Calamachus

I've been looking for something like the Alternate Start mod for a while. Can someone please explain to me why that's not on the Hot List? Awesome mod.

I'm a huge fan of small publishers and buy their stuff whenever I find something I even moderately like. The problem though is the huge undertakings, like Skyrim. Could you have made something more true to form with the open world games like Daggerfall, Ultima VII, Fallout and the like? Yes, but certainly not with everything voiced, motion capture animation and all the nifty high-cost bonuses. You're not going to get Max von Sydow to do any of your voice acting. What is that tradeoff worth? Good question. I'd pay $60 for a game with less impressive graphics (those are the easiest thing to improve with mods anyway), some less professional voice acting (I'd even be happy with some Morrowind-style most communication in text and only a few things voiced content) and a crap ton more plot and story depth with a wider range of options. Could you do that for < $10 million? < $2 million? Would I be happy with a $60 game with only Morrowind graphics today? Ugh, that's a hard call. It's also a nearly impossible sell for getting investment capital. I want too though. Mount & Blade, ARMA II, these are some great examples of PC niche games that have become reasonably successful and largely based on the modding community. Wasteland 2 looks like it's going to be awesome. How many games like that have come out recently though? DRM, second-hand game sales, that sort of stuff is one of those 'stupid human behavior' business factors. Do they legitimately impact sales numbers? No. Not really. They stick in the craw for a product creator though. The moment someone with an MBA or CPA sees some metric detailing 'fraud loss' (relative value of pirated/stolen product) or something detailing the value of second-hand game sales that they don't see a penny of and they will start working on a business case for some product, new business model or process change to try and recoup that mythical lost revenue. "This new DRM will cost us $250,000 to implement and $4 per unit but will increase total sales revenue by $2 million! It's a great business investment!" Then when it fails and you try to say 'The revenue was never there. It's a secondary residual, unless we sell our own games second hand we're never going to see any of it regardless. Pirated content does not equate directly or really even indirectly to lost sales' the response you get is 'It is too lost revenue, I have metrics to prove it! With CHARTS!' It will always feel like it's money they are being screwed out of. Beyond that most people who make something, games or otherwise, would rather a unit never even get sold than let someone steal it. It's a point of pride. That's never going to change. The moment you get more than 10 people in a business someone will have a job based on trying to get more money out of the same product.

@handofbane Sales can be viewed as the 'score' in this game and that makes it a tough thing to ignore. Games like CoD, even though there not in the same genre, showed how much money was on the table so to speak. The money behind the business and the investment side of things is going to look for what it can quantify to gauge success and return. That and plain old competition. If you're a game developer aren't you going to feel the drive to be the best? How do you gauge that? The guy writing your check is probably going to gauge it by how many copies you sell. As to DRM, I really hate it. I was a latecomer to Steam and still dislike it in principle. Piracy is always going to happen. The problem is that it's not really even about how much money is legitimately lost, it's about the feeling of being stolen from. If you tell someone 'I realize that there are a lot of people stealing your product, effectively crapping all over the value of the time and money you've put into making and producing it but it's not like it's really costing you a lot in the end' they're still not going to be happy about it. The only people who really suffer from piracy are the legitimate game consumers. We get stuck with the DRM crap and the negative stigma of the PC market it creates. Fixing piracy isn't going to make a big difference in what size of the financial pie PC game consumers generate. Right now our big cards are modding and we tend to buy a lot more DLC. Fortunately the next generation of consoles should help us, bringing the new standard for consoles closer to the average hardware in a gaming PC. @Fortunado3 So, I talk about the economic aspects of game design, development and sales today as opposed to 12 years ago and the market factors that drive the shift from a PC-focused industry to a console-focused industry, you respond with some personal opinions, condescending generalizations like 'the sheep', some ad hominem and some entitlement driven 'its the vets that matter' stuff. Strange, since I've been playing TES titles since Arena, though I did skip Redguard. None of which has anything at all to due with what goes into game development, what drives game development and what if any leverage PC gamers have in the industry. We are clearly not having the same conversation. You and I are also just as clearly not going to agree so I'm just going to say 'hope your approach works out for you. Best of luck.'

