s E3, followed by a marketing blitz if it s really meant to be out around December.
In other Mass Effect news, a few days ago we got confirmation that Andromeda s lead writer, Chris Schlerf, has left BioWare to work at Bungie. We imagine that much of the story is already in place, so we re not sure it s any cause for concern. We do wonder still what s next after Andromeda, though it d be shocking if it weren t the start of another trilogy, given that save game transfers are such a core part of the original trilogy. The heck are they going to call the sequel, though? Mass Effect: Andromeda 2? Mass Effect: Aquarius Dwarf Galaxy? Andromeda 2: A Mass Effect Story?
The Witcher
Geralt s trilogy is over with The Witcher 3, but that doesn t mean CD Projekt isn t going to return to the universe. The franchise will continue, according to CD Projekt Red CEO Adam Kicinski. For the next year, CD Projekt has said it s focusing on support and expansions for The Witcher 3, though we also heard that it has a bigger team working on Cyberpunk. Our guess is that we ll be playing Cyberpunk 2077 in the winter of 2017, a nice round 60 years before it takes place, and then start hearing about The Witcher again in 2018.
On the next page, shooters and strategy games...
Shooters
Battlefield
EA has to have at least one big shooter every year. Last year we got Battlefront (and Battlefield Hardline, though that was supposed to release in 2014), and this year it ll be another Battlefield. EA said so during one of those investor calls we all love to listen in on. Presumably BF is going back to DICE (Hardline was primarily developed by Visceral) and may be called Battlefield 5, but we don t know for sure. We expect to see it at E3 this summer and, if it follows tradition, a late October release date. Looks like we re getting Titanfall 2 this year, too.
Borderlands
Back in 2014, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford said that Borderlands 3 wasn t in the works, but told Polygon that they ve got big ideas. It should be massive, he said. Then, in January of last year, recruiting began for the big one. So, it ll be big. That s what we know, and it sounds like Gearbox has put about a year of work into it so far. It s possible that we ll see what they ve been up to sometime this year, but I d wager that we might not see a trailer until next year.
"I could leave without damaging Borderland or Gearbox too much if I did it at this moment, so now was the time," said Armstrong. "I think Gearbox will do great in the future, and I think Borderlands will stay strong and awesome. I've been thinking about it for a while. I'm not quitting out of anger or getting fired. It's just time for new adventures. I'm an inventor. I'm ready to make something new. Not just new to me, but new to everyone."
Call of Duty
As long as the sun rises in the west there s no worry of Call of Duty missing a year. It was just revealed on an Activision investor s call that this year s CoD will be made by Infinity Ward, which last contributed the somewhat disappointing Ghosts. We expect to hear someone say wait and then instruct us to take the guy on the right. Outside of that, who knows? Maybe they ll surprise us and it won t be a near-future war with terrorists.
Tough to say what the future holds for ol Max. The Rockstar-developed Max Payne 3 felt a bit like the end of the line—or as Max would say, the final bullet, silhouetted against the thundery sky of everything. We haven t heard anything that suggests Rockstar definitely isn t pursuing another Payne game, but outside of some highly suspect rumor reports, there s equally no sign that the series will continue. If it does, it might not be for some time, when we re really hungry for it. It was nine years between Max Payne 2 and Max Payne 3, after all, and Rockstar has GTA to worry about.
In an ideal world, Remedy ties up Quantum Break and gets to do another Max Payne, maybe ignoring the events Rockstar Studios put in place and spinning off into whatever noir timeline it wants. But Max doesn t live in an ideal world and nor do we.
Strategy
Civilization
There s no suggestion of when Civilization VI might be announced, but it seems clear enough that Civ V is in the hands of the modders now, with no more expansions planned—which doesn t necessarily mean we ll be seeing a new game soon. The gap between Civ IV and Civ V was five years, and though five years has passed since Civ V (feels like yesterday, probably because we were playing Civ), with Beyond Earth as a midday snack it s reasonable to assume we ll have another year or two before we hear about the next one. Civ games don t need yearly iteration to stay relevant, though, so there s no rush. We re just curious to find out how Firaxis might further alter the board game—doesn t seem to be much point in releasing a game with Civ V s rules but prettier graphics, so if a new one is in the works we expect a divisive change or two.
StarCraft
Legacy of the Void is the end of this StarCraft story, but surely not the end of StarCraft. Back in August of last year, producer Tim Morten said that Blizzard may consider returning to Warcraft, but that more StarCraft is also possible. Anything is possible.
Also last year, we saw that Blizzard was looking for a "Senior Software Engineer, Classic Games," which might suggest that it s planning to re-release some oldies.
Meanwhile, Creative Assembly says work on the next historical Total War game has proceeded uninterrupted, though it hasn t been announced yet. The free-to-play Total War Arena is also in development, and is currently in closed beta.
XCOM
We can expect an expansion for XCOM 2, but after that it s anybody s guess. Unlike Enemy Unknown, XCOM 2 has all the longevity that modding affords Civilization, so a quick turnaround on a new one feels unnecessary. Enemy Unknown came out in 2012, so even if XCOM 3 is coming, it probably won t be until 2020 or later. And by such a futuristic-sounding date we have to assume we ll be living on cities built of flotsam lashed to tankers and cruise ships.
If you can imagine it, chances are there's a Skyrim mod for it. Skyrim is one of the most modded games of all time, with over 60,000 submissions on Nexus Mods and 28,000 in the Steam Workshop. Modders have created everything from tiny tweaks to entirely new campaigns to silly memes for Skyrim since its release in 2011. There's no sign of Skyrim modding slowing down now, with new mods still being created every day. It's an overwhelming number to sort through, which is why we're here to help find and install Skyrim mods.
This is our guide to the best Skyrim mods, sorted into categories that will make it easy for you to find what you're looking for. And if you're looking for Skyrim Special Edition mods, follow that link to our separate collection. Mods added in the latest update of this list have been marked with a ⭐.
It's no secret Bethesda's RPGs can be more than a bit buggy. There are glitches, optimization problems, and in Skyrim's case, a UI designed for consoles. Thankfully, long after the official patches stopped rolling out modders remain devoted to making the game more stable and usable. Here are some mods that will improve your overall experience.
Skyrim's map is functional but boring. A Quality World Map offers multiple ways to fix it. You can replace the map with a much more detailed world texture, with colors that help delineate the separate areas much more obviously, but there's also an option to have a paper map with a more Oblivion look if that's your thing.
Skyrim's original UI is, well, terrible. SkyUI makes it easier to use, more pleasant to read, and much more useful for sorting through your loot and menus. Most importantly, SkyUI adds a mod configuration menu to the pause screen, letting you tweak and adjust compatible mods (including many on this list). A lot of mods don't require SkyUI and will run just fine without it, but you'll get much more out of your mods if you have it.
Created by the same modders as the Unofficial Oblivion patches, the Unofficial Skyrim patches catch a huge amount of bugs the official patches don't. A lot of them are things you might never notice, like objects that were placed slightly wrong so they clip through each other or quests that break if you do something unusual, but it's still better to have them than not. There's one for the Legendary Edition and one for the official High Resolution textures patch.
This is a small mod, but it makes the game much less frustrating. Now instead of having to listen to the vendor dialogue before they’ll trade with you, the trade window opens up immediately while they give their speech about their junk—I mean “treasures.”
Sick of walking like a turtle and sprinting like a cheetah? This mod fixes the problem. Your movement speed is adjusted to more reasonable levels, from a brisk walk that lets you keep up with NPCs, to slower run speeds that make it challenging to escape from that cranky troll. Also eliminates “skating” from sneak running.
Dragons returning is a pretty big deal, but the main questline feels like you’re on a runaway train at times. This mod helps you modify the order of events to a more reasonable pace. Not only can you get Breezehome when you hand in the Dragonstone, but you can also ignore the Civil War part altogether! Fully customizable through MCM.
