Skyrim, modding and Elder Scrolls

I keep forgetting about this: Skygerfall, a remake of Daggerfall’s Main Questline.

Arena and Daggerfall are free to download from Bethesda’s own website, but you’d be hard-pressed to get them to run properly on modern systems (as they relied on running on old DOS software). For those wanting to bypass that hassle or at least curious about the stories of classic TES titles this is definitely worth a download.

I personally like how instead of being a full remake, it instead tries to recreate the original Daggerfall experience as much as Skyrim’s game engine allows. The claustrophobic, maze-like corridors bring back a sense of 90’s PC gaming. There’s also a real challenge and incentive to be careful and be prepared for anything as you might run into a few enemies that you’ll be rapidly outclassed against, but can mercifully avoid. But I admit, I found the padding a bit tedious – Every time you make a sliver of progress, you could be sent to another dungeon to clear. And there’s not much else to do, until the team behind it decide to add in more of Daggerfall’s features, such as faction questlines.

I believe they’ve replaced it with Vortex.

https://www.nexusmods.com/site/mods/1

Haven’t played ESO’s Blackwood expansion (yet), but as it’s the 15th anniversary of Oblivion, I decided to start a new game and check out some mods.

Of note is the Blackwood Company faction, which allows to join the rival guild from the Fighters Guild questline of that game. I’m about 2/3’rds of the way through it, and I’ve enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s a very well-thought out mod; fairly well-placed, good quests that offer conditional rewards if you complete them in a certain way. It feels like something that should’ve been included in the vanilla game. It’s reminiscent of how Morrowind had several factions where it was basically impossible to join all of them as a single character. For RP purposes, this is a good choice to download if you’re playing as a “dark warrior” type character.

On the Skyrim side of things, Wyrmstooth, a popular Skyrim mod that got taken off the net five years ago, is now back on the Nexus. This is a complete, detailed “New Lands,” mod offering roughly as much content as the official “Dragonborn” add-on. The file size is less than a gigabyte large, so it should run on Oldrim on a decent system without too much issue. If you missed out on the original release, then take the opportunity to check this out. It’s not as impressive as some of the mods that are available for Special Edition, but it’s worth sinking some hours into.

Wintersun has earned a spot as part of my permanent load order. You can dedicate yourself to one of Tamriel’s many Gods and receive gameplay benefits to playing the game a certain way. Good for RP, whether it’s being a Knight-Paladin of the Divines or a Champion of one of the Daedric Princes of Oblivion, or even the more obscure, lesser-known deities.

Familiar Faces is one of the best mod ideas out there – It basically “records” all of your character’s save data and creates a “clone” of that character, allowing you to port them over into another save game as an NPC follower. Ever made more than one character and wished you could have them meet and team up? This mod makes it possible (you’d have to download several other mods to get this to work, but IMO it’s worth it).