OP-ED; Modding Shows The Best And Worst Of Gamers Everywhere

(This Article Contains Language And Content Not Suitable For Children)

On Nexus Mods, one of the top free mod hosting sites of all time (That recently introduced a system which pays modders without charging for mods), lists The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as its most popular mod platform of all time. Second place goes to Fallout 4, which holds about one-third the total number of mod downloads as Skyrim, at 428 million. The first non-Bethesda title on the mod lineup is The Witcher 3, which is number eight on the list, behind Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout: New Vegas, Skyrim: Special Edition, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Fallout 3. Despite just recently allowing official support for mods with Fallout 4 and Skyrim: SE, Bethesda has long since proved themselves the kings of modifiable interfaces, with their games being almost as highly anticipated for their moddability as they are for their excellent single-player experiences.

Checking in on the most popular Skyrim mods, we are greeted with a host of massive improvements on all facets of the core games, made by individuals who choose to put their free time and talent back into the community.

At the #1 slot, Skyrim HD: 2k Textures gives the whole game a massive visual overhaul with every texture in the game being manually enhanced by just a few hyper-dedicated individuals.

Next is SkyUI, a massive overhaul for how the game’s menus work, adding automatic sorting, making text sizes smaller, adding a full-text inventory search, favoriting of items, multiple hotkeys, and more.

In the number 3 slot is FNIS, or Fore’s New Idles In Skyrim. This expansive immersion mod breaks into the core game’s animation engine, allowing community-made custom animations for particular actions, which allows new weapons styles to be implemented more cleanly, spell animations to match that of different visual styles, or even a host of new idle and standing stances to be added to aid in the game’s immersion value.

Number 4 is ApachiiSkyHair which adds an absurd number of new hairstyles into the game to improve on Skyrim’s (somewhat lacking) character creation system. A plethora of other mods exist to combat this purpose as well, improving skin and eye textures, improving facial sculpting and other things.

And at number 5 we have…

*sigh*

Caliente’s Beautiful Bodies Edition (NSFW)

Which transforms all of the game’s female characters into super-strippers with waistlines tiny enough to make even some DC Comics Heroines jealous.

At this point, I’m no longer going to link to every mod discussed here. Skyrim has an enormous variety of mods, and the Mod Catagories page on nexus is a good showcase of that. There are mods to improve the combat and magic systems, make the game more difficult, add in food and hunger meters for hardcore survivalists, improve meshes and water physics, and so much more. There are even jaw-dropping DLC style expansions that add massive amounts of new content, fully voiced NPC’s, and new lands to the game. But time and time again, some of the top rated mods on the site are based around the idea of converting Skyrim to a Meet – ‘N – Fuck game.

There are mods for skin textures, makeup mods, breast slider mods, there’s a mod that adds a separate physics engine into the breasts and butts of female characters to make their assets jiggle around as they move. There’s an addon for that mod to make the bouncing bitties collide with the ground for *realism* (Gotta keep our bouncing breasts realistic). There are many mods that add such a great number of eye, lip, and hairstyles into the game that it can crash upon starting up the character creator, so there’s mods to prevent that. There’s even a mod for sex animations.

There are fully voiced companion characters that act like walking sexbots. There’s animation mods to make these characters run and sit like Victoria’s Secret Pinup models. There’s a mod to overwrite world population numbers to make every single person in the game a hot female character. There’s a mod featuring an expansive re-texturing and re-modeling of every single base game armor and clothing model made on over 500 hours of work that exists only to eliminate most of the ability for said clothing and armor to function as clothing or armor so that you can instead see your character’s breasts better as they jump around. There’s a mod to replace your character’s noises after getting hit with lewd porno moans.

Mods are great. I’m glad they exist.

But you’ve only got two hands. And playing Skyrim requires both of them. If you’d like to use one of your hands for something else, then turn off the game.

Featured Image Via Flickr / Cakesicles