Page 1 of 1

How to play Skyrim with no Internet; permanently?

PostPosted: Thu May 31, 2012 5:40 pm
by Penny Flame
I posted this on the Steam/Skyrim board, and thought I should post here too in case anyone has any suggestions.



Well, the time has come to make a decision. When I bought Skyrim, I knew I was going to get laid off, but then got a reprieve for 2 months, but now I got my final notice that I will be out of work in 2 weeks.

I have been running Skyrim v 1.1.21.0 since the 'Ninja' patch came out that made Skyrim need Steam to play the game. Before that, you did not need Steam, so that is how I play; No Steam and No Internet needed.

The thought was that at some point, if I had to get rid of my Internet to save money in bills, that I would update to the current version, and make it final that my Steam would play offline all the time. If I do log into Steam, the first thing it is going to do is update my game to the latest version, require I now have to use Steam, and the possibility of it crashing making the game unplayable.

Can you all tell me if this would work?

1) Do a complete backup of my computer and set a system save point.

2) Log into Steam, been months since this game has seen Steam, and allow Steam to update my Skyrim to the latest version.

3) Find a 'real' way of playing Skyrim in off-line mode that won't require an Internet connection in the future.

The above is the plan. Now, since I have read many threads on how Steam won't stay in off-line mode, or something gets corrupted, the game won't restart unless you log back into Steam online. Well, if I turn off the Internet, I won't be able to get back online to update/patch/fix the game to set it back to offline mode.

So my thought is, do the above. Then, if for some reason my Skyrim/Steam gets corrupted, or breaks in some way that won't let me back into it, I can copy my entire Steam/Skyrim directory from the backup; and go back to playing Skyrim v 1.1.21.0 that doesn't need to be online and doesn't need Steam. Would this work?

I ask if it will work, as I have never had to rely on a backup before, but this is different as I won't be able to play Skyrim if it needs to connect to Steam online in the future in order to fix.

Any thoughts on whether or not copying my whole directory could be brought back.

If that didn't work for some reason, would a system restore back to this date bring back the game in a working v 1.1.21.0 of the files?

My only other option is to just keep playing Skyrim v 1.1.21.0 for eternity and live with whatever things may be broke in the game that have now been fixed, or will be fixed in the future.


Thank you for any answers and comments

How to play Skyrim with no Internet; permanently?

PostPosted: Thu May 31, 2012 12:49 pm
by chinadoll
See this is what Bethesda /steam does not take into account......that sometimes people have no choice but to turn off their internet. If you update , then go OFFline, you will always have to run steam.

Save your Original steam free EXE..its worth Gold!!. yes a backup of what your running now will work and work good...you just don't get the improvements. Mods wont work for the most part either.
they have improved many things over the span of the patches....but with that you have to get married to steam.

Or in the case of the 1.2 patch they broke many things...seams like this latest patch also...

How to play Skyrim with no Internet; permanently?

PostPosted: Thu May 31, 2012 5:53 am
by Natasha Biss
To bad you cant set the game to play off line while you are actualy off line then get back to playing your single player game, that would solve a lot of probs, but it just dont work that way, it wants to to get on line to set it off line, which if your internets down you are screwed.

How to play Skyrim with no Internet; permanently?

PostPosted: Thu May 31, 2012 11:18 am
by Josh Sabatini
See this is what Bethesda /steam does not take into account......that sometimes people have no choice but to turn off their internet. If you update , then go OFFline, you will always have to run steam.

Save your Original steam free EXE..its worth Gold!!. yes a backup of what your running now will work and work good...you just don't get the improvements. Mods wont work for the most part either.
they have improved many things over the span of the patches....but with that you have to get married to steam.

Or in the case of the 1.2 patch they broke many things...seams like this latest patch also...

Which is truly a funny time to be posting this. I had originally thought of updating to the latest and greatest, go offline, and all would be fine. But it doesn't work like that. Who knows if I would have trouble with v 1.5 and the game unplayable? Don't know for sure, but with all the ramblings of players having issues, it sure don't sound appealing to update.

