Revisiting Skyrim

[Barry Admin]

I have finally started a new save. I've never finished one of these or the Fallout games, as I spend all my time titting about, then get bored eventually and never want to look at them again, despite having absolutely loved them and had a hell of a time. One thing that always annoys me is having to forage for items, absolutely spent too much of my life searching through drawers made of pixels.

But fuck it, I'm giving Skyrim a long overdue revisit. I'm actually really looking forward to revisiting some of the locations I haven't seen for so many years. Currently I am moving very slowly towards Riverwood, over-encumbered but unwilling to drop any loot, as fucking usual.  Genuinely excited to see Whiterun again.

The music and general ambience is cracking. I should really try and turn off YouTube and just soak it all up, shouldn't I.

Also thinking of starting a secondary character to try the mods. Any suggestions there?

[Barry Admin]

Really have to just try and do a blind playthrough. Was five minutes in before I was googling "Hadvor or Ralof." Multiple choice games are a special kind of torture for my dumb brain.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I was given this (and the rest of the Elder Scrolls series) a few years ago by a friend, but I've yet to play it. I loved Fallouts 3 and New Vegas, and this looked amazing when my friend was playing it, but it's just too daunting a prospect. These sort of branching/multiple path games are too big for their own good.

[Shay Chaise]

For mods, on XB just go with the top rated of all time stuff, for the most part:

Unofficial Skyrim Patch
Graphical Overhaul Pack
Mesh something something
Landscape 1k something something
Realistic Water 2 (or something)

I also like Vivid Weather 2 (or most recent). It can be a little overblown at times but it looks fuckin great. You also have Campfire and Frostfall for a survival type mode but that's not really my focus. I just love soaking the place up.

I've quite recently picked this up on both XB and the Switch. I think it's a bad game in many ways but I literally don't care and forgive it pretty much anything because what it achieves is so singular, and so profoundly affecting, that I don't even know how they did it. It simply has a sense of place and atmosphere which encourages exploration and allows you to lose yourself better than any open world game ever made, Zelda included. It can't begin to match BotW's mechanical and physical overlapping systems and creative opportunity but you set off in any direction, Jeremy Soule's music stirs and you are gone. I've said it elsewhere but when I'm on my deathbed, if all my family are gone, this is what I'll want to do while I wait to die. This or sit down at Firelink Shrine and go hollow.

[Barry Admin]

Don't go hollow!

Anyway thanks, I've sold all my gear so I think I'll start that alt now, and see what these mods are like for a laugh.

The combat is, you know, urgh, and the models are keek, but yeah, it does have a real charm. It's just those beautiful snowy, mountainous environments that does it for me, I'm a sucker for a snow map. And I love sniping/archery so the combat shortcomings shouldn't bother me. I think I'll make my alt a big badass melee orc or something. I have a vague memory of a YouTube video with a Swiss Nord running around twatting everyone in the face and shouting "BOOM FUCKED HIM UP" or somesuch as his warcry.

[Barry Admin]

I found it! I'm gonna be this guy http://youtube.com/watch?v=uhBiNx749Zw

Fucking pussy wolves.

[Barry Admin]

Mods are interesting, SMIM looks great, and I put on one called Surreal Lighting as well. Everything looked rather glorious. Turned it all off to go back to the vanilla experience for now though. I laughed at the mod which has "realistic kissing" or something, as the developer put a note in saying he'd put in some kind of "pedo-protection at script level" to stop any nonces from snogging babies.

Claude you should get stuck in man, I was just looking at the original thread where you were asking about it back in 2010. I totally know how daunting they can be, mind.

I stood outside Whiterun for a bit with my headphones on, just slowly panning around the vista. Glorious.

Now I remember I've got to spam iron daggers, then get them enchanted, then flog them. Need to find that lass who taught me some archery skills back in the day, too.

[Zetetic]

Interesting NPCs.

