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 It's no secret that Skyrim has become more than the sum of its parts. This is in no small part due to the fact that prior to Skyrim, The Elder Scrolls as a series has never gone more than six years without a main line release; the longest previous gap between a new mainline Elder Scrolls game was 6 years (Daggerfall to Morrowind, 1996-2002) and that was primarily due to the switch between faux-3D and full 3D. We are now 12-and-a-bit years past the release of Skyrim, 6-and-a-bit years past Special Edition's release, and 2-and-a-bit years past the release of Anniversary Edition. This has given modders ample time to tear Skyrim apart on a scale like never before; the previous greatest achievement in Elder Scrolls modding was bringing Dual Wielding to Oblivion. Now? Modders have ripped Skyrim's engine apart and put it back together again like Victor graverobbing to build his Adam. Skyrim Special Edition also marks the first time that an Elder Scrolls game has been present in an 64-bit engine instead of a 32-bit, which has both greatly improved stability - something modded Elder Scrolls games have never been great at - and massively opened up the breadth of what can be done. And that's what we're going to look at. I've been playing and modding Elder Scrolls since Battlespire. My forays into actually creating mods have been brief (and never released to the public), but I have spent entirely too much time in the Creation Kit, converting mods and altering scripts in an attempt to get massive load orders containing dozens if not hundreds of gameplay-expanding mods to play nice together. Unlike my aborted BGT play, we'll not look into how mods are created nor how to force them to be kind to each other, but instead simply enjoy the fruits of the labors of the talented Elder Scrolls modding community. Should we run into unrecoverable bugs, however, I may rip open the Creation Kit and show off some fixes - assuming there isn't a patch already available! This is Skyrim like you've never seen it before (or maybe you have if you've watched Skyrim playthroughs on Youtube in the past few years), utilizing my own personal load order for my own enjoyment, with a caveat: I'm going to be playing some of the more... contentious mods available, but only those that have merit on the basis of how absolutely insane it was that they've been put together, or if they have a story that has the seeds of being a truly good story but the execution isn't quite there, stretching all the way back to Moonpath to Elsweyr - which was released before the Creation Kit. The biggest mods we'll be looking at I'll go in-depth on on each video where they first appear - meaning that this will be somewhat frontloaded, as we'll be starting with an Alternate Start mod. Just not the one you're probably expecting. I'll also be playing through some of my personal favorite mods, which are few and far between, and I don't think they really get enough love - either because they flew under the radar compared to much larger mods, or because they're newer. Sirenroot - Deluge of Deceit comes to mind as one of the latter, and you can bet we'll be going through it at some point. This is Skyrim: It Just Works. Strap in, buckle up, and get ready. Q: Why do this? A: Because I want to. Q: Nudity? A: Yes. But no overt sex mods. I'm too ace for that poo poo. But the various body mods that vastly improve the way people look in Skyrim trend towards nudity. I'll do my best to not show off a lot of the nudity involved in stripping corpses, but expect to see a tit here and there. Our protagonist, however, as we'll see, will have little reason to strip bodies. For this reason the videos are also marked as 18+ on Youtube. Q: Will Mod X be-- A: Probably not. I'll cover what I want to cover, and maybe I'll throw something else in for fun, but this is mostly based on my personal load order that gives me enjoyment and I'd rather not have to figure out conflicts for something else on top of what I'm already taking on. Q: But Mod X is-- A: I'm running on the 1.6.1170 build, which a great deal of long-beloved mods, especially those SKSE or DLL dependent, don't work on, as they've not been updated to function with newer versions of SKSE or of the Skyrim binary. If it works for 1170, I'll consider it, but if this becomes a 'please show off this cool mod' thread I'll probably shut it down. If an update for something comes out, I'll give it a test drive and see if it causes any crashes before upgrading to it. Then again, if it's a really cool mod that's outdated, I'll see if it's possible to get the DLL binary to work in 1170 - after all, I'm running at least one outdated/personally updated/updated by someone else but not the mod author DLL in my personal load order that, by the grace of fuckery, is working. As a side note, the modding community seems to mostly want to stay with the last pre-AE patch for a lot of things, which is totally their call - updating for the occasional patch is less work than having to update every time Bethesda decides to add new Paid Mod content. I completely understand the decision of only wanting to support the last patch before Skyrim: Fishing Edition. I don't intend to slam anyone for making the decision to not update or make separate versions of their mods to function with Anniversary Edition - hell, it was only a few months between 1130 and 1170, barely any time to work! So I get it. But I'll be playing 1170 and using mods that work with it. Q: How's this going to work? A: This is going to be a hybrid narrative LP. I have a set character in mind to go through the various mods, and will be posting Journal Updates after each video written in the character's voice to get her thoughts on what we just watched. Any deaths we see - and there will be more than a few of them in the early levels - will be non-canon. Videos will not be commentated, but will probably include a couple of subtitles here and there. Expect videos to be between 25 minutes and an hour at a time, sometimes longer if there's no good break point to end a video and a mod has scenes that keep going. Q: What's the Spoiler Policy? A: Feel free to spoil and talk about base game quests and story, because we'll be going through some of it - namely, we'll be playing through the Dark Brotherhood and Mage's College, as well as completing the Main Quest at some point. Don't spoil any of the modded content, as even though some of these mods have existed for a literal decade, people may not have seen them - especially those who've only played on console. Let the mods play out and discuss only what's been seen. Lastly, feel free to talk about the various qualities of mods, but no actual insults should be leveled at mod creators or voice actors involved. Remember this is free content for a game, worked on by people who do it in their spare time. You should never expect studio quality from mods - those few that manage that kind of quality are the exception rather than the rule.
