There are a few games like Mojang’s Minecraft and Bethesda’s Skyrim that have been around for over 10 years and are still just as popular as the day they released. The incredible longevity of these video games can be explained in part by their expansive worlds that never feel fully explored and the boundless creativity that they inspire in players.
In Skyrim, this inventiveness is expressed through the plethora of mods developed by the community. Almost anything that players can think up, there’s a Skyrim mod for it — fixing the title’s notorious bugs, adding quality-of-life adjustments, upscaling textures, or adding hot dog and hamburger stands. There are mods to turn Skyrim into Star Wars, Red Dead Redemption 2, and even bring areas from Morrowind like Sheogorad and Bleakrock into the game.
One Skyrim mod called Skyrim Together was in development for years before progress stalled in 2019, when the developers of Skyrim Script Extender discovered that the mod team was using its code without permission. Since then, the mod has been redeveloped and restructured to bring co-op and multiplayer capabilities to Steam’s Skyrim Special Edition. Now dubbed Skyrim Together Reborn, the revamped version of the add-on will launch on July 8.
Skyrim Together does just what its name suggests and allows 2 to 8 players to enjoy the game together. There is even a PvP mode, though it is disabled by default. The host player creates the party and is in charge of interacting with NPCs and looting quest items, and as they advance through a quest, progress is saved for each member of the party. It is also advised by the Skyrim Together development team that the same player serve as host throughout the entire playthrough.
As a party member who is not the host, players can kill quest monsters and bosses, clear dungeons, and solve puzzles. All of Skyrim’s quests, NPCs, dragons, and monsters are fully synced between all players, including animations, death states, and locations. Chest items, NPC inventories, pickpocketing, lockpicking, and dropped items are also synced, and for this reason pausing in most menus has been disabled. Random encounters like hunters, prisoners, and couriers may not appear in everyone’s world, however.
The development team also warns that, as a fairly complex add-on that syncs the progress of multiple players, Skyrim Together can potentially be buggy and also occasionally crash. The add-on’s compatibility with other mods has also not been thoroughly tested, and so the team advises disabling other mods first. Skyrim Together is also still a work in progress and the modders plan to implement additional features in the future, such as syncing the weather between players and adding map markers. Despite the limitations, the chance to play Skyrim with friends may well be worth it for some fans.
