cheimison

Three mod managers and two installations later I decided I'm not interested enough in playing Oblivion to go through the modding required for it to be tolerable. At one point it almost worked, but it persistently refused to allow the viewdistance sliders to stay where they were put, and I decided I gave zero shits what the problem was. As far as Vanilla Oblivion, I don't even consider it playable. Every TES game requires more work to be functional/not hideous and wildly unbalanced that I have totally lost interest in the f***ing game by the time it actually works. If it actually works, which it doesn't. Morrowind is by far the most stable of any of these, unfortunately I find the entire aesthetic of Vvardenfell hideous and would rather adventure in an art deco gay porn museum than step foot on that island. All a bunch of insectoid architecture and 80-year-old looking women makes me think of is that it's some veiled reference to Fallout (anachronistic, I know, but Fallout 3/NV/4 and Morrowind share the lust for the ugly). If only they'd make a sequel to Daggerfall. That game had numerous unplayable bugs and was hideous, too, but at least it was actually a sandbox (I give a s*** about the main quest in any TES game, which is usually super cliche, comically easy, and boring at that) and didn't take ten f***ing hours worth of modding to get it to work.

I'm looking for mods that change, primarily, two things: one, to make it so the peasants and nobody guards aren't all smart-mouthed punks. Talking to a professional warrior or aristocrat like that is, seriously, grounds for summary execution in ancient and medieval societies that Tamriel is vaguely modeled on. Plus it's just unrealistic, these people would be too busy peeing and begging me for miracle cures to talk s#*! like Cockney gangster film extras. Two, I want followers and 'faction' position to be more meaningful, both in terms of advantage and hindrance. As it is, people barely seem to give a damn whether I'm leading the Stormcloak rebellion or just a Skooma dealer from Riften.

You should never buy or even play an Elder Scrolls game until it's been out for a couple of years and mods have been produced to fix the glaring flaws that infest Bethesda's thinly disguised beta testing. Same goes for Paradox games. Hell, Daggerfall came out almost twenty years ago and it's still so buggy and f***ed up that it's going to be basically unplayable/game broken half the time you get past level 10. I won't even play Oblivion without mods. Leveling up makes you suck, still to this day not fixed by any official patch. Bethesda is apparently an idiot savant, capable of producing games that only strangers on the internet can make worth the investment they demand of your time. I might add that this makes Bethesda's console focus doubly annoying, because these games are essentially garbage/broken in consoles and can't be modded. Many games these days benefit from mods, but TES games are always broken without them. There is not a single TES game which has ever been made without some gameplay breaking bug, glitched major quest or simply nonsensical issues with bad leveling systems. Morrowind is the only one I'd even consider worth playing without the unofficial patches, and it's vastly better with mods and community patches. I can't figure out if Bethesda actually play tests their own games with anyone except their conceited development staff, because there is so much crap in your typical game that is not an accident but built-in retarded (like the Oblivion leveling system, or half of the skill tree perks being s#*! in Skyrim). I can not believe how much patent garbage gets past them. I do like TES games modified, I would not even bother turning them on on a console.

It seems that it's really easy to make your character basically invulnerable simply by grinding them and buying good equipment, and if you have a Perk mod that makes it so half the perks aren't garbage/tedium it's an even steeper power curve. In Morrowind the difference between a straight-warrior and a super-alchemist warrior was something like 29,900 points of Strength, in Skyrim it's hundred or so damage even at high levels. Alchemy is not necessary for anything, I don't use potions almost ever because there's no reason to, 90% of the time using the Heal spell is way more effective than bothering to gather ingredients, etc. The game is simply so easy and the alternative routes to power (sneak attack, smithing, enchantment, melee beasting) are both easier to master and more generally useful. Plus, everything except potions is a permanent effect, potions are the only thing that go away forever when you use them (along with their net worth). To my mind, being unecessarily and patently inferior I can't figure out why I'd do alchemy other than making money. From a practical standpoint characters are already too powerful, adding a tedious method to make characters too-too-powerful hardly seems like anything but an afterthought. Partly because of 3rd Edition D&D logic (rogues = sniper/glass cannons) the thief character is quite capable of being a combat monster, dealing hundreds of points of damage with a frickin' dagger. If thief characters were actually wimpy guys who stole stuff and fought as a last resort it might make sense for them to use poisons and whatnot, but as it is their oversmithed glass armor and invisibility rings are enabling them to scythe through enemies just as easily as a tanked out Orc or a supermage. Even if you don't grind it, there is no reason not to oversmith stuff, and even if you don't enchant, buying enchanted items is more effective than alchemy.

