Improving Skyrim / Recommended Mods thread (Mostly about Requiem)

[Yosharian]

Starting to feel a pull towards inserting myself into the Simperial VS Stormchad conflict again.

Haven't touched Skyrim since 2014 or so, and never tried the Special Edition.

Do most people who play Requiem still use the original game, or are the SE-ports reliable?

Requiem will be officially ported to SE soon, so you might want to wait for that.

In the meantime, there's always the Wabbajack mod list for Enderal called 'My Way', I haven't played it yet but it's on my to do list.

 

[DraQ]

The main attraction of Requiem is that it strives to make stuff make sense and feel more real, mostly successfully.

• You can no longer just stuff your face with food between blows to heal in combat.
  
• Enemies have logical strengths and weaknesses and might need specific preparation and planning. For example draugr that are dried dead meat wrapped around dead bones just don't really care about arrows, sabercat WILL knock you down and eat your face unmolested if it pounces, troll will outregen your damage output, then your stamina, then kill you, giant spider will paralyze you and skewer you with giant, armor-piercing chelicerae, bandit archer in a high place will simply shoot your dumb, lightly armoured ass dead given opportunity.
• You don't regen, not even by resting, and many attacks are near or actual OHKs - managing health is a much bigger deal, and you almost never have luxury of just tanking blows.
• Stamina matters in everything you do, managing stamina in combat is vital. Without stamina your blows are pathetic, you can't meaningfully block, you move slowly, get casting penalties and you might even have weapon fall out of your hands.
• You get soft incentives to sleeping and eating.
• Lack of fast travel makes distances in world a much bigger deal. You can't just quickly hop between town and dungeon to restock and pawn off loot.
• Carry weight limitations force you to think what is useful, necessary or valuable when looting, conversely, because you loot less you have less shit to manage. This also makes horses and houses valuable assets.
• Traps fucking kill and might be actually hidden. Let's be honest, traps that are just health tax are already pointless, completely meaningless in a game where you regen.
  
• Lack of level scaling forces you to pay attention to where you're going.
  
• Perk based development makes your build matter. You're no longer jack of all trades by default, merely master of none.
  
• At the same time alternative options are added that just make sense (for example smashing chests and doors open if you're strong enough, or bullrushing people to knock them down if you have mass advantage)
  
• Combo of the above encourages creativity allowing you to punch way above your weight and reap rewards (for example bullrushing a dangerous but lightweight opponent - like a caster or archer - might make the difference between life and death, triggering a trap with an arrow might be the only way to kill powerful enemy given inventory limitations, resource management and lack of level scaling, etc).
• Combat is serious business. Even relatively lower level enemies that fall like wheat before your scythe can end you quite easily if you're inattentive. Death is quick to both you and your enemies. Attacks have much more bigger impact and combat doesn't look like two guys in invisible boxes pretending to hit each other.
  
• High level spells are a big deal and suitably spectacular.

 

[Duralux for Durabux]

The main attraction of Requiem is that it strives to make stuff make sense and feel more real, mostly successfully.

• You can no longer just stuff your face with food between blows to heal in combat.
  
• Enemies have logical strengths and weaknesses and might need specific preparation and planning. For example draugr that are dried dead meat wrapped around dead bones just don't really care about arrows, sabercat WILL knock you down and eat your face unmolested if it pounces, troll will outregen your damage output, then your stamina, then kill you, giant spider will paralyze you and skewer you with giant, armor-piercing chelicerae, bandit archer in a high place will simply shoot your dumb, lightly armoured ass dead given opportunity.
• You don't regen, not even by resting, and many attacks are near or actual OHKs - managing health is a much bigger deal, and you almost never have luxury of just tanking blows.
• Stamina matters in everything you do, managing stamina in combat is vital. Without stamina your blows are pathetic, you can't meaningfully block, you move slowly, get casting penalties and you might even have weapon fall out of your hands.
• You get soft incentives to sleeping and eating.
• Lack of fast travel makes distances in world a much bigger deal. You can't just quickly hop between town and dungeon to restock and pawn off loot.
• Carry weight limitations force you to think what is useful, necessary or valuable when looting, conversely, because you loot less you have less shit to manage. This also makes horses and houses valuable assets.
• Traps fucking kill and might be actually hidden. Let's be honest, traps that are just health tax are already pointless, completely meaningless in a game where you regen.
  
• Lack of level scaling forces you to pay attention to where you're going.
  
• Perk based development makes your build matter. You're no longer jack of all trades by default, merely master of none.
  