Project Optimization improves Skyrim performance by occlusion culling, which means not rendering effects you can't see. If you use a lot of serious lighting mods, like ENB and Realistic Lighting, then this mod can save you several frames per second.
This mod rezises and enhances the textures for armor, clothes, and weapons, making them both better looking while simultaneously making the file sizes smaller for improved performance. This is useful for users with low-end machines who still want to improve their graphics. The modder has done the same for animals and creatures.
Falling leaves and snow are pretty, but can sometimes cause FPS drops on older GPUs due to the size of the textures. Performance Plus decreases the fidelity of particles, which provides an FPS boost. In most cases, such as snow, it's barely noticeable, and the slight degrading of particle textures is more than made up for by an increase in performance.
Lets the player be way more in charge of what quests they want. Stops random auto-quest greetings from NPCs, stops books from giving auto-quests, and lets the player customize when they want to see certain quests become available. Full MCM support. Optimal experience paired with Timing Is Everything.
Using a keyboard and mouse for Skyrim means sometimes the game gets confused when you're selecting a dialogue option. You've noticed, surely, that sometimes when you choose a response the game thinks you've chosen a different one. Skyrim's dialogue controls are weird and clunky, and this mod completely and thankfully fixes that. The same modder also created one for message boxes.
You don't need your HUD onscreen all the time. This mod hides the crosshairs and status bars when you're not actively using them, such as outside combat. You can also toggle the compass and quest markers on and off with a keypress, and adjust their opacity.
On the other hand, sometimes you want a little more info on-screen. This widget adds a clock to your screen—with several different elegant and unobtrusive faces you can choose through SkyUI's mod configuration menu—so you can keep track of the time and date. The Dovahkiin's got a smartwatch.
Skyrim, frankly, wasn't really that fantastic looking to begin with, so there have naturally been a lot—a lot—of visual improvement mods over the years. Here's how to squeeze improved visuals out of the aging RPG.
A compilation of existing changes to NPC appearances, the Total Character Makeover makes everyone in Skyrim look better without making them better-looking, if you catch our drift. No nudity, no anime hair, no glamazon makeup, just a suite of new textures and tweaks to everything from beards to vampire fangs.
You may have noticed some things in Skyrim that should be sources of light don't actually cast any, while in other places things are brightly lit for no real reason. Enhanced Lights and FX fixes that, making light shine where it should. There are options for just how dark you want interiors to be, and enabling those will mean torches and spells like candlelight are vital. It also makes some nice tweaks to the appearance of smoke.
Does what it says: replaces Skyrim's textures: sky, water, architecture, clothing, clutter, reflections, and so on, of the cities, towns, dungeons, and landscapes. There's a full version if your PC can handle it, but there's also a lite version that should make things look nicer without killing your performance.
This comprehensive mod adds hundreds of new weather systems, a huge library of new cloud systems, a new sun, improved lighting for both fans of a fantasy look and realistic visuals, and even audio improvements. With all of these systems combining, each day in Skyrim will feel different from the last.
A pretty hefty collection of high-quality replacements for Skyrim textures, covering everything from equipment, landscapes, dungeons, and architecture. While they look much nicer, the textures are the same resolution as Bethesda's high-res DLC pack so it shouldn't slow you down.
Make sure you read the notes on the mod's page. There are hotfixes required to get everything working.
This mod edits a number of 3D models in the game, and with over 700 meshes placed in over 15,000 locations in the world, it's a welcome difference. You'll notice better looking architectural elements, furniture, objects in the landscape, and all sorts of other models that didn't get much attention from Bethesda.
Enhances your graphics with FXAA and other post effects, such as sharpen and bloom, creating crisper visuals and more vibrant colors. Conveniently, you can adjust these settings while you play by alt-tabbing out and moving the sliders on the mod's desktop utility.
This mod comes in three different versions, depending on how drastically you want to change your game. All versions promise more luxurious trees and bark, taller grass, and prettier plant life. The heavier versions completely replace the trees altogether and give you lusher greens for a summery feel.
Realistic Water Two, drawing and expanding on the work of some earlier water mods, adds better ripples, larger splashes, re-textured foam and faster water flow in streams, bobbing chunks of ice, and even murky, stagnant-looking water in dungeons. It's the next best thing to getting wet.
If you're looking to get closer to reality with crisp visuals, this ENB configuration is one to try. With hyper-realistic color corrections, realistic specular highlights and reflections, improved spell effects, and tons of other adjustments, it makes Skyrim look like a real-world place.
This collection of visual tweaks improves the lighting vastly without losing the eye-candy fantasy feel of Skyrim. It is, however, very hard on your GPU and may not play nicely with other visual or weather mods.
It may not seem like that big of a deal, but these little high-res book covers do make for an extremely pleasant upgrade over the standard, muddily-textured ones. When you're relaxing at home or perusing (or robbing) a bookstore or library, make sure you've installed this lovely cover mod.
Because they are! What self-respecting parent wants to give their kid a dirty, beat-up naked doll? Instead, give them an actual cute dolly, or an adorable teddy bear in a variety of different colours.
Gotten your fill of Skyrim's official quests? Tired of repeating adventures you've done before? Looking for some new locations to explore and conquer? Start right here.
Legacy of the Dragonborn adds a gallery in Solitude where you can keep mementos of your time in Skyrim. It's a museum about you, with space for almost every unique item in the game. All those quest rewards and Daedric artifacts you went to so much trouble to earn but don't use can be displayed in a beautiful building with its own library, store room and more. The curator hands out quests to help fill it, there's an entire archeology system with its own perks, and Legacy is compatible with several major quest mods like Moonpath, Moon and Star, and Undeath so you can display items from those as well. The only downside is that it won't recognize items received before installing it, so it's worth starting a fresh save.
Miss the arena? This quest mod adds a group of pit fighters you can join to the Gray Quarter of Windhelm, each of them voice-acted. The bouts take place in bespoke arenas outside the bounds of the map, and you can choose to fight one-on-one, against teams, or against wild animals. You'll have to wait between fights, so it's a good faction to visit in between other questlines. If you use the Open Cities mod download this version instead, and make sure to read the notes on that page to get the voices working.
Want your own flying ship? Yeah, course you do. This takes the airship model from the Moonpath to Elsweyr quest mod and combines it with the interactions from a separate skyship mod to make the best flying fantasy you'll get. The Dev Aveza is docked behind Solitude, and once it's yours can be flown all over the map. It's a much easier way to get to the top of the Throat of the World than walking, and it's got room on board for all your belongings.
This total conversion mod creates an entirely new world, very nearly the size of Skyrim itself, and populates it with new dungeons, quests, monsters, and fully-voice NPCs. Some of Skyrim's systems have also been tweaked, there's a new custom story to enjoy, and a good 50+ hours of new adventures to be hard. You can read about the opening hours of Enderal here.
Winterhold used to be the capital of Skyrim, but the inhabitants still haven’t rebuilt it since the Great Collapse. This mod solves that problem. It’s a quest-driven mod that not only rebuilds the town to its former glory (including more shops and amenities), but also gives you a horse and a lore-friendly player home.
Ever wanted to tell the Blades to get bent when they tell you to kill your dragon bro? Well, now you can! With this mod from Arthmoor, you now have the option to explain matters to the Blades and make them see reason (although you might have to get a bit forceful—darn).
Adds in a lot of content that Bethesda cut before release, including NPCs, dialogue, items, quests, and locations like villages, towers, farms, mills, and more. The mod author, Arthmoor, also organized and cleaned up the code so that everything would make sense and run smoothly.
Have a burning desire to beat Nazeem at his own career? This mod adds a Hearthfire-style farm to Skyrim. Check out the notices posted at some of the inns, buy the property, and rebuild the ruined farm in Dawnstar into a model of agriculture with livestock and several farm fields. You can even upgrade it to include a guardhouse and your own meadery.
