PharmakosChroster

If I continue posting on the Nexus, I think I'm very likely to get banned. I won't be participating any more in the Nexus fora, so if you need to talk to me about a project with which you need assistance, I recommend you send me some email at: S m a s h T h e S t a t e @ S y m p a t i c o . c a (spaces added to thwart spambots).

Reading all these comments about how much more quality armour is available for CBBE, I was scratching my head the whole time, since I use UNP exclusively and haven't found a single thing I wanted which I couldn't use. I eventually realized that it's because I have no interest in Daedric pasties or Red Sonja chainmail bikinis, which are what the CBBE "quality armour" tend to be.

I would consider these mods critical in the sense that, without them, I probably wouldn't want to play Skyrim at all (listed in alphabetical order, not order of preference). Apocalypse Spell Package: There are a few overpowered spells, but not many. The real benefits are from the utility spells which should have been part of the vanilla game, stuff like featherfall, panacaea (cures disease), and open (basic) locks. Auto Unequip Arrows: What this does is unequip your arrows when you put your bow away, and equip them again when you draw it. It's a tiny mod with a tiny effect, but the cumulative effect on the aesthetics of the game is huge. Even if you play a "pure" mage or warrior, you end up carrying a bow and arrows just for emergencies, which means your character spends the entire game with a visible quiver, ruining the appearance for the majority of the game. Better Males/UNP Females: The very first thing I do with any Bethesda game is download a "nude patch." I'm not a pervert, and I'm not interested in low-poly simulated pr0n, but painted-on Victorian prudery annoys me and constantly reminds me I'm playing a video game. Tasteful nudity actually draws far less of my attention than Puritan censorship does. Follower Trap Safety: As far as I'm concerned, without this mod, followers are worse than useless. Having this mod makes all sorts of character builds which involve followers feasible which were not otherwise. Legendary Smithing Upgrades/Lost Art of the Blacksmith/Smithing Perks Overhaul/Val's Crafting Meltdown: As someone who really enjoys the whole hunting-and-gathering thing and can spend many happy hours just wandering the countryside looking for ore, hides, and ingredients, these mods are a must-have for me. I'd have finished Skyrim and uninstalled it a long time ago without these mods, which are complementary with each other. Move It Dammit: Again, another mod which makes followers less irritating. I actually destroyed a keyboard at one point after screaming, "god DAMMIT Lydia, get OUT of the GOD DAMN way!" for what seemed like the 20th time in the last hour. The Art of Magicka: Although I have some basic design disagreements with the designer (the designer seems to really dislike the Norse aesthetic of Skyrim and wants to replace all the rusty iron, narwhal horns, and dirty fur with generic designs off the cover of bad fantasy novels), there is a huge variety of craftable non-armour clothing available, which makes playing a "pure mage" viable. UFO: The dialogue options and immersion here are... not impressive ("Train some, you are weak"), but its utility can't be questioned. It allows you to equip followers as you please, check up on their abilities, and even give them spellbooks to study in order to give them new spells. If you plan to have followers, this mod is just about mandatory.

Real 1st Person View Mod

If you're talking stock, modless Skyrim, my experience is that stealth builds are easy mode. The easiest character I ever played was a one-handed/illusion specialist. For the early game, backstab will do for single opponents, and fury for crowds. Once you get invisibility, it's game over. Dagger in one hand, illusion in the other, and you'll never get hit again. I didn't even bother to wear armour, just clothing enchanted to give me -100% cost on illusion spells. At 30x backstab damage and Mehrune's Razor, I could one-hit anything in the game. Dragons were a bit trickier, but even then I could simply spam invisibility as required until they landed. Then it was game over. Pure spellcasters are harder in the early game, before you can enchant yourself some game-breaking armour to remove spell costs for destruction and/or summoning, and pure warriors are harder in the end-game after you've maxed out your skills and enemies continue to get harder without a consummate improvement in your damage-dealing. Stealthy archers are the glass cannons of Skyrim. They can take down most stuff easily, before anyone even knows they're there, but that small percentage who can survive an alpha strike become Nintendo hard. (I'm looking at you, Morokei.)

