Skyrim is worse than Oblivion in every way

[Luzur]

Skyrim is the best Elder Scrolls game and best rpg of past 10 years, suck on it haters !

Only if it's modded to hell. Frostfall, Requiem, Needs, HD, etc. It's legit as hell afterwards. I can't bear more than a few hours of unmodded Skyrim. It's crazy bad.

Dont forget about all of the city expanded mods either, or the better NPC's mods, or the better roads, better economy, better dungeons, lore monsters, more NPCs', Arena towns added in etc etc etc

 

[Zeriel]

I don't find the mods really change anything substansial re: enjoyment of the game. The underlying flaws are still there, and I've played pretty much every overhaul mod except Requiem. I've played Skyrim many more hours than I am comfortable admitting, and after assembling hundreds of hand-picked mods what fun I have with the game still comes down to it being a hiking simulator, not the actual gameplay.

Skyrim is okay if you want to explore a snowy prairie, pick flowers, and listen to drearie string instruments. On the other hand, if you want to play a TES game for its gameplay I'd still return to Daggerfall for the millionth time.

 

[Repulsive]

Not even up for discussion. Although Oblivion wasn't too great either.

 

[MWaser]

If we're talking completely unmodded, I'd take Oblivion over Skyrim. At least it has a UI that doesn't make me want to slit my wrists.

 

[roll-a-die]

If we're talking completely unmodded, I'd take Oblivion over Skyrim. At least it has a UI that doesn't make me want to slit my wrists.

Nah, it makes you want to cut out your throat, Oblivion's UI was an unresponsive piece of garbage.

 

[DraQ]

I don't find the mods really change anything substansial re: enjoyment of the game. The underlying flaws are still there, and I've played pretty much every overhaul mod except Requiem.

There's your problem.

If we're talking completely unmodded, I'd take Oblivion over Skyrim. At least it has a UI that doesn't make me want to slit my wrists.

MWaser: plays games for their UI.

 

[Zeriel]

I don't find the mods really change anything substansial re: enjoyment of the game. The underlying flaws are still there, and I've played pretty much every overhaul mod except Requiem.

There's your problem.

If we're talking completely unmodded, I'd take Oblivion over Skyrim. At least it has a UI that doesn't make me want to slit my wrists.

MWaser: plays games for their UI.

Adding one-shots to Skyrim's boring combat isn't my kind of fun, but if it does it for you I'm not judging.

 

[roll-a-die]

I don't find the mods really change anything substansial re: enjoyment of the game. The underlying flaws are still there, and I've played pretty much every overhaul mod except Requiem.

There's your problem.

If we're talking completely unmodded, I'd take Oblivion over Skyrim. At least it has a UI that doesn't make me want to slit my wrists.

MWaser: plays games for their UI.

Adding one-shots to Skyrim's boring combat isn't my kind of fun, but if it does it for you I'm not judging.

Requiem does a lot to actually add tedium in my opinion as well. It does a lot to enhance muh immurshun, but not a lot to enhance the core gameplay.

Poor/no fatguy regeneratation while walking/running -> Means you move like an obese zombie most of the time, to avoid potentially getting fucked over by wolves appearing behind you spontaneously while you are low fatguy.
No fast travel -> Shitty walking speed to maintain fatguy regeneration exploration in the bland, boring and tasteless overworld
Instakill combat early on -> Mandates an autosave or quicksave before every combat encounter, and often within every combat encounter.
Spamming quicksave through combat -> Bugs that can kill your save game, and removal of risk from combat.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Gee whiz man fast travel can be toggled.

 

[roll-a-die]

Gee whiz man fast travel can be toggled.

Recent feature. At least if I recall correctly, and one highly not recommended by most people. Still doesn't solve the slowness and tedium problems from movement speed and gameplay interacting.

 

[typical user]

Why would you need fast travel anyway? I had Skyrim playthrough where I have discovered and cleared every location and I found out I was taking carriage to hold city then exploring every cave and returning back to sell loot until entire hold was complete. If you try to follow main quest without knowing this is Bethesda game then it will tell you to travel entire map for McGuffins which you won't like then you shouldn't play it anyway.

I'm playing Fallout 4 in Survival now and I don't see much difference without fast travel. I had to reduce sponges respawning because I would lose my shit fighting raiders 10th time in the same spot under the bridge between CIT and Diamond City.

