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To be honest, I didn't play the game as much as I modded it. You could count most of my playing time as mod-testing!

I liked the way DS could be changed into another game using the same engine, and collaborated on mods like Abstraction and The Halloween Special Late Late Show, that changed the whole setting and much of the UI. My rescue map even does away with almost all the combat (you fight one angry tree).

But I spent a lot of that time undoing things. Like suppressing the rings around characters, the numbers that fly off enemies instead of blood, and the excess of glows and sparkles that show that something is magical. DS2 added more of what I didn't want and DS3 was so bad (and had no toolkit) that I didn't get that.

Instead, I moved on to The Elder Scrolls, even going back in time to mod Daggerfall. That series has avoided the unrealistic aspects I was trying to minimise, and has even better construction kits, and interfaces to generally available tools for modelling and animation.

I still look after the mods I made or contributed to, as far as I can, but some of it has been broken by the operating systems, and other support systems, moving on. Only part of the Halloween Special is playable these days, as it depended on the multi-player interface, which for me broke with Win 7. Discreet quietly dropped gmax, and although you can still get it, you need to sign up for spam. When I replaced my computer, I lost the ability to work on DS models. Siege Editor still runs, but I haven't needed to fix anything using that for a long time.