A small share of a huge market is larger than a huge share of a small market. The suits who run Bethesda are an Armani-wearing herd of greedy, grasping, short-sighted corporate swine with the aesthetic sensibility of Visigoths. They are therefore slobbering the stanky pucker of the drooling subnormals who populate the console crowd while simultaneously flipping off all the PC gamers who supported them loyally through the hard times. Anyone on a PC with a triple-digit IQ can see the consolized UI in stock Skyrim is simply unplayable, and received little or no playtesting. As for why many console gamers still dislike Skyrim, I'm sure even with the aggressive lobotomization of Skyrim that it's still too complex and immersive for huge swaths of the grunting neanderthals who play their Cheeto-crusted Xboxes with prehensile toes.

. The gods gave you two arms, and you use them to play a violin. I respect that.

Bethesda has made the mistake of going for the low-hanging fruit. PC gamers account for only 15% of Bethesda's sales right now. From the perspective of the beancounters and corporate drones, it's a simple decision: catering to mouth-breathing, slope-headed console neanderthals brings them six times the cash of catering to the people who supported them when they were small and struggling. This decision, however, will yet come back to bite them in their collective arses. The tastes of the console cretins are fickle, and their loyalties nonexistent. The first time Bethesda releases a Daikatana -- and they will -- they will suffer the same fate as Ion Storm, and for the same reason: greed and arrogance. They have forgotten one of the darker truisms of corporate life, that one should be kind to those one passes on the way up, because one will pass them again on the way down.

When new locations are added to your map, you get a message saying, "Location added to map" -- but it doesn't tell you *which* location it added. This can be a nuisance when there isn't an accompanying miscellaneous quest entry added. For example, when you encounter the random mercenary on the road and convince hir to let you look into the issue sie was assigned to deal with, there's no way to tell what map location it is; there's no quest marker, and you're never told which location it is. Is there anyone who could make a mod which gives the name of the location being added, so that instead of "Location added to map," you get "<Name of location> added to map"?

I fooled around with the GECK in FO3 a few years back, but not since then. I imagine the principle is the same, so it shouldn't be hard to pick it up as required. I used to design and build scenarios for Heroes of Might and Magic II, so I've done a little mod-making, though not for Beth' games.

I have a bit of free time, so I'm offering my skills as a writer to mod designers in need. I can do prose, news & feature writing, and technical specs, and can edit for spelling and grammar (UK/Canadian English) in Canadian Press style. I was an administrator in the 90s for what was, at the time, one of the largest MUDs on the Internet, so I have experience with atmosphere, game balance, and the logical necessities involved in writing C-style object-oriented code for a game. My professional work as a writer has mostly been fetish erotica, but I have also been published as a Mythos horror writer. My style tends to be rather purple and pulpy, so don't expect Flaubert; I'm happy if I can measure up to Lovecraft and Howard. Part of the reason why I'm offering my skills is out of annoyance with several mod designers who believe their deathless prose is so perfect that friendly suggestions for improving descriptions, documentation, or NPC dialogue options results in monocle-popping dudgeon and disbelief. Folks, your My Little Pony fanfics may be very well received, but it doesn't make you a professional-level writer. Let me help.

Okay, thanks. Funny, every time I hear something about Bethesda, it keeps increasing my contempt. They seem to be trying to supplant EA as the Bastard Kings of Gaming.

I recently got a warning from staff here for commenting in a thread about porting files between copies of Skyrim on different media, something I would have assumed was completely innocent before being informed by staff, and this thread has me wondering now. If a person made a mod which accessed music in a Morrowind install on the same computer, would it still be a violation of the rules? In other words, no file is being copied, no data is included in the mod, all the mod does is look for and play music from a game already installed on the player's computer. Still verboten?

Just to be clear, I'm not asking about the sort of mods to which you're referring, but rather a mod which stitches the games together internally. So when you cross over physically from Morrowind to Cyrodiil, you begin using the Oblivion executable but with your Morrowind character translated into the new system. So in order to play it, you need to own all the games to start with. It's nothing you couldn't do manually with the console. There's a mod which does it for FO3/FONV and I'm wondering if such a mod is being worked on for Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim.

