But already I knew I was out of my depth. Things kept happening, and I rarely understood why.Īnd sure, I could have fought through the confusion. And, thanks to an extensive series of combat and difficulty tweaks, every fight was a brutal battle for survival. Things kept happening, and I rarely understood why. Suddenly, I was freezing to death in Windhelm, penniless and without the resources to craft warmer armour. 'It'll be an adventure!' I declared as I decided to jump in completely blind. It's not just that the thought of installing hundreds of mods made me tired, I also didn't really fancy reading and remembering which mods were being installed. Within minutes of playing, though, I realised I'd made a mistake-one that, to be clear, was entirely of my own making. New quests! New systems! New locations! New armour! Werebears! It sounded like a definitive round-up of the modding community's most audacious creations, which instantly piqued my interest. And to that, Lexy's list adds even more stuff, all curated to support what Legacy of the Dragonborn does. The mod itself sounds like an impressive piece of work, billing itself as an expansion-sized addition that adds new items, new quests and, most importantly, a display hall for showing off artifacts and a new explorer's guild.

The first list I picked was based on Lexy's Legacy of the Dragonborn-a guide built around the Legacy of the Dragonborn mod. Nevertheless, it's a lot easier to configure a handful of mods than to install hundreds. Even if it doesn't, you've got to manually configure the mods in-game. There are still some steps you need to manually perform, especially if the guide you've picked recommends an ENB wrapper. When you wake up, you have hundreds of Skyrim mods ready to go. If you're going to do this, you should start from the beginning-see what the community has made since the last time you looked. But, you realise, you're a different person now. Maybe now's the time to finally play it, you think. You're between games, and, browsing through your Steam list, you remember all the hours you spent modding Skyrim all that time ago.

A couple of hours later you're distracted by something else-perhaps some other RPG you left half-finished before you started this project.

This is it! You're playing modded Skyrim!

You run LOOT in lieu of taking the time to learn how load order works, and hope that it proves an effective substitute for knowing what you're doing.

You download them, after a cursory check into whether there'll be any conflicts.

You ignore most of that research, sort Nexus Mods by most downloaded, and pick whatever isn't some creepy, inexplicably popular Lydia mod.There's a kind of separate game that exists above Skyrim that doesn't really involve interacting with Skyrim at all.

Skyrim you feel the world shift