Improving Skyrim / Recommended Mods thread (Mostly about Requiem)

[mastroego]

"no women bandits" - sounds like another sensible mod to backup somewhere

 

[Yosharian]

Nexus retards went butthurt about straight marriage mod, and disabled extremely helpful SSE engine fixes mod. What a fucking idiots.

Nexus didn't disable the SSE Engine Fixes mod.

Also you can still access the mod via the API.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

I rescinded my long term ban on post-Morrowind TES games and played Skyrim for the 1st time late 2019. A girlfriend bought me a Switch and suggested I give it a try. Proceeded to do about 70 hours as a vanilla stealth archer with a side of werewolf, mashallah.

It is an instructive game to play as it helps you contextualise a lot of what is now doctrinaire AAA single player game design. Broad brush strokes the whole way down was hugely influential then and remains so today. Characters are largely defined by very simple traits or primary issues, the open world is a "theme park" filled with infinitely repeatable scaling content, the major narratives gesture at substantial themes and conflicts but are easily ignored. You breeze into it and breeze out out of it but ultimately nothing overly interesting or impactful is experienced; a casual game in the most literal sense. Junk food – not exactly good but it just hits the spot sometimes, actively bad for you if consume too much.

Having intermittently tried various mod setups/wabbajack lists since I think large sections of the modding community don't understand this. When they try to make it into an actual RPG or add difficulty to combat or add in survival mechanics etc. the game's systems and world design aren't tightly wound in enough for most mods to significantly improve on the base game. In fact I'd argue the waifu/husbando sex mod perverts understand the game's nature better than any other group of modders. There isn't scope for anything more than casual adventure here so why not make Camilla look like Laetitia Casta circa the early 2000s and have at it?

With the above in mind I think the single best Wabbajack list to go for is Streamlined Skyrim. No massive overhauls, no survival shit, no collect-a-thon garbage. The major part is a specific set of animation/camera tweaks combined with attack commitment to firm the combat up just enough. Other aspects are left vanilla or use very simple overhauls which preserves the relaxing vanilla vibe and avoids the autistic busywork pathognomonic of most of the recommended system/perk overhaul mods. Also big props to the author for choosing not to use ENB series and keeping the faces/other textures close to vanilla. Of note it does include the bloaty Werewolf/Vampire overhauls Growl and Sacrilege. They can easily be stripped out and replaced with Manbeast and Scion respectively. I strongly recommended that you do so.

 

[oldmanpaco]

Laetitia Casta circa the early 2000s

A gentleman and scholar I see.

 

[Stavrophore]

Wildlander looking good but i wish there was non-requiem version too.

Edit: i will download it and play i hope it doesnt stray from vanilla requiem, since i want to get requiem experience firsthand. Ive played it a bit long time ago, dont remember much.

 

[Grunker]

Wildlander looking good but i wish there was non-requiem version too.

Edit: i will download it and play i hope it doesnt stray from vanilla requiem, since i want to get requiem experience firsthand. Ive played it a bit long time ago, dont remember much.

Wildlander is a heavily edited version of Requiem. All the features of Requiem are there - but so are a shitload of other mods, including survival mods and stuff like that.

Think of Wildlander as a heavily (HEAVILY) modded Skyrim, and Requiem as its "rules engine" and you won't be too far off.

 

[Stavrophore]

Well there's no way im gonna download that amount of shit without nexus premium account, and even then i only have like 25mbit internet so. Wildlander will have to be postponed, i will think if its worth to shell money on nexus.

Guess its back to making my own modlist. Last time i kinda failed because i took things too fast. Never install too many mods at once, build your pack over months, or even a year with playing, testing, and evaulating whether a mod is worth having its place.

 

[Grunker]

It’s easily worth one month of subscription compared to the hassle of doing things yourself. Not to mention that you basically gave 24-7 tech support in Dylan’s discord; a lot of mods know the install almost as well as him and are super helpful.