Morrowind had hidden fast travel too IIRC, it had boats, teleportation spells, those flying bugs and probably more. You just needed to memorize where you need to go to fast travel to new area, this stays true to some extent in Skyrim and Fo4. Can't speak about Oblivion because I have no intention to play that piece of crap.

 

[Beastro]

Morrowind had hidden fast travel too IIRC, it had boats, teleportation spells, those flying bugs and probably more.

But it was an organic form of it explained in-game that made sense (and with the Silt Striders it did so while enriching the world building by showing what an alien place you'd found yourself in where giant insects were beasts of burden and not a single mammal is ever encountered) and blended into the world, since you were using methods of travel used by others to move goods and such around the island.

That is far superior in every way to a system that warps you around instantly and never bothers to even try to larp that it's you running to that place and just cutting the busywork out. The diner in FO4 sums that up perfectly, since you warp in infront of where you killed the guy the diner owner wants dead, and after he dies a pair of raiders keep spawning, which means you warp in with them right behind you, so there's no pretense of you running there without them noticing you, like with many games and being attacked while you sleep.

BTW, it wasn't "hidden" either, the first thing your eye is drawn to after waking out of Seyda Neen is the Silt Strider, which after overcoming wariness of it being a monster, you quickly realize is something else when you see the Dunmer pilot next to it that explains what it is and does. Again, in a nice organic fashion.

The cart in Skyrim was an afterthought and you could easily play through the game, fast travel or not, and miss it, which is what I did in my first play through, since I never expected Bethesda would add something like that back into their games without removing map based fast travel or referencing that it exists elsewhere iin-game.

 

[DraQ]

I guess it's all a matter of personal taste. I just finished Morrowind (again) and am 2/3rds into my draft review. I decided that now is a perfect time to play unmodded Skyrim while the memory of Morrowind is still fresh. I joined the Nords and am at their initial village with a side quest and main quest now under my belt. Some observations:

- The game is gorgeous but somehow ugly at the same time. Bethesda has been trying to make realistic-looking characters in their games since Oblivion, but the technology is not there yet and off-putting. I grant it they got better here with human characters, as faces in Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Dishonored were just friggin' creep. Now I feel I'm watching an odd puppet show by the guys who brought you Team America. I like playing Dunmer, though, and the elven characters somehow look worse off from Oblivion.
- Items that are not colored in a shade of light blue or gray look great, such as trees. But the game is as depressing as a movie filmed with a blue camera lens. They decided to take feedback from the negativity surrounding the bright colors and bloom effects of Oblivion and go the exact opposite and depend mostly on the color gray. I'm hoping the developers used modern graphical capabilities to make some location look bright and joyful in this game. Guess I'll have to keep playing to find out.

Can't agree. The game is only ugly where they had to make concessions to make it run on 2006 toaster - polycount cuts, minimized number of light sources, low res textures (especially bumpmaps - low-res bumpmaps never look good). Still, it uses all means at its disposal to look about as good as possible. Characters in particular look like MW ones, done by better artists using better tech.
Dishonored characters were purposefully made to look a bit like caricatures rather than real people, it's the environments that looked bad up-close (and hounds - "painterly" looks and fur don't mix well).
Other than that, while Skyrim generally tends to look a bit desaturated most of the time, it tends to use visual effects in smart and responsible manner, even such seemingly hopeless ones as DoF.

- I have no more fucking attributes? So I maxxed out all of them at first level and don't need to worry about them anymore? And my skill options are greatly narrowed. So much for specializing in a type of character. I still love reading about everyone's favorite character builds in previous Elder Scroll games. Forget about that here. I'll hold anymore criticism until I play some more and see how my character develops. So far I moved the meters a bit on marksman, one-handed, heavy armor, sneak, speach, and lockpicking without getting myself or any skills to level 2.

Perks, point allocation in H/M/S. The system is a bit crap in vanilla, but it generally leads to to diverging builds.

