Travelling back to Skyrim

It's funny how you can ignore a game for a long time and then get completely back into it :)

I had bought the Dawnguard and Hearthfire DLC for Skyrim during the Steam sales, i used to play Skyrim A LOT, but at a certain pount got tired of it.
Not that long ago i somehow ended up on the Nexus and saw some great new mods out and that reminded me i had bought the DLC so i figured it was time to check that out.

I always fear starting my (modded) Bethesda games after release of updates/DLC because it always breaks the game/mods, and, no surprise, this time it also did.
I couldn't start building a house in Hearthfire and i couldn't enter the Dawnguard Fort without crashing the game..
Even without mods activated the game would still be bugged as hell, i would actually say even more bugged than with mods as i have quite a few mods that fix stuff that Bethesda left in.

So first i had to figure out what was causing all that, first thing of course is checking which mods i wanted to use and which mods could go, after that updating all mods to the latest releases.
That fixed my Heartfire problems, but the crashing at Dawnguard Fort still happened, in the end i found that there was a script in my scripts folder that altered the mannequins in the game (i think there used to be a "wandering" mannequin bug and this script fixed that), that script caused the crashing, after removing that script everything (seemed to) work.

But my happiness was short, apperantly my save game was allready pretty bugged, had a savegame with a huge filesize (226MB) and during play the game would constantly freeze, pretty much unplayable..
So a new game had to be started, with a new character.

Eventhough i hated abandoning my (first Skyrim) character, it does feel kinda nice to start over, despite allready knowing most of the quests, i am still seeing stuff i don't remember from my first playthrough.
I also enjoyed Hearthfire and Dawnguard, although Dawnguard was still buggy/glitchy like hell, i actually had to use the console at least twice to be able to advance in the questline because some scripted scene would not start (like Serana opening the portal to the soul cairn) and many more small glitches/bugs, overall i would say Hearthfire and Dawnguard where enjoyable, but i was not very impressed with them, but they felt very rushed, i have seen stuff in mods that is much more impressive and though out, and better working than what Bethesda showed in Hearthfire and Dawnguard (and mods are free!!).

I may have said it before but Bethesda really needs to take a look at the modding community over on the Nexus and get some of these people to work for them, i mean i see modders doing way more impressive things with (i assume) the same tools the devs use and usually a lot less bugs/glitches.

So far i have played over 500 hours of Skyrim and i think there will be many more :)
Although i doubt i would be playing this much without mods :)