Never played past an hour or so. I’m gonna give it a good try to get into it.
Are there any mods that people would suggest I use for quality-of-life improvements?
Dozens. Hundreds. Buuut if it’s your first time you’re gonna be fine. Enjoy it, be happy, be annoyed. Especially with anniversary or special edition it’s going to be fine.
Second playthrough then go nuts with mods.
Just play it as is first time through. I wish I could go back and replay it for the first time again. I’ve dumped so many hours into this game. My biggest suggestions are just run around and have fun. Talk to everyone, explore everywhere. Don’t fast travel! Travel by foot everywhere, the things you’ll run into and random people you’ll meet are part of what makes the game so rich. Save often. You never know when you might have to go back and reload your game in the case of a needed NPC getting killed. Enjoy yourself!
I would first play it a bit unmodded before adding a ton of mods. You’re gonna want to experience the game in its natural state before changing it. I do this for any game I mod. Makes you appreciate it all more.
Along with SkyUI, these are a must have for me
Nice. I never knew those existed.
For a first playthrough I’d just play the game stock. In fact I still usually play the game stock. Mods can be great fun, but they alter the gameplay experience and the base game is still excellent.
If you’re having some trouble getting into it, for a first playthrough try playing a stealthy archer. It’s so satisfying in a way melee and magic just isn’t, and it doesn’t interfere with the roleplaying elements.
That’s an idea! I can struggle with “Open” world titles not giving me interesting things to do.
It took me ages to get into BotW because I had undiagnosed ADHD and didn’t realise I needed to set my own goals to get enjoyment from it
I have spent probably hundreds of hours in Skyrim at this point, but I would say the most fun playthrough I did was actually on the Nintendo Switch. I think that I enjoyed it because I didn’t stop every hour to install a bunch more mods, since that wasn’t an option (and I guess having it anywhere was nice too…).
If you want a bit of a smoother experience, I would recommend SkiUI on PC and Alternate Start, but I would also suggest trying it vanilla too as it can be a bit prickly to get SKSE (requirement for SkyUI) set up if you’ve never done it before.
I don’t recommend doing what I did and installing 200 mods, finally getting it all working and then not actually going back to the game. Do we really need 12 million K textures?
Holy shit, I thought I was alone in the big gaming world!
The reason I never played it is because at the time the game was out, my PC couldn’t handle it, so I gave up after my sad attempts to sit through the unplayable frames. And by the time I upgraded, there were simply too many games to steal my attention entirely - that’s how it been ever since.
I want to play it, though. I never considered it boring - I liked it even when I wasn’t that interested in fantasy, and now I’m gravitating even more towards it. Hope to get my hands down to it one day, but with Starfield (hopefully) coming out this year, and with The Outer Worlds to beat before that happens, I think I’m not slaying any dragons any time soon.
I would not do mods your first play-through. However, what I would recommend, is just doing whatever it is you feel like doing when you play. See a cave you want to walk into? Do it. Did you get assigned a new quest that looks more interesting than the one you’re doing? Hop on it. Don’t let certain storylines drag you down if you don’t enjoy them.
If it’s your first playthrough the only Mods I’d recommend is bug-fixes and such.
Any in particular I should look out for?
Yes! The base for every modded Skyrim is SKSE. It provides access to the game engine for a lot of mods out there. Nearly every script mod needs this.
I installed the anniversary edition through steam (maybe a year ago? shortly after it released), and I had such a hard time I gave up. I tried no-mods, but the game didn’t seem to like 3440x1440. So a mod helped that - but then THAT mod required the bug-fix mod, and then THAT caused a game conflict, saying versions were wrong. And all of that was using Vortex. Maybe it’s better now?
Edit: looked into what I actually did, got it mostly right. I installed a fresh “special edition”, but it was shortly after “anniversary” released. Even though I was using Vortex, I do wonder if version control was the issue. Not sure if I should try again, or pay for anniversary edition?
Ok, everyone telling you no mods isn’t wrong, BUT…I kind of find a few mods to be all but essential. Specifically, making your horse invincible but also unable to do damage will really save you a headache. You want both because if he’s invincible then he’ll just start kicking dragons to death. And then SkyUI because the default UI is awful.
You can check on Nexus Mods for some general bug fixes, but I 'd say just open up the game and give it a shot. There’s just so many mods for Skyrim-- imagine a feature you’d like in the game, and there’s probably a mod for it. To keep the vanilla experience, maybe stick to UI mods and QOL stuff. If graphics are important to you, there’s a bunch of visual mods that are subtle but bring the game up to speed. Enjoy! I’ve put so many hours into that game over the years.
If you never modded skyrim I would suggest following a modding guide like this one: https://dragonbornsfate.moddinglinked.com/intro.html
I’m generally in agreement with trying it unmodded… except that I would suggest getting the SkyUI mod. I’m not a big fan of the stock interface.
There are countless such mods, but I recommend not going down the rabbit hole. It’s very playable as is.
My biggest mistake is that I played my first time with the Kenny Loggins mod that changes combat music to “Danger Zone” and now I’ll never be able to play without it.
That sounds like the opposite of a mistake to me