There was a mod for FO3/FONV which allowed someone with both games installed to physically travel between The Capital Wasteland and New Vegas, eseentially translating the player between each. I was wondering if anyone knows if there are any teams working on a similar mod for Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim. I own all three games, and it would be fun to be able to travel between them. (Though it wouldn't make much logical sense of course; I suppose the Nerevarine could theoretically be the Hero of Kvatch, but also the Dovahkiin? Not likely. And crossing the mountains into Skyrim would involve time travel...)

Blackreach was cribbed from the Lost Spires mod for Oblivion, right down to the ambient chimes.

In the opening scene when you're in the tumbrel with Ulfric, you can see that Ulfric's left foot clips the left foot of the thief from Rorikstead across from him. I know this is a very minor thing, but it drives me totally insane. I have to see it every time I start a new game, and all I can think about is how easy it would have been for Bethesda to fix it, and how impotent I am to do anything about it. Is there anyone who can move Ulfric very slightly to the right to fix this?

In general I prefer the Dwemer ruins, but they've lost a lot of their panache in Skyrim. The Morrowind Dwemer ruins felt claustrophobic and scary, full of rusty metal and set up in a way where you could imagine people actually living there. In Skyrim, the Dwemer ruins are large and spacious with lots of light. They also have a layout like a typical "treasure dungeon" instead of a place where people once worked and lived. The Skyrim Dwemer ruins also look insufficiently old, with not enough wrack, ruin, and rust; it's like the Dwemer disappeared ten years ago instead of aeons ago. (Edit: Why were the Dwemer of Morrowind obsessed with barrels? The Dwemer of Skyrim apparently have a phobia of barrels, because I haven't seen a single one.)

Oh Brandy, I very much fear you are mistaken. About a lot of things. "The market" does not determine how the people of Skyrim live. The people of Skyrim do. And the people of Skyrim are getting tired of being relentlessly ransacked by a tiny number of "adventurers" like the Dovahkiin who believe that because they have the biggest swords, they can take what they wish and kill whom they please. For a very long time, the jarls have protected the adventurers, and anyone who dared to stand up to the adventurers were thrown in the dungeon or had their heads cut off in the public square or were quietly made to disappear by the Dark Brotherhood. But you see, Brandy, the Dovahkiin and his fellow adventurers have robbed and pillaged so many people, so many towns and villages, that there are increasingly large numbers of people across Skyrim going to bed with empty bellies. They are being forced to work the mines and fish the lakes ever longer hours just to get repeatedly pillaged by the Dovahkiin. When hard-working farmers and fishermen beg the Dovahkiin not to steal any more septims from them, that their children are hungry and their cottages are shabby, the Dovahkiin just laughs and says, "Then why do you not buy a suit of ebony armour and a daedric axe like I do, and slay yourself a dragon?" And, Brandy, I am very much afraid for the future of Skyrim. I am afraid because the Dovahkiin and the other adventurers and the jarls who support them don't seem to recognize one very important fact, a fact elucidated upon by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “You can have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power.” The Dovahkiin has become accustomed to getting his way, but lately he's found a surprising number of people are refusing to just hand over their septims. He's having to actually chop people up with his sword to get their dwindling septims, and townsfolk are starting to glare angrilly at him when he thunders through town covered in the blood of their neighbours. I am afraid for Skyrim because in his arrogance and stupidity, the Dovahkiin doesn't realize that he is aggroing the entire land. The Dovahkiin may murder thousands, and the rivers will run red with blood and fire, but the aggro he has built up is limitless. One angry farmer with a pickaxe isn't a threat, but a thousand are. The ordinary people of Skyrim have begun to organize, and when they finally begin to move, all those big, expensive, treasure-filled houses the Dovahkiin has purchased are going to be nothing more than treasure chests for the people to loot when they've killed the final boss. I am not at all concerned that the Dovahkiin will murder thousands before he's brought down. The people of Skyrim have faced worse and survived. What makes me concerned is that the people will earn all too much experience in all the wrong skill trees from their struggle, skills which will make them better at casting firebolts and swinging axes than doing anything productive, and that they will feel the need to keep on using these skills even after the threat is gone. That is the terrible legacy that the greedy, vicious, arrogant Dovahkiin will leave behind when history sweeps his broken body into the trash where he belongs.

