The Overlord of Overhauls - EnaiSiaion

[farazon123]

In response to post #61752302. #61777427, #61778377, #61779667, #61781432, #61812637 are all replies on the same post.

Tsumikiro wrote: As has been said already, and will probably be said many more times: much of Enai's work is essential for my enjoyment of Skyrim. Whenever someone asks me about modding Skyrim, the short answer is always, "get everything by EnaiSiaion." Here is to hoping that Bethesda just puts him in charge of ES6's mechanical details.

DaBlake wrote: lol that's me in my local TES facebook group

EnaiSiaion wrote: Bethesda doesn't consider me to have any skills they want. It doesn't matter, TESVI will sell like hotcakes regardless. Gameplay is overrated.

Thanks though.

BinakAlgo wrote: >Bethesda doesn't consider me to have any skills they want.

What's wrong with them? At this point, I'm starting to suspect that TES6 is going to have 2 schools of magic, just 1 armor, and 1 weapon skill and it will be a button smashing galore and hope that people like you are still around to make the thing playable. Because if they don't want that even in their paid mods club, then I don't know where we are going to get quality gameplay. :/

PureModding wrote: Sadly this is what sells today (it seems)
Although if you look at the popularity of ordinator you could think otherwise.

EnaiSiaion wrote: I see my statement is being used to attack Bethesda.

Skyrim is still the most popular single player game on Steam. It sold more copies than the entire population of many European countries. Bethesda knows exactly what people want, and "better gameplay" is evidently not what people want. The gameplay in Skyrim is adequate and does not detract from the game's strengths, which is all it needs to be.

Bethesda is looking for people with the skill set to amplify their strengths and further extend their lead over also-ran games like CDPR's oeuvre. They have no reason to patch up their weaknesses if no one really cares about said weaknesses. (Case in point: the popularity of Arcane Accessories despite its obvious faults. It adds spells and makes mages viable on legendary, which is all the community really wanted out of it, so mission accomplished. One could argue that perhaps it matches the needs of the community more closely than Apocalypse, which may add too many spells that may be too complicated.)

In the end, Bethesda knows a lot better than you and I what sells, and what people download for free may not align with what they spend money on. Ordinator does not belong in Skyrim, end of story.

As a non Butten Smasher. and a Role Player I lost interest in Skyrim along time ago, but Mods like yours and Quaxes Questorium and other great mods have brought the game to a level of play that's I can enjoy and play for many years. I don't even bother with the generic quest any more unless I just happen into it. Because with all the great mods out there I just go into skyrim and my character, just lives his daily life in what ever way he or she wants. If He wants to hunt he does if he needs ore for fixing his sword he goes to the mine. If he's hungry he eats. So on and so on.

[farazon123]

In response to post #61806927. #61812027 is also a reply to the same post.

DoritoJunkie wrote: His mods are not without people complaining about how op and unbalanced they are.

EnaiSiaion wrote: The vanilla game is OP and unbalanced. Either you match the vanilla game and get complaints that your options are OP while similarly OP vanilla content is perfectly fine (Apocalypse) or you go for sensible balance and every option is useless next to the vanilla OP alternative (Summermyst).

Two mods I cant live without.

[Schattenkiller5]

It's been said already, and it's been said that it's been said already. No matter. I as well am one of those people who consider many of Enai's mods to be essential for every single Skyrim playthrough. Hell, Thunderchild actually motivated me to crawl through a lot of dungeons with word walls cause I could actually get something interesting out of it. And every time I ran back to High Hrothgar like an excited child waiting to unveil his new toy. Just like how Apocalypse made me run back to the College whenever I hit a certain skill level to see what new spells would be available. And Sacrosanct actually made me play vampire for the second time in my 'skyrim life' (the first time having been Dawnguard).

 

There's one sentence I like to use to describe him to other people: "Enai is one of the (disappointingly) few people who realizes that spells should be more than colorful damage numbers." And this is undoubtedly the thing I value most when it comes to his mods. Depth. There's unique mechanics and interactions in almost everything, which allows me to throw basically everything that vanilla has out of the window (except for candlelight, I suppose).

