Skyrim's Enderal mod team are making a new commercial game
Ooh! What could it be?
The final update arrived for the huge (and hugely impressive) free Skyrim total conversion mod Enderal yesterday. It's a small patch but does bring a bit tease that the developers are now working on a new commercial project. They don't give any hint as to what that might be, but considering the years they've spent with Enderal as well as Oblivion mod Nehrim, it's hard not to assume/hope it might be some fantasy RPG dealio. Fingers crossed?
Enderal tells a whole new story in a whole new world, using Skyrim as the technoscaffolding for a game that's familiar but different. Richard Cobbett noted in our Enderal review, "Much of its DNA comes from games like Gothic and The Witcher, and most of the systems are changed up in some way." And it's huge, even getting its own expansion. Three-and-a-half years after its initial release, it's now done.
"This patch will be the final one for Enderal, because we no longer have the amount of free time we used to have to keep on patching it!" developers SureAI said in Sunday's announcement (spotted by PCG). "This also means that we will not create a port for Skyrim Special Edition."
That second part is a shame. Be nice to have the game on Bethesda's slightly fancier version, both for its wee technical improvements and for, y'know, folks who don't own the non-Special version. But they have good reason to be busy.
"SureAI is currently working on a new, commercial project which will hopefully be announced this year," they teased. SureAI's website lists a "Soon TM" on their Games page.
That's it. That's all they say. No hints as to even genre. But given they've been making their own fantasy RPG series for over a decade, and even have a trilogy of Enderal books coming, I would assume it's along similar lines. Unless they're so chuffing sick of fantasy by now that they escapist fantasy would be a first-person shooter about American soldiers conducting high-calibre diplomacy in a fictional post-Soviet state. But probably not, right?
You can download Enderal for Skyrim from Steam. Nehrim is up on Steam for Oblivion too.
Speaking of Elder Scrolls mods spawning commercial games, this should be the year we finally see the fancy remake of The Forgotten City, the neat Skyrim mod about a city stuck in a strange time loop. After a lengthy delay, that's now due to launch this spring. Our Katharine talked with one of the devs in 2019, which I keep wanting to say was last year but definitely wasn't.