There's a load of other fucking nonsense worth adding in so that the nights are nightier and you can actually open barrels and so that you can more accurately loot currencies of long-dead civilisations and all that nonsense, but nothing compares to voice-acted ridiculous fan fiction that's considerably more interesting than the tedious nothing of whatever it is people in the base game are jibbering about.

I've got about 90 mods in place for Skyrim and I'm not sure what most of them are for, but Interesting NPCs is what makes the game returning to for me.

Edit: The trailer for it is quarter-of-an-hour long and opens with one of the worst examples of the 250+ it has to choose from, which betrays something of the project.

[Eight Taiwanese Teenagers]

I just started playing this yesterday on the Switch.

So far I'm feeling a bit lost and confused, maybe because I'm so accustomed to Zelda.

Can't work out how to fight properly, just swinging my sword randomly - can I 'lock on' to enemies or anything?

Does the landscape get any more varied? It's all so bleak and grey. Everywhere looks the same so far.

After reading so much about this game over the years I'm delighted to get the chance to play it. Please help reignite my excitement after an underwhelming first day!

[Shay Chaise]

Melee combat is clunky, that's just a fact. Archery holds up better for various reasons, and it's why the stealth thief archer build is a meme. That said, this time I'm playing a two-handed heavy weapon heavy armour tank, just because I've never done it before. It's satisfying to crunch stuff in one hit with a warhammer. You'll get a feel for it but it's not really a game where the combat is more than functional. Once you get into magic and stuff though, it becomes quite interesting and varied.

It's very much a Snowdonia vibe, as well. It's something I love about the game personally. There are more varied areas but expect lots of forests and mountains and snowy peaks. Once you reach the expansion areas (much later on), you'll see a very different side to the world but don't expect spectacular variation for the most part. I did feel similarly to you when I first played, and the scale of it only added to the sense that it's a big grey mass. It's not, but the atmosphere will likely get under your skin and you'll see the variation. It's a bit like flamenco music. It all sounds the same until you listen to a bit more and get hooked on it. If that sounds like apologism, you'll probably only know through playing on a bit more if it's really for you.

I'd recommend you follow the initial quests just to get you going and get a little homebase. You'll have a house within an hour, I reckon. Maybe less. Then you can either talk to folk and follow more main and side quests or just do what I do and start walking across the map for hours wishing I lived there.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

I know Elder Scrolls has an amazing mod community but do Bethesda ever consider using their services to increase the content of the game on release? Especially considering most people would be happy to do it for free.

[Shay Chaise]

Interesting idea.

For the Special Edition release last year, which had a new coat of Bethesda's own paint, essentially, they did have mods at launch. The PS4 mods were much more limited than the XB1 because of some proprietary codec Sony whining, something like that, but the Xbox edition could certainly be said to 'allow' the mod community to increase the content of the base game.

Aside from all the graphics mods and weather stuff, there are entirely new areas of the game (developed and released previously for PC) which gave console players some pretty large chunks of new game. We're also supposedly talking good chunks, too, though I haven't seen any of the new sections yet.

As for involving modders in any new game development, well, I suspect there may well employ some who've impressed because you tend to see a bit of that with game development. I couldn't see them handing out the code to the Skyrim sequel to some amateurs, though, and saying get to work, for free, but perhaps I misunderstood what you're suggesting.

I think the nature of modding is that it takes a hell of a lot of time, it's not on a deadline and it tends to involve plenty of bugs and odd interactions with other elements of the game. I'd also imagine it's very difficult to deal with some modders who are not aware of their 'place' within the development team. The Binding of Isaac devs opened it up to modders and said that the best additions would make it into the proper game via Booster Packs, regular free updates. Most of these are quite crap, tonally off, aesthetically misjudged and yet there's a massive sense of ownership and entitlement from some of these folks - who basically designed a couple of sprites and tweaked existing variables.

[Bazooka]

I just started playing this yesterday on the Switch.

So far I'm feeling a bit lost and confused, maybe because I'm so accustomed to Zelda.

