Should I Get Skyrim For The PC?

[RJ 17]

I find myself in a bit of a predicament, my fellow Escapists. You see, I already own Skyrim and all it's DLC for my 360...however, after having watched some videos of what mods are capable of doing to the game on the PC, I have a very strong urge to pick it up on the PC.

Really my question boils down to "Would mods make it worth buying a game that I already own?"

Though this topic was made mostly because I want some input on whether or not I'm being silly or if the mods would make it worth it, for greater discussion value (if needed) feel free to take the above question and apply it to yourself: "have you ever bought a game for your PC that you already owned on a console purely because you've seen what mods could do to the game?"

 

[Daystar Clarion]

I rebought it on PC.

The thing with Bethesda titles, is their modding scene is so huge, you can turn your game into anything you want it to be.

I mean, one of the biggest mods I have is Skyrim Redone (or SkyRe).

This mod overhauls the perk system, changes the stats on many items, the way combat works, making it more deadly, making you rely on tactics and skill rather than simply overpowering opponents.

The great thing about the best mods, is that they usually work well with others. So, for instance, there's a mod called Frostfall, which adds a survival aspect to Skyrim. Your character can't just walk around in a blizzard without starting to suffer from seriously negative drawbacks, and eventually, death. You can build tents, campfires, wear cloaks (which another couple of mods make even better, with a wider selection), and brew a special potion that lets you swim in frigid waters.

With SkyRe, there's even a whole perk tree dedicated to the Frostfall mod, as well as other benefits.

That's before I get into mods that alter the graphics, changing the lighting engine, removing the godawful colour filter, high-res textures, sound pack mods that change the way weapons, spells, and the environment sound.

If you have a capable PC, there is absolutely zero reasons to ever get a Bethesda RPG on console, not with the sheer amount of mods made available.

 

[RJ 17]

That's before I get into mods that alter the graphics, changing the lighting engine, removing the godawful colour filter, high-res textures, sound pack mods that change the way weapons, spells, and the environment sound.

And those were the videos that I was talking about in my OP, I saw all the graphical, texture, and sound mods that people have put out and I thought "Damn...I could be playing this right now..." which is what really gave me the urge to go ahead and buy the game again despite already owning it for another platform.

That, and I think I'd be willing to pay money to have the dragons using Macho Man Randy Savage lines instead of various assortments of roars. :3

 

[Daystar Clarion]

That's before I get into mods that alter the graphics, changing the lighting engine, removing the godawful colour filter, high-res textures, sound pack mods that change the way weapons, spells, and the environment sound.

And those were the videos that I was talking about in my OP, I saw all the graphical, texture, and sound mods that people have put out and I thought "Damn...I could be playing this right now..." which is what really gave me the urge to go ahead and buy the game again despite already owning it for another platform.

That, and I think I'd be willing to pay money to have the dragons using Macho Man Randy Savage lines instead of various assortments of roars. :3

Oh god yes.

PC Skyrim with high-res textures, realistic lighting, and more vivid colour contrast is still one of the best looking things on PC to date.

So, so, pretty.

 

[Lethos]

Now is a pretty good time to get Skyrim on the PC because the Unofficial Patches have squashed most of the bugs that the Official Patches didn't. So even if you don't have a beefy computer that can handle tons of mods, you'll at least be able to play a less bug-ridden Skyrim.

 

[CloudAtlas]

I find myself in a bit of a predicament, my fellow Escapists. You see, I already own Skyrim and all it's DLC for my 360...however, after having watched some videos of what mods are capable of doing to the game on the PC, I have a very strong urge to pick it up on the PC.

Really my question boils down to "Would mods make it worth buying a game that I already own?"

Though this topic was made mostly because I want some input on whether or not I'm being silly or if the mods would make it worth it, for greater discussion value (if needed) feel free to take the above question and apply it to yourself: "have you ever bought a game for your PC that you already owned on a console purely because you've seen what mods could do to the game?"

That depends on what you liked about Skyrim, and what you expect from a modded Skyrim, I guess.

First, if you don't have a pretty beefy PC, your Skyrim will not look like in those youtube videos. It will still look much better than on your Xbox, but not that good.