 

[Ravielsk]

I think large sections of the modding community don't understand this.

I have to agree. I have been fishing for a mod/compilation that would overhaul Skyrim in a manner similar to what Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul or Francescos did back in the day and have consistently failed consistently for over 10 years because the modding community fundamentally does not grasp what Skyrim is as a game. To continue with the fast food metaphor what Skyrim moders do for the most part is that they try to fix the shitty Mcdonalds burger by slapping some pickles or "secret sauce" onto it when they need to replace the patty. Sure the pickle and sauce can help but they cannot turn a crapburger into a gourmet dish.

My absolute favorite variant of this are combat overhauls that think making the bandits roll around with the default skyrim rolls is somehow fixing the combat. I mean it is hilarious but I hardly a fix for anything.

 

[Stavrophore]

So why dont you guys install requiem? Ive tried it while on LE and it was quite challenging. If you do not fancy a creative, number crunching game, metagaming, PoE alike theorycrafting like @HumanTotemPole described "autism" of some mods and at the same time complaining about shalowness of skyrim, then what are you after? Obviously Skyrim won't be a different game, and people have to work with what they have. There is no back to oldfag gaming like it was before 2000.

 

[MiguelSerranoFan]

Requiem is bloated. Just use Morrowloot Ultimate.

 

[Lambach]

Requiem is bloated.

There is no adjective in the English language that describes Requiem less accurately than "bloated". It's literally an essential fix that turns a mind-numbing, painfully boring video-game into a pretty decent one and it does so mostly by tweaking some numbers rather than re-inventing the wheel. The only truly significant departure from vanilla is the static, de-leveled world and even that is technically just a number tweak.

 

[MiguelSerranoFan]

Requiem = 161 MB
MLU = 55 MB

That's 106 MB too many to do the same thing.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

creative, number crunching game, metagaming, PoE alike theorycrafting like @HumanTotemPole described "autism" of some mods

It's worth noting that I'm not against the above in principle either (I'm an RPG fan after all) but rather I find that there's not enough depth to Skyrim's quest content or worldbuilding to make it worthwhile.

Never tried Requiem. It being stuck in LE till now was always a barrier. All of the previously available Requiem converted to SE modlists seemed to be of the BRUTAL HARDCORE ROLEPLAYING SURVIVAL EXPERIENCE SKYRIM HARDCORE variety as well.

 

[Grunker]

I basically have the diametrically opposite view of you, HumanTotemPole. None of the content in Skyrim has any value. It's basically just a big-ass world filled with nothing whatsoever worth your time.

So the only way to make it worth your time is to make the simulation worthwhile. That's what Requiem, Frostfall and so on and so forth do. They add a buckload of challenge to the simulation so all the hiking and scenery and slaying and collecting you do is hinged to meaningful progression and adversity. People love to complain that these mods aren't balanced or that they're hodpodge. I can only imagine they've played some terrible effort, base their opinion on early editions or simply need to git gud. All the mainstay sim-system mods today are really well done, certainly better than anything in the core game.

Without that, I don't understand why anyone would spend 1 minute on this abonimation. For the story? To go to the top of a mountain and look? For the combat? For the "dungeons" (even calling them that seems retarded). Certainly not. Giving all the space some challenge to traverse is all one can hope to extract from Skyrim.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

I think large sections of the modding community don't understand this.

My absolute favorite variant of this are combat overhauls that think making the bandits roll around with the default skyrim rolls is somehow fixing the combat. I mean it is hilarious but I hardly a fix for anything.

Utterly cancerous. The other big one is combat overhaul authors not understanding that NPCs have no cooldown on block bashing and can cancel any normal attack into a block leading to infinite bonk cycles unless you spam power attacks.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

I basically have the diametrically opposite view of you, HumanTotemPole. None of the content in Skyrim has any value. It's basically just a big-ass world filled with nothing whatsoever worth your time.

