Skyrim - Beyond Reach: A Mod Review

hey I'm zenam man I'm not interested in who you are Beyond reach is a well-known mod within the Skyrim modding Community for among other things being one of the biggest and most fleshed out new landan mods you can download the mod was primarily made by the nex's user Razer kid alongside some contributions from other users and of course voice Act from many other people it was originally uploaded in 2013 and received its last update in 2022 the mod took me roughly 15 hours to complete and it is quite impressive how big of a project this is and that it was made by primarily just a single person makes it even more impressive this video is going to be a review of Beyond reach but I want to preface this that while I may come across as negative I want to State I love mods there's something really pure in the artist artistic Vision that mods convey a vision that can be unconcerned with popularity sales or the end user that you don't really find in polished games even to a degree in the indd space some of my best gaming experiences have been in mods and I'll continue to play mods as long as modders make them I have great respect for any mod author able to finish a project and release it and while I have some criticisms off the mod I want to make it clear that I don't criticize from a place of dismissal or hate but out of love for the medium of Storytelling and modding and that I want to highlight this mod as a unique experience I also want to warn you about some spoilers while I won't go into great detail on the story line as I don't think me telling you the story beat for beat would be very interesting for me or for you I will be discussing some events and Revelations during the story I do urge you to play through the mod yourself with some caveats there are topics of sexual assault unwanted pregnancy and pedophilia and slavery that may not be suitable for everyone with that out of the way let's begin Beyond reach begins in Skyrim when you are approached by a priestess and her bodyguard there is also a level five requirement but upon meeting you the Priestess becomes a conduit for Mara to speak to the player of the plight of the kingdom of Evermore in the reach to make the trip you will need to speak to a merchant found outside the main gate of Markarth and he will take you to the reach the mod takes place in a new land to the west of Markarth which is a part of the land known as the reach but no longer the province of Skyrim but of hyck the region is comprised of three towns you can visit the divide the bog city of arima and the seat of the king the city of Evermore the map can be split into several distinct regions you have the mountain holds closer to the Skyrim border where you can find enclaves of Nords you have the dreary boglands around arema the forested highlands of the ma and the Lush and fertile lands that lie Beyond Evermore alongside settlements there are also several Dungeons and explorable locations scattered throughout the map many of the Overworld camps of enemies will not have a map marker but the dungeons do the level design of the map and dungeons is pretty solid I don't really have anything bad to say about the level design none of the dungeons overstay they welcome and they are wellmade for the most part and provide some iconic and Scenic Vistas as you explore the weakest parts level design wise might be the Oblivion Realms that aren't as detailed as the Overworld it's primarily the fault of flat ground teex textures covering large empty areas but they do have some striking visuals and set pieces generally the world is detailed up to the standard set by the base game I think the way the map is designed helps the player with their exploration you are provided with clear paths of exploration in the Overworld and you could view the Overworld as a sprawling dungeon with Pathways connecting sites of Interest as opposed to just one big open space the map uses Cliffs mount mountains Ravines and rivers to create these paths I think this is good design for open worlds while you could jump down a mountain and go from one path to the other existence of these Paths of exploration does encourage you to stick to one path until they connect with other paths or you find a dungeon it helps the player feel a sense of completion as they explore if you run down One path and complete the dungeons along the way you can mentally mark off that region of the map as having been explored and your next next Expedition you can try a different path it's a way of compartmentalizing and it helps exploration feel manageable now back to the story when you arrive in the reach you discover a watchtower that has been assaulted by the witchmen what awaits you is a scene of Carnage as the guards have all been butchered and mutilated you ascend the tower and come face to face with your first witchmen a custodian it serves as a very good introduction to the dark tones of the mod setting and the threat of the witchmen I can draw parallels to the guards Outpost in ARX fatales and the ulid and it sets the scene in a similar manner after killing the custodian the merchant urges you to take the news on ahead to the ruler of the divide the Divide is the first settlement you arrive in and has a striking design being essentially just a single Street spanning the length of a bridge there you will meet the noble woman morosa who will perhaps not react with the gravitas you'd expect at the news of the witchmen after you having seen firsthand the result of their savagery morosa asks you to head to arima and speak with jaos a Guardsman