But if you go back after playing a heavily modded game for a while, you will feel like half of the game is missing. That's not even getting to vampires or werewolves. And then you join a guild, and it just feels kinda bland. Then Skyrim Unbound (or Alternate Start). Then you start missing everything Enai: perks, races, standing stones.

Survival Mode is okay-ish, but Frostfall with iNeed or RND is better. Armor, weapons, cloaks, overhauled movement speeds, first person view of your body, those things you miss first. You don't realize how many mod features you took for granted until you lose them. So in the end I thought that maybe just playing Vanilla is better than not playing at all.įirst thing I did is I went to CC and bought Survival Mode, because I was so used to having to eat, sleep and deal with cold that it was just weird not to have a reason to do any of it. That was a year ago and I kept delaying it, because it takes days of downloading and researching to install everything. When I've got a new PC, I was really looking forward to modding and playing Special Edition. Currently, I have an Excel sheet of 166 mods changing just about every aspect o the game. Then I started adding mods and played that for a long time, though admittedly it wasn't the most stable thing. I've Survival Mode, weather mods, lighting mods, NPC dialogue overhauls all manner of tweaks and enhancements to make the world feel alive and challenging as I dredge through knee-high snow to loot tombs and slay dragons. Mods breathe new life into the game for me, but also make it what I always wanted it to be from the beginning. It's hard to go back to being that anonymous vagrant and build your way back up when it's so easy to cheese your way there. I think one reason a lot of people find it hard to play vanilla Skyrim after playing with mods is being 'spoiled', for lack of a better word, by the end-game being an ultra-powerful dragon slayer with an arsenal of weapons, potions, spells, and shouts at their disposal. I've done every sidequest, every side storyline (aside from DB, which I always destroy), bought all the houses, filled them up, adopted kids, tried different play-styles.

In all my playthroughs over all these years, I've never, not ONCE, finished the Main Quest. But I've played the game to death at this point found all the secrets, explored all the avenues. There is nothing wrong with it, and it certainly is not unplayable. I sunk hundreds of hours into it, spent days on end absolutely glued to it learning lore, speaking to NPCs, exploring, looting. Those first few hours were absolutely magical as every book, every location, every NPC was a treasure trove of discovery. I played the game vanilla on PS3 from the first time I picked it up in 2012/2013 up until it came out for PS4.

Skyrim with mods vs without