I would say leave the current front page the way it is. Hot Files is a honest representation of what people are downloading and liking. That's not a bad thing at all. Anyone who is surprised by the fact that, amazingly enough, most men enjoy pictures of mostly naked women has a lot more to learn in life than just how to sort mods by tag on a website. Trying to censor mature content above and beyond what the site already does not seem like a good investment of time and energy to me. I'm all for letting modders self-select for lore-friendly. Anyone who wants to be a jackass and put their hard work on display in a location where it won't be appreciated will get a reminder of the unpleasant truths of why good modders often quit the community in a huff. I really don't expect that to come up and trying to create a 'THESE ARE THE STONE-CARVED LAWS OF WHAT IS AND IS NOT LORE' list is doomed from inception. Let modders mark their work as 'lore friendly' if they want to. Let us have a second 'hot list' that only sorts the lore-friendly tagged mods. Let us do so with all the existing pre-built sorting methods (most popular in last 2 weeks, most popular of all time, etc). That's it. Simple, non-judgemental, as inclusive as possible while still achieving the generally desired results.

A realist...we are becoming a small section in the demographic picture. I was really tempted to just let this go because I absolutely realize no amount of discussion of economics is going to change your opinion, but I've just got to ask. What are you talking about? Pander to the lowest common denominator? Lazy? Greed, absolutely. If by 'greed' you mean 'get paid and feed your family'. Do you think that everyone who works at Bethesda is knee deep in hookers and blow? All these insanely wealthy game developers, hanging around on their private islands and being escorted around in gold-plated limos? But lazy? Skyrim has probably invested more time and money just into the motion capture animations than was spent in total on Morrowind. More time, more money, more people were invested in Skyrim than any TES game prior. How is that lazy? That one boggles me. Like somehow all these people who went into game design because they love in instead of taking a higher paying job in some soulless IT department just don't care about their work? Admittedly I know a few people in the game design industry. Nobody at Bethesda, but still. Pandering.... not sure where 'lowest common denominator' comes in. The console market is over 80% of the business now. It wasn't at the time Morrowind or even Oblivion were being developed (around 2000 for Morrowind and 2003 for Oblivion) and thus the games were designed for PCs and ported for consoles. No question Skyrim was made for the console market - which is why it could be made in the first place. Skyrim sold more copies in the first two weeks than Oblivion did since 2006. Because of that TES VI is going to get made despite the rising cost of game development. They are selling their product to the largest group of people who will pay them the most money for it. Are you saying they should feel guilty and ashamed for that? That attitude is a great way to get your opinions and recommendations utterly written off and ignored. The reality is you want someone to go above and beyond what everyone else is paying them for (and happily so) and do something extra for you but all for the same price. The whole point of my post, from the start, is to say that if you want to do that you need to provide them an impetus to do so. Are you going to pay extra? I'm pretty sure 'I promise not to badmouth you on the forums anymore' isn't going to do it. Again. PC gamers are now the minority. We want special treatment for the same CPU (cost per unit) as console gamers. Right now we add value by making mods and generating word of mouth advertisement. Our best angle would be to become the 'high return' market segment. Longer loyalty, higher return per consumer (more likely to buy DLC, etc). That's where piracy comes in as a negative. Everyone who pirates a game on the PC just cut their value of the copy of the game you actually bought in half. Literally. There is an inherent resistance to investing in a market that has a lot of loss due to fraud. If you sold TVs all over the country but in Flushing, NY 1 in 10 of the TVs you ship there got stolen when everywhere else in the country it was closer to 1 in 1,000, how tempted would you be to stop selling in Flushing? You're still going to make 90% of your sales, but still. What if it was 50%? You'd have to make everyone else in the country pay a little extra to offset your losses in Flushing. That is why piracy hurts PC gamers. It drives business decisions away from our market. Or you can just believe that everyone else is just 'out to get you' and that businesses make their decisions based on some strange desire to do evil. Whatever floats your boat. Hope that works out for you, keep us updated on how it goes. I'm going to stay focused on actually getting what I want based on economics and the realities of business and industry.