• At the same time alternative options are added that just make sense (for example smashing chests and doors open if you're strong enough, or bullrushing people to knock them down if you have mass advantage)
  
• Combo of the above encourages creativity allowing you to punch way above your weight and reap rewards (for example bullrushing a dangerous but lightweight opponent - like a caster or archer - might make the difference between life and death, triggering a trap with an arrow might be the only way to kill powerful enemy given inventory limitations, resource management and lack of level scaling, etc).
• Combat is serious business. Even relatively lower level enemies that fall like wheat before your scythe can end you quite easily if you're inattentive. Death is quick to both you and your enemies. Attacks have much more bigger impact and combat doesn't look like two guys in invisible boxes pretending to hit each other.
  
• High level spells are a big deal and suitably spectacular.

So it's like playing Skyrim with the purpose of not playing Skyrim.

 

[Lambach]

So it's like playing Skyrim with the purpose of not playing Skyrim.

More like taking an existing framework that would be impossible for unpaid, hobbyist moders to re-create or create from scratch and turning it into something that's not complete shit.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Lambach]

its really funny how in requiem your stealth archer can be dragon killer quite quickly, but when it comes to undead you just suck.

Or worse, automatons...

It is p. impossible to play a stealth archer without a whiff of magic (unless you avoid the problematic content or stealth past it when possible). I found I need either 50 in Enchanting, for the Fireburst/Shockburst enchants that shred Undead/Automatons, or 50 in Destruction for the Tier 2 empowered Fire/Shock runes. I suppose the latter fits the concept of a stealthy build more, i.e. you can LARP you're a Rogue setting traps.

Ive heard that labitynrhian is amazing in requiem but frankly, my larping builds were too weak against enemies in there

Oh, fuck yeah, Labyrinthian and Soul Cairn are the tits, but those who can't deal with Undead need not apply. Although I suppose you could just stealth past everything in Soul Cairn, since that Undead Dragon fight is the only mandatory one.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[ERYFKRAD]

its really funny how in requiem your stealth archer can be dragon killer quite quickly, but when it comes to undead you just suck.

Or worse, automatons...

It is p. impossible to play a stealth archer without a whiff of magic (unless you avoid the problematic content or stealth past it when possible). I found I need either 50 in Enchanting, for the Fireburst/Shockburst enchants that shred Undead/Automatons, or 50 in Destruction for the Tier 2 empowered Fire/Shock runes. I suppose the latter fits the concept of a stealthy build more, i.e. you can LARP you're a Rogue setting traps.

Ive heard that labitynrhian is amazing in requiem but frankly, my larping builds were too weak against enemies in there

Oh, fuck yeah, Labyrinthian and Soul Cairn are the tits, but those who can't deal with Undead need not apply. Although I suppose you could just stealth past everything in Soul Cairn, since that Undead Dragon fight is the only mandatory one.

Just go melee guise.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Requiem is a great mod but indeed it does not fix fundamental problems with skyrim. While it certainly makes "builds" feel more meaningful in terms of perks and abilities (no more being a I CAN DO.. WELL. EVERYTHING), nothing fixes the utter lack of world reactivity or choice. Skyrim plays almost identically whether you're a 2 handed axe wielding orc, or a khajit thief. Its very telling that the most fun people have with skyrim is when they're randomly doing shit in the wilds.... IOW: actively AVOIDING engaging with the writing. Skyrim actually seems intelligent when you're just exploring and finding random scenes that might tell a story through the environment, like the retard who got crushed in his house because he built it below a tree hanging over a cliff. But then you go into a city and some scripted event or dialogue happens that reminds you how fucking stupid the game is. Just as a ready example, going into whiterun for the very first time, the blacksmith bitch will entrust you, a RANDOM fuckin NOBODY shes never met, to take her very valuable sword for the king regent or whoever the fuck it was and deliver it to him, with nary a thought given to that you might just decide to keep the sword for yourself, or pawn it off to the khajits for a quick buck for that sweet skooma fix. The game is full of situations like this that are just fucking braindead.

Yeah, Skyrim is hopeless to the bones, much like other Bethesda games.

TES desperately needs an actual competitor to force them to step up their game. Ive always disputed the popular notion that its because bethesda is stupid. They aren't. They've just gotten lazy because literally no one else does or could make games anything like a TES title.

This already happened. There have been various excellent open world games in the last several years: Witcher 3, ELEX, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and Breath of the Wild. Each is getting a sequel of sorts.

And yes, this is where Skyrim fans crawl out of the woodwork and claim "oh but these are not exactly like Skyrim, boohoo!". That's kind of nonsense, in my opinion, though. First of all, if they were exactly like Skyrim, they would suck the same way. And second, those games are close enough. I am a huge fan of open world games, have played most of them, and in the end, these games are great in various ways that Bethesda games could never touch.

