I never quite got Skyrim. I'm a Morrowind nerd, yeah, sure, we're all very certain of that, but it's not my pining for the old days that meant the game never sat right with me. What was it? The slightly floaty combat? The streamlined skill system?
No. It was the fact that it never let me annihilate a mudcrab with a DP-27 light machine gun using 7.62x54mmR rounds, sending it speeding at 400 miles per hour across a lake surface and into the waiting arms of God.
Luckily, someone has solved that problem. Skyrim WW2 Overhaul is, well, just what it says: a mod that cuts Skyrim's plinky, do-nothing civil war that consists of four Norwegians smacking each other in a field and replaces it with the most destructive conflict in human history. Specifically, it turns it into the Eastern Front, turning Imperials and Stormcloaks into the Red Army and Wehrmacht (which is which depends on the flavour of mod you download).
It is, and I do not mean this ironically, fantastic. It's mashed-together chaos, of course. The mod's attempts to simulate real-life WW2 guns like the MP 40 and PPSh-41 relies on a very hacky adaptation of base-Skyrim's crossbow mechanics. Shooting anyone is a kind of recoil-less raspberry spray of inadvisably damaging bullets that will continue until the game's decided it's time for a reload and starts an 8-second animation of your character gently caressing the machinery of death. You cannot, so far as I can tell, reload when you want, only when the mod decides it is time. Which is appropriately totalitarian of it.
But what you get out of these various bodges of Skyrim's usual systems is genuinely fun and supremely chaotic. Once I'd emerged from the ruins of Helgen alongside Hadvar, now a senior officer in the Red Army, I was plunged right into Operation Uranus. The trees bristled with Germans, the air was a clatter of gunfire and grenade explosions, NKVD Border Guards with SVT-40s gave me the stink-eye over the top of their immaculate moustaches. Every so often I would have my head blown smooth off by some Wood Elf from Wiesbaden I didn't even get a chance to see. This is Skyrim as it's meant to be played.
I really mean it about the 'having your head shot off' thing. Inexplicably, Skyrim's health and damage systems weren't designed to accommodate the introduction of the output of the Izhevsk Mechanical Plant. Giving all your allies, all your enemies, and you the ability to throw several hundred points of damage a second at whoever the hell you feel like kind of breaks the game in two. Here's an example of how easy it is to bite it.
But it also turns the entire thing into an extended version of the beach scene from Saving Private Ryan. People are collapsing around you, brave men hold their guts in as they crawl across Honningbrew Meadery. Sometimes they throw fireballs, which actual Red Army officers couldn't do in 1944.
It is, I cannot emphasise this enough, incredibly fun to just dip in and see how long you can go for. Which makes it a shame it's not technically on Nexus Mods right now. The big ol' mod site banned it for reasons I can't find, but if I were to guess I'd probably say the whole 'WW2 Eastern Front' thing made it a bit of a magnet for awful people, even if the author promised "This mod is created purely for entertainment and not to push any political agenda or offend. Great effort has been made to exclude any symbols/units/uniforms that can be seen as offensive."
I say technically because, if you have the link, you can still download the mod. This link right here, to be specific. And if that doesn't work, a noble soul has uploaded it to Archive.org too (although that website's currently down for other reasons). I'd grab it now, if I were you. War waits for no man.