@Tidus44: Boy it's a good thing you chimed in. I can't say how glad I am that you shared that. No, seriously. In the terms and conditions. It pretty much outright says that I can't say it. Something about flaming. ******************************* Anyway. Again, the idea isn't about changing the layout of the Nexus site or tacit implication that one mod is better than another. Just some better search options for lore friendly content. By Lore Friendly I'm content with anything moderately in keeping with the game setting in the opinion of the mod-developer.

It's not about 'excuses'. It's about profitability. If 'dumbing down' as you put it (streamlining I think is the favored term in most industries for dumbing stuff down) gets more copies sold and earns more profit then it's the direction the industry will go. That's a big part of my point. What are WE, by which I mean PC game consumers who want a more complicated product, offering to make that investment worthwhile? QA is and has always been an issue in games, hardware and software for as long as they have existed. It's certainly not tied to computer games. As systems get more complex the number of things that can go wrong increase. I've worked on inhouse software development in a couple of large businesses. There was a huge focus on it being bug-free but at the end of the day it's just not possible. That has nothing to do with consoles, piracy or anything else save the complexity of the product. If you think Skyrim, just as an example, is mediocre then what do you consider exceptional? 5 years and somewhere between $20-$100 million dollars (so the statistics say for a AAA game), over 30gb of content uncompressed.... is there some uber-game that came out 10 years ago that was actually better? Some example of complete and perfect gaming upon which no improvement has or ever could be made? For example I loved morrowind - when I could play it but it crashed almost constantly for me. It had some features I enjoyed but the combat system was crap and all the quests were linear, etc. etc. For the same $60 that gets you Mass Effect three which is probably 30-50 hours of entertainment (with multiple playthroughs) I've gotten a good 500 hours out of Skyrim thanks to mods (which Beth supports hardcore) and the Nexus. That's mediocre to you? I admit that sort of attitude really confuses me. Given the realities of the costs involved in game development now Skyrim is phenomenal on the PC. If your intent is to motivate game developers to give you more for your money I'm not sure buying it and saying 'Meh, could have been better' is going to do it. That other 80% on the console market plus most of the PC market paid the same money you did for the same game and said we loved it. What are you offering that we are not? In the end it's all academic. What is important is that if you want the industry to move your direction to have to offer something more than everyone else or otherwise make it a good business decision. Saying 'I'm not going to buy any games made for the console market' isn't going to do it - everyone else already is buying it. Would you pay more? Enough to make it worthwhile? $80 a game? $100? Just looking at raw market percentages you'd need to pay approximately 5x what a console gamer does to make releasing a game just for the PC as cost effective for the developer. Probably less due to a reverse economy of scale (selling less copies involves less overhead) but still. $200? A better coin to offer is loyalty, consistency and support - these payoff to a developer in terms of making it easier to get investment capital for the next title in the series. That at least can keep us in the loop and justify the greater cost of cross-developing for the PC. Better consoles will help because it will push up the bar, but otherwise the best advice is to always remember that we are a niche market. Be worth selling to because we're not the biggest fish in the pond.

Also keep in mind that your craft skills reduce your relative fighting power compared to your level. Level nothing but combat skills and you'll be a beast - get that Smithing up to 80 by the time you're level 20 and you'll be a good 5-10 levels weaker than a pure combat monster. You start leveling alchemy/smithing/enchantment along with it and suddenly you HAVE to twink the bjesus out of your gear just to keep up. I find 20-30 to be the worst when I'm trying to have a warrior/smith sort of character. You'll run into some Falmer archer or bandit mage who is just a stone cold b*tch to to defeat or even just a small group of 2 or 3 bandits or drauger who repeatedly take you out back and beat you like you owe them money. When I get over 30 though suddenly it evens out again. You start pushing level 40 and you are, reasonably enough given that you're a level 40 Dragonborn world-saving, dragon-killing, war-winning death machine, able to mod up the floor with pretty much everyone and everything. I consider that GOOD balancing not bad. Nothing irks me like being the biggest, baddest, most powerful character in the game and you still get mugged by fur-wearing bandits.

