And... I'm playing Skyrim again.

I'm starting to dream in Dragon.

We all have those onerous backlogs of games that we swear to ourselves we'll get around to one day. One mythical day where we just pull ourselves up and play more hours than are physically within the day in order to complete literally every single game we've ever had a passing interest in, and it's a lie. We know it's a lie. Most of us are lucky if we've even played all the games that we own, let alone finished them; but it's a falsity that harms no one. Yet even that becomes hard for me to tell myself when I'm going around wasting valuable off-time playing my fifty thousandth Skyrim playthrough on Anniversary edition! (Someone stop me, I can't do it myself!) So I think it's fair that if I'm going to talk about gaming as it currently exists for me right now, it only makes sense that I bring everyone into my ongoing love affair with Skyrim and overmodding to just-unhealthy degrees.

First of all, I've just played through Skyrim's main story on Skyrim Special Edition, which Steam is telling me is the first time I've done that... ever. Which goes to show the amount of times I've dived into a playthrough and just gotten lost on the innumerable side activities, and large questmods that characterise playing PC Skyrim. Currently I'm playing with exactly 312 active plugins in my Skyrim game, and I've touched upon maybe half of those mods in a lot of playing time. Most of which I started the game with and a few I picked up along the way are mostly patches or appearance mods to replace one's that broke or which I forgot; all of which is the sign of a modder who is a little too experienced. Knowing pretty much exactly what I wanted to have in my game, what I needed to have installed right away, what I probably wanted to leave until the future is all recommended knowledge, of course, because mid-playthrough modding is typically ill-advised.

So what sort of mods am I rocking? Well I'm actually rather conservative when it comes to modifications to the core gameplay experience simply because I really like the way that Skyrim plays. It's not particularly dripping with pitch perfect weight or complexity, but it has enough going on to sustain a playthrough and at least feels impactful on swings, which is all I ask for. That being said, I do have a couple of gameplay effecting mods in there from CACO (an alchemy and cooking overhaul which I'd never tried before and figured would be worth checking out) and Wintersun. (a really cool mod that brings religion into the game as a meaningful mechanic.) And there are the tons of companion mods I download, because I love making friends, which almost necessitates mods like OBIS (Organised Bandits In Skyrim) otherwise I would just roll through every combat encounter like a train. (Because I need to have Inigo, Sofia, Lucien, Aurlyn, Vilja, Lydia, my Armoured Mudcrab I call 'Harry', a modded version of Meeko that's a white Husky and some rando NPC from 3DNPC that I stumbled on and liked their backstory, all in my party at the same time.)

My visual overhaul mods aren't too numerous, although I've very happy with the few that I've chosen. Jk's Skyrim does an incredible job remixing all of the settlements across the region to create something feeling very much in the spirit of Skyrim but with more personality and sensible scale to them. One of my favourite additions being the way the mod adds a whole graveyard of ruined houses around the back of Winterhold, using the environment to tell the canonical story of the city literally fell apart, as in- off a cliff, under dubious circumstances. Plus there's Obsidian Weather, which adds some small seasonal rotation to the game, but also just improves the sky box so much that there are times I'm just left stunned looking up at the celestial wonder of the sky. Which is very important, because with the many mods of Anniversary Edition I spend a lot of time walking the roads.

'Skyrim: Survival Mode' is one of the most enduring inbuilt mods I've kept in my playthrough rotation and only now, that I've completed the main game, am I starting to get annoyed by it. (New Vegas still maintains the best integrated survival mode in a Bethesda published Role Playing game.) Why disable fast-travel, no seriously- why? Fallout 4's Survival Difficulty is a hardcore challenge, a Souls-esque weighing of risk and reward where the brutality of travelling to objectives is a large part of the fun. But Skyrim, even with Survival Mode, is just not that. Having to eat and sleep feels like natural addendums to this world and the rate they build on you against the amount of ready food there is within the world doesn't feel the least bit imposing to me. This isn't one of those games where the struggle to survive desperately outweighs your ability to have fun and do what you want, the meters just add value to the otherwise ancillary food items which litter the game world. So forcing walking everywhere feels totally out of left field and leaves we wondering if the makers of this little plugin even understand what the purpose of the mod that they made is. (I had to install a extra-carriages in Skyrim mod just to resist the temptation not to turn the mod off.)

But what brings me back to the act of modding Skyrim again and again are those quest mods. Good lord do I never get tired of taking my Dragonborn on some of the craziest and grandest new adventures cooked up by the endlessly talented creatives all over the community. Terminally unbalanced, all of them, but still incredibly exciting. And just as with Morrowind where I spent weeks walking the streets of the mainland, or that communities interpretation of Skyrim, and fell absolutely in love with places like Necrom and the Hammerfell-Skryim border; the promise of great 'New Lands' mods also excite me. I haven't had the opportunity to explore a great many of them quite yet, but I'm enthused everytime I bump into a character who's a hook for Moonpath, or a recruiter for Vigilant, or get jumped scared by the lead-in to 'Gray Cowl'. (It feels uproariously wrong spelling it that way.) 

Of course, juggling a load order like that there are some precautions to take, and if you don't mind I'm going to turn this into a little bit of an advice corner for a second. Firstly, research all of the mods you're about to install extensively, obviously, so that you know what each of them does and if any of them have any special install requirements. Use a current mod manager, manual installation is absolutely out of the question. Check the 'LOOT' sorter tool, it tells you about any well known patches you might be currently missing in order to make some mods work better together. (And LOOT comes included with Vortex Mod Manager, by the way) And most importantly of all, turn off all autosaving and never quick save. Even if you don't have particularly script-intensive mods, autosaving and Quicksaving are going to get things tangled up and sooner or later you're going to get a corrupted save. Oh, and read the heck out of requirements. (That really screwed me for one mod in particular and had me scratching my head for hours.)

I remember a very long time ago when I was just dipping my toes into the RPG world and I used to follow someone online who seemed much more into all of this than me and was hyping up every insignificant news drop leading upto Skyrim. A lot of the marketing material was really cool on it's own merits, but this guy could blow it up into a dance number and sing the news straight the way into Valhalla with his endless praise-fuelled rants. When talking about decapitations, as shown in the combat trailer, specially, I remember him stating something along the lines of 'this will be a game you'll play for ten years.' And at the time that really stuck with me, as I pondered on it and thought: "I mean maybe, but isn't that kinda optimistic?" We're past the ten year mark, and look at me. Because of Bethesda, because of re-releases, but most of all because of an unbelievable community, here I am falling for Skyrim in 2022. Some things never do change.