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The last year and a half have been an era of rapid progress in Skyrim modding.
The game remains relevant to this day largely due to its openness as a modding playground, and the massive modding community holds true to this spirit. The growth spurt in several aspects, especially in the animation department, has been unprecedented.
Midway into 2022, the modding horizons have expanded beyond what anyone could have predicted a few years ago, as seen below.
Five completely new things 2022 modding has implemented in Skyrim
1) Climb ladders
This title has its fair share of ladders, most of which are usually found as roundabout ways to access forts and sewers through a hatch. The handful of actual ladders in the environment are not climbable.
They have never been in Bethesda games, including the newer Fallout games, because of engine-level limitations.
However, thanks to behavioral edits with Nemesis and the recent developments in Dynamic Animation Replacer, ladders are not only climbable but come with polished animations to boot.
Everglaid's EVG Animated Traversal does much more than that - it adds numerous environmental prompts to do certain maneuvers like squeeze through tight spaces and climb walls.
2) Peek into keyholes
Stealth in Skyrim is a much more polished experience than previous games in the series, making it a natural cornerstone of attention. This is likely part of why many playthroughs eventually converge into a stealth-archery build.
The modding scene also recognizes that, with popular thief mods like Skyrim Sewers and Sneak Tools becoming staples of the community over the years.
The 2022 addition to this thievery collection represents the massive ramp-up in modding technology. jayserpa's 'Take A Peek,' as the name suggests, adds an entirely new stealth mechanic.
It is now possible to peek into keyholes to scout the building before getting to business. This adds more than flavor, as the glance is a real-time representation of the interior.
3) Duck to dodge an attack
On account of being a game that came out in 2011, the standard of combat is not very sophisticated. Moreover, polish in combat has never been a major focus in Elder Scrolls titles. In this category, they are serviceable at best, without exception.
The hitboxes in this game most accurately reflect this crisis, wherein every melee weapon has an added phantom range that makes evasion unintuitive. Thus far, fans have had mods try to manually rescale the range of each weapon as a band-aid fix.
In 2022, however, users have Ersh's work-in-progress mod 'Precision.' It makes the weapon hitboxes as accurate as the modern measures of Dark Souls 3, and attacks do not do damage till they hit the player physically, even if they are dangerously close.
4) Play Skyrim in co-op
Numerous parallel projects have attempted to juggle the much-coveted golden chalice of multiplayer in Skyrim. Few have successfully implemented sessions allowing third-party gamers to join, and fewer have managed to do so with sufficient stability.
Skyrim Together is one of these successful attempts that has been troubleshooting its myriad obstacles for about half a decade.
This year, Skyrim Together Reborn came out as the closest approximation of its release candidate. Despite a few bugs here and there, this project has finally made it possible to have a complete multiplayer session with full functionality.
Better yet, numerous mods have already begun to bolster its community with features like dedicated settlement-building and PvP.
5) Hold hands
While the steadfast esprit de corps shared among the nordlings of Skyrim manifest well in its inns even in their war-torn times, these rarely ever translate to anything more concrete. With the provisions possible only in Skyrim VR, users can impress this sense of brotherhood by shaking hands with their fellow guildmates.
PLANCK, or Physical Animation and Character Kinetics, uses the VR hand rig to have the Dragonborn's hand interact directly with NPCs. Some of its more sinister applications are obvious in combat.
Whether by grabbing enemies by the elbow to pin them in place or holding them by the throat to assert dominance, this mod brings VR player agency only seen in the likes of Blade and Sorcery.
Disclaimer: This article reflects the author's views.