This extensive mod not only gives you a new city to explore, but a murder mystery to solve, NPCs to interrogate, secrets to uncover, and, oh yeah, a chance to do some time travel. Voiced by over a dozen actors, this mod took years of development time and is recommended for characters over level five. We tried it out here. (The Forgotten City is also being made into a standalone game.)
Ahoy, matey! Fancy yourself a ship captain? This mod lets you acquire a ship, hire a crew, and set sail for a number of quests on the Sea of Ghosts. There are seven quests scattered over a number of new islands, and the mod features professional voice acting to boot.
Ever thought it was pretty stupid that you got into the Circle after only doing a few minor quests, or that you were railroaded into becoming a werewolf? With this mod, you get a lot more quests, becoming a werewolf is your choice, and you can battle the Silver Hand with members other than Farkas or Aela.
This mod adds ten new cities to Skyrim, all drawn from The Elder Scrolls: Arena, like Amol, Black Moor, Granite Hall, and others. Respectful of game lore, the cities have been added as close to their original locations as possible, and fit in with Skyrim's aesthetic nicely. They've even been populated with NPCs. We explored it here.
As the saying goes: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Alternately, you can beat 'em and join 'em. I'm talking about necromancers, in this case. Undeath is a custom quest in which you're tasked with wiping out an evil cabal of necromancers, with the twist that you can choose to continue their dark unholy work. You can even perform a ritual that will allow you to become a powerful Lich and command an army of the undead. It's meant for players over level 30. We covered it here.
Puts a ton of hidden shelters in the game, dotted all over the landscape. They're great fun to stumble upon and perfect for outlaws to stash their stuff or just disappear from the law. The mod is customizable depending on how easily players want to find these places (you can turn map markers off).
For those who are sick of snowy mountains, Moonpath to Elsweyr offers two brand new environments: lush jungle and barren desert. This quest mod takes you to the Khajit homeland of Elsweyr, which you can travel across in your airship. Did I mention you get an airship? You get an airship. We spoke to its creator about making one of the first Skyrim quest mods.
Falksaar is a massive 'DLC sized' continent created by a young modder as an audition piece for Bethesda. The island itself is impressive, comparable in size and scope to Dragonborn's Solstheim, though a bit more linear. Still, the continent itself is well-worth exploring.
A dangerous criminal from Morrowind has arrived in Skyrim, and your quest to track him down will take you to a new town and an inventive, puzzle-filled dungeon, introduce you to several new NPCs including merchants and traders, and outfit you with new weapons and spells.
A huge and fantastic quest mod that centres around rebuilding and ruling the town of Helgen, also known as “that place that got burnt down at the start of the game." Following the quest will lead you to creating a ragtag bunch of misfits to act as the town guard, while the city itself slowly expands around you.
Descent into Madness was one of the highlights of Richard Cobbett's Week of Madness diary. Take a nap in your bed in Breezehome and you'll be transported into the realm of Sheogorath, where two nations called Madness and Dementia are engaged in an eternal clash of the crazies. Each side offers a different, hour-long questline full of puzzles and riddles, all set within a bizarre, dreamlike landscape.
Taking a page from The Witcher, this mod adds a notice board outside inns in every city in Skyrim. There you can collect radiant missions, some to gather materials or ingredients, some to fetch a specific item, others to hunt down bandits for a bounty or rescue a citizen. It's a good way to keep yourself busy when you're not saving the world.
So you've done your part as the Dragonborn, but now you're looking for a new twist on the game? These mods will help you start over as someone else entirely and add survival needs like thirst and hunger for more realism and challenge.
Post offices may not sound like an exciting addition to Skyrim, but Imperial Mail adds a heck of a lot of convenience. Once you open an account at either the central office in Solitude or any of the marked taverns, you can forward equipment between them for a fee—meaning you can send a bunch of heavy gear back home after a quest, then carry on. There are also quests on offer if you want to help the Imperial Mail out by delivering messages, and it's compatible with Legacy of the Dragbonborn so you can send items direct to the gallery.
Both of these mods work together well to enhance a survival playthrough. The first puts a hunter cabin in each Hold, which can be used as a basic starting player home. Also includes some lore-friendly weapons and arrows for ranger characters, including a "secret stash" of better weapons out in the woods of Falkreath. Corners of Skyrim puts even smaller shelters in the game, great as emergency shelters that offer a few basic necessities. They both feature creative architecture and are lore-friendly. Player can decide if they want to see NPCs living in the shelters or not.
A great addition to survival playthroughs. No more fishing with your bare hands! Adds fishing poles, fishing nets, a bait mechanic, spellbooks, and the explosive “Dwarven boomfishing” ability. You can also fish up new and exciting junk, some of which you can sell off for extra gold.
One of those small mods that just makes sense. Created by Chesko, author of Frostfall, this mod gives players the ability to knock on locked doors instead of having to break and enter. Someone might answer the door, or you can convince them to open up with your Speech skills. Customize options through MCM.
It's cold in Skyrim, and Frostfall lets you really feel it. An immersive survival system tracks weather, climate, time of day, and even the type of clothing you're wearing to determine how cold you are. It also allows you to gain experience in terms of camping and endurance skill, and a new ability helps you find the creatures and items you'll need to survive.
For immersive roleplayers, religion in Skyrim may feel a bit lackluster. This mod makes several significant changes, including the ability to build an actual relationship with one of the Divines (or with a Daedra). You can expect blessings or curses depending on your character’s actions, and praying at a shrine may gain you divine favor. You can also meditate for inner strength if you’d rather not deal with a deity.
If you want to begin a new game of Skyrim as someone other than the Dragonborn, this is one of several mods that give you a fresh start. Skip the opening sequence and begin life as someone arriving by boat, locked in a jail cell, a visitor at an inn, an outlaw in the wilderness, and many more.
Looking for more ways to start a new playthrough? This mod expands on the original Live Another Life by Arthmoor with over a dozen new beginnings, including the option to start as a vampire, a werewolf, or even a skooma addict. And just like the original mod, there’s a good mix of safe options along with those that are downright deadly.
Remaining in first-person mode helps a game feel immersive, and this mod does that in spades. Not only can you look down and see your entire body while playing, but other activities such as crafting, cooking, riding horses and even riding dragons won't break you out of first-person mode.
Another great mod that lets you begin a new game as a random, no-name adventurer. You can quickly choose your starting gear and pick your arrival spot from dozens of different camps, inns. You can toggle dragons off completely and participate in the civil war despite not being the Dragonborn. You can even choose to begin as a vampire or werewolf. Our coverage is here.
In Skyrim you may contract a disease or two from time to time, but they're typically unchanging and you can deal with them at your leisure. This mod makes diseases progressive, meaning they get worse and worse until they're cured, though there's also a chance your might fight off the infection with bed rest. Hunger and thirst also have stages of severity, food can spoil, and getting enough sleep is important. It's entirely customizable as well.
Get immersed in new audio: tons of it. Hundreds of new sounds effects are included to make dungeons and sewers spookier, enhance the wilderness and wildlife, and make cities and villages more lively and real. This mod is a treat for your ears, and has customizable modules for each type of area.
You're not the only one dealing with the harsh elements in Skyrim. Using this mod, NPCs will bundle up in the cold, move inside if its raining, and do their best to avoid blizzards. The mod also adds effects like wet-sounding footsteps, visible vapor from your breath when it's chilly, and reduced movement speed in heavy snow and strong wind.
Being a lycanthrope is so much better with this mod, which features new music, over 200 new beast skins, new enemies, and lots of customization through MCM. Also, who doesn't want to try being a werebear?
This mod provides a more immersive experience for hunters. No longer do you simply yank loot or food out an animal's inventory, you can now dress the carcass, skin it, and butcher it. You can even carry the entire animal back to your camp or to a vendor. The mod comes with hunting knives, dozens of new ingredients that can be harvested, and new recipes.
