Improving Your Skyrim Experience on PC

I know Skyrim came out almost a year ago and many thought they were done with dragon-hunting and stuff, but with DLCs coming out I guess it's time to FUS-RO-DAH the thin film of dust off the game's icon and become a Dragonborn once more.

TES V: Skyrim is a great game, yet I felt some amount of discomfort when started playing it. The problem is, it is optimized for console; and I'm a sworn PC player.

So let's break it all down to points. What's wrong with Skyrim PC experience, compared to my previous experience with Morrowind and Oblivion.

• the interface is optimized for game controller/keyboard, not mouse manipulation;
• the senseless horror of mouse acceleration;
• the FOV (field of view) is for viewing it from larger distance on TV screen;

Many of you will find other stuff to complain, but I think everyone will agree on these three points. So what should be done?

Now a word of precaution first, keep in mind that we are going to modify game setting files and install mods. This might prevent you from gaining achievements, corrupt your save files and make the game freeze. So when I say "make a backup of the file", take it a bit more seriously. Though I never had any of those problems, you never know, and starting over might be frustrating.

1. The only way of improving the interface is modding the game; yes, I know that feeling when modding the game feels like jailbreaking your phone, but sometimes it does more than making your game look like a Korean MMORPG, both in looks and quality. I had to mod my Fallout New Vegas to make it playable (Project Mojave mod pack with bug fixes), and that made me less aggressive towards mods.

You'll find a ton of mods and tweaks at Skyrim Nexus, and I suggest you use SkyUI:

A registration at Nexus and Skyrim Script Extender will be required, sadly. Also, the mod page recommends using Nexus Mod Manager to install it properly.

At this point, before installing the mod and other components, you'd better backup your savegames directory and maybe your game files.

2. Now that we have the interface optimized for mouse and keyboard, let's fix the mouse acceleration.

Go to your Skyrim user data directory (for Steam version - *Your Steam Directory* \steamapps\common\skyrim\Skyrim, for retail version in Windows 7 - C:\Users\*YourUserID*\Documents\My Games\Skyrim) and locate SkyrimPrefs.ini file. Make a backup of SkyrimPrefs.ini. I suggest just right-click-dragging it and selecting "Copy here", it will create a copy of the file named "SkyrimPrefs - Copy.ini", so you'll always have the file on hand in case you want to revert the changes.

Open SkyrimPrefs.ini and locate the [Controls] section. Find the line saying bMouseAcceleration=1 and change it to bMouseAcceleration=0.

You might also want to fix the mouse lag caused by vsync. For that, disable gamepad support inside Skyrim, locate the [Display] section in SkyrimPrefs.ini file and add iPresentInterval=0 to the bottom of the section.

This will not entirely negate the mouse acceleration problem, but will make it more tolerable.

A possible problem may occur when saving this and other configuration files, if you have User Account Control on in Windows 7/Vista. One solution is opening Notepad as administrator then opening the file from the Notepad window. A simpler solution is copying the file to your desktop, making the edits there and pasting it back.

3. Now, about the FOV. FOV stands for Field of View, and should be based on the presumed distance of the viewer from the monitor. If you want to see what it does for yourself, just open the game console and enter fov 99 or some other value.

The default FOV for skyrim is 60 or something - good for TV screen, awful for computer monitor. I suggest you use a value of 85, as at higher values the game starts looking fisheyed. You might experiment with the console as well to find the value that suits you best.

Now let's change the value in the settings file. The file we need this time is Skyrim.ini, which is located in the same directory as SkyrimPrefs.ini (for Steam version - *Your Steam Directory* \steamapps\common\skyrim\Skyrim, for retail version in Windows 7 - C:\Users\*YourUserID*\Documents\My Games\Skyrim). Make a backup of Skyrim.ini.

Now open the file and find the [General] section. Add fDefaultFOV=XX to the end of the section, where XX is the FOV value. Alternatively, you might add fDefaultWorldFOV=XX and fDefault1stPersonFOV=XX to the end of the section to manipulate first and third person FOV values separately.

Good dragonhunting! Coming next: game optimization and game graphics tweaks.