 

[Chippy]

If Skyrim had reached its potential (not saying it was good, just reached its potential) it would have had battles in it like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EIO6Tw3uaE

But even if it did, it would have broke immersion somehow. As some smartass says in the comments; you'd be in the middle of the battle, and some guy would say "Are those fools actually fighting?!".

 

[Duralux for Durabux]

If Skyrim had reached its potential (not saying it was good, just reached its potential) it would have had battles in it like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EIO6Tw3uaE

But even if it did, it would have broke immersion somehow. As some smartass says in the comments; you'd be in the middle of the battle, and some guy would say "Are those fools actually fighting?!".

There is an imperial soldier flying in the air caused by bugs in the video.

 

[Chippy]

Everyone knows that bug is a holdover from the levitate spell used in the Battlespire game/code. You can't hold it against Bethesda.

 

[Luzur]

What clusterfuck, people floating all over the place, imperials standing around like its a nice friday on the watch and one guy was spinning in place.

maybe its jsut good they enver did large scale battles with that engine.

 

[compvet24]

The main attraction of Requiem is that it strives to make stuff make sense and feel more real, mostly successfully.

• You can no longer just stuff your face with food between blows to heal in combat.
  
• Enemies have logical strengths and weaknesses and might need specific preparation and planning. For example draugr that are dried dead meat wrapped around dead bones just don't really care about arrows, sabercat WILL knock you down and eat your face unmolested if it pounces, troll will outregen your damage output, then your stamina, then kill you, giant spider will paralyze you and skewer you with giant, armor-piercing chelicerae, bandit archer in a high place will simply shoot your dumb, lightly armoured ass dead given opportunity.
• You don't regen, not even by resting, and many attacks are near or actual OHKs - managing health is a much bigger deal, and you almost never have luxury of just tanking blows.
• Stamina matters in everything you do, managing stamina in combat is vital. Without stamina your blows are pathetic, you can't meaningfully block, you move slowly, get casting penalties and you might even have weapon fall out of your hands.
• You get soft incentives to sleeping and eating.
• Lack of fast travel makes distances in world a much bigger deal. You can't just quickly hop between town and dungeon to restock and pawn off loot.
• Carry weight limitations force you to think what is useful, necessary or valuable when looting, conversely, because you loot less you have less shit to manage. This also makes horses and houses valuable assets.
• Traps fucking kill and might be actually hidden. Let's be honest, traps that are just health tax are already pointless, completely meaningless in a game where you regen.
  
• Lack of level scaling forces you to pay attention to where you're going.
  
• Perk based development makes your build matter. You're no longer jack of all trades by default, merely master of none.
  
• At the same time alternative options are added that just make sense (for example smashing chests and doors open if you're strong enough, or bullrushing people to knock them down if you have mass advantage)
  
• Combo of the above encourages creativity allowing you to punch way above your weight and reap rewards (for example bullrushing a dangerous but lightweight opponent - like a caster or archer - might make the difference between life and death, triggering a trap with an arrow might be the only way to kill powerful enemy given inventory limitations, resource management and lack of level scaling, etc).
• Combat is serious business. Even relatively lower level enemies that fall like wheat before your scythe can end you quite easily if you're inattentive. Death is quick to both you and your enemies. Attacks have much more bigger impact and combat doesn't look like two guys in invisible boxes pretending to hit each other.
  
• High level spells are a big deal and suitably spectacular.

Welp, time to try Requiem then. Be back soon.

 

[Hirato]

Everyone knows that bug is a holdover from the levitate spell used in the Battlespire game/code. You can't hold it against Bethesda.

this ruins the joke

Actually, there's an active actor limit of 128, and shit starts acting weird once there's more than 64 of them nearby.
This mod adjusts the cap and fixes the isssue(s)
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/32349

to quote the page:

When you have more than 128 actors in the same place the game stops updating movement of the actors after the first 128. This causes them to float towards their destination randomly instead of moving properly.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

The main attraction of Requiem is that it strives to make stuff make sense and feel more real, mostly successfully.

• You can no longer just stuff your face with food between blows to heal in combat.
  
