Improving Skyrim / Recommended Mods thread (Mostly about Requiem)

[Crispy]

He was also complaining about how in Enderal you need "5 to 7" ingredients for crafting instead of Skyrim's default "3 to 4".

I think he's in for a very rude awakening with Requiem.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

He was also complaining about how in Enderal you need "5 to 7" ingredients for crafting instead of Skyrim's default "3 to 4".

I think he's in for a very rude awakening with Requiem.

I don't remember it being a huge problem in requiem until you get to the higher tiers of metal.

 

[Lambach]

I don't remember it being a huge problem in requiem until you get to the higher tiers of metal.

It's a huge pain in the ass because the Weight Allowance is a lot smaller in Requiem, so you can't haul as much looted equipment to melt into ingots. Almost makes it necessary to get a horse before you start grinding Smithing.

Best to just use Trainers to get to 50 and get the jewelry crafting Perk. Crafting jewelry is the most efficient way of getting to 100.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Weight Allowance

Manageable though, and gets better.

Almost makes it necessary to get a horse

That thing is damn near mandatory whatever you plan on doing.

 

[coldcrow]

Phew lads, after only 12 hours and 40 minutes, wabbajack has finished downloading! Now it only has to extract 991 files and I'll soon be able to experience Serenity 2!!! Can't wait, it's gonna be so fun and totally not a waste of time!

Total Skyrim Overhaul is probably "better". But it's more demanding on GPU and also unforgivingly hard.

 

[Eyestabber]

Crafting skills are a serious grind, though, specially when it comes to reaching the highest levels. Can't jump from Smithing 95 to 96 by crafting 20 Iron Daggers anymore, you either have to craft 20 of something much more valuable instead or craft a couple dozen thousand daggers if you're a madman.

The latest version of Serenity did away with the improve-by-use system entirely. The current system gives you skillpoints per level and crafting/alchemy/enchantment no longer provide any XP, meaning levelling must be done via quests and combat. Which means a ridiculous asspain until you reach a non-joke level. I solved the issue via console commands. Same with weight allowance, another garbage change. I guess the "devs" expect the player to hunt wolves for 7 hours in order to reach level 10-15 in a "legit" fashion. I seriously wonder if any sane person would ever consider that "fun".

I'm doing two-handed + evasion with some crafting as well. Bleak Falls was painful but doable at level 14. We'll see how it goes from here. One thing is for sure: the game looks very nice after 964 files are added to it. Performance is fine with no ENB, 40-ish FPS with ENB.

 

[mastroego]

I still think that Requiem + a bunch of hand-selected mods is the best way to go.

 

[Crispy]

"Maybe you should try Enderal SE instead of downloading a thousand mods."

"I already did, I hate it."

"Really, why?"

"Too much grinding."

"Hmm, okay, so how's it working out with what you went with instead then?"

"It's also too grindy."

"HA! I told you!"

"Nah, I solved it with console commands."

"..."

 

[Eyestabber]

Welp, looks like Serenity 2 is indeed shit. Even at the "correct" level you can still get one-shot quite frequently. Damage feels very uneven, attacks will either barely scratch or one-shot you. That's fine, I think the last time I played skyrim was like 2014 or so. Guess I'm good for another 8 years Skyrim-free. It's never a good sign when you have to force (cheat) a game to let you have some fun. It also doesn't help that the modlist is full of "features" like getting smitten by gods based of an entirely new "morality" system that essentially amounts to blocking the player from a bunch of questlines. I think the people who make these kinds of mods display an uncanny amount of incomprehension towards the game they claim to "love" and keep trying to shove in "features" that run counter to the core design of the base game.

If it's any consolation to Crispy, I had about 12 hours of fun with Enderal while serenity was good for...two hours? Maybe three, but definitely not nearly as long as it took to download all this crap. At the end of the day, it's still Skyrim and therefore shit.

EDIT: also, the installed folder is 93 GB, lmao.

 

[Lambach]

Welp, looks like Serenity 2 is indeed shit. Even at the "correct" level you can still get one-shot quite frequently. Damage feels very uneven, attacks will either barely scratch or one-shot you.

Well yeah, Requiem advertises itself as a mod that greatly increases combat lethality as opposed to vanilla's wet noodle slapping contest. You'll kill a lot quicker, but you can also get killed a lot more quickly yourself.

No armor or light armor? Get one-shot by some bandit's arrow early on (obviously this changes once you get better Light Armor, more HP and the like). Either dodge 'em or put on Heavy Armor that makes being hit by an arrow just a minor nuisance. This is literally in the mod's description on the Nexus.