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Apr 5, 2024 21:37
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Gameplay & Narrative Episode One: Awakening Calia's Thoughts, Part One Episode Two: The Thalmorening Episode Three: Trouncing the Thalmor Episode Four: The Endragoning Episode Five: The Grey In Our Beards Episode Six: Assassins, Khajiit and Bounty Hunters, Oh My Episode Seven: Momma Calia Episode Eight: More Thalmor for the Slaughter Episode Nine: Stormcloaks & Stabbings Episode Ten: Revelations Mod Showcases One: Visuals and Startup Two: Rigmor of Bruma Three: Piercings and Overlays Four: Dungeons, Hotkeys and NPCs Five: M'rissi Six: Custom Skills Rambling The Thu'um RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 01:47 on May 14, 2024 |
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Apr 5, 2024 21:37
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Reserved.
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Apr 5, 2024 21:37
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And reserved, just in case.
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Apr 5, 2024 21:37
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Our story begins with the Altmeri Clan Silinor. Silinor is known for producing atypically strong mages, even for Altmer, mostly due to their astrological breeding practices which result in 95% of children born to the clan to be born under the sign of the Atronach. In typical Altmer fashion, with their traditions centered around racial purity, any child of the Silinor clan born outside of the sign of the Atronach are declared hulkynd and abandoned. Clan Silinor was also known for being staunchly against the formation of the Third Aldmeri Dominion, and especially the resurrection of the Thalmor as a form of secret police. Their reputation was thoroughly destroyed by the Thalmor, and their status was reduced to near nothing. Many died of poverty, shame, or were simply slaughtered by the Thalmor, while some branches disappeared into hiding. Our protagonist, Calia Silinor, is the youngest daughter of this clan, a mere 25 years old. Her birth was to signal the end of the clan, as her mother, Psysephona, died in childbirth and her father Corelian followed shortly thereafter, pining after his lost love. Her three older brothers - Lillandril, Corelian II, and Solimon, confirmed bachelors all - took to raising the child Calia. But too, they took their parents' mission to heart, to stymy, if not destroy, the Aldmeri Dominion. Calia grew up under their tutelage in swordplay, bow, stealth, and spell, and shared their hatred of the Dominion. While it wasn't the happiest childhood, Calia grew well and took to their lessons with a talent. However, the touch of any metallic armor or weapon not made of Moonstone would leave her with horrid rashes, and so she had to learn to defend herself solely with magic. But, as she grew, her brothers all died to the Thalmor and their plots. While the clan had been horribly reduced from what had been a position of power, the name of Clan Silinor still held some weight in the Isles, and her brothers all were their parents' children, carrying with them the same level of fervor and talent the Silinor elders had once held. While they could not publicly denounce the Dominion, they worked in secret, linking allies together to try and topple the Dominion from within - and gradually drawing entirely too much attention to themselves. Corelian II was brazenly assassinated in an open-air market one day, and nobody there was willing to identify the attackers. Solimon was found with high-ranking Thalmor documents upon his person and was publicly executed. And finally, Lillandril, on the eve of Calia's 21st birthday, got into a drunken brawl in the tavern he had taken his little sister to to celebrate, responding to some snide remarks about how far their clan had fallen. A knife in his ribs stole his life, and nobody can say for sure who put the knife to him. Alone in the world, Calia swore to put an end to the Dominion. She ransacked her brothers' belongings and found details of a few contacts in distant Skyrim who were trying to resist the Dominion's push into the country. After some long back-and-forth communications, she managed to get them to trust her and opened a path into Skyrim. Taking what meager possessions she had and the small wealth of coin her family had managed to secret away, she left the Summerset Isles and began the long journey to Skyrim, spending nearly all the gold in passage through Valenwood and Cyrodiil to reach the frozen north. And then... nothing. She remembers nothing of what happened to her after crossing the border, and finds herself awakening in a strange place, surrounded by burnt corpses, bereft of everything but her jewelry... The Story of Calia Silinor, Part One - Awakening
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Apr 5, 2024 21:40
