It was overwhelming, and it pushed me away for a few months. There were people with mind-bogglingly huge modlists and load orders, and I discovered tools I'd never heard of before, like SSEEdit and DynDOLOD. Before, I thought 200-400 mods were 'ultra,' but it wasn't until I dove into the enthusiast community that I found out how wrong I was. Now here I sit with a 2080 Ti, and I wanted to take a stab at real ultra-modding Skyrim. Though my framerate never exceded 60fps, I loved almost every minute. It wasn't until I upgraded to a 1080 Ti that I felt the urge to go back to Skyrim and install a bunch of GPU-crippling mods. I've long dabbled in modding Bethesda games, but I usually just installed some graphical mods, gameplay adjustments, and the required bugfixes and patches. Throw in Dawnguard and Dragonborn, and I was a content gamer for years.īefore, I thought 200-400 mods were 'ultra.' Oh, how wrong I was.

In the months and years to follow, I poured hundreds of hours into the Xbox 360 and PC versions as I did with Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion. Despite being the person in charge of controlling the music, and therefore necessary, I decided to skip sleeping to play Skyrim.

See, I had a wedding to go to that same day for my now sister-in-law and her husband.

Skyrim special edition music mods