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Unified Vidya Games thread

Started by Cain, November 21, 2013, 05:10:58 PM

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Junkenstein

1/4 odds aren't great, but it does add quite a bit.

Mammoth fish sized slaughterfish? Awesome. That's a must see.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Cain

Not my picture, but...



That one is more horse-sized, but I've been assured the waters around Windhelm are definitely not safe for casual swimming.

Freeky

O___O

I want to play Skyrim again more than ever.  CURSE YOU SUBSTANDARD LAPTOP! :argh!:

Freeky

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1J9miGFMH4#t=149

According to this video, other major overhaul mods are Bad Plans, so maybe the Civil War thing is not a great idea?  Don't know anything, just wondering.

Cain

The Civil War Overhaul has explicitly been patched for...in fact, without the patch it is too easy, as otherwise enemies are not assigned the correct levels and perks and so get utterly crushed.  The only problem is occasionally you get endlessly spawning enemies, or enemies who are massively beyond your level, or your orders never get updated or similar.  One time, I had an invincible party of dragons gatecrash the Siege of Whiterun and the only way to get them to go away was to leave...which counted as desertion, meaning the Stormcloaks took the town (sad day).

The main problem is processing power...CWO is very script heavy in places, and it remains to be seen that my new computer can handle a bunch of HD mods, Requiem scripts, Frostfall scripts, Hunterborn scripts, Dragon Combat Overhaul scripts and CWO scripts on top of that.  I'm fairly sure at least some of my personal experiences with it have been due to script lag, simply because my poor laptop cannot keep up.

But maybe the new computer can.  Once the screen arrives and I get everything installed, I'll be doing some stress testing.

Cain

OK, so I have to ask this...am I the only person who was completely underwhelmed by Falskaar?

Yeah yeah yeah, new landmass, dungeons, questline, over 100 new NPCs, thousands of hours of work, blah blah blah.  I wont deny, the guy clearly put a lot of effort into it.

But the storyline is so lacking, even by Skyrim's dire standards.  The geography is clearly designed to add difficulty, rather than realism.  And it's nowhere near lore-friendly.  It's like your Skyrim character was dropped down into an alternate universe somewhere, which I find jarring as fuck.

I much prefer Wyrmstooth.  A few unfinished elements aside (those fucking ingots), you have a fun questline (recruiting the mercs is enjoyable), a fairly sensible if not spectacular plot, and it's much more lore-friendly.

Reginald Ret

Quote from: Cain on September 10, 2014, 01:15:08 PM
OK, so I have to ask this...am I the only person who was completely underwhelmed by Falskaar?

Yeah yeah yeah, new landmass, dungeons, questline, over 100 new NPCs, thousands of hours of work, blah blah blah.  I wont deny, the guy clearly put a lot of effort into it.

But the storyline is so lacking, even by Skyrim's dire standards.  The geography is clearly designed to add difficulty, rather than realism.  And it's nowhere near lore-friendly.  It's like your Skyrim character was dropped down into an alternate universe somewhere, which I find jarring as fuck.

I much prefer Wyrmstooth.  A few unfinished elements aside (those fucking ingots), you have a fun questline (recruiting the mercs is enjoyable), a fairly sensible if not spectacular plot, and it's much more lore-friendly.
I have not played it, but from what you are saying I won't even bother.
Skyrim is already immersion-deficient, it can't stand to lose more.
Lord Byron: "Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves."

Nigel saying the wisest words ever uttered: "It's just a suffix."

"The worst forum ever" "The most mediocre forum on the internet" "The dumbest forum on the internet" "The most retarded forum on the internet" "The lamest forum on the internet" "The coolest forum on the internet"

Cain

If it were a new setting, a new game using the Skyrim engine and assets, it might be better.  A bit.

But it's not.

Junkenstein

Quote from: Cain on September 10, 2014, 01:15:08 PM
OK, so I have to ask this...am I the only person who was completely underwhelmed by Falskaar?

Yeah yeah yeah, new landmass, dungeons, questline, over 100 new NPCs, thousands of hours of work, blah blah blah.  I wont deny, the guy clearly put a lot of effort into it.

But the storyline is so lacking, even by Skyrim's dire standards.  The geography is clearly designed to add difficulty, rather than realism.  And it's nowhere near lore-friendly.  It's like your Skyrim character was dropped down into an alternate universe somewhere, which I find jarring as fuck.

I much prefer Wyrmstooth.  A few unfinished elements aside (those fucking ingots), you have a fun questline (recruiting the mercs is enjoyable), a fairly sensible if not spectacular plot, and it's much more lore-friendly.

Falskaar was diverting, but your critisisms are certaintly valid. Mine are on the same lines really, ropey plot, pain the the arse landscape, etc etc. It ended up being like that "moonpath to somewhere" mod which again, had a lot of potential but it needed more people involved who were willing to say "this is fucking dumb" instead of "Yeah, and THIS too".

Wrymstooth was better put together in many ways, including the (almost annoyingly sensible) plot. Unfortunately when I tried it it was a quite buggy and various map areas just crashed everything. I'm guessing that's been fixed(or was a conflict with another mod) but it certaintly did take the shine of it.

I did try the "Vvardenfell recreated" kind of mods, of which I could only get 1 actually running and even then I wasn't actually able to get to the new landmass so while I'd quite like to suggest one of those, I can't really.


Credit where it's due though, mods of this kind of size and standard really are labours of love. Yeah there's bugs and many things are far from perfect but judge it on the size of the development team. Frequently, it's one guy, or a very small team. It would be great to see companies recruit top modders to their talent pools but that's far too sensible an idea to be taken seriously in the games industry.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Cain

I haven't tried the Moonpath to Elseweyr.  It looks interesting, but even by the authors own admission it is not really finished or fully fleshed out.  That, and giant fucking spiders, made me lose interest, despite normally being up for thrashing the Thalmor regardless of location, affiliation or setting.

