Ah, cool. The world’s foremost hosts of unofficial Skyrim additions you’d rather not have to explain to an elderly relative, Nexus Mods, have committed to bringing SteamOS support to their mod manager Vortex at some point down the line. That’ll mean you can use it with the Steam Machine and Steam Deck, if you fancy a modded playthrough on the go or via a smaller package.
As spotted by Parliament Candidate Gamer, the modding site have slipped this confirmation into a post about their focuses for this year. Upon opting to stop developing the multiplatform Nexus Mods App earlier this month, the Nexus folks hadn’t ruled out potentially working the Linux support that was planned to include into what’s now their one and only mod manager – the Windows-only Vortex.
Now, they’ve announced that they’re committed to delivering Steam OS support to Vortex at some point in the future. “We’ll be targeting vanilla Steam hardware like the Steam Deck and Steam Machine,” product manager Iluviel wrote. “We won’t be officially supporting any other configurations, but as Vortex is an open source project community developers will be free to extend support for their preferred Linux distros as they please.”
I can only imagine how chuffed our dedicated treehouse Machine and Deck enthusiast James is about the idea of possibly having to have even more conversations with me on a weekly basis as a result of this. I can see his stoic expression now, as I gently poke him and declare: “That Thomas dragons mod for Skyrim runs great, you should analyse exactly how many frames per train carriage it’s averaging”. I can see his eyes rolling as I arrive at morning meetings wondering aloud whether I should shove a Steam Machine into a fairly titchy space just to get 40 minutes into a modded Fallout 4 playthrough for the millionth time before giving up.
Actually, I can see him aiming his liquid-cooled 4090 blunderbuss at me from across the virtual office as we speak. Hey man, what it it that you w-
Well, that was unpleasant, but I’ve dusted myself off so I can relay the other stuff Nexus Mods said about their future plans for Vortex here. “Our plans for the year include a steady, iterative modernisation of the Vortex user experience,” they wrote. “We’ll be investing in the developer experience, which will allow us to focus on quality-of-life improvements, specifically streamlining navigation, simplifying game management, and introducing more intuitive controls for load orders. You can expect the interface to become cleaner and more responsive as we integrate the design lessons learned from our recent projects.”
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to pick large metal balls out of my face.