The one thing I do know with v 1.1.21.0, with no Steam and no Internet needed, I have not had a single crash in Skyrim?

And yes, I am actually leaning towards just staying with my launch day version, because as you said, it is like GOLD.

I guess in some way, I was hoping that I could update/patch, and if for some weird reason it should become unplayable, I could resort to a backup.

So do you think if I start Steam, let it patch me, then go offline; that I should crash, I could just copy over my saved backup directory and go back to playing good old solid v 1.1.21.0?

The reason I also ask is that I know back with DOS, this would not be an issue; but with Windows you have registry files and such that have to be set and dll's that need to be registered. So I didn't know if a simple copying over the existing directory would suffice or not.

How to play Skyrim with no Internet; permanently?

PostPosted: Thu May 31, 2012 1:45 pm
by Ana Torrecilla Cabeza
To bad you cant set the game to play off line while you are actualy off line then get back to playing your single player game, that would solve a lot of probs, but it just dont work that way, it wants to to get on line to set it off line, which if your internets down you are screwed.

You are correct, it would solve a lot of issues.

I have read the forums, and when you read about all the players who have tried to 'really go off-line', it can be hit or miss. And this is the first time where I have read about software, Steam, where deleting and reinstalling things is 'COMMON'. Verify integrity of game, delete files and re-install, etc... just seems something that shouldn't be done as 'routine'. :-)

How to play Skyrim with no Internet; permanently?

PostPosted: Thu May 31, 2012 6:54 am
by biiibi
Wish i could give you a definitive answer...i just don't know positive that that would work. i don't see why it wouldn't. But if the steam activation is stored in the registry. and you used system restore ( i would not go this route) it would be back to how you have it now. The best time to do this would be when a patch is in Beta....if you dont like it you can back out and get back to what you have as a stable game.

The problems most are having ,,,has to do with AMD and or mods.

I would personally recommend you get this patch, before taking Skyrim "off the bottle". The addition of LAA , the HD DLC , besides those, you need the latest patch to get the most important patch of them all.....the "UNofficial patch".

How to play Skyrim with no Internet; permanently?

PostPosted: Thu May 31, 2012 11:21 am
by Sxc-Mary
I have a post in the Steam forums to get help from those who might have had to deal with this, and someone reported back that I could use the system Restore, to bring back the game in it's current state.

He was running 1.4, got online to do something on Steam and even though some setting he had said to not update Skyrim, it did anyway. It patched him up to 1.5. This version 1.5 had ill effects to his game and made it unplayable. So since he does a system save point each time before he uses Steam; he was able to system Restore back before v 1.5.

This is good news to me if true that this works. It would allow me to try start Steam, knowing it will patch me from day 1 launch version to whatever is the current version now. After it does patch, I can try the game to see if it works properly on my setup. If all runs fine, then it is a matter of finding the definitive answer on how to set Steam to offline mode; PERMANENTLY.

If I will have to run Steam from now on in order to play Skyrim in the future, I would like to make sure that Steam doesn't crash and needs to dial home (get on-line) to verify cache or re-install, or any other such nonsense.

But before I do the above, I am going to make a system save point with my current setup. Running Skyrim v 1.1.21.0, not running Steam, and have no mods installed. This works fine and I have no crashes. Should the day come where Steam causes issues, I can always bring back this working version of the game and have it overwrite the broken game.

Well, that is the 'plan'. :blush:

How to play Skyrim with no Internet; permanently?

PostPosted: Thu May 31, 2012 2:43 pm
by Pete Schmitzer
I only play Skyrim in offline mode. Whenever Skyrim gets an update (when I get wifi access), all I do is run the game online, save & quit. Then I verify the file cache, tell Steam to restart in offline mode, run the game again and save/quit. Now whenever I don't have wifi, I can play Skyrim offline. Easy as pie.

Unfortunately there's no permanent "setting Steam to offline mode" because the program will automatically go online the second it finds a wireless internet signal.