 

So to finish this up, thank you so much, EnaiSiaion. I have played Skyrim for over 1000 hours in total, and while I don't intend to disregard the countless other mod authors that have contributed, I can still safely say that a lot of the fun I've had in this game is thanks to you. Because regardless of which new modded land with its new quests pulls me back into the game occasionally, I always have your fancy spells, shouts and powers with me.

Edited July 16, 2018 by Schattenkiller5

[BinakAlgo]

In response to post #61752302. #61777427, #61778377, #61779667, #61781432, #61812637, #61892962 are all replies on the same post.

Tsumikiro wrote: As has been said already, and will probably be said many more times: much of Enai's work is essential for my enjoyment of Skyrim. Whenever someone asks me about modding Skyrim, the short answer is always, "get everything by EnaiSiaion." Here is to hoping that Bethesda just puts him in charge of ES6's mechanical details.

DaBlake wrote: lol that's me in my local TES facebook group

EnaiSiaion wrote: Bethesda doesn't consider me to have any skills they want. It doesn't matter, TESVI will sell like hotcakes regardless. Gameplay is overrated.

Thanks though.

BinakAlgo wrote: >Bethesda doesn't consider me to have any skills they want.

What's wrong with them? At this point, I'm starting to suspect that TES6 is going to have 2 schools of magic, just 1 armor, and 1 weapon skill and it will be a button smashing galore and hope that people like you are still around to make the thing playable. Because if they don't want that even in their paid mods club, then I don't know where we are going to get quality gameplay. :/

PureModding wrote: Sadly this is what sells today (it seems)
Although if you look at the popularity of ordinator you could think otherwise.

EnaiSiaion wrote: I see my statement is being used to attack Bethesda.

Skyrim is still the most popular single player game on Steam. It sold more copies than the entire population of many European countries. Bethesda knows exactly what people want, and "better gameplay" is evidently not what people want. The gameplay in Skyrim is adequate and does not detract from the game's strengths, which is all it needs to be.

Bethesda is looking for people with the skill set to amplify their strengths and further extend their lead over also-ran games like CDPR's oeuvre. They have no reason to patch up their weaknesses if no one really cares about said weaknesses. (Case in point: the popularity of Arcane Accessories despite its obvious faults. It adds spells and makes mages viable on legendary, which is all the community really wanted out of it, so mission accomplished. One could argue that perhaps it matches the needs of the community more closely than Apocalypse, which may add too many spells that may be too complicated.)

In the end, Bethesda knows a lot better than you and I what sells, and what people download for free may not align with what they spend money on. Ordinator does not belong in Skyrim, end of story.

farazon123 wrote: As a non Butten Smasher. and a Role Player I lost interest in Skyrim along time ago, but Mods like yours and Quaxes Questorium and other great mods have brought the game to a level of play that's I can enjoy and play for many years. I don't even bother with the generic quest any more unless I just happen into it. Because with all the great mods out there I just go into skyrim and my character, just lives his daily life in what ever way he or she wants. If He wants to hunt he does if he needs ore for fixing his sword he goes to the mine. If he's hungry he eats. So on and so on.

Enai, I agree that Bethesda knows what they are doing, and what they are doing is what any non-public company does: makes money. I can't argue with that as that's how things work. If people want more battle royale games or modes, that's what the companies are going to give them and we can't blame them because that's what people want and what companies do.

I can't "attack" Bethesda from that angle and even if I do, who cares? As you said TES6 is going to sell millions of copies, the whole population of Chile or Central America.

But we are worried about ourselves who love the game worlds that Bethesda builds (unparalleled by any other developer out there) but are not entirely satisfied with the gameplay. Not all of us can mod (I tried once to create a dungeon and got frustrated after 4 hours), so create overhauls like yours is out of our reach.

And now, if the CC is not even interested in to give that kind of content, again, what are going to do? The first answer that comes to mind is to buy other games, but there no other games like this, The Witcher, Kingdom come, etc., are completely different games and to a market that's being dominated for big huge publishers the chance to see new products that can emulate the experience is going to become smaller.

