Skyrim Special Edition

[oldmanpaco]

Did anyone ever get Deadly Mutilations to work in SSE? That was a fun mod.

 

[Konjad]

 

[JRIz]

I recently played Skyrim and in the Dawnguard DLC, there's this one thing I wonder about. It has the Soul Cairn location which makes the whole game make a nosedive when it comes to fun gameplay (stealth archer corridor cleaning is pretty OK otherwise).

It follows the exact same design principles as this cave with the Red Nirnroots in the MQ. Both are extremely large areas with almost no content except some very simplistic fetch quests. But you must traverse them in order to progress in the quest. It is one of the most boring things I can imagine in a game. Can someone enlighten me as to the origin of the design principles behind this? Does it come from MMOs? I mean, these locations are not even good for hiking and I have never seen anything like this in other Bethesda games.

 

[DalekFlay]

My final setup

Ancient post, but holy fuck man those exaggerated colors. Do you use "vivid" mode on your TV too? Hideous shit.

 

[Chippy]

So I only played Skyrim once. True story. I was actually thinking of giving it another go - with lots of mods. So do the modders only support the special edition these days, or is there usually support for the original game?.

Thanks.

 

[Butter]

There's still a lot of activity on the original Skyrim Nexus, and it has more mods than SSE and Fallout 4 combined.

 

[Chippy]

There's still a lot of activity on the original Skyrim Nexus, and it has more mods than SSE and Fallout 4 combined.

Cool. I'm a bit late to the party, but I remember they had the SE option for free for people that had all the DLC, but I didn't buy the home building one. I noticed that's disapeared now and you have to buy the SE. So thought they had put the mods behind the paywall of the SE. I can't see why mods shouldn't just work for both games.

Plus, I remember looking at the 'advanced graphics' of the special edition (and the recommended requirements being a 4gb card) and they looked worse. Game looked ok on the 1GB card I had at the time.

 

[Butter]

My understanding is that some mods work on both versions, but others won't. I don't know the technical specifics, but when Bethesda were getting ready to reveal the Special Edition, they contacted some modders and gave them early access so that they could convert their mods by the time it released. Day 1 SSE had a pretty good selection of mods as a result.

 

[Falksi]

Jesus Christ, just watching these vids is reminding me how bad Skyrim was.

 

[Luzur]

Fertility Mode
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/13068/?
Adds a menstrual cycle to the women of Skyrim for role play purposes. Tracked women proceed through the menstrual cycle and can become pregnant as well as give birth to babies.
For the best experience, the following additional mod(s) are recommended:

• Flower Girls SE: Adds an immersive way to have sex in Skyrim. Fertility Mode is compatible with an optional patch.

Spoiler

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Elder Scrolls are the king baby ! For serious i had whole Encyclopedia Tamrielica 2 tomes plus lot of source material from IL printed and on the shelf makes me ES nerd 100%.
Wonder when TES VI will be released. Playing any part of ES since Arena was always my favourite time.
Actually replaying Skyrim SE with Bruma and Faalskar.

Fertility Mode
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/13068/?
Adds a menstrual cycle to the women of Skyrim for role play purposes. Tracked women proceed through the menstrual cycle and can become pregnant as well as give birth to babies.
For the best experience, the following additional mod(s) are recommended:

• Flower Girls SE: Adds an immersive way to have sex in Skyrim. Fertility Mode is compatible with an optional patch.

Spoiler

 

[Sigourn]

My issue with Skyrim is that the lack of variety in the quests leads to a heavy focus on the dungeons over the roleplaying (i.e. LARPing in this case). And sadly, as creative some of the visuals in the dungeons are, it boils down to the same shit every time. It doesn't help there isn't much variety in enemies either. And the dungeons aren't that rewarding too.

Playing a stealthy archer hunting creatures in the wild can be fun for a while, but you can't make that the entirety of the game.

 

[Poseidon00]

Last time I played it I had a mod setup to try out the Cyrodil province, a few weapon mods and weapon animation mods, a few spell packs and Path of Sorcery for the magic perks, and some town called Oakwood. Was actually pretty solid.

 

[Chippy]

My issue with Skyrim is that the lack of variety in the quests leads to a heavy focus on the dungeons over the roleplaying (i.e. LARPing in this case). And sadly, as creative some of the visuals in the dungeons are, it boils down to the same shit every time. It doesn't help there isn't much variety in enemies either. And the dungeons aren't that rewarding too.

Playing a stealthy archer hunting creatures in the wild can be fun for a while, but you can't make that the entirety of the game.

I had some good moments in large battles. Warzones of Skyrim I think. I remember playing this large battle the Stormcloaks lost, out on the ice with fog all around, and all the Imperials were after me. I was sniping them for sneak damage and taking them out one at a time. It was pretty cool and atmospherice while it lasted.

If the next Skyrim manages large battles and NPCs with skills like tracking, spot and listen, tactical ai, and specific class enemies, that battle could really have been something.

...Maybe 30 years from now.

 

[gurugeorge]

Christ, I was so bored I decided to get into modding Skyrim for the umpteenth time - again.

