Mod review: Legacy of the Dragonborn (version 5)

I am finally done with my very first Skyrim playthrough involving Legacy of the Dragonborn, so I can finally put up some organized thoughts about it! This review will avoid spoilers as much as possible; if you want to see in-depth spoiler commentary, pick any post in Kendeshel’s playthrough, where I talk about my experiences with the mod in depth.

Also, this review is based upon version 5 of Legacy, since that’s what I was running when Kendeshel’s playthrough started. Version 6 dropped before I could finish her run–and I did not update her to 6, on general “because it’s extremely unwise to try to update mods in the middle of a Skyrim playthrough, especially a mod as big as Legacy of the Dragonborn” grounds.

I’ll do a followup post later, since I’ve launched a new playthrough that has version 6. For now, though, this post will focus on what I encountered with version 5.

So let’s start this off with a picoreview out of the gate: I loved the hell out of playing Legacy. I have some quibbles with it, but these quibbles are minor, and are not in the slightest going to keep me from playing through it again.

More behind the fold.

The core concept

It’s doubtful that I need to explain Legacy of the Dragonborn, as it’s one of the most famous Skyrim mods out there, and I have yet to encounter anyone in the Skyrim modding community that doesn’t know what it is.

But just in case, briefly: Legacy is a mod that adds a whole new angle to the entire experience of playing Skyrim, by creating a museum in Solitude where you can collect and store all the relics of your adventures as the Dragonborn. This museum includes a player house inside the museum building, a mobile player house (the Dev Aveza airship), an overall quest line to follow for the museum’s progress, several side quests involving archaeological expeditions, and a large array of quality of life improvements that make overall gameplay a lot easier to manage than in vanilla Skyrim.

Stuff I liked

Narrative progression through the mod’s various quests

I love that all the various major and minor quests for Legacy are generally very organically driven, and are triggered by you achieving certain milestones in filling your museum. So this made it very rewarding to keep coming back to the museum, not only to put stuff up on display, but also to interact with NPCs and see if they had new tasks for me to do, or new plot points to pursue. The progression felt very natural, which I very much appreciated.

Legacy also does a mostly stellar job of structuring its quest stages so that you can run off and do other things if you want to, then come back and continue with the mod-related content. As with unmodded Skyrim, this may also sometimes strain narrative coherence–but that’s really a function of how Skyrim works in general.

Legacy’s content does follow a general rough structure, though, be advised. And I do recommend that once you get a certain quest in Legacy started, go ahead and finish that up before tackling any other part of the mod’s quest line. Otherwise, things will get narratively weird. Non-spoilery example from Kendeshel’s run: I wound up doing the final quest in Legacy before finishing another major part of it, which meant I got Legacy’s end credits cutscene before I was actually done playing all of the plot!

NPCs and voice acting

Legacy adds a bunch of NPCs to the game. There’s Auryen, the curator, but a whole set of other NPCs as well–colleagues you work with, guards in the museum, but also just random NPCs whose function is to just be museum visitors.

The voice work is almost entirely splendid. A couple of the NPCs had distinctly Irish-sounding (or maybe northern UK?) accents, which I found a little odd just because they didn’t sound like anyone else I was used to encountering in Skyrim. And in particular, these characters were Nords yet did not sound like other Nords. But this being a function of “you take your voice performances where you can get them in a fan-made mod”, I was quite willing to just roll with that.

Also, I loved that the mod had minor as well as major NPCs. The museum visitors in particular really made the place thrive. A major addition to Solitude like this should get a lot of attention from the locals! And Legacy does a great job in establishing that with the visitor NPCs.

Most importantly, I really loved that all the major NPCs do see some great character development throughout the progression of Legacy’s storyline. I came away with a lovely sense of how these people all grew closer to one another as a group of colleagues and friends.

Graphical design

The museum and Safehouse are visually stunning. And the bedroom in the Safehouse in particular is the fanciest place I’ve ever slept in any Skyrim playthrough! It’s even nicer than Proudspire Manor.

Every other location added by the mod was equally impressive, visuals-wise.

I can’t state this for a positive fact, but at least in Kendeshel’s run, I also saw a bit of a visual discrepancy between what Legacy locations looked like, and what the rest of Skyrim did. Legacy content in general seemed like it was using higher-resolution graphics than vanilla Skyrim does. This didn’t bother me necessarily, but it was distinct enough to notice.

Whether or not you’ll notice this will depend very heavily on what else you’re running besides Legacy in your playthrough. If you’re running any mods that overhaul the look and feel of the game, you may have a smoother and more cohesive visual experience.

The Dev Aveza

I’ve written on this blog before about my opinions on airships in Skyrim; c.f., my prior thoughts on Moonpath to Elsweyr. Legacy of the Dragonborn’s airship is pretty much directly inspired by Moonpath to Elsweyr, and in fact, if you’re running Moonpath, how you get that airship will be a bit different than if you’re not.

