Tag: open world

Enderal: Forgotten Stories Review

An atmospheric, narrative-oriented total conversion mod for Skyrim

If there is one thing that the Elder Scrolls games are known for, it’s the enormous, vibrant modding community – heartily supported by Bethesda providing extensive support and modding tools. Although there are literally tens of thousands of mods available for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, one in particular has managed to stand out as being exceptional among them. Developed by German studio Sureai, Enderal is a total conversion mod for Skyrim, meaning that it uses some of Skyrim’s assets to create a completely new open world setting, replete with new quests, characters and items. Sureai have over a decade of experience in using Bethesda’s modding tools to give form to their own original worlds, having also made Nehrim for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the less-known Cube Experimental for Fallout 3, and two more mods for Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. If Enderal is anything to go by, this experience has payed off, as they have managed to create a mod that, for me and many others, has completely eclipsed the base game in terms of story and worldbuilding. Having said that, Enderal is certainly not without faults. The combat system is only passable and the Creation Engine that Enderal is built on hasn’t aged particularly well, and while not as buggy as its predecessor, is still prone to random crashes and getting the player stuck on otherwise inoffensive terrain.

Enderal was originally released in 2016, but in February 2019 was re-released on Steam as Enderal: Forgotten Stories with a plethora of additional content. This content includes some new highly detailed side quests, items, and performance improvements. Enderal can be installed for free on Steam, but you do need a copy of Skyrim installed through Steam for it to work. Side note: it specifically has to be installed with the vanilla version of Skyrim – not the Special Edition.

Gameplay

Coming to Enderal after spending a lot of time playing Mordhau wasn’t my best idea, as the (mostly unchanged) Skyrim combat system felt a lot clunkier than I remember it being. Really though, it works just fine. The only real issue I had was the same issue that I had with Skyrim’s combat system in that late-game enemies get stupidly tanky and fighting more than one enemy at once will generally result in you being slowly stunlocked to death. There are a couple of ways to get around the tedium of trying to avoid being repeatedly staggered to death, and these ways can be found in Enderal’s custom level up system. In addition to being able to choose from extra health, stamina or mana, leveling up gives you valuable memory points that can be used to gain different perks and abilities from the eleven skill trees available.

There are three skill trees each for melee combat, magic and thievery, and an additional two skill trees that are essentially focused around summoning minions to aid you and being able to turn yourself into a werewolf. If you decide to go with any form of melee combat, I highly recommend getting the heavy armor talent that makes you less likely to be staggered when hit, which is easily the worst aspect of the combat system. I went with a half-melee, half-magic themed build, which ended up working well in the long run, but there were some frustrating moments where I would run out of magic after just being able to defeat one enemy and would be left with several more full-health enemies chasing me around the terrain while Yakety Sax played in my head. As luck would have it, the magic-focused skill trees also provided me with some abilities that I could use without mana, such as Shock Nova, which made every encounter after unlocking it much, much easier. The skill trees give you a lot of dynamic ways to build your character, and by the end of the game I could see uses for pretty much all of the skill trees, with the minor exception of some of the thievery-oriented skills, some of which seemed to have too narrow a niche to really be of any use.

In Skyrim skills are leveled up through repeated use, but in Enderal this system has been done away with. Instead, you level up skills by finding and buying ‘learning books’. At first I didn’t mind this system, but by the end of the game my opinion had changed for the worse. Sure, it’s gratifying to find skill books as you explore the world, but you can never quite find the ones that you want. By the end of the game most of my skills were still fairly low and if I wanted to say, learn to craft some decent higher-level gear or learn a mythical spell, I’d have to travel around to all of the relevant vendors and buy out their entire stock of learning books for that particular skill. This ended up being by far the biggest money sink in the game for me, and couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t quite how the developers intended me to increase the skills, but couldn’t really think of any other way to do it.