It could also be heat. Do you have a heat monitor installed? (Try downloading Speccy to help us figure out what your problem might be, hardware-wise.)

How about, after the Dovahkiin has robbed and pillaged his way across Skyrim, murdering anyone who gets in his way and stealing everything which isn't nailed down, we ask him to pay fair wages to the people who fetch his mead and bang out the dents in his armour and clean his house and sharpen his axe and cook his food and heal his wounds and sweep his chimney and stoke his fire and the thousand other tasks he takes for granted as he sleeps on a mountain-sized heap of money he stole and decided to claim that he "earned." And I think you'll find that there are quite a few members of Occupy Whiterun who are neither beggars nor peasants nor kindly old peaceful priests of Mara, and who don't find the Dovahkiin especially scary. And whose long experience fighting the Jarl's brutal guardsmen in the marketplace have taught them how to fight and who to fight. If you think the Forsworn are scary with their stealthy knives in the back, you haven't seen anything yet. When all possibility for peacefully erncouraging the Dovahkiin to stop being such an oboxious n'wah have ended, the cities of Skyrim will burn, and not all the Jarl's men will put them out. The Dovahkiin doesn't care about the health of anyone else because he doesn't believe his own health is at risk; soon, he will see that he is very, very, very wrong,

Uriel Septim VII sure wasn't. :biggrin: Neither was Al-Esh, Reman, or any other DB. Tiber Septim was. Is.

I suspect this may be my last Elder Scrolls games. I've been playing since Daggerfall, and I'm really dismayed by the direction it's taken since Morrowind. I spent $3500 on a computer for the explicit purpose of being able to play games. Having my game experience nerfed so that someone with a $200 console can have the same experience I scrimped and saved and sacrificed to get is both ludicrous and unfair. This sudden love affair with Steam has totally put me off of Elder Scrolls, and with the dumbing down of the game mechanics it made me wait six months before picking up Skyrim where I used to one of those first-in-line types. If the next installment of the Elder Scrolls continues in the direction I fear it will, I think Skyrim will be my last. Bethesda better hope that the fickle tastes of console cretins don't change, because they've successfully alienated the very people who were their strongest supporters through their arrogance and ungratefulness. There's another company which operated with a business model built on alienating their customers while relying on being the only game in town; M$ just posted the first quarterly loss in its history. Take heed, Bethesda.

Sure you do. For example, even most bandits will yell at you to clear off and warn you away rather then just attack you. It just so happens that most interactions with the Dovahkiin tend to go like this: Bandit: "Oi, geroffit, 'is iz moi patch!" Dovahkiin: "That is a nice pair of boots you have there. Orcish, are they? Enchanted?" Bandit: "Whuz all 'is, then, eh? Clear off a'fore oi up'n job ye!" Dovahkiin: "FUS RO DAH!" Sure, pillaging your way across Skyrim is rewarding, but nothing says you have to mug every person you meet and heave their stripped corpse away over your shoulder like an empty beer bottle. It just generally works out that way.

I use Apocalypse Spell Package and The Art of Magicka. Apocalypse contains a few overpowered spells, but mostly they're utility spells which should have been included in the vanilla game. The featherfall spell which allows you to fall any distance (for 15 seconds) is particularly useful in Skyrim. The Art of Magicka has some questionable design decisions (the person who made it doesn't seem to like the Norse aesthetic, for example, and seems to want to replace everything with the sort of generic sword-and-sorcery designs you find on the cover of bad fantasy novels), but most of it you don't have to use, and there's enough new magic-oriented craftables (like lots and lots and lots of non-armour clothing in every conceivable colour) to make a pure-mage viable and enjoyable.