Can't work out how to fight properly, just swinging my sword randomly - can I 'lock on' to enemies or anything?

Does the landscape get any more varied? It's all so bleak and grey. Everywhere looks the same so far.

After reading so much about this game over the years I'm delighted to get the chance to play it. Please help reignite my excitement after an underwhelming first day!

It's definitely the bleakest of the series but you get used to it. Stealth archer like Shay said is overpowered. Do the one hit kill raiders still exist, or been patched out since the original release?

It's strange,I haven't had any desire to play through Skyrim more than once compared to Morrowind which I went through about 10 times. I think it's down to the fact you can be good at everything on one character.

[Zetetic]

I know Elder Scrolls has an amazing mod community but do Bethesda ever consider using their services to increase the content of the game on release?

Yes, for isolated bits of tat like new armour versions or weapons or the like. The least interesting kinds of mods. (Having said that, Interesting NPCs tries very hard to integrate its content into the world without integrating it into gameplay systems or the like. It has undergone around 6 years of development at this point, mind you.)

Especially considering most people would be happy to do it for free.

The backlash would be significant.

Approaches that have worked tolerably well have included publishers working with mod authors after release on specific commissioned works. Cities: Skylines has done this for example. (Although the interface for installing mods into the game is horrendous, when dealing with lots of new addon buildings for example and trying to group them into styles or what-have you, so there's a somewhat-artifical added-value to official mod packs in that case.)

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Thanks both, interesting to read.

It seems to me if the human resources are ready and willing, it's more a question of how to utilise them rather than if, and when?

For instance, as has been pointed out - modders can be whimsical/obsessive and while that may not feed into a major developer's working structure, or rigid deadlines they wouldn't necessarily be working on those aspects - the rigid stuff like the central plot, game engine etc could be done in house whereas the tweaking and the stuff that for whatever reason just isn't thought of in the studio could be created via, I dunno FTP or whatever they have now - immense creative potential could surely be harnessed without onerous additional costs as those would be voluntarily borne by the people who want to take part - let's think of Momentum for example where this has been successful (in limited ways) - their videos are made very cheaply, quickly and involve the short term loan of film equipment and expertise of their volunteers, plus because there's such a short journey from concept to execution, some of their videos have almost crystal clarity in the points they're trying to get across. You can imagine developing a game, or a comedy series where that dynamic is equally important to ensuring artistic expression.

Yes there's the problem of leaks and so on, potentially security breaches by malicious elements but if the teams working on stuff like Skywind have managed to keep their stuff safe surely it's not beyond the wit of people at Bethesda.

This kind of concept - collaborative community co-ops was meant to be what the internet was working towards in preference to corporate business structures and it would be great to see a studio that is part of the established industry actually interacting on a fundamentally greater with these people, and it could even give people a leg up into the industry. If your fans are so devoted and have time on their hands and enthusiasm to volunteer and you don't make good use of them...you're a fool.

For some modders part of the fun of a game like Skyrim is playing around after it has been released, or just playing around in itself separate to the game, but if the game itself is so packed full of the stuff you see on youtube and want to fit onto your game to begin with, then you get a product that's so instantly superior and interesting on release it will attract enough attention to sustain independent mod communities for years (as well as the after-care work for GOTY editions and so on). In fact that content could set a new baseline as to what people expect from a videogame and from a developer.

[Zetetic]

I think that probably underestimates the extent to which games are generally rushed to release, and how fragile (and intertwined with proprietary tools) the internal processes for creation are. Involving more modders, particularly ones that you'd have to keep at arm's length, would impose a remarkably large amount of work outside the most implausibly disciplined project. (It might well be good for the project in some ways, but perhaps only if you're prepared to add a year or two on to the release date...)

I think mostly modders would be glad if more of an effort was made on the technical side of things so that the bar for entry was lower after the game was released - decent tools, decent documentation and decent interfaces - and engagement with the community on those technical issues. (Civ 5 vs Civ 6 is an interesting example of this - the stuff available to modders in Civ 6 is a dog's breakfast, even though it's clearly based heavily on Civ 5's approach in theory, and continues to be revised with every update.)

