Lore-vriendelijke Skyrim Mod repareert de meest flagrante realismefout: The Pheasants

Heruitgegeven door Plato

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Skyrim has plenty of oddities. There’s the goldfish memory of your enemies, the way you can get good enough at pickpocketing to literally steal the shirt off someone’s back, and how it’s possible for NPCs to attain a level of narrative importance sufficient to de dood afwenden. But those are nothings. Trifles. Mere bagatelles compared to the game’s most major inconsistency: The pheasants.

Think about it. Pheasants are all over the place in Skyrim, but only ever as corpses. They hang in kitchens and linger in food halls, but you can count the number of living ones you see on no hands at all. Are we to believe that the denizens of Skyrim, like the hunters of the Dodo, reduced the region’s pheasant population to a set of cold bodies and warm memories? How long have they been gone? Are those corpses you can take giblets from decaying by the time the game takes place?

Zet deze onaangename gedachten uit je hoofd, want Skyrim-modders zijn hier – nogmaals – om de logica te behouden en de dag te redden. Een mod genaamd Ring-necked Pheasants – Mihail Monsters and Animals returns the humble pheasant to its natural home: Skyrim’s wilderness, not its pantries.

De maker, MihailMods, is serious about their craft, too. Their mods are “implemented in an immersive and unique way, with respect to the pillars of lore,” they say, emphasising that “instead of pathetically just throwing models and textures in the game reusing 100% vanilla mechanics, the creatures made by Mihail have uniqueness and extreme zeal in their idealization and implementation, which will provide you with an experience that you have never had before in this area”. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

It honestly looks great. The author is clearly something of an ornithological artist, and the pheasant they’ve rendered for Skyrim (including its older Legendarische editie) is eerlijk gezegd weelderig. Hij paradeert, hij strijkt glad, het avondzonlicht danst op zijn iriserende veren alsof het op een plas helder water is. Ze maken zelfs de juiste fazantengeluiden.

I mean really, just compare the game’s stock (dead) birds with MihailMods’ version below. There’s no contest.

Don’t worry, you can replace the usual dead pheasants with MihailMods’ version using een andere mod.

You might think I’m poking fun, but I’m not. MihailMod’s bird really is exquisitely rendered, and has ensured that I won’t be able to play Skyrim ever again without the peculiar absence of living pheasants sticking in my craw. Mods like these—tiny, hyper-particular things that fix issues that only a vanishing percentage of players are likely to have—might truly be my favourite kind. And if you need more bird variants in your Skyrim playthrough, you can always throw in the kuikens en kip variant mods van dezelfde auteur.