there about the situation in the valley and of the town's Lord morane she seems more concerned with morane than the threat of the witchmen out in the woods a realization should set in by now that the nobility in Evermore have very different priorities to you or the common folk at this stage the mod really opens up as you're able to explore the reach on your way to arima or just proceed with the main quest The Divide also offers several Side Quests for you to tackle and a follower for you to recruit Larin while the follower is not as fleshed out as a dedicated follower mod would be he does react to areas and parts of the story I will say however that many story sections of the mod were not made with followers in mind so he may get left behind I recommend you having a follower mod such as ne's follower framework that teleports your followers to you if they get left behind on your journey through the reach you'll have several side quests you can complete they are often worth doing because they provide additional context for what is going on in the world or directly deal with events that are related to the main quest such as finding a cure for a disease ravaging the region or laying the spirit of a Lord's deceased wife to rest there are some exceptions such as the quest from the Nords at the lodge who ask you to deal with an undead problem it doesn't seem to be related to the events in the main quest but it does fit in thematically I think the quests that do pertain to the main problems established by the main quest are the best of the bunch and it's how good side quests in RPGs should be relevant to the general events unfolding in the world and not just menial tasks without connective context I think the mod does well in that regard and all of the quests felt interesting after talking with jaos in ARA you begin the process of solving various problems facing the region there is a slight disconnect when the most immediate problems of the NPCs are not the witchmen Who as a player you may feel are the big enemy but the NPCs feel very differently with jaos you fight the dragon star mercenaries and then together with the Imperial Legion stationed in the region you fight the orcish Marauders there are several enemy factions that you'll face during your time in the reach the Dragon Star mercenaries the witchmen orcish Raiders Undead Exiles and The Afflicted and I think the mod does a really good job at establishing these factions why they are a threat and sometimes why you have to fight them why they fight and their connection to the setting they also have established areas and do not just occur randomly you'll know that if you head up the hills over there you're likely to stumble across hordes of witchmen and the Dragon Star mercenaries are down along the river they feel like they have a place in the world and that makes them satisfying to fight to an extent by defeating these enemies it feels like you're making a difference but more on that later while I can't speak much on the standard difficulty of the mod as I played with mods that unlevel the world and a set of combat mods I can say that it seems more difficult than regular Skyrim if you have your own mods uh it will be on the tougher side the witchmen in this mod are far stronger than for sworn and use Weaponry that poison you there are plenty of high level enemies in boss fights with their own special abilities and at least two sections where you have to run from enemies rather than fight it can be very deadly so prepare for a more difficult time I would suggest that you don't start the mod before you are Level 20 or so I've gone over the events of the storyline step by step so far but a quick rundown over the next part is that It All Leads up to you meeting and working with morane dealing with the witchmen and ultimately to deal with Mor thehan and the dri plot that wraps up the first part of the story line this first part of the story has some cool reveals it feels like planned out and coherent story line that is well executed you can notice how much thought was put into it with small details like arima being an anagram of namira the dri Lord orchestrating the plot where it to stop here Beyond reach would be great but it does continue and I think It suffers for it so you've just foiled a dri plot and restored peace to the region with three main threats defeated then the second part of the story line comes into play it seems as if the second part of the story was either cut short from what it was meant to be or the story was never meant to continue past morane story before but it does and it feels like the story is a lot less tight and slightly disconnected what I mean by disconnected is that at several points in the story you are suddenly transported into the realm of Oblivion and spack back out in a different place these jumps back and forth to the realm of Oblivion also seems to be t skips they also serve as very convenient ways to get you to locations and away from locations such as putting you in the Palace of the king or allowing you to escape the palace it feels as if there just wasn't a plan for how you get from plot point a to plot point B so the mod just teleports you there I didn't have any crashes with the mod but I did have two instances where the main story bugged out at one point I advanced too far into an oblivion realm before speaking to a quest NPC which made the NPC unresponsive when I returned the other time was during a boss fight in reject respit where you need to strike two tendrils to lower a shield in order to damage the main body but I damaged the main body