Skyrim, now 12 years old, is still very popular with players on Steam. Now a Reddit user has announced that he has killed over 5,500 NPCs in the game and has accumulated an in-game bounty of a whopping 267,000 gold.
What did the player do? According to his own statement, amelix34 killed everything that could be killed. The stats posted are as follows:
Not one of the kills was from behind, however. So amelix34 was fair enough to face his opponents during his run. The total kill count is 5,504.
Is everything dead in the game world now? In Skyrim, not all NPCs can be killed: you cannot kill plot-relevant NPCs such as Jarl Elisif in Solitude or Mjoll the Lioness, a possible companion. According to its own statement, amelix34 also decided not to explicitly kill two NPCs: the old dragon Paarthurnax and the mount Shadowmane.
Presumably it was these surviving NPCs who placed the excessively high bounty of 267,000 gold on Amelix34’s character, which was appropriate in view of the massacre. This means that each of the newly spawning guards will hunt the character for the first time until they restart in a new game.
Is Skyrim still being played today? Bethesda’s role-playing game from 2011 is still extremely popular today. The special edition of the game, which was released a little later, currently has a 24-hour player peak of over 26,000 on Steam charts. When the news was released, the game had around 24,000 current players.
With these numbers, Skyrim also beats Bethesda’s latest game, Starfield. The space adventure was released almost three months ago and currently has a 24-hour player peak of around 21,300 players. As of the news release, the current number of players is around 17,000.
Skyrim’s age may be partly responsible for its continued success. Thanks to the large number of mods available, the 12-year-old game is still relevant today and can even keep up with the graphics of current AAA games:
A YouTuber is showing how amazing a 12-year-old game on Steam can look with an RTX 4090