• Enemies have logical strengths and weaknesses and might need specific preparation and planning. For example draugr that are dried dead meat wrapped around dead bones just don't really care about arrows, sabercat WILL knock you down and eat your face unmolested if it pounces, troll will outregen your damage output, then your stamina, then kill you, giant spider will paralyze you and skewer you with giant, armor-piercing chelicerae, bandit archer in a high place will simply shoot your dumb, lightly armoured ass dead given opportunity.
• You don't regen, not even by resting, and many attacks are near or actual OHKs - managing health is a much bigger deal, and you almost never have luxury of just tanking blows.
• Stamina matters in everything you do, managing stamina in combat is vital. Without stamina your blows are pathetic, you can't meaningfully block, you move slowly, get casting penalties and you might even have weapon fall out of your hands.
• You get soft incentives to sleeping and eating.
• Lack of fast travel makes distances in world a much bigger deal. You can't just quickly hop between town and dungeon to restock and pawn off loot.
• Carry weight limitations force you to think what is useful, necessary or valuable when looting, conversely, because you loot less you have less shit to manage. This also makes horses and houses valuable assets.
• Traps fucking kill and might be actually hidden. Let's be honest, traps that are just health tax are already pointless, completely meaningless in a game where you regen.
  
• Lack of level scaling forces you to pay attention to where you're going.
  
• Perk based development makes your build matter. You're no longer jack of all trades by default, merely master of none.
  
• At the same time alternative options are added that just make sense (for example smashing chests and doors open if you're strong enough, or bullrushing people to knock them down if you have mass advantage)
  
• Combo of the above encourages creativity allowing you to punch way above your weight and reap rewards (for example bullrushing a dangerous but lightweight opponent - like a caster or archer - might make the difference between life and death, triggering a trap with an arrow might be the only way to kill powerful enemy given inventory limitations, resource management and lack of level scaling, etc).
• Combat is serious business. Even relatively lower level enemies that fall like wheat before your scythe can end you quite easily if you're inattentive. Death is quick to both you and your enemies. Attacks have much more bigger impact and combat doesn't look like two guys in invisible boxes pretending to hit each other.
  
• High level spells are a big deal and suitably spectacular.

Welp, time to try Requiem then. Be back soon.

Due warning, you will need to invest in armour and arms pronto.

 

[DraQ]

The main attraction of Requiem is that it strives to make stuff make sense and feel more real, mostly successfully.

• You can no longer just stuff your face with food between blows to heal in combat.
  
• Enemies have logical strengths and weaknesses and might need specific preparation and planning. For example draugr that are dried dead meat wrapped around dead bones just don't really care about arrows, sabercat WILL knock you down and eat your face unmolested if it pounces, troll will outregen your damage output, then your stamina, then kill you, giant spider will paralyze you and skewer you with giant, armor-piercing chelicerae, bandit archer in a high place will simply shoot your dumb, lightly armoured ass dead given opportunity.
• You don't regen, not even by resting, and many attacks are near or actual OHKs - managing health is a much bigger deal, and you almost never have luxury of just tanking blows.
• Stamina matters in everything you do, managing stamina in combat is vital. Without stamina your blows are pathetic, you can't meaningfully block, you move slowly, get casting penalties and you might even have weapon fall out of your hands.
• You get soft incentives to sleeping and eating.
• Lack of fast travel makes distances in world a much bigger deal. You can't just quickly hop between town and dungeon to restock and pawn off loot.
• Carry weight limitations force you to think what is useful, necessary or valuable when looting, conversely, because you loot less you have less shit to manage. This also makes horses and houses valuable assets.
• Traps fucking kill and might be actually hidden. Let's be honest, traps that are just health tax are already pointless, completely meaningless in a game where you regen.
  
• Lack of level scaling forces you to pay attention to where you're going.
  
• Perk based development makes your build matter. You're no longer jack of all trades by default, merely master of none.
  
• At the same time alternative options are added that just make sense (for example smashing chests and doors open if you're strong enough, or bullrushing people to knock them down if you have mass advantage)
  
• Combo of the above encourages creativity allowing you to punch way above your weight and reap rewards (for example bullrushing a dangerous but lightweight opponent - like a caster or archer - might make the difference between life and death, triggering a trap with an arrow might be the only way to kill powerful enemy given inventory limitations, resource management and lack of level scaling, etc).
• Combat is serious business. Even relatively lower level enemies that fall like wheat before your scythe can end you quite easily if you're inattentive. Death is quick to both you and your enemies. Attacks have much more bigger impact and combat doesn't look like two guys in invisible boxes pretending to hit each other.
  
• High level spells are a big deal and suitably spectacular.

Welp, time to try Requiem then. Be back soon.

Due warning, you will need to invest in armour and arms pronto.

The worst thing about Requiem is having to unlearn stupid Skyrim habits that get you killed. Repeatedly, brutally.
The second worst is that modders are somewhat insane (at least not "typical modder" insane).

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[DraQ]

Yeah, Skyrim is hopeless to the bones, much like other Bethesda games.

Sigh.