So this means the Dev Aveza operates the way Moonpath established airships work: i.e., they’re telepathically powered. I still don’t buy this, for the same reasons I’ve written about before.

The controls of the airship were a bit confusing, in that there was an entire map with pins on it belowdecks, where you were in theory supposed to be able to set the ship’s course. This didn’t work, but that was a known issue with v5.

Also, there was an entire area full of cots belowdecks, where in theory NPCs could have slept–if any had ever come on board. Nobody ever did, about which I was sad!

And I did not quite buy that I was cavorting around Skyrim in an airship, and that not once did General Tullius ever go, “Citizen, I’m going to have to commandeer your conveyance in the name of the Empire. We need it to take Windhelm.” ;D

But all that said?

The Dev Aveza is fucking awesome and I love it to bits. In v5 of Legacy, you could only take it to a set number of locations. But there were enough locations available to it that it made travel by airship absolutely viable. I wound up doing a strategy of using the airship to travel to those various major locations, and then picking up whatever horse I had in the local stable, to get to places the airship couldn’t reach. That let me strike a nice balance between enjoying the airship and enjoying traveling overland!

Ambient music in the museum

I really liked the ambient music in the museum! There were a few distinctive themes that cycled through every time I came back to the place, and I loved that it had its own unique music.

Making me re-think areas of the game I’d previously overlooked

The need to find All the Possible Things to fill out displays in the museum meant that I had multiple occurrences of visiting spots in the game I had ignored. This was great. I discovered a few things I had not even known about Skyrim before, just because I’d never bothered to go to certain places!

The Stash Supplies spell <3

OMG where has this spell been all my Skyrim-playing life? I’ve said over and over on this blog about how I’m chronically overloaded every time I play Skyrim. This spell? This spell right here?

Solves that problem.

And I took shameless advantage of it all throughout Kendeshel’s run. Which meant I was able to loot a lot more stuff, too. 😀

Stuff I’m ambivalent about

So many NPCs, but I’m still doing all the work?

By the very nature of Skyrim, as the player character, you are of course the catalyst by which action moves forward at any point in the game. But there were parts of Legacy where this didn’t really work well for me. If I’m in a situation where a team of six people has already gathered to do an archaeological excavation, they should not be stymied in their progress just because I haven’t shown up yet!

Again, this is not really a thing that Legacy can fix–it’s the nature of being the player character. But still, this can be mitigated by well-written dialogue. But there was at least one situation where I was asked to do a task that, narratively speaking, really should not have required me to figure out for all the NPCs given that they’re supposed to be competent at their jobs. 😉

Not sure I buy how many dig sites Legacy adds to the game?

One of Legacy’s many, many features is that it adds different types of “dig sites” to pretty much any dungeon you can expect to run–draugr tombs, Falmer hives, Dwemer ruins, etc.

While I enjoyed finding them all, I also have to admit to having a bit of a strain on my suspension of disbelief about it. I kept wondering who was actually doing these sites, and if that was Auryen’s work, and if so–what happened to the people who set up those sites before?

Found the museum supply dropoffs too common

Another feature the mod gives you is various museum dropoff spots where you can send stuff back to the museum, without having to physically go back there yourself. This is super convenient, but I also found it straining my sense of disbelief a bit. It implies extensive effort by Auryen to set all that up, effort which is not really supported by your interactions with him or other museum NPCs.

This is, however, configurable. I’ll cut back on where those supply dropoff spots are, for my v6 run.

Making every other house in the game pretty much useless

The combination of the Safehouse in the museum as a primary home base, and the Dev Aveza as a secondary, pretty much means I had absolutely no reason to use any of the houses anywhere else in the game.

Now, I’ve written a lot on this blog about how the game does already have way too many houses in it, enough that I am often ignoring most of those houses anyway. But part of the fun for me, at least in the early stretches of a Skyrim run, is getting some of the most critical starter houses–like Breezehome and Lakeview. I enjoy building out the Hearthfire houses! And I enjoy putting my loot up on display in those houses, that’s what building armory wings in the Hearthfire houses is for.

But Legacy made it much, much less important. At the very tail end of Kendeshel’s run, I ruefully realized I hadn’t even finished building out the three Hearthfire houses.

Play locations that are too large to navigate quickly through for my tastes

While I really did like just about every single quest Legacy added to the game, a few of the locations it added in were awkwardly large for my personal preferences.

By which I mean: it took a very long time to make my way through a few of those places. And in at least one or two cases, I had to visit these locations repeatedly. Which meant having to go through much if not all of the same locations again. I found this tedious and time-consuming, and really wished there were shortcuts to get to the quest-relevant parts of those locations faster.

Somewhat erratic patch support for Anniversary Edition content

Legacy of the Dragonborn was created well before the Anniversary Edition/Creation Club content became a thing. And Legacy brought in its own versions of a lot of the various artifacts you can get in the AE–which means inevitable conflicts between Legacy versions of those artifacts, and AE versions. The matter is further complicated if your load order happens to include any other mods that include versions of those same artifacts.