Some really solid improvements since I last got into it. In particular, the new animation engine, Nemesis, is doing wonders for making Skyrim PC control and movement more life-like. Especially when combined with Immersive Camera. Smooth Camera and iEquip. All you need really (in conjunction with SkyUI's built-in favourites system).

Smooth Camera makes controlling a Skyrim avatar a delight, with a much more polished "action" feel, almost like modern games in its slickness now. iEquip is a fantastic mod that you can use with basic features, or a lot more in-depth. Very easy to set up, very good for the thing of starting small with only a few preciuos items, and then building your kit as you go, so you understand it better in order to use it better.

Also there's a quick and dirty solution for the amateurish "jitter" problem that Bethesda have left in the game for years, that drives those of us who prefer to play in 3rd person crazy (I refer of course to the jitters your character gets if you have a mouse and you're prone to keep a light hold on it even when you're not steering. Tiny movements of the mouse are amplified into a horrible, brain disturbing jitter effect that ultimately makes you not want to play Skyrim (in 3rd person at least, and that's literally half the fun of the game for me). Mod called Dirty Skyrim Animation Turn Fix. Bit of a DIY faff to set up, but easy enough to do with MO2. (The idea is genius. Since we can't get it fixed Behesda-side, you can at least get rid of the jittering effect to a very large degree by replacing the right60 turn and left60 turns with the main idle itself (copying it twice and renaming the copies the appropriate left and right names). The "mod" is just a file structure with vanilla versions of the files you need to look for if you have some fancy-schmancy animation mods.

Sheer genius in the simplicity of the idea! It means that instead of jittering you skate a teensy bit, but that's much less visually intrusive and immersion-breaking, to the extent you don't notice it any more and can get into muh immersion more easily. (My idea for a fix, btw, was to have a tiny mouse "dead zone," like a joystick deadzone, so that those tiny movements of your hand just don't trigger the half speed side move animation until it looks natural for it to come in.

And with the Nemesis engine (and combine that even again with animation variety from the Dynamic Animations Replacer and the various packs people have made for it), what you're controlling is the animations beatifully varying and blended in a natural looking way.

This time round I've taken to faffing about with, ahem, complex-to-set-up Loverslab stuff, which has meant I've left the Special Edition landscape pretty much as-is. And actually it has its charms au naturel (with Rudy ENB SE ofc). It's more "painterly" in terms of art design than the more realistic and detailed replacers I'm used to, but it's aesthetically of a piece and has its own powerful fairytale atmosphere. The colours are just really nicely done (with ENB ofc).

Another great little mod is ENB Light, which creates screen space particle effects by accessing the depth buffer (so preferably for third person gameplay - it only works to enhance lights that have their source on-screen, so sometimes it doesn't work if there's an important light-source offscreen relative to your first person view - still it's really worth it for 3rd peron, adds another tweak in terms of beauty and immersion). It adds things like glowing magic light from your hands, which lights the area around you and casts shadows - you can also do torches, fire and other lightsources, and even dragon's breath if you have a computer that can fight God. I know Skyrim can do that anyway with painstaking editing of your .esp file, but it's another very effective "quick and dirty" solution to high quality lighting in-game.

Oh, and mustn't forget Pascal Gilcher's raytracing mod for Reshade. It's a fantastic replacement for ambient occlusion - turn that shit off and bask in the glory of some kind of mysterious thing that's somewhere inbetween ambient occlusion and actual raytracing. Looks so much better, everything looks that bit more solid and life-like.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Elder Scrolls are the king baby ! For serious i had whole Encyclopedia Tamrielica 2 tomes plus lot of source material from IL printed and on the shelf makes me ES nerd 100%........

Do you have pics of this? Did you go through a company to have the books bound? Leather?

 

[oldmanpaco]

This is on sale right now and I'm thinking about getting it for my kid. Right now he loves stuff like Shieldwall and Ravenfield. Need to get him a babies first RPG before he goes all in on crapware. On the other hand the risk of becoming a bethtard is not zero.

Parenting is hard.

 

[Semiurge]

This is on sale right now and I'm thinking about getting it for my kid. Right now he loves stuff like Shieldwall and Ravenfield. Need to get him a babies first RPG before he goes all in on crapware. On the other hand the risk of becoming a bethtard is not zero.

Parenting is hard.

You'd better install loverslab mods too so that he'll learn about the birds and the bees without your awkward instruction.

 

[oldmanpaco]

This is on sale right now and I'm thinking about getting it for my kid. Right now he loves stuff like Shieldwall and Ravenfield. Need to get him a babies first RPG before he goes all in on crapware. On the other hand the risk of becoming a bethtard is not zero.

Parenting is hard.

You'd better install loverslab mods too so that he'll know about the birds and the bees without your awkward instruction.

See Bethesda games are a slippery slope. Fuck it he can start with Ultima III like I did.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

I haven't played Skyrim since idk, 2013...

Can you tell me what's up with the mods? Is there a manager that deals with installation order, and what are the basics mods that anyone would want anyway?

Thanks, I appreciate.

Edit: I think I figured it out. Just one question. Is loverslab not necessary now? I'm seeing a lot of sex stuff on nexusmods.