As much as Bethesda does seem unable to code their way out of wet paper bag, as much as they completely fucked up Fallout, and as much as they do seem to make haphazard decisions, core TES series have been more or less fine with one exception (Oblivion) and despite some rather noticeable up and downs Bethesda does seem to learn (for example their approach to building dungeons in Skyrim was relatively clever - I'm speaking of methodology and asset use, not hurr-corridor here).
As it is, TES series, both made by old Bethesda (Arena, Daggerfall) and made by new Bethesda has remained unique in what it strives for.

This already happened. There have been various excellent open world games in the last several years: Witcher 3, ELEX, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and Breath of the Wild. Each is getting a sequel of sorts.

All of those very constrained games compared to TES if only because of predefined protagonists being strongly tied to predefined storylines.
That alone makes them less open world and arguably less RPGish at the very least in concept, if not necessarily in execution.

If anything FO2 would be the closest game to TES formula that springs to my mind.

And yes, this is where Skyrim fans crawl out of the woodwork and claim "oh but these are not exactly like Skyrim, boohoo!". That's kind of nonsense, in my opinion, though. First of all, if they were exactly like Skyrim, they would suck the same way.

So being able to define your character and to large extent your goals in an RPG is a sucky thing. Wow, do tell me more.

And second, those games are close enough. I am a huge fan of open world games

No, you are not. Because you don't seem to grasp what makes them attractive.
Not any more than Bethesda seems to grasp what makes a Fallout.

You are free to not like open world RPGs. You are free to not like Bethesda.
You are also free to hate Bethesda fucking up Fallout, deride their technical quality and laugh/complain about Skyrim being half fucking baked - actually that makes two of us.
But the fact is that you don't really get much in the way of alternatives so as long as Bethesda keeps making TES and doesn't stick its dick into it again like did with Oblivion, and as long as there are no games, perhaps more skillfully made ones following the same formula, TES will remain synonymous with open world RPGs. And Witcher, for all it's numerous virtues, won't.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Sorry DraQ, you know I admire you autism but you are completely wrong on this. Yes, Bethesda games have always been very open, with a blank slate everything, but they achieved this by a devil's bargain, by essentially being completely devoid of any depth or meaning. Sure, you can go in any direction, be any class, do anything, but the only thing you can do is engage in stupid meaningless and terrible combat, and visit tons of copy-pasted PoIs.

One day we might get a game that is actually both completely open AND meaningful (Dwarf Fortress is the most likely candidate), but until then, compromises have to be made. Those games I mentioned have more constraints than Bethesda's shit, but they are still open enough to be considered open world, and unlike Skyrim, Morrowind, etc, are actually good.

 

[Lemming42]

Yes, Bethesda games have always been very open, with a blank slate everything, but they achieved this by a devil's bargain, by essentially being completely devoid of any depth or meaning. Sure, you can go in any direction, be any class, do anything, but the only thing you can do is engage in stupid meaningless and terrible combat, and visit tons of copy-pasted PoIs.

This basically is the appeal of the games, though. You walk through a huge world admiring the views and delving into dungeons where you essentially already know exactly what you'll find. You mindlessly steamroll through the trash mobs, fight the obligatory named boss, grab new loot that will let you slaughter better trash mobs in other dungeons, and then jog off to your next adventure, which is about 30 seconds down the road. The whole thing is supported by cool lore (even if most of it is only in books rather than actually represented in the world), and a lot of solid sound and visual work that enhances the feeling of really "being there". Throw in a few memorable setpiece moments - that one dungeon where the floor collapses and throws you down into a massive flooded pit, the distinct visual design of the cities, the laughably easy Cidnha Mine escape - and you've got a game that, for whatever reason, people are still playing in huge numbers nearly 10 years later.

There's definitely a place for this type of game, just as there's a place for something like Diablo. And unlike Diablo, Morrowind/Skyrim clones have never overtaken the market and fucked up the whole RPG genre for years.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

This basically is the appeal of the games, though.

I don't get (nor ever have) that appeal. Without a functional story, it all feels so pointless. Without a good combat system, you can't feel good about your character, no matter how much you can customize them. Without decent exploration, you get bored.

 

[Yosharian]

I dunno DraQ, Skyrim vanilla has some horrendous flaws. I can't play it without mods anymore.

 

[Funposter]

I even played mods by Giskard

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Bad VA can take me right out of the moment. I did notice they put together some kind of guild of amateur voice actors with acceptable levels of VA talent/skill. I don't know how successful it is. You're probably expected to throw a few bucks their way when you hire a few which is okay, I guess, considering the time they put into it. I remember one modder hiring the actual voice actress that did the VA for Veronica in FNV for his mod which I thought was kind of cool