Before anyone yells, I understand that alchemy can easily be used to funnel circles of madness whereby increasingly powerful oversmithing, enchanting, and alchemical effects can be snowballed. However, because it takes so much time and specific resources, and because I never use any potions except for this function (aside from the occasional health/stamina potion to compensate an unforseen critical hit) and because reasonably powerful potions can be bought with money I have little to spend on anyway - what's the point? I have put a few mods on the game to jazz it up a bit, but whether modded or not I find this game exceptionally easy after 18+ by using either oversmithing or enchanting, both of which are far less tedious and time/weight consuming than alchemy. True, smithing ingredients are heavy, but it's easy to determine which specific ores I'll need ahead of time and buy them piecemeal along the way. Yes, I could sculpt super armor or super weapons, but already with un-magicked weapons I can easily stand and be wailed upon by giants with no more effect than leveling my Block skill. Likewise, every enemy in the game. Doesn't matter who they are, I don't even have to fight them, my companions with their super-weapons can easily kill them all, and I can one-to-three hit any killable creature in the game with essentially zero risk to myself. My first character (Thor, got him up to around Level 70) was able to annihilate anything with one hit of his enchanted hammer, could buy grand soul gems by the dozen, and could oversmith a wooden sword to do more damage than pretty much any vanilla weapon in the game. In the last few days I've made two characters, one a spellsword and the other a paladin - there were like two times when I was in danger of dying, these both outside fights v. wizard mobs at low levels. I had one to level 25 in two days, and my current got to l. 32 in the same time span. It's not just that they're invulnerable at high levels, but that I spend almost no time at low levels, either. Scaling the difficulty just makes fights slower, but does not make them any harder. In fact, my gear is so far beyond characters in the game that I am hardly even fighting anymore, I just loot chambers and let my dual-ebony sword wielding buddy kill the 30 skeletons or whatever. This game is extremely freakin' easy and it's quite possible to get to invulnerability status simply by oversmithing and grinding, and enchantment is an even more extreme game breaker. Alchemy is just totally unecessary, having to carry the damn ingredients and potions makes it useless; and I've never been in a situation where I thought 'damn if I only had Alzerbs flying draught I'd have done much better'. If I specifically need a potion it's ridiculously easy to buy them, yes it won't be as good but so what? I'm already much too powerful to kill without even using magic. Unlike Daggerfall, a guy with absolutely no magic skills can cakewalk annihilate everything in this game unless he's leveled entirely on Pickpocket; and even the sneaky types can do so much damage with an oversmithed sneak attack as to make poison useless. In Morrowind there was a lot more to do in the game, a lot more extreme benefits to being an alchemist, in Skyrim it just feels like giving Superman a magical sword, like he needs it... Oversmithing is the most straightforward, Enchanting is the most powerful, Alchemy is the tedious 3rd wheel in the whole affair whose main advantage is in enhancing the other two. Yes, some potions are super powerful and can turn you into a combat god from the pause screen, but I am already a combat god and can shield-bash a giant to death in a few seconds, so why bother?

I just wanted to comment that what's wrong with a lot of the arguments for Skyrim survival mods is that they don't understand the literature. Conan, Elric and Aragorn do not rest between fights - at least not for long, and they don't get Skeever Dickrot from scratching themselves on twigs in the forest. They can run for - literally - days at a time. Skyrim's immersion problems come from the fact that nobody acknowledges that you are a demigod, not because you don't have a piss meter. In this game you literally play a reincarnated demigod, if not a god outright. You are the Eternal Champion of Moorcock trope, and this is a 'thing' in Elder Scrolls. Those people in Riften and working at Battleborn Farm are the people who have to build a fire to camp, who worry about getting lost, etc. Through supernatural hardihood, divine luck and plain eugenics you are a person who is so naturally superior that you can not make a place for yourself in the world and are constantly at war with it, this is like the point of your character; conquest, ravaging not merely particular enemies but whole social orders and ancient traditions fall before you. Your character isn't a nameless soldier, he's not even Alexander, he's Anomander Rake. Of course he's better than everyone at everything. Now, Skyrim being an engine and an open game I can see that people may prefer to play it as a survival and crafting game, or whatever. But that's because they're not playing the character that TES are supposed to be about, not a fault of the game engine. Indeed, I generally find many of these so tedious that I question if real people (with stuff like spatial sense and rumble in their gut) would have so much difficulty getting their shite together as these modded characters do, but that aside, it simply is not in genre for your character to actually be threatened by the sorts of trivial s*** that other people are. You are, literally, better than them. Also, a lot of the characters are not even human - like half the races - what do you know about elf eating habits? If they're anything like mythical Sidhe/Oni, etc. they probably are made more of magic than not, and I've never heard of an elf with frostbite - they are nature gods, the Vanir at least. In fact, if anything the game engine underplays the inhumanity of the Mer, which the lore is much more keen to emphasize. Aside from Appendix N literature, Indo-European and Babylonian mythology will tell you a lot more about the logic of TES than treating him like a frail, merely human thing. These guys are hardcore compared to vikings like vikings are compared to fat Swedish bankers. Most people today underestimate the hardihood and chutzpah of the ancients (who couldn't just give up and get a desk job when things got hard), much less the mythological ideal of the Warrior/Mage who occupies so much of the literature of the ancients. There is a whole cycle of post-Vedic literature covering a mage who enslaves a race of demons, a man who is chopped to pieces and survives; Gilgamesh bodyslammed an ogre the size of a freakin' mountain. 'Realistic needs' are inaccurate to such a being, personally I'd prefer 'realistic responses to your being an invulnerable demigod who tosses off magical artifacts for practice'. Is your character an unstoppable badass? Well, that's how it's supposed to be. Even the part where you go nuts and kill your allies for trivial reasons is in-character. Herakles, Rustem, etc. it's even got a term in the literature 'the sins of the warrior'. You put up with the murderous Pelinel Whitestrakes because they're your only hope when slaying dragons and, also, because they will eat you alive if you annoy them.