But well, this is futile. At the end I'll too buy TES6, but I will wait 3 more years after the release to buy the GOTY edition with 750 cc credits at sale on Steam.

[BinakAlgo]

In response to post #61812772.

EnaiSiaion wrote: I can't reply "<3" to every comment, so here's a shared one:

<3

Can someone pin this one? :P

[BinakAlgo]

In response to post #61784387. #61812257, #61814812 are all replies on the same post.

Jinxxed0 wrote: Ever since 2008, I've been saying that user created content is the future of gaming. Making long lasting content for games takes a long time. Developers spend hundreds of hours making something that only takes a few hours to play. That's crazy when you think about adding content to MMOs and online games.

However, when you look at something like Second Life, something that's 99.99% user created content, the world is so huge and ever expanding that no single person could ever see the entire thing in one life time, including the developers themselves. I shake my head when people say "people still play Second Life?" yep. the same amount as always 50,000 concurrent users online 24/7 for years. i think it peaked at 65k to 75k back in 2010, but it's almost always been about 40k-55k on average. Then you had something like City of Heroes. They introduced a mission making system which almost instantly injected the game with 25 times the content than the game ever had. They could have approved the top missions to be official, but never mothered. The system still kept the game fresh for a while though.

Then you look at Skyrim and other BGS games. I have nearly 3,000 hours and haven't even done more than 40% of the vanilla content. I think there's a way to add value to games with user created content, but the Creation Kit isn't one of them. All the creation kit did was add microtransactions to single player games. And now people pirate mods. Pirating mods. Think about that for a moment. There's a better way for sure, and I think the Nexus found it for the Donation Point system and supplementing it with Patreon. i would like to add though, there there should maybe be another donation pool for those who would rather do a one time donation for that month or whenever they have the cash to spare. I know people, like myself, who don't like monthly subscriptions and would rather do random one time "payments" for everything. Like, I'd like to see a button where I can donate to the Donation Pool once and be done with it until i can donate to it again without worrying about canceling something a month later just to make sure that first payment went through while stopping the second. Just food for thought if any admins read this.

EnaiSiaion wrote:

Ever since 2008, I've been saying that user created content is the future of gaming.

It is, but not the way you think. The Creation Club is brilliant: take a mod scene that is known for unlimited creativity and unpaid labour and tame it, channel it into a source of free or cheap content for your own game. Reward the best authors with a job and everyone else will compete to be the next. Rather than random stuff like Sexlab or entirely new games like Dota and battle royales that are only tangentially related to the parent game the developers are trying to sell, authors will put their unpaid heart and soul into making content Bethesda wants to see.

This may be a good thing, as it gives the best authors a revenue stream and encourages others to step it up in terms of quality and support. "It's free, eat s#*&#33;" is no longer such an appealing retort to a bug report when Bethesda might be watching.

It came far too late for Skyrim and a bit too late for FO4, but I predict the TESVI mod scene will be centred on the Creation Club. Most content created will be along the lines of Creation Club content; new people will join, driven by the hope to one day work for Bethesda; and users will download mainly Creation Club content because it's vetted and -let's be honest- mods are a hassle to install and use.

I could be wrong. I may be right. We'll see.

Jinxxed0 wrote: I guess I'm more in favor of the wild and untamed mod scene. I'm also looking at this from the perspective a Second Life content creator where everything is made and everything is profitable including the stuff that's similar to Sexlab, only in Second Life. Millions dollars exchanges hands in Second Life everyday and the company that created and runs it, Linden Labs makes money off that everyday.

Obviously, Bethesda is different, but I still don't generally like the idea of having to pay $5 for a sword. I think something like the Creation Club with it's current type of mods could work if they lowered the prices permanently. As far as having higher and higher quality mods, i think that it wont be the case in practice because it's ultimately Bethesda deciding who they want and what they want. Which isn't a bad thing. But i think for mods, the free market s better at deciding. I think there's room for both scenarios at the end of the day. It's just that I personally think one of better than the other. The Creation Club needs a lot of tweaking I think. The lack of content and the kind of content is something not many expected.