Content-wise, there are a lot of mods who improve the gameplay mechanics in various ways, and many mods that at add lots of different aspects to the game: hunting, proper sicknesses, thirst and hunger, hypothermia (you can actually easily freeze to death, yes), somewhat smarter enemies, more weapons and armors, bigger cities, more NPCs, interesting NPCs, more spells, more skills, more extensive civil war, whole quest lines, actually useful companions and horses, and so on. They can make your game experience much richer, they add a lot - but what they do not do is make Skyrim a fundamentally different game.

(With no mod that I am aware of anyway...) Combat still won't be great. Balancing will still be awful. Enemies will still be dumb. Dialogues will still be undramatic, to say the least. The writing will still be... wildly fluctuating in quality. Hearing the same voice actors spouting the same lines of random dialogue all the time will still grate on you. The world will still lack depth, your choices will still lack meaningful consequences. And so on. All that was bad is still bad, just often a to some degree less so (obviously if you didn't find this or that aspect bad you can disregard it).

Edit: So basically if you always liked Skyrim and didn't mind its flaws, you can get a significantly better Skyrim now, so go for it. If you hope that mods fix all the flaws that always annoyed you before, then don't.

 

[RJ 17]

First, if you don't have a pretty beefy PC, your Skyrim will not look like in those youtube videos. It will still look much better than on your Xbox, but not that good.

------------------

Edit: So basically if you always liked Skyrim and didn't mind its flaws, you can get a significantly better Skyrim now, so go for it. If you hope that mods fix all the flaws that always annoyed you before, then don't.

Other than some game-breaking glitches (such as a quest refusing to start for whatever reason, etc) I never really had a problem with all the flaws in Skyrim. I know exactly what you're talking about with regards to them (a voice actor having a conversation with himself, silly-behaving enemies and NPCs, etc), just they never really bothered me that much.

On the other hand, you do bring up the other part of the equation that I have to consider: I'm not certain how my computer (which was store-bought and I doubt it's anything special) would handle it. It is a pretty recent computer, only had it for about two years now, but still I know I didn't pay for a top-of-the-line graphics card or anything.

I'm sure there's probably an easy way that I could find out my computer's specs, buuuuuuuut as someone not part of the PC master race who uses his computer for mostly word-processing and the interwebz, I wouldn't know how to do that. ^^;

 

[Barbas]

You mean you don't have Skyrim for the PC? You bought it...on. A. ConsooooOOOOOOOLLEEEEE...?

Spoiler

Buy it now and join the sensation that's been sweeping the nation. It's like a whole new game.

 

[RJ 17]

I'm sure there's probably an easy way that I could find out my computer's specs, buuuuuuuut as someone not part of the PC master race who uses his computer for mostly word-processing and the interwebz, I wouldn't know how to do that. ^^;

Just click on the start button, hover over "computer," right click and choose properties. The dialog box that comes up will tell you what you need to know. Then post it here and we could tell you stuff.

Thanks, here's what I've got:

Processor: Intel Core i5-2320 CPU @ 3.00 GHz
6.00 GB of RAM
64-bit Operating System
Display Adapter: AMD RADEON HD 6450.
739 GB free on my hard drive.

 

[moosemaimer]

You might not be able to crank everything up to maximum, but that's plenty enough for Skyrim. My old machine was an i5-750, 4GB and an HD5850 and that ran it just fine.

 

[sanquin]

Oh god yes. Bethesda games should always be played on the PC. The community fixes some bugs and glitches. The textures can be improved on a lot, there are hundreds of custom armors and weapons or retextures for current ones, there are great packs for sound improvement, packs for gameplay, for new skills/spells, you name it. Vanilla Skyrim is fun for the first time, maybe second too. But what really makes the game replayable time and time again is all the mods that you can get for it. You can change almost everything about the game to make it fit your tastes.

I currently have 27 mods installed. And I don't think I could play the game and have fun again if I uninstalled them all.

A bit off-topic and a bit on-topic, but:
If, or rather when you get skyrim for PC here's some mods I can recommend:

Spoiler

Skyrim Project Optimization.
A mod that attempts to improve skyrim's performance. It got me an extra 10 fps or so.

Unofficial Skyrim Patch.
Fixes quite a few bugs, glitches and text typo's. Plus some other things. Haven't looked into it in detail.

SkyUI.
Turns the UI into something more suited for keyboard and mouse.

Purewaters.
Greatly improves how water looks.