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Today's Mod Roundup, Part One: Visuals and Startup Redux SE (mod page defunct, retained only for information) is a New Main Quest of Skyrim that runs alongside the original Main Quest, now only maintained as part of the ezPG package, featuring the Bosmer woman we met and finding answers to the questions about her. However, we won't see anything more from Redux until we reach level 10. All we have right now is a 10 point deduction from our Health for receiving the woman's mark. Spoilers: It's not a very nice story we'll be seeing. Improved Alternate Conversation Camera is the letterboxing and zoom-in dialogue screen you see. It's just nice to have, honestly, and I enjoy it. You can see that it's not... a hundred percent, though, on swapping to looking at the player character, having to exit and reenter dialogue a few times before it does so. It's probably just a bit of script lag. Smoothcam makes the third person camera a bit smoother, especially with Octavian's Preset Alt active. Noble Skyrim - My personal favorite sweeping texture overhaul mod at 2k. Noble Skyrim both sharpens the vast majority of textures and softens the jagged edges. There are higher resolution texture mods out there, and more realistic textures, but I feel Noble does just enough without completely altering Skyrim's aesthetic. JK's Skyrim All In One - jkrojmal has overhauled all the Hold cities and many, many, many interiors and buildings. This is just their Hold Cities wrapped in a single mod, changing the nine main cities of Skyrim. I usually prefer the Great Cities series, but they've grown rather unstable over the years when mashing in extra mods, and jkrojmal's series is far more used and thus gets more compatibility patches, so for maximum compatibility I've gone back to these. For what it's worth, I think jkrojmal does a great job of revamping the cities without going overboard, and staying within their original appearance while making them bigger and better. Plus it doesn't really change much in the way of where things are located, so it makes it far easier for mods utilising these holds and their navmeshes to work with. Lux Orbis, Lux Via, and Lux are a trio of mods designed to work together to overhaul various lighting aspects of Skyrim and to utilise ENB to its utmost. Orbis deals with exterior artificial lighting, Via deals with the roads and their lighting, and Lux is interior lighting. Honestly, if you're going to use or develop an ENB, I feel like Lux should be what you base it on, it's just that good. And speaking of ENBs... Natura ENB is the ENB I'm using for this playthrough. It makes use of Picturesque's weathers, and gives everything a sort of fantastical feel without going overboard with it. It also utilises two other mods: Enhanced Volumetric Light and Shadows is a volumetric lighting adjustment that synchronizes them with Nirn's two biggest light sources - the sun and the moons, and Mists of Tamriel, which is where the thicker fogs and mists you've seen come into play. Static Mesh Improvement Mod - One of Skyrim's luminaries and most long-running must-have mods, having been uploaded to the Oldrim Nexus originally in February 2012, Static Mesh Improvement Mod, or SMIM, updates the static objects palced in Skyrim's world - potion bottles, carts, firepits, lanterns, lamps, ingots, ores, so on and so forth. While it and Noble Skyrim cover some of the same ground, the two work together wonderfully if you let Noble overwrite SMIM's stuff where they cross. Spectral Armaments is a texture replacer for the "Ghostly" weapons of Skyrim, but I'm only using the optional file that replaces the Bound Sword, Battleaxe and Bow with its textures. This is why Calia's Bound Sword and Bow don't look like the Daedric Sword/Bow. Now, let's talk gameplay. The biggest mod I'm using that alters gameplay is Attack - Modern Combat Overhaul, which is no longer freely available - though it can still be found. This forces attack commitment and slows animations to a single speed, which makes melee combat significantly more about committing at the right time. The second-biggest is Precision - Accurate Melee Collisions which does exactly what it says on the tin - what your weapon connects to during the animation now gets hit. This means that two-handed weapons can cleave through swathes of enemies, and even one-handed weapons can hit multiple opponents - the vanilla melee dual wield power attack, for instance, can now hit everyone around you if they're close enough. This can also be something of a pain in dungeons, as if your weapon hits a wall, your attack stops and you stagger backwards. So long as there are colliders in the animations you choose to use, Precision works with them. As you can see, though, Precision can cut both ways - a few attacks missed despite being locked-on because the animation made no collision with the smaller huskies. Speaking of animations... Verolevi's Animation - All in One Collection is what I'm using. It includes Conditional Armor Type Animations which changes your wield style based on the armor you have equipped, allowing you to use multiple animations for combat in the same game - so long as you're willing to do it manually. However, with the Collection, that's all set up already. This is the source of my dual wielding and magic animations. True Directional Movement adds 360 degree movement to Skyrim, along with a lock-on feature so you can actually hit things if you're not playing with analog controls. Don't Sheathe Bound Weapons is hit or miss for me, but basically what