Wandering into a tavern or inn on a cold and blustery night isn't the experience it really should be, and this mod makes inns a bit more realistic. Room rates widely vary, you can arrange for an extended say, and you can even arrange lodging for your followers so they're not just standing next to your bed all night while you sleep.
Intending to make outdoor living a robust experience, this mod lets you build several different kinds of fires, from a weak and flickering fire to a roaring blaze suitable for cooking. You can also buy or craft camping gear like tents and tanning racks, and backpacks that display your various cooking pots and waterskins. If you're married, your spouse can camp with you. Here's our piece about it.
With great power comes great responsibility. But what about great rewards? With all of your accomplishments and deadly abilities, it would make sense for you to become King of Skyrim, don't you think? Move into a huge castle, have your own army follow you everywhere, and throw citizens in prison or have them beheaded. It's good to be the king.
Looking for some more variety in Skyrim's bestiary, more realistic behavior from animals, and some upgrades for the countless dragons you'll have to fight? Here are some mods that make your enemies more interesting.
You've got two options for replacing Skyrim's dragons with something goofy-looking. The "Really Useful Dragons mod" adds Thomas the Tank Engine, who seems to make it into even more games via mods than Shrek these days, and Macho Dragons turns them into 'Macho Man' Randy Savage. Both are hilarious and creepy in their own way. Note that the first actually adds a variety of characters from Thomas the Tank Engine, if that's a selling point for you.
Arachnophobes might appreciate the mod that replaces the spider textures with Spider-Man, although it still looks freaky as all get-out to me. Insects Begone is a more lore-friendly attempt at getting rid of the bugs, swapping spiders for bears and chaurus for skeevers as well as deleting spiderwebs and other arachnid clutter.
Guess what? You're not the only one who can shout, Dragonborn. This mod gives dragons a whole new toolbox of spells and shouts, new abilities like disarming attacks and the power to summon animals or other monsters. One can raise the dead, another can't fly—it's a skeleton—but uses deadly physical attacks. It's completely customizable as well, in terms of difficulty, frequency, and loot. We tried out these new dragons here.
There are a lot of excellent retexture mods available for Skyrim, but the sad thing is that you can only ever use one at a time. Automatic Variants exists to correct that problem. It allows Skyrim to randomly choose different skins from a pool of variants. Pick a bunch you like, and the mod will distribute those textures for you in the game.
While it doesn't add new species, this mod does add around 100 recolored or touched-up textures for Skyrim's animals, everything from goats to bears to werewolves to the oft-discussed mudcrabs. You can choose from high or medium resolutions.
Basically, it makes horses a million times better. Your followers can ride them, and fight while riding. You can conduct conversations and loot while on horseback. There are a variety of new saddles and armor types. Dismounting is quicker and automatically draws your weapon. You can auto-mount horses when they're called, and even dictate their AI in combat.
If you're tired of fighting vanilla creatures and don't mind digressing from the lore, check out Immersive Creatures. A huge collection of modders contributed to assemble an astonishing 2,500+ new creatures to populate Skyrim. From goblins to crocodile demons to dragon-people—and even a mechanical dragon.
You don't just have to slaughter every creature in Skyrim: you can also tame them, keep them on a farm, and have them accompany you on quests. Whether you want a pet mammoth or a pet chicken, this mod will allow you to assemble an impressive bestiary of loyal creatures. You can even breed them to create more powerful animals. Here's our write-up.
Play Skyrim long enough and you'll notice that the difficulty drops off sharply at later levels. The problem is that a lot of standard enemy types don't have high level variants. The toughest Bandit, for example, is level 25, not much of a challenge when your Dovakhin gets past level 30. High Level Enemies contains hundreds of new enemy types, ensuring that basic enemies remain a challenge well into the endgame.
Animals have been revamped with better AI and more realistic behavior. Bears will hibernate in winter, animals will travel to water to drink each day, and predators not only hunt but whatever they consume will remain in their inventory (belly) for a while. Instead of always attacking, they may flee, or simply just watch you. Plus, you won't just see full-grown animals but also their young following them around.
Looking for some new gear and armor? Not happy with how your character moves? Want some new weapons to carry and new ways to swing them? Here's the place to start.
It's not real fantasy if people aren't wearing big flappy cloaks. Cloaks of Skyrim populates the world with a variety of new capes and cloaks, automatically adding them to the inventories of random guards and bandits and so on, which makes them look much more impressive. And then you can loot those impressive cloaks off their corpses. It's worth adding 360 Walk and Run Plus as well, which prevents some of the clipping issues that otherwise ruin the effect. There's nothing to be done about Argonian and Khajiit tails, however, so this mod simply removes them when cloaks are worn.
A collaboration between Valve and Bethesda to celebrate the opening of the Skyrim Steam Workshop, this mod adds the space core from Portal 2. Yeah, the little guy who is obsessed with space. He falls to earth when you're near Whiterun and can be picked up, then crafted into armor. Make sure to keep an eye on your skills screen for another effect added by this mod.
Want to know which skill books you haven't read? Now they glow bright red. Spell tomes are green until you've learned their spells, and other books are different shades of blue depending on whether they trigger quests or not. The other advantage of this mod is that you can tell which books you need for that completionist library you're putting together at a glance.
Bethesda left several unassigned kill moves lurking in Skyrim's code when the game was released, including some very cool shield bash kills. The Dance of Death re-enables them and re-organises all kill moves so that they're gradually unlocked as you earn perks. It also includes a full menu that lets you control the rate of kill moves. Alternatively there's Violens — A Killmove Mod, which features much of the same functionality but also works for ranged attacks.
Immersive Animations adds dozens of little touch-ups to Skyrim's existing animations, plus a few nifty new ones. It's also compatible with Dual Sheath Redux, allowing for all sorts of nice animations for having your shield on your back, or sheathing two weapons at once.
Makes lore-friendly and balanced changes to many unique items in the game, including Auriel's Bow, the Gauldur Amulet, Harkon's Sword, the Jagged Crown, and plenty more, including artifacts from the Dawnguard and Dragonborn expansions. There are lots of customization options for the player in case they don't want all the items affected.
This mod provides a hefty selection of new weapons that fit in nicely with the existing look and feel of Skyrim. You'll find axes, daggers, maces, and any number of new swords, all beautifully designed and textured and suitable for veteran characters and those just starting out.
Does your character have better things to do than learn smithing, or are they opposed to getting their hands dirty like a common peasant? With this mod, you can simply hire blacksmiths to craft, temper, and hone your gear for you. It's a fantastic gold dump, as they'll automatically craft everything to the very best of their ability and charge you for it. Also different blacksmiths have different skills—the smith in Solitude can craft up to Legendary, but not so much the smith in Riverwood. Eorlund Gray-Mane is basically a smithing god. MCM supported with lots of customization options.
Zweihander is a set of new animations for two handed weapons in Skyrim. The big selling point is the idle animation, which sees you resting your sword/axe/hammer on your shoulder. There's lots more than that though, with animations for running, turning and even a leaping overhead strike included. It's all customizable too, so you can mix and match new and old animations.
Belt Fastened Quivers moves all arrow quivers from the back, where they often clip through things like backpacks or cloaks, down to the waist, adding new animations for the new position. It was originally made as part of Frostfall, so if you're using that, you don't need the standalone mod. If you aren't, however, it's still well worth getting just to stop your arrows from clipping through the items from Immersive Amours and Wet and Cold.
This mod brings you a huge collection of great-looking lore-friendly armor. And it's not just for you, either: the armors are assigned to various NPCs and randomized loot lists throughout the game. You can even turn individual armors on and off through SkyUI's configuration menu, giving you full control over what items actually appear in your game.
