Digital Recuperation

Of course, these days, all I play is Skyrim. It's hard for a game to get old when it changes all the time. The quality of user made mods has improved by leaps and bounds over the past five years, too. Lately I've been trying out a lot of companion mods, mods that add NPCs to follow your character as friends and allies.

There are followers in the vanilla game with simple quests and even with the potential to become romantic partners through marriage, though a great deal is still left to the imagination. Bethesda, the company that makes the Elder Scrolls series, of which Skyrim is the fifth installment, as well as the Fallout games since Fallout 3, began with a philosophy of RPG making that imposed little to no character traits on the player character, allowing the player's imagination to fill the gaps. The problem with this method is that characters the player interacts with often must be vague in any dialogue relating to the player character's distinguishing traits.

Bethesda has been gradually moving towards a format that confers more backstory to the player character with motives that drive their actions in the narrative. This is what made Fallout 4 so unpopular as Bethesda forced the player into the role of a parent seeking their kidnapped infant. Many people didn't enjoy being handcuffed to the resulting dialogue consisting of plaintive questions regarding that child. The main selling point of Bethesda games for so long has been their open-endedness, the ability for a player not only to explore whatever physical territory he or she wished, but also whatever thematic or moral territory he or she wished.

Modding has proved a method to bring the best of both types of game narratives together. The mods you choose define not only the world of Skyrim as you like it but also the personality of your character and one of the best ways to do that is with companion mods, particularly companion mods with a variety of options of how to interact with the companion.

Val Serano is a companion created by a modder named Axarien last year and voiced by an actor named Krimson Graey. He has custom created clothing, armour, weapons, and even a ship (he's a pirate). Everything, from the 3d models and textures to the voice acting, is professional quality. The writing is, too, and a cut above most Skyrim mods. It's definitely made with a YA female audience in mind--Val is the proverbial bad boy waiting to be fixed. The dialogue is left open ended enough for you to play it as a gay romance but this is the kind of thing you usually find in fiction aimed at women. Val is a rough customer but not too rough who was made so due to a rough childhood and he just needs someone to show him how to love himself. I kind of feel like he switches from mischievous pirate to devoted follower a little too quickly but I'm not the audience for this. The ones aimed at heterosexual male players certainly can't claim moral superiority. The popular Serana Dialogue Add-on converts the vanilla character into a complex romanceable character who's an impressive creation but the level of ego stroking in her dialogue is nauseating at times.

One of the things I appreciated about Val Serano is that he has dialogue asking the player character about his or her past: about religion, place of birth, and outlook on life with a lot of potential answers, allowing you to flesh your character out with dialogue. Val also interacts extensively with another mod follower, called Remiel by maplespice, which adds another level of personalisation for the player. Remiel is a very popular follower, a nerdy specialist in Dwarven technology. She also interacts with the Serana Dialogue Add-on:

As you can see, everything about these mods is professional quality, but they're all free. What's going on here?

A couple years ago, Bethesda started hosting a site for paid mods but the general consensus on mods found through the paid system is that they're shit. All the good stuff is still being made by people working for free. Sometimes mod authors will pay professional actors out of their pocket and many of them have Patreons and sell t-shirts and mugs. It's a strange system but, historically, it's always been hard for artists to get compensation for their art. I think a lot of modders and the actors who participate in the making of mods see this as resume fodder, basically a free-range internship and a number of modders have gone on to being hired by companies like Bethesda. On the one hand, it's a worryingly unstable system but, on the other, I think it facilitates a diversity of creative products we wouldn't see otherwise. One thing's for sure, I'm certainly getting value for the sixty dollars I forked out for Skyrim all the way back in 2011. It's no wonder Bethesda has been so supportive of modding.