Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor The best feature is easily a nemesis system, and upcoming mods try to add it to skyrim.
If you’re not familiar with the Nemesis system, here’s how it works: Enemies remember the player’s actions, such as whether you’ve killed them or been killed by them before, allowing them to move up and down the hierarchy. Often defeated by the grunts, it may climb the ladder and they will also bully you to keep dying. Now modder Syclonix is trying to add a similar system to Skyrim (thanks to PCGamesN).
As they described on Reddit, Syclonix is calling the mod in development Shadow of Skyrim: Nemesis and Alternative Death System, or SOS-NADS for short. This post paints a beautiful picture of how they imagined the mod to work narratively, telling the story of a player being defeated by a swamp vampire named “Breaks-Many-Shields”.
Following this flavor text, Syclonic does describe what the mod actually does. On the one hand, it turns the player-defeating enemies into Nemesis, giving them unique names, better stats, and special buffs. Players may also receive situational or random debuffs when defeated, such as being unable to use shields, while Nemeses can take and use your gear.
Players will also be given the task of going out and tracking Nemesis so that the entire competitive event really takes place. This sounds like a very deep mod, and Syclonix shared some screenshots showing what the mod looks like. While it won’t be as complicated as Shadow of Mordor, it seems like it will offer some pretty cool alternative gameplay options due to the lack of things like voice acting.
Syclonix also notes that it works with other mods, and it seems to work well with Elden Ring-style messaging mods.
