I love me some Skyrim but, in 2023, it’s really starting to show its age. For me, it’s the clunky walk animations, and quirky pathing (think robot walk into walls) that really sticks out, but there are other issues running the gamut from graphics to gameplay. Luckily for us, the game is imminently moddable so, surely, for anything that looks creaky to modern eyes, there has to be a mod for that.
So let me see some of your favorite mods to make Skyrim look and play like something out of the 2020s.
Skipping over the boring stuff, like the evergrowing list of bug fixes (Seriously there’s like a new one every week. Though, given 2020s games also have a ton of bugs, it’s just part of the immersion :p ), enb/reshade, and whatever else is basically mandatory before you can even start nodding Skyrim.
I’ve been giving a few of the bigger story mods a try. Even if they’re old by Skyrim modding standards, I never got around to playing undeath, clockwork, or faskaar back in the day. With all the improvements and fixes over the years, they are relatively stable, and quite fun.
A relatively minor thing that really improved the life of the game for me was just swapping out the first person animations with CFPAO. I’m one of those people who just prefer first person, and even with Skyrim’s simplistic combat, that little change made it feel a lot different.
Other than that, what really helped me back into it was finding a wabbajack mod list with things I mostly liked. Not having to spend weeks on modding and generating lods before playing is kinda new to me. Though, I’m still one of those bastards that will try update things even if it may be slightly unsafe to do so, as I’m no stranger to rooting around in the resaver and manually fixing scripts.
Something that has been on my mind for quite some time, and that I would consider learning to mod just to make it happen would be discretizing the potion and enchantment system. By that I mean that instead of having the ability of making potions that restore 50 health, 51, 52, etc., depending on how high your alchemy, you would only have discrete values, eg. 25, 50, 75, 100, 125…, or whatever you choose, and you jump from one to the next instead of going through all the intermediate integer values.
That would avoid a lot of inventory clutter that you get from making potions and leveling alchemy in the process. I remember I’ve seen a mod that does this once, but it didn’t seem very active and updated.
