LE Smithing Overhaul Idea

[Greenslade]

First up let me just say this isn't a "request" per se as much as an idea that I'm not even sure is achievable. I'm interested in kicking the idea around to see if it's worth getting the CK and trying to do it.

 

Of course if someone else has done something similar, or wants to work on something like this, I don't mind! Open Source Ideas and all.

 

 

The inspiration for this came from hitting 100, unlocking all the perks and realising that I've more or less run out of options for one of my favourite parts of Skyrim, the customising of weapons and armour.

 

It also came from thinking that, for all it's "fun," the smithing and crafting aspects of it are quite shallow and not really developed as a system. Armour and weapons are discrete objects that you get by mixing specific things up in a pot. This is fine as far as it goes, but does leave you with an incredibly limited number of objects to create. It also makes very little sense from the point of view of watching your character do these things. You're a jobbing adventurer who's happened to learn how to work with fancy metals like moonstone and ebony, but apparently all you do with those is create objects that replicate existing designs, rather than coming up with your own ways of working.

 

To get better smithing, therefore, a complete overhaul of the whole system seems necessary. As I say, I'm not even sure this could be *achieved*, without going back to Bethesda and getting them to rewrite a whole chunk of the game.

 

1. Rather than having every item be a discrete object with fixed ingredients, change it so that it's a recipe with slots that can be filled with anything (dependent on skills and perks). You learn how to make something, and you learn how to work with a kind of metal, and it's up to you to do that.
    
   
   • So, for example, a basic sword would have a blade and a hilt. The blade could be made out of steel, or could be made out of ebony. The hilt could be made out of iron or it could be made out of gold. Later you could learn how to make an ornate sword with a jewelled pommel, or a scimitar, or a blades sword, or a rapier. The design would have certain advantages, and these would be modified by the materials.
      
     
   • For another example, a set of armour might have shoulder plates, scales, fixings and straps. All these could be made out of different things, again bringing different qualities. Heavy plated armour could be made entirely out of steel or ebony, or some bits could be made out of moonstone and malechite to save weight. You could make the whole thing out of gold if you wanted to - it would be stupidly heavy, slow you down, and not offer much protection, but the point is that you *could*.
     

 

[*] Materials aren't fully explored in the game. Dwemer metal doesn't do anything in particular, its quality is "used to make Dwarven gear". But *why*? Why is the stuff so heavy? Why is it not as good as Orichalum? And so why did the master engineers the Dwemer use so much of the stuff? The result of not exploring this is that the lower materials like steel, quicksilver and Orichalum end up being useless when you get later in the game. You get the perk and then completely ignore it.

 

This can be fixed by exploring the intrinsic properties of the materials you use. We already know that silver, for example, is particularly effective against undead (so why don't the Silver Hands use it in their armour as well as their swords?). It makes sense that other materials would have similar properties. Dwarven metal could provide better grounding for use against magic users. Ebony could have a very dense insulating quality, protecting you against fire and frost. Quicksilver can be used to store a reserve of magicka, increasing the ability of spell users. Moonstone could take enchantments particularly well. These are just examples, and a proper system would need to be bashed out and balanced, but they would bring all the skills and materials back into play when designing customised armour and weapons.

 

• For example, again take a simple sword. On paper ebony looks to be the best material for the blade. But you want this sword to fight a bunch of wizards. Actually, the qualities of Dwemer metal suddenly look attractive. It does extra damage to magicka, and if enchanted with shock or magicka damage can do even more for less "soul cost" than ebony. You could then make the hilt out of malechite, to reduce the weight. Or maybe out of orichalum, to increase the weight and therefore the damage from plain hacking and slashing.
  

 

Designing all your gear now turns into a balancing act where the intrinsic properties of the material need to be considered, rather than just a grind to get the "best" armour stats.

 

 

[*]You've got a smelter. You've got all these ores. Why not make some alloys, and see what strange and beautiful qualities they have? What's a moonstone-ebony alloy good for? Maybe nothing, but it's worth giving it a go. Alloys can have strange, sometimes unexpected effects. This means there are now 45 different metals to make each part of each weapon or suit of armour with. It also means that things like iron ores could come in useful later on in the game. We know that iron-corundum makes steel - what does iron-orichalum make? Or iron-silver, for that matter?

 

 

[*] Also, you've got all these different hides, surely they'd make different kinds of leather? And you could use the hides themselves, particularly in scaled armours. Not to mention the horns, antlers and jewels you pick up around the place. How about a mace made of an ebony-orichalum alloy, (because it turns out that gives a bonus to blunt force bashing weapons, even though it's much harder to make it keep an edge and is therefore a bit rubbish for swords and axes), with an ivory handle made out of a mammoth tusk, decorated with pieces of broken soul gem? Or a wolfskin fur armour with pure ebony scales and gold-quicksilver alloy fixings, because that gives an advantage to enchantments as well as making your Orcish Witchdoctor character look badass?

