Skyrim Verisimilitude

[avianmosquito]

I'm beginning work on a verisimilitude mod for Skyrim. This mod will be uploaded to the Nexus when it's done, as long as I recieve at least one review of my verisimilitude mod for Oblivion. If I don't, I'm keeping it to myself. (If this is what I have to do to get feedback, so be it.) The mod's overall goal is to eliminate some of Skyrim's rediculous number of massive, glaring flaws. Namely, its kill moves, the horrible armour system, the piss-weak weapons, the nonsensical weapon statistics with badly overpowered bows, even more badly overpowered magic, rediculous regenerating health, loss of features present in previous Elder Scrolls games, small number of gameplay-related options in chargen, instantaneous healing (which makes death impossible for the prepared if you don't get rockfalled with a kill move) and much, much more. This was the most dissapointing and broken game since Sonic '06, and as long as I have the modding kit, I have to at least try to fix it.

 

 

Note that although I may use past tense a bit here, I'm not very far into this mod and most of this has not yet been done.

 

Firstly, kill moves would be fine if they were PC only. In the hands of NPCs, though, they're the most frustrating, useless mechanic in the game. The issues are that they're random and can occur at any time. So they can occur right when a fight starts when you still have full health, are wearing armour all the way up at the cap, are 10+ metres from a target and blocking. With the addition of ranged ones, they get even worse, rockfalling the player from as far as the AI can see them. Worse yet, they don't even have to hit you. The kill move starts when they attack, they teleport into position and the player loses control while their character just stands there and stretches their neck out for the hit. This can often take several seconds, during which time the player would be able to heal themselves, block, get out of the way or even kill their opponent if they still had control, but they don't. If there are any Bethesda employees reading this, you should be deeply ashamed for your part in creating the single worst mechanic of any modern game.

 

I'm just scrapping them completely. Kill moves will be completely removed.

 

Second, the armour system is crap. It's a straight percentage system, with indestructible equipment and no counter-effects. There is no worse system to use. It's impossible to balance any two options of different strength (light and heavy armour, for instance) in such a system. It cannot be done. Any penalty for the stronger options that balances them early in the game will be too small late game, and any strong enough for late game will be overpowered early game. Worse yet, if the cap can be reached by both options and the weaker option has any benefit over the stronger one (which it has to, of course, to avoid unbalance early game) than the weaker option is flat-out better later on in the game. Making this worse, percentage resistances are already crap due to linear numeric increases resulting in nonlinear increases in effect. Increases in a percentage system are more meaningful at higher levels, meaning that anything that makes your armour more effective later on in the game can easily push it to game-breaking levels if you don't install a cap. Skyrim takes all these issues and makes the worst possible choices in dealing with them. First off, there is no penalty for armour. It doesn't slow you down, it doesn't increase stamina usage, it doesn't decrease spell effectiveness, nothing. At least, none of these are strong enough to be at all noticed. Second, the cap is easy to reach with light armour, so you can easily get to 80% resistance and still... wait, there's NO PENALTY for heavy armour, so... the f*** does that matter? Worse yet, all the increases to the armour's protection are multiplicative, making the natural shittyness of the system even worse.

 

This was a real *censored* to figure out how to circumvent, but I got it. I made it pathetically easy to hit the cap, and installed counter-effects. Now armour is less effective against late-game weapons, so you need to keep going past the cap to keep the effect at max. So there's no longer a point where increasing your armour doesn't matter, armour still matters early game and increases are still big enough to be worth investing in. One point is now 0.1%, not 0.12, so it's easier to read. (I can't find that thrice-damned hidden rating, or I'd have axed it already. Just don't forget to add in that hidden 10% when reading your rating.) Armour provides much more than it used to. Normally, light has a base of 50-100 and heavy 100-150, which can be increased as much as 50 through improvement. This is multiplied by five for body armour, one for helmets and shields, half for gauntlets and one quarter for boots. Skill increases this by a percentage equal to its value, perks can double it again after that. Properly muchkin-sized armour can hit 8000. (including the 100 hidden) The cap is 90%, which is reached at only 800. Armour now always has significant weight and this does slow you down a significant amount, as well as increasing fatigue usage based on its weight and (if I can find a way to do so) reducing spell effectiveness. Weapons multiply this by a number determined by type and quality, with the worst quality being silver at 1.2, (or iron at 1.1 if you don't count silver) and the best being daedric at 0.5. Weapon types have their own multipliers regarding armour, with 1 for swords, bows and arrows, (these are seperate, so their quality multipliers hit twice) 0.75 for axes and daggers, 0,5 for maces and hammers and 0.25 for unarmed strikes. Enhancements can cut it in half again, perks for maces and hammers can cut it in half yet again and a new enchantment can cut it in half one final time. If muchkin-sized, armour multipliers can fall as low as 0.03125. Now the strategy for armour is to find the proper amount of armour to bring enemy weapons down to 90% without losing too much speed or spell effectiveness, while weapons focus on getting the right balance of raw damage and armour penetration to get the most effect against the current. (Carry a sword and a mace/hammer for different situations, or an axe for general purposes.)

