My Ghost Vapes

Skyrim turns 15 next month and nobody has finished it

The best fantasy game ever made is the one that lets you ignore the story.

, 4 minute read

Skyrim came out on November 11, 2011. Eleven, eleven, eleven. Next month it will be fifteen years old.

In that time it has sold 65 million copies and been re-released on basically everything with a screen, most recently the Switch 2 last December. The sequel was announced in 2018 with a short teaser. Eight years later it still has no release date, and the reporting says 2028 at the earliest.

And people are still playing the original. Not replaying it for nostalgia. Still playing it.

I am one of them. I have put more than 1,200 hours into it, across ten different characters and builds. I have finished the main quest seven times and beaten all the DLCs more than once. Most of my playthroughs have been Vanilla Sky, with some modding for S’s and G’s.

Seven times through the main quest, and I would not tell you I have finished Skyrim.

It is a place, not a story

Here is my theory on why. Most games are a story you get pushed through. Skyrim is a place you get dropped into.

There is a main quest. There is a dragon problem and a civil war and you are the chosen one. And the game truly does not care if you do any of it. You can walk out of the first town, turn left, and spend forty hours picking flowers and robbing farmhouses.

Everybody has the same experience with it. You set out to do the thing you are supposed to do. On the way you see a ruin on a hill. Three hours later you are a vampire who owns a house and you have forgotten what the thing was.

The best dungeon masters do the same thing

Anybody who has played tabletop knows this. The campaigns people remember are never the ones where the story went according to plan. They are the ones where the table wandered off, and whoever was running the game was smart enough to follow.

Skyrim is a dungeon master who never says no.

A friend I played with regularly runs a Dungeons & Dragons channel called The Art of Character. It is about story and character more than rules and numbers, which is the same idea. I am on a couple of episodes. Here is one.

And then the players took over

The other reason it won’t die is mods. Bethesda handed players the same tools it built the game with, and people have been rebuilding it for fifteen years. New lands, new quests, entire other worlds bolted on top of it. Since 2016 the mods have worked on consoles too.

I am one of those people now. I am building a mod called Skyrim: A Song of Ice and Fire. It turns Skyrim into Westeros, the world of Game of Thrones.

The trick is that I am not matching places by their weather. I am matching them by the part they play in the story.

Skyrim’s civil war is already the War of the Five Kings. A proud northern rebel is fighting a distant crown, and a third power is enforcing religious law on both of them. So the Stormcloaks become House Stark, and Ulfric becomes Robb Stark. The Imperial Legion becomes the Lannisters, and General Tullius becomes Lord Tywin. The Thalmor become the Faith Militant.

Once you do that, the rest falls into place.

  • Whiterun, the rich town in the middle that everybody fights over, becomes Riverrun.
  • Solitude, the capital, becomes King’s Landing. Windhelm becomes Winterfell.
  • Markarth, a fortress city sitting on top of its mines, becomes Casterly Rock.
  • The draugr become wights. The frozen dead did not need a single change except the name.
  • The Dwemer were an advanced people who vanished in one disaster and left ruins full of treasure and death. They become the Valyrians, and the fit is almost embarrassing.
  • The Dark Brotherhood becomes the Faceless Men. The Forsworn become the Free Folk. Even the money changes. The septim becomes the Gold Dragon.

Version one is a rename, and I mean that as a limit. It changes the words on the screen and adds six original lore books to find in the world. It does not touch a single quest. The voice acting stays too, so a guard will still say “Whiterun” out loud while the screen says Riverrun.

It is also not a file you download. It is a script that builds the mod on your own computer, from your own copy of the game, so it works with whatever else you have installed.

Next comes the art: Stark direwolves on the banners in Winterfell and Lannister lions in King’s Landing. After that, the Dawnguard become the Night’s Watch.

It is a fan project, and it will never cost anything. Bethesda already built the war. I am just telling you who is fighting it.

Fifteen years in, the game is less a product than a workshop. That is why nobody has finished it. There is nothing to finish.

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