 

Not every design would have slots for everything, of course. Armour might have an "inlay" slot, which could be another metal (perhaps gold, or a material that isn't good at being armour but which grants a bonus effect), or could be bone or antler, but which couldn't be jewels. The aforementioned mace might be able to have an ivory handle, but other maces might need metal only. Rather than leather being a "thing", it would instead be a class of things.

 

The point is, you can very quickly come up with thousands of different permutations of weapons and armour from the basic ingredients already in game. A design for a jewelled scimitar with 3 components could result in over 300 possible swords, each with their own qualities - some very bad and useless, others particularly suited for a certain kind of player.

 

• Now we get to the point where I think this means a system like I envisage isn't "moddable" onto the Skrim base. From what I can gather, this would involve someone *making* all these thousands of permutations, and while a lot of it would be simply retexturing rather than remodelling, it's still an awful lot of ballache to manually make them rather than get the software to dynamically generate the models from a set of parts. It definitely wouldn't fit in the old smithing menu, because you would need to list every single possible permutation, and that would be completely unusable.
  

 

[*]But while we're revamping the entire thing and rewriting the game from scratch, why not look at the enchanting system too. Rather than merely having one fixed "whole weapon" enchantment, why not fix it so that jewels become "enchantment slots", with the quality of the enchantment down to the quality of the jewels. You could, this way, end up with silly overpowered armour and weapons but it could still be balanceable (IMO). If you found an armour design with four jewel slots in it you'd have to find four flawless diamonds to get it really top notch - four garnets wouldn't give you anywhere near the same effect. And the really tough materials could actually resist enchantments, so an Orichalum-Dwemer alloy plate armour might be hard as nails, but heavy and make enchantments 30% less effective.

 

You could get a silly-powerful greatsword with four jewels in the pommel, of course. But once you'd loaded it up with enchantments you'd only get three swings out of the thing before you had to recharge it with another soul gem - not particularly practical!

 

You'd have to nerf the "double enchantment" perk and think of something else to put there. Unlike double enchanting with the perk, each enchantment would be unique and require a soul gem - two enchantment slots equals two soul gems.

 

• Again - I have absolutely no idea if this is even possible within the confines of the Skyrim engine, and think it probably isn't.
  

 

[*] Also, why do "daedric" weapons all look the same? Is the principle behind a daedric weapon that it was made by the mystical beings from beyond the plane of Oblivion, in which case what are you doing making them on your damned village forge? Or is it, as it says in the game, that you've bound a daedra soul to your weapon - in which case why can't you bind one to an iron dagger if you want to?

 

• As an aside - I don't see any reason why some things shouldn't be smithable at all, or should only be smithable by certain classes or races or factions. You can make armour out of Dwemer metal, but the Dwarven armour that's lying around the place was made by dwarves, not jobbing adventurer-blacksmiths. You'd need their designs to make it, surely, not just the materials. And if Daedric weapons and armour that you find in-game are made by the Daedra, then you can't make them. This means there's still an incentive to loot - you might find something you just can't make yourself.
  

 

So what does "binding a Daedra heart" do? Well you're actually making your armour demon-possessed, so why doesn't it reflect that? Fun, interesting "overpower" effects combined with downside risks. Armour could restore your stamina or magicka when it's low - by draining your health. Shields could create wards (a la Spellbreaker) but the glow from that ward would nullify your sneak. It just seems silly and pointless to make the result of "binding an immortal demonic soul to your armour" be nothing more than "your armour is a bit better and sort of black and frightening looking".

 

Also, if you bind a Daedra heart to a low-grade weapon, it'll probably run the risk of exploding and releasing the dremora back out into the wild, and the chances are they won't be happy with you when they get out. So, y'know, while you can bind one to a plain steel greatsword, it's not recommended, because if you do you might be halfway through a dungeon and suddenly find yourself with no sword and burnt hands fighting an angry demon.

 

 

So.

 

 

I appreciate that this is a complete and utter overhaul. I appreciate that, while some aspects of this may be implementable quite easily (just creating more variations like "ebony scaled armour, orichalum scaled armour, glass plate armour etc"), the whole thing is a massive task and also is probably impossible. (I also appreciate that it is quite long, and if you've got to the bottom, thank you for sticking with it!) BUT... what do you guys think? Is any of it doable? Would any of it make the game better for anyone else, or does it represent some kind of overkill that the game doesn't need?

 

And, most importantly, if I, as a non modder, downloaded the CK and attempted to do any of this, would I very quickly find myself going "whu? buh?" and possibly setting my hard drive on fire?

Edited February 27, 2012 by Greenslade

[d4em]

Seen as I had too much coffee, I only got up to 4 (will probly read the others later xD) but I like where you are going. Specially the "dwemer more usefull than ebony against mages" part.

 

However, I don't think that creating recipes is going to be easy, if even possible. I have about 3 years of modding experience, and I know from frustration that things like these usually take a script extender and some script genius. Usually. Maybe they made it easier this time - don't really explored the ck yet.

 

If you need retextures I can help tho - models as well when blender nif scripts are out. Interested to see where this idea goes.