 

Bethesda, I don't how how you managed to make weapons feel even weaker than they did in Oblivion, but you did. Maybe it's the visible paper-cutting, or the simple fact that you need 2-3 times as many hits to kill an enemy as you used to, and it already took quite a few. Worse yet, the way the weapons are "balanced" doesn't work and doesn't make any f***ing sense. You currently have maces and hammers as the strongest weapon types and swords as the weakest. This is bulls*** and you know it. A blunt chunk of metal on a handle isn't going to do half as much damage as a metre-long sharpened piece of steel, much less all, much less twice. Bows are even worse with this, because bows in game deal as much damage as greatswords. Seriously, compare an arrow wound to a sword wound, and tell me that makes sense. An arrow does damage like a bullet, it's just a hole and some brusing (although somewhat more hole and somewhat less bruising) with a laceration on the rear side. A sword leaves a deep, body-spanning, massive jagged gash on the target, massive bruising all the way to the other side and rip organs out of the body and scatter them across the ground in pieces. With a blade that isn't even that sharp, they've been known to cut men in half. So tell me, in what way are these wounds even remotely comparable? Stepping past the bulls*** factor, the balance doesn't work. A stronger, slower weapon is better than a faster, weaker weapon because being blocked stops your attacks. You only have time for one strike with any weapon when your enemy stops blocking, so what does it matter if your weapon is faster? The only time you can string together multiple hits is if your enemy can't block, and that's not common. Bows are even worse, because once again damage is more important than DPS when you have to take time to aim shots. You can also just run away from your enemy and pelt them until they die, even if it is a little harder with the slower rate of fire, and in fact there's no downside to this tactic because your DPS is just as high with a bow as it is with a one-handed weapon, and you aren't stopped when an enemy blocks your arrow.

 

How can I fix this? Well, I made the three primary melee weapons attack at the same speed, because that was a crappy mechanic to begin with. I made swords the strongest, maces/hammers the weakest and axes somewhere between, and gave them different levels of armour penetration as their new balancing factor. Daggers are weak and fast like always, but have the advantage of doing extra sneak attack damage right off the bat. Bows are weaker than melee weapons, but their arrows are much faster, giving them longer range. (They used to move like continental drift, so this was a serious bonus.) This makes it so you can actually use them at a distance, but they're not effective up close any more and you can't clear the entire game with a bow like you used to be able to. Overall, weapon damage is much higher, with a basic steel longsword dealing 80-320 damage.

 

Spells deal more damage than melee weapons, from a distance. They also skip armour, deal extra against many of the more common enemy types, have longer effective range than bows, have a good attack rate, have a special bonus effect, often deal area damage, and with a few simple tricks we all know you can fire them non-stop for so long that almost no enemy in the game can outlast them. On my first playthrough, without any special tricks, I killed Alduin in SIX SECONDS using fireballs. Try doing that with a weapon, it's not possible.