This was awesome covered awesome with a rich, awesome filling.

Opening Skyrim up to consoles and that market allowed it to outsell Oblivions total sales in a matter of a couple of weeks. Was it a decision based on money? Of course it was. Bethesda isn't a charity, they have jobs and families and they want paid and paid well for the work that they do. That's not unreasonable at all. PC games are a niche market now. Trying to pretend otherwise is pointless. What you need to do is get passed that and start focusing on what's important - staying worthwhile enough to get to tag along on the big titles. Halo 3 anyone? PC games get pirated far more than console games. They are more twitchy to develop for (different video cards, hardware specs, etc). Making a game for the PC is more complicated and expensive than it is to do for the console and the return per consumer is technically LESS because a larger percentage of your would-be consumers steal it instead of pay you for it. Skyrim is an awesome game. Could it be better? Of course. Oblivion and Morrowind both could have been better at release too. Be glad Bethesda isn't Ubisoft and we get all these awesome modding tools. Hands down the smart thing to do as a PC gamer is NOT to *censored* and complain and try to pretend that somehow Bethesda is required to spend more on us than they are on console gamers for the same or less return but to instead to show that we add value. Promote the game, make and use mods, buy DLC and otherwise continue to be a market worth catering to. Console kiddies have proven they are going to continue to shell out $60 for 25-30 hours of content every couple of months just about regardless of quality. They make up about 80% of the market. We need to make our 20% *worth* catering to and supporting. If it's cost-effective and a worthwhile investment game developers will make better PC-focused content for their games. If it's not, then they won't. It's pretty simple. What are you going to do - threaten to not buy TES VI if it's geared towards the console market? So their choice is to sell an extra 1,000,000 console copies with an extra $3 or $4 profit per unit or sell an extra 500,000 PC that barely meet production costs? Let's see.... make an extra $4 million or an extra $500,000? It's a business. It has shareholders and investors. It exists to make money. The people who work their without a doubt have pride in their work and want to do what they enjoy. They WANT to make the best game that's ever been made ever - and they want to do it every time. It's not a career someone gets into for the money, but the business itself has to. If we, as PC game consumers, want to get the greater attention we need and our platform can take advantage of we have to be worth the investment. Does that make sense?

What's funny is I'm actually a passable anime fan. I just don't have any interest for that sort of stuff as a mod - no issue with someone who does, just that it's not quite my thing for Skyrim. I'm also a big fan of having a diverse set of mods available. Someone may get inspired by some anime retex or sexy armor mod and make something lore friendly out of it. I don't really even mind that the Hot Files are generally filled with stuff that doesn't interest me and go searching for things that do. Nexus is a well laid out site and it's not that hard to search stuff up. However. I don't feel it's unreasonable or disrespectful to anyone to say that IMO there should be a Lore Friendly Hot List. Skyrim didn't just spring fully formed from the forehead of Todd Howard. It's the 5th game in a series with a rich, involved lore. A good chunk of players, especially those who like mods, have played prior TES titles and gravitate towards keeping the game true to original form and concept. Is a lore-friendly section of the Nexus an unreasonable request? Just a link to it from the home page, leaving everything else as is, would be awesome. Currently it's a lot of sorting to find something that's not a pretty huge deviation from what Skyrim is if I want to add a mod to my game. Admittedly we should all endorse more. Religiously and fervently. Speak up and promote the mods you like and it promotes more people to enjoy them and more people to make them. Hmm.... in the interim while we beg/whine/cajole Nexus to make it easy for us, anyone up for making a thread with 'recommended lore-friendly' mods? I'd really love to see what other people of a similar interest are playing. Maybe there's something cool I've missed in the shuffle.

Huzzah for endorsements! In fact this has got me trawling through lightly-endorsed mods, looking for under-appreciated goodies to try and if they are good, endorse them. Anyone have an recommendations that are not otherwise all over the top of the list?

