Ever since Skyrim released back in 2011 and the craze so many of us fell into during the following year or so, I’ve found myself trying to go back every so often to try and recap- ture some of that initial magic. This has, at least for me, proven largely impossible. When the sense of discovery is gone, what is there to do, you know? Yet, when I see that tons of people can still enjoy it all these years later, I find myself wanting to try all the same.

I bought Skyrim Special Edition for Xbox One back in 2016 or so, and, for a time, it felt like new again thanks to the mods. The game looked prettier, ran better, and had more fresh and new content than ever. I could take on quests I’d never experienced, visit new loca- tions I’d never visited and blast through all of the earl-game frustration that led to so many abandoned playthroughs after I retired my first character. Mods were a game changer for sure.

Now though, now mods have become kind of old hat as well. It’s not that the modding scene for Skyrim has become any less robust since 2018, but rather that, perhaps, there’s only so much you can do to keep a game feeling fresh in the end. It’s now been about 14 years since Skyrim released, and, even with mods, there’s just hardly anything new to do in the game anymore.

Lots of players can enjoy just building characters, using different weapons or having dif- ferent followers, and perhaps those sorts of fans can still get a lot of enjoyment out of the game. For me though, it was always about discovering the province of Skyrim and experiencing all the stories found within. With all the stories thoroughly explored and the whole of the province seen, though, what’s left for a player like me?

Playing on PlayStation 5 makes it especially difficult, as I’ve been finding that many of the best content mods, those that add fan made quests, locations, characters and even plotlines, are just straight up not available here. The scene is a sight better than it was when Skyrim Special Edition first released, but wow are they still lagging behind! Further, the content mods that did make it over have all been conveniently folded into the Creation Club (paid mods). Yeah, no thanks.

It’s been long enough since I last did the main side quest storylines and DLC that they’ve become fun again, but I fear that once those are done it’ll finally be well and truly time to put Skyrim to bed for good. This was always going to happen, as it does with all games, so having that moment come all these years later really shows how good of a game Skyrim really is. All that said, I’m really hoping to see Elder Scrolls 6 soon and finally have new things to discover again in the land of Tamriel.

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What’s your experience with Skyrim been like over the past few years? How have you kept the game feeling fresh? What is it about the game that’s kept you coming back?

Image by Flickr user: JBLivin (cc)