Finished Enderal: Forgotten Stories , a Skyrim total conversion/mod that you can get as a standalone download on steam provided you have the vanilla Skyrim version (not SE) in your steam library. I went in totaly blind, just to try it out since it's free and got some praise in an era thread and after finishing it, i have to say it's one of the most impressive games i remember playing. It's a fully fledged, 100+ hour rpg with a huge open world full of hand crafted, high quality content with good writing and excellent character interactions, on top of that it's fully voice acted and honestly, i can hardly tell a difference between these amateur voice actors in a free mod and some professional ones in big budget titles. It just seems like such a huge game, but the credits consist of around 10 people aside from those that did the voice acting and translations, i have no idea how they pulled this off, they must have some next level team managment skills.
The only downside is the outdated Bethesda engine, so i experienced frequent crashes to desktop, but i guess that is to be expected since it really pushes the engine with nice graphics and lots of scripting, also i suspect playing a melee build might not be so fun since they can't do miracles with this old Skyrim combat engine, i played an archer and it was ok. On the other hand, the sense of progression is very well done, every level up until late game feels meaningful, it's a lot like a Gothic game where besides just getting experience to level up you also need to pay for skill learning, so you're basically always short on cash. Really love the game, would be perfectly happy with it as a full price purchase, yet it's totally free. (felt so good about it i had to donate to the developers anyway)