If it's any consolation to Crispy, I had about 12 hours of fun with Enderal while serenity was good for...two hours?

Ahem.

Don't get discouraged by everyone and everything dick-slapping you across the face during the early game and give up. This isn't Gothic, it doesn't have interesting non-combat quests you can do to level up until you're combat ready, so depending on how you start, you might find those first couple of hours pretty tedious*. Push through it for at least as long as it took you to download it, Requiem (and Requiem-based mods, I guess) gets really fun once you're no longer an anemic tuberculosis patient and can hold your own in a fight, it's not likely you'll just give up at that point.

 

[coldcrow]

Welp, looks like Serenity 2 is indeed shit. Even at the "correct" level you can still get one-shot quite frequently. Damage feels very uneven, attacks will either barely scratch or one-shot you. That's fine, I think the last time I played skyrim was like 2014 or so. Guess I'm good for another 8 years Skyrim-free. It's never a good sign when you have to force (cheat) a game to let you have some fun. It also doesn't help that the modlist is full of "features" like getting smitten by gods based of an entirely new "morality" system that essentially amounts to blocking the player from a bunch of questlines. I think the people who make these kinds of mods display an uncanny amount of incomprehension towards the game they claim to "love" and keep trying to shove in "features" that run counter to the core design of the base game.

If it's any consolation to Crispy, I had about 12 hours of fun with Enderal while serenity was good for...two hours? Maybe three, but definitely not nearly as long as it took to download all this crap. At the end of the day, it's still Skyrim and therefore shit.

EDIT: also, the installed folder is 93 GB, lmao.

Seems like you are pretty naive. A cursory inquiry about Requiem would have let you know that you can easily one-two-shotted until much later in the game.
100+ GB is expected for a Skyrim-sized game with HD textures. If you want to have *fun* run Phoenix Flavour or Keizaal.
Or just run Wildlander, it's requiem-lite and only ~75GB.

 

[Yosharian]

Wildlander is coming along nicely, that's all I'm going to say regarding this game

 

[vibehunter]

https://steamcommunity.com/app/489830/eventcomments/4960174866669334426

Bethesda just pushed out some ridiculous minor update that broke SKSE. Luckily I managed to catch it and disabled auto-update on Steam, but wow, they're still updating this game for no reason after all this time.

 

[HereticGuy]

What's the reason of people's obsession about Skyrim and modding it? Don't get me wrong, I am not asking it in a condescending way; if you have fun, more power to you. But to me Skyrim was an offensively bad product, so moving on was the best thing I could do. So I'm geniuenly asking, what's it appeal? Did modders found solutions to poor writing, uninteresting exploration, brain dead combat, awful animations, shitty engine etc... ?
(I have never played "Special Edition" by the way; last time I played it was about a decade ago)

 

[Lemming42]

It's because the game - like other TES games - holds the promise of being something far greater than it actually is.

Essentially, the game presents a world that promises constant adventure, all kinds of unique things to find, varied enemies to battle, and amazing dungeons to delve into. There's also a crafting system, an economy, an alchemy and enchanting system, equipment and spells, and so on.

In reality, very little of this promise materialises in the actual game, and the systems are quickly shown to be shallow. But the thing is that the outline of a great game is there, the framework for something great, and for over a decade now, modders have been obsessed with adding to that framework in the hopes of actually creating the game that Skyrim promises to be.

I've come to the conclusion that it's never really going to happen and it's not possible, but a heavily-modded Skyrim can still offer a fun action-adventure game for anyone who wants one. Modding in itself is also fun when you really start to get into it, arguably more fun than the actual game itself for some people. To answer your questions:

Did modders found solutions to poor writing

Try Interesting NPCs. The quality varies, but there's some interesting use of TES lore in there and some decent characters to meet (quite a lot of shit ones too).

uninteresting exploration

This depends what you think was wrong with Skyrim's exploration. Stuff like Morrowloot (a very old mod that I'm sure has been superceded) places unique loot around in a Morrowind-esque way that rewards exploration. Options exist to remove level scaling too if you want to get your ass kicked early in the game and occasionally discover late-game equipment long before you "should" get it.

brain dead combat

Requiem for a large-scale attempt to remake the entire combat system (and various other systems too), SkyRe for something more lightweight. Two very different approaches that both overhaul the game in their own ways, and both have pros and cons to weigh up.

awful animations

Never looked into this much because Bethesda's animations really make me laugh, but yes, there's animation packs out there. You could probably get most of the vanilla animations replaced.

shitty engine

Nope, it's fucked. Special Edition is more stable than the original though, and the script extender can allow modders to take the engine to its absolute limits.

