All these years later, it seems folks just can’t stop playing Bethesda’s hit open-world game Skyrim. Originally released in 2011, the fantasy action-RPG has been re-re-re-released on just about every platform since, and is one of the most popular games to download mods for. Software-engineer-turned-Twitch-streamer Blurbs has developed a new one which lets his chat voice in-game NPCs, and it’s the funniest shit ever.
Blurbs is a content creator who primarily plays Sea of Thieves, but occasionally dabbles in other games such as Dragon’s Dogma 2 and The Finals. Over the April 26 weekend, though, he played Skyrim on stream with his “first-ever game mod.” The mod, which is currently unnamed and not publicly available, allows his viewers to use text-to-speech to voice NPCs with lip movements and subtitles in real-time. It’s unhinged in the best way possible, as chatters say some incredibly ridiculous things in-game.
“Hey there, kid, you want some drugs?” one NPC, apparently “voiced” by chatter YuriOnTwitch, said to Blurbs’ Dovah-Kiin (Skyrim’s protagonist). “Sup dude, nice cock,” said a cat-faced NPC spouting words provided by ProfessorWumbotron. “I hear there’s an adventurer abducting children from their homes and bringing them with him on his twisted journey,” said an NPC voicing SinfireTitan’s contribution, before Blurbs’ Spartan kicked them into a wall.
The streams of the mod are delightfully bonkers, with more silly lines from chatters. But the best part, in my opinion, are the deaths of in-game characters. If a viewer’s NPC dies in Blurbs’ game, that chatter gets banned from his channel for five minutes. It’s hilarious to watch this play out in real-time.
In X/Twitter DMs with Kotaku, Blurbs briefly explained how he built the mod, saying the most complicated part was learning the tools since he’s never done anything like this before. He also said that “due to its complexity,” it won’t be publicly available as of right now.
“So it’s not a normal ‘mod’ really,” Blurbs told Kotaku. “It’s multiple programs running all together for this to work. I honestly doubt I’d be able to package it as [an] all-in-one mod and release it publicly, so [there’s] really [no] need for a name. I’ll be putting out a YouTube video soon with the resources I used to make it, however.”
While the voices used are AI, Blurbs explicitly stated that they’re a collection of either “actors who were paid for their voices to be used” or “created digitally from scratch.” When asked how many chatters were temporarily banned, Blurbs said he had no clue.
“I have it programmed where chatters can also voice hostiles/bandits,” Blurbs said. “So when I unknowingly walked into a bandit fort, I had a whole crowd of hostiles, shouting nonsense from my chat, chasing me. I had to fight all of them, so a lot of good chatters were lost that day lmao.” That day being April 26, the first day he streamed himself playing Skyrim with this mod. I’ve died laughing watching this shit.
Anyway, Bethesda has been in the limelight lately thanks to Fallout—not the games, but the television show on Amazon Prime. The series has been a runaway success, generating a lot of online discourse and getting greenlit for a second season. Unfortunately for The Elder Scrolls, Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard said he’d probably reject a TV show based on the long-running fantasy action-RPG series.