Enderal is as buggy as you would expect from a Skyrim mod made by a dozen or so people. At several points the game randomly crashed to the desktop without any error. After finishing a conversation with an NPC they would regularly seem to forget about it and chase after me to try to initiate the same conversation again. Terrain would sometimes turn into quicksand, forcing me to reload if I couldn’t find a way to wiggle out of it. Walking across items on the floor would sometimes catapult me across the room or simply crash the game. None of these issues were outright gamebreaking, but they did make the game a fairly frustrating experience at times. Given the scope of the game and the small development team, it’s easy to see why there are so many bugs. Skyrim was also a smorgasbord of glitches in its day, and many of those glitches seemed to have just carried over into Enderal.

Story

Enderal takes place several years after the events of Sureai’s previous total conversion mod, Nehrim, but you don’t need to have played that to get the most out of Enderal, as they take place in different locations, with a totally different story and cast of characters. Characters from Nehrim may show up and plot points will be referenced, but these are mostly just throwbacks and knowing about them isn’t crucial to the story.

The plot begins in a familiar way; you are a stowaway on a boat bound for the continent of Enderal and after awakening from a disturbing nightmare, you are caught by the ship’s crew and thrown overboard. Luckily you wake up on the shores of Enderal anyway and after a brief tutorial and meeting Jespar, one of the first major characters, you are set loose into the world. From there, following the first lot of quests given to you by Jespar will inform you of the strange occurrences in Enderal, like the zombies and skeletons roaming the wilderness, animals attacking travelers without provocation and a mysterious condition called the ‘red madness’ wherein unsuspecting citizens will go mad overnight and attack the people around them. Eventually you learn that the Holy Order that rules Enderal believes these things to all be connected to an historical event that could cause global mass extinction. From there, it’s a race against time to discover what exactly this enigmatic mass extinction event is by trawling the ruins of past civilisations believed to have been wiped out by it.

It’s the sort of plot that smacks more of Sci-Fi than classic fantasy, but while it gave me more than a few flashbacks to Mass Effect, Enderal is a dark fantasy tale through and through and accordingly isn’t afraid to up the ante at any given point. The story escalates rapidly when you start finishing main quests, and I can’t help but feel that the pacing could have been a bit slower in the early quests, giving you more of a chance to work your way up to the events that happen later. Although, if you’re the kind of player to spend all their time exploring the world and doing sidequests, this is a non-issue. In the later main story quests, twists are smart and plentiful, without falling into the trap of over-explaining certain aspects of the world. Instead, the story ends up quite firmly focused on it’s strongest feature: the characters.

The plot has a strong psychological component to it, and the neuroses of each character has a definite impact on how the story plays out. This is even true for the player character, despite being only able to communicate in dialogue options. The game subtly introduces a personal narrative that explains the motivations and backstory of the protagonist, providing some unexpected context for their actions in the game world.

Overall the story of the main quest was the highlight of the game for me, and I also found that it was complemented by the highly detailed sidequests. The side quests don’t have anything to do with the main quest, but manage to tie back into it in a purely thematic way. My favourite side quest involved infiltrating the ranks of the Rhalâta, the mysterious ascetic thugs that controlled the Undercity, a city literally underneath Ark. This quest was again mostly driven by the characters, and unfortunately played out badly for me, as my people pleasing tendencies backfired in an unexpected way during the epilogue of the quest. Turns out that simply picking the dialogue options that other characters approve of most isn’t necessarily the best course of action. In this case, an innocuous dialogue option which I avoided because it lost points with the character may have been crucial to a better outcome for the quest line. This was quite surprising to me and I respect Enderal a lot more for it; games very rarely punish the player for going out of their way to score the most approval points with the other characters.


Visuals & Sound

Enderal is an incredibly photogenic game. The engine shows its age in the blocky quality of the assets and environments, but Enderal still manages to create some interesting and downright beautiful locales. Many of the more interesting areas have a history behind them, which is either explained through quests or the environment itself. The Whisperwood is a particularly dangerous example of such an area. The Whisperwood was the first location I set foot in that really made the realization that Enderal is more than just a mod sink in. It’s a sprawling shadowy forest, with dead trees lit by ominous light and clumps of oversize glowing mushrooms littering the hills. The sinister environment was a good indication that my fresh player character might not be strong enough to deal with the monsters roaming the forest. Sure enough, the area was full of fairly tough monsters and the mushrooms gave me arcane sickness when I got too close to them. A few reloads later and I decided that I should probably wait until I was a higher level before sating my curiosity and exploring the area. The imaginative visual direction of some the locations make the game feel closer to Morrowind than the somewhat mundane landscapes of Skyrim.

