This is ofcourse if you have the pc version.. but you're welcome to join in. :)

So would anyone that have played Skyrim on pc, play it without mods?

I personally am a achievement whore(360), but as soon as i saw all the different mods, i couldn't help but to get the game on steam.

Now i think i have 30+ mods installed. Personally, i grab those that add to the game without breaking it, i don't want it to end up being easy

and now i think I'm up on 14hours so far..

If it gets me like fallout, i might end up with 300+ hours of gameplay..

So what's your opinion on Skyrim and mods? or just mods in general?

I have no mods installed, although I'm thinking about putting some in. I've replayed Fallout 3 and New Vegas over and over, yet I reached the 30 hour mark in Skyrim and just got so utterly bored. I haven't touched the game since.

I got it for PC because it looks like an entirely different game graphically with everything maxed (which is pretty much true for any game these days, in an era where we could sure use new console hardware). The only mods I'm using are the high-res textures, the official Portal 2 tie-in, and one that allows you to craft silver weapons (which seems like a weird oversight on Bethesda's part).

Installing too many mods is the mistake I used to make with Morrowind, which invariably led to something breaking and me staring at a nightmare world of big yellow question marks.

I had some ENB mods installed, but then I uninstalled those too. I dunno why I feel wierd about mods. It might be the console gamer in me.

That's just crazy, you guys are crazy.

Playing it on PS3, so no mods. Same with Fallout 3 and New Vegas. I'm still having a great time with them. Mods don't feel essential in any way to me.

@Vampire_Chibi said:

So what's your opinion on Skyrim and mods? or just mods in general?

I haven't played Skyrim on PC, but in general, mods have multiplied the hours I spend on games that have them. I can barely stand playing Minecraft without texture packs and the tekkit mod pack. Just Cause 2 and Oblivion are the same way, it just makes the games more fun, and it's one of the big reasons that I'm pushing more towards PC gaming.

After playing it with mods, hell no, Skyrim is literally shit without the mods. The UI overhauls and enhancements, the graphics and textures and spell effects, the fictional creature companions, the 100+ WILD CREATURE MOD... 
 
Mods for life.

I use a few mods but the thing I liked most was after getting my crafting up to make dragon armor, I thought it looked like crud. So I pulled out the textures and repainted them in photoshop so they looked cool. Reminded me of the old days of making customer skins for my quake char. :)

I play all Bethesda games on my 360 and while I probably am missing out on a lot of fun, I think the fact I havent used any mods helps me enjoy the bare bones game.

The one time I tried my hand at getting mods to work with Morrowind it totally screwed up and I havent had the desire to try and get them working since.

@AhmadMetallic said:

After playing it with mods, hell no, Skyrim is literally shit without the mods. The UI overhauls and enhancements, the graphics and textures and spell effects, the fictional creature companions, the 100+ WILD CREATURE MOD... Mods for life.

Oh MANNNN, how could I forget the UI mod? Yeah, I guess I lied then. The UI mod makes Skyrim inventory management a heck of a lot more usable.

Skyrim mods are so overrated. The majority of them are garbage. I don't care about mudcrabs having top hats, stupid teddy bear backpacks, or turning every female into an anime sex bot. Also, all of the ENB mods are super heavy handed and lack any subtlety. Aside form the inventory fix or the flying mod, theres nothing out there that actually make the game better, just dumber.

Obligatory clean ladies reference.

Skyrim was the first game I ever looked into mods for and it's made the game so much better for me. My shopkeepers have a reasonable amount of gold, so I don't have to run around to 3 different towns to sell all the junk I pick up. Potions weigh nothing so now I can actually hang all of them, not just the health and stamina boosts for when I need to use them, and maybe use some of the more fun or helpful ones when I feel like it. Same thing with scrolls. (although they still weigh a little bit, but just .1 lbs) The UI is a bit better, so I don't need to tinker in the menu's so much, because I can swap stuff out quick. The map is a bit more useful because I can see clearly the roads and such. Snow is prettier, and so is the night sky.

