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Some thoughts on the Anniversary Edition of Skyrim
I’m not yet done with my first official playthrough of the Anniversary Edition of Skyrim, but I’m close enough to the end of it at this point that I feel like getting some thoughts down about the AE in general is now a thing I can do. So here are those thoughts!
All of this so far is entirely based upon Shenner’s playthrough, as well, even though Faanshi’s playthrough now has access to AE content. I may have additional thoughts later about the AE specifically on the Switch. For now, though, I’m focusing on the experience of playing on the PC and Deck with Shenner’s game.
Deets behind the fold.
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My current modding setup on Steam Deck (Updated)
This week I was contacted on Twitter by a user with the handle Shadark. (Hi, Shadark!) This person was going down the same path I’d done, trying to get Skyrim Together Reborn running on the Steam Deck. We got to talking on Discord, and I agreed to provide some screenshots of what my current setup is.
But during that conversation, I realized it might actually be better to do so here on the blog. Shadark found me googling for help about modding on the Steam Deck. But if anybody else needs this information, I figured it would be nice to have a cohesive walkthrough I can point at!
Previous posts of mine were more scattershot, and contained a lot of experimentation. So here’s a more up to date post, pulling relevant bits of data out of previous posts and presenting them in a more coherent fashion. Hopefully this will be useful not only to Shadark but to any other Steam Deck players who might be interested in modding Skyrim on their devices.
Since Shadark was specifically interested in Skyrim Together Reborn, I’ll be talking about that some in this post, but my setup is not just for that mod. If STR is not a thing you want to try playing, feel free to disregard the parts of this post explicitly related to that, which is section 9.
This is in-depth geekery so I’m putting it all behind the fold. (Dreamwidth folks, if you’re reading this via crossposting, as near as I can tell the post came through okay over to Dreamwidth. It looks okay from my DW account. If it does not look okay for you, let me know.)
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Gaming surprise of the week No. 1: Anniversary Edition on the Switch
Nintendo surprised the hell out of everybody by finally officially releasing Skyrim’s Anniversary Edition to the Switch! I kind of knew this was already coming, given the leak that went around about this back in May, but now the AE on the Switch is finally here. 😀
Here’s what I know about it so far, for those of you who, like me, might want to consider playing Skyrim on your Switch.
One: this is not a free upgrade for previous Skyrim owners, you do have to pay an additional twenty bucks if you want the new content. (Whether that additional twenty bucks is worth it to you, your call! If you’ve already bought enough versions of Skyrim and don’t feel like buying more of it, totes fair. Me, I’m still new enough to Skyrim that ponying up for the AE on the Switch too is worth it to me.)
Two: I have no way of knowing for sure, but I’m fairly sure this release won’t necessarily deliver any bug fixes to the Switch. The Anniversary Edition is essentially a package deal for all of the Creation Club content previously available on PC and console. So any previously known existing bugs on the Switch are probably going to still be there.
(I’ll be confirming this, at least, when I get Faanshi back to the Throat of the World to learn Dragonrend, and I’ll see whether the cutscene is still broken for her.)
Three: This is going to have interesting ramifications in general for Faanshi’s playthrough, since she was up to level 62 and had just reached Solstheim. So she’s pretty far along in my usual playthrough cycle, and I’m not sure yet whether I want to go to the trouble of playing all of the new AE content with her.
At the very least, though, since she did just get to Solstheim, this now puts me in a very good position to run Ghosts of the Tribunal with her. 😀
And I also feel like that as the Guildmaster of the Thieves Guild, she’s pretty much obliged to go get Shadowfoot Sanctum, as well as the Bow of Shadows. Not quite so sure about the Gray Cowl of Nocturnal, just because Faanshi is a Khajiit, and that thing does not have ear holes!
I don’t want to bother to go and get every single house available in the AE, though it’ll be amusing to see how many of the couriers start showing up to hand me notes. I’m pretty sure I should get the ones for the quests for Hendraheim and Bloodchill Manor?
And since I enjoyed the hell out of Saints and Seducers as well as The Cause, it might be interesting to go ahead and run those with Faanshi as well. Doing Saints and Seducers as a higher level character should mean it’ll go a lot easier for Faanshi than it did for Shenner!
So, a lot to think about here! And I’ve got to now be amused at the thought that my Switch is all jealous that I’ve got the Deck now, and it’s going pay attention to meeeeeee!
Four: I can at least report that I’ve had a Faanshi session since installing the AE content on the device, and it seemed to work just fine, no problems at all. I’ve seen one of the new spellbooks already, showing up as cultist loot while running Miraak’s temple.
More on this in Faanshi’s next official playthrough post!