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Skyrim Together, a mod supporting eight-player cooperative multiplayer in The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, will go into a closed beta “soon” with the intent of releasing it to everyone very soon thereafter, the creators said earlier this week.
The news sent jags of excitement and anticipation through the game’s community — and inevitable mentions of Fallout 76. Commonly disparaged as a game that should have been a Fallout 4 mod, Bethesda Softworks’ beleaguered semi-MMO (a sem-MO?) was often called “Fallout with friends” by developers in the run-up to its November launch.
The closed beta will be opened “soon” to those who have backed the project via Patreon, The Together Team said on the mod’s subreddit. But that will not last long. “We currently have no release date of either the closed or open beta,” they wrote. “The open will be announced potentially a week or two after the closed.” That post was made on Saturday.
About a week before that, the mod-makers streamed three hours of play inside the mod. The beta will shore up the stability of the mod, but the mod team is already rather confident that it’s in good working order. The Together Team says most mods made within the official Bethesda Creation Kit should be compatible with Skyrim Together, too, although that’s not a flat guarantee. (It doesn’t sound like swapping out dragons for Thomas the Tank Engine or Macho Man Randy Savage will work, because the modders say dragon events aren’t yet working, for example.)
The mod includes its own launcher, mainly because Bethesda objected to releasing the mod via Steam Workshop. Servers, for now, are located in Europe and the mod is limited to eight players in-world but modders say that could be raised in the future. The beta mod is about a 200 MB download, for those wondering how big the finished version may be.
Modders have made many attempts at co-operative multiplayer for Skyrim going back to 2012; this one seems like a cut above earlier attempts. Skyrim Together was originally expected to launch sometime in 2017, but based on that stream, it seems like this was worth the wait.
