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What's left to be said about Skyrim? Very little I reckon. Or, at least until the next iteration of the now-pushing-13-years-old 2011 RPG megahit that's featured on every single platform imaginable since rolls around, right? I'm being flippant (sort of), but there really is nothing like The Elder Scrolls 5 – so much so that I'm now at the stage where I don't think there will be another game like it. Ever.
My latest reason for feeling this way is tied to modding. The best Skyrim mods are one of the many reasons why Bethesda's flagship role-player has stood (and continues to stand) the test of time, and it recently came to my attention that TES 5 has passed six billion downloads on the popular modding site, Nexus Mods. Six billion downloads. Which is absolutely remarkable.
Modfather
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These numbers only apply to Nexus Mods, of course, meaning when taking into account the myriad other mod hosting platforms that offer Skyrim content, that number is likely to be much, much higher. For context, Nexus mods currently hosts 60,000 Skyrim Special Edition mods, and almost 70,000 for the game's standard edition; with downloads totaling 4.2 billion and 1.9 billion respectively.
The closest contender is Fallout 4 with 48.1k mods and 1.4 billion downloads, with Fallout: New Vegas (32,9k; 531.4 million), Stardew Valley (15.3k; 336.6 million) and Cyberpunk 2077 (10.1k; 326.9 million) rounding out the rest of the website's top five. From a recency and popularity perspective, Baldur's Gate 3's seven thousand mods have been downloaded 130 million times; whereas Starfield's 7.2k mods have been downloaded 39.6 million times.
Without getting too lost in the numbers, Skyrim is a juggernaut among some clearly very popular moddable PC games. There are a number of obvious reasons for this, not least that the game's been around for a long time, that Bethesda's ventures are both ripe for modding and considered to be easier to mod than many other developers' games, and that a sizeable chunk of Skyrim's mods are very NSFW. But none of this properly explains the enduring appeal of the game some 13 years on, at least not enough to justify why players keep coming back for more and more.
When I spoke to Mark Lampert, the game's audio director, towards the end of 2021, he suggested the reason Skyrim is still so popular today is because of its timeless game design. He made comparisons to chess and said that the reason people have continued to go back to that game for centuries is because it's a good, solid, timeless game. "There's something very compelling about it every time you jump in," he said, before explaining how even Bethesda developers using Skyrim to inspire future projects wind up inadvertently spending hours getting re-lost in Solitude and beyond.
"10 years from now, if Skyrim is still playable, then people will still be playing it. And of course it will be, it's on everything."
For me, it's this exact principle that extends to mods and the creative people who make them. The idea of getting re-lost in Whiterun or Winterhold can take on a whole new meaning when it's you driving the recreation of that journey. I don't think it's a stretch to suggest, then, that some of the most downloaded Skyrim mods are so popular because dozens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of other people have also longed for that nip or tuck that changes the original formula.
For Lampert, it's that openness that's kept players coming back for more. He said: "In Skyrim, you can go wherever you like, even into an area you're not ready for – the whole thing is wide open. So it's a case of: let's go see that, let's go see this, those mountain points, let's go find our way up there."
"All of which gives the game a real sense of longevity. And even though when we're working on a game, and we might have played it, literally, thousands of times – I don't know how many thousands of times I've heard the main theme – taking a short break and jumping back in, it all becomes so compelling again. I mean, hats off to the game designers in that respect, Skyrim just has that hook."
"10 years from now, if Skyrim is still playable, then people will still be playing it. And of course it will be, it's on everything. By then, we'll be playing on screens, your refrigerator, your Tesla on your commute. And it'll make you late for work."
I've no doubt that Skyrim will still be playable in 10 years' time, and I'm likewise pretty sure it'll also be moddable then too. Who knows how many billions of downloads its Nexus Mods pages will boast by then, but I'm also convinced no other game will be anywhere near its numbers. Over to you, Elder Scrolls 6.
If you can't play Starfield, this sci-fi Skyrim mod has 7 districts, 200 interiors, 400 NPCs and is perfect for space envy
