Almost embarrassed that this is what pulled me out of lurkerdom, but when duty calls…
First, if you want to play Skyrim without actually playing Skyrim, try Enderal. It’s a free mod that changes it into an entirely new game with improved mechanics and good worldbuilding. I enjoyed it maybe more than Skyrim itself. There’s a few areas that you can tell were left underdeveloped, but it’s overall polished and has few bugs (for me at least).
For actual Skyrim, I last played a few years ago. Bethesda has continued to update the game by incorporating Creations into the official release, so no idea if these still work. Here’s my top few:
Ordinator is a perk overhaul that makes things much more interesting than “expert level spells use less mana.”
SkyrimSouls makes it so that opening a menu doesn’t pause the game (you can configure which menus). Prevents the classic cheese wheel spam (or at least forces you to bind it to a hotkey and make combat more reactive)
Apocalypse and Summermyst add a bunch of new interesting spells and enchantments, respectively.
SkyUI is the UI that should have shipped with the PC version, rather than just porting over a console-friendly UI
Genuinely Intelligent Soul Trap is a small but massively nice QoL improvement.
Inigo is a fully voiced companion that is fun to travel with.
There’s a burgeoning scene of AI NPC chat in Skyrim: speech to text or free-entry type your dialogue, it goes to an LLM with some prompt engineering to answer as the NPCs, then a text to speech model have them respond back. Obviously a lot of jank involved and there can still be latency issues, but it looks very cool. Mantella was the first big one, CHIM seems to be the most developed currently, and SkyrimNet is a promising up-and-comer. I haven’t actually used any, so do report back if you try them out.
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Almost embarrassed that this is what pulled me out of lurkerdom, but when duty calls…
First, if you want to play Skyrim without actually playing Skyrim, try Enderal. It’s a free mod that changes it into an entirely new game with improved mechanics and good worldbuilding. I enjoyed it maybe more than Skyrim itself. There’s a few areas that you can tell were left underdeveloped, but it’s overall polished and has few bugs (for me at least).
For actual Skyrim, I last played a few years ago. Bethesda has continued to update the game by incorporating Creations into the official release, so no idea if these still work. Here’s my top few:
There’s a burgeoning scene of AI NPC chat in Skyrim: speech to text or free-entry type your dialogue, it goes to an LLM with some prompt engineering to answer as the NPCs, then a text to speech model have them respond back. Obviously a lot of jank involved and there can still be latency issues, but it looks very cool. Mantella was the first big one, CHIM seems to be the most developed currently, and SkyrimNet is a promising up-and-comer. I haven’t actually used any, so do report back if you try them out.
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