A number of Mod Ideas. Which do you want?

[teebird]

As soon as the CK comes out I plan on doing some work on the game. I have a few ideas in mind, but I'd like people to download them when I'm done... So I'm asking the community what they want first!

 

General Balance Mod

There are a number of things in the game that bug me in terms of balance, and a lot of that resides in the perk system. While I feel that my early points are well spent in trees like archery, I feel that making novice lockpicking easier is simply laughable. I don't like investing in silly/worthless things to get to decent options. Skill trees with this issue are mainly smithing, lockpicking and ALL magic perks.

 

Magic in general is iffy. While I can dual cast in destruction for the impact bonus and automatically kill any one opponent, my damage just doesn't scale well with much. This makes many battles won before they've started, but long and completely lacking challenge. In other words, boring. Redoing the perks to increase damage and decrease cost, just in general rather than for a specific skill, would be a start. Adding some new enchantments to the game might be in order as well. Archery's final skill point suffers somewhat from this as well.

 

My biggest pet peeve by far is the synergy between alchemy/enchanting and smithing that quickly spirals out of control. Investment in these three trees quickly outshines anything else you can do. Damage/Armor can be easily doubled from their original values. This is just too much and forces players trying to optimize down this path. (Though you certainly don't need to optimize in a single player game with multiple difficulty settings). I'd likely place diminished effects to upgrade values at higher levels. I'd have to look into exactly how potions/enchantments up smithing. In order to get the best of the best armor/weapons you'd still need all three, but the difference wouldn't be THAT significant. I would also be changing smithing/enchanting level system to match potions, making the experience gained based off of the value of the item created.

 

Companion Mod

This would add a follower/marriage option character with some actual personality and background. Ideally the character would have a fair number of dialogue options, often related to current quests, and comment on the world around them in a more specific/intelligent manner. IE not saying "I've never seen anything like it." every time they see a crypt end area and having the exact same response upon reaching blackreach. This is NOT something I'd necessarily be able to do well on my own. Likely I'd need help with animations, perhaps meshes, and perhaps a female voice actor. While I'd LOVE LOVE LOVE to create unique interactions for the existing characters this would require me to do one of three things:

1. Get someone who sounds similar to the original actor. (Difficult if we're really gonna try and keep immersion.)

2. Get someone to completely redo every line the original character had as well as the new lines. (not necessarily a challenge for some with smaller amounts of dialogue)

3. Just say screw it and tack the lines on from whoever. (shoddy, and it wouldn't really serve it's purpose).

 

Werewolf/Vampire Rework

Currently it really doesn't feel like being a werewolf is anything but a curse, without being able to root through corpses/pick up items you don't want to stay that way longer than is necessary to clear a room, and with no access to your inventory and no reliable way to recover, you really can't even if you wanted to. Without equipment you deal less damage and are less resilient to boot. In human form the only difference is that you can't gain any sleeping bonuses. A useless transformation and a negative effect outside of it? Can be kind of fun once in a while perhaps, but really? Sadly you can't do much with this as is. On the other hand I imagine a bunch of people will tackle this pretty quickly.

 

Armor Rework

The way that armor is currently crafted and working very few people want to use anything other than heavy armor, unless they're speccing into alchemy/enchanting and smithing, and they are going to reach max armor anyway. Light armor confers useful bonuses to melee champs that use stamina, but characters that you would expect to see wearing light armor, archers and mages, have no reason to put aside the plate for the scale. On top of that you take Daedric armor for heavy champs and Dragon scale for light, no reason to ever consider anything else, and you only use daedric weapons. I'd like to make the top three choices more of a choice. Glass would be more effectively enchanted, with a 30% enchanting bonus to any enchantment on it perhaps. Daedric armor would "drink" poisons and perhaps potions applied to the armor/weapon to confer more lasting benefits, allowing you to almost "enchant" weapons with poison (currently it's to cumbersome to apply poisons for every hit...). As a downside they would have a negative factor in enchanting. Some effects may have to be reduced in trade for their extended number of hits (20-30?). I'd have to look into how max poison effects compare to max enchanting effects. This one seems like the least likely to have someone else doing, so certainly an enticing option.

 

Skill Line Master Quests

Adding a quest for each skill line that adds something considerable for them. The magic ones already have some, granting them master spell access. Alchemy has a few quests that seemed promising, and admittedly Sendirion's blessing isn't bad, but the white phial was a HUGE disappointment for anyone actually doing alchemy. Smithing might gain a hammer that allows them to increase their smithing capabilities, perhaps craft rare weapons, or access unique properties of certain armors (see the armor rework). Weapon master quests may teach a skill (power) that could be used with that weapon, or perhaps a legendary weapon of that type. Enchanting arguably already has the black star/Azura's star, but I'd likely add something else or cause a person to have to go through a quest for the double enchanting perk. Problematically this would require the most work. I would need help with voice acting for sure, possibly animation/meshes. Again, another thing I can't entirely do myself, at least not well.

