The Elder Scrolls is for Porn

Ahh, Skyrim! A friend of mine wondered whether Skyrim has so many fantastic mods, because the game is actually rather bland and uninspiring and the plot a bit shit and generic. Perhaps they see Skyrim as a blank canvas? While I agree that Bethesda games are far from great in the story department, I believe that it's actually the other way 'round - the plot is so bleh, because mods. They know people are gonna buy their games because open world, easy modding tools, people are gonna modify the shit out of everything, so spending a massive amount of resources on a fantastic, moving plot may actually be financially bad. People are gonna buy it anyway, so why waste time and money on a good story?

I believe these games get so many great mods because modding them is possible - and it's easy. People would still do it, even if the game had an amazing story and a completely immersive world right out of the box. Case in point: Fallout - New Vegas. Seemingly endless possibilities, a deep, memorable story and people modded it like mad, simply because they could. Because it's fun. And because many 'role-players' want to play exactly the characters and stories they have in mind, so they'll just create stuff on their own if it isn't already in there. Of course what starts modding in pretty much every game isn't even the desire to create, to tell a story or to make the game better. It's the urge to get off.

No exceptions

The first mod for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was a nude patch, which removed the tattooed-on underwear from female characters. Turned out there were real 3D-modelled naughty bits underneath, which were hard-coded into the game. Yep - the modder didn't even have to create any of that stuff, all he had to do was remove the bra and undies and everything was pretty much as it should be underneath. And because nudity is terrifying, the release of this mod caused the game's ESRB rating to go up a notch. Because it had 3D tits in it, even though they could only be accessed via a 3rd party hack.

You might wonder why the artists decided to put boobs in there to begin with, but nudity wasn't exactly a new thing in The Elder Scrolls. Rewind time to 1996 and you could completely undress your characters in Daggerfall, the second game of the series. As a teenager I was eternally grateful for that, because I had no internet back in the day and the only boobs I had access to looked like this:

Actual screenshot from Daggerfall. Khajiit had human faces back then.

There was no Google image search back then. Heck, even if there was, it took five minutes to properly display a website, let alone several images. I couldn't hide any magazines under the bed, because the maid would find them (spoiled rich kid here). So to me, Daggerfall wasn't simply the best damn RPG at the time. It gave me boobies when I was lucky enough to be alone. I shared the room and the computer with siblings, so on top of trying to figure out female anatomy from a bunch of blocky pixels there was always the risk of getting caught. It may sound hilarious now, but back then nothing was better than knowing the family was out and I could have five minutes to myself with Daggerfall. Who am I kidding? Twelve seconds was all I needed. Had I yanked it any harder I'm sure my dick would have caught on fire.

Here's a funny story - today the first bunch of mods for Elder Scrolls games always add nudity. Daggerfall has naughty bits by default, so there are mods to get rid of them. Fans probably did something similar for Battlespire, which in its default state features some of the most pointless droopy nutsacks in RPG history.

It wasn't a very good game.

Over the years, Elder Scrolls tried to become more family friendly by getting rid of nudity and adding brutal decapitation, instead. There was, however, one more reason for outcry caused by naughty bits in an Elder Scrolls game. The horse buttholes of Oblivion:

Yep.

This is not a mod. The horses in the release version of Oblivion had assholes. I'm not a particular fan of assholes of any kind and such details don't usually bother me. But riding in Oblivion meant you were constantly staring down the eye of Sauron. This bothered people so much that someone ultimately removed horse buttholes in one of the earliest mods for the game.

Depending on where you get your mods from, you may even get some unintentional nudity. It always bothered me how all the werewolves in Skyrim look the same. They're all black. No grey, white, brown or multicoloured ones. The mod nexus didn't have any interesting fixes at the time, so I fired up Google and ended up on some Russian site that promised "more diverse" werewolves or something to that effect in cyrillic. So I went and installed it, everything ran fine, I played the quest where one of the Companions turns into a werewolf aaaaaaaaaaand he's got his dick out.

The new texture is great, but it's difficult to unsee the cock once you've spotted it.

It's not a game breaker and the devs decided that all your clothing should magically disappear when you shapeshift, but it feels a bit weird. I'm a werewolf, I'm on top of a bandit, I've got my wang out, where do we go from here? I feel that this removes a certain level of professionalism when you're really just out on a quest to kill a guy. Sure, he won't live to tell the tale, but impressions are important in any business and you should not meet a business contact without any pants on, even if the ideal outcome is that one of you will be dead by the end of the encounter. I want the bandit to think, "Oh my god, he's a werewolf and he's about to eat me." I feel that, if we're taking pants out of the equation, I'm sending mixed messages.

I don't need these bits, because I consider myself a fighter. Others walk the path of the lover, however, so they may decide to slap a bunch of extra nipples on their Khajiit ladies. Or how about a spiky kitty cock for your boy Khajiit? The mod also comes with Argonian lizard wangs, which retract into a skin fold, much like with real lizards. "The argonians carry their balls inside, being cold-blooded, so their balls don't show at all. The fully extended schlong is fully animated." That's in the mod description. People put some real thought into this.

And with companions like this, who wouldn't want functioning bits?

Judge my teenage self all you want for defiling a sock over a pixellated drawing of mammaries. But some people want to become fully immersed in their game. They want to be their characters. And if that means rocking a spiky, furry or scaly wang and/or half a dozen nipples, then they'll go there. They'll absolutely go there. Good for them! To lots of people, playing an RPG isn't just a fantasy where you murder damsels in distress and rescue dragons and monsters. Some folks want to conquer the opposite sex. Or the same sex. Or all the sexes. And elves. And aliens. I feel BioWare always understood this much better than Bethesda. All that boning in Dragon Age and Mass Effect is there for a reason.

Also, the Skyrim Special Edition is highly moddable now, it's a lot faster and more stable than original Skyrim and I actually quite enjoy putting all those mods on it. Perhaps one day I'm actually gonna play it, too. I heard it's pretty decent.