Skyrim Modding - Dead for the "average" gamer

[AlShaitan]

6 hours ago, Gunslinger808 said:

Hey, to be honest some of the mod requirements have gotten way out of hand.

Not just a  litany of Nexus ones, but off site requirements that in some cases have a longer list and suspect sites are making it daunting for even those of us that are used to it.

As an example I had to ask for help here just to find a version of High Poly Heads earlier this week as the normal site that supports it was unusable.

And add to that all the ones that you have to now subscribe and donate to such as Patron and others just for a requirement.

Understandable that it’s their mod, their rules, but the latest batches are becoming rather obnoxious, and it seems that gone are the days of people just being proud of their accomplishment.

At the price of angering some, I think creation club and their continual money grabbing gatcha mods are at  least a major contributor the the current issues.

I encountered one mod author, who had some minor efficiency mod. it was a requirement to a requirement from my mod list. I clicked download and got this insane list of requirements. I mean it was absolutely laughable. It was a complete mod list on it's own! So I check the description and there's the mod author and other users in the posts going "Oh my god stop being stupid THEY AREN'T ALL REQUIRED! read the this and that". Well I couldn't find the this and that and I had about 50 more mods I needed to install at this point not counting further dependencies. But here I am, being called a moron (again) because a mod author has decided that the requirements is a great and user friendly place to list a mix of "Must have" and "these could be cool with my mod but aren't needed" mods. This incidentally, was when I just gave up and wrote this post.

I do think Bethesda are absolutely partially to blame though. SSE, AE, forced AE patch. Creator club. Skyrim modding was fine for the original. A few complicated mods, but overall pretty straight forward. Easy mods on Workshop. A few more complex ones only available via Nexus. Now it's become a broken, nightmarish mess of confusion, Creators club content dependencies, patreon paid mod as dependencies hidden inside collections, version confusion and no one mod being in fact one mod but a fragmented portion of a massive mod list that can't work alone.

[7531Leonidas]

@AlShaitan Those requirement lists upon d/l are almost always referring to any mod that might be required to allow each patch available to function.  So, FOMOD installations are especially guilty of containing stuff that you will never need to d/l ALL of the requirements listed, they are on an as-needed, or contingency basis.  I have seen some discussion in the recent past that the requirements listings might be made more specific, but for now, it is what it is.  What I really hated were the one or two authors that managed to NOT list files that were required as primary, not even hinted at in the mod info.

I want to thank the authors who take the time to place a note beside each requirement on their mod page that explains why and (especially) when that requirement is needed.