So the only way to make it worth your time is to make the simulation worthwhile. That's what Requiem, Frostfall and so on and so forth do. They add a buckload of challenge to the simulation so all the hiking and scenery and slaying and collecting you do is hinged to meaningful progression and adversity. People love to complain that these mods aren't balanced or that they're hodpodge. I can only imagine they've played some terrible effort, base their opinion on early editions or simply need to git gud. All the mainstay sim-system mods today are really well done, certainly better than anything in the core game.

Without that, I don't understand why anyone would spend 1 minute on this abonimation. For the story? To go to the top of a mountain and look? For the combat? For the "dungeons" (even calling them that seems retarded). Certainly not. Giving all the space some challenge to traverse is all one can hope to extract from Skyrim.

As you quite rightly say the actual quest content and so on is abject so why bother trying to derive meaning or challenge?

I think the fun I've had with it has been through breaking its goofy-ass systems. In retrospect my initial playthrough was all about that. I found that the combat was awful, stealth archers break the vanilla combat system, naturally I gravitated towards that playstyle (as a lot of new players do apparently). I ran around the world clearing locations and ignoring quests till I lost interest.

The wabbajack list I recommended turns the combat into a very light souls-like system. Hence you can properly exploit reach and attack timings, use a little footwork, all that good shit I love in souls-likes but in a casual setting for when I don't feel like playing a proper game. I suppose I'm blessed in that I still have enough free time to waste a bit every so often.

 

[Grunker]

I basically have the diametrically opposite view of you, HumanTotemPole. None of the content in Skyrim has any value. It's basically just a big-ass world filled with nothing whatsoever worth your time.

So the only way to make it worth your time is to make the simulation worthwhile. That's what Requiem, Frostfall and so on and so forth do. They add a buckload of challenge to the simulation so all the hiking and scenery and slaying and collecting you do is hinged to meaningful progression and adversity. People love to complain that these mods aren't balanced or that they're hodpodge. I can only imagine they've played some terrible effort, base their opinion on early editions or simply need to git gud. All the mainstay sim-system mods today are really well done, certainly better than anything in the core game.

Without that, I don't understand why anyone would spend 1 minute on this abonimation. For the story? To go to the top of a mountain and look? For the combat? For the "dungeons" (even calling them that seems retarded). Certainly not. Giving all the space some challenge to traverse is all one can hope to extract from Skyrim.

As you quite rightly say the actual quest content and so on is truly abject so why bother trying to derive meaning or challenge?

Because I'm not doing it from the content, but from the systems. Which are not native.

Meanwhile this

In retrospect my initial playthrough was all about that. I found that the combat was awful, stealth archers break the vanilla combat system, naturally I gravitated towards that playstyle (as a lot of new players do apparently). I ran around the world clearing locations and ignoring quests till I lost interest.

is exactly the sort of shit I don't get. Sounds p. boring tbh. Guess we just look for different things in open world games

 

[HumanTotemPole]

I basically have the diametrically opposite view of you, HumanTotemPole. None of the content in Skyrim has any value. It's basically just a big-ass world filled with nothing whatsoever worth your time.

So the only way to make it worth your time is to make the simulation worthwhile. That's what Requiem, Frostfall and so on and so forth do. They add a buckload of challenge to the simulation so all the hiking and scenery and slaying and collecting you do is hinged to meaningful progression and adversity. People love to complain that these mods aren't balanced or that they're hodpodge. I can only imagine they've played some terrible effort, base their opinion on early editions or simply need to git gud. All the mainstay sim-system mods today are really well done, certainly better than anything in the core game.

Without that, I don't understand why anyone would spend 1 minute on this abonimation. For the story? To go to the top of a mountain and look? For the combat? For the "dungeons" (even calling them that seems retarded). Certainly not. Giving all the space some challenge to traverse is all one can hope to extract from Skyrim.

As you quite rightly say the actual quest content and so on is truly abject so why bother trying to derive meaning or challenge?

Because I'm not doing it from the content, but from the systems. Which are not native.

