To be fair, Skyrim still holds up today.
But it holds up thanks to the mods that are available for it now. Mods which are all developed by not-Bethesda. Vanilla Skyrim doesn’t hold up in 2024, modded Skyrim does.
True, but Bethesda not only embraced modders with open arms—they encouraged them! You can’t say the same for most other game devs; the majority either ignore modders like they’re pests or, worse, are outright hostile towards them.
Their “open arms” has felt like a vampiric embrace for almost a decade now, because they would really, really, really prefer if modders released stuff via their club, where modders can get money and they also get a slice for free.
The bigger PC names of the 90s and early 2000s were all welcoming to modding, with some games shipping with the “official editor tools” for anyone to mess around with (UT99 and Warcraft 3 come to mind)
