New Skyrim PC Patch Makes Steam Mandatory, Disables Some Mods

Bethesda has released a new update for their megahit The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It doesn't fix any bugs or offer any improvements, but it does add the mandatory restricton to only be able to run with Steam.

"Well, whatever," I see you typing, "Steam is awesome and I use it constantly, anyway, so I don't care." But before you hit "Submit Comment," there's more.

Linking a game to Steam limits what you can do to tweak it. Steam has its own type of security, you see. Most significantly, this leads to certain popular Skyrim tweaks being rendered useless, most notably the Large Address Aware patch. The LAA patch allows the game to access more than the strangely low maximum 2GB of RAM. Thankfully, though, a workaround has already been implemented that makes the patch work post-update without altering the game executable.

Hopefully Bethesda will one day remove the 2GB RAM cap themselves, making the LAA patch redundant in the first place, and maybe they'll remember how much The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was improved by modders.

Staff article by Rhody Tobin (November 23, 2011) Rhody likes to press the keys on his keyboard. Sometimes the resulting letters form strings of words that kind of make sense when you think about them for a moment. Most times they're just random gibberish that should be ignored. Ball-peen wobble glurk.