 

[HereticGuy]

Lemming42 I appreciate the detailed breakdown man!

This depends what you think was wrong with Skyrim's exploration.

My general problem was, the world of Skyrim was too... lack of any identity? I mean, Morrowind has it's own characteristic, or so did Gothic. But Skyrim? It could have a distinguishing world if Bethesda would have gone for a full grim Nordic atmosphere with TES lore. But as it is, Skyrim feels like a failed mish mash of a Nordic and generic medieval fantasy world.

Other than that; most of the dungeons were similiar and open world was extremely empty. Morrowind had detailed instructions about quest locations & what to do,; so searching for quests gave a nice exploration feeling. In Skyrim however, you have to follow the damn quest compass; because there is no instructions on your quest log. Skyrim threats you like you have an IQ of a TikToker, and that's insulting.

 

[Lambach]

Morrowind had detailed instructions about quest locations & what to do,; so searching for quests gave a nice exploration feeling.

Except when you look under the meaningless text fluff, Morrowind's quests p. much never rise above the level of "go to location [X] and fetch item [Y]/kill NPC [Z]".

The Dark Brotherhood Questline from fucking Oblivion alone is worth ten times more than all the shitty, horribly designed, sad excuses for "Quests" in Morrowind put together.

 

[Lemming42]

Lemming42 I appreciate the detailed breakdown man!

This depends what you think was wrong with Skyrim's exploration.

My general problem was, the world of Skyrim was too... lack of any identity? I mean, Morrowind has it's own characteristic, or so did Gothic. But Skyrim? It could have a distinguishing world if Bethesda would have gone for a full grim Nordic atmosphere with TES lore. But as it is, Skyrim feels like a failed mish mash of a Nordic and generic medieval fantasy world.

Other than that; most of the dungeons were similiar and open world was extremely empty. Morrowind had detailed instructions about quest locations & what to do,; so searching for quests gave a nice exploration feeling. In Skyrim however, you have to follow the damn quest compass; because there is no instructions on your quest log. Skyrim threats you like you have an IQ of a TikToker, and that's insulting.

A mod is available for all vanilla quests which removes the quest compass and instead gives you directions in your journal, though I've never been a fan of that because the world isn't really designed with a such a thing in mind (and I must admit I don't really mind the quest compass anyway, unless it's pointing to an actual objective within a dungeon).

As for the world's lack of identity, it's subjective I suppose. I get what you mean, though personally I think they did a decent enough job of presenting the country as it was described in the in-game books of the earlier games, and the 200~ year timeskip let them portray the Empire as being in decay and collapse, which acts as a nice contrast to Morrowind's depiction of a rapidly-expanding colonialist Empire imposing itself on a new frontier. Skyrim's one of the less interesting areas in the TES world IMO, which is probably why Bethesda picked it - they thought it'd be an easy way to do their generic medieval fantasy thing and avoid the more interesting metaphysical and out-there aspects of the setting. That's not to say better and more creative developers couldn't have done a far better job than Bethesda ultimately did, of course, but since Skyrim's a fairly mindless action-adventure-exploration game and the setting is just there to look pretty and give the player excuses to go into dungeons, I think they could have done much worse than they did.

The dungeons being similar haven't really been fixed as far as I know, but personally I prefer them to the dungeons of other TES games (except Arena). Daggerfall's are wonderful but completely insane, Morrowind's felt very boring, samey and empty to me, and Oblivion's were just terrible from what I remember of them. Skyrim's dungeons are fun if you accept them for what they are, which is basically a short, mostly linear rollercoaster ride where you'll see a bunch of "cool" shit, dodge lots of traps, find a corpse with a blood-soaked letter that says "i am dead", and ultimately fight a mini-boss who drops a new weapon or bit of armour at the end. A lot of them have little mini-stories too, some of which are quite good.

 

[Yosharian]

Again, unless you've actually tried a modlist like Wildlander, you can't appreciate the subtle differences and changes. Yes, core elements of Skyrim remain, but it can still be a compelling experience if you remain open-minded.

 

[gurugeorge]

What's the reason of people's obsession about Skyrim and modding it? Don't get me wrong, I am not asking it in a condescending way; if you have fun, more power to you. But to me Skyrim was an offensively bad product, so moving on was the best thing I could do. So I'm geniuenly asking, what's it appeal? Did modders found solutions to poor writing, uninteresting exploration, brain dead combat, awful animations, shitty engine etc... ?
(I have never played "Special Edition" by the way; last time I played it was about a decade ago)

Modders have done a hell of a lot with the game, considering its age, they're always stretching the capabilities of the engine, and there's enough variety of modders' tastes out there that it's possible to mod an experience to your liking, whatever that may be. And as Lemming42 said, it's also fun to mod once you get into it - it's even a potential gateway into learning a little bit of scripting and programming, or 3-d modeling, texturing and all that, if it starts to grab you and you start modding yourself.

