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Survival Mode Thoughts


Calzien

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I decided to sign up for the new beta and tried out Survival Mode a bit. Honestly, it's not as impressive as I hoped it would be. It has the basics of mods like Realistic Needs and Diseases, iNeed, and Frostfall but implements them rather poorly. First let's talk needs:

 

Your basic needs are hunger and sleep. Food and drink fall into the same category meaning you can play a Nord who survives on nothing but alchohol and the game is perfectly fine with that. Stock up on mead, ale, wine and you're good. Solids are for milk drinkers. Sleep is represented by fatigue which lowers your magic pool and regeneration of both magic and stamina. Forgetting to eat will reduce your fighting ability a bit and lower your overall stamina pool. Being overencumbered will quickly drain your stamina and rapidly increase your rate of fatigue. Run out of stamina and you can forget about moving anymore until you drop something or chug a stamina potion. Diseases are deadlier and you can contract Food Poisoning by eating raw food. A few races have slight resistances like Orcs can go longer without needing to eat or drink, and High, Dark, and Wood Elves can last a bit longer before needing a rest.

 

Cold is handled somewhat like Frostfall but on a very barebone level. Parts of Skyrim are considered one of three climates: Freezing, Cold, or Warm. Areas like the Whiterun Tundra, Riverwood, and the Reach are considered cold. Heading into more snowy climates like Helgen, Winterhold, Morthal, Windhelm, or the mountains is where you're going to freeze to death. Head on down into the Falkreath area, hotsprings north of the Rift, and the Rift itself and you'll find warmer climates. Armor offers some protection but it categorized as either "Cold" (Basically barely more than being naked.) or "Warm" (Fully covered head to toe.) depending on the armor. However there isn't much difference between say most of the fur armors and wearing a full suit of orcish armor, daedric, or glass. They'll all offer the same amount of warmth. Of course if you want to run around naked or wear custom armors you can pack some "hot" variants of soups and stews recently added using Fire Salts and the normal ingredients. Good for a quick temperature boost if you're headed somewhere cold. Skills like the Dunmer's Ancestral Wrath and Flame Cloak will allow you to temporarily resist freezing waters if used or casted before you dive in.

 

There's more but I only wanted to give the basic grasp of it. Now for the bad part, a number of mods are going to be incompatible with it until either patches (Which can be hard to make given the .esl format isn't compatible with SSEEdit or the Creation Kit.) are made or somebody figures out a workaround. Some incompatible mods include:

 

- Custom armor mods (These require adding the warm/cold keywords to fix. These are found in the Update.esm file and not the esl for Survival Mode fortunately.)

- Mods that alter vanilla armor (Retextures and meshes are fine. Like custom armor adding the keywords to the armors will fix this issue.)

- Mods that alter vanilla food and drinks (If they change the price, weight, name, or anything with the entry it will overwrite the .esl file changes.)

- Mods that change vanilla weather (Some cold effects rely on the vanilla weather system, which and how much I'm not sure.)

- Campfire (Heat sources like campfires in that mod are not recognized by Survival Mode. The .esl file uses scripts to determine what in-game fires are considered heat sources.)

 

As a final thought, I'm a bit disappointed in this. Like Fallout 4's Creation Club the first offering falls quite short for the steep price tag of $8. It's nice to see it isn't as cumbersome as Fallout 4's Survival Mode difficulty is and can be turned off or on at any time too. But it still lacks a considerable amount of content that really doesn't justify paying that price. If you're on XB1 or PC I'd still suggest sticking with a combination of Frostfall, Campfire and Realistic Needs and Diseases/iNeed for a more rounded experience.

Edited by SamusKnight2K
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well , that is truly hardly surprising.....

It was almost obvious that this is going to be less advanced than the free alternatives , and it would obviously require patches with many many mods

 

I would honestly be surprised if , when CC releases new armor mods and such , they would have the proper keywords for this system

 

and to top it off , an 8$ price tag , I highly doubt it's good value for your buck

it's the price of a small DLC , and yet it doesn't really add any deep mechanics , and what it does , it does in a really shallow way

so far , that's the CC in general......

 

I do hope they have some actual content planned , and something that doesn't have a 30$ price tag attached to it

but I won't be surprised if the first quest CC content we get will cost more than a DLC , and have much less content

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I like the idea, a bare bone frostfall is what I may want all long instead of ff. The other stuff is pretty nice too!

 

But really? We have to pay for that? No that not a good idea at all beth. IF you want to charge us mods, they have to be huge well made gear/magic packs or dlcs sized stuff. Not this s#*!.

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This was a nice review, thanks!

 

I don't use survival mods, but was curious about this CC offering and how it compares to what is currently available. Unfortunately, it's starting to seem like the main audience for the CC mods will be PS4 users. That's only a partial bonus for them. Sure, they get more mods, but they have to pay for them, whereas PC and Xbone users have free mods available that, in most cases, do it better. They're not going the job of making these things attractive to ALL of their players, and it doesn't seem like that will be enough to justify the expense of putting this whole thing together.

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Thanks for the kind words, I didn't actually mean this to be a review since I just spent maybe a half-hour messing with it in-game. The rest was just poking around in SSEEdit. You can do so yourself with any of Bethesda's .esl files from the Creation Club by renaming the extension to .esm or .esp.

 

Fun note, apparently .esl files are nothing more than .esm files just loaded into the game. SSEEdit reports the header using a .esm header. They're loaded in without the use of a load order ini file apparently so this is why the executable is probably patched each time the Creation Club is updated. It has to be told to look for a new set of .esl files and if they're present, load them. So I have a fairly good feeling Skyrim SE is definitely going to follow the same fate as Fallout 4 when it comes to requiring patches to SKSE64 when it is fully released. If you intend on not using the Creation Club at all I recommend backing up your executable for SSE right now before the Creation Club goes live.

 

On that I feel I should add that they are offering Survival Mode for free right now for one week.

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i only have a question is the Survival mode a MOD or is part of a new update for skyrim like in fallout 4 ?

 

Since it's a part of the Creation Club it's DLC. It's not delivered in a standard update, like in Fallout 4, and it's not distributed through Bethesda's modding site so it's not a mod.

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While frostfall is a very well done mod, I find it severly limits the things I can do in Skyrim, which some may find immersive, but I just find annoying.

 

The scale and scope of this game is huge, especially with mods, and frostfall and similar survival mods slow the pacing down to a crawl.

 

Survival mode could be good but needs lots of testing and balancing, the pacing of needs and de/buffs would need to be fine tuned for it to seamlessly integrate into Skyrim and be something people will want.

Edited by magus55x
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I can agree with you in some ways. Frostfall is restricting but does come with means to tailor it and resist the cold. Coupled with Campfire and the right perks it just becomes a regular part of your gameplay. It's all down to what you feel balances out your gameplay.
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