Why I’m Not Playing Skyrim Again

Skyrim is an odd game. It is both full of content but also eerily empty. While I have played a lot of Skyrim in the past (and even did a whole walk-through playing as the TF2 Medic), I’m wondering if it’s time to give Skyrim another try. But there’s a lot stopping me from doing so.

I ought to move to Special Edition.

Currently, I only have the Legendary Edition of Skyrim installed. This is the old, 32bit version of Skyrim. I’ve played a bit of Special Edition before and while being a tad more stable, is a little bit harder on my weak, old laptop.

But Special Edition still does get the odd update. Which means I have to make sure that my mods still work. Most importantly, I have to hold off on updates until SKSE (Skyrim Script Extender) and all its child mods get updated as well. Or, alternatively, I stop the game from updating at all and hope that everything stays on the save version.

On top of this, all my saves will have to be left behind. I’d be starting from scratch.

I gotta mod everything again.

While yes, most mods have been ported over from Legendary Edition to Special Edition, I’ve still got to go through and collect all my mods. There’s no easy way to just transfer everything over. Textures are kinda okay, but everything else needs to be updated. How you actually update mods yourself, I don’t actually know. But often you need to wait for the original author to update a mod to Special edition themselves. At the very least, you need to get permission from the author to update the mod for personal use.

I’d also have to upgrade the personal mods I’ve made, but I have no idea how to do it. Thankfully a couple are just altered textures, so it’s not too bad. That being said, because my saves all use different mods, I can’t really re-use my old saves at all.

Then I gotta test it all.

After installing mods, you need to know if the mods will work. And that requires a lot of testing. The problem is, Skyrim is so vast that anything could cause a crash. I once had a crash from a plugin conflict, due to the position of some trees in a specific snowy area. You can get crashes from all sorts of things. But what makes matters worse is that a crash or a freeze can happen hours into a playthrough. You don’t know that a plugin conflicts until later in the game.

And troubleshooting is a massive pain. It requires turning off all mods then reactivating them one at a time until you get your crash or game freeze. There’s no easy way to do this at all.

It’s not really that good a game.

Honestly, without the mods, Skyrim is a mediocre game at best. Somehow, we keep on getting new versions of Skyrim though, and people are still paying for it. Really, what makes Skyrim a genuinely good game is just how easily you can mod it and fix all of the game’s problems. Don’t like the combat? There’s a mod for it. Not a fan of how empty the game is? There’s plenty of mods that fill up all the empty spaces. We have an unofficial mod that fixes many of Skyrim’s bugs and inconsistencies, and there’s been one for all versions of Skyrim, including the DLCs. While Skyrim is playable with mods, it’s the modding community that keeps it alive.

I’ve done pretty much everything.

The biggest thing though is that I’ve done pretty much everything. I’ve been the Dragonborn, I’ve saved the universe, I’ve done all the major faction stuff. There’s not really much more that I haven’t experienced. I think the only thing I haven’t done is kill Paarthunax but I don’t see a reason to, especially since he barely fights back, and Odahviing always gets involved.

What I could do is try several fan-made quest lines, but that needs modding and testing too. So it leads me back to square one.

Maybe one day I’ll get around to playing Skyrim again. But for now, I have better things to play.