Fancy installing some extra storage on your plate mail? This mod adds a whole range of pouches, belts, potion holders and water bottles that can be stuck on top of whatever clothes you're wearing in several configurations, giving you the look of a serious adventurer equipped for a long journey.
Warmonger Armory is another compilation mod. It adds a ton of great looking new armor, clothing and weapons to the game, including some using DLC equipment. Once again these items are carefully distributed around the world, given to specific NPCs, and added to randomized equipment lists.
If you're using some of the lighting mods you'll notice that nighttime in Skyrim has gotten much darker. Spells and torches can help, but warriors who want to use their off-hand are out of luck. Chesko's Wearable Lantern mod sorts out this problem, letting you clip a light source to your belt, front or rear. Companions can also carry the lanterns, and will automatically douse them when you enter sneak mode.
Skyrim is full of unique items with fascinating lore behind them, but unfortunately very few of them have the looks to go with their backstory. InsanitySorrow's Unique Uniques adds new textures and meshes for several of the game's unique weapons, giving you a great excuse to bust out Dragonbane again.
A lot of games have been called "Skyrim with guns" but now Skyrim fits that description too, thanks to this mod that lets you carry a blunderbuss, a flintlock rifle, and a grenade launcher. With custom sounds and bayonets, it's time to introduce those primitive Skyrim screwheads to your boomstick. We tried it out here.
There are more than just monsters in Skyrim: there are also everyday citizens. Like just about everything else in Skyrim, you can change them to suit your wishes.
Maybe you don't think a blue Khajiit who follows you around commenting on everything and being sarcastic about Lydia is what Skyrim needs, but trust us on this. Inigo is a follower with tons of dialogue, some tied to his own questline and more that crops up at appropriate times depending on the location you're at. He can be told where to go and what to do by whistling, and will follow you even if you've got an existing companion, chatting away with them thanks to skilfully repurposed voice lines.
A sequel to a much-loved Oblivion mod (which Terry Pratchett contributed to), Vilja in Skyrim adds the great-granddaughter of the original Vilja as a follower. She's an alchemist with her own questline to follow and a unique system to give her orders, essentially spells bound to hotkeys that can be used to co-ordinate attacks. Like Inigo she doesn't count toward your follower limit, and if introduced to each other Inigo and Vilja will even chat amongst themselves.
This AI overhaul makes citizen react more sensibly to attacks, running away to secure locations when dragons or the like attack their settlements. It also changes the way combatants act, with some sensibly backing off to regroup at low health or making judgements about whether an opponent's worth taking on based on their level and equipment. Also makes changes to NPC schedules, their responses to weather conditions and more, making all Skyrim's citizens behave more believably.
Guards in Skyrim are total arseholes. They constantly belittle you, even when you've saved the world several times over. This mod helps fix that. As you climb the ladder of respectability, more common phrases (arrow to the knee, etc.) will become less common and they'll start being more respectful.
If you'd like your companions to be a bit more fun to have around, this mod adds a ton of new followers with custom voices and tons of location-based commentary, their own quest lines, and some interesting and unique appearances. If you find one you particularly like, great news—you can marry them.
Ever noticed that Skyrim's Imperial army is a no-girls-allowed club? Oh sure, there are female named characters like Legate Rikke, but the actual rank and file soldiers, with the exception of Windhelm and Riften, are always male. This mod edits the list of models that town guards and Imperial soldiers are randomly drawn from, adding some women into the mix, and also adds in several different faces for the male guards.
Immersive Patrols creates a series of patrols for Skyrim's different factions: Stormcloak, Imperial, Thalmor, Dawnguard, Bandits, and so on. Occasionally these routes intersect, resulting in two opposed factions fighting to the death. Imperials and Stormcloaks regularly clash at designated warzones, with the survivors either reinforcing or taking control of the nearest fort. It adds a tremendous amount of life to Skyrim's conflict, and generates far more of those emergent clashes we all love to watch.
Want multiple followers? Want to micromanage them, pick their outfits, tell them which spells to use, how to fight, where to live, and how to level up? This mod allows that, and more, including making them smart enough to avoid traps, ignore friendly fire, and ride horses.
The roads of Skyrim are typically pretty empty, except for you and the occasional bandit who is forced to make his living trying to rob you since you're the only person on the roads of Skyrim. This mod adds dozens of fellow travelers who move between the cities and towns. Now you'll encounter traveling merchants, alchemists, mercenaries, and mages when you hit the road.
Here you'll find tweaks, changes, and complete overhauls of Skyrim's systems. Grab some new spells, enjoy added perks and skills, and change the way you fight.
If you're using one of the mods that adds more perks you might be frustrated at how slowly you earn the points to unlock them. This mod lets you choose how many points you get for them at each level-up and works retroactively as well, so if you're already level 40 you're going to get a bunch in one go.
Ever thought the College of Winterhold should better resemble an institution of higher learning? This mod adds awesome visuals, ongoing experiments, the ability to specialize in certain schools of magic, and even an option to refuse the title of Arch-Mage (and give it to Tolfdir instead). Custom options in MCM.
Another simple mod that just makes sense. This mod gives a separate cooldown for each Shout, allowing the player to use several Shouts at the same time. It also adds SkyUI-type Active Effects so that you can see how many Shouts are active. The actual time for the cooldowns has not been adjusted from vanilla, and no Shouts have been altered.
Some of Skyrim's perks and skills are a wee bit drab. Enchantment, for example, is a useful skill but isn't much fun to put points into simply because most of its perks are simple increases in enhancement strength. Perkus Maximus overhauls a number of systems, keeping passive effects but adding powerful and interesting active effects as well. We covered this mod here.
So long, hack and slash combat: you're going to need to be far more careful tackling foes to-to-toe. This functions due to some changes to AI and especially damage: getting hit with a sword or an axe is something you can't just shrug off anymore. As a result, combat is more tense, takes more patience, and is considerably more challenging.
Apocalypse adds 140 new spells to Skyrim, most of them pretty well balanced. These aren't just 'spray lightning/fire/cold until someone dies' spells either. There's a whole variety of cool summons, disabling effects, and unusual attacks available.
You probably don't spend much time fighting unarmed: it's just not that much fun. Way of the Monk fixes this by giving you more combat options when taking on the world fist-first. There are new skills, perks, spiked gloves, and ways to enchant your fists to do different types of magic damage.
There should be more to stealth than just being invisible and gaining surprise damage bonuses. Now you can be a genuine slippery, filthy, sneaky type. Slit the throats of the unaware. Knock people unconscious from behind. Wear masks that hide your identity. Douse torches and lanterns to move through the shadows. Add an arsenal of trick arrows, including one that launches ropes that allows you to climb walls.
Skyrim's Dragon shouts are cool. Much cooler than regular magic. The best fighter/mage in Skyrim is frequently just an ordinary fighter who yells a lot. Thunderchild expands the Dovakhin's magic vocals with a bunch of cool new shouts. Yell until you teleport, shout ghosts into existence, holler until the earth quakes or just scream so hard you open up a black hole.
Spice up cooking and alchemy with this expansive mod that adds dozens of new ingredients, recipes, and effects. Portable alchemy stations mean you can craft on the go, potions can be sorted from weakest to strongest, and you'll even be able to cook up alchemical bombs to hurl at your enemies—even while on horseback.
Bring a little Dishonored into Skyrim. Some of the powers like Blink, Possession, Devouring Swarm, Wind Blast, and Void Gaze are at your disposal once your read a mysterious book, meet the mysterious Outsider, and visit a series of shrines.
How many spare dragon souls have you got? If you've been playing a while, probably tons. Now you can put your spare souls to use. This mod adds a Dragon Stone (look for it near the Guardian Stones) where you can exchange souls (the amount is configurable) for perks.
Now that you've found some mods you'd like to try, here are the tools you can use to get them working. Again, make sure you read the pages for each of your mods: many of them require specific steps and instructions.
