I try to get on but i become saddened of all the things that cold be added to increase playtime drastically.

I played the vanilla game for years and have done everything I could think of. I want to roleplay but the base game is missing a lot of things that would make it more enjoyable for me, such as a longer length of day, actual uses for eating/drinking, animations for eating, more natural armor, more crafting recipes, more perks, etc

I forgot to mention I'm on 360

Well, the one and only question I have right now is are you on a computer or console?

console, my living conditions are not adequate enough to have a personal Gaming PC

Well, there are several people on the forums who play using the console I'm sure they can give you advice since a lot of them have been playing for years

A longer day would be nice (or longer night as far as two of my characters are concerned)but even on PC I hear it can break a lot of quests when the time scale is changed so I ignore those mods

What kind of RP characters are you thinking about? Maybe from there people can start throwing out suggestions once they know what you like to play.

I feel your pain - I've been on the console for my entire Skyrim experience. I've been considering a gaming PC but can't justify it for a 'game'. It's a pretty penny (even a humble one) though people swear you can do a budget machine. There's also the extra time you need to administer the machine... In the end, it's just tough to accept that the gaming experience is worth so much money. If I could come to grips with that, I'd probably do it.

I want to do all the things you list - totally!

I've done a great deal of characters already so I can't think of anything to do anymore. If i had access to mods I could be more creative.

Though a lot of the time, once i make the character I want, I dont know what to do with them.

I game on 360, do you have the legendary edition? Because the DLC is definetly worth it and they got the patches 1.1-1.9 which helps as well, really makes the game a lot better.

yup!

Really love the new armor and weapons from both DLCs, only trouble is that i love light armor and heavy armor equaly so I end up gimped

For me a computer actually ends up saving me money .... well I convince myself of that anyway If it wasn't for all the mods for Oblivion, FO3, Skyrim and a few other games I would have been spending money on other games once I became bored instead of enjoying the same games for years. I can understand not wanting to spend money just for a game (well, not really I'm a gaming addict ), but you might be surprised at how cheap it can be to get a computer for Skyrim. If you are interested in a cheap gaming computer I'd go to the community forum and ask in the tech thread, there are a lot of very knowledgeable computer gurus there. In fact if you could find a computer comparable to the one I'm using (mine is so old you cant even buy most of the parts, they don't even make my aftermarket graphics card anymore) it would be under $500 and it plays Skyrim with tons of mods just fine. Well, if I stay away from mods that have a ton of scripts constantly running and sometimes I do have to wait a second or two when loading into a new area. I can completely understand not wanting to buy a computer, just throwing that suggestion out there in case you didn't think of it and find it worth looking into.

EDIT: I should note though that you may be upset you bought a cheap computer when new games come out and you realize you can't play them on your PC. Just keep that in mind if you are thinking about it.

Yeah, even with mods I get the same way sometimes which is why I have 4 different characters right now. Not every quest is appealing to every character depending on their personality, so sometimes I get stuck trying to figure out what my character wants to do next. So I switch to a different character for awhile, I figure everyone needs a break even my characters.

@OP well I don't know what to tell you.. you can make the best with what you got, or migrate to the PC.. Consoles are never going to get User-made content (which it feels you are subtely hinting at you want..)

A decent gaming rig is not that expensive.. a pre-built machine that could run Skyrim on near max-settings would cost you not much more than a PS4 or XBoxONE would, build it yourself and find a decent part distributor and it may be cheaper..

Skyrim is not very resource intensive, pretty much any new PC will play it (with the exception of some small-form-factors i guess).. Now yes, there are some games out there that have some ridiculous system req's, but Skyrim is not one of them..


I don't know where this "but PC gaming is so much more expensive" mentality came from, because if you do it right, its actually cheaper in the long run due to the ridiculous discounts Steam or Origin give and being able to upgrade specific components rather than the entire rig.. you may have to pay a small amount more on the hardware to begin with (but like I said, if you know what you want/need it won't cost that much more than a current-gen console), but you will save money on cost of games, and instead of having to buy a new console to upgrade like in Console gaming, you can just upgrade the needed part in the PC which will save you money...



Now honestly, I play more on my Playstation and XBox these days than I do my PC (so don't call me a really devoted fan, lol), but I am just telling you that while there are some legit reasons to prefer a console (like exclusives), "price" is not really one of them if you go about PC gaming properly..

Well, yes and no to many of the points you raise.

Yes, you can get a machine without spending 'too much' money, but you pointed out the drawback yourself, the shelf-life is going to be shorter. Yes, you can save money by building it yourself but I've never done anything like that and starting to learn how with $600, $700, or $800 worth of parts doesn't seem like it'll save me money. I'll mess something up, it won't quite work right etc. I'll have to put in lots of time troubleshooting etc. And yes, it'll save me money as compared to buying a new console, but I'm really only interested in Skyrim. I don't like other games, just don't (though I play Halo with a buddy at his house).

The real challenge isn't building a cheap machine, the real challenge is figuring out how many mods you want to run and how much machine you'll need to run them. There's really no guideline for figuring this out. There are so many mods that nobody is going to say 'you need a machine of spec X to run the following list of mods...' It's kind of trial and errror. I'm pretty sure I'll want to run lots of texture mods, NPC mods, upgrades to towns, home mods etc. I'd be better off with a beefy machine build by a vendor. I'd spend more time playing, less time fixing and troubleshooting. Just gotta accept the price-tag versus the time it takes to master the learning curve. Who knows, I'm getting older, maybe I won't find another job for a long time and I'll end up doing it from scratch any way.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate the enthusiasm of the PC gamers!

If you're on 360 with no option to go that next step, you'll need imagination to keep your game going. I played Skyrim on consoles from 11/11/11 until January of this year. I always put my character first, you know... put a lot of imagination into the characters, and what they would do & say and stuff. The quests are secondary. If a quest just happened to fit what my character was all about, we'd take that quest.

But after awhile, imagination starts to run out. You burn out and get bored. Fortunately this never really happened to me on consoles, but it's possible that it could have. It took about 5 years before I finally became bored of vanilla Oblivion, but until that point, I made a lot of different, interesting characters. That's what kept me addicted to vanilla TES4 and 5 for so long.

You can save a lot of money if you build your own computer. It's not something I'd say is easy, but it is possible.

If you have a Micro Center near you, they sometimes have classes on how to build your own. I've never built a computer , but I recently put a graphics card in one. I had somebody help me, but now that I know how to do it, I could easily do this on my own.