I was actually looking forward to buying quest mods for $15 here, $20 there. But then they showed golden armored mudcrabs and other content I generally wouldn't pay for. i get why it's that way, everything needs to be compatible. So, with CC we have content makers getting paid, but not the best of the best who make bigger and better mods. This is brings me back to my other point of liking the untamed stuff better. You're free to break it and therefor have more stuff if you manage to keep it unbroken. Since there's room for both, I hope that at least something like CC or whatever its evolution is doesn't become the only option available at some point in the future. companies will likely only want to profit from certain mods while a lot of people will want those Sexlab-like mods and skimpy waifu followers that they never actually use as followers but have hundreds of them installed anyway. I lost my train of thought, so i'll stop here.

It is, but not the way you think. The Creation Club is brilliant: take a mod scene that is known for unlimited creativity and unpaid labour and tame it, channel it into a source of free or cheap content for your own game. Reward the best authors with a job and everyone else will compete to be the next. Rather than random stuff like Sexlab or entirely new games like Dota and battle royales that are only tangentially related to the parent game the developers are trying to sell, authors will put their unpaid heart and soul into making content Bethesda wants to see.

When you put it that way, it's kind of scary. For Bethesda seems like an "only win" situation, in that sense, it is truly brilliant. Their effort seems minimal yet they will keep the huge part of the profits while the creators are going to get a small income from it and all that under the vague promise of a "real" job at Bethesda... sounds like when at your new job they "promise" you that in 6 months they are going to increase your minimum wage but in truth they will get rid off you before that even has a chance to happen.

[EnaiSiaion]

In response to post #61784387. #61812257, #61814812, #61900507 are all replies on the same post.

Jinxxed0 wrote: Ever since 2008, I've been saying that user created content is the future of gaming. Making long lasting content for games takes a long time. Developers spend hundreds of hours making something that only takes a few hours to play. That's crazy when you think about adding content to MMOs and online games.

However, when you look at something like Second Life, something that's 99.99% user created content, the world is so huge and ever expanding that no single person could ever see the entire thing in one life time, including the developers themselves. I shake my head when people say "people still play Second Life?" yep. the same amount as always 50,000 concurrent users online 24/7 for years. i think it peaked at 65k to 75k back in 2010, but it's almost always been about 40k-55k on average. Then you had something like City of Heroes. They introduced a mission making system which almost instantly injected the game with 25 times the content than the game ever had. They could have approved the top missions to be official, but never mothered. The system still kept the game fresh for a while though.

Then you look at Skyrim and other BGS games. I have nearly 3,000 hours and haven't even done more than 40% of the vanilla content. I think there's a way to add value to games with user created content, but the Creation Kit isn't one of them. All the creation kit did was add microtransactions to single player games. And now people pirate mods. Pirating mods. Think about that for a moment. There's a better way for sure, and I think the Nexus found it for the Donation Point system and supplementing it with Patreon. i would like to add though, there there should maybe be another donation pool for those who would rather do a one time donation for that month or whenever they have the cash to spare. I know people, like myself, who don't like monthly subscriptions and would rather do random one time "payments" for everything. Like, I'd like to see a button where I can donate to the Donation Pool once and be done with it until i can donate to it again without worrying about canceling something a month later just to make sure that first payment went through while stopping the second. Just food for thought if any admins read this.

EnaiSiaion wrote:

Ever since 2008, I've been saying that user created content is the future of gaming.

It is, but not the way you think. The Creation Club is brilliant: take a mod scene that is known for unlimited creativity and unpaid labour and tame it, channel it into a source of free or cheap content for your own game. Reward the best authors with a job and everyone else will compete to be the next. Rather than random stuff like Sexlab or entirely new games like Dota and battle royales that are only tangentially related to the parent game the developers are trying to sell, authors will put their unpaid heart and soul into making content Bethesda wants to see.