Vortex ⭐
Replacing the Nexus Mod Manager is Vortex, a newer program for organizing your mod loadout. Available from the Nexus Mods website, just like most of the mods on our list, it will handle everything for you. It's easy to use and makes downloading, activating, and deactivating mods a breeze. It's also useful in that it supports tons of other games, like The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, and many more.
Skyrim Script Extender
Skyrim Script Exstender (SKSE) is a utility that's required for some of the more complex mods to work. Not every mod on this list requires it, but many do, including the essential SkyUI, so you're best off just installing it up front. SKSE is now available directly through Steam, but you can still find it here if you prefer manual installation.
Load Order Optimization Tool
Load order is often very important when using multiple mods, and sometimes if mods aren't loaded in the correct order they won't work properly. LOOT is a great tool for automating and customizing your load order, and will detect problems and attempt to repair them.
Steam Workshop
You can also browse and use Skyrim mods via the Steam Workshop. It's easy to navigate and adding them to your roster is accomplish by simply clicking the subscribe button. Keep in mind, more complex mods usually require a few more steps to install, and even if they appear in the Workshop they may require more steps to get running.
After a dramatic debut at last last year's E3, which brought us news of a certain post-apocalyptic roleplay game, Bethesda has found it in its heart (or more likely pockets) to host a follow-up at E3 2016. And this after Pete Hines suggested it wasn't a sure thing.
All we have is an announcement, the date and time—June 12, 7pm PT—and a line-up of stylised characters from the Bethesda portfolio. There's some power armour in there, a nord, demon and yep, there's ol' Corvo too. I have my fingers crossed to hear more on Dishonored 2 before June, but if not it's pretty unthinkable it wouldn't take centre stage.
Elder Scrolls 6? They're devs, not machines, and I'm a pessimist.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind® Game of the Year Edition
/u/TheTitanova's finest work.
When I think 'lore', my mind goes to dusty tomes in long-forgotten libraries, or scrolls of prophecy that blind the reader. Facebook isn't typically the vehicle by which arcane knowledge is conveyed, but that hasn't stopped Redditor TheTitanova from retelling the entirety of Morrowind's backstory in status updates.
Posted to the Morrowind subreddit and created using a Facebook Wall generator (having friends whose names coincide exactly with the cast of Morrowind would be quite the coincidence and a boring Venn diagram), this timeless work goes deep into the history of Tamriel and is naturally laden with spoilers. Long-time Morrowind fans should get a kick out of the in-jokes.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind® Game of the Year Edition
I'm enjoying Morrowind's new vogue—it was the first open-world game I played, so it's hard not to coo over throwbacks like Morrowind Rebirth, Skywind and OpenMW. The latter is a project to port Morrowind into a new, open-source engine that will allow modding (and all-new games) beyond anything the Elder Scrolls Construction Set is capable of. Multiplayer, for instance.
Officially, multiplayer is on the OpenMW crew's wishlist rather than their aims for version 1.0, but that hasn't stopped one Stanislav Zhukov having a crack at it. The video above shows two instances of Morrowind running one one machine in which one character is clearly synced up to the other's world. Position, animations, inventory and player attributes carry across.
OpenMW can't yet support interaction between the visitor and the host's world, but as a networking experiment on a 13-year-old game, it's a corker.
The Skyrim theme song Dragonborn is thoroughly epic stuff. You can't really dance to it, but it's got the sturm, it's got the drang, and it's got Max von Sydow in your head, telling you that it's time to kick ass and chew bubblegum—and boy, there is yet again a crippling shortage of bubblegum. The only thing that could possibly make it more epic is seeing it sung by an 80-member Swedish chorus fronted by singer Myrra Malmberg. So, here you go.
Yes, the video is a couple years old, but it's semi-relevant right now because the track is one of 13 included on the upcoming Greatest Video Game Music III—Choral Edition, which will be out on January 29. The album will also include the Skyrim track Age of Oppression, as well as music from World of Warcraft, Portal 1 and 2, Assassin's Creed IV, and Minecraft. It's available for preorder now on iTunes.
On this week's mod Roundup, a more informative HUD arrives for Skyrim and wearable backpacks appear in Fallout 4. Meanwhile, The Witcher 3 gets a beautiful texture makeover, and Arma 3 becomes host to an alien virus in a mod that echos John Carpenter's classic horror film "The Thing."
Here are the most promising mods we've seen this week.
If you're looking for an immersive way to improve your carry weight in Fallout 4 (without strapping on a hulking set of power armor), here's a nice little mod that adds a wearable backpack. Backpacks are always a highly requested mod in Bethesda RPGs: they makes you feel like a real traveler, a drifter, a vagabond. This one is no exception.
I think The Witcher 3 looked pretty nice, but the great thing about the modders of PC games is that they're always working hard to make games look even better. This mod improves—greatly I'd say—the textures of rocks and boulders, crates and sacks, and floors and tiles. Have a look at the video above: comparison shots begin at about 45 seconds in, and you can really see the difference.
This custom scenario for Arma 3 brings to life John Carpenter's landmark horror film The Thing (based on the sci-fi novella "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campell, Jr., which I recently read.) Set in 1982, you lead a team of Marines to investigate an outpost in Antarctica and deal with (shoot) the horrifying results of an alien virus. Note, it requires several other mods to be installed—you'll find a full list on this Steam Workshop page.
You're romping through Skyrim and spot something: a book, a weapon, a piece of armor. What are its properties? To find out, you need to pick it up, then open your inventory and search for the item to find out. The moreHUD mod makes an item's properties available simply by looking at it. It'll tell you if you've already read the book you're looking at, how a weapon's damage will improve your attacks, and list an ingredient's effects. You can even see how much an item weighs, and how it'll contribute to your current carryweight. Nice!
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind® Game of the Year Edition
There s a theory that no one ever loves one of Bethesda s open-world games as much as they love their first. Whichever Elder Scrolls you first lost yourself in will be the one that sticks with you forever, the theory goes, and none of the others will measure up. But although there certainly is a format shared by all the single-player RPGs in the Elder Scrolls series, there isn t a formula each new game makes significant changes, and many of those changes seem like responses to common criticisms of the previous fantasy epic.
It feels like Bethesda pays attention to the things people complain about and use mods to fix, though the company rarely gets credit for it. It s especially noticeable when you put all five central games in the series ignoring the spin-offs side by side to see how they ve evolved, and how different they are. This is our history of The Elder Scrolls, from Arena to Skyrim, republished with the release of Skyrim Special Edition.
The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994)
Speaking of evolution, The Elder Scrolls: Arena went through some famously massive changes even before it was properly begun. Initially conceived as a game about a team of gladiators competing in turn-based battles (hence the subtitle), what started as a series of sidequests in dungeons and cities took over during early development and became the core of the game, reshaping it into a first-person real-time RPG in the mold of Ultima Underworld.
What Arena added to the genre was a massive overworld. Its scale still hasn t been matched by any of the follow-ups in the series: players can travel across the entire continent of Tamriel, including the main locations of each of the later games. It isn t like the continuous open worlds of today, though. Fast travel is the only way to get from one settlement to the next because the wilderness is algorithmically generated filler surrounding each town. You can walk down roads looking at trees and stumbling across the occasional dungeon for hours, or at least until the game s memory fills and it became unstable, but you ll never reach the next town.
In those towns the people are created by a similar algorithmic process. Each character has an individual name and career, but every butcher tells you about the same shipment of mutton and every second joiner complains about dryrot. Each place feels like a remix of the last, the random name generator throwing up forgettable shops like “The Basic Merchandise” with the same white-skinned human character models for bartenders and other service providers no matter which race of people the rest of the populace in that area is composed of. There are sidequests in these population centers, picked up in bars, but all are variations on walking around town to collect or deliver things.
