20 Video Game Hard Modes For True Masochists

At this point, every Bethesda fan knows that the studio’s approach to difficulty is just tweaking the enemies’ stats until they become bullet sponges.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’s difficulty settings are no exception here, but with the introduction of the Anniversary Edition, Bethesda has actually found a new way to torture its players—Survival mode.

Survival mode offers the player an immersive and challenging experience where the Dragonborn can no longer spend twenty-four hours going from quest to quest like some skooma addict on a bender and instead has to eat, sleep, and stay warm to stay alive.

On paper, this sounds like the perfect addition for those players who seek a touch of realism to the game, but in practice, as is the case with most Bethesda stuff, the game mode is bugged. So bugged that it makes the game nigh unplayable.

The warmth mechanic of Survival mode makes the player freeze far too quickly, lowering their health and making them abysmally slower, and since you can only remove the cold condition at select fireplaces, when you travel the world, you’re pretty much guaranteed to die to anything, as the cold turns you into a one-hit-kill icicle.

Oh, and to add insult to injury, the mode also cuts your weight capacity in half, because managing your inventory space wasn’t already annoying enough as is.