The only one I have that I feel is a bit of a cheat is the magic basement that connects all my houses. But since I can't just put all the stuff in my house that I want I don't care. I want to be able to go to one place to craft potions, smith gear, enchant items, and whatever else I want without having to run back and forth and deal with loading screens and such.

Basically I'm trying to cut down the tedious stuff, so I can head out into the wilds and kill more dragons.

All in all, I love the mods. The only thing I'd want is more cool unique armor sets for me to give to all my companions. My dudes need to stand out.

I want to add I did play it for about 70 hours without mods, but a lot of those 70 hours were wasted with me dealing with many of the aforementioned problems.

After I've worn myself out with my main character I might install some of the more colorful or gamechanging mods and play one of my secondary characters for a while just to mess around.

@AhmadMetallic: As a man who knows hyperbole, I have a thing or two to learn from you sir.

I bought it on the PC specifically to be able to play with mods. I have a ton installed and I love it. I'm always switching new ones in and tossing out older ones. The point of the game is to have a good time and playing with all sorts of mods makes it fun for me. I don't worry about Steam achievements whatsoever. I wouldn't trade my mods for an S-rank in anything.

 I don't care about mudcrabs having top hats

@DeeGee: have you tried to look for mods on http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/ ??

there's a big variety of mods, right now i have a mod which makes me a vampire, so I'm weaker in daylight,

stronger at night and if i don't feed on humans, i will get even weaker and if i don't feed at all people will see me as a vampire and attack me..

There are also Lycan mods, if you're more into that.

I would recommend getting the skyrim-nexus mod manager, it makes it alto easier to install and disable mods, if you don't like them..

just ask if you want any help. ^-^

@AndrewB: the graphic is definitely true, we could use new hardware, i kindly pushed the xbox aside for a while and focused on pc, if i may say so, i play more with friends on the xbox than on pc, well not everyone got a good pc and the xbox is so easy to use.

That's where the skyrim-nexus mod manager comes into play, if it doesn't work, simply disable it and you're good to go.

I really can't imagine you would be playing the game without mod after you tried it.

I find most Elder Scrolls mods to be pretty immersion-breaking for me.  They usually feel like they just don't belong.

I played the game without mods (Xbox 360) for nearly 200 hours. It's a terrific game without them, though I would definitely mod the crap out of the game if I had the PC version to make it prettier and make the UI a bit better.

Well, I put over 100 hours into it when it first came out without mods. Loved the hell out of it.

I've recently got back in thanks to mods and have been enjoying it all over again. I tend to stick with mods that don't break immersion or lore, so none of those weird body altering mods (like clean skin or ridiculous super model looking characters) or turning into a dragon or summoning ridiculously powerful meteor spells or explosive chickens or you get the idea.

But I do like hair style mods (some are a bit out of place, but the original hair just looked like a fucking mop), quest mods, player houses (Riverside Lodge is my fave), armor mods (Omega99's is fantastic), improved crafting mods, new weapons (that aren't ridiculous OP or anachronistic) and camping mods. Then there are of course the mods that are more tweaks than anything; ones that let followers stay at custom player houses, or improve jumping/running with a bow animations, or let your character have more interesting idle animations (like warming their hands by a fire or reading a book) or one that lets you tell the Blades to fuck off when they give you an ultimatum.

So I think the game is terrifiic without mods, but they certainly add an amount of depth and customization that the original game (or any game for that matter) inherently lacks without em. I mean, obviously something with additional user created content is going to be a more robust experience than something without. I certainly couldn't go back to a modless Skyrim after having played it with them, but I'd still certainly recommend the game to a newcomer with or without mods.

Love the mods, won't play it on the console version again.

I don't have any mods installed, I still haven't completed the game 100 percent. I turn it on every now and then to go rage up a dungeon or cave or 2 while traveling on shadowmere. fucking up the occasional giant. I'm a level 55, I just don't see how there is enough game left for me to hit the level 80 cap much less it's not even necessary.

