Old Game, New Tricks

A pseudo review of the modded Skyrim Roleplay community, “Keizaal Online”. This article was written between 8/18/2026 and 8/22/2026 and details are subject to change as the servers and admins continue to iterate the game over time with its community.

For some games, the concept of Replayability isn’t a concern. There is simply the way it was meant to be played. For example, OneShot is a title that the developer intended a player to experience in a single run. There are tons of games like that: OneShot, DDLC, Undertale, etc. (Toby Fox’s penultimate opus can remember choices across multiple playthroughs, so I’m counting it as one big run). And once you beat that game, there is a way to reset your save if you truly want to, but usually you’re supposed to enjoy them in one go. These prioritize polishing a single gut punch of a narrative, not necessarily replayability.

A generous person might ascribe that term to the 15 or 16 disparate releases of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. But playing it one more time only goes so far if you inevitably resign yourself to playing a stealth archer for the 7th time like I do. For me, most games aren’t fun if I’m not Doing Good, and so I tend to min-max, though on a personal note, I promise that I’m trying to grow as a person and find dopamine within other playstyles.

Imagine my surprise when I found it playing Skyrim in a way I’ve never played anything before.

A way you might not even know exists.

The concept of playing Skyrim with friends has existed nearly as long as the game has been released, and there have been almost as many attempts at this as rereleases of the game. But none have really stuck, and even if they had there’s been so much drama over Skyrim modding that even normies like me are aware of the moral and legal arguments around modders using Patreon to indirectly support their work. A contentious affair when all is said and done.

Suffice to say that the dream of multiplayer Skyrim was well and dead for years. But almost six months ago there was a bit of a resurgence. A couple of them, actually. The first one I heard about was Keizaal Online and that’s the one I’m going to talk about today. It’s a mod pack that touts itself as a true multiplayer experience, in a persistent and changing world. You can create an account, make a character, and teleport to your favorite hold in the reach where you can start your brand new life.

The catch? You won’t find a single NPC in the entire game.

If you see anyone, a guard, a messenger, a tailor, hunter or warrior, an Orc, Elf, or Nord - that’s another player.

I’d previously heard of RP servers (roleplay, and no not like that) in other games. Red Dead: Redemption and GTA:V are the notable ones my algorithm will serve up clips of. And that’s about all the consideration I gave it. A silly way to play a classic game and clip-farm it. I wrote off RP servers as an interesting concept, but ultimately one that wasn’t going to be any fun for me. GTA Online is difficult enough as it is, especially when griefers can have unreasonable spending power to shoot orbital lasers at you before you can get back into passive mode.

The idea of opening myself up to being harassed by anyone able to afford a power trip, regardless of the game, didn’t appeal to me in the slightest. But Keizaal promises something a little different.

Let me walk you through the pitch, and then let me tell you what it’s like in reality.

The pitch is that Skyrim is populated with only players. Some dungeons and spots on the map have enemies to fight or animals to kill, but that’s it. Gear and money are earned by trading with other players, and you get to live your dream life as a random citizen of Tamriel, about 30 years after the Dragonborn killed the last dragon.

And it’s free! If you don’t need any further convincing, here’s the link.

But be warned. The reality, as with all things, is a little more complicated.

Let me be clear: Keizaal Online is not necessarily for the casual Skyrim player.

It is punishing at times. It’s buggy and barely optimized in places. Hell, sometimes it’s hostile to even the day one players who made it possible. Some of it is just the usual Bethesda jank that we’re all used to, but some of it is new jank!

Modding is a requirement, so you better get comfortable with navigating the innards of your game’s install directory if you want to play at all. Having a mic isn’t strictly necessary, but if you have one, and a silly or dramatic voice to put into it, oh man does it make things easier. And there is a time commitment, one that will vary from player to player depending on what you want out of the experience. There are some who treat it like a second or even third job, and there are also dozens that just stop by for a weekend to see what it’s like.

I could go over the mechanics or classes and what they can do, but that can change from month to month, as the devs (referred to by players in character (IC) as the Aedra as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the gods of the Elder Scrolls universe), have the ability to mod entire towns, grant or take away leadership of a hold, or even remove the workbenches in the map.

All you need to know is that the class you choose determines the things you can make and the workstations you can interact with, and most of the time it’s pretty self explanatory. Tailors can use looms to make clothes, but they can’t gather leather from killed animals. Hunters can skin and dress their kills, but they can’t make much with the leather besides a limited set of items.

