Featured Image Credit: Bethesda Softworks
Topics: Skyrim, Mods, Dark Souls, The Elder Scrolls, PC
Skyrim players can now tuck into a new mod which adds a challenging new game mode, perfect for Dark Souls fans.
Thanks to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’s generous difficulty sliders, players can make the game as difficult or as easy as they want to. The world’s your oyster.
However, the difficulty slider simply makes enemies stronger or weaker, and doesn’t really add much challenge besides making things take longer to kill.
That’s where mods come in to make things a little bit more interesting. This one by Blackspine18859, for instance, gives things a Dark Souls-esque gameplay twist.
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Titled Soul Fade, the mod adds a new difficulty twist in which players face more consequences for dying and reloading.
“The Dragonborn's soul is immortal, but it can be weakened. Death may not bring about your true end, it does weigh heavily upon you, and as you fall time and time again in battle, your very essence weakens. Thankfully, you are a slayer of dragons. Consume their souls and use them to restore your own,” reads the mod description.
How it works is simple. A new death counter is added to the game’s loading screen when you die and reload your save file. Every ten deaths you experience, you go through something the mod calls Soul Fade.
Soul Fade essentially diminishes your ability to harm enemies, where the number of times you’re killed is linked to an increasing chance that your attacks, physical and magical, will cause no damage.
This debuff is displayed in your active magic effects for you to track, in case you end up dying a lot.
The chances of dealing no damage change depending on the number of deaths you’ve experienced, where hitting 10 deaths gives you a 15% chance of no damage, and increasing by 15% every next 10 deaths until you hit a 75% chance of dealing no damage.
To recover from Soul Fade, you need to perform a lesser power Soul Sacrifice, which requires a single dragon soul to reset your death count.
If you don't have any dragon souls to spare, though, you can use another power called Soul Anchor, which counters the zero-damage chance penalty with another penalty to movement speed.
As for why Blackspine18859 made this mod, they wrote that “I've tried a ton of alternate death mods, and I couldn't find a single one that didn't give me problems.
“I wanted something simple, streamlined, and bug-proof. Rather than trying to prevent death, which seems to be where all the problems and conflicts arise, I decided to allow the character to die and implement a post-death penalty.
“It's harsh enough to be meaningful if you don't do something about it but simple enough to get rid of that it won't make you miserable. It also gives you something to spend dragon-souls on when you've run out of other uses for them.”
You can download the Soul Fade mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim now from Nexus Mods.
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