Do the mods add any additional quests that will help me accumulate

Ever since Oblivion I've been all on top of mods for Bethesda/Obsidian games. Fallout 3 and NV had me especially go crazy with mods because of all the really great real gun packages that even went so far to rebalance weapons loot and NPC equipment relative to the real guns added.

I've ended up hitting a performance wall with my Skyrim mods recently though, with me inevitably getting into CTD problems worse than my previous experiences with modding the crap out of my Bethesda games. I'll probably just start a clean new character in vanilla and slowly implement the mods I want next time I get into Skyrim.

@Deathmachine117 said:

I play all Bethesda games on my 360 and while I probably am missing out on a lot of fun, I think the fact I havent used any mods helps me enjoy the bare bones game.

The one time I tried my hand at getting mods to work with Morrowind it totally screwed up and I havent had the desire to try and get them working since.

Mods literally install themselves from the nexus sites now, so that whole agony of installing mods is mostly gone. You literally go to the mod's page, hit "Download with manager" and it downloads it and puts it in the manager which lets you manage your mods very easily, enabling and disabling them as you see fit. Especially useful for when you install a couple of mods that clash together.

@Spoonman671 said:

I find most Elder Scrolls mods to be pretty immersion-breaking for me. They usually feel like they just don't belong.

That's why I focus on 'enhanced vanilla' mods myself, really it's just things like textures that just look like a higher quality version of the vanilla textures, or something like that mod that changes a lot of things like ropes from flat planes to full polygonal models. Beyond that, the only mods I have that effect gameplay are pretty fitting. One is a spell that basically imprisons your target between pillars of rock that come up from the ground, and I have a few lore friendly balanced weapons added in. Other than that it's all texture stuff, some of which I made myself. It's not too hard to find mods that make the game look better and maybe play a bit better without really changing the experience in the game or having it stick out like a sore thumb, although there's plenty of that going around too, with all of the goddamn sexy mods. Blehk.

When I played it there weren't many mods out at the time, and I enjoyed the game.

Now I'm replaying it with mods and it doesn't seem as good to me but that's probably because I've already done everything once.

Haven't even tried the mods for Skyrim, but from my experience with others, mods just don't offer the level of polish the standard game does.

I bought Skyrim for my Xbox but now I'm tempted to buy it on steam as well after seeing some of the mods. Project P.E.W. and another one that turns the shouts into farts in particular

@AhmadMetallic said:

@thornie said:

I don't care about mudcrabs having top hats

O.o How do you sleep at night?!

I do care about mudcrabs NOT having top hats! Amirite?

Also, why would I ever want Whiterun to not look like this?

I probably used 100+ mods in Morrowind, was able to find stuff to do in the game for a few years because of the low system requirements.

Hated Oblivion though, tried it with and without mods and just didn't feel it. Both Fallout installments (having played the original 2) I thoroughly enjoyed on Xbox and PS3, but never really got around to using mods, despite eventually buying both for PC.

For Skyrim, I played for about 2 weeks when it came out, then got bored and went to other games. Trying to get myself to finish Skyward Sword, then either find something else via Gamefly, or hopefully convince myself to play Skyrim. Needless to say, I can't see playing it without mods as an option. Just hope there are more around than "Demon Tits Armor Pack v3.01" and "Shiny Door Knobs" bullshit.

I'm over 70 hours in and I haven't used a single mod yet. The game is great as it is. I might install some mods later on, but for now I refuse to do it.

This is the first Bethesda game that in my opinion doesn't need mods to fix something inherently broken in the gameplay. It's a real marvel of design. I've added a few mods to Skyrim, but nothing that alters the core gameplay - merely stuff that expands it, and not radically at that. I've definitely had to remove a few mods because they tried to fix something was definitely not broken. If someone put a gun to my head and said "you will spend your days playing unmodded Skyrim" I would struggle to find anything wrong with that.

If you've played Skyrim long enough to fully appreciate the vanilla experience and to form opinions on what you like, dislike, and would change if you could it's time to add some mods. If you don't, for whatever reason, you're doing yourself a supreme disservice.

