Tell me about your longest or most favorite playthroughs

[melvinius]

On 3/16/2024 at 3:24 AM, BlutsaugerMedic said:

That sounds really fun! And close to the sort of thing I like. If it was not obvious, I really like having followers and trying to make them more relevant to both combat and the story. And it makes sense for Melvinius to be good with squad tactics and teamwork I think, so I like how that is kind of a thematic thing too. Do you still play Morrowind or Oblivion sometimes? I hear they are difficult to mod and not nearly as supported. I also like how he has lore-justification to know some of the things you know about Morrowind and Cyrodiil, and I am curious if those experiences actually come into play often. I really hope nothing will get in the way of keeping that Skyrim playthrough for a long time, and I am surprised Mantella is working so well for you. I loved the idea but it seemed a little too experimental and ambitious for me. A mod that adds a female companion who is not completely a thot for once is a rare gem to find, which is partly why I have been interested in The Knight of the Void, I also just love that character's aesthetic, but I am still on the fence about using it myself and don't know much besides what is on the modpage, but hmm I wonder if they have much in common with your character and they might fit better for more grimdark adventures like Vigilant and Beyond Reach maybe.

I'll have to check out Knight of the Void, hadn't heard of it before.  I have been surprised how dark VIGILANT is, was running it solo but I think I'm going to have Serana along for the ride after all.  Makes sense with her backstory.  I've heard Darkend is... well, "dark" also, we'll see when we get there.  I honestly hate the Reach, it's too GoT for me, but when I have new lands mods like that it frees me up to be a bit more chaotic in my playstyle.  Melvinius, when pushed to the wall, is a brutal brutal survivalist after all.   If I'm enjoying a mod, I take it slowly and savor the experience, bring some companions along.  If I'm not enjoying it... well, I call those kinds of mods "stomping ground" mods.  Great way to experiment with crazy spell/power mods, overpowered weapons, etc.

Yes, I still have a heavily modded Morrowind install.  The nice thing about MW is it's very stable, really a blast to mod.  I have it working with Talky (voiced dialogue) and it really looks fantastic with mods like MGE to extend the view, earthquake mod, overlays for underwater, etc.  I used to have a heavily modded Oblivion install too, probably still have the folder backed up but haven't gotten it running on this PC yet.  Kind of low priority.  Oblivion was a great game, but the janky character, weapon, and armor design put it at the bottom of my list of Elder Scrolls games.  The spongy combat wasn't good either.

I'm the same as you, I enjoy playing with a squad of companions for certain questlines.  For others I'll run solo.  Infiltrating the Thieves' Guild was too touchy to do with others, for example.  But during the Civil War, I had a squad of my own housecarls and mercenaries that I led, all fully decked out in Imperial gear and ready to rumble.  I have a lot of mods that expand the Blades and the Temple as well, really built that out into a well equipped and armed faction.  It made sense to take Auri with me to explore the wilds of Chanterelle.  I'm thinking of romping around with Gorr from Interesting NPCs for a while doing a monster hunter type of thing down the road.  I have an Oldrim mod that I converted myself that revolves around hunting sea monsters in the Sea of Ghosts, but I somehow borked it by talking to NPCs in the wrong order and hijacked the questline halfway through.  I was able to play it through to completion but somehow missed the first 2/3 monster hunting quests or so (I think).  Basically the mod author's fault for not having some basic checks/conditions for progress through the questline.  Oh well.  It just meant that I was encountering these things in an organic way while exploring, which was hilarious and often confusing.  Like the time a giant dwemer machine rose up out of the sea for no reason and I had no idea what was going on.  Fun stuff.

[melvinius]

Mantella is absolutely great.  I wasn't sure I would be able to keep it installed all the time for normal playthroughs, as my computer is several years old and not the best CPU/GPU.  But it's been working really well.  I've got about a 5 second delay when talking to NPCs which is adequate for running realtime conversations with one companion.  I don't think I would try the multi-conversations with multiple NPCs or have background conversations going, don't think my PC could handle all that.

The main thing with Mantella is to understand that there are about four different pieces to the system, each with its own performance bottlenecks.  If every piece is streamlined, then the whole functions really well.  For me the biggest bottleneck was that my PC really couldn't handle running a chat AI model locally so I had to sign up for an OpenAI account.  That cut response times by over 60%-80%.  Other little things like limiting responses to about 3-5 sentences (who needs a novel?), optimizing XVASynth, etc. made a big difference.  5 seconds response time is very reasonable IMHO.

I will say Mantella is a bit of a project to install, what with all the working parts that need to be installed also.  My philosophy though is NOT to always have to keep updating everything to the very very latest version.  The introduces the potential for new bugs and instability.  I'm still running Skyrim 1.5.97 which is the most reliable and has the best mod compatibility at this point.  And now that I've got the whole Mantella system working perfectly, I don't think I'll update any of it unless I get a new PC/Skyrim install or unless for some reason the Mantella to OpenAI API stops working.