Fucking play Falskaar!

Skyrim DLC is a lot like sex with me - quick, cheap, not great but pretty fun and a bit messy. Um... no, let me try and start over.

What if I told you that some 19 year old has spent a year in daddy's basement, away from school and a proper job, so he could create a huge mod for Skyrim, which rivals the official DLC in terms of fun, quality and amount of content? 20+ hours of extra play time for free! Well, you'd probably say, "I know! It's been all over the internet more than a week ago, what's your point?" Gee, aren't you in a bad mood today? Fine, I'll cut to the chase: Having finished all the official DLC and Falskaar, I can honestly say that Falskaar is more fun. And it's free!

A friend of mine, who pretends to be an ancient Indian professor in his spare time, once said, "If I secretly added Falskaar to your Skyrim installation, you wouldn't even know it's user-generated content. That's how well it fits in."

And you don't mess with Sambulai Afnak-Afnak

And it's true. Falskaar follows Skyrim tradition all the way up to it's ludicrous background story, which is best enjoyed without asking too many questions. Questions such as:

If you reach Falskaar through a portal, which had been inactive for centuries and everyone suddenly refers to you as the fabled traveler, why can you just leave the damn place on a boat? When you first step into Falskaar, you get the impression that the place had been forgotten and out of touch with the main land for eons. If you want to leave, however...

"Yeah, I can sail you back to Skyrim, no problem." Really? People travel to Falskaar and back by boat all the time? Then why add the whole portal traveler prophecy thing in the first place? It doesn't really make any sense.
Again, this isn't a big deal and by no means worse than the plot holes in the official DLC. Let's just say you'll be playing this for fun, but not because you're dying to see how it all ends or because the story was somehow moving and full of unforeseen plot twists.

Anyhow. Portal, shmortal, at the end of the little introduction you reach the town of Amber Creek, a little town full of completely helpless NPCs. I had a dozen or so new quests piling up in my journal, simply because every single NPC needs help with something. Sexy merchant chick wants some lost family ring returned. Farmer dude wants his stray cattle returned. Mrs. Jarl wants me to check on the neighbours. Elf Jr. wants me to find proof he's adopted. Daddy Elf wants me to stop monsters from killing all of his chickens - with bonus rewards for speedy completion!

And since this isn't an MMO, you don't just go there, kill this and loot that, but fight your way through massive, well-designed dungeons full of traps, puzzles and secrets, as well as hordes of strong enemies. I was level 54 when I started my playthrough and found many of the bandits and necromancers in Falskaar to be a lot stronger than regular Skyrim baddies, even on adept difficulty. Crank it up to legendary and you're in for a rough time. What fun!

Many quests make excellent use of the creation kit. If you want to figure out who is killing all the chickens, you'll need to hide and wait in the bushes at midnight, then follow the killer to their hideout, rather than whacking them on sight. Leave the quest in your journal for too long and all the chickens will be dead. In a seemingly empty lighthouse, a ghost will fade in and out of existence to guide you towards a hidden passage. There are also some good guy options when handing in a quest. "I don't need your gold, I did this because I'm full of love" or some shit, which may sometimes result in an even better reward or, unsurprisingly, no reward at all, since you just refused it. You moron!

And it works with companions! Look at how happy the wife, follower, doggie and mount are!

The real meat and potatoes lies within the main quest, which stretches over nine lengthy story missions. There's a bad guy and his army of other bad guys, who all happen to be a bit greedy and hungry for power, so they start ransacking the nearby towns and end up planning their attack on Amber Creek, the one thing that stands between them and total domination of Falskaar. There's also a bit of Indiana Jones style mythology going on and then both factions chase after some magic artifact, which supposedly grants immortality and all kinds of nifty perks, but for the most part, it's guerilla-style elite soldiers vs generic bad guy army action. Almost a bit like Call of Duty with swords.

For the most part, this works incredibly well. You join a bunch of five or so NPCs and infiltrate an enemy fort through the sewers, then battle your way through, rescue a kidnapped family and duel the commander to the death. At some point, you'll have to decide whether you want to join the Brawny Bros. on their raid against some bandits or the Jarl and his monk buddy to kick some necromancer ass - you can only choose one of the two missions, the other one will be finished by the NPCs.
This may sound a bit strange, but it's actually really cool. Nobody in Falskaar gives a shit about you being the Dragonborn. They have brave, capable warriors there, who get shit done. They'll ask you for help and they'll happily have you tag along, but you don't single-handedly save the day and defeat a whole army. They lead the attack, you follow, kill as many bad guys as you can and try to stay alive. The NPCs related to the main questline rarely just sit on their asses and wait for you to do all the dirty work. Good!

It's not exactly Braveheart, but then, William Wallace probably didn't have to fight with framerate issues.

Of course there's a reason why the official DLCs and Skyrim's main plotline don't do stuff like that. And that becomes apparent during, and after, every major battle in Falskaar. First of all, things can and will turn into a huge, confusing clusterfuck rather rapidly. This is especially the case in the later, bigger battles, where on top of the main NPCs you get some generic soldiers to join you.

All the red dots on the compass are enemies.