I've spent some time testing mods in preparation of starting a new game when Dawnguard comes out. I've got about 40 mods now that I'd consider must-have and they're all lore friendly, high quality pieces of work.

@Spoonman671: yeah, but that really depends on what you're looking for, if you don't search after something, that you want to improve the game with, you ain't gonna find it..

One thing i can say i got for my character is a pair of earrings. i mean not much special about that, just like regular rings i can enchant them aswell and also i've got a mod that lets me have 2-4 rings on. i found it odd that i had 10 fingers, but only one could handle the ring..

Also, if i may say so, i don't really care much of the story in skyrim. in someway i do, since progressing in the story, grants me new powerful powers, but other than that, i prefer just to wonder in skyrim and see what hits me..

Ofcourse there are hundreds of mods that are just weird and would surely break the game for me, but it's also a choice of that matter for each individual user to decide what he/she would like in their skyrim and if it's worth it..

i guess many get those mods, just to fool around and have some mad fun, but i couldn't.. i would like a challenge, one that i think is fair.

Besides all i just said, i would recommend mods, to any pc-skyrim-gamer, just because it add so much to the world and we have the power to decide how we want our skyrim to change, for better or worse, that's our choice..

P.S. i read each and every comment and i can see, some are against and some are for, ofcourse there's something different playing the game without mods and there's something different playing with, but as i say above, it's a user choice, so have fun in the world of Skyrim. \(^u^

The game is average at best without mods... Mods just add so much to the experience

I modded some configuration files to allow the game to look A LOT better, and also installed some community mods that enhanced visuals. I so far haven't installed any mods that change gameplay, and will probably only get mods that enhance gameplay without breaking it. I'll likely look for something that makes the game more difficult when my character is more powerful, because I've heard when you are high level everything is just too easy.

Then again I haven't looked at what is going on in the mod scene for about 4 months now so I don't really know what I could be missing out on. Perhaps it is time to take a closer look.

I completed the game without using any mods. I rarely modify any game and if I do it would be long after I've completed it and explored it.
 
I'm thinking of trying a mod, but don't really know what I want... So I guess I'll just continue playing it vanilla.

i played it without mods the first time through on launch, just mainly because i want to get the intended experience before messing with mods. Now im replaying im using tons of mods and its even better

@thornie said:

Skyrim mods are so overrated. The majority of them are garbage. I don't care about mudcrabs having top hats, stupid teddy bear backpacks, or turning every female into an anime sex bot. Also, all of the ENB mods are super heavy handed and lack any subtlety. Aside form the inventory fix or the flying mod, theres nothing out there that actually make the game better, just dumber.

I beg to differ.

Here's a screenshot of me trying out a mod I downloaded, as you can see, me and another mage are locked in a spell duel. Pretty much what the mod does is adds a % chance (which you can modify) of you getting into a spell lock mini game when you and another mage cast a spell at each other at roughly the same time. The aim is to rapidly tap the mouse buttons to overcome your opponents spell and knock their ass to the floor, it's a fantastic mod even though it's still in it's beta stage, because it really adds to the games spell combat and makes it more fun. Now add this and all the awesome armour mods, weapon mods, texture mods, etc and you can really, really add to the games immersion. I only download lore-friendly mods as not to break the games immersion, while running around in a spiderman costume killing English top hat wearing Mudcrabs would be funny, it would just ruin the game for me.

Are there a lot of mods that make the game dumb? Yes, definitely, I do not disagree with that. That said, there are hundreds of mods that improve the game tenfold.

And to answer the OP's question, no, absolutely not. When I played the games on the console version, I never really thought mods would change all that much about the game. Oh how wrong I was, I actually uninstalled all my mods just a few days ago for reasons I won't get into, but before reinstalling them I decided to start up the game and run around for a bit without any mods. The game just felt so empty and boring compared to when the mods are installed, so no, after playing the game with mods I can never go back to playing it without mods.

EDIT: And if anyone likes the look of that spell mod and wishes to try it out here's a link http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/18763 it's still in it's beta stage at the moment so bugs should be expected, but from what I've seen of it so far it is pretty stable.