Wyrmstooth's plot was very sensible.  It wasn't outstanding, but it all cohered nicely, made sense and stayed close to the lore.  It was competent, in other words.

I believe Skywind is coming out of alpha testing soon...I actually believe they have the entire landscape set up, they just need to actually do the quests.  There is also one aiming to build the entire of Tamriel...I believe northern Cyrodiil has been constructed to the extent one can kill bandits and do vendoring there. 

Freeky


Cain

Freeky, your modlist.

OK, you need your mod client.  You have two choices, but whatever you choose, you need the Nexus Mod Manager.  I prefer to also use the Skyrim Mod Organiser, which is a more complex piece of software, but has additional benefits than NMM does not.  A guide to how to use it can be found here.

Firstly, you need to install SKSE.  This is what allows most mods to work in the first place.

Secondly, you need SkyUI.  Note SkyUI and Mod Organiser do not always play nice....when launching the game via MO, you need to go to the Archives tab and deselect the option "Have MO manage archives".

After that, you need the Unofficial Skyrim and DLC patches, available here (scroll down for the DLC links).

After that, you want A Quality World Map With Roads.

That's what I would consider a basic mod install.  Everything should work properly, you now have a nice interface, and the map is now much more awesome and useful.

After those, I would also have

Clothing and Clutter Fixes
Weapon and Armour Fixes.  I recommend the Complete Plus version, which has changes to Orcish and Daedric weapons, Dragon Masks and arrow and bolt speed, in addition to the bugfixes.
Complete Crafting Overhaul Remade.  Please note a patch is required to make this work with WAF, but is included under the download list.

This will make a number of changes to the crafting system, as well as restoring Orcish weapons to a more proper category (better than Elven or Dwemer, worse than Ebony).  If you like playing mages, this will allow you to wear circlets with hoods, which also works with the Nightingale and Shrouded Armours.

Run for Your Lives and When Vampires Attack should prevent NPCs dying due to dragon or vampire raids.

Dragon Combat Overhaul.  Unlike the Civil War Overhaul, this baby is stable as hell.  And while it does utilise scripts, my laptop handles them without issue.  It also instantly makes dragon fights 50 times more epic.  DCO makes dragons act more unpredictably in combat, making them a lot harder to kill.  No changes to damage or health are made, so this mod can be freely combined with Deadly Dragons, which does make dragons tougher, but does not change their behaviour.  For that one, keep Assault Mode switched off or mark cities as exempt, as dragons spawned via that assault mode will not make citizens run inside even with Run For Your Lives installed.

Also DCO has the single best mod description on the entire of Nexus.  I do recommend tweaking the settings to drastically reduce the chance of reinforcements however.  Having five dragons show up to every single fight can sometimes cause script lag...and more importantly, it's annoying as fuck.  Except that that one time, when they did it during my very first fight at the Whiterun Tower and slaughtered all the guard, making that battle at least 500 times more epic than was ever intended.  Dunmer supremacy was asserted that day, let me assure you.

Cutting Room Floor restores content that never made the final cut into Skyrim.  Exception: Boethiah's Bidding, which would have had the Dragonborn assassinate Jarl Elisif for the Daedric Prince has not been included due to the complexity of restoring Civil War related plotlines, though I believe Apollodown is interested in restoring it at some point for his own Civil War Overhaul mod.

Extended Encounters.  Just for fun.  I often run into Companions in the Reach or Rift, and Jenassa does a surprising amount of mercenary work.

Immersive Armors and Immersive Weaponry.  Personally, I uncheck some of the armours (all the mage armours except Ebony, because they look goofy, and Glacial Crystal).

VioLense.  Because more epic kill moves, more often, are never a bad thing.

And a follower overhaul mod never hurts.  UFO is probably the best known, but AFT can also be useful.

And if you want even more potential followers and quests, I strongly suggest Interesting NPCs.

If you want a serious combat challenge, I also suggest:

Duel.  Use the hardcore version.
Stealth Skills Rebalanced.  Alongside Duel, this improves enemy detection to an impressive level.  Also, you aint picking that master level lock, or that pocket for that matter, without some serious perk investment now.
Revenge of the Enemies (if you're feeling very sure of yourself.  Includes numerous "boss" fights which makes previously levelled enemies much, much harder.).
High Level Enemies.  Makes sure certain enemies, notably bandits and Forsworn, do not have an absurdly low level cap.
WTF - Random Encounter Zones. Changes the minimum levels in certain zones, meaning say, for example, nothing in Embershard Mine will be below level 40.  Which sucks, if you go there at level 2 expecting an easy fight.

Freeky

You're awesome, Cain. As soon as i can actually download Skyrim and these mods onto the computer, i will.

Cain

Yeah, no worries.  I am something of an old hand at modding though...hell, I was modding Infinity Engine games, back in the day.  Admittedly, Skyrim is several scales of complexity more difficult than those were (and, frustratingly, I've still not figured out the Creation Kit to my satisfaction) but, on the plus side, there are a lot of good people out there who will help get you a stable setup.

In your modlist, I linked to STEP.  They're well worth following, their install guides, though a lot of what they offer is designed for higher level computers.  Its an active community and they offer step by step guides on how to do massive game overhauls to make Skyrim a more interesting, dangerous and immersive experience.

Cain

No problem.  And I feel your pain...I'm currently downloading all 11.3 gigs of the game onto the new computer...and for some reason (namely updating Windows) its going at about 110 kb/s.  So, 4 days according to Steam.

Well, I was gonna use this weekend to catch up on my writing a bit anyway...