Skyrim: Immortality Through Creativity

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is gearing up for its 10th birthday this year. In a market dominated by triple-A multiplayer titles from Overwatch to Fortnite to a myriad of Call of Duty and Halo sequels and spin offs it’s quite spectacular to imagine a single player RPG from 2011 is still going strong and is even relevant within the spheres of gaming discussion and news and yet even before the announcement of TES VI, Skyrim’s direct sequel, the game still enjoyed an enduring cultural relevance that stands tall to this day. How? What makes Skyrim so different to other single player titles that enjoy a far more limited shelf life in comparison to the trend of live service games? The answer, I believe, is a perfect storm of accessible beginner level RPG creative freedom and the unstoppable creative Juggernaut that is the Skyrim modding community.

What is a mod? That’s a good place to start, if you’re unfamiliar with the term modding is essentially taking a video game and creating your own extra content, it’s taking what exists within the game already and using it to expand on what’s already there. Simplistic mods can be along the lines of new weapons and cosmetics but some are so complex they completely overhaul the game itself, changing it to become unrecognisable and completely altering the gameplay experience.

Since day 1 on the 11th of November 2011 Skyrim’s veteran modding teams who had spent years dedicated to the expansion of TES IV Oblivion’s creative horizons jumped ship to the fresh title from Bethesda Softworks. Since that day, Skyrim modding has exploded to unprecedented levels going from Mudcrabs with monocles to entire cell-for-cell remakes and remasters of previous games within Skyrim’s haphazard and frankly outdated 2011 game engine. Modding has completely revolutionised the game’s possibilities and the popularity of it is borderline cult-like at this stage. On Skyrim nexus alone, the main hub for Skyrim mods, there are 1.8 billion downloads between 66.5 thousand mods, by the end of the year that will equate to roughly 17 mods a day uploaded to the site for the past ten years. This is just one site however, Skyrim Nexus houses the majority of Skyrim’s most renowned and well loved mods but other sites include Loverslab which houses the more risque and sexual themed mods and Eskyrim which is mainly reserved for ports of armours from anime, other games and even films. Ports are essentially outfits and weapons and armours from already established IPs. Among the most popular are armours from Witcher, Dark Souls, Black Desert Online and even a few Marvel sets like Deadpool.

How does this lend itself to the game’s immortality? I am going to use my own experiences for this section. I’ve been modding Skyrim and Fallout 4 (Bethesda’s other successful IP) for nearly 6 years now. I dropped £1500 total upgrading and building a gaming PC specifically to mod this game and it has expanded my creative horizons tenfold. Skyrim is less of a video game to me and more of a platform for creative expression. I like to build a character and write a story as I go along with that character and I bring the story to life through in game screenshots that I manage to take and organise using mods and console commands. I’ve created epic battles of warring armies,

brought to life monstrous villains,

And even take characters from four separate save files and have them duke it out for the fate of reality as we know it!

Currently, I’m telling the story of a Vampiric noble who has wormed his way into Skyrim’s political machine and caused a civil war to try and seize power in order to usher in an age of Vampiric supremacy.

I have found no limits to the characters you can create and the adventures you can enjoy, the game has become a canvas for me to not only experiment with the kinds of stories I can tell but the different ways I can tell them. The aforementioned Vampire story is told in an epistolary form coming from the character’s own journal entries and I have another story that started in 2007 in Oblivion and was completed in 2018 about an Elven Sorcerer who became so corrupted by the power he thought he deserved that he basically became the living incarnation of evil and is the primary villain of my own linked multiverse of original characters. Skyrim modding is my primary hobby and it’s something that has enriched my life more than any other game that I have ever played.

The modding community have taken a game released nearly ten years ago and created a hub of tweaks and additions and overhauls that have boosted what may have been an excellent but forgettable RPG to the crown jewel of what single player game devs hope to achieve. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the example video games should follow, it proves that if you give your player-base the tools to expand upon your games, if you encourage their creativity and imagination your game can live forever.

Sources

https://www.nexusmods.com/

https://eskrimmods.blogspot.com/

Loverslab.com (no link included as site is NSFW)