it's supposed to do is never play the "sheath weapon" animation for bound weapons and instead play the animation where you let the weapon go into the air and it fades out of existence. When it works, it's nice, when it doesn't, whatever. Almost always works for bow, works about 40% of the time for dual wielding. Experience revamps the leveling system of Skyrim to gain experience from killing, completing quests, discovering locations and the like, and not from leveling up skills. It also institutes a skill cap for skills of a base of 18 + 2 per level, leading to most skills being capped at 20 for a level 1 character (though racial bonuses can push it past that cap). Combined with Leveling Freedom you can control the XP curve of Skyrim and massively slow down the leveling process - we'll be playing on slightly higher-than-normal settings to slow the pace to godhood that the Elder Scrolls games encourage. Immersive Spell Learning - DESTified is a combination of Immersive Spell Learning and Don't Eat Spell Tomes, where learning from spells now takes time, based on your skill in the spell school, the ranking of the spell (novice/apprentice/adept/master), your maximum magicka, if you're sitting or standing, and if you're in a relatively quiet place or not. The best place to study spell tomes with this mod is in the Arcanaeum at the College of Winterhold, just after waking up from an 8 hour sleep. The DESTification also means the spell tomes don't disappear, so you can throw them into your library or sell them back after you're done with them. Skyrim's Paraglider with the Anniversary Edition Update slams a Breath of the Wild-style Paraglider into Skyrim, along with a spell tome called Tarhiel's Gale that lets you initiate an updraft wherever you are, making it much easier to use. As Calia's journal stated, though, there won't be a great deal of use of this given the frozen clime. (This is mostly for me to bypass tedium in descending tall places - you'll understand why once we get into at least one of the mods.) Starfrost - A Survival Overhaul is a lightweight survival overhaul built on both the Creation Club Survival Mode and the Survival Mode Improved mod. While it's a bit lighter weight than what I prefer, Frostfall's more heavy-handed nature keeps me from playing with it anymore - plus I like seeing Warmth on clothing/armor in the UI now. Starfrost makes Survival mode less tedious overall while keeping the penalties relevant. Campfire - If you've been on the Skyrim modding scene for any time, there's two names you know - Chesko's Campfire and Frostfall. They're legendary in the circle and came onto the scene relatively early (Feb 2012) and filled a need for Elder Scrolls players to both punish themselves with harder gameplay loops and invent new mechanics that help to mitigate them if not become outright necessary. Campfire will give us a way to set up camps and avoid the cold and warm up to sleep to get rid of tired penalties without needing to trek all the way back to civilization or clear out a bandit camp with beds. And believe me, we're going to need portable sleeping for some of these mods. Blade and Blunt introduces a number of elements to Skyrim's combat, like being able to receive injuries (which integrates with Starfrost above) as well as reducing general regeneration capabilities, making combat more than "spam power attacks and back away til stamina regens then do more power attacks". It also introduces stamina drain for holding a drawn bow, and can also introduce stamina drain for sneaking (which I have turned off) and caps for armor, magic resistance, and spell absorption (which I have also turned off). Coupled with Scrambled Bugs and editing the .toml file to disable Power Attacks if you don't have the full Stamina cost available, and combat gets much more unforgiving. Smart Harvest NG Autoloot - There's been a few autoloot mods for Skyrim. For this playthrough I've turned off everything except Ingredients collecting because I really suck at managing to grab ingredients, especially butterflies. If worried about that making me overpowered, see: Complete Alchemy and Cooking Overhaul vastly overhauls alchemy so that it's no longer a get-rich-quick or loop yourself to godhood scheme. What it all does would take too long to go into, so have a peek at the mod description. As for our stats, well there's Character Creation Overhaul which has given us a permanent birthsign (Atronach) and differing base stats for being an Altmer (which is why our base carry weight is only 200), as well as the Specs Weedle's Daggerfall Traits for Skyrim available on the Skygerfall page, from which we have acquired a +200 Magicka bonus, a +100 Stamina bonus, and a 100% Weakness to Magic. Which is why the mage bandit hit us so damned hard when our Atronach Spell Absorption didn't fire. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Apr 5, 2024 |
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Apr 5, 2024 21:42
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  (Journal template provided by Mask of Vice on DeviantArt)
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Apr 5, 2024 21:43
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Well this promises to be an interesting trainwreck.
