A tiny patch to Skyrim has disabled many of file tweaks that players have been making to improve Skyrim's visuals. RPS noticed growing annoyance on the Skyrim forums as players discovered that the popular Large Address Aware tweak that lets Skyrim recognise more than 2GB of ram on 64 bit systems has stopped working since the update.
The patch tweaks the Skyrim .exe file to stop players from being able to launch it outside of Steam. This ensures that all copies of Skyrim fall under Steam's anti-piracy protection, and suggests that there may be even more people playing Skyrim than the huge Steam stats figures indicate.
The broken tweaks are likely an unintended side effect of the update. We've contacted Bethesda to find out, but no comment just yet. Meanwhile, workarounds are already appearing as modders warm up for the upcoming release of the Skyrim Creation Kit, which will give everyone access to Skyrim mod tools.
Even without the creation kit, some decent mods have already started appearing. Discover the best ones in our round up of the best Skyrim mods so far.
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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.
