"It makes me sick": Skyrim modder with 475,000 downloads, fed up with "daily harassment," abandons modding after "thousands of hours" of work on what she calls "the most advanced follower to ever exist"

gamesradar.com:

A Skyrim modder with nearly 500,000 downloads has announced that she's stepping away from the modding scene despite putting "thousands of hours" into her masterwork as a result of demands and harassment from the community.

Many of the 475,000 mod downloads amassed by modder Kukielle stem from her extremely detailed Skyrim follower mods. Of those, the most popular is Daegon and Kaeserius, "two custom-voiced followers with 6k+ lines that play off each other." The pair have intersecting combat capabilities, and were described by Kukielle as "my passion project," providing the player with a D&D or Baldur's Gate 3-style 'party' rather than standard followers.

Since that first release, Kukielle has created three similar follower mods; Koemia, Little Witch Taeka, and 'Daegon Legacy'. The latter is a by-product of the significant changes that Kukielle made to Daegon in the year after its release. Sometime roughly halfway through its lifetime, the original Daegon mod became the current Daegon and Kaeserius mod, changing several aspects of the former's personality and backstory in a way that proved quite unpopular at the time. 

Kukielle would eventually re-release the original version of Daegon under the 'Legacy' name, noting in that mod's description the mistakes she says she'd made in changing the character, and suggesting that "it's something I won't do [...] again."

Regardless, multiple smaller changes continued to be made to the mods, resulting most recently in a two-part romantic questline added to Taeka. The result of a year of work, with more than 1,600 voice lines including custom lines for different player names, Kukielle claims that Taeka (like her other followers) is a "super follower" who is able to react to the world in significant detail. Noting that only "my free time is the limit" to that reactivity, Kukielle had also promised more work on her witch follower mod, with a third part to that romance questline also "upcoming."

It now seems, however, that