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Apr 5, 2024 22:34
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Part Two
RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Apr 6, 2024 |
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Apr 6, 2024 01:07
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Mod Showcase: Rigmor of Bruma Welcome to Rigmor of Bruma. One of the more divisive mods on the Nexus - though by no means the most - Rigmor of Bruma creates a lengthy questline in which we'll get to know this girl we've helped save from the Thalmor. The most valid criticisms leveled at Rimgor are about the dialogue options which envisions the Dragonborn as a certain type of person, and about Rigmor herself. The reason I want to show this mod off, however, is because there is a good story here, just somewhat mangled by the execution - what we're seeing here is an extremely traumatized girl that's barely 18 years old who's had expectations set on her from childhood that have been constantly destroyed by the machinations of the Thalmor and the fallout of the White-Gold Concordat. Enter the PC, who saves her from her latest near-death experience and goes with her to help brutally murder anyone who wants to hurt her. For my part, I find Rigmor's character believable, if a bit... difficult to deal with at times, not helped by two things - first, as mentioned, your own dialogue options which range from Needless Jerkass to Doormat a few too many times, and second, the mod pushing you towards romancing this girl. Yes, there's a romance, and no, we won't be exploring it in Rigmor of Bruma, for various reasons. One of which is utter inconsistency when it's a WLW romance - in an upcoming conversation Calia will get to declare her orientation to Rigmor (who asks), as gay, straight, or bi/pan, to which Rigmor seems rather confused about if you say you're a gay femme, only to later have a forced dialogue option in which you, an open lesbian expresses concern and confusion about the relationship only for Rigmor to reassure you about it. So, no, we'll not be doing her romance, mostly because again, she's only 18 and is more traumatized than a teenager growing up under late-stage capitalism, and making any romantic moves towards her feels predatory and creepy even outside of the inconsistency I mentioned. We'll revisit that decision in its sequel, Rigmor of Cyrodiil, which we won't be seeing for quite some time. That aside, one of the other valid concerns about Rigmor is that her questline is entirely Rigmor's story, and the Dragonborn is just the facilitator of it. This is her show, and we're tagging along to make sure it goes on, to the point where, as you've seen, we're told not to interact with the various bits and bobs of Skyrim's stories until Rigmor is finished (Bleakfalls Barrow, Anise's cellar). Though it will support some of the main quest going alongside Rigmor's - we'll see a bit of it. But it's not like Calia's going to turn down the opportunity to slaughter a shitload of fascists who have taken over her country, killed her family and want to ruin everyone else's lives - to say nothing of trying to save the first genuinely good person she's met in Skyrim. The only good Thalmor is a dead Thalmor.  Also be kind to Calia's journal entries while we're going through this. I am doing my best with the material I'm given. The final criticism of Rigmor I find valid regardless of one's playstyle is the extremely lengthy overland travel you do; the mod suggests not doing any Fast Traveling, and I have seen it break scripts if you fast travel - though that was the old version of the mod, and we're playing the much more recent and updated Rebooted version (and in my playtests, teleporting around - yes, we have some teleport spells available coming up - didn't break anything). I'll be fast-forwarding through the boring bits after the next video, just to give you all a taste of how the mod author chose to implement the Rigmor-centric locations the mod introduces. Also, the reason Rigmor doesn't show as being carried in Calia's arms is because of the HDT SMP physics extensions that allow for things like moving cloth and hair, which breaks carrying NPC models and turns them invisible. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Apr 9, 2024 |
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Apr 6, 2024 01:14
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Episode 3: Trouncing the Thalmor Today we encounter the first bit of Rigmor 'jank' - as stated earlier, the original Rigmor of Bruma was constructed by a single author, who did their best while also trying to minimize conflicts. Building in such out of the way places is one such method they took, because these far-flung exterior cells are rarely touched just because of their remoteness and inaccessibility outside of using horses like mountain goats. However, the lengthy overland travel we saw here is just the beginning; as said before, the mod page suggests not fast traveling, though the Reboot is remarkably better at not breaking on fast travel. This is perhaps the shortest overland journey we'll encounter in Rigmor of Bruma, which will take us nearly all over Skyrim before we're done, and to its furthest fringes. Always take a horse, as well; several of the places you're meant to go don't function well if you try to cross them on foot, involving a lot of jumping and finding the right spot to let you go up without a horse - you can see me struggling a little here and there over the meshing. There's a few places