- Combat is a simple click and move affair. Seems even more simplified then in past games. And now I regenerate quickly after combat? No need to worry about resource management, then. Or develop specific player tactics. Or require Mark/Recall spells. Or any need for restoration magic. Oh, and I just won several battles against multiple opponents when I would fear doing so in previous games and try to draw them out one-by-one or take one out using archery before the second could close on me. And I just killed a fucking huge bear with three arrows... at level 1. The game panned out and showed a slow-motion take on my last shot against the bear. The bear couldn't really get to me because I placed myself on some rocks, was weaker than I thought it would be, and the AI is stupid, so that moment seemed more derp to me rather than epic.

- I was able to carry a ridiculous amount of heavy armor to take to the first village and sell. The ridiculousness of the inventory situation from the previous games is escalated here.

Replay with Requiem later on for pleasant surprise.
AI is actually quite smart under the hood, but purposefully crippled (evident from the fact that quite a few mods improving the AI yield very similar results) - Requiem takes care of it too.

Anyway, vanilla is somewhat above mediocre but overall enjoyable casual romp with occasional hints of greatness (but quite a few moments of derp), most of Oblivion's awfulness is gone, some good things from MW and even DF are back, fun enough to play overall, though by no means great.

Meanwhile *my* Skyrim has:

• Tons of characters, including followers, that are better written, more interesting and far more reactive than anything made by Bioware and quite a few made by BIs/Troika/Obsidian (courtesy of 3DNPCs and Inigo), that are well integrated and remove one of the key weaknesses of vanilla
  
• A great number of interesting interlocking questlines (3DNPCs) addressing another key weakness of vanilla
• Fun and somewhat challenging gameplay (courtesy of Requiem and DCO, you can add RoTE to the mix if it's still too casul for you) addressing final major weakness of vanilla
  
• Tons of well integrated lore (3DNPCs building on top of vanilla, previous games and auxiliary material)
• Rewarding exploration (some courtesy of Vanilla, but most from Requiem and Morrowloot)
• Fun and well developed magic system (Requiem and Apocalypse)
• Unique items with unique effects (Utter Uniques Upgrade)

I generally have over 60 mods (but that includes patches and sub-modules), but you really only need two to pretty much completely turn Skyrim around in terms of key aspects (Requiem, 3DNPCs - one completely overhauls mechanics the other adds enough interesting characters and quests, and ties them to vanilla material, to mostly render vanilla's weaknesses irrelevant), two more to further improve key aspects (DCO, Inigo), and at most 4 others if you need some extras. And patches, of course. That's not a whole lot of modding effort.

The rest is cosmetics and all sorts of minor stuff.

better dungeons

I don't know of any mod that would fix dungeons' topology and "puzzles". Other than that they are fine or handled sufficiently well by mechanical overhauls alone.

Requiem does a lot to actually add tedium in my opinion as well. It does a lot to enhance muh immurshun, but not a lot to enhance the core gameplay.

Poor/no fatguy regeneratation while walking/running -> Means you move like an obese zombie most of the time, to avoid potentially getting fucked over by wolves appearing behind you spontaneously while you are low fatguy.
No fast travel -> Shitty walking speed to maintain fatguy regeneration exploration in the bland, boring and tasteless overworld

That's what horses, paid travel services, stamina regen enchantments/perks, potions, food and teleportation spells are good for and overworld is actually quite good.
And if nothing works for you (see below) you can enable fast travel from MCM.

Instakill combat early on -> Mandates an autosave or quicksave before every combat encounter, and often within every combat encounter.
Spamming quicksave through combat -> Bugs that can kill your save game, and removal of risk from combat.

Mad cuz bad.

Git gud.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

DraQ have you tried Enderal?

 

[DraQ]

DraQ have you tried Enderal?

I rarely do TCs.

I play Skyrim because it's in a setting I like so it's relevant to my interests, it's just about good enough to be fun on its own, justifying spending effort on modding it and is really good while modded properly.
A TC drops #1 of this chain while adding a high barrier of entry, unlike a standalone game, because it requires me to maintain multiple mod setups, load orders and such (mind you that I first started modding Skyrim manually, only later switching to mod managers, so my installation is only partially modular - how robust is the installer/launcher?).

I've heard it's good overall, but what sets it apart from everything else - mods and standalone games alike?
Typically when a game can't be described in some unique terms (as in "THE game that <does X>") I find it hard to care.
How would you sell Enderal to me?

 

[ERYFKRAD]

How would you sell Enderal to me?

Right, first off it backs up your skyrim install automatically so you can switch freely between the two. No need to manage a dozen mods or so.

