I have been excited for The Elder Scrolls 6 long before Bethesda foolishly decided to announce it all the way back in 2018. Prior to falling head over heels in love with Skyrim in 2014, I had amassed a huge amount of admiration for Oblivion and Morrowind before that. While I’m not the biggest Elder Scrolls fan in the world – I haven’t played Daggerfall, after all – I am prone to endlessly searching for Scrolls-likes at 3 am in the hopes of recapturing the magic that seemingly only these games inexplicably hold.

Of course, that wait for The Elder Scrolls 6 keeps getting longer, and Bethesda’s reputation continues to be tarnished, with the likes of Starfield receiving scathing reviews. While I doubt I’ll ever fully stop desperately imagining what TES 6 could be like and irrationally and irresponsibly getting my hopes up far too high, I have decided to move on somewhat. Fortunately, one of those 3 am sessions looking for my Elder Scrolls obsession paid off, as I stumbled across a huge open-world first-person fantasy RPG unlike any other.

Enderal Is A Huge Conversion Mod For Skyrim

It Adds A New Story, Region, And Gameplay Mechanics

Enderal: Forgotten Stories is a complete conversion mod for Skyrim created by SureAI. It is a new game made within Skyrim’s engine. It has its own world, storyline, characters, quests, armor sets, enemies, mechanics, and even better visuals than Skryim, all of which combine to create a staggeringly large 100-hour RPG experience. The first time I stumbled across Enderal, I was blown away, not simply because of its impressive size and content offering, but also due to the fact that somehow, despite constantly searching for the best games like Skyrim, I had never heard of it.

That’s not to say that it’s a hidden gem. After all, it’s one of the most popular mods for Skyrim. However, I think the sheer scale of the mod as well as its significant alterations to Skyrim’s foundations often go overlooked. Not only is Enderal a far more narrative-driven game, offering a far superior alternative to Skyrim’s somewhat generic chosen-one narrative with its more mature and darker reflection on pressing social and political topics, but it’s also much harder, putting a greater focus on combat and adding a lot of depth.

I love Enderal: Forgotten Stories, often more than I do Skyrim, not just because it changes a lot, but because it manages to encapsulate everything that made the Elder Scrolls series so great during the Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion eras. It also offers me something that’s so incredibly rare in video games: the ability to experience one of my favorite games as if it were the first time again. Playing through Enderal brought me back to my teenage years, sitting in front of my tiny TV playing through Skyrim for the first time and feeling like literally anything was possible.

Enderal: Forgotten Stories is the definitive version of the Enderal experience. It was initially called Enderal: The Shards of Order, but was later renamed to Forgotten Stories when the developer released it on Steam with new features, including extra quests.

That magical freeform sandbox experience is what has made Skyrim a timeless classic, one that I think about practically every day and wish more RPGs could be like. Enderal offers that same experience, only far more improved, made with the love and passion of fans who understood what Skyrim was missing, and what its successors need. Enderal, for all intents and purposes, feels like The Elder Scrolls 6, just years before it was meant to be released. While it may not be as graphically impressive as TES6, its gameplay and world design absolutely serve as the perfect blueprint for it.

Enderal Should Be A Blueprint For TES6

Its Improvements To Skyrim Are Extensive

Todd Howard has expressed that TES6 will learn from Skyrim’s mistakes, and that makes me very excited. It’s not that Skyrim is bad, but it has a lot of flaws that, at least through a modern lens, make it less impressive than it was back in 2011. I’m not going to pontificate about everything that makes Skyrim bad when compared to the likes of Baldur’s Gate 3, largely because I think it can be reductive thinking that takes away from not just the cultural impact of Skyrim, but what it does so perfectly that even BG3 couldn’t achieve.

Nevertheless, those flaws need to be addressed in The Elder Scrolls 6. It’ll make it a better game and prove that Bethesda still has what it takes to be at the top of the RPG scene. I’ve made it clear that Starfield, Fallout 76, and Fallout 4, have been disappointments to me. I appreciate some love them, but I feel it’s a clear indication of Bethesda’s slow decline in quality. However, I don’t believe that Bethesda should look to Baldur’s Gate 3 or really any other popular RPG for lessons on how to improve, but rather mods like Enderal.

Enderal’s changes to the Skyrim formula never detracted from the immersive RPG experience that the Elder Scrolls series has done so perfectly for decades. Rather, its harder combat, more restrictive magic systems, survival elements, world design, and more helped to elevate the RPG experience, offering something that brought the series back to its roots while ensuring that those accustomed to Skyrim’s style could still enjoy it. SureAI took risks that perhaps Bethesda couldn’t take at the time, adding more hardcore features that only certain parts of the fanbase may enjoy.

However, the boom in soulslikes showcases that casual players are open for a challenge; Baldur’s Gate 3 illustrated that players want more in-depth RPG systems, even if it involves a lot of dice; importantly, Dragon Age: The Veilguard showcased that removing the hardcore elements from a beloved series causes a huge drop in sales. When playing through Enderal, it became clear to me that TES6 needs to take the risks it did, implement a survival mode, feature more in-depth combat that doesn’t just devolve into sneaking around with a bow, and, above all else, show a new side to Bethesda.

Enderal Shows How Important Modding Will Be For TES6

It Was Created By Passionate Fans

Enderal: Forgotten Stories is also a great indication of the importance of the modding scene for Bethesda games. It is a truly huge effort from dedicated fans who had a vision for their own world and utilized Skyrim’s foundations to make that a reality. Of course, the base Skyrim experience was good enough to inspire players to go the extra mile and create and implement their own ideas and worlds. I was even tempted to learn how to mod for Skyrim, although the community is probably lucky I never bothered as I can’t imagine I’d have made the next Enderal.

Enderal isn’t the exception either, as, alongside many unfinished projects that had a lot of potential, modders have created some of the best conversion mods as well as full-blown quest chains that have even gone on to become their own games. The other notable example – outside SureAI’s other giant mod for Oblivion, Nehrim: At Fate’s Edge – is Fallout: London, which similarly takes the core Fallout 4 experience and puts a bigger focus on player freedom. Both of these mods show the weak points in Bethesda’s game design, which I hope will inspire the developer to do better.

There’s also the complicated Skyblivion mod, which is recreating Oblivion within Skyrim’s engine while adding a wealth of new features, Fallout: Miami, and many more. I hope that The Elder Scrolls 6 has full mod support like Skyrim and Fallout 4 so that future fans can be as inspired as the SureAI team and all the other dedicated modders out there. Enderal: Forgotten Stories is completely free for those who want to experience just how majestic it is and, I hope, get a glimpse at what The Elder Scrolls 6 could and definitely should be like.