What I think has sustained Skyrim's modding (and Fallout 3 and New Vegas) was perhaps less the content of much of the game itself - although the TES world more broadly is attractive in certain ways for telling your own stories - than how relatively easy Bethesda's RPGs are to cram mods into. (Edit: I think I am doing down the world in Skyrim itself a bit here.)

I suspect part of the creativity is also that the mod scene is relatively open. There are some slightly weird attitudes to intellectual property at work, but generally people are happy with others copying and altering general concepts - so you get a diversity of takes on different ideas. (For example, the various mods for Skyrim intended to address the idea of freezing to death.)

I think I would also say that sometimes the most interesting mods are those that aren't really suitable for everyone. Frostfall (for Skyrim) is an irritating and unfair in the arse for most people. JSawyer (a mod for F:New Vegas made by the project director of F:New Vegas!) is too needlessly difficult for most people (including me). A dynamic city naming mod for Civ 6 opens a whole bunch of ethical, political and aesthetic concerns that Firaxis tries generally to sidestep (and I didn't like its choices either, but I liked the idea, so I made my own version with different concerns in mind). And Interesting NPCs is far too inconsistent (in quality and with canon and possibly with age ratings) to have ever been a official product - and that's part of its charm for me.



To try to balance my negativity (!), do you have some ideas of mods in mind that you think "They could have included that if they'd worked together earlier."?

Edit: I think I might be overly focused on precisely the sort things that wouldn't work so well. Perhaps it is also a matter that a slightly different change in form would be required as well, and I'm stuck thinking about the games we have now.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

To try to balance my negativity (!), do you have some ideas of mods in mind that you think "They could have included that if they'd worked together earlier."?

Most of the ones I've seen for Skyrim fall into these:

1) Incremental technical improvements eg. visuals, AI, bug clearances/exploits
2) Additional material - weaponry, combat, NPCs, quests etc
3) Funky/unusual - novelty stuff but the kind of thing that might also give a glint of an idea of something to exploit

1) Given the improvements and patches since release, I wonder whether opening the engine to modders at various stages would give rise to more innovative solutions and in the process make sure it was as robust as possible. A studio restrained by employees, publisher deadlines and the amount of work experience drones they can muster for free labour/testing, yet shunning the pool of resources they've already curated through their past work, is perhaps one that could use a fresh look at their working processes.
2) is where I think the mass of willing participants could help in the most simple way, because if I remember rightly Skyrim further curtailed a number of features which had themselves already been cut after Morrowind in the making of Oblivion. This seemed to come down to available time/space to complete the design and testing, both of which seem silly in hindsight given what has happened to the game since amateur modders were given freedom to play around. How often has the word after been used? Why after?
3) Comes down to ingenuity and simply the benefit of having someone not surrounded by the development studio and not restrained by their own career and relationships with the studio itself there to do things they hadn't thought of. A really important one this.

[Mister Six]

Your issues there are:

1- Opening up the engine code means potentially having it nicked. The same goes for the game in general - if you let the fans start playtesting or accessing design docs, how do you keep a lid on spoilers and secrets? You could make them all sign NDAs but how many fans are going to take it seriously? How many will get angry when you start suing? And how much will you have to spend in investigators and lawyers to pursue those claims?

Not to mention the risk of them slipping code in there to make it say DARREN IS A KNOBBER if you go to some obscure part of the map.

Also most games buy in proprietary engines for physics and the like from elsewhere, so you'd be hard pushed to persuade the companies you buy them from to let their code into the hands of random schmoes that aren't even employed by you.

Also, since you brought up deadlines: What happens when you try to corral a bunch of people who are doing this as a labour of love or second, unpaid job? As someone who's previously had to rely on poorly paid freelancers working from home, the answer is "people putting off shit until the last minute".