And it's got solid explorefaggotry, with dungeons easily superior to Skyrim's. Skills are more precious as you don't increase them by learn-by-doing, but by use of skill books, which keeps you on your toes cash-wise.

Sidequests in particular are more interesting than Skyrim's with most of the ones in the game offering some manner of choice that can affect the world in small ways.*
Now I don't into setting as much as you, there's a constructed world here and all, but I haven't dug into it much. That said, there's fuckloads of books with ten pages of writing and so on if you're into it. Writing seems okay.

It's a pretty professional mod, with on-par to better VA than skyrim and utterly stable.

Some would liken the game to explorefaggotry of the Gothics in the Gaembryo engine, if that seems up your alley, well.

*Not too much into the game mind you, but digging it.

So much for selling it you though. Maybe I'll try putting it across better later.

 

[Zeriel]

My biggest complaint with Enderal is the performance. It just doesn't run that well relative to how it looks--I don't blame that on them really, Skyrim's engine just can't handle much more. But at the end of the day that's why I stopped playing it.

 

[JarlFrank]

I've heard it's good overall, but what sets it apart from everything else - mods and standalone games alike?

Good explorefaggotry. Dungeon design is above average throughout, with a handful of dungeons that reach the level of great to excellent. The overworld exploration is great, too, the landscape design is beautiful and most encounters are handplaced (and random spawns are based on region, with zero level scaling). Story and world are mostly solid, too.

For me, the reason I installed it right after release were the dungeons because I hoped for the same quality that Nehrim had.
Overall I found the dungeons to be slightly weaker than in Nehrim, but still above average mostly.

And a handful of dungeons were absolutely excellent. There is one dungeon, connected to a sidequest, in the far north of the gameworld, that is so good that it alone makes installing and playing the mod worthwile.
Trust me.

 

[roll-a-die]

Hey Draq, we've had this discussion before.

I'll sum it up.

Roll-a-Die's commentary: Combat is bad, because one arrow from an archer can kill a starting character without them knowing what's going on.

Draq's response: Get good.

Roll-a-Die's response: How about not trying to build a hardcore flesh on top of a the skeleton of a very casual game? It generally doesn't work.

Draq's response: "Bird emoticon"

Roll-a-Die's Rant: And while I'm at it. Here's everything else that's wrong that I can spew out, until I get bored of spewing and tell you a mod set up that works for a "hardcore roleplaying skyrim".

The economy is scewed to you having to grind massive amounts of random trash mobs to afford close to anything of relative use. A starting character can actually be bogged down in the weight of their own gold and arrows. No joke I had 50 pounds of gold and arrows at one point. Meaning I couldn't pick anything up and had to drop my arrows, at which point skyrim's buggy physics took over, and caused the arrow to bounce for some reason killing my character instantly. Because physics.

It doesn't actually fix Skyrim, it just introduces new problems. Oh look a game where you can feasibly master everything given enough time. Let's make it too where only mono/pure builds work in any respectable degree. Oh look, you're expected too fight through hordes of human NPC's, hardened soldiers or rebels, in the tutorial, only they kill you in one hit, often an animated one, that you have no control over. Leading to your basically cowering behind NPC allies the entire sequence. This basically sets the stage for requiem. It's utterly hostile to solo play. "Git good" in the mind of Draq, seems to be cower behind as an immortal NPC tanks the way through the enemies. This may skew his perception of the actual gameplay just a smidge.

So, even if you tough it out, going the solo route in requiem looks like this.

10 hours of running around the wilderness, abusing quick saves or installing a mod that saves for you every 5 minutes, and killing wolves and maybe stray bandits you abused the clumsy stealth mechanics of the original game to glitch out of their bases and away from their allies. You pray you don't get random events that spawn enemies like Sabretooths, or bears on you, because well, it's basically impossible for you to beat them early on. But gloriously after 10 hours, you'll be around level 7. And able to take on a bandit base with the perks you have, which are mostly boring if you are going for melee, Oh joy, to become a competent sword and board heavy fighter, I have 9 INITIAL perks I have to buy. That just make it so that I can block or use heavy armor or a sword effectively without getting staggered. And maybe even have enough cash to dick around and get some real equipment rather than the shit you've harvested off of NPCS.