Legacy does not officially support the AE, either. As called out in their install guide, there are patches for CC content. By and large these patches do a decent job of smoothing over conflicts with AE stuff.

There are two typical strategies I saw the patches taking to resolve these issues:

Creating an alternate, renamed artifact for the AE content in question, or,
Removing the Legacy version of the item where this could be done without breaking something else

Mostly, I saw strategy number one happening. And I was actively disappointed early on in the Kendeshel’s game, when I realized that running the quest in Whiterun that I thought was going to give me the Bow of Shadows gave me a “Bow of Obfuscation” instead. So that was a little immersion-breaking. Not enough for me to care about–but enough to basically establish for me that I need to treat a Legacy run as a Skyrim AU, which is likely to contain a bunch of artifacts that just do not exist in official Elder Scrolls lore.

Takeaway from this: if you like the AE content (and I do), be prepared for a Legacy run to be a little weird with it. Or, alternately, don’t play with the AE content. Choose wisely.

A certain part of the museum make less sense if you’re playing a law-abiding character

There is an entire section of the museum set aside for you to put less than legal acquisitions. This, however, is mostly meaningful only if you’re doing one or more of the following:

Running the Thieves Guild
Running the Dark Brotherhood
Playing as a vampire

Without doing into spoilers, I’ll simply say here that I did at least like the mini-quest that grants you access to that part of the facility. And I liked the in-game explanation for what that area was previously used for.

And even if you are playing a law-abiding character, that area can also be used for certain weird and/or unsavory items you acquire during main Skyrim content, and which you wouldn’t otherwise have any use for after you play the relevant material. Such as, for example, Arvak’s skull from Dawnguard.

Treatment of the Falmer

One of the major quests in Legacy heavily involves the Falmer and the history of the Snow Elves. And after all the Skyrim I’ve been playing over the last couple of years, especially after running Dawnguard and the Thieves Guild plotline so many times, I was already on the fence about the ethics of coming into Falmer areas, attacking them, and taking their stuff.

Legacy leans harder into this–but on the side of “coming into Falmer areas, attacking them, and taking their stuff”, rather than the side of “y’know, given all the shit the Falmer have gone through, and how justifiably pissed off they are at the surface world, maybe obliterating them is not the most moral of ideas?”

Which is not to say that the Legacy plot about this isn’t well-written; it is. But this issue hung out pretty strongly in the back of my mind while running it.

Stuff I didn’t like: performance on the Steam Deck

There’s honestly very little at all I didn’t like about Legacy of the Dragonborn. The only thing I actively disliked is that it’s not officially supported on the Steam Deck, because none of their dev team plays on that platform. They are very, very clear that they only support players playing on PC.

So if you’re playing Steam Deck, like I am, this means that you are entirely on your own solving any problems that come up in your playthrough.

And here’s the problem with that. The museum had recurring issues with hard FPS hits all throughout the latter part of Kendeshel’s run. This ramped up the more items I added to her museum, and usually manifested as the game locking up in either the Hall of Heroes, the Safehouse, or the Hall of Wonders. I either had an unplayable slowdown that resulted in my having to save and restart the game–or I’d have the Deck just lock up completely, and would have to hard reboot.

Now that I’m firing up a Tuxborn-based playthrough, which involves version 6 of Legacy, I’m also hearing that that version has performance issues on the Deck as well.

So my advice to any Steam Deck players is, be prepared to have to wrestle with performance issues if you want to mod your Skyrim on your Deck, and do a Legacy run. If you’re technically inclined enough to mod Skyrim on a Steam Deck to begin with, handling these issues is probably well within your ability. I’m just saying, be prepared to have to do that.

And in my v6 playthrough, I’ll try some strategies that will hopefully mitigate some of these issues–chief among them being, relying less on the Safehouse as my primary headquarters. By extension, this will also mean relying less on storing personal supplies and loot there, and less use of the Safehouse’s Sell Chest. We’ll see how this holds up as Nona’s playthrough gets underway; more on this to come.

I’ll also definitely post tips and tricks for improving Legacy performance in a modded Steam Deck run.

All in all

Even though I’ve written about as much about the parts of Legacy I’m ambivalent about as I did the parts I really like, let me be clear: I really did enjoy playing through this entire mod. I am not kidding when I say it is a transformative experience, in how much it overhauled my approach to playing Skyrim.

It might not be to your taste if you like your Skyrim experience as close to vanilla as possible. Or if you’d feel pressured by the task of gathering so many objects to fill up the museum, and satisfy its varioius quests.

But in general, I heartily recommend trying it at least once, if you’re interested in modding Skyrim at all, for almost all types of players. Especially if you’re a player who loves gathering loot, and having places to put it and proudly show it off!

And I’m very much looking forward to my run through version 6. 😀