Review of the Thieves Den mod

Official description:
Uncover a famous pirate's lost ship and claim it for your own. Designed for stealth-based characters.

What you get:
- a classy abode
- fences, trainers, spell merchants
- a quest

Description:
Basically, what you get is a home for your thief-archetype character. You also get all the services you could want: you can sell off stolen items without being in the guild, you can buy spells of the type interesting to types like you (unlocking, stealth, ...) without bothering with the mages guild, you can train a few skills and you can buy lockpicks and weapons and other stuff. You also get to read a real-life sea captain's journal, which consists of four volumes and tells the story of how this particular scurvy cur became a pirate cap'n and how he came to die in a cave. I'm not going to bother describing the whole thing. If you want to see what it's like, check out the screenshots below instead.

The quest mentioned above consists of first finding the cave, which is very easy, and furthermore to put to rest the undead remains of the ole sea cap'ns crew, including the chief himself. Since these skeletors are level scaled, it shouldn't be much of a problem even for lower level characters.

Stargel's opinion:

Summary: Good as a housing mod, but not the promised "Goonies" like mod.

Ashley Cheng announced this mod on E3 by conjuring up images of the movie "The Goonies". "Basically, it's Goonies," he said. "That's what we really wanted.", he said. Now everyone who has seen this movie in their younger years will remember that it is about a group of teenagers who stumble into the greatest adventure of their young lifes. Traps. Loot. Bad guys. A giant cave with a pirate ship. Naturally, after this comparisson, my expectations skyrocketed. There was talk of pirates, and I was kind of expecting Yarrrs and Arrr Mateys. I could hear the Buccaneer's Den tune from Ultima 9 in my mind. I was excited!

Weeeell. It does have a pirate ship in a cave, but unfortunately that's where the similarities end. As far as bad guys go, skeletons are a dime a dozen, and they didn't even say "yarrr" or anything like that. Traps? Nope. Loot? Well, there's a gold nugget or two, and a few silver spoons. I guess those pirates ate all their loot before they died.

Ultimately, this is but a housing mod, the equivalent of the Wizard's Tower, just for thieves. Now, it's not a bad one at that. It's classy, what with the pirate flags and the rum bottles on deck and all. The services you get in your den make sense, and having a bunch of thugs go loot and burn and pillage is of course always a good thing to have, even if only for roleplaying purposes. It really just isn't what I -and others- expected. It's not Goonies. Not even close. It's maybe the end scene of Goonies, but without the loot; and the cave was bigger in the movie, too!

Is it worth the $1.89 Bethsoft asks for it? Well I guess that boils down to what you expect of it, and what you want, whether you need a classy home for your thief-type character or not. Personally, I have to say this isn't the kind of mod that interests me and that I would normally spend money on, but hey, whatever floats your boat I guess. I did like the cap'ns journal though, that was a nice piratey touch.

BTW, what is it with the lovely Redguard lady that you have to talk to to get a crew together? You ask her about the gray fox, and even though she just organized a bunch of thugs, pirates and other rather unfriendly people, she tells you how much she despises that thief? Weird. Just Weird.