And for all the bad words one might have about Bethesda, they have created the most easily and comprehensively moddable games out there. So naturally people take advantage of that.

But even at an end-user level, you have to learn to be careful and systematic about things, which is nice. It's a great feeling when you iron out the glitches and get your set of preferred mods working (it's a feeling rather like when you build your own PC and go from, "Why the HELL isn't this hunk of junk working?" to, "Aha, it's working now!")

The downside is that it is quite time-consuming, and in a given "bout" of playing Skyrim (I've had like maybe half a dozen over the years), you might or might not end up actually playing the game for any length of time

Modding is basically a hobby within a hobby.

 

[HereticGuy]

Morrowind had detailed instructions about quest locations & what to do,; so searching for quests gave a nice exploration feeling.

Except when you look under the meaningless text fluff, Morrowind's quests p. much never rise above the level of "go to location [X] and fetch item [Y]/kill NPC [Z]".

The Dark Brotherhood Questline from fucking Oblivion alone is worth ten times more than all the shitty, horribly designed, sad excuses for "Quests" in Morrowind put together.

Can't argue about Morrowind stuff honestly; I haven't replayed in years. But as far as I remember the instructions were adequete for finding your objective. Whereas in Skyrim it is like "kill the bandit in X camp". Okay, where is that camp, can you give me some specific locations dear quest giver? Of course not, we have a GPS system for console players who doesn't like to read!

I have no idea about Dark Brotherhood quest in Oblivion, because I tried to like that piece of shit game for a few days when it released. Then I uninstalled and never played since 2006.

 

[HereticGuy]

though personally I think they did a decent enough job of presenting the country as it was described in the in-game books of the earlier games, and the 200~ year timeskip let them portray the Empire as being in decay and collapse, which acts as a nice contrast to Morrowind's depiction of a rapidly-expanding colonialist Empire imposing itself on a new frontier.

I see. I am not familiar to TES lore other than Morrowind so I couldn't spot these details you mentioned.

but it can still be a compelling experience if you remain open-minded.

Yeah, maybe I can try it again when I have time and accept it for what it is.

And for all the bad words one might have about Bethesda, they have created the most easily and comprehensively moddable games out there.

This is the only reason why I still have some respect to Bethesda. But on the other hand, I hate consumers' "modders gonna fix / complete it" mentality towards half-assed releasing games (and how Bethesda can get away with it since two decades)

 

[Grunker]

Yeah, maybe I can try it again when I have time and accept it for what it is.

Here's what Wildlander does: makes the systems and the core gameplay loop *infinitely* more interesting and actually fun, puzzling and challenging to interact with (play with the survival options).

Here's what Wildlander doesn't do: fix the God-awful quests, dialogue and retarded Bethesda-shit

Here's what Wildlander kindda does: patches the combat (it's still a broken base, but now it has robust and fairly complex systems on top of it + it's actually hard when it needs to be), patches the world (Skyrim's world was not toooooo bad to begin with, and Wildlander makes interacting with it better and spawns flavour everywhere)

If approached correctly, Wildlander (and mods like it) can be a fun challenge that actually takes advantage of the open world and builds it into the gameplay challenge. However, if you expect it to transform Skyrim completely, you'll be disappointed.

 

[Valdetiosi]

Fuck it, I'll give Wildlander a go, I could stomach Oblivion with Maskar's Overhaul cause despite not changing quests, dialogue or bethesda-shit, it did improve on dungeon crawling, level scaling and health bloat.
I'm just extremely pissed off that it's gonna take 3 days to install all mods even with Wabbajack. Seems to be there can't be a good single overhaul mod, it gotta be spread out to hundreds of plugins.

 

[Ravielsk]

Seems to be there can't be a good single overhaul mod, it gotta be spread out to hundreds of plugins.

Blame the primadona modders who cannot stomach the idea of having their work used by anyone besides them and the sites that enable them. In the oblivion days a lot of mods were just cobbled together compilations of many other mods because nobody asked nor demanded a permission to use another man's mod for his own(with maybe the exception of custom made assets). Today you cannot even copy paste a generic script without someone throwing a hissy fit over "stealing".