I never quite got Skyrim. I'm a Morrowind fan, yes, we all know that. But it's not because I pine for the good old days that the game didn't sit right with me. What was it? What was it? The streamlined skills system?
No. It was that it never allowed me to annihilate a mudcrab using a DP-27 lightweight machine gun with 7.62x54mmR cartridges, sending it speeding across a lake's surface at 400 miles per hours and into God's waiting arms.
Someone has solved this problem. Skyrim WW2 overhaul is exactly what it says it is: a mod which replaces Skyrim's plinky civil war, consisting of four Norwegians smacking against each other in a small field, with the most destructive conflict ever experienced by mankind. It turns it into an Eastern Front, with Imperials and Stormcloaks becoming the Red Army and Wehrmacht, depending on the mod you choose.
It's fantastic, and I don't mean that ironically. It's a mash-up of chaos, obviously. The mod's attempts at simulating real-life WWII guns like the MP 40 or PPSh 41 rely on a very hacky adaption of base-Skyrim crossbow mechanics. Shooting anyone will result in a raspberry spray of unwisely damaging bullets. This will continue until the game decides it's time to reload, and then starts an 8 second animation of your character gently stroking the machinery of death. As far as I know, you cannot reload whenever you want. Only when the mod decides that it is time. This is a totalitarian move.
Skyrim's systems are messed up in a way that is both fun and chaotic. After I emerged from the ruins with Hadvar, a senior officer of the Red Army who was now my companion, I was immediately thrown into Operation Uranus. The trees were bursting with Germans. The air was filled with gunfire and grenade blasts. NKVD border guards with SVT-40s gave the stink-eye on top of their immaculately trimmed moustaches. Every now and then, I would get my head blown off by a Wood Elf I never saw from Wiesbaden. This is Skyrim the way it was meant to be played.
I'm not kidding when I say that I'm serious about the "having your head shot" thing. Skyrim's damage and health systems were not designed to accommodate the output from the Izhevsk Mechanical Plant. The game is broken in two if you give all your allies, enemies, and even you, the ability to do several hundred damage points a second on whoever you want. Here's a good example of how easy it can be to bite it.
It also turns it into a longer version of the beach scene in Saving Private Ryan. As you crawl across Honningbrew Meadery, people are collapsing all around you. They throw fireballs at times, something that actual Red Army officers could not do in 1944.
It's incredibly fun, and I can't stress this enough. Just dip in to see how long you last. It's a shame that it isn't technically at Nexus Mods. The big ol’ mod site banned it, for reasons I cannot find. If I had to guess, I'd say that the whole 'WW2 Eastern Front" thing made it a magnet for awful, even though the author promised, "This mod was created purely for fun and not to offend or push any political agenda." Great effort has been made to exclude any symbols/units/uniforms that can be seen as offensive."
I say technically, because if you have a link, you can download the mod. To be more specific, this link. If that doesn't work either, a kind soul has uploaded the file to Archive.org (although this website is currently down for various reasons). If I were you, I'd grab this now. The war is not a waiting game.
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