 

Alright, well I didn't have to do much here to balance them. I actually decreased magicka usage, increased spell speed and range, made spell skill increase damage, jacked up their special effects and made enemy weaknesses to spell types more severe and all I had to do to counter all of that was slow magicka regen down. It's now slow enough that waiting usually isn't enough to recharge your magicka, and since the special effects players exploit for near-instantaneous regeneration are percentage increases, they won't allow you to blast non-stop anymore. Part of the reason this is balanced is because it removes the exploits related to regeneration, but the rest is because the weapons have been made much more powerful, so spells can afford to have more firepower. Either way, spells still feel awesome, and in fact with all their extra power they feel much more awesome, and this remains as long as you have them. But there's the catch, you can actually run out and when you do you're not going to be getting it all back in a few seconds anymore.

 

I HATE walk-it-off mechanics. The health regen in Skyrim isn't that fast and by the standards of such systems it's pretty well done, but it's still regeneration in a timeframe short enough to enter into combat. Worse yet, everybody gets it so it's not a mechanic you can avoid. In addition to this, as long as you have some health potions favourited and in stock, you just need to down a few when your health falls and the only thing that can kill you is a rockfall killmove.

 

The solution was easy. With the much greater weapon damage, it's not going to be fast enough to stop you from killing anything. No, not even a frost troll. (f***ing annoying bastards just don't die.) The same goes for you, even with health regen enchantments it's not going to heal you fast enough your enemy will have any issue killing you. I've also slowed it down a great deal to make sure it stayed that way and made other forms of healing non-instantaneous as well so you can't just use potions to make yourself invulnerable. (A standard health potion now takes a minute to heal you.)

 

In TES IV, we had ten races, two sexes and twelve birth signs. All together, we had 240 gameplay-related choices for our characters in chargen. In Skyrim, we only have twenty. No, the standing stones don't count.

 

I added age into the game, at least as best I could, and some extra races. If I can get in all the ones I wanted, which is a big if, than there should be 22 races, two sexes and six ages for a total of 264 options. Granted, in my Oblivion mod I managed to get 2640, but this is all I could do here.

 

Skyrim does not feature attributes, which were a major part of every previous installment and cutting them was a bulls*** move made for no reason other than simplicity. This, along with their menu, user interface and controls, are indicative of a severe case of consolitis. Bethesda, simplicity does NOT equal quality, and dumbing down your game for console-players makes it WORSE, not better. Second issue, they removed acrobatics and athletics and hand to hand. Acrobatics and athletics were both good skills, they were both things that gave the player an advantage in the game and were worth building. Removing them because you feel the way you improved them didn't require special effort is like curing the sick by dumping them in an incinerator. And even if you don't think it's much of an option, many players loved hand to hand, and not having a skill to represent it is bulls***.

 

IF I can add in custom skills, I'm bringing back acrobatics and athletics as a single skill, and hand to hand as another skill. I'll also be adding in cooking, but that's beside the point. I doubt I can add in attributes, so I'll just add in a "fitness" skill (uncategorized, not impacted by the standing stones) to fill in for a few of them. Your mobility skill will make you move faster and its perks can increase your run multiplier and jump height, reduce falling damage, decrease stamina usage and so forth. Hand to hand is weaker than weapon damage, but penetrates armour well, can be made to penetrate better, deals more fatigue damage, which can also be improved, can be made to deal magicka damage, bonus limb damage, (yes, I'm adding limb damage) anbd can knock down, silence, disarm or even paralyze targets with its final perks. Fitness improves your health, magicka and stamina regeneration. In its perks, you can get bonus health, magicka and stamina as well as natural armour (up to 500) resistances to elemental damage and even more regeneration. You know how to increase the former two, but the latter is increased by killing foes, improving other skills and levelling up.

 

As I mentioned in the last one, I'm adding limb damage in if possible. The engine was also built for Fallout 4, and it's got limb damage and vats built in. I just need to activate it. I'll also work out a realism mod later that includes bleed damage, better poison effects, hypovolemic shock and slower regen. As for vats, it's used for kill moves at the moment. If I can find a way to trigger it manually, I can have you use special moves if you trigger vats in the right circumstances, rather than having random kill moves trigger in fights. (I'm looking for sneak-attacks and finishers for enemies that are already down, neither of which will cause issues for the player.)

 

I'm sure there are some other issues that didn't come to mind. If you can think of any other issues that need fixing or any features that could be added, just leave it in a reply.