Skyrim's New Survival Mode DLC Might Make You Angry

Creation Club – the vehicle Bethesda will use to deliver new, paid content to games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 – has entered beta on PC, and to go along with this roll out, Bethesda has announced a new survival mode for Skyrim. Skyrim's survival mode will be distributed exclusively through Creation Club on consoles and PC, and it will ramp up the the game's difficultly in a very significant way.

Should you choose to purchase survival mode (more on that in a little bit), you'll have to worry about the more mundane aspects of being the Dragonborn. Skyrim's cold climate is no longer just a pretty backdrop to your adventure – it now poses a potent threat that you need to worry about. As outlined in the map below, Skyrim will now be split into regions where the temperature ranges from warm to freezing.

In more temperate regions, the cold won't be such a huge concern, but in freezing regions, you'll need to figure out a way to stay warm. Avoiding death by hypothermia can be accomplished a number of ways, from finding one of the campfires dotted across the map to making and eating hot soup or wearing warm armor. Neglect to manage your temperature and you character could end up dead from exposure.

You'll need to eat food regularly, otherwise your stamina will be limited and you'll swing your weapons slower. Just as well, you need to make sure you sleep regularly too, otherwise your total magicka will be capped by fatigue. Sleeping is also the only way to level up, so you'll definitely want to keep an eye out for any bedrolls you may come across.

Managing hunger, sleep, and warmth is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, though. Fast travel will be disabled in survival mode, limiting you to travel by horse or carriage if you want to get somewhere quickly. Arrows and lockpicks now have weight, carry weight has been significantly reduced, and diseases will wreak havoc on your character if left unchecked. You can ready more about the finer points of survival mode by checking out Bethesda's announcement.

All in all, survival mode sounds pretty neat, but some Skyrim fans are skeptical. Over on the Skyrim subreddit, many players are taking issue with the fact that this is being offered through Creation Club, even though it seems to emulate popular mods that have been available for free for quite some time.

Bethesda hasn't announced how much survival mode will cost, but it does say that console and PC players "will get survival mode free for one week once it launches on their preferred platform." Whether this is a free trial or something of an early-bird promotion that will grant players the mod permanently is unclear at this point. Survival mode is currently in beta on PC, and it should enter full release across all platforms sometime next month.