 

[cretin]

I haven't played Skyrim since idk, 2013...

Can you tell me what's up with the mods? Is there a manager that deals with installation order, and what are the basics mods that anyone would want anyway?

Thanks, I appreciate.

Edit: I think I figured it out. Just one question. Is loverslab not necessary now? I'm seeing a lot of sex stuff on nexusmods.

Mod Organizer 2. Accept no substitutes (they're all trash).

Mods are largely overrated. After all these years the only thing id recommend is YASH (yet another skyrim hardcore) or Requiem. Skyrim SE looks perfectly fine, so the only visual mods you "need" IMO is Static Mesh Improvement Mod, and possibly the ruins clutter thing + using dyndolod and texgenlod or whatever to make better LODs.

Don't fall down the rabbit hole of trying to replace every asset in the game, thats where you spend 200 hours modding and half an hour playing only to realize the only actual eyesore parts of the game can't be saved by mods (such as distant cell rendering). Besides: a lot of the work the autistic community insists you must have is actually markedly worse looking than vanilla - as lazy as bethesda is, these modders clearly aren't professional artists and it shows when you see the whole thing in motion/play.

Other than that, just stick to modding things only if they bother the hell out of you. A lot of mods sound cool on paper, but don't play so well. Things like Frostfall come to mind - ends up being little more than a tedious bar management minigame because skyrim is ironically too small for survival elements to every truly matter beyond LARPing, and actually you are better off LARPing without the mod because at least then you'll be "immersed" instead of looking at a HUD element every 10 seconds.

 

[janior]

requiem is shit

 

[cretin]

requiem is shit

do tell why you lazy cunt

 

[gurugeorge]

I haven't played Skyrim since idk, 2013...

Can you tell me what's up with the mods? Is there a manager that deals with installation order, and what are the basics mods that anyone would want anyway?

Thanks, I appreciate.

Edit: I think I figured it out. Just one question. Is loverslab not necessary now? I'm seeing a lot of sex stuff on nexusmods.

Mod Organizer 2. Accept no substitutes (they're all trash).

Mods are largely overrated. After all these years the only thing id recommend is YASH (yet another skyrim hardcore) or Requiem. Skyrim SE looks perfectly fine, so the only visual mods you "need" IMO is Static Mesh Improvement Mod, and possibly the ruins clutter thing + using dyndolod and texgenlod or whatever to make better LODs.

Don't fall down the rabbit hole of trying to replace every asset in the game, thats where you spend 200 hours modding and half an hour playing only to realize the only actual eyesore parts of the game can't be saved by mods (such as distant cell rendering). Besides: a lot of the work the autistic community insists you must have is actually markedly worse looking than vanilla - as lazy as bethesda is, these modders clearly aren't professional artists and it shows when you see the whole thing in motion/play.

Other than that, just stick to modding things only if they bother the hell out of you. A lot of mods sound cool on paper, but don't play so well. Things like Frostfall come to mind - ends up being little more than a tedious bar management minigame because skyrim is ironically too small for survival elements to every truly matter beyond LARPing, and actually you are better off LARPing without the mod because at least then you'll be "immersed" instead of looking at a HUD element every 10 seconds.

lol, so true that about the art design. You can get a decently realistic Skyrim out of visuals modding, but you have to pick and choose, not everything that's recommended is good (or is just someone's personal taste), and really it's best to leave most of it alone. The standard SE graphics, with as you say some mesh improvements and distance tweaks, have a very nice fairytale look to them.

The thing about modding is that the modding in your head when you anticipate a session of modding is always much more exciting than the modding you can actually do (sex mods, I'm looking at you). Though people try because autistes be autistes, and it's the least-worst option available (and ofc it's great that Bethesda have always allowed and encouraged it, one of their strongest points).

Also great point about the survival mods. They're all actually pretty good and work well, and it's kinda fun for a while LARPing with setting up a tent and campfire at night, making sure you've got the right gear, etc., but it's a case of "all dressed up with nowhere to go" - the world of Skyrim is effectively tiny, with one "event" crammed in after another, no actual just empty countryside that would make the survival stuff meaningful. And also, none of the way the world is set up (in terms of lore and art design) makes for a good background for a survival story really. The game is designed for fast, loopy gameplay, and if you try to make it feel more realistic, the realism just gets in the way of enjoying Skyrim for being Skyrim.

I always do feel that there's a demand for semi-realistic survivalism in open world games, but a game world built for survival would have to be at least 3 times as big as Skyrim, with less crap jammed together on it.

I'm surprised nobody's done like a Ranger or Hunter game where you're a ranger, or a normally skilled hunter drawn into events beyond his ken, but you're also a survivalist, and you need the skills so you can go and get the bad guys. Then you could have the desired mix of fantasy and realism.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

I installed a bunch of mods through Vortex. But when I open Skyrim and go to "Mods", most of them aren't enabled.

Should I enable them manually or is Vortex taking care of it, and fiddling with this menu will only break things?

Answer is not googlable.

 

[racofer]

requiem is shit

do tell why you lazy cunt

It's Skyrim. What else needs to be said?