This Elder Scrolls game is over a decade old, but a new DLC-sized mod keeps it fresh

You don’t need to spend lashings of cash on a brand new game when excellent community mods exist. 

Released in 2011, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim still holds up today as one of the best RPGs ever. It has all the core trappings of a fantasy epic: colossal dragons, slick swashbuckling, and a lot of yelling. But even though Skyrim over a decade old now, there’s still new life to be breathed into it yet.

Warden Of The Coast is a huge DLC-sized creation from modder TheBawb, adding up to 15 hours of new missions, voice lines, companions, and five possible endings to one of Bethesda’s best-loved games.

Oh, and it’s free.

Shout at the devil

TheBawb has kitted out its Warden Of The Coast mod with everything you need to take the Dovah-Kiin on a brand-new adventure. At just 2.5GB, you’re getting a lot of content in a comparatively small space - especially considering how detailed this mod seems to get.

In the Warden of the Coast’s mod listing, TheBawb says it’s “heavily inspired by the game mechanics of Mass Effect and Dragon Age”, your mission is to halt the return of a malevolent Daedric lord with the help of your nine in-game companions. Each companion has their own unique questline to help build their loyalty to you, which should come in handy given the “three-companion exploration system”.

You’ll be able to check on your progress with each companion thanks to TheBawb’s companion regard system. It will be updated through dialogue, kills, and quest choices to give you an accurate bearing of where you stand with your partners. 

They seem to be fully-interactable members of your party, as you can revive them during combat and even level them up once your relationship is high enough.

As well as 9,000 brand new dialogue lines shared between 27 voice actors, you’ll be a lover as well as a fighter thanks to some new romance storylines - and you’ll even get to marry the beau of your choice in an upcoming patch. What’s more, the five possible outcomes will hinge on the choices that you make in the game, leaving plenty of room for replayability.

Storyline aside, Warden Of The Coat offers two brand new world spaces and 19 new interiors, giving it a fresh look that will shake up the world of Skyrim as you know it.

The only things you need to play Warden Of The Coast are your PC and a copy of Skyrim. It doesn’t use any unique assets from the special editions of the game, so you shouldn’t have any issues running it with the vanilla release.

As one of the most modded games ever, the Skyrim community has loads to look forward to if the talented modders keep the goods coming for incoming Bethesda games such as Starfield.

• Not into modding? Pick up one of the best PC games for a brand new adventure.