enough for it to gain the defeated state but it did not actually defeat it so it just kept repeating I had to redo the fight several times before it worked and only then did it work with continuous cast of the the flame spell as opposed to striking with a sword using MCO animations I mentioned the follower earlier in the video while I took Larin along for most of my playthrough I had followers along from Skyrim too I did lose okarin somewhere along the way I think he got stuck somewhere in an oblivion realm or in a dungeon when I went back to record some footage for the mod I did run into several more bugs that I hadn't encountered before several scripted events didn't properly launch so the scripting does seem pretty finicky when you don't play as intended now onto some critiques I have of the mod the Grim dark tone the mod sits very much in the genre of grim dark that is both a good thing and a bad thing let me explain the mod is exhausting mentally and emotionally and I mean that in a good way the topics it covers and the way the story plays out makes it exhausting because it makes you feel and that is the point it delves into the dark sides of humanity ancient evils and cycles of violence there is justification and actions taken that makes it hard to determine if there's a good side to fight for at all and as seems to be standard for Grim dark women get the worst of it if you can't handle stories containing sexual assault non-consensual pregnancy cannibalism pedophilia slavery among other topics you probably shouldn't play Beyond reach because it features those topics in its main quest although I think there is a choice at the start of the mod that lets you disable the sexual assault themes now I don't think I can speak on how well these themes are executed but I never felt like they were glorifying any of these acts only to make the villains more villainous and monstrous but the flip side of this is that it goes a bit overboard everything in the setting just seems so overthe toop awful that Bor on parody particularly the pedophilia reveal in the later half if it wasn't taken so seriously by The Narrative it would have been comical how awful these characters are Damian's whole Entourage at the dinner lat to the storyline is such a comically evil cast of characters that while you are given the chance to join them you are actively encouraged to oppose them if you look at the cast here you have Daman established to be a demon in a flesh suit you have Predator leader of the ustasa and drora in Disguise you have Dr mangr Who conducts experiments on orcish slaves and Research into Eugenics no no wait Soul genics yes the reference couldn't be any more hamfisted and then you have Josiah who just wants to buy in slaves to replace all the surf servants in the fields to make it cheaper it's really only in the second half that this becomes a problem for me it's like the story had to try and one up itself on how of it could be but it just ends up feeling comical instead this might seem like a nitpick however the naming scheme is inconsistent many of the prominent characters in the quests are only named as like priest of the nine or Priestess of Mara or Merchant I dislike assuming too much but there may be some thought to it such as being less a character and more representative of a particular group or to make it more reminiscent of a theater play where the name isn't important compared to the function they serve but it is inconsistent because many characters have names which makes the ones without names stand out all the more as background characters when in fact several of them are characters you interact with the most and it differs from regular Skyrim where important NPCs all do have names things like this makes Beyond reach feel like a different setting Al together from Skyrim voice acting the voice acting is of a variable quality some of it is good some of it is average some of it doesn't exist yet now this is not a complaint that is standard fair for mods and volunteer work but some of the voice over is pretty good well as you may know already the man has been a prodigy in Alteration and has helped trace a great many relics in the past to the east of this bridge lies the town of Ora formerly Raven spring lest you run into a resident whose mind is stuck in byon years the quality boils down to primarily mic quality and Clarity of their speech the voiceover also does not always match up to what is written or the voice actors don't realize they are saying a different word that is similar to the one written the begotten King had fermented and grown the branches tearing through the Earth and penetrating all life above P the disenfranchized out of the Muddy Waters meditate and save whatever you can it's not gamebreaker but it can be annoying and you do notice it as you read along the dialogue is functional but it's also clunky and wordy at times there are some differences between how characters speak but not really enough most of them use the same needlessly complex word choices doesn't help that you are often stuck listening or reading through a long conversation happening not through dialogue that you could skip through but by scripted sections that You' stand around for many of them are also very long however there is one character which is arguably the best character in the mod the Wayward husk this character alongside most of the dri characters featured in the mod speaks in utter incomprehensible gibberish the Wayward husk speaks vaguely using complex words and intentionally strange syntax and about things that lack context all that