Environments in Enderal are cluttered with detail, and I mean that in a good way. Plants are messily strewn everywhere in the surprisingly colourful forests, caves and ruins are filled to the brim with cobwebs, furniture and objects of interest, and just walking through the fields will take you through bridges, valleys and past towers and ruined castles. While I was keen to continue the gripping main story quests, walking from place to place made it very difficult to resist the temptation to explore, and I often ended up very far from the quest marker when I finally decided I should go back to trying to finish the quest I originally set out to do. The busy environments lends a strong feeling of authenticity to the setting, as though the world has a genuine history and has been inhabited and weathered for generations, not simply the bland digital amusement park that many open world games seem to be these days.

Despite being developed by a German studio on shoestring budget mostly composed of donations, the English voice acting in Enderal is fantastic, and stacks up well when compared to any AAA title. Amateur voice actors are seamlessly interspersed with more well-known professional voice actors and I often had trouble telling them apart, with a few exceptions. Every now and then while walking the streets of Ark, Enderal’s capitol, I’d walk past an NPC who would yell out jarringly loud, overacted lines that would pull me right out of the otherwise immersive environments. If anything, it’s a testament to just how well crafted the rest of the game is, as a glitch or just a bit of out of place audio is all it can take to ruin the immersion to the extent that it does. The music is similarly excellent. It’s not quite as heroic or dramatic as Skyrim’s soundtrack, but more subdued and melancholic, complementing the atmosphere and story well.

Conclusion

It’s a huge disservice to call Enderal a mod, but ultimately, it being a mod is the main thing holding Enderal back. The main drawbacks I had were the clunky combat system and overall bugginess, which are just part and parcel of being a total conversion mod for Skyrim. For those that can overlook these issues, there’s world teeming with life and history ready to be explored, and a deep, atmospheric story far superior to that of any given AAA title.

Enderal: Forgotten Stories is available for free on Steam, but requires the base game, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, to be installed before it can be played.

How Metro 2033 does worldbuilding better than Exodus

Metro 2033 is easily one of my favourite FPS games of all time. The gritty, grimy setting, smooth gunplay and beautifully rendered environments had me hooked right from the first chapter. Of course, Metro Last Light was pretty good as well, but didn’t quite live up to the original for me. Naturally when Metro Exodus was announced I was stoked. To me, the issue of Metro Exodus being an Epic store exclusive, and the ensuing cold war between Steam and Epic was only a sideshow – I just couldn’t bring myself to care. Now, having played Metro Exodus, I couldn’t help but feel let down, despite generally enjoying it. It was missing something that was vital to the original game. Despite the obviously superior graphical fidelity and varied, open environments, the world it attempted to construct around me just didn’t feel authentic.

The reason for this lies in the differing way in which they present their environments: specifically, in characters and design choices of the original game.

The story of Metro 2033 plays out in a fairly traditional way, with plenty plot devices and characters that we’re fairly used to seeing, albeit often not in a post-apocalyptic setting. There’s a mysterious existential threat looming over the Metro (the Dark Ones), and accordingly, the protagonist’s much looked up to mentor tasks him with warning the rest of the world about said threat. Along the way, the protagonist meets a variety of more worldly characters that fit neatly into common storytelling tropes, a roguish character familiar with the underbelly of banditry rampant in the metro, a mystic shaman-esque character who guides the protagonist through some of the many haunted tunnels in the metro.

Metro Exodus replaces a lot of these classic adventure tropes with a smorgasbord of post-apocalyptic clichés. Slavers, zombies, bandits, cultists who sacrifice their own people to a giant monster, cannibals, bandits, and more bandits. The significant difference here is that Metro 2033 uses tropes to introduce the unique setting, whereas for Metro Exodus the tropes ARE the setting. If you take away the post-apocalyptic staples, there’s very little of substance left.