Where Arena shined was in its main quests. Not for their bare bones story—after escaping from a prison you’d been locked in by an evil wizard who banished the Emperor to another dimension, you were sent to collect the pieces of a magic artifact to defeat him—but for the dungeons each chapter is set in. They’re hand-crafted, making them far more atmospheric than the randomized dungeons in the rest of the game, and each has a dramatically different theme. In Selene’s Web spiders are bred in pits and signs warn their trainers to be careful, while in Labyrinthian (revisited in Skyrim) the story of two brothers cursed to guard the place is written on the walls.
Most of the dungeons have an alternate way of exploring them that monsters won’t use, perhaps by jumping into mineshafts or underground rivers, as if the player is an alien in the ventilation shafts leaping out to launch surprise attacks before scurrying away. And though its sound palette was limited, the roar of a troll in the distance or the beating of drums in the deep adds menace.
The rest of the world isn’t so atmospheric, and not just because of the randomization. Tamriel then was a much more generic fantasy setting. Its Orcs are typical dungeon fodder rather than a playable race, and the Khajiit are described as “feline and sleek” but look like ordinary humans. There are no Daedra and no Dark Brotherhood assassins. Though the Elder Scrolls themselves are referred to throughout Arena, repeatedly looked to for clues to the location of the next dungeon, a lot of what we think of as essential parts of the Elder Scrolls series aren’t present, and wouldn’t appear till its sequel.
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996)
There were two ways to make a character in Arena. You could choose a class from a list of 18, or have one chosen for you after filling out a questionnaire like a cross between the quandaries at the start of Ultima IV and the Voight-Kampff test from BladeRunner. Daggerfall adds the option to create your own class, as well as a second set of interview questions to determine your background, asking about your childhood nickname, motivation for seeking adventure, and so on. As well as influencing starting skills, these answers were incorporated into the player’s journal to create a backstory for who they were before being roped into helping the Emperor with his latest problem. From the start Daggerfall aimed for a higher level of detail than Arena.
To achieve that it shrunk in scope from an entire continent to two provinces, High Rock and Hammerfell, which is still massive compared to the later games. The world map is so intimidating, each town and dungeon a single pixel, that there’s a search function without which you’d never find anything. Although fast travel is still a necessity for getting around because it takes hours to walk anywhere, it is possible to trudge from one location to the next even if you see the same trees and mushrooms a hundred times in between. Some locations, like the witches’ covens, are almost impossible to find except by stumbling across them this way.
To get to that overworld though, players have to survive the beginning. Although Arena and Daggerfall are both games in the then-popular ‘good luck surviving the starter dungeon’ genre, adding more options to character creation in Daggerfall made it even easier to create a hero who’s ill-equipped to face the brutal beginning, a dungeon where resting can summon grizzly bears and there are enemies who can’t be harmed by mundane weapons.
Escape to the city of Daggerfall, as the tutorial suggests before promptly breaking and never reappearing, and things change. While the streets are still on a 1:1 scale, making travel from one shop to the next take minutes, the people on those streets have a lot more to say. Reviews of Arena had said things like “NPC interaction is rather lifeless”, but in Daggerfall there’s a bewildering variety of conversation topics to choose from and different answers based on whether you ask bluntly or politely. Many characters belong to factions, and completing sidequests for them increases your reputation with those factions—another layer of complexity aimed at giving life to the NPCs.
The NPCs still draw their answers from a common pool that repeated quickly, but the intent was clearly to address one of Arena’s flaws. Another criticism of Arena’s towns was that wandering monsters infested them at night, gangs of skeletons stalking the streets like they were auditioning for Westeros Side Story. In Daggerfall, there’s an explanation for this: the ghost of King Lysander and his army of wraiths haunt the city, moaning “VENGEANCE!” and driving everyone into well-lit taverns for safety.
Every city has guilds, and now they’re joinable and have quests associated with them. There are secret guilds too—pick enough pockets and the Thieves Guild will recruit you, murder innocents and the Dark Brotherhood will be impressed, get bitten by a vampire and their brethren will be in touch. Summoning the pagan Daedra triggers quests for artifacts that would recur throughout the series, like Azura’s Star and the madgod’s staff Wabbajack. These side stories are richer than Arena’s, but also more likely to break. NPCs you need to interact with might not spawn, and the math behind the random dungeons that sidequests send you to sometimes place objectives in inaccessible rooms.
Where dungeons were Arena’s strong point, they’re Daggerfall’s weakest. Twisting staircases and angled floors make for jumbled geographies that turn the automap into an eyeboggling mess: rotatable 3D sculptures that look like they were drawn by M. C. Escher. It’s easy to get stuck on objects or fall through the floor, which happened so frequently a keyboard shortcut was added to teleport players to their last stable position (Alt-F11 if it happens to you). Other bugs let arrows fly through walls and doors, transformed the sound of torches into an angry buzz, and sometimes made the main questline impossible to complete. While Arena wasn’t free of bugs either—notably reloading the same save too often would cause a crash, and sometimes so would simply attacking with fists—Daggerfall became infamous for its bugginess and gave Bethesda a reputation that’s stuck with it to this day.
Yet even though Daggerfall was unfinishable for many players, Bethesda took its endings seriously. Part of the overall goal of adding to the variety of options included having six different endings, allowing the player to choose who to side with. Rather than have one be the canonical conclusion, books in later games referred to a mystical event called ‘The Warp in the West’ that allowed all six of them to happen simultaneously. It was Daggerfall that added these readable books to the series, filling them with history and legends, jokes and songs. The Elder Scrolls’ background was becoming richer and stranger.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002)
While Daggerfall followed two years after Arena, Morrowind had six years to ensure its relative sturdiness—the longest development period of any game in the series so far, though that includes a year spent working on one of the spin-offs. That six-year gap also made for the most radical shift in terms of presentation, with the similar interfaces of the first two games replaced entirely. Where they’d had thick bars of buttons hogging the bottom of the screen, Morrowind’s HUD is unobtrusive, and while Daggerfall’s move to 3D had included an option to mouselook by holding Alt, in Morrowind it’s standard. The sensation of presence within its world was radically improved.
That world is also significantly smaller. Bethesda boasted that Daggerfall had “a game world the size of Great Britain”, but Morrowind’s setting only takes up approximately 24 square kilometers. Early in development it was planned for the entire province to be playable, but then its scope was reduced to the single island of Vvardenfell. Likewise, plans to have all five of its Great Houses as joinable factions with their own questlines were scrapped, and their number reduced to three. The payoff for these reductions in size is a setting with a greater degree of interactivity. Daggerfall’s scenery was untouchable, but Morrowind is full of objects that can be picked up and plants that can be harvested. It feels big because there’s so much to do. (And also because fast travel had been removed.)
Rather than being algorithmically generated, Vvardenfell is a hand-crafted place, designed to present stunning vistas. Giant mushrooms, flea-like Silt Striders, floating Netches, buildings hollowed out of the shells of dead behemoths—its overworld is distinctive where Arena and Daggerfall’s had been generic. Its lore builds on Daggerfall’s to add to that distinctiveness, and people have written entire essays about what its hermaphrodite poet god Vivec is really on about.
Still, the actual quests are fairly cut-and-dried with the player cast as another prisoner given a job by the Emperor, this time living up to a prophecy to defeat a dark lord on his dark throne within a volcanic wasteland. It’s underpinned by some of the best mythic fantasy writing in video games, but the quests themselves frequently boil down to traveling to a place and clicking on a person.
Morrowind also made thorough changes to the controls. Movement in the first two games was directed either by left-clicking the edge of the screen you wanted to walk toward (which meant painstakingly centring the screen on objects before picking them up, which made collecting keys from the floor a trial), or by using the arrow keys, with sidesteps bound separately. Morrowind’s WASD controls are far simpler, and so is its combat, which no longer requires right-clicking and then dragging across the screen in the direction of your swing. Morrowind’s stealth is activated by crouching, where in Daggerfall it had been an invisible skill check modified by the speed of your movement. With this change playing a thief class suddenly became fun.
