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.

[Wolfstorm]

I'm not an average gamer, I'm a mod author myself and I have some trouble to install some mods. 

For instance, I was never able to trust SPID. In 2020 I attempted to use a similar mod, which distributed armors and weapons through scripts, and ended up with several npcs naked, as it made no distinction between the sexes. So I created OBIS Armors, which inserted a new level of lists between the outfit and the vanilla lists, and then modified several armor plugins by hand, inserting them manually and using bashed patches to solve conflicts. It worked. Then later came SPID and it became a sensation, but every time I tried to use it, with some other mod that requires it (for instance, for spells), I ended up with crashes. And when I point it out, I'm told the problem is on my end. But my load order have no issues since 2021. 

Other example is MCO and animation mods. Can't install any of them, because they require Nemesis. And Nemesis can only get compatible with FNIS through a fake plugin. This plugin removes the shield arm fix from FNIS. I reported this on their github years ago, no solution came. Still Nemesis is a sensation on the scene and hundreds of mods depends on it. Can't make any of them work and from my perspective, they are extremely niche mods. In 2021 I collected some animations as resources and made my own DAR setup, using a combo of 4 blows for each weapon. But I still see hundreds of these mods dumped on the site from time to time, and their requirements are growing larger. 

This is all the consequence of parlor modding. It is another aspect of it (besides the suppression of province-level content), where mod authors are cloistered in small overspecialized cliques, and these cliques dont communicate with each another. This ended up with many authors isolated in discord channels, with their own following. Hence their mods become incompatible, and inaccessible to many. So it is not just a average gamer problem. It is a problem caused by a worldview that does not allow peaceful coexistence between the authors. Hence why it is more easy to find parlor dramas (and usually over follower mods), than to find mods that are compatible with your setup and can be installed easily. 

[7531Leonidas]

@Wolfstorm Have you checked out Pandora for animations?  It is supposed to replace both Nemesis and FNIS.  I am probably going to try to use it when I update my game to v. 1.6.1170 in a month or so.

[weiht68]

Sorry but i do not understand you.

If you are taking a look to collections you get everything you like without any problems. You don't nedd to install requirements because they get automatical downloaded - also from off site. When you take away the download time do you need for the most collections not more then 1-2 minutes to get it running. 

Here is a example especially for what you are searching https://next.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/collections/kiaclu?tab=mods and instead to let your own anger out without any basis get off the ground and try.