I have the itch to play Skyrim again, probably because of everyone talking about the Oblivion remaster. While I beat both games, and had multiple playthroughs over the years I never really engaged with the DLC content; and after enough years that the base game should feel fresh as well, I want to jump back in.
But I’m wondering whether I should download mods or not! Last time I tried to play Skyrim, a few years ago, I spent all this time building a perfect mod list, and then got burned out before I actually started the game. So I’m probably just looking for a handful of the most impactful mods.
Gives you a fun, useful, and not drastically overpowed companion, which is a nice change of pace from some of the default companions if you’ve grown tired of them.
So Radiant quests DON’T take you to expansion areas if you’re like me, and wait to do that content until much later in the game.
Is a favorite of mine - it makes Dragon Souls more useful in a wider variety of areas. After all, I don’t normally care about all of them (many are very situational) and by late game I’ve killed so many it feels wasteful. Can get unbalanced depending on how much you let yourself use it - but it sure makes more sense on how a Dragonborn could be considered godlike by using this.
This makes smithing/crafting a LOT more interesting IMHO. You can make your own arrows (something you didn’t used to be able to do until the homebuilding addon) but also break down existing items (to a degree) for materials, and craft a wider array of objects.
Lots of cosmetic options are available, but those are the ones that I consider the must haves from my last playthrough.
Honorable mention for the “Immersive Armors / Immersive Weapons” mods if you want a wider variety of armors and weapons, but some people feel that’s a bit closer to cheating. Still, many of them look a lot less chonky than the defaults, so it’s a favorite, if not a “must have” of mine.
Pretty good list - still going through it in detail.
The two things that stand out as not being covered, I suppose, are a perk overhaul and a mod for the enemies faced? Do you feel those are necessary and/or have any recs?
I enjoyed my time with Skyrim Requiem and mean to give it another shot when my backlog is a bit lighter (as if.) The latest version is for Skyrim SE, which is $5 or so pretty often.
It’s an overhaul mod so the changes are pretty drastic, but it’s still Skyrim at its core. I’m struggling to describe it. I’d say it requires you to play Skyrim in a more purposeful way. The world doesn’t scale with you, so you need to be careful about going to the wrong area. Choices like skill points have more impact. For example, many dungeons are now guarded by placed bosses with specific loot rather than random items. One thing I liked is Destruction is much more viable.
Those both get very deep into how much you want the game to change, so I’m always reluctant to comment on those, but since you asked.
Keeps the majority of the original perk trees feel but gives a lot of additional flavor and fun while purging some of the “just adds x% damage” or similar. It’s what I normally use, though of course, full overhauls like Palooka mention are an option. Ordinator was popular enough that a lot of other mods had support for it at least.
Combat rebalances I don’t normally use. I find most of the combat reasonable easy because I tend to over-grind my character before I really embark on the story, and most of the mods seem to go the Fallout 4 route of just making everything spongy without being more fun.
The ones my friends swear by, those not using full overhauls is this one:
Yeah, I’ve got Special Edition. Requiem looks like exactly what I’m looking for - a one stop shop that covers a bunch of my needs. The way it handles perks sounds like it will keep things very fresh.
I’m considering going with a mod pack that includes Requiem - Wildlander seems pretty cool.
I really enjoyed Legacy of the Dragonborn, just because trying to fill up the museum sent me to a lot of locations I somehow never made it to in all of my vanilla Skyrim playthroughs.
yeah, I played it last year and had fun. It doesn’t really add a whole lot but like I said–if (like me) you’re a “collector” with serious loot-itis when gaming, it’s fun gathering up stuff to put in your museum. (And as mentioned, it sent me to places and on quests I just never made it to in vanilla.)
I will say it was a bitch to install, the directions were not great and it’s one of those installs where if you don’t do things in the perfectly correct order you break the game. I don’t have much experience with Skyrim modding but I can say the modding experience itself was not fun.
(I understand that package managers like Wabbajack make this stuff much easier today? I haven’t mucked around with that yet.)
Unless you want to cough up $5 a month to Nexus, downloading mods is very annoying - it downloads like 10 at a time, but each time it finishes one you have to click “Slow Download” to get the next mod to start. Most finish in just a few seconds, but some take longer, and there were almost 500 in this Wildlander pack. But, I was able to click while doing other stuff, and it wasn’t too bad. From there Wabbajack handles the install and everything.
So far I’ve only had like 20 minutes to actually play. Game looks and runs great, and the new character creation system seems fun.
I’m playing a Nord Mage, and decided to start the game crossing the border near Falkreach. My idea is that my character will be an Imperialized Nord, who grew up in Cyrodil and became an apprentice mage; they decide to go explore, and learn about magic, back in Skyrim. Maybe they’ll have the idea of trying to go to Winterhold, to see the College. But of course, it turns out that’s a much longer (and colder, since Wildlander has survival mechanics!) journey than they thought…
Thanks again for the Requiem recommendation, which led me to the Wildlander pack surrounding it. I’ve been having a blast with it!
I’m playing a Nord Mage who I’m RPing as an Imperialized Nord who grew up in Cyrodil. A bit foolishly and naively, they decide to travel to their ancestral home of Skyrim, to learn more about the magic of that land. Little do they know, they are the Dragonborn, and Alduin has returned…
Wildlander modifies the main quest to start much later. Helgen is already destroyed by Alduin at the start, but you weren’t there; instead, you can start at a city, the wilderness, or a border crossing (I started near Falkreath). At the beginning of the game, Alduin is still resurrecting dragons and building up an army; so he’s not really sending them after you yet. They start showing up once you get a bit higher level.
So instead of escaping Helgen and going to Bleak Falls Barrow straight away, the early game took me to Falkreath, to get enough supplies to survive the journey to inner Skyrim.
I ended up accepting the Hircine quest, forgetting it would mean I have a cursed ring until I finish the quest. Luckily, the quest is pretty easy if you side with the werewolf, and that felt more like what my character would do; unfortunately, it means my reward is the Ring of Hircine, which is only useful if I become a werewolf. Which I wasn’t really planning on doing.
Afterwards, I made my way to Whiterun. I’ve got a decent chunk of change saved up from messing with alchemy, so I’m going to spend some time with the Spell Research mod that’s included in Wildlander while staying in town for a few days. Maybe I’ll head over to Riverwood for a few beginner quests.