Leading to another problem of requiems. No one, has, any good shit, that they sell. And if they do, it's so obscenely expensive, that you'd basically weight yourself to a singularity if you were logically carrying the gold for it. What's that, you've got 3000 gold pieces in your pack. That's 30 pounds/wg of GOLD FUCKING COINS. And that'll get you, a plain, unenchanted orcish longsword, or maybe an enchanted iron long sword, if you can find one, maybe a plain dwarven one in markarth. Have fun, you'll either be walking or paying 1.5 pound/wg chunks to fast travel between the cities. Next you have to deal with this problem, if you are a wizard spell tomes, cost around 500-1000 gold each for beginners spells, or 10 POUNDS/wg of gold. Enjoy. Leading too you likely just using that ebony dagger you found in the fucking TUTORIAL DUNGEON, to be your only "good" weapon. What's that, Requiem is a mod that increases choices, and consequences, role playing overhaul where you have to work to do what you want.

Of course, unless you put points into speechcraft, everything you sell, even an enchanted weapon or an artifact, will sell for less than 200 gp. May just a smidge higher. So you better get used to grinding, you're gonna have to do it. I remember getting out of the tutorial and seeing that ebony dagger, which had a value of like 3000 in my inventory, selling for 5% of that value, roughly 150g.

Oh and don't even try to do quests yet, Draugr will fuck your brains out, sometimes literally if you have sexlab defeat installed. So will bandits. So will pretty much anything with an actual weapon. So stick to trying to fight rats, dogs, maybe the occasional mudcrab.

So you know what I did, after roughly 15 hours into a playthrough of requiem, after the tedium got to be too much, I said fuck it.

Installed Sands of Time, longest name in the modding business.
Installed Enai's ordinator perks, and wildcat combat mods.
Installed SoT hardcore encumbrance.
Installed Morrowloot and scarcity x 4(for the Semi-random events).
Installed INeed and Imperious.
Installed 3dNPC, and Trade and Bartar.

And with that roughly 10 mods, accomplished an overhaul that basically did everything Requiem attempts to fucking do. And does it better. Capitalizing on the strengths of the game. SoT makes the overworld harsher, not by killing you in one hit, but by introducing a lot of randomized radiant encounters. It plays more like left 4 dead now. Ordinator perks give lots of passive bonuses but are still better than Requiem by default, because where requiems core assumption is you suck at a skill until you get perks in it. Ordinator assumes at least that you don't suck, not that you are particularly good, or even decent.

Wildcat does combat so much better than either Skyrim or Requiem it's not even funny. It's a tad rough at this point. But it's still a step above any other combat mod I've played. The races are more distinct than Requiems races, because Imperious revamped everything. Morrowloot does handplaced loot in a way and method that makes sense. And doesn't super fuck up the values of items, trade and bartar makes the trade in game make more sense as well.

INeed and SoT hardcore encumberance create reasons to go to town and spend money not because I suddenly can't move, but because it basically progressively makes it feel like your pack is getting fuller due to SoT HE, and gives you the impression you need to eat, drink and sleep from INeed.

It's less cohesive for sure, but when faced with the tedium of Requiem, forced to grind for ages to just get too good gear, I find this preferable. Because it's not bandaiding or glossing over Skyrims problems to the detrement of it's gameplay, but because it increases skyrims strengths, and adds complexity, while still getting rid of some of the flaws.

Now Draq, here you go. How about you "Git good" and get off your fucking butthurt high horse.

 

[Zewp]

roll-a-die, git gud.

 

[roll-a-die]

roll-a-die, git gud.

No u.

 

[DraQ]

The economy is scewed to you having to grind massive amounts of random trash mobs to afford close to anything of relative use.

Not true*. If you concentrate on loot that is either highly valuable or directly useful to you, you can accummulate wealth relatively quickly. If you only hoard gems, jewelry, rare ingredients, etc. as portable wealth you only convert to gold when needed, you can carry quite a lot of wealth, conversely, if you are picking stuff with significantly less v/w than gold with any intention other than using it up or storing it pretty much immediately or making it a part of your adventuring gear, you're doing it wrong. Collecting scrap is typically a hobo-grade job with hobo-grade payouts.

*) Economy has its problems, but this isn't one of them.