One point in restoration - no matter what your build it's almost certain you're going to be stuck somewhere in trouble, sprinting blind through caves from Falmer with no potions left and needing to heal yourself. Getting double your mileage out of even basic healing can make or break you. One point in or two in Alchemy. First and possibly second perk. I know most don't find a lot of use for that tree but a couple of points, especially early on, can dramatically change the economics of how you play. Free potions (in large piles even) = more money to spend on other gear or even a house. Better potions = less potions you need to carry = more room to carry loot out of dungeons. I'll agree with 1 point in smithing too. No matter who or what you play. Any sort of weapon using sort needs that point in smithing magic gear too.

Anybody else find they use a huge pile of mods but almost never endorse them. This makes me a bad person who does not deserve nice things. Why? Because I pick a lot of the mods I play based on other peoples endorsements. If I don't endorse the mods I play then A) I'm not giving due props to the modder who invested so much time in something I'm greedily enjoying (479 hours played baby, RESPECT IT) and B) I'm not adding my support to an accurate reflection of what mods people are downloading and using to promote more mods along the same line. In comes NMM. Which is amazing and deserves an up-vote of its own but that's another story. The 'latest version' column lets me link directly to the mods page and easily vote it up - so I did. Quick and easy. Now it's your turn! Time to put up some endorsements! Fire up NMM and come face to face with just how many mods you use and give them the respect you've been denying them like the abusive SOB you are! DO IT.

This. The only 'lore friendly' mods should be ones that Bethesda makes. It's their lore. Anything and everything else is by definition non-canon. Not to mention that it smacks of trying to compel people to make mods or play mods that they enjoy but somehow shame or influence people into making stuff that you want. A doomed idea to begin with for one thing and ultimately destructive to the community for another. More mods = more content = more people involved = greater odds of content that appeals to you, whatever that is. Anything that tries to create an impression of one thing being superior to another will inevitably skew opinion. That's not going to make someone who wants to make, say, a mod for authentic japanese armor make something more Akaviri style instead. Someone feels a jones to make japanese armor they will, if they think their hard work will be mocked they probably won't. However someone else might see that same armor and decide to ask for permission to modify it into Akaviri armor. There are tons of examples of that sort of stuff on the forums. More = better. Even if you don't like it all content adds to the whole which then breeds more content.

Look at the storyline through. Most likely it'll be a sort of retelling of the First Era with humanity enslaved under the Aldmeri Dominion and the player assisting in something akin to the Alessian Army overthrow the evil elves. Possible that it'll be on the Summerset Isle, just as likely that it'll be High Rock or Hammerfell (both of which are likely to be holdouts against the pointy-eared villains). If the current setup isn't intended to create a 'humanity enslaved by the elves' environment for the second game I don't know what would.

I admit I'm at a bit of a loss here. I'm a fan of some anime. Doesn't appeal to me to in Skyrim any more than seeing Rick Hunter shout 'FUS ROH DAH!' to knock over a Zentradi in Robotech. Yet I fail to see what someone making a mod with anime elements in it has to do, at all, in any way what so ever with what mods I download and enjoy. I don't even get why there needs to be a filter aside from adult content for it. Are people seriously offended, as in affecting their enjoyment of the game offended, by the idea that someone is making anime mods or playing them? Somewhere, right now, someone is listening to Hannah Montana. On purpose. And enjoying it. Not just a little girl but an actual adult. This does not mean that you need to destroy your ipod or that Amazon Music needs to filter out Hannah Montana content least you be somehow horribly confronted with the idea that someone else is listening to it. I have no personal interest in a mod with anime models in it for Skyrim. Or tentacle sex for that matter. Or god items for thieves. In fact there is probably a longer list of things I don't want in mods than of things I do want. Fortunately the amazing wonders of technology that is the Incredible Interwebs lets me actually go past the things that don't interest me and just click on the ones that do. Perhaps the ability to go past things I don't like and click ones I do is some god-like superpower I have up until now simply taken for granted? Perhaps what we need to do is create some sort of device, some sort of small hand-sized device that allows you to move a cursor around the screen, that people can more easily click on just the things that interest them. Hand sized, perhaps with a cord that attaches to the computer, almost like a little tail.... we could call it a mouse! Maybe this would extend to the great unwashed masses the same incredible superpower that my superior genetics have granted me! This will save people from having to click on, look at and be utterly compelled by their complete lack of impulse control to make needless and pointless comments on. Maybe I can patent the idea. In the interim maybe we can.... crazy idea I know.... maybe, just maybe we can have the wacky expectation that people use a thimble full of maturity and take advantage of that whole 'scroll on past' thing instead of asking someone to waste their time creating a 'anime' tag for mods and sorting through countless thousands of mods to retroactively add them? Crazy, yes, but just crazy enough to work! ******* The above is a bit smarmy and more than a little sarcastic. Yes, it is intended to offend a bit - shouldn't it? Are we seriously even talking about the idea of an anime content filter here? How other people spend their time in the game, what mods they enjoy and the like is part and parcel to the very idea of modding. Make it whatever you want. What it feels like to me is a misplaced attempt to try and somehow 'shame' modders into making more lore-friendly content and shame fans into not support something they might otherwise like. That's counter to the whole point of something like the Nexus. More is always better. That anime mod you hate just might provide the inspiration for a lore-friendly mod you do. More mods = more total content = more creativity = more interest in the game = more total support for modding in general. Making someone who spends the time to mod feel bad about their hard work is a kick in the nuts to the community as a whole. It benefits nobody. Hopefully we're better than that. If we're not we should at least lie and fake it.