Also, what the hell – how are there even so many bandits in the wasteland when there are virtually no normal people around? How do they make a living? How do they even reproduce when there are no women in a five-mile radius? It’s a mystery.

The threat of the Dark Ones is the underpinning narrative of Metro 2033. They are the reason the player sets out into the world in the first place, and the game constantly reminds you of this, as you see the Dark Ones observing you during encounters with some of the more ghostly phenomena in the tunnels. The game communicates their intentions through the story and details in the setting. At the beginning of the game, the player is told that they are hostile and that the rest of the metro must be warned about them, and the hospital in the starting village is full of soldiers left debilitated by their traumatic encounters with the Dark Ones, making it pretty clear that they are indeed a threat to the Metro. However, in the player’s encounters with the Dark Ones, they are shown to be more curious than anything, and sometimes even provide assistance when the player finds themselves in a tight spot. This dilemma is a major source of tension throughout the game, as the player begins to see signs that, despite their sinister appearance and the hostile nature of the rest of the setting, maybe the Dark Ones are not really hostile after all.

Metro Exodus does away with the supernatural undertones and overarching enemy of Metro 2033, instead opting for the vague goal of finding what remains (if anything) of the Russian government. To this end, the player spends most of their time meandering in the wasteland wilderness to get whatever he needs to be able to meander to the next post-apocalyptic set piece so they can be given a new set of objects to clear before they can continue their journey to nowhere. There’s no real continuity between the areas… unless you really care about the characters. Ah yes, the characters.

After long and lonely segments of crawling through mutant infested tunnels of Metro 2033, punctuated by the occasional settlement full of downcast denizens going about their daily life unaware of the threat of the Dark Ones, I really came to appreciate the occasional companion. The tropes that the characters adhere to made their perspectives on the metro make sense and helped make the setting more coherent. Now let’s compare this to Metro Exodus; instead of slowly introducing characters to build up the setting, Exodus throws more characters than the player can possibly keep track of from the start. Most of these characters have a couple of lines in each area to give them a bit of personality, but after clearing several chapters I still couldn’t quite remember most of their names, let alone their personalities.

For the most part, the characters in Metro Exodus are there to provide the player with something to do. Some of the characters give out optional missions, some of them accompany the player on missions, some of them die to make the player feel guilty for not doing all the optional missions in an area. It’s a fairly common (but clumsy) approach to open-world gameplay. The end result is that the characters aren’t memorable and don’t really have anything interesting to tell the player about the world.

The use of ammunition as currency that was an almost iconic feature of Metro 2033 and Last Light has been done away with in Exodus and replaced with a staple of the open world genre – a crafting system. In some ways this is a sensible move, as you’re very unlikely to come across merchants in the open world wastelands, but it was still a distinctive part of the setting and removing it makes the setting feel just that little bit less authentic in comparison to Metro 2033.

Gas mask use was a must when you’re on the toxic surface in 2033, and running out of the fairly rare replacement filters meant certain death if you can’t find a way back to the safety of the tunnels, this too has been mostly made obsolete in Metro Exodus. The surface is for the most part clear of toxic gases now, with gas masks required for only small segments of gameplay. Filters are also nowhere near as rare, as with the crafting system you can build a dozen of them out of materials you can get from a stripping a few guns and finding some cans of baked beans. I don’t dislike the crafting system as it is, but the features that it replaces were an important part of the series and the fact that it makes the scarcity of resources seem like a complete non-issue really made the world less believable for me.

Metro Exodus is a decent game in its own right, and in many ways superior to the original games. For all the issues I had with the story and world-building, it was still fun to play. The gunplay was tight and responsive, the visuals are some of the best I’ve seen in a modern game, and the sound design is excellent. This made it all the more disappointing for me that they opted for a more generic open world setting, forgoing the unique atmosphere and design choices of the original Metro 2033.