5 biggest issues with vanilla Skyrim (and 5 mods to fix them)

Even after 11 years, the relevance of Skyrim in the modern gaming landscape remains evergreen.

The game was originally released into a world of overwhelming appreciation from critics and players alike. Its accessibility and grandiose elements made it the perfect first RPG for an entire new generation of gamers. As the novelty of its scale wore off with time, however, its lack of depth in several aspects became more prominent.

The game's modding community, however, has become the reason why it remains alive. While one may level legitimate critiques at the game's flaws, many of these downsides can be nearly eliminated with the help of modding.

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5 of the most glaring problems with Skyrim

1) Bland characters

The strongest aspect of Elder Scrolls games, compared to their RPG competitors, is the uniquely detailed, complex, and mystical worldbuilding. Few games can compare to the amount of books and other such diegetic bits of lore that these games have. Skyrim does not betray the legacy of its franchise with its 300-odd books.

Where it does fall short is the more immediate way most players interact with the story: its characters. This does not imply that the dialogue in Skyrim is dull. Its world is a spingboard of memorable quotes and flavored characters such as Nazeem, which also lends to its propensity for community memes.

The standout pieces of funny guard dialogue, however, cannot detract from the fact that a number of the central characters in the major questlines are one-dimensional.

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2) Player-centric progression

Skyrim's world does not have a deliberate static leveling scheme. As the player approaches quests and dungeons, the elements level according to the player's profociency. Arguably, Skyim and Oblivion are designed this way to grant player agency in tackling the world.

On the flip side, leveling centered around the player also strips away a logical consistency from the difficulty. There is an improvement over Oblivion in that bandits do not acquire end-game daedric gear, and there are level multipliers applied to higher tiers of enemies.

The issue with the vanilla game is its leniency about minimum boss levels, which mitigates a genuine sense of progression.

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3) Ice skating combat

An oft-raised criticism against Skyrim is about its lackluster melee combat. The Elder Scrolls franchise does not lay much emphasis on actual combat feedback due to its roots in old-school Ultima-like gameplay. The brunt of this is felt most in Morrowind, where connecting a melee only plays out its diceroll mathematics.

Skyrim and Oblivion have each implemented their own improvements. Skyrim, however, feels like the smallest step forward compared to Oblivion's attempts. The lack of proper feedback on hits remains. Moreover, the way it implements inertia leads to a desynchronization between attacking animations and movement animations.

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4) Potion-stacking

Rather than its intended gameplay designs, Skyrim was popularized because of its many mechanical hijinks. Arguably the biggest of these are represented by the Dovahkiin eating potatoes mid-fight to regain health points.

Players have to manage three combat resources in the game:

• Health
• Stamina
• Magicka

There are potions to directly restore either.

The chief difference in terms of balance from the previous Elder Scrolls games here is that these act as an instant flat restore. Seeing as its combat is simply a thinly veiled DPS exchange, this makes any fight winnable as long as one has the potions to spam.

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5) Lack of class specialization

All Elder Scrolls games, up until Oblivion, have had a class system inspired by the original tabletop DnD classes. Skyrim does away with it in favor of a more freeform approach to character builds.

While most of the skills - broadly categorized as thief, warrior, and mage - are still there as individual perk trees, the steady pacing and leveling leniency means that there are no class restrictions by endgame.

The game balance also endorses this jack-of-all-trades playstyle. While it is fun on its own under set conditions, it puts the onus on roleplaying and class restrictions solely on the player's imagination.

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5 mods that can address some of the biggest drawbacks of Skyrim

1) Interesting NPCs

A large-scale mod project called 'Skyrim: Extended Cut' sets out to make logical corrections to the main quest, as well as spice up its lackluster guild questlines. However, the completion of such an ambitious project will take a while.

The current one-and-done way to make the cast of characters less bland is to simply add new ones. The appropriately named 'Interesting NPCs' mod sets out to accomplish this exact goal. The mod adds over 100 fully voiced unique NPCs to fill up empty spaces in the worldspace and lorewise gaps.

The writing of these characters blends in perfectly with the vanilla game. While the quality of voice acting can be hit or miss, the impact of breathing new life into the game is immediate.

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2) Skyrim Revamped - Loot and Encounter Zones (SRLE)

SRLE is one of the many deleveling mods available for Skyrim. Essentially, there are two types of mods to address the leveling system. The first approach maintains the player-centric level progression of the world. SRLE belongs in the second category, in which mods implement specific level ranges to the corresponding dungeons.

Taking after its biggest community predecessor, Morrowloot, SRLE separates these ranges by dungeon type - whether they are bandit camps, falmer hives, vampire lairs, animal dens, and more. It also redistributes the loot system to make more sense as drops in that specific range.

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3) MCO/ADXP

MCO, short for Modern Combat Overhaul, is a rework and improvement over the design of the popular combat mod framework, SkySA. SkySA implements an attack commitment system to the game with a full-fledged animation framework.. However, other mods like Mortal Enemies implement commitment only in a mechanical fashion.

With MCO, gone are the woes of ice-skating combat, and each melee swing reflects the appropriate weight that should go behind it. Found on the Skyrim Guild website, MCO/ADXP also comes with in-built animations from the Elder Souls collection for a polished and sound combat experience.

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4) Apothecary - An Alchemy Overhaul

Apothecary, as part of SimonMagus616's mods suite to replace the mechanics of Skyrim, completely overhauls the balance, values, and types of potions and food in the game.

This mod clears the vanilla exploitability of potion stacking by making them restore their resources over time rather than instantanously. This is not the only vanilla jank eliminated by the mod, as it also tackles the economy of grinding alchemy to address its exploitability.

The optional module also adds some much-needed additional benefits to food items.

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5) Ordinator

Indubitably the most complete and feature-rich perk mod, Ordinator replaces all the perks of Skyrim, making it much more interesting and functionally significant. It also happens to be a deceptive behemoth in terms of content. The perks in the game, 251 in total, were aplenty by default, but Ordinator increases this to nearly 400.

Compared to the base perks that mostly just upped the numbers game, Ordinator's perks are much more interesting. Take, for example, Vancian Magic, a perk in the alteration tree. As its name alludes, the perk replaces the entire magicka system to allow the player a specific number of magic casts until they hit the hay.

The amount of perks is enough that the player can only choose to specialize in a handful of skills, emulating a soft class system. As a tradeoff, the build variety that Ordinator offers by itself is second to none.