All of this + 1. A great idea to balance immersion and enjoyment. A persons effective 'level', as in how tough they are and how famous/well known/hardcore, is not necessarily connected to their professional skill. Ysolda may be a skilled merchant but does that really mean she gets swamped by level 30 monsters whenever she leaves town? This would go a long way towards making a hero level up by being a hero. No making cheap bracers until one day he's made a nice full suit of ebony plate before he goes into Bleak Falls Barrow. One thing I'd really like to see in a mod is moving the amazing Skyrim game away from being just 'The story of the Dovakiin' and more towards a true Skyrim sandbox. Who else remembers what 'Alternate Start By Ship' did for Oblivion?

Awesome ideas. All for it, I'm about 325 hours into Skyrim and a bit burned out on it. This would really breathe some life into the game again for me. Suggestions on dual wielding - One thing I'd love to see removed is the idea that you just can't do certain things because of you fighting style. Let dual wielders parry, just not as effectively. In fact I'd say tie the effect of parry be tied more to the weight of their weapon than their skill and make shields weight x 3 or something comparable to reflect their better value at blocking. If comparative weight of attacking/parrying weapons can be compared and used as a relative percentage of parry effectiveness that would be amazing. Blocking a two handed hammer with a dagger is like trying to kill a dragon with a fork. A dodge mechanic similar to the one in Oblivion (you dodge left or right, forward or backward) with a speed/distance dependent on your block skill. Take block and make it more of a 'not get hit' skill tree as we no longer have athletics available. The advantage of a block/parry technique over a hit and move technique is reliability, consistency and the ability to turtle behind your shield regardless of terrain. Stick and move, hit and doge needs open space. Sword and shield in a narrow hallway or a crowded battlefield is way better than dual wielded daggers in terms of survivability. Suggestions on sneaking - Shields should hamper sneaking. Weight of your weapon should as well (this and previous suggestion buoyed by your idea of weight reflecting size/cumbersome nature not just weight) as should your total carry weight, not just armor. A dagger has no real place in a battle save as a backup. It is however the idea weapon for sneaking in and killing people, attacking from behind, everything like that. A 'cover' sneak option when out of doors would be amazing. Idea being you're dropping prone, scooting behind bushes or whatever. You're stationary and can not attack or defend but you get a big sneak perk. As you can't climb trees to set ambushes this seems like a reasonable compromise. I'm not against the sneak/thief/assassin character concept at all. Just that if it's realism that's the goal there is a whole different build of gear and skills for that compared to a heavy fighting sort. A heavy fighter should have a real tough time trying to sneak and assassinate or steal just as an assassin/archer sort should have a tough time on a battlefield.