This may be a good thing, as it gives the best authors a revenue stream and encourages others to step it up in terms of quality and support. "It's free, eat s#*&#33;" is no longer such an appealing retort to a bug report when Bethesda might be watching.

It came far too late for Skyrim and a bit too late for FO4, but I predict the TESVI mod scene will be centred on the Creation Club. Most content created will be along the lines of Creation Club content; new people will join, driven by the hope to one day work for Bethesda; and users will download mainly Creation Club content because it's vetted and -let's be honest- mods are a hassle to install and use.

I could be wrong. I may be right. We'll see.

Jinxxed0 wrote: I guess I'm more in favor of the wild and untamed mod scene. I'm also looking at this from the perspective a Second Life content creator where everything is made and everything is profitable including the stuff that's similar to Sexlab, only in Second Life. Millions dollars exchanges hands in Second Life everyday and the company that created and runs it, Linden Labs makes money off that everyday.

Obviously, Bethesda is different, but I still don't generally like the idea of having to pay $5 for a sword. I think something like the Creation Club with it's current type of mods could work if they lowered the prices permanently. As far as having higher and higher quality mods, i think that it wont be the case in practice because it's ultimately Bethesda deciding who they want and what they want. Which isn't a bad thing. But i think for mods, the free market s better at deciding. I think there's room for both scenarios at the end of the day. It's just that I personally think one of better than the other. The Creation Club needs a lot of tweaking I think. The lack of content and the kind of content is something not many expected.

I was actually looking forward to buying quest mods for $15 here, $20 there. But then they showed golden armored mudcrabs and other content I generally wouldn't pay for. i get why it's that way, everything needs to be compatible. So, with CC we have content makers getting paid, but not the best of the best who make bigger and better mods. This is brings me back to my other point of liking the untamed stuff better. You're free to break it and therefor have more stuff if you manage to keep it unbroken. Since there's room for both, I hope that at least something like CC or whatever its evolution is doesn't become the only option available at some point in the future. companies will likely only want to profit from certain mods while a lot of people will want those Sexlab-like mods and skimpy waifu followers that they never actually use as followers but have hundreds of them installed anyway. I lost my train of thought, so i'll stop here.

BinakAlgo wrote:

It is, but not the way you think. The Creation Club is brilliant: take a mod scene that is known for unlimited creativity and unpaid labour and tame it, channel it into a source of free or cheap content for your own game. Reward the best authors with a job and everyone else will compete to be the next. Rather than random stuff like Sexlab or entirely new games like Dota and battle royales that are only tangentially related to the parent game the developers are trying to sell, authors will put their unpaid heart and soul into making content Bethesda wants to see.

When you put it that way, it's kind of scary. For Bethesda seems like an "only win" situation, in that sense, it is truly brilliant. Their effort seems minimal yet they will keep the huge part of the profits while the creators are going to get a small income from it and all that under the vague promise of a "real" job at Bethesda... sounds like when at your new job they "promise" you that in 6 months they are going to increase your minimum wage but in truth they will get rid off you before that even has a chance to happen.

How is this a bad thing? It works like every contract based career: if you want to make art for Magic The Gathering, you should make free art in the same style and if you are good enough, you may land that contractor job at WotC. The contractor model works fine for a lot of talented artists, musicians, 3D modellers, etc.

The main difference is that the mod scene lives in a delusional bubble where authors are expected to make content for free forever and are not considered valuable enough to deserve a job or paycheck. Thus people desperately look for reasons why the CC is bad, even though as far as I know, pretty much all authors in the CC are very happy with the arrangement. Edited July 17, 2018 by EnaiSiaion

[EnaiSiaion]

In response to post #61898557.

Schattenkiller5 wrote: It's been said already, and it's been said that it's been said already. No matter. I as well am one of those people who consider many of Enai's mods to be essential for every single Skyrim playthrough. Hell, Thunderchild actually motivated me to crawl through a lot of dungeons with word walls cause I could actually get something interesting out of it. And every time I ran back to High Hrothgar like an excited child waiting to unveil his new toy. Just like how Apocalypse made me run back to the College whenever I hit a certain skill level to see what new spells would be available. And Sacrosanct actually made me play vampire for the second time in my 'skyrim life' (the first time having been Dawnguard).