A starting character can actually be bogged down in the weight of their own gold and arrows. No joke I had 50 pounds of gold and arrows at one point. Meaning I couldn't pick anything up and had to drop my arrows, at which point skyrim's buggy physics took over, and caused the arrow to bounce for some reason killing my character instantly. Because physics.

This sort of thing only happened once to me, in unmodded and unpatched game.

Gold weight is a good incentive to spend, which makes it harder to accumulate over 9000 bazillion GP as it is common in cRPGs, which is pretty fucking good idea as murderhobo phase of any RPG tends to be the most interesting one.

As for ammo - yeah, it weighs. Don't carry it around by wheelbarrows.

Oh look a game where you can feasibly master everything given enough time. Let's make it too where only mono/pure builds work in any respectable degree.

You're saying? My main character is a battlemage. Hybrids are perfectly viable in Requiem, in fact they may be OP compared to more focused builds because they lack crippling weaknesses.

Oh look, you're expected too fight through hordes of human NPC's, hardened soldiers or rebels, in the tutorial, only they kill you in one hit, often an animated one, that you have no control over.

And they often die in one hit too.
Animated finisher problem has been reqtified recently, there is a slider only allowing them to be performed (by you and NPCs) on targets below certain health threshold, 25% by default.

Leading to your basically cowering behind NPC allies the entire sequence. This basically sets the stage for requiem. It's utterly hostile to solo play. "Git good" in the mind of Draq, seems to be cower behind as an immortal NPC tanks the way through the enemies. This may skew his perception of the actual gameplay just a smidge.

NPCs, even immortal ones, get downed awfully easily, at which point they are worse than useless, because they just get in the way crawling about.
You need to lend a hand as well for them to be any help.

10 hours of running around the wilderness, abusing quick saves or installing a mod that saves for you every 5 minutes, and killing wolves and maybe stray bandits you abused the clumsy stealth mechanics of the original game to glitch out of their bases and away from their allies.
You pray you don't get random events that spawn enemies like Sabretooths, or bears on you, because well, it's basically impossible for you to beat them early on. But gloriously after 10 hours, you'll be around level 7. And able to take on a bandit base with the perks you have, which are mostly boring if you are going for melee, Oh joy, to become a competent sword and board heavy fighter, I have 9 INITIAL perks I have to buy. That just make it so that I can block or use heavy armor or a sword effectively without getting staggered.

That's 3 perks you get from the moment you start Helgen.
You should be able to take on a small bunch of bandits (2-3) right when you leave Helgen, although probably not without using up some resources and certainly not without a lot of movement. Same applies to low-level draugr as they are dumb and slow. If you can't, you need to git gud.

Sabercats and bears - they do exactly what you could expect them to if you weren't conditioned to see every beast as trashmob.
They aren't hard to kill but if you're alone and underestimate them, you'll likely die, even as high level character with good gear.
Being sat on by a bear that tries to chew your face off significantly limits your tactical options, even if you're well enough armoured to survive such treatment for a while.

And maybe even have enough cash to dick around and get some real equipment rather than the shit you've harvested off of NPCS.

Real equipment is whatever broadens your tactical options. If it doesn't it's probably a waste of money. Early on you should focus on getting a horse (fast movement and ability to carry a lot of load), a house and a follower (unless the latter really cramps your style).

Leading to another problem of requiems. No one, has, any good shit, that they sell. And if they do, it's so obscenely expensive, that you'd basically weight yourself to a singularity if you were logically carrying the gold for it. What's that, you've got 3000 gold pieces in your pack. That's 30 pounds/wg of GOLD FUCKING COINS. And that'll get you, a plain, unenchanted orcish longsword, or maybe an enchanted iron long sword, if you can find one, maybe a plain dwarven one in markarth.

Ok, here you've hit one of Requiem's actual problems. Everything costs too much. If nearly all prices (save for gold, silver, better gems, jewelry, advanced magic and top level gear/artifacts) were reduced 10x, along with the abundance of gold and valuables, the economy would still work the same, but with less hassle and less stupid amounts of money changing hands.

I've already suggested this to the authors, BTW.