2- Same problems as before, but also it's tricky to direct content when you have a widely dispersed group not working to design documents or directly answerable to a design department. How do you maintain consistency? Continuity? Balance?

3- As with 2.

Also you talk about deadlines, but this kind of thing is only going to make them worse, as the QA teams struggle to playtest and debug tons of material made by people they don't know and who don't work in-house, and have little incentive to prioritise the game over what pays their bills.

[Mister Six]

I think Wasteland 2 did do something like this but people were just creating post-apocalyptic detritus rather than anything more substantial or integral to the story.

[surreal]

I think Wasteland 2 did do something like this but people were just creating post-apocalyptic detritus rather than anything more substantial or integral to the story.

yeah, I think they got people to make the models for the landscape which they could use in Unity.

[Mister Six]

i use the word 'also' too much.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

You could make them all sign NDAs but how many fans are going to take it seriously? How many will get angry when you start suing?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICwHhj92WOk

[Beagle 2]

I just started playing this yesterday on the Switch.

So far I'm feeling a bit lost and confused, maybe because I'm so accustomed to Zelda.

Can't work out how to fight properly, just swinging my sword randomly - can I 'lock on' to enemies or anything?

Does the landscape get any more varied? It's all so bleak and grey. Everywhere looks the same so far.

After reading so much about this game over the years I'm delighted to get the chance to play it. Please help reignite my excitement after an underwhelming first day!

I'm just playing the game for the first time and had much the same experience as you. Are you getting on with it better now? I also find the stiffness of the controls really jarring, although I haven't farted about with sensitivity or anything. I got stuck down a small hole fairly early on when a sword fight broke out and was just comically jumping up and down on the spot while dramatic music played and steel clanked.

[Cerys]

I'm currently playing yet again, and I seem to have broken it.  My character, Stealthbastard, is on a mission to murder everyone.  I'm doing okay with that - but somewhere along the way the Thieves Guild questline went tits up and all Brynjolf will do is say 'hmmm?' to me.  Although I do seem to have inadvertently caused a glitch that allowed me to get to the guild inner sanctum and kill them all apart from Mercer Frey and the ones who stay in the Ragged Flagon.

233 murders at the moment.  I didn't even bother joining the Dark Brotherhood, although if I had I could have murderised more.

Oh, and Stealthbastard is a Nord who creeps everywhere in his pants.  On Adept.  I think I'm getting better at this.

[biggytitbo]

Bethesda like to keep releasing this game on every system imaginable (its actually available on casio calculators), but weirdly refuse to fix any of the massive well known bugs that are close to 6 years old and are as notorious and well known as anything in the game itself. There are old game breaking bugs that Bethesda absolutely know exist, that they've shamelessly ported over to the switch version without fixing, despite the fact community fixes have existed for them for 5 years. Shame reall, as they are brilliant in many ways - Doom, Dishonred 2, Prey, Wolfesntein 2, Evil Within 2, that's as close as to the best few years anyone as ever had, but their amazingly lazy attitude towards skyrim is an absolute disgrace.

[Zetetic]

What game-breaking bugs do you have in mind?

^{How do they compare to Battlespire's?}

[biggytitbo]

Do a search on gaming forums and there are the same major bugs discussed 5 or 6 years ago that still exist in the switch port. That's not on is it? If you aren't going to fix it, don't release it.

[Zetetic]

An extremely quick search raises the usual pathfinding glitchiness and the like.

I'm interested to know what "game-breaking" bugs have survived the 5 years. I appreciate this might seem like I'm trying to wind you up or that I don't believe you; that's not my intention, and I find it plausible. Such bugs are usually interesting in themselves (particularly having read the Battlespire playthrough above!) and I wonder if any of the Unofficial Patch projects have tackled them.

[Shay Chaise]

An evergreen game, at this stage, at least.

Just replying because that edit glitch bugs me.

[Beagle 2]

Aye well I'm a few hours in now and it's bloody brilliant!