There's one sentence I like to use to describe him to other people: "Enai is one of the (disappointingly) few people who realizes that spells should be more than colorful damage numbers." And this is undoubtedly the thing I value most when it comes to his mods. Depth. There's unique mechanics and interactions in almost everything, which allows me to throw basically everything that vanilla has out of the window (except for candlelight, I suppose).

So to finish this up, thank you so much, EnaiSiaion. I have played Skyrim for over 1000 hours in total, and while I don't intend to disregard the countless other mod authors that have contributed, I can still safely say that a lot of the fun I've had in this game is thanks to you. Because regardless of which new modded land with its new quests pulls me back into the game occasionally, I always have your fancy spells, shouts and powers with me.

Thanks. :) :)

[EnaiSiaion]

In response to post #61849217.

Saizetsu wrote: Hello, Enai, I really do enjoy your work, but I have some questions for you if I may, I don't quite understand your stance on the creation club stuff fully,

When you speak of it in high praise I may misunderstand but do you mean it as a replacement overlay of the entire free modding scene? With the current rise in controversy over the Loot Boxes and Microtransactions are you sure the creation club won't be forking into money that people were giving to authors via patreon or other means? Or this won't embitter a free community towards a company or even people who do work on mods? I suppose the topic of paid content is always a rough road..

If a community is bitter because authors want to make a living, then the community is not worth paying attention to.

I believe the Creation Club concept is superior to mods for most users. Compare Survival Mode to Frostfall: while some people may prefer the customisation options of Frostfall, the majority will go for the more streamlined Survival Mode that feels like it is part of the game and does not disable achievements. The Skyrim Creation Club hasn't found its groove yet, but the FO4 one is doing well so far and ramping up to bigger projects. All of this is just a dry run for their future RPG titles, which are likely to have a Creation Club running on all cylinders available at launch.

Bethesda will probably not eliminate free mods, but if the Creation Club gets going by the time TESVI releases, the majority of users may gravitate to creations over mods due to the extra polish and less hassle.

The concept of the "normal person" is useful to keep in mind. Normal people want to play the game, and if they like it, buy its DLC. Normal people don't want to sift through a pile of mods to find the best ones, then crash anyway because they didn't read the compatibility notes. There are far more normal people than added value seekers in the world. Do the math.

[EnaiSiaion]

In response to post #61818607.

ff7legend wrote: Will Ravengate ever receive a proper update? I've always wanted to try that mod but have stayed away due to all the reports regarding the hostility issues. LOVED Spectraverse despite your harsh criticism of that mod Enai. Especially the Force Choke-like spell that lifted targets off the ground while siphoning away their health. The boss fights in Spectraverse were EPIC as were their voices.

The hostility issues can be fixed, but there are other issues as well.

One key element of Ravengate is that the world is not segmented into cells and you can just walk around, observe other fights, watch people go about their day, interact with your opponents and steal their stuff or assassinate them outside the arena. But the engine doesn't really seem to support that level of complexity. AI packages randomly don't work, scenes get stuck, etc.

These are not bugs with Ravengate and therefore cannot be fixed. The correct approach in this engine is to have separate cells and have the player load door into the arena where a copy of the opponent is waiting and a copy of Zanath is announcing the fight, then after you win, disable the real opponent and have the player load door back to the barracks to speak with Zanath doing his routine. Having the same characters do everything from sleeping and eating to watching other fights or walking down into the arena to fight you with no interruptions is apparently beyond its limits.

In addition to the technical aspects, there are some design elements almost everyone disagrees with. Your first encounter with the mod is King Cereus taking all your money and you can't fight him for the money until later, so people uninstalled right there. Also, the characters may be too wacky.

This has resulted in an enormous number of complaints and Ravengate is now considered "f***ing garbage" so I'm considering handing it over to the caretaker.

Oh well. Edited July 17, 2018 by EnaiSiaion