 

Let me know and I'll start brainstorming more thoroughly.

[huntsman2310]

this is well thought out. I have some ideas about crafting in general, they don't get in depth but it could help.

 

Ideas thread

[RenownedWolfman]

My votes for the vampire, werewolf rework so i can then ask you about using it in my own mod. <-- has his selfish face on.

 

In reality though i think theres been a lot of mention of different groups planning to rework vampire and werewolf, i would first make sure your not the only one doing it and maybe for that idea hop on with someone else or just let them do it and do one of you other idea.

 

My second suggestion then would be the companion mod.

[CampanaAliquanta]

I vote for companion, since some of the others are already being planned by other people.

 

Atm I'm modelling water creatures, but I'm tempted to offer you some help if you go for the companion one (can do a little modelling and texturing, and possibly animation, and I can definitely help with dialogue and a character-driven story/background).

[teebird]

With the companion thing I would likely work on a male companion first, since I can do the voice for that. But with future updates I'd likely add more followers, preferably with different voices, and would need some voice acting help. Anywho, I'm going to bed now. I'll think on character/story/quests tomorrow.

[surasshu]

I'd love more interesting followers/companions, that'd be super awesome. Also, multiple followers would be cool? Although I guess there should be some kinda maximum, maybe it can be a thing you develop with perk points, "Leadership" or something (with a max of 3 or 4 so?). Maybe you can even have conflicts, like if you have a high elf follower and you try to recruit an orc, he leaves you, or something...

 

Voice acting wise I guess you could also just use text dialog as placeholder, and recruit voice actors based on that? At least for a beta or so.

 

I actually made a post about it in another topic with a couple thoughts, I'll just add that:

I was thinking about it before too, but one thing I'd love is to get more dialog out of followers, while you're wandering around. Just observing stuff (like the first time you enter a village with them, they'll talk a little about it, if they have any connection to it... not EVERY village of course), or if you fight a certain monster, they might comment on it (like in the intro, "I hate those things. Too many legs, y'know?" also not every time, but maybe once a game-day/week).

[teebird]

Ahh, curses, why did I even make that an option? Clearly more difficult than many of the other options. Especially if I really want it done well.

[llamaRCA]

Companion Mod

This would add a follower/marriage option character with some actual personality and background. Ideally the character would have a fair number of dialogue options, often related to current quests, and comment on the world around them in a more specific/intelligent manner. IE not saying "I've never seen anything like it." every time they see a crypt end area and having the exact same response upon reaching blackreach. This is NOT something I'd necessarily be able to do well on my own. Likely I'd need help with animations, perhaps meshes, and perhaps a female voice actor. While I'd LOVE LOVE LOVE to create unique interactions for the existing characters this would require me to do one of three things:

1. Get someone who sounds similar to the original actor. (Difficult if we're really gonna try and keep immersion.)

2. Get someone to completely redo every line the original character had as well as the new lines. (not necessarily a challenge for some with smaller amounts of dialogue)

3. Just say screw it and tack the lines on from whoever. (shoddy, and it wouldn't really serve it's purpose).

 

Let me know and I'll start brainstorming more thoroughly.

 

More companions is always better and they definitely could use more and better world interaction. I'm thinking about doing a couple as well and will be using your number 3 option for adding a second follower to the mod. I wouldn't call it a shoddy option if you have sufficient dialogue from the same voice actor using the same voice. And I can come up with three reasons right off the top of my head when it would be good to do it: 1) you have a vanilla character you really like and want to expand dialogue for him/her, 2) you want to build a new follower and you don't want to bother with getting a voice actor or 3) (for me, right now, this is the biggest advantage) I don't have to write another entire character from scratch.

 

:) llama

[teebird]

 

More companions is always better and they definitely could use more and better world interaction. I'm thinking about doing a couple as well and will be using your number 3 option for adding a second follower to the mod. I wouldn't call it a shoddy option if you have sufficient dialogue from the same voice actor using the same voice. And I can come up with three reasons right off the top of my head when it would be good to do it: 1) you have a vanilla character you really like and want to expand dialogue for him/her, 2) you want to build a new follower and you don't want to bother with getting a voice actor or 3) (for me, right now, this is the biggest advantage) I don't have to write another entire character from scratch.

 

:) llama

They won't sound the same if I'm taking some random person and tacking lines on to lydia. That will break immersion and annoy, the exact opposite of what I want. Though Lydia has so few lines already that it wouldn't be hard to completely redo everything she says.

[mrplow00]

This may be pretty much impossible but I think would be cool as hell to have ocean waves...big ones in some areas.. Thinking how fun it would be to surf heh.

 

 

edit: whup I just read I'm not supposed to post suggestions for mods...mea culpa

Edited December 8, 2011 by mrplow00