If Elder Scrolls Online didn’t satisfy your urge to play Skyrim with friends, this ambitious new PC mod might just be what you’re looking for.
The appropriately named Skyrim Together mod affords players the chance to explore the world of Skyrim together. Specifically, it lets up to eight players join a single Skyrim game and (mostly) enjoy the same sights and sounds featured in the basic game but with others.
How is such a thing possible? The technical details don’t seem to be readily available at this time, so we’re going to guess the answer is “magic.” in any case, some of the things that the team has done with this mod is certainly bordering on magic. Not only does this mod turn Skryim into a multiplayer experience, but it even incorporates UI improvements that allow you to monitor the health of your fellow adventurers. That’s especially handy when you consider that you can heal your teammates and interact with them in just about all the logical ways you would expect.
Sadly, there are a few catches. It seems that the team hasn’t quite figured out how to make dragon events work without a hitch. There’s also the not insignificant problem of the original game’s quests. While there are quite a few quests you can embark upon with your friends, there are many quests that were simply not designed in a way that would make it feasible to incorporate multiple players. Those quests are currently not accessible. As you might imagine, this mod is also currently only designed to work on PC (where it can be used with other Creation Kit mods).
Limitations aside, this is an impressive mod from both a concept and execution standpoint. We’ve seen how horribly the “Bethesda game, but with more people” concept can go (Fallout 76) which makes it that much more amazing that this team of fans was able to create a mostly stable multiplayer mod for Skyrim that is just a few tweaks away from working about like you’d hope such a concept would work.
The Skyrim Together mod is entering a closed beta period for those who supported the project on Patreon, but everyone else can get in on the action when the mod’s open beta period begins at a currently unconfirmed time.