where you're best served going overland, anyways - there's a number of pit stops that you make during these travel sections for chatting with Rigmor - and the markers for these trigger whether you or Rigmor go over them, so you can end up with Rigmor just stopping in the middle of nowhere with you a few miles away waiting to talk and no idea where she is, necessitating backtracking to find her - if you can find her, as she can take shortcuts like the player and thus might stop several hundred feet off the road and be obscured by foliage. (The Summon Rigmor letter helps abate this slightly.) There is at least one part of the mod that involves overland travel that takes over an hour to get through with no other recourse. Moving forward, I'll be fast-forwarding a lot of the boring parts of the travel - I just wanted you to get a taste of it in this video, though there's one particular part that I'm tempted to just let play out without any kind of fast-forward feature. Story-wise, though, there's a theme that runs through Skyrim modders that seem to take the view that Thalmor aren't already evil enough, so they either amp up their atrocities or make some kind of Uber-Thalmor within the Thalmor, and in either case it pushes their evil behavior to almost cartoonish levels. We'll be seeing worse with Rigmor as we go forward, and another mod will show another tack modders take to "make Thalmor more evil". Personally, I don't think the Thalmor needed to be made more evil - they're already a dictatorial fascist state with racial supremacy overtones and a propensity towards religious subjugation. How much more evil do they really need to be? Steve Rogers would punch every last one of them in the face as is - and with some of the stuff we'll come to see, he'd probably view the Geneva Convention as the Geneva Suggestions in dealing with them. Calia's already got a raging murder ladyboner for the Thalmor - suffice to say it's going to get worse as we move forward.
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Apr 8, 2024 11:32
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Today's Mod Showcase: Piercing and Overlay Mods Calia sure has a lot of piercings. The vast majority of them come from Satisfactory Facial Piercings which gives a whole wealth of piercings that fit onto High Poly Head and respond well to the various expression mods, mainly by equipping them as HeadParts - without getting too technical, it makes them part of the face morph, and they look absolutely stunning. Other piercings come from Elenwin Jewelry SSE (NSFW link) with optional SMP support (NSFW link), along with Pierced Ears - Earrings SE, which adds some of the more elaborate earrings you can see in the crafting menu. There are some 'intimate' piercings that won't be very showcased in this playthrough from Ayleid Piercings (NSFW link). I originally installed it to compare to the Elenwin navel piercings and just never removed it, but I do like the way they look - they do tend to clip through clothing, however, making their use in non-bikini armors rather difficult. And finally, there's Sharkish Piercings (NSFW link), which adds some very nice looking piercings indeed - but again, of limited use in a mostly-clothed playthrough. These are the piercing mods I've found to work the best for various applications. While others exist on the Nexus, these are the ones that fit into my general interests and aesthetics when it comes to RL bodymods. Another thing Calia has a lot of are freckles. These all entirely come from the Skin Feature Overlays SE and FRECKLES mods, which add many new options for skin overlays, from stretch marks to birthmarks to freckles. Lyru's Tattoo pack collection and THeHAG's and Bladesinger's Private Body Tattoos and Overlays add quite a few nice looking tattoo overlays as well - Calia will likely acquire a few tattoos later. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 11:58 on Apr 8, 2024 |
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Apr 8, 2024 11:53
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Episode 4: The Endragoning 
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Apr 11, 2024 21:18
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Episode 5: The Grey In Our Beards 
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Apr 18, 2024 00:17
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Mod Showcase: Dungeons, Hotkeys and NPCs Hi there, Bleak Falls Barrow and Ustengrav - you're looking different. Dungeons - Revisited revamps a few of the more played dungeons in Skyrim to be longer, with multiple paths through and more enemy saturation, to make dungeon crawls a bit more crawl and a bit less easy. Ustengrav, I think, exemplifies why I like the mod so much; much longer, much more of a trial for a fledgling Dragonborn to test themselves against. The old Grimy Utilities provides the hotkey spellcasting. It's not to difficult to convert yourself to work with SE/AE, utilizing the BSA unpacker tool - there's even a tutorial on how to do so here for SkyTweak, Grimy Bunyip's other very popular LE mod. As an aside, I am very sad that Grimy themselves never updated their plugins to SE/AE format; 95% of gameplay altering mods could be done through SkyTweak alone. A number of appearances have been altered by the Bijin series - I have NPCs, Wives and Warmaidens installed, the last of which gave Delphine a more war-torn appearance with the scarring over her cheek. Majestic Greybeards provides the Greybeards with their namesakes - truly impressive beards of grey.