combines the four monologues that while there is meaning behind it requires too much analysis to bother grasping you would have to study each sentence word by word to disseminate what is going on the promised son that Sue the flesh schemes what the masculine manifest what the heck is masculine manifest supposed to mean the only way I know what the [ __ ] his whole storyline is about is because I read about it online it also doesn't help that there is a segment where you have to listen to this character as he spouts [ __ ] for for about 5 minutes straight what felt like an eternity I went back in my recording and timed The Exchange and it was over 11 minutes 11 minutes of listening to this character go on and on about vague lore that doesn't really matter in the first place and he has a second conversation that can be almost as long if not longer lastly there are some points about the execution of the story that I'd like to touch upon the ending makes everything you've accomplished so far basically pointless up until the second half of the story it feels like you were slowly but surely aiding the region and leading it towards some semblance of peace through your actions but even if you destroy every witchman Hideout Afflicted Enclave orc Hideout and Dragon Star camp on the map the kingdom falls into ruin as various factions return to wage war and innocent civilians caught in the crossfire are forced to flee the region that is part ly fitting with the Grim dark tone where hope of a better future is crushed by the Grim reality of the situation and Powers beyond your control but it is very different to the tone of standard Skyrim and perhaps more egregious is that it makes you feel like you haven't actually accomplished anything in your 15 hours of playing the mod only really made things worse also if you purchased the house in Evermore which you can do the city will be ruined and you'll lose access to that house now I will add there are two different endings normally you can follow the prince's command and kill several good NPCs you've interacted with previously to pave the way for a new future and you'll be forced to live with the fact that evil prevails and persists due to your choices but it ends without Fanfare or reward really only that the world doesn't turn into chaos and just keeps going as it was but like I mentioned previously The Prince and his Entourage are so hideously evil and the people he Tas you to kill are so gloriously good that any but the most depraved character would be hard to justify taking this path so you attempt to be a hero and rid the land of the demon in disguised Prince and the pedophile King which is the path that I feel like most players will pick because there is no other choice and that leads the kingdom in ruin death of innocence and conflict across the kingdom final [ __ ] you to your good intentions I just can't describe it any other way than that the second part of the storyline and Beyond reach felt like it continued beyond what it was meant to be and then rushed towards a conclusion prematurely without the buildup it needed if it had ended with Moran's storyline the story would be great combined with the emotional exhaustion and the guilt of the destruction you have wrought upon the kingdom it makes continuing a character's journey in regular Skyrim feel wrong when when I returned to Skyrim after Beyond reach it all felt Hollow like the life my character was living was a lie I retired him to live with his wife Sophia shortly after the return as it felt wrong to continue his journey after all he had seen and experienced in the reach conclusion Beyond reach is a well-made mod that delves into far darker themes than regular Skyrim while the story line and theming is very good the second part of the story line was not executed to the same standard as the first and It suffers from it while I have a lot of critiques of Beyond reach I do recommend playing it it does so many things well there are so many small details and scripted events that just brings the setting to life and I have barely scratched the surface of what the mod offers it deals with a complex storyline not focused on the player but manages to execute things so well in the first half and while the second half of the story tries to reach the same same Heights those Heights lie just beyond reach if you play Beyond reach for yourself I would highly suggest you plan for that character's playthrough to end with playing through Beyond reach it's an emotional story and an experience that you won't find in the base game but it is more reminiscent of watching a Shakespearean tragedy unfold over the course of the mod's main quest rather than a heroic epic it fits well into a more grim and gritty mod list or for Grim dark characters but if you RP you might find your character scarred with PTSD from witnessing the absolute worst of humanity and the evils of the dra the mod is currently finished content wise based on the author's comments online he mentions the possibility of fixes and further voice acting updates in the future finally I can recommend the mod mod apocalypse NPCs for Beyond reach to go along with Beyond reach as it makes NPCs a bit nicer to look at that was really the only mod I had specifically for Beyond reach and that's also all I have to say on Beyond reach really take care

Channel: Zannerman

Views: 9,116

Keywords: Skyrim, Beyond Reach, Reachmen, Zannerman, Elder Scrolls, Video Essay, Essay, Review, Gaming, Game, Mod, Modpocalypse

Id: uq7m-B0qgYQ

Length: 24min 7sec (1447 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024