And yet Bethesda use modders' ideas, mods are free and you have nothing to lose. Game developers don't always get the game right and that's where modders come in but at least with mods you can pick what's right for you.

I know it may surprise some but not everybody is in to mods.
I get by just fine without giant anime swords,better boob physics,overhauls,Fan fics come to life, weapons packs, et al
If that is your thing good on ya.
As I said I am more envious of the acess to console commands
But to each their own

It would be nice if Bethesda didn't rely so much on the modders to finish their game. It can make one wonder why the modders aren't working for Bethesda since they fix many of the bugs and make content that keeps people playing for years after release.

Thanks for all the suggestions, also thanks to everybody contributing to the topic itself.

Tomorrow I'm gonna look at some Dell desktops.

I'm just putting my point of view into this I know there are good mods out there but you have to really go find to find them through all the silly and goofy mods

Silly and goofy mods blow no mods away any day. Just saying.

And thats fine.

It just bothered me, insinuating that modders were generally lacking in quality and professionalism.

And again: Yes, a lot of crap... as there is with all things.

I know I said right in my post that it was my opinion!

I know you said you were a PC noob, but I'd still recommend looking into building your own. It can be tricky buying parts that'll work together and getting it put together, but the payoff is very high. You'll spend less money and get a superior machine. If you don't feel like doing the research though, then get a prebuilt. You can waste a lot of money if you don't do it right.

You PC guys forget something. You are PC guys. Yea it seems cheap to you because that's how you live. The rest of us don't and the reality of it is that we don't have the money for everything. I used to be a PC guy but things have changed for me now.

My PC is old and glitched out atm and I can't currently afford a new one, not even one as "cheap" as $800 (honestly that's not cheap to a lot of people). We do have an X-box so I had to take that as my only option. We've had the X-box for about 4 years now and have had no issues with it, no needed upgrades, no worries about viruses or other computer issues. All it cost us was the price of admission and we got it used from one of my wife's friends so even that wasn't much. The console is easy to use and Skyrim has played really well on it for me. I have no complaints. Put in the disc and play, no fuss, no bother.

That said this is the first Beth game that I've played on the console and I really am going to miss the modding as it was extremely enjoyable in all the previous Bethesda game's I've played. I had tons of mods in Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Oblivion. I played Morrowind but at that time I had no clue about modding and never used any with that game. But modding adds a lot of life into these games and makes them fun again after the burn out sets in of playing the Vanilla version over and over.

If I had the cash I'd put together a new PC in a heartbeat so I could play Skyrim and some of the other games I love. But that isn't going to happen any time soon unfortunately.

Also, from years of PC gaming, it's not nearly as cheap as having a console. There is no contest there so you guys trying to say the PC is the same are fooling yourselves and nobody else except the ignorant. PC gaming will always be more expensive and troublesome over the long haul compared to console gaming. PC enthusiasts are willing to overlook a lot of things to enjoy the cutting edge of gaming. PC gaming is better, but it is certainly not on par cost wise. And PC's are a lot more trouble over the long haul. Yea I know some of you never have a single issue. The moon is made of cheese too.

More that they bought an cheap laptop. Major retailers often have good offers but no idea that they are selling.
Entry level laptops can not play serious games, same with the ultrabooks who is designed primary to be light and small.
Lower mid range: 800$ laptops works well if you focus that it have an decent gpu.

Any stationary pc unless it's over 5-7 years old or real cheap crap, run into some dell computers without 16x pci-e slot as the worst example, yes they save 50cent cutting it, add that the case and pcu was non standard.

@Cronox - you already got the general consensus. One thing people haven't mentioned is that just using mods takes time. After Skyrim was announced I went and replayed Morrowind & Oblivion on PC. I used > 300 mods (not even counting the texture and mesh mods) for each. Having been through it before, I knew what to expect, and spent more than a week on each game, prepping for a stable, usable mod setup. If you use a few mods, you don't have to worry about it. When you start getting to 50 mods or so (not counting textures/meshes/animations), you have to put work into it. When I had Oblivion setup finally, it was far more stable, performant and bug-free than vanilla ever was, but it took patience and research.

Also, while a decent PC will blow away a console for performance--even on ultra settings--certain types of mods will eat all of that extra power and still want more. So that's more work, still. Even simple things like textures turn into a headache. I've got > 3GB of textures already, and I'm at the limit of what my GTX570 can handle (in some cells). Now I wish I'd shopped around for a card that offered greater than normal VRAM. So I have to go back and reasses my texture setup whenever I update or add new textures, otherwise my performance might suffer. Yeah, I could just remove some, but that would be wrong.

So you'll get a ton of new content, thousands of bug fixes (eventually), potentially better performance, much better visuals, and have the option to personalize the game more than you'd imagine. The downsides are a huge step up in cost, and a lot more of your time. But once you get svcked in, you won't mind.

im usually all Xbox360 mode, but the mods for skyrim left me envious. so im now going to build me a pc this year, and by time i do that hope the really really REALLY good mods for skyrim have come out ( Mainly want the witcher 2 armor mods LOL )

Very easy to set up, insert disk, install start up, press yes an couple of times and you are up running.
Main problem is that things can go wrong.
I had a radeon HD 5700 card, played Skyrim well on high, some crashes but survivable, added some texture mods and it started crashing every 10 minutes, tried to replace it and the new card worked without problems.

If you use a console for it's intend purpose I promise you it is more expensive than a gaming PC is. Do you play games on your 360? Like I said earlier how much does it cost for you to have a thousand hours of fresh content for a console? Do you borrow all of your games from friends? You can't even download a 17.kb JPG of Guile on the conosoles unless your willing to pay 3 bucks for it. Also did you type all of that out on your xbox? I didn't think ya did. So you need a PC any way. The gaming part is just one part of a gaming PC. The total price of a gaming PC isn't thrown at games. With a console you have nothing to do except look forward to buying over priced content or do like I do and use it to play movies because it's the cheapest blue ray player avalible at the time. A dedicated, restrictive console is over priced compared to PC gaming no matter what you want to think. Just because the initial investment is more don't change that fact.

Then they weren't modded well. I play modded TES games since Morrowind, used craploads of em (a bit over 100 mods in Morrowind was an average) and I have never experienced any bigger issues than I had with vanilla game. That includes usage of third party programs such as Graphic Enchancers, FPS optimizers, Script Extenders and so on.

I lol'd

pretty sure that's why you upgrade your PC instead of buying a completely new one :S

May Sanguine and Debela smile upon you wise one.

While you sit waiting for bug fixes that may or may not ever come, modders will fix on PC. The Unofficial Oblivion patch for example http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes4Mod:Unofficial_Oblivion_Patch : "The Unofficial Oblivion Patch, Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch and Unofficial Official Mods Patch are major mods by Quarn and Kivan that fix over 1,800 bugs (and 70,000 object placement errors) left over even after the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Patch is applied. These fixes range in importance from trees that seem to float in the air up to conflicts that could cause the game to crash."

Mods can be a wonderful addition to the game, and are easily worth forsaking the comfort of the couch and the big TV in favor of playing on a PC instead. But adding mods to one game isn't worth buying a PC for if you don't already game on one.

Feel free to join the PC ranks,once you get a good gaming PC you will not look back it also opens up a new genre for you RTS games.I recommend to total war series if you want a total RTS experience.

I wouldn't play a game like this without the option to mod. It makes a big difference.

Meh im good, games got more than enough content to keep me goin for years to come.

Yeah it does have alot of content whether it is good or not is debatable.

Same here, I couldn't care less about mods, console commands or creation kits.