Three more classes were also added to the character creation options, as well as Orcs and more beast-like versions of the Argonians and Khajiit. But one of the most important additions to Morrowind was the Elder Scrolls Construction Set, which not only made it easier for the designers to add new things to the game, like its expansions Bloodmoon and Tribunal, but also for players to do the same. Morrowind was the first game in the series to embrace modding, with over 3,000 mods available for it today. That would turn out to be one of the series’ most enduring changes.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006)
With Oblivion, Bethesda tried to marry what was best about Morrowind—the feeling of hand-made specificity—with the larger scope of the first two games. Using procedural generation tools, they created swathes of terrain and then edited them into shape, trees made of splines snapped to columns and algorithmic erosion roughing up the landscape.
Its setting of Cyrodiil is more than twice the size of Vvardenfell, with an extra 33 square kilometers, but with that increase in scale comes a decrease in uniqueness. As Bethesda’s Todd Howard said, “We wanted to get back to the more classic Arena and Daggerfall feel of a fantasy world that felt more refined and welcoming, a place that you instantly understood. But in that, we sacrificed some of what made Morrowind special: the wonder of discovery.”
While Oblivion begins with the hero a now-standard prisoner who is given a vital task by the Emperor, it steps back from turning you into the prophesied chosen one. Instead that role is played by Martin Septim, voiced by Sean Bean (Oblivion was the first fully voiced game in the series). Players help Martin live up to his world-changing destiny, rather than having their own. Instead, you discover your potential through sidequests. While the importance of these sidequests grew with each game, Oblivion emphasizes them to the point of feeling like a different game once you abandon the central story. Join the Thieves Guild and you eventually steal one of the Elder Scrolls themselves; join the Dark Brotherhood and you become a master assassin; hunt down the Daedric shrines and you earn artifacts of the gods.
As well as focusing on the freedom to find their own path, Oblivion emphasizes the freedom for players to explore in any compass direction. Earlier games funneled players with mountains that pushed them away from more dangerous areas, or with level limits on quests. Oblivion’s level-scaling means that no matter where you go enemies are balanced to provide an appropriate challenge.
While the intention was noble, it had strange side effects. Certain animals disappear from the land once out-leveled, and NPCs who began the game in rags carry magic swords later. Meanwhile, the arcane way character improvement works in Oblivion—with variable bonuses per level depending on whether players have been dutifully grinding to improve their lesser skills—could make one level eight hero a combat machine while another is still a wimp. It’s entirely possible for the same challenge to be harder for a higher-level character than a lower-level one.
In other ways, Oblivion reduced confusion. Morrowind players sometimes felt lost about what to do next, faced with a journal that filled itself with notes until its usefulness as a questlog vanished (the Game Of The Year edition addressed this by adding a filter for quest-related entries). In Oblivion, the journal became less messy, and an arrow points to the next objective for whichever quest is currently active. Along with the return of fast travel this infuriated the kind of fans who complain about ‘dumbing down,’ but it definitely reduced the amount of time you spent wondering where you were and what you were doing, especially if you didn’t play for several days and tried to pick up where you left off.
Oblivion was also the first Elder Scrolls game to add downloadable content, while we’re on the subject of infuriating fans. Its ‘horse armor’ selling for $2 became a running joke among critics of DLC. Later additions would be bigger and often cheaper in response, and were followed by a full-sized expansion in 2007’s Shivering Isles. Set on the island home of the god of madness, Shivering Isles replaces the fantasy European look of Cyrodiil with a twisted version of Alice In Wonderland that concept artist Adam Adamowicz memorably called “Walt Disney on steroids crapping a rainbow into your brain.” Deeply strange and small in scale, Shivering Isles recaptured Morrowind’s magic but with Oblivion’s commitment to cutting out filler.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011)
Depending how you measure it, Skyrim’s map may be slightly smaller than Oblivion’s. It’s much less flat, however, and there’s a lot of geography outside the bounds of the game, only visible from the top of its tallest mountain on a clear day or during the quest in which the player is summoned into the sky to commune with a god. That it contains climbing mountains and chatting with gods are part of Skyrim’s commitment to making everything feel epic. The main quest is the focus again, and the player is restored to the center of the plot—born a chosen one, with powers beyond those of mortals and a destiny to fulfill. Unlike Oblivion, Skyrim’s most impressive set pieces all take place during its main quests, whether battling dragons or traveling to the land of the dead.
Some of Skyrim's changes can be seen in user-made mods for Oblivion. Popular mods that added more combat moves were mimicked in Skyrim’s system of perks, unlocking new abilities with each level that made its combat more interesting the longer you played. An individual mod that sped up the rate arrows flew in Oblivion, which made a surprising difference to how enjoyable they were to shoot, was replicated for the archery in Skyrim. Other aspects seemed designed with gaps for modders to fill deliberately left in them, like the crafting and detailed weather and wildlife systems that seemed to beg for survival mechanics to be bolted onto them, as they inevitably were.
Way back in Daggerfall players had been given the option to create their own class, and Morrowind removed limitations on which classes could use certain equipment or learn spells. Skyrim took away the concept of classes completely, with starting skills determined purely by choice of race. Any skill could be used by any character, essentially leaving you to create your own class as you played, turning the entire game into one of the earlier entries’ Q&A sessions about what kind of adventurer you are.
Also removed was the ability to create your own spells. As far back as Arena, the Elder Scrolls games had let spellcasting characters edit spell effects and in doing so give themselves game-breaking magical powers, whether to knock down walls, fly, or become invincible. Skyrim’s crafting remained open to abuse, however, through tricks like making potions that temporarily increased your skill at creating enchanted items, which allowed you to make equipment that boosted your ability to brew potions—a loop that ended with low-level characters able to craft some of the best gear in the game.
That crafting system is a rare example of outside influence on an Elder Scrolls game. While first-person RPGs Ultima Underworld and Legends Of Valour have been cited as inspirations for Arena, and apparently the addition of vampires came after the team played the tabletop RPG Vampire: The Masquerade, the Elder Scrolls games have largely done their own thing. They’ve become influential, but only rarely been influenced. That changed when Skyrim not only added crafting but companions and romance options—rudimentary ones, but still. It’s an example of a willingness to borrow from other RPGs that’s new.
Of course, Skyrim was also influenced by lessons Bethesda learnt while working on Fallout 3 between Elder Scrolls games. It and Skyrim share the same level-scaling mechanic, which balances each area to be a challenge for players when they first arrive in them, but then keeps them at that level of danger, making the areas first visited less of a threat when returned to later. Another idea from the same source was giving NPCs unique conversations rather than mixing their personal dialogue with a generic pool of rumors and observations that sometimes jarred. Skyrim s random narrative encounters, like the thief who hands you a weapon moments before the hunter he stole it from arrives, also came from Fallout 3. We realised in Fallout 3 that that kind of environmental storytelling, where you come upon a little scene, is really good, Todd Howard explained. And so we ve tried to do it a lot more.
Unlike each sequel in the Elder Scrolls series, Skyrim Special Edition doesn't significantly build on what came before. It's the same Skyrim, but with improved lighting, inferior audio and the potential for more and better mods thanks to a 64-bit executable. With Bethesda saying The Elder Scrolls VI is still a long ways off, Skyrim Special Edition will likely be a canvas for modders for years to come.
With Fallout 4, Bethesda took even more influence from other RPGs, namely by adding a voiced protagonist, and has also given a nod to building games with settlement construction. It seems natural that the lessons Bethesda learns from these changes, positive or negative, will also make their way into the next Elder Scrolls, along with lessons from Skyrim and its predecessors although it s probably not going to bring back the game-breaking spellcrafting system. More's the pity.
