Congratulations Bethesda, you've finally updated the life out of Skyrim LE/SE/AE (whatever).

[davoshannon]

Just checking with Steam; Skyrim LE 3129 hrs, Skyrim SE 6393 hrs. Over a 10 to 12 year period. Latter half usually running up to 150 chosen mods with NMM. A little universe of my own choosing.

And in late Dec. last (or was it early January) that last update crept past my Steam settings, and presented me with chaos.

"ff7legend" I'm sure has all the non-update settings, but nevermind. It's done.

Been using mods for about 8 years or more, so know most recovery methods, but this time I wasn't prepared to go through it all again. Bought "Middle Earth - Shadow of War" and got up to speed on their excellent "Nemesis" combat system. Not good enough (at Lvl 65) to beat Sauron, though.

So returned to AE, with Vortex, and loaded a selection of mods (correct versions for 1170 where I could determine), and began. Warnings all over the place, significant SKSE and SKSE-caused load problems. Sexlab being the primary, with SoS a close second. Ignored what I could, ducked in under the wire, and off the tatters of the game went. It's the same "little universe" but significant chunks are missing. Doubt adding animations would be worthwhile, the triggers aren't working - yet!.

But if de-motivating modders was Bethesda's intention I'd say they've finally hit the mark. And other than an incredible base game, what have they given in the updates? - f____ all! - "Skyrim Fishing"??.

I'm reading down what's left of the NMM mods , but there aren't enough of my favourite modders to make a list. But in my book they contributed well more than 50% of the pleasure of playing Skyrim.

[1Cyanide101]

Yep. the cash grab updates are ruining legacy mods that have worked fine for years with out issue so that they can add a store and fishing of all things, which btw was already available from a free mod for years.

[AaronOfMpls]

Still, plenty of modders have been working around the problems.  Many SKSE mods use Address Library to stay compatible with future updates.  Plenty of SKSE mods have been updated or patched, or can be replaced with similar mods.  There's a big table on modding.wiki of various SKSE mods' status.  And plenty of players have downgraded their games or prevented the recent updates from installing.

Meanwhile, mods that don't rely on SKSE have mostly continued as normal. 

As for plugins disabling on startup, that's a known issue with the updates and Engine Fixes; some changes to Engine Fixes' .toml file will make things work again.  (You can even download an updated .toml file with the changes already made.)

If you're not downgrading and are worried about Survival Mode's scripts eating up your Papyrus script resources, Survival Mode Improved reimplements it as an SKSE plugin that uses C++ instead of Papyrus -- and you can still turn Survival Mode off in your game settings with it, or even turn it off by default in the mod's .ini file. 

If you have a lot of Skyrim mods, you might want to consider using Mod Organizer instead of Vortex or NMM.  It keeps mods isolated in their own folders instead of in Skyrim's actual Data folder, then presents them to the game in a virtual filesystem (so the game only thinks they're in the Data folder when launched through MO).  And it can use multiple profiles, with different sets of mods enabled and active.  So mods are more easily activated/deactivated, more easily tested (just copy your profile and test on the copy), and more easily removed without having to track down loose files.  And you can effectively change your install order on the fly by moving your mods around in the left pane.  (The right pane has the plugin load order.)  You can even use it on Linux, with dodges like Rockerbacon's installer script to make it run in the game's Wine prefix in Steam Proton.

As for cash grabs in Creations, I figure don't buy what you don't support in them.  I haven't seen anything among them that I've felt like buying and installing yet, myself.

And Skyrim LE is still an option if it's in your game library, free of disruption since it hasn't been updated at all (beyond Steam's shader pre-caching) since SE came out.

EDIT: Long story short, I refuse to let Beth's changes ruin one of my favorite games.  And so do many other modders, thankfully.

Edited March 14, 2024 by AaronOfMpls

[melvinius]

Bethesda has ceased to innovate.  I'm really disappointed with them, they used to be my favorite game studio.  Starfield still doesn't run reliably on my PC.

I've got a bunch of different Skyrim versions that I bought over the years.  Started playing it on Xbox 360 because my PC couldn't handle it at the time.  Then I bought LE for PC and modded the heck out of that.  Bought SE eventually because the engine was so much better than LE, and bought VR for... VR of course, duh, though I don't play this any more.  My PC was only ever borderline VR capable and some updates of VR-related utilities broke my VR capability.

But that's it for me.  I'm not updating my SE 1.5.97 any longer and I'm not buying another Skyrim version.  At this point, Bethsoft is just exploiting us all.

I'm gonna call it now... Hammerfell is going to be crap.  Lipstick on a pig, and we'll look at it and say, "Ooooh, pretty, but nothing we've got justifies the system requirements or bugs and jankiness."

I'll probably play Starfield some since I bought it... but that's going to wait until my next PC upgrade.

[melvinius]

On 3/14/2024 at 4:07 PM, AaronOfMpls said:

Still, plenty of modders have been working around the problems.  Many SKSE mods use Address Library to stay compatible with future updates.  Plenty of SKSE mods have been updated or patched, or can be replaced with similar mods.  There's a big table on modding.wiki of various SKSE mods' status.  And plenty of players have downgraded their games or prevented the recent updates from installing.

Meanwhile, mods that don't rely on SKSE have mostly continued as normal. 

As for plugins disabling on startup, that's a known issue with the updates and Engine Fixes; some changes to Engine Fixes' .toml file will make things work again.  (You can even download an updated .toml file with the changes already made.)

If you're not downgrading and are worried about Survival Mode's scripts eating up your Papyrus script resources, Survival Mode Improved reimplements it as an SKSE plugin that uses C++ instead of Papyrus -- and you can still turn Survival Mode off in your game settings with it, or even turn it off by default in the mod's .ini file. 

If you have a lot of Skyrim mods, you might want to consider using Mod Organizer instead of Vortex or NMM.  It keeps mods isolated in their own folders instead of in Skyrim's actual Data folder, then presents them to the game in a virtual filesystem (so the game only thinks they're in the Data folder when launched through MO).  And it can use multiple profiles, with different sets of mods enabled and active.  So mods are more easily activated/deactivated, more easily tested (just copy your profile and test on the copy), and more easily removed without having to track down loose files.  And you can effectively change your install order on the fly by moving your mods around in the left pane.  (The right pane has the plugin load order.)  You can even use it on Linux, with dodges like Rockerbacon's installer script to make it run in the game's Wine prefix in Steam Proton.

As for cash grabs in Creations, I figure don't buy what you don't support in them.  I haven't seen anything among them that I've felt like buying and installing yet, myself.

And Skyrim LE is still an option if it's in your game library, free of disruption since it hasn't been updated at all (beyond Steam's shader pre-caching) since SE came out.

EDIT: Long story short, I refuse to let Beth's changes ruin one of my favorite games.  And so do many other modders, thankfully.

Yes, thank goodness the modding community innovates!  They're the best part of Bethesda's dev team. And I don't know why more people don't use Mod Organizer 2.  It's the best tool for those who heavily mod their Skyrim SE.