If you haven't heard already, Nehrim: At Fate's Edge is a free total conversion mod for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It's a completely stand-alone game with its own original world, characters, and quests so impressive in ambition that it rivals the scale of the vanilla Oblivion experience. And in most ways, it's actually better than Oblivion, which is either a heaping bit of praise for Nehrim's developers, SureAI, or a scornful derision of Bethesda. I'm going with both. After all, it's kind of sad when a group of volunteer modders can make a better game than a multi-million dollar studio of (supposedly) industry-leading professionals.
I'm somewhere between 20 and 30 hours into Nehrim and I've only just finished the first of (I believe) five chapters. I'll be writing a full review once I've finished the game, but since I'm still only a fraction of the way through it, and I'll almost assuredly be distracted by Risen 2 when it launches, I figured I'd go ahead and publish my early impressions of the game. So far, I've been really enjoying it. It feels far more like Gothic 2 with an Oblivion skin, which makes it a far more compelling experience, even though Nehrim can't quite escape some of the inherent problems of Oblivion. More of my impressions after the jump.