Right, I've had a pretty interesting time with Skyrim (still playing it) and I thought I'd share with other addicts/casual players my little story!

It all started on a dark and gloomy night, many moons ago. I was browsing the web looking at... knitting tips and I came across a review on Skyrim. I had heard of this massive game before, but never paid much attention. What you say, magic?! Nah, not for me. I want guns. And stabbing weapons.

But then I saw a video of it, and thought, well, that looks pretty darn cool if I say so myself! So I went strolling/strutting (that Stayin Alive song is now stuck in my head) down the street with some cash/eftpost/interac card in my hand ready to get myself a shiny, gleemy copy. And I came home (well, to work at lunch time) and installed it on my laptop. Yes, I had Steam issues, yes I don't like Steam, but I'll leave that topic out of this. Got it running and man, this is pretty awesome!

So I played it for a while, and found myself thinking of butterflies and picking flowers all the time. Belethor is stuck in my head. And his assistant that works for Belethor. Obviously.

Several weeks later, I had completed major parts of the game, the main quest, but haven't finished the game yet. Then I saw the mods popping up.

And that's when the game changed. For the better.
And for the worse in some ways.

I saw houses. I thought I could download every single house mod and I'd be a happy man! Not sure what I'd do with that many houses, but hey, it's a house! A new one! Yay!

Then I started getting the crash to desktops (CTD for the required acronym these days). And then the painful process of finding which ones caused them. To make my life easier, I downloaded save games, some with 200+ hours. And I installed the mods on them. I found that for some reason, a save game with heaps of hours played or a large file size could cause CTD's whereas a game that didn't have much explored didn't do it as much. Not sure why.

So eventually I settled on about 4 house mods including a town upgrade. And the crashes hardly happened.

Then came texture mods. Water, scenery. And what came with that? CTD's. I spent ages figuring this one out, but then I thought, well, I'm running 32bit Windows 7 and I don't use all my RAM (6GB). Been meaning to upgrade for a while, may as well do it. So I upgraded the OS and it's now 64bit which also solved the texture CTD's.

I'm running Skyrim on a laptop, an i5, 6GB RAM, 64bit and a GT520M. It's good, but not great for gaming. I play at 720P. On a TV - which is explained later. And saying it's not great for gaming - Skyrim runs very well on it. Can't go over 720P, but that's good enough for me.

This is running the Skyrim HD textures (not official ones), water mods, lush trees and grass and a couple others. The game looks very different to vanilla, for the better.

Then came the gameplay mods. More birds, more sounds, more cooking recipes, more weapons, more crafting and so on. They didn't really cause many issues. Except the crafting ones, had a couple that Skyrim 1.5 played havoc with cause of the skill tree modifications. So out they went (yes, I realize there are fixes for them now).

So I was getting pretty happy. Then I saw the lighting mods.

And I wanted.

Now as I said, I play on a TV. The TV is an LCD using a HDMI cable (for some reason HDMI has a brighter picture for me compared to VGA). Now the colours on the TV look totally different to the laptop screen. And it took me AGES to figure the lighting out (obviously using a mod to change the lighting). Changing values here and there, getting colours right for my TV which would display colours differently to what I saw on screenshots.

So fixed that eventually. The last thing I wanted to fix - shadows.

For me, I have to run low shadows - my poor lil' laptop has issues processing anything larger than 1024. So I run 512. And it's blocky. Real blocky. So, my twinkle toes/fingers came to the keyboard and off to Google we went. Skyrim blocky shadows was the topic I say I say (yes, that's meant to be typed twice). And what I found was changing the Prefs.ini.

Specially: iBlurDeferredShadowMask

I run that at 7. And it makes a difference. I get better shadows without performance loss.

So why the post? To help mainly.
It's a bit techy in some areas maybe, but ask away if you have any questions and have similiar issues to what I had.

I intentionally haven't put mods names down, but ask if you want to know what mods I tried and ended up with.

At this point, I've probably spent more time testing and configuring the game more than playing the game. Crashing (not due to the game itself really, but to mods and conflicting mods) was a constant headache. BOSS doesn't always know best with load order.

And trying to squeeze the most performance I can from my laptop, but that involved a lot of trial and error.

I think this is a very awesome game, and this ain't brown nosing, but definitely a big thanks to Beth for making a game like this. One for making a game as big as this, and two, for making this game and previous games, open to modding.

And also - a very big thank you to the modders out there. You guys and girls make the game even more unique and extend the life time of a game. You guys are awesome!

I'm a person who likes to tinker and man, does this game let you tinker.


Now I'm starting a brand new game.

You are notthe first one nor will you be the last one with this experience
I myself wased a few hours trying to find out what mods were causing conflicts
I did found them and learned a valuable lesson , read the info , a good and serious modder will notify if his or her mod is compatible with any other mods , lesson 2 wait a while if a new mod comes out , read the feedback and wait for the improved version

I actually now have a reason to be glad i play on the console.

actually i believe that you haven't plaed skyrim untill you played it on a pc, no disrespect
But with a better graphic quality on a pc a expanded UI and console commands alone it is more than worth it add to that the many great mods that are out now and actually do work smoothly , i encourgfe everybody to try and use a pc for this game

Depends on how you look at it with consoles and all.

If you prefer to buy a game, play it and job done - yep - console is better.
If you prefer to buy a game and change it, PC is probably a better option.

Each to their own.

I myself wouldn't play this game on a console as there is just too much to offer via PC. My laptop is probably just a bit above or the same in power to a current gen console. I play it on a TV with the Xbox controller.

It is a hassle trying to get the game just right, keeping in mind the mods are still relatively new and the game is still being patched.

But the pay off is worth it.

- The graphics are substantially better
- I can modify the contrast, brightness, color levels and so on within the game itself
- Dungeons are darker
- Rain is heavier
- I can craft more weapons
- I have new weapons
- I have new armour
- Characters looks better and less blocky
- Shadows are cleaner
- I have more houses
- City textures are reworked
- Trees and grass are fuller and better textured
- Roads are better textured
- Snow actually looks like snow
- Water looks unreal now
- I actually fear Dragons now
- And the list goes on.

Did I spend ages to get the game to this point - yep!
Was it fun for me? Yep!

But mind you, I like doing stuff like this, I even made up a program to compare vanilla to modded version and it's very different.

I did the exact same for Fallout 3, but with that, it crashed less.
Saying that - I didn't have as many mods editing the world space.
And I was using mods on the GOTY edition which was the last release from Beth (I think).

Just seeing the ENB stuff for Skyrim is just unreal. The ability to have kinda like bokeh and depth of field - awesome. And mods get made that provide that experience with nil to little performance loss.

Tradeoff I guess - a better gaming experience but at the cost of temporary instability (for myself anyways).

My advice?

Give using mods a go, just go in a little cautious and don't think you can download every mod out there and things will work.
Mods can and will conflict with each other.

I am glad I only download weapon / armor / texture mod, i feel like i am playing Barbie...

Oh i know the PC's better i just at least know i don't have to deal with all the bugs and viruses that might come from Mods.