Imagine fighting a dozen or so bad guys. There might be a dozen soldiers on your team, not counting any possible followers you may have brought along. They all want each other dead. Actually hitting one of the bad guys is incredibly difficult, because they all just disappear into a cartoony cloud of fists and swords. No, not literally. Shut up!
It doesn't help both the bad guy soldiers and good guy soldiers wear simple guard outfits. You can only tell them apart by their colour, which is a bit difficult during night time or when you start torching people. And again, you're not Rambo, you're part of a whole bunch of soldiers. If you run, hide and sit around for long enough, your troops will destroy the enemy units, with or without you.

Finishing off what I hope is an enemy soldier.

Personally, I think it's great. Fighting side by side with a bunch of surprisingly likeable characters, storming enemy keeps and trying to stay focused in a big, confusing battle is very different from your usual Skyrim experience. Think about it: You're the fucking Dragonborn, the über düber hero, nothing can stop you, everyone thinks you're such a badass, blah blah blah. Yes, that's fun or nobody would have played it. But in Falskaar, you're just some friendly, helpful stranger, who helps out in a war, which would have happened anyway, with or without you. The whole world doesn't just fucking revolve around you. In Falskaar, you're not treated like some fabled superhero, who could take on the gods all by himself. You join a war, try to stay alive, try to keep up with the main characters and try to kill a few guys, who actually belong to the enemy team rather than your own. It's confusing, a bit scary, potentially frustrating and highly immersive.
To be fair, the whole thing may polarise a bit. If you love being the one and only hero, if you want your battles everyone vs you, then Falskaar's main plotline probably isn't for you.

Wearing the main baddie's armor. Which isn't really supposed to happen, but I modded it. :P

The other, bigger problem with quests and battles of this magnitude lies in the unpredictable, stupid AI of Skyrim. Sometimes you're supposed to meet up with NPCs at a certain location. You can follow them as they move there, only to realize they're casually walking and killing every single last mudcrab on the way. There are fucking horses in Falskaar, why don't they use them?
"Make haste! We have to make it to the Temple of Bob before Mr. Badguy gets there! Time is running out!" *casually prances away and attacks a crab* Mkay...
I have caught quest NPCs swimming across a river literally three feet away from the fucking bridge.

Most of the time it's best to just fast-travel to the quest location, then use the game's wait function for NPCs to catch up. This becomes especially hilarious when only half of the important NPCs show up for an engine-rendered dialogue cutscene.
"Halt! I challenge you to a duel! If you have any honour, you will fight me or forever be known as a coward!"
"Ha! Fighting an old man isn't much of a challenge now, is it?"
Silence. One minute. Two minutes. Everyone just standing there.
Wait-hotkey. "Wait for 6 hours". 6 hours pass. Missing NPC comes running into the cutscene.
"How dare you!" AHA! Imagine he had been all out of breath to make it even more surreal.
This isn't game-breaking. Not entirely. Stuff bugs out, you wait or do a quicksave/quickload to fix it. But it's there.

Some script and AI quirkiness aside, presentation is fucking amazing and beyond anything I had ever expected from user-generated content. First of all, there's the voice acting. Okay, Jarl Ragnarr is a ham and overacts every line of dialogue so badly, he must have been channeling William Shatner or David Caruso the entire time. The other voice actors (29 total) are really, seriously good, up to a point where even enemies such as the countless bandits you kill, have their own voice sets in combat! They're seriously fun to fight, because you get some different lines of text, which you haven't already heard a million times in the main game.
Falskaar also looks really amazing.

These burgers are so fresh, they're still mooing!

The whole place is about one third of the size of Skyrim and full of caverns, outposts, ruins and other places to explore. Well... if you're allowed to explore them before finding the corresponding quest first. More often than not, I'd run into a locked door that would not budge until I had managed to get a quest for the dungeon.
You may notice some performance issues if you're using texture and ENB mods. Indoor areas aside, the whole thing is in one piece, there are no loading screens when you enter a town, the landscapes are incredibly detailed and use more plants and vegetation than most areas in Skyrim and if you add 20 or so bloodthirsty warriors to the picture, well... things can get a bit taxing on your hardware.

Falskaar also comes with it's own 40something minutes of soundtrack, which is pleasant enough, if a bit tinny and canny. But come on. On the one side, you have Jeremy Soule for the main game, then there's Falskaar and what I presume must be an enthusiastic six year old with his own Bontempi home keyboard. Style and quality are somewhere between Runescape and Minecraft. Still. Custom music for user-made DLC. And it's not horrible. You can enjoy it for the 20-30 hours you'll spend there.

A geyser. Something I can only pronounce because I play King of Fighters a lot.

If you're still not sold, here's the one reason to play this, on top of it being free, fun and full of stuff to do: Any idiot could set it up in two minutes. Even you.

Even if you never use any mods, if you're staying away from everything that isn't official DLC, because you're afraid it might mess up your game, try Falskaar! It consists of two files that go in your data folder, you activate them, that's it. No need for plugins, script extenders, nothing. All you need is an up to date version of Skyrim. You don't even need the official DLC. And it's not intrusive, either. It adds one NPC to Riften, who asks you to check out a mine in the middle of nowhere, which will lead you to the new content. That's it. The rest of Falskaar is entirely seperated from the main game, it doesn't add any weird new shit to it, it won't mess with your story and it won't break anything. Doesn't get any more convenient than that.

I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favourite DLC on the Citadel.

-Shep