With a renewed interest in big fantasy RPGs as of late (mainly cause of Baldur’s Gate 3 which I still need to finish admittedly), I got a craving for it and considered crawling back to playing Skyrim or Oblivion once again seeing as how there’s still little else like those until… Avowed I guess? Or just waiting for the next TES game 5+ years from now…
Somehow though I’ve only just recently heard about Enderal: Forgotten Stories, a free “full conversion mod” for Skyrim that’s actually considered a whole separate game you can download on Steam. Very curious, instead of replaying Skyrim for the 10th time I decided to give that a shot to see how it differs. Now that I’ve finished, to say I’m impressed by it is an understatement
The main thing to point out about Enderal is that calling it a mod is doing it a disservice honestly. While it of course plays the same as Skyrim and uses its assets, it is most definitely its own RPG and a dense one at that, set in a completely separate world to explore. It has its own unique world-building and lore, a main questline that’s actually pretty compelling and far more involved compared to Skyrim’s own, more fleshed out characters especially with the focus on two central companions throughout the story, has dozens of good side quests to do, and it has full voice acting with its own soundtrack. Needless to say for something that costs nothing aside for just owning Skyrim, I was immensely caught off guard by how extensive it really was. Almost like playing a TES game for the first time again, I got lost in it and have over 50 hours now with the story done but still plenty left to do and explore
There are criticisms to note though, for one as much as they try to rebalance its systems, if you didn’t care for Skyrim’s combat then this won’t really be much different. If anything I found the change to buying learning books for leveling skills instead of natural progression with use to be a bit too limiting after a while, though it did make money more useful and kept the game more challenging given there’s no level scaling. Quests can be prone to breaking also which is an issue for main ones especially, occasionally having to reload older saves to progress cause nothing would happen otherwise. And the voice acting, as varied as it is which was appreciated for something like this, ranges from pretty good to kinda amateurish most of the time. Though on the whole it’s hard to fault this given how huge of a game it is, and that it’s just using Bethesda’s engine which is inherently janky
So overall I think it’s a great game in its own right, but as a free fan project it’s a pretty amazing achievement, even going so far as to say it surpasses the game it’s taking from in most aspects. If anyone’s looking for something that revitalizes Skyrim’s style of adventure or just wants a new fantasy RPG to really sink into, then give this a try for sure
Somehow though I’ve only just recently heard about Enderal: Forgotten Stories, a free “full conversion mod” for Skyrim that’s actually considered a whole separate game you can download on Steam. Very curious, instead of replaying Skyrim for the 10th time I decided to give that a shot to see how it differs. Now that I’ve finished, to say I’m impressed by it is an understatement
The main thing to point out about Enderal is that calling it a mod is doing it a disservice honestly. While it of course plays the same as Skyrim and uses its assets, it is most definitely its own RPG and a dense one at that, set in a completely separate world to explore. It has its own unique world-building and lore, a main questline that’s actually pretty compelling and far more involved compared to Skyrim’s own, more fleshed out characters especially with the focus on two central companions throughout the story, has dozens of good side quests to do, and it has full voice acting with its own soundtrack. Needless to say for something that costs nothing aside for just owning Skyrim, I was immensely caught off guard by how extensive it really was. Almost like playing a TES game for the first time again, I got lost in it and have over 50 hours now with the story done but still plenty left to do and explore
There are criticisms to note though, for one as much as they try to rebalance its systems, if you didn’t care for Skyrim’s combat then this won’t really be much different. If anything I found the change to buying learning books for leveling skills instead of natural progression with use to be a bit too limiting after a while, though it did make money more useful and kept the game more challenging given there’s no level scaling. Quests can be prone to breaking also which is an issue for main ones especially, occasionally having to reload older saves to progress cause nothing would happen otherwise. And the voice acting, as varied as it is which was appreciated for something like this, ranges from pretty good to kinda amateurish most of the time. Though on the whole it’s hard to fault this given how huge of a game it is, and that it’s just using Bethesda’s engine which is inherently janky
So overall I think it’s a great game in its own right, but as a free fan project it’s a pretty amazing achievement, even going so far as to say it surpasses the game it’s taking from in most aspects. If anyone’s looking for something that revitalizes Skyrim’s style of adventure or just wants a new fantasy RPG to really sink into, then give this a try for sure