You’ll have to be patient from time to time though, as Enderal has a special storytelling technique that Lietzau calls “segmented linearity”, which temporarily locks you into a main quest so you can’t get distracted from urgent issues like you can in some of the best open world games. With side quests like the aforementioned waiting for you out in the open world, I don’t blame you if you want to jump in and start exploring straight away. Want a good story? Then you can’t do anything you want – for good reason I really hope you’re installing it as you read this.
I’m just going to say this again in case you weren’t paying attention before – Enderal is free on Steam right now. With 30-125 hours of gameplay, the sheer range of quests you’ll find throughout the world is diverse enough to challenge some triple-A RPGs. That one aside, you’ll be investigating the disappearance of someone’s wife, following birds as they soar through the sky to find their nests, and tracking down missing persons across the large space. Well, they have one which tasks you with collecting magical symbols, but it’s a way to get you to explore the world and that makes it ok in my book. Lietzau tells me that “there are lots of open world games that offer freedom but the story isn’t that present… do prefer Enderal to Skyrim because they felt Skyrim was lacking in this atmosphere and story department, and that’s exactly what Enderal provides.”Īs well as a story centered around those shudder-inducing enemies that live in your subconsciousness (joke’s on them, I’ve had the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme tune stuck in my head since forever), Lietzau tells me that Enderal doesn’t have the typical fetch quests that can often be found in open world games. Enderal sure as hell isn’t easy, yet its special brand of tough love has won over the hearts of hundreds of players.Įlder Scrolls 6: release date, trailer, news, and everything else we knowīut treading that fine line between the freedom of an open world and strong narrative that’s found in some of the best RPG games of yore is tricky. Comparisons to old-school RPGs like Gothic are also rife in the reviews there’s no level scaling, so some areas are a no-go when you start off as a beleaguered traveller (even wolves should be avoided to begin with), and killing an enemy gives you XP rather than levelling up a skill like in Skyrim.
Most players really can’t get enough of it: “ Skyrim 2: Free and Better edition”, “ the world seems almost hand crafted”, and “ we would gladly pay 60$ for it, that’s how good it is” are just some of the things mentioned on Enderal’s Steam page, and currently there are over 600 reviews that attest to the game’s prestige, that dwarf the 63 negative ones. Comparisons to such impressive triple-A games are bold, but the reviews on Steam back up what I’m being told. However, Lietzau tells me that, story-wise, Skyrim had no influence over Enderal, with him instead citing Bioware’s trademark attention to complex characters as an inspiration – mentioning Mass Effect and Dragon Age in the same breath.
To do so, I sat down with Nicolas Samuel Lietzau, Enderal’s project lead – who was also responsible for crafting the game’s huge 250k page script and directing the English and German localisations that featured a cast of over 80 professional voice actors – to find out how this colossal total-conversion mod was brought to life.Īs Enderal is built using the Creation Engine, you’d expect there to be some overlap with Skyrim that goes beyond using the same assets. With the studio behind the project, SureAI, boasting over 1.5 million downloads of Enderal to date and with dozens of reviews on Steam praising it as being superior to Skyrim, I just had to find out what it is that makes this game so special.
In fact, Enderal offers over 30 hours of original content, it’s basically free (though you will need to own a copy of the original Skyrim to be able to download it), and it’s finally available on Steam. And, yeah, those wolves you’ll be running away from – more on that later – look exactly like the ones you would loot in Skyrim to find garnets (don’t ask me how they go in there), but everything story and character-wise is brand new. So, sure, the textures and surroundings might look a little familiar from time to time – they are based on those of the wilderness and the Bannered Mare, after all. The game may have been made using Bethesda’s Creation Engine, but Enderal won’t give you any major déjà-vû as it’s effectively an entirely new game.