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Apr 18, 2024 00:33
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Today, I'd like to talk about what I view as one of the biggest failings of Skyrim: The Thu'um. The Thu'um is a very, shall we say, unintuitive process, and the attempts at tutorializing the player in how to use and interact with Shouts are straight up failures. This comes solely down to the universal cooldown-based system they used for it. I am a proponent of internalized consistency in fiction - players and NPCs should be governed by the same rules at all times, save in the case of exceptional exceptions. And yet, in the early parts of the game, Skyrim goes out of its way to break its own established rules about the system just to avoid player frustration and waiting. For instance, when practicing Fus Ro, the cooldown timer is scripted to reset early so that you can get it over with in a short period of time; the same goes for when you're demonstrating Whirlwind Sprint, and then again in Ustengrav when you're using Whirlwind Sprint to get through the gates before they close. You can see the cooldown timer resetting immediately after launching yourself halfway through the gates. Story-wise, Arngeir also spends multiple voice lines talking about the way Shouts work, only to append those lines with "Nevermind, that doesn't apply to you" - I suppose to give the Dragonborn an exceptional exception in story, if not gameplay. There were three paths they could have taken to make the shouts more internally consistent - they could have reduced the Shout cooldowns entirely and made the actions you end up taking the baseline. They could have made Shouts individual cooldowns, and required you to quickly switch to another Shout to get through the closing gates in Ustengrav. Or they could have just designed the parts of the game that interact with the shouts differently so that they didn't have to break the game's own rules on how the Shouts work. They chose to do neither of these, and just have unexceptional exceptions, one-off resets of cooldowns so the story flows the way they want it to, instead of having the story flow around the mechanics introduced. This is lazy, not just from a game design perspective but from a storytelling, gameplay, and immersion perspective. Having these unexceptional exceptions pop up is jarring and breaks the flow of the story, if you're the type to notice them. Not everyone is, I'll admit. The UX elements are also very unintuitive, with the base game having the Shout cooldown be a thin line around the compass that fades in an outward progression towards the ends of the compass - a UI element you're not paying attention to in combat, because all the action is happening several hundred pixels below the compass. This makes Shouting in combat an exercise in altering your own gameplay style, or it becomes a one-off that you open with or that you pull out once in combat, exacerbated by the excessive cooldowns. The point is, having the tutorial sections of the Shouts break their own rules before the player can even understand what the baseline rules are is a recipe for disaster and confusion. There are many, many mods around making Shouts more accessible - individual cooldowns for Shouts, better Shouting, reduced Cooldowns, etc. Beyond that, most of the Shouts just aren't useful from a gameplay perspective. Unrelenting Force is cool and all, but it does very little damage, meaning its primary use is throwing enemies off of tall places or interrupting an attack - hardly in line with the fantasy presented in the trailers. Damaging shouts, in general, do very little damage. Utilizing the utility shouts means locking yourself out of more generally useful shouts for a long period - Aura Whisper, which lets you see actors through walls, has a baseline 30/40/50 second cooldown, and only lasts for 10/20/30 seconds. Become Ethereal, one of the more useful Shouts, is a 20/30/40 second cooldown for 8/13/18 seconds of damage invulnerability. Fire and Frost Breath as combat Shouts see some use, but Fire Breath in particular is only useful at the first word, at 50/70/90 damage for a cooldown of 30/50/100 seconds. The only real standout above the rest is Ice Form, at 60/90/120 second cooldown for a variable paralyze effect depending on enemy strength. In short, the entire Shout system - one of the main talking points of Skyrim in the announcements, trailers, and teasers - was underdeveloped, undertested, and shipped as a partially broken system with only a few of its shouts viable in gameplay with cooldowns entirely too long for them to be a core component of the gameplay. It's a flaccid appendage appended to an Elder Scrolls game, an extraneous gameplay feature that you can go the entire game without using and not even notice its absence save for the times where you're forced to use it (Greybeard training, the penultimate and ultimate battle against Alduin) - which accounts for maybe ten minutes out of a 50+ hour experience. Hell, one of the more popular mod attributes is not being the Dragonborn - alternate starts such as Skyrim Unbound can be used to turn off the system entirely, and any number of quest mods catch flack if they call the player the Dragonborn in dialogue because playing as not the Dragonborn is such a popular choice among players. The Shout system could have been a cool and amazing gameplay element. Letting the player rapidly swap between Shouts depending on the situation with individual cooldowns alone would have immensely improved the system and increased engagement with it. Rapidly firing off an Ice Form followed by an Unrelenting Force to yeet an ice statue would have been a cool and fun gameplay iteration - or Whirlwind Sprinting into melee range and unleashing a Fire Breath in someone's face, or using Throw Voice to position someone in front of a cliff to Unrelenting Force them off, or any number of potential interactions between utility and combat shouts. Instead, we got something that is entirely forgettable that has to break its own gameplay rules to even be used correctly in the places the developers wanted you to use them. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Apr 18, 2024 |
