What’s Gus Playing? Episode 1
A new regular read from the Halfling of Happiness ~
Lloyd Sabin, 2 October 2017
Hey all. It’s been a while, you know with real life getting in the way. To make up for lost time, BB and I thought it wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world to start a new weekly piece, cleverly entitled What’s Gus Playing {insert obvious joke here}.
This first installment covers my last few hours with the absolutely gorgeous, quite impressive full conversion mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, named Enderal, developed by German modder and AI tinkerer SureAI. This link will take you to the pertinents, including where and how to download.
The actual modding process is extremely well documented and pretty painless, especially if you have been modding PC games since before Steam workshop and know The Struggle that modding used to be like.
I’ve already put in about 25-30 hours into the Enderal mod. According to the internet I am about half of the way through the intricate story line, and it is just as good or better than a lot of professionally developed games. That is on top of the ~150 hours I’ve put in to the Skyrim base game and most of the DLCs. It’s hard to believe the game is 6+ years old. Which begs the question…where is the next Elder Scrolls game? But…I digress. Below are some screen shots of What I’ve Been Playing for the last few days. I think you’ll agree they are quite impressive. And if you don’t agree well I never liked you that much anyway.
Look at the detail here. You can see that the creators really loved what they were doing and developed Enderal with a loving hand.
Much like the rest of the standard game, Enderal has some hidden gems to discover. And much like vanilla Skyrim, you can totally ignore them to pursue the main quests, or vice versa.
Some of the locations in this came have me torn: am I excited to go exploring or terrified that my avatar will be ripped to shreds by what lurks inside? Tough call.
Case in point here. The main story line required me to enter this place and talk with the owner. From the architecture and exterior decor, I didn’t feel particularly welcome.
Once inside, the decor became more amazing. If I were living in Enderal and was wealthy enough to construct my own manse, this would be my library.
Who woulda thunk it, but this great gothic pile of a place had an even more impressive basement…
…which led to an even more impressive portal. You can’t just slap something like this together, in a game or otherwise! All these set pieces take loving care to create. And the whole mod operates almost flawlessly. I have occasional crashes but the game is constantly tweaked and updated by SureAI and it runs excellently 97% of the time.
It may be hard to tell from this shot, but that is the floor of the chamber within the portal you saw in the last couple of shots. It is descending into a crypt…it took about 30 seconds to get down there. Every discovery in Enderal becomes more and more impressive and there are some truly amazing settings to discover. The last few shots was one of the best settings so far, without giving away any of the byzantine plot.
Like what you see above? It’s 100% free. And if Enderal cost 25.00 it, you know what? It would be worth it.
Hoped you enjoyed this first installment of What’s Gus Playing? Check us out again next week.
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