Have fun, you'll either be walking or paying 1.5 pound/wg chunks to fast travel between the cities. Next you have to deal with this problem, if you are a wizard spell tomes, cost around 500-1000 gold each for beginners spells, or 10 POUNDS/wg of gold. Enjoy. Leading too you likely just using that ebony dagger you found in the fucking TUTORIAL DUNGEON, to be your only "good" weapon. What's that, Requiem is a mod that increases choices, and consequences, role playing overhaul where you have to work to do what you want.

"Good" weapon isn't all that essential in Requiem. Selling that ebony dagger is probably a better investment than keeping it, and if you're a caster there are few better ways to spend gold than spellbooks. They open up tactical options and help train your skills. Unless you're a melee assassin type or at least a dedicated 1h guy, keeping this dagger is a folly, even if the sum seems paltry. It's not Daggerfall (even though the dagger is definitely a tribute to it). Ebony dagger is still just a dagger, even though a very good one. It doesn't do tons of damage, doesn't home on enemies and isn't the only way to hit half of the bestiary early on.
If faced with a troll you'd probably prefer an ordinary iron one but with fire enchantment or a decent steel one plus a torch (granted, a torch is easy to come by without spending any gold).

Oh and don't even try to do quests yet, Draugr will fuck your brains out, sometimes literally if you have sexlab defeat installed. So will bandits. So will pretty much anything with an actual weapon. So stick to trying to fight rats, dogs, maybe the occasional mudcrab.

Don't tank with your face.
Generally you should do your best to never let an unblocked hit through. Heavy armor gives you some safety margin, but a power attack with a heavy 2h weapon or executed by powerful enemy (such as vampire) may still be all that it takes.
And if you have trouble avoiding getting hit even by a lone draugr, then maybe gaming isn't for you.

Also, 3DNPCs is a wonderful complement for Requiem, as it adds tons of interesting, mostly relatively low-level content.

Installed Sands of Time, longest name in the modding business.
Installed Enai's ordinator perks, and wildcat combat mods.
Installed SoT hardcore encumbrance.
Installed Morrowloot and scarcity x 4(for the Semi-random events).
Installed INeed and Imperious.
Installed 3dNPC, and Trade and Bartar.

And with that roughly 10 mods, accomplished an overhaul that basically did everything Requiem attempts to fucking do. And does it better.

Not bad, but it doesn't do it better.

Requiem does a lot work diversifying enemies, skills and so on, without sprinkling everything with fabulous, nonsensical perks.
Heavy armor plays completely different from light. Enemies have their own, logical, strengths and weaknesses - for example draugr are pretty much immune to normal arrows, trolls regenerate awfully fast, big animals can knock you down easily, giant spiders sport nasty bite and even nastier poison, etc.

Requiem's main limitation but also main advantage is that it isn't a collection of disjoint mods.
And it is ONE mod.

And some of your disjoint mods play nicely with Requiem, say, MWL or 3DNPCs (although MWL really needs an artifact only edition and more gating).

OTOH locational damage mods just didn't seem to work well in Skyrim last time I checked, I also remember trying SoT at some point.

Ordinator perks give lots of passive bonuses but are still better than Requiem by default, because where requiems core assumption is you suck at a skill until you get perks in it. Ordinator assumes at least that you don't suck, not that you are particularly good, or even decent.

The thing is Requiem gives you perks right off the boat.

 

[ortucis]

I should probably replay Oblivion one of these days.

Anyone knows of a mod that fixes the level scaling shite? That's the only thing that really bothered me when I played it during release (after learning about level-scaling.. much later). No matter how much you progress, it feels like you don't.

 

[Wayward Son]

I've heard great things about uninstall.exe. But really, Oscuro's did a decent job of that.

 

[roll-a-die]

Well argued Draq, I'll go through it in a bit again, but initially, I quite like how you've written that mate. You didn't use a superior tone either, which is helpful for making me respect your opinion.

EDIT: For clarity and stuffs. Also I will point out last time I tried Requiem I was coming off about 6 months of TESO and was also on a medicine which caused decision paralysis. Which probably shaped a bit of my opinion on it. I also like the feel provided by my cobbled together set of mods, when I do go back to them.

I should probably replay Oblivion one of these days.

Anyone knows of a mod that fixes the level scaling shite? That's the only thing that really bothered me when I played it during release (after learning about level-scaling.. much later). No matter how much you progress, it feels like you don't.

Oscuro's or try to set up FCOM, if you are an utter masochist.