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Apr 18, 2024 01:11
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Episode 6: Khajiit, Assassins and Bounty Hunters, Oh My
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Apr 20, 2024 23:13
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Episode 7: Momma Calia
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Apr 26, 2024 01:34
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Mod Showcase: More Companions M'rissi's Tails of Troubles [sic] is another of those mods that makes the Thalmor MORE EVIL by introducing us to M'rissi, a very unusual Khajiit. We'll be exploring her story more in the future, but suffice to say that there's a reason she doesn't look like any of the established Khajiit furstock, and that reason is because the Thalmor are bastards. M'rissi is one of those companion mods I do quite like, even if there's some quite squicky content involved in her storyline that adds a questionable (at the very least) sort of morality to her romance plot, which Calia will not be partaking in. Given the other dialogue options on display for M'rissi's introduction, it should be patently obvious what the Thalmor's interest in M'rissi's is (yech). At this point it should be assumed that Calia is essentially adopting these people she runs across and has only maternal interest in them.
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Apr 26, 2024 01:41
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Episode 8: More Thalmor for the Slaughter 
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May 4, 2024 20:49
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Episode 9: Stormcloaks & Stabbings Mild desyncing issues again with an attempted resyncing of the audio, forgive me if it's a bit off. Not sure why just 8 & 9 had this issue, 10 (already recorded and edited) doesn't. 
RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 00:04 on May 11, 2024 |
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May 10, 2024 12:53
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vid is listed as private
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May 10, 2024 23:05
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:vid is listed as private Corrected, thanks. I swear I made it Public prior to posting it but I guess it didn't take.
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May 11, 2024 00:02
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Episode 10: Revelations 
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May 14, 2024 01:32
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Mod Showcase: Custom Skills The new perk menu you see is a combination of Custom Skills Framework, Custom Skills Menu, and Custom Skills Menu - Custom Icons. The Custom Skills Framework is one of those things that only happens when a game lasts in popularity for so long. The Perk Menu is hardcoded - you can't add or remove new skills to or from it, even if you can change the number of perks in each tree and the shape that tree takes. Custom Skill Framework breaks that and adds new Perk Trees with their own Skyrim-styled perk menus, though generally you need an Ability or an Item to access it - you've seen the Meditate I got from the Greybeards quests, which is used to access the Dragonborn tree. That's where Custom Skills Menu comes in, which adds a new Custom Skills option in the tween menu (the tab menu), and the Custom Icons mod adds colorful icons for these new Custom Skills. I've installed a few of those new Custom Skills mods, but I haven't shown them off because I was waiting for an update for .1170, which it did shortly before recording Episode Ten. Those skills are Unarmored Defense, which adds a new skill like Morrowind's unarmored ability. It levels as you get hit without wearing armor, and has perks associated with giving unarmored bonuses. VIGILANT, which is a companion to Vicn's VIGILANT mod, which levels as you do things while wearing an Amulet of Stendarr, and gives bonuses while wearing the same and fighting daedra and undead. Hand to Hand which is a perk tree for, well, unarmed combat. Subclasses of Skyrim - the DESTINY menu - gives perks at certain levels and lets you buy perks that more define your role - or blur it between the archetypes of Mage, Warrior and Thief. College of Winterhold Perk Tree - Gives a skill that makes you a better mage, unlocking perks as you complete the College questline. (However I done did screw up and reset it to 15 instead of leaving it at 100 - I'll see if I can fix that.) You may notice three of the above are from Vicn, who's something of a legend in the modding community for their VIGILANT, GLENMORIL, and UNSLAAD series of mods. I may do an alternate install to show those off, as they're not exactly in Calia's wheelhouse, but they are very moody, atmospheric, and fun. One more thing to note is that most of these new Custom Skills are divorced from the Skyrim perk system and give their own perk points that can only be spent in those trees. Unarmored, Vigilant and Hand to Hand give perk points at certain skill levels while Subclasses of Skyrim gives perk points at certain character levels. College of Winterhold Perk Tree, however, uses vanilla perk points. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 02:15 on May 14, 2024 |
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May 14, 2024 01:46
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