Any body model/texture improvement mod.
There are so many of these, and several of them good. It depends more on preference. But you can improve the body textures and models of yourself and npc's with these.

Skyrim Flora Overhaul.
Improves on the landscape adding ground covers, plants and trees. It also has a summer and regular edition.

Inconsequential npc's.
Adds random npc's to the world. Like guards for carriages, and travellers and such.

And most of all, Falskaar.
This is not really a mod, but more a full community made expansion. It adds a full new land to discover with pretty much professionally voiced npc's and quests and such. It's quality is on par with the official skyrim DLC's, and it's free.

EDIT:
P.S: At least the hearthfire DLC isn't worth it if you do it for the house building. Unless you really find it fun to scavenge for materials to put together a set of pre-made modules for a house. There are a ton of awesome, gloomy, cheerful and beautiful community-made homes to pick from, a lot of them being better than what you can get from the DLC.

And also, the PC version has access to the console and it's commands. You can find what commands are in the wiki or other sites, and they can help a lot if the game decides to bug out and make a quest incompletable.

 

[Angelous Wang]

I own

Skyrim
New Vagas
KoToR
KoToR 2
Deus Ex HR
The Last Remnant
Dark Souls

all on PC even though I already had all of them for 360 before I bought them.

All for the mods.

Answer your question OP?

My Skyrim mods alone make a 150h game a 500h game.

 

[AuronFtw]

Shameless plug for my favorite skyrim mod - the flintlock rifle [http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/26653]. Using a heavily modded crossbow frame, it adds "realistic" gunshot noises, a wide variety of craftable bullets, and even 3 different guns (blunderbuss, grenade launcher, rifle, although rifle definitely feels the most polished).

It's not for everyone, it can certainly hurt immersion if you're trying to go for an untarnished Tamriel feel, but oh god is it fun. Best when combined with Skyrim Redone to get the extra perks from the modified skill trees (crossbow talents).

OT: Yes, Skyrim is one of the best sandboxy open-world-explorey games currently available. The modding adds anything from extra player housing to bonus dungeons to an NPC merchant that sells goods for you out of a chest near your house for a slice of the profit, allowing you more time adventuring and less time hunting down shopkeepers with gold left in their pockets. If you enjoyed it even a little on console, you will love it to death on PC.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Mods are good, but they can also be evil considering you may be installing new mods all the time, ruining saves because mods fuck them up, etc. Its best if you treat your first few days (weeks, months) of mod hunting as a testing phase and not get too attached to any character/playthrough.
Once you've found a comfort zone, aside from updating mods, DON'T install any more unless you're going to back up saves and also (through Nexus Mod Manager) save your mod-load order so you know which goes with which. Otherwise be prepared to flush some work down the drain if you don't.
That being said its fun and extremely cool that you can change a game so much just by downloading files and tossing them almost willy-nilly into the game.

 

[AuronFtw]

Unpopular opinion time..

If there's ever a rationalization for pirating a game, it's got to be this one. You already bought the game and supported the company, even with DLC, and now you just want a decent experience for that..
It's probably in your best interest to tell me what a bastard I am for suggesting that, but remember you can secretly still go to piratebay and download it afterwards =)

Ehhh... kinda shitty, given Skyrim's amazing quality and Bethesda's typical high quality games, any money thrown at them is certainly not money wasted. The worst thing that can be said about their games is that they're buggy as HELL, but typically that's taken care of via mods.

If someone wasn't thinking and bought a bethesda game on console, that's not really bethesda's fault. If they then want to turn around and play it on PC, bethesda doesn't "owe" them a free copy of the game, regardless of what flimsy justifications they might want to use to convince themselves otherwise. Skyrim is worth the cost, every time.

 

[Shymer]

I have Skyrim on both the XBox360 and the PC (paid for both) and now play it almost exclusively on the PC with many of the Mods people have mentioned above - bug fixes, better quest markers/descriptions etc. I installed the HD textures, the more extensive sound packages, new weather and climate. I'm not a fan of new weapons and armour - but I do like the addition of pouches and bags that add carrying capacity - but that's because I love collecting vast arrays of low value tat that are lying around.

Never regretted it for one minute of the 150 hours+ my sons and I have spent exploring.

Main quest line? What main quest line?

 

[Flames66]

I honestly have no idea why anyone would buy an Elder Scrolls game for anything other than the PC.