Oh, the hours I sunk into this game, a decade or so ago.

Someone on a friend’s Discord brought up “Nolvus,” one of the mod pack manager bundle thingies (technical terms? what’s the fun in using those?) for Skyrim and how it made them want to revisit the game again and I thought… why not? Surely, after the better part of a dozen years, the Skyrim experience has been perfected and polished.

Well.

One forty-dollar purchase of the Anniversary Edition on Steam later, there I was, preparing to… figure out what mods to install. I should explain, there is too much, let me sum up:

• For all that there are improvements, the game’s still memorably janky, in many of the same ways that it was a decade or so ago. (Literally my first post-tutorial-event plot interaction involved a character sitting down at his dinner table and having a plate of food slowly clip through his body and onto the floor. Oh, Bethesda!)
• Nolvus’ install process wanted to force some changes to gameplay that I wasn’t comfortable with (combat “improvements” mostly). One would assume there’s the ability to change this but the documents were a bit opaque on this matter, so I chose not to risk spending hours on something only to be annoyed at the results.
• Hours of reading and perusing and contemplation later, I settled on using the Vortex tool from Nexus Mods and loading up a whole heap of bugfixes, graphical changes, and various other tweaks & amusements. (And their prerequisites. So many prerequisites. This isn’t for the entirely faint of heart.)
• Along the way I found a mod (“Timing Is Everything“) which allows for pushing off the vampire attacks that kick off the Dawnguard expansion’s content until your player has reached a high level of your choosing. (I picked 90-something.)
• Luckily, Vortex made the process of getting everything into place quite easy, so hooray for user-friendly tools.

And so began anew my adventures as a newly-minted Dragonborn.

Anew? Well, the original version of the game is a separate product from the Special/Anniversary version, so my old save games aren’t available via Steam. Which is fine. My previous main character was messed up by the Dawnguard expansion anyway, and my last play session was the better part of a decade ago. Fresh start ahoy!

I lost a bit of time to the disconnect between how much of the game I remembered and how little of the game I remembered, but after a while I got fairly well settled in. I ran into a few weird issues, though. Such as the fact that Eagle Eye didn’t work for me at first.

The “block” option is on the 2nd mouse button by default. This doesn’t work very well on my GameBall because I have “left” and “right” mapped to the two thumb buttons. Once I mapped “block” to a keyboard key, I got my “sniper scope” back. And there was much rejoicing! (Except by the poor foes sprouting arrows in their foreheads. Can’t please everybody, I guess.)

So we’ll see how this goes. I’m on a bit of a break from Palia (still in beta, with all the jank that entails) and am trying to go easy on Satisfactory (I’m down to my Final Destination site build before it’s going to be time to do a new fresh start again) and a nostalgia trip just might be the thing to fill the gap.

Fus Ro Dah indeed.