Skyrim Together Reborn is an innovative mod, created by a small team from the ground up, so that you and seven other friends can band together as the most powerful troupe of Dragonborn that Skyrim has ever seen.
Giving Skyrim a co-op mode is an awesome idea with tons of potential, and it even received thousands of downloads in its launch weekend. That said, it could still do with some tweaks to make it an even better experience.
10 The Ability To Wait
For Skyrim Together Reborn to work smoothly, the devs had to disable the 'wait' and 'sleep' features of the game. Although these functionalities are in no way essential to the game, it can be pretty annoying when you’re trying to wait for stores to open, or you want to get rid of time-based effects.
With waiting and sleeping off the table, Survival mode can feel significantly less survivable. The reason for their removal is so that all play states remain aligned, but a good workaround would be to grant this ability to only the party leader, and have it affect every party member.
9 Introducing A Ping System
The ability to ping items or spots in the world is a godsend in co-op or multiplayer games. It’s so much easier to ping that health potion or incoming troll instead of scrambling to warn your entire party, especially considering how vast and cluttered the world of Skyrim can be.
Middle-mouse or a keyboard key dedicated to pinging items would be a real boon to any party that wants to stay on the move.
8 Horseback Together
Since Skyrim’s steeds are said to be one of the hardiest - even able to traverse sheer cliff faces - it would be great if you could have a passenger on the back while one rides. Even though each party member can just grab a horse for themselves, the number of horses available for purchase in each location can be limited.
Allowing two riders on one horse could save large parties a lot of trouble and help them resist the temptation to console command their way to a legion of horses. The Ride Sharing mod lets followers do this in solo mode, but it would be great to have it implemented in Skyrim Together Reborn as well.
7 Trading With Your Party
Right now, the drop system is pretty funky. If you try to reverse-pickpocket these goodies to your party members, you end up getting “caught” by them and are unable to do it again for a time. Sometimes, your other party members won’t even see the items you dropped. Let’s chalk it up to the planes of Oblivion engulfing them.
This could all be fixed by a simple trade system that lets you offer and accept stuff, much like in Elder Scrolls Online. Admittedly, this may be harder to implement. One good thing about this wonky drop system is an exploit that lets you keep your items even when you’ve dropped them for other party members. Using this, you can essentially double any item you want.
6 Party Member Visibility
Skyrim Together Reborn lets every party member go off and do their own thing, for the most part. While this is fun, it can also lead to a lot of “Wait, where are you guys?”
A mini-map would kind of ruin the whole Skyrim aesthetic, but it could help just to have a highlight feature or permanent hovering tag, so you can see your party members from a distance. Currently, you can teleport to your party members using the server menu, but this can occasionally result in you getting stuck under the world or in a wall. It's still early days for the mod, so a few rough edges are to be expected.
5 Fixing Desync In Quests
Quests will only progress if the party leader triggers the next step. For the most part, it works pretty well, and other party members can still see and hear the dialogue or animation that needs to happen. Of course, it wouldn’t be Skyrim if things didn’t fall prey to bugs every now and then. It can be pretty troublesome when certain doors remain locked for party members even though they’ve been opened by the leader. Objectives also don’t always update at the same pace.
For example, the main quest objective to get all the words for Unrelenting Shout may sometimes result in the party leader already having “Roh” while everyone else is stuck at “Fus.” It updates eventually, but it would be better if it didn’t take so long. There's also the weird side effect of having multiple instances of Borri in the same spot.
4 Better Mod Compatibility
You can use other mods along with this one, but the creators don’t recommend it, in case of compatibility issues. Right now, you should be safe using visual enhancers without too much trouble. That said, major mods like Cutting Room Floor still make things a bit buggy.
The developers have also explicitly said that Skyrim Together Reborn won’t work well with the likes of DLL Plugin Loader and SSE Engine Fixes. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, but it would be amazing to have all the quality-of-life mods at your disposal.
3 Talking to NPCs Separately
Only the interactions performed by the party leader really matter in this mod, but other players can still talk to NPCs. The only trouble is that it pretty much amounts to nothing and can even cause the NPC in question to get glitchy.
So, as of now, it’s better if the leader does all the talking. Even with that though, NPCs will still try to talk to other party members at the same time. It’s kind of immersion-breaking and also causes some quest issues.
2 Automated Mod Downloads Per Server
You can set your server to require certain mods for players to join, but it would be pretty cool if these mods could be downloaded already just by joining the server. We’ve already seen this work in Conan Exiles, with players being brought to a download screen with all the relevant mods before being allowed to enter the world state.
It might be a long shot to include in Skyrim Together Reborn, but it could really make modded servers much easier to maintain. It also simplifies things for players that want to join existing playthroughs without worrying about incompatibilities.
1 More Bug Fixes And Patches
Most of the team is taking a break from actively working on this project, hence this is considered the full release. It’s an understandable step, considering how much work has already gone into making the mod playable. Plus, they’ve already put in a new update that fixes some issues from launch.
That said, there are still quite a few bugs that could do with a patch. A few common occurrences include seeing naked NPCs and party members, NPCs floating around or clipping underground, and mobs not appearing for certain party members. It would be great if the team decided to work on them, only after getting their well deserved rest, of course. Though, if we’re being honest, these bugs seem right at home in any true Bethesda game.