———————————————
SPOILER INFO
A mild spoiler, if even that, only as far as the mod Summerset Isle and the college quest in Skyrim proper are concerned.
———————————————
Summerset Isle is better than Falskaar, better than The Forgotten City, better than Dragonborn, much better than Skyrim proper. Need I say more? Oh yes, I do.
But let's start at the beginning. The mod description says you won't be able to travel to Summerset until you have become – believe it or not – Arch-Mage of Winterhold College. I was rather dumbfound when I read that. How the hell do I become Arch-Mage of Winterhold College, and why, in heaven's name, should I want to? I couldn't (and still can't) imagine myself being even remotely qualified to fill that post any more than operating an oil drilling platform.
I installed the mod all the same. All else failing, I would be able to look up some location ID's with TES5Edit and get in with the console command COC . And who knows, maybe I would even find myself willing to do the college quest far enough to actually become the Arch-Mage.
Well, it so happened that eventually I grew so bored with nothing to do in Skyrim that I actually went forward with that repulsive college quest. I couldn't believe my eyes when after a few tasks, when I thought I was something like halfway through, I was told that the quest is complete and now I am Arch-Mage. That was ludicrous. I may have saved the college from destruction, but as a mage, I was a complete nothing. What happens at the end of the college quest is like Americans in 1945 appointing General MacArthur their Minister of Education.
Of course, that nonsense has nothing to do with the mod Summerset Isle. It's the Bethesda plot developers' laziness. The important thing is that now I was supposed to be qualified to travel to Summerset.
How, I wondered. I thought the most logical thing to do would be to check out the inn. I went there and there was no courier or anything. I went out again. Maybe it would take some time, I thought. Better travel around a bit and return to Winterhold someday.
But no. On second thought, I realized I was too impatient to see Summerset Isle. So I cheated a little and checked the mod description. It said to go to the inn. Dammit to hell, that's what I had just done!! I went to the inn again. This time there was a messenger there and I succeeded in traveling to Summerset Isle all right.
I was most happy with Summerset Isle.
Above all, Summerset Isle is beautiful. Maybe not quite as beautiful as Falskaar (although I'd hate to have to live on the difference), but occasional visits to it are really a required therapy against the grimness of Skyrim. Apart from which, Summerset Isle is big. There is a lot more to do here than there is in Falskaar.
Summerset has many beautiful women. Even though the majority are elves who are, on average, clearly uglier than human races, there is much more racial variety than I would have expected from a province of Aldmeri Dominion, and the quality of both elves and non-elves is so high that if you took 10 prettiest women from Summerset and 10 prettiest women from the rest of the Skyrim game, the rest of Skyrim would probably win, but it would be very close.
Those are the reasons why I most emphatically recommend the Summerset Isle mod.
Here are a few things you would want to know before you play:
Your first questgiver will give you some wrong information about where you will have to go. Don't believe what you are told. Believe the quest marker on your map.
At first, I was left totally confused by numerous buildings without doors. The local map said it was This-or-That's House, but I walked several times around it and couldn't find a way to enter it. The thing is, there are those glowing white spheres. They are a kind of teleportation portals. You have to target them, after which a text appears inviting you to press E . When I finally found that out, I remembered that in the beginning of the mod, I had been given a vague hint about teleportation playing an important part in Summerset, but it had never occurred to me that it meant that common house doors would be replaced by teleportation orbs.
Discovery of locations has been implemented extremely badly by the author of Summerset Isle. There was an important location which I kept visiting and I was somewhat annoyed that the author had forgotten to create a marker for it on the world map. Seriously, I had been there several times coming from and going into various directions, criss-crossed all over the place, and still the location wouldn't show on the world map. I just had to remember where it was. And then, on my 10th visit or so, I was informed all of a sudden that I had "discovered" that location and indeed I was now seeing it on the world map. Turned out the mod author hadn't forgotten the world map marker after all. I simply hadn't so far had the luck of walking over the exact square inch of ground which he had deigned to choose as the discovery spot for that location. That is the case with some other locations as well. You might think they are not on the world map, but they are. It can take several visits and lots of walking around, but sooner or later the game will realize you have discovered them. (Solution: increase the discovery radius with TES5Edit. For my next game, I did it for all mod-added locations as a routine measure.)
You might also find yourself confused by a number of quests that are apparently pointless. Fulfilling a task that seems important and then seeing it leads to nothing, you might think you have missed something. You haven't. Those tasks are actually meant to be pointless. It would appear that the author has created them solely for the purpose of making you discover various locations and learn to find your way around.
Traders have very different business hours. You may go to a location and see only one merchant and wonder why there are several empty stalls nearby. You come back another time, at another hour, and there are suddenly 3 or 4 more merchants.
I wish the author would have been a little more careful with the names. Admittedly, Summerset Isle has nothing as disastrous as two Emelia Celatas in ETaC, but there are a few pairs of namesakes and that can get confusing when a player is not in the habit of registering the NPCs' refID's like I do. I don't understand such sloppiness. How difficult can it be to open TES5Edit, sort your NPCs by name, look at the list and rename the duplicates?
Finally, here are a few minor flaws which you don't need to know about. I wanted to point them out since I was writing a review anyway, but you can just as well leave this article and get the mod.
It is a rather bad mistake that almost every bed can be slept in. It's not realistic.
Summerset Isle doesn't really work together with iNeed. I mean, you eat and drink and sleep and get hungry, thirsty and tired as normal, but none of Summerset's rivers are recognized as bodies of water by iNeed. Little puddles of frightening color are okay, though. Hilariously, even a hotel pool can be used to fill up your waterskins. But don't hope to find any drinking water in rivers. (Obviously, this is not the fault of Summerset Isle's author.)
One quest required me to go to a certain place and get a certain item. I already had one item with exactly that name in my inventory, but that wasn't accepted by the quest.
It was confusing to see several rooms next to each other with exactly the same name, which made it nearly impossible to find my way around until I had used TES5Edit to give the rooms unique names. I was also annoyed by a large number of people in the same location being all named "Student" and such. I wanted to be able to tell which woman was which, so I did some research on the Internet, found a number of suitable names and named those NPCs with TES5Edit.
[originally published 2019-01-15]