Meanwhile this

In retrospect my initial playthrough was all about that. I found that the combat was awful, stealth archers break the vanilla combat system, naturally I gravitated towards that playstyle (as a lot of new players do apparently). I ran around the world clearing locations and ignoring quests till I lost interest.

is exactly the sort of shit I don't get. Sounds p. boring tbh. Guess we just look for different things in open world games

It absolutely was boring once fucking over the brickheaded enemies lost it's charm. I had gone into the game almost totally blind re mechanics, plot etc. I kept playing to see if anything interesting would crop up but it didn't. I thought that there must be reasons for it's near universal acclaim other than being released in 2011 when fantasy products featuring dragons were hot shit in mainstream culture. I was, of course, totally wrong about that and largely had my time wasted.

The time I've spent with it since has been to see if the oft lauded mod scene has managed to make anything worth playing, resulting in further exasperatrion till Skyrim as casual souls-like has clicked for me latterly.

Fundamentally I think we both agree that the content is dog-shit but just have different preferred solutions to the same.

 

[MiguelSerranoFan]

Skyrim has less depth than most action RPGs. This is a fundamental problem that is engine-based and cannot be fixed, even by mods that remove level scaling like Requiem or MLU, since fixing it would require adding a stats and skills system akin to the older entries, something that is simply impossible. There's a reason it is primarily used like a sandbox model viewer now, except the models are elves with humongous tits.

 

[Ravielsk]

BRUTAL HARDCORE ROLEPLAYING SURVIVAL EXPERIENCE SKYRIM HARDCORE variety as well.

This is actually one of the biggest problems with Skyrim modders. Their idea of what constitutes hardcore is so insanely warped that absolutely anything that requires even a modicum of effort is "hardcore" in their eyes. Increase the npc damage? HARDCORE! Stamina management? HARDCORE! Not everything is leveled specifically to the players level? ULTRA MEGA GIGA HARDCORE!
Its seriously annoying to search for anything because they mix genuinely insane difficulty mods with just minor tweaks and patches. Same thing with "IMMERSIVE", holy fuck do they have no idea what that even means. Seriously these people will slap that onto anything and everything. I mean adding fog to the swamps is nice but I dont really see how that makes anything more immersive or how making my character freeze to death after 5 seconds in the cold is "realistic"(for a fucking dragonborn no less).

Utterly cancerous. The other big one is combat overhaul authors not understanding that NPCs have no cooldown on block bashing and can cancel any normal attack into a block leading to infinite bonk cycles unless you spam power attacks.

Yup, Dark souls "conversions" are especially guilty of this shit. They almost exclusively focus on the player and basically ignore the NPCs wholesale when it should be the exact inverse. What even is the point of rooting the player in place when all the NPCs still operate like beyblades? Its the equivalent of changing the oil in car to fix a blown tire.

 

[Yosharian]

Frostfall is pretty awesome in my opinion.

 

[Grunker]

Frostfall is pretty awesome in my opinion.

must have taken next level autism to get it to be so precise

 

[coldcrow]

Wildlander seems to be p. good, with combat being on the easier side. I wonder why he didn't implement static levelling, though.

 

[Grunker]

Wildlander seems to be p. good, with combat being on the easier side

Wildlander (or well, US, but I assume the same is the case for Wildlander) is a bit of a trade-off in the difficulty department. It's definetely "Requiem true" in the sense that its systems are challenging, but it does include mods and game balancing that is on the easier side for hardcore mods. I'd prefer it to be harder tbh, but I consider it the sacrifice for a modlist that is insanely well-supported and mostly autism-free. With most other hardcore modlists you have to suffer unpolishedness and often quite a bit of autism

EDIT: As for static levelling, the mod generally doesn't fuck with Elder Scrolls mainstay stuff. Guess that's why. I personally have always disliked the "skills from use systems" - and it makes my favourite Requiem build (heavy armor mage) a pain in the ass to level.