Very disappointed with the new lands mod Shumer and The Priest Kings
Shumer is one of the most self-indulgent new lands mods I’ve ever played
I finally uninstalled Shumer after forcing myself through enough of it to feel confident saying this: the mod is honestly kind of insulting to the player’s time.
It’s pretty. I’ll give it that. Some of the city design is cool, some of the character design is cool, and there are moments where you can tell a lot of labor went into visualizing this place. But that’s basically where my praise ends. As an actual gameplay experience, I thought it was awful.
The whole thing feels less like an expansion to Skyrim and more like someone spent years building a DnD homebrew setting with their friends and then used Skyrim as an excuse to turn it into a 3D museum. Which, as far as I understand, is literally what it is, according to the author. And that would be fine if it actually translated into good gameplay. It doesn’t.
The towns and cities are packed with NPCs, but most of them are mannequins. One line of dialogue, no actual reason to engage with them, no feeling of social density at all. Just bodies standing around to create the illusion of a living world. There’s a ton of lore and exposition, but almost none of it is delivered in a way that feels rewarding or interactive. One of the mandatory quests I got was basically just “learn about the gods of Shumer,” which translated into sitting there while NPCs lore-dumped at me for what felt like twenty straight minutes.
The quests have no markers, which would be cool if they were Morrowind or Elden Ring style quests, but they aren't, they are fetch quests and delivery quests where the reward is, I SHIT YOU NOT, Ten septimes. Yes, Ten septims. Mind you, these quests aren't even easy to find, as you have to start a conversation with one of the thousand NPC's hoping they actually have a quest for you, and a lot of the quests are gated behind prerequisite quests that literally have nothing to do with the following quest it unlocks.
The dungeons I found were short, shallow, and usually had no meaningful reward at the end. The roads between settlements had basically zero encounters. No roaming danger, no surprise fights, no sense of wilderness pressure. I’d see something in the distance that looked interesting, walk all the way over to it, and get absolutely nothing. I found a shrine on a raised little path that looked like it was obviously supposed to matter. No blessing, no lore note, no hidden item, no environmental storytelling, nothing. Just a prop. That happened over and over. The mod keeps making visual promises with no reward.
And that’s really the core issue: Shumer has scale without density, lore without embodiment, towns without life, exploration without payoff, and quests without actual dramatic or mechanical weight. It wants credit for the amount of stuff it has built, but not for what that stuff actually does.
Compared to other new lands mods, it’s not even close. Bruma feels like a genuine Elder Scrolls expansion. Beyond Reach has real atmosphere, Midwood Isle at least feels like it wants to be an adventure. Grey Cowl of Nocturnal actually has propulsion. Even Chanterelle, which barely has quests, feels more alive because the wilderness itself pushes back and gives you things to fight and survive. Shumer just felt dead. Huge, detailed, and dead.
And yes, I know some people love lore. I love lore too. I’ll sit through insane exposition from Kojima because Metal Gear is actually fun to play and the lore serves the gameplay. That’s the difference. Here it felt like the gameplay existed to justify the lore, not the other way around.
I also ran into one of the dumbest bugs I’ve seen in a while, where a mandatory NPC’s outfit was literally exploding into geometry spikes across the screen and breaking the area. I fixed it via console codes, I had to manually disable the NPC's outfit, but honestly by that point I felt exhausted and irritated the whole mod is like that. A big visually ambitious shell with something nothingat the center.
My honest score is 2/10.
Two points for the visual design. Everything else felt like wasted SSD space, which was 4 gigs by the way, and wasted time. If you want to walk around inside someone else’s lovingly rendered fantasy notebook, maybe you’ll get something out of it. If you want a new lands mod that actually feels alive, reactive, and worth playing, there are much better options.
I was so irritated by my experience with this mod that I felt compelled to whine about it here on reddit. If you got this far thanks for listening to my whining.