But a hunter might consider selling meat to a local inn for a discounted meal, or offer pelts from a recent kill to a Tailor who could fashion it into a beautiful cloak.

Because of this, the gameplay IS the roleplay.

I did not understand this at first.

I spent days (weeks if I’m actually honest) agonizing over trying to select my class. Do I want to be a hunter? I have to get a good weapon, good armor, find all the spots where game spawns, and hope that arrows don’t get too expensive when I miss my shots.

Or would I rather be a warrior? Be a bodyguard for a merchant? How do you set your prices? What if you die on the job? You could be a gourmet chef, but you might have to buy every single ingredient from someone else.

There are a thousand ways to do it, and the abundance of options was just overwhelming for me, so I hesitated to choose. Through my partner, I was lucky enough to fall in with a small group of characters who call themselves the Runalongs, and decided to see if my character, a Khajiit by the name of K’Cee could fill the role of a blacksmith. People need weapons, after all.

But I got stuck. You see, I wanted to hang out with the Runalongs, and just Play Skyrim, but that was the wrong approach. I went in expecting Skyrim Multiplayer: western RPG gameplay, but also that other people would be there. Originally, I didn’t even realize there would be restrictions on classes or workbenches, and let me tell you, the economy was crazy at first. Prices are only just now starting to stabilize, months after the servers became public, and even now the Aedra habitually make changes without warning.

For the first few in game days of playing it, I was miserable. For hours, I would stand around in a shop, or outside in the street waiting for a shop to open, only for me not to be able to afford anything, or searching a map to find spots where I could mine ore, only to find them already mined when I got there. And when trying to sell the few things I could find, I had no idea whether I was getting lowballed on septims when I tried to empty my backpack in Solitude.

So I gave up on playing for a while. I settled for jealously watching other YouTubers play instead. I think the main reason I couldn’t make it click was because I was looking for the usual Skyrim mechanics. Chopping wood, buying food and running from Ice Wraiths. Spamming the jump button on the side of a mountain. You know, Skyrim.

Keizaal Online was in desperate need of quality of life changes, but I can’t honestly claim that those were the sole reason why I initially quit. And I still don’t know why it took so long for me to grasp that the appeal of roleplay, at least as I understand it now, is that it has the power to supplant the gameplay entirely.

It was the cloak that did the trick.

I’d spent a few hours running around, determined to give the game a final shot. So many people seemed to be enjoying it, including my partner who at this point had played almost daily for a couple of months straight. I wanted to get it, but I just wasn’t having fun. I made a new character to play as, A wood elf named Alerin Oakshade. She was to be a hunter. Everyone’s gotta eat, I figured, so meat and animal hides would always be in demand. I’d get to have a little bit of the Skyrim gameplay that I'd expected back, just hunting animals like normal. It was an okay start. I collected a few small pelts and hides, and for a bit it seemed to be going smoothly.

But when I went to use the tanning rack and started to make leather I was met with a restriction. Exhaustion. I hadn’t even been told about this mechanic yet. Turns out, I can only make so much leather at one time. If I want to make more? I gotta wait. I can make it recharge slightly faster if I wait in one spot or eat some food and just stop playing the game until the bar refills. And then, I can make a few more leather.

I was infuriated and kind of insulted. But I didn’t have a choice.

I hung out in the tailor shop for idle banter and was thinking maybe I could figure out pricing for my minuscule stock. Then another hunter arrived, promptly offering to sell leather in bulk. Their price was so far off from what I’d even guessed the rates might be. I was already anticipating having to sell at a loss.

I felt this massive surge of imposter syndrome. Embarrassment that I had no idea what I was doing. Here I was pretending to be a hunter, looking to sell the handful of leather I’d spent all night struggling to collect. Between the limits on what I could make at the tanning rack and being completely out of my depth with regards to the economy, it felt like I’d wasted the whole night.

Something you should know about me, I suppose, is that I struggle a lot with mental health. I’m quite autistic and have a very tough time with understanding social interactions.

I worry a lot about stepping on other people’s toes.

I have issues with people pleasing. I’ve also been dealing with some self-worth issues, and while I won’t bore you with any details, I was very stuck in my own head at this point of the night and very ready to give up and go back to playing Arc Raiders.

And then one of the Runalongs showed up, an aptly named woodcutter known as Chopp, The burly orc was bored and looking for something to do. I’d only just started settling in as a hunter but was having trouble finding good spots for game, and the few I’d found usually resulted in me chasing after an elk or fox that would despawn after about 100 meters. He offered to hunt with me.

I explained, as much as I could in character, that I was having a bad mental health night and he was understanding. He helped me catch game, locate new spots, and generally wander around while I tried to rationalize why the game wasn’t fun for me. We caught a few things and headed back to one of the modded towns, Markarth Side. No one calls it that. We call it Morkarth, because it’s actually closer to Morthal than Markarth. None of that matters.

We get back into town and I’m about to log off again, thankful for the attempt to cheer me up, but ultimately ready to give up for the second time of the night. And literally, right as I go to click out of the game, I hear the words I’ve wanted to hear all night.

“Does anybody have any leather?”

I did.

And suddenly it didn’t matter how much I could sell it for. I was the only one there to sell. The tailor shop across the road was closed for the afternoon. There were no toes to step on.

I made 32 septims. I was able to buy myself some dinner. I hung out with a few acquaintances in Morkarth and shot the breeze. And there it was. Click.

I was able to go back out and hunt again. I found a Sabrecat and fought with it valiantly. (It couldn't swim so I took potshots with my bow from the riverbank.) I took the pelt back, and I had a local tailor fashion me a cloak from its hide.

I wasn’t playing Skyrim anymore. I was a citizen of Tamriel.

Plying an honest trade, eking out a living between the plains and the peaks. Treated to stories around campfires. Tempted by dungeons and rare treasure, only to fall to the mistmen and wake up two cities away at a temple for healing. I’m planning ahead to gather some extra supplies so that I can afford to repair my armor if it breaks. I’m Alerin Oakshade, a bosmer with a dry wit and good with a scimitar. You can spot me by my cloak.

The world suddenly became as mundane and as full of possibility as it is in the real world.

I think the art of Roleplay is much easier for others than it is for me. It didn’t help that I went about it all wrong. I was masking very hard at first, and it was draining my energy. I was pretending to be a citizen of Skyrim, without the reward of better armor or weapons that usually drags me across a playthrough. But when I decided to actually become a hunter, the world stopped being an RPG and suddenly it was just an RP. I wasn’t searching for replayability in a game I knew and loved anymore. I was playing a different game altogether.

There are dozens of things happening in this little country. We’re having a fair in Morkarth this Sundas (2-5PM EST, 8/23/26). There’s been talk of vampire covens murdering people in the night, bandits on the roads, a cult taking over the woods just past the town. The college of magic is set to open soon and soul gems are going to upend the economy yet again, so everyone is bracing for how the world will change when mages flood the land once more.

If you decide to move to Skyrim, or just to vacation for a weekend or two, you too could be killed by a mudcrab or fall off an unexpected cliffside to your death. You might meet a strange man on the road with a silly little voice, or find yourself in a tavern sharing a bottle of mead with strangers while an Argonian with the sexiest voice of all time tells you a romantic tale of two star crossed lovers. You can visit the College of Winterhold and check out a book at the library, as long as you have a library card (which costs 50 septims per month).

Depending on the time of day, on server two alone there are nearly a thousand daily concurrent players creating communities, starting fights, and making names for themselves as fellow craftsmen and citizens of the reach.

There’s no subscription fee or Patreon paywall.

Just the dream of Skyrim multiplayer, finally realized. If you want to join us, all it takes is a few dozen modding steps and as much time as you’re willing to spend there. Just don’t do what I did and expect to play Skyrim like you have in the past.

The Aedra have molded Tamriel into something unfamiliar and wild, but in doing so they haven’t stripped away our potential. If anything, they’ve given it room to grow.

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Kara Everbright is a Community Curator for Player.gg

This article is not sponsored, and is the honest opinion of the author. The mechanics of Keizaal are subject to constant change, and this article reflects the state of the game at the time of writing.

Kara is a writer, video editor, music producer, and a wife. She streams on Twitch and YouTube, and you can find her less polished thoughts on TikTok and Bluesky.

You may find her on Server 2 some evenings, in the woods near a mountain, looking for a pack of skeevers to skin and trade. Just follow the trail of 30 missed arrows.