The Elder Scrolls Megathread XV: A Song of Ice and Draugr - Games

[QUOTE=archangel125;42784547]I don't know. There's something way cool about realizing that when you're high in the icy mountains and a sudden blizzard starts to blow, you won't survive long without a fire and a tent or building to take shelter in. It makes the world of Skyrim seem so much bigger - Especially when the mod has an option to disable fast travel. The mod also has an option where certain classes of vanilla/expansion armor have different resistances to cold. For example, a full set of ebony or dragon armor offers moderate protection, a set of fur armor offers the highest cold resistance, and a set of Hide or studded hide gear or forsworn armor is going to make you a meatsicle in a couple of minutes (Because in the game, that covers very little of you, leaving your upper body mostly bare). If you have armor added by a mod, it has an 'inspect' option that lets you choose how resistant that armor is to cold. Resist Frost enchantments also go a long way. Hunting game using Hunterborn is fun - You get to pick up and carry carcasses before field dressing and skinning/harvesting them. Deer, Elk and Sabre Cats are naturally very heavy, and very difficult to carry. You can kill and gather a brace of rabbits or other small game much more easily. [B]Imagine:[/B] You're starving with no food, and stuck far from help, high in the mountain passes of the Pale. There's a snow storm brewing. You've been stalking an elk, and you finally take it down with an arrow. The chill starts to get to you despite the fact you're clad in thick furs, and you're slowly freezing. Now, carving up that elk for meat is going to take time. You won't last long enough in the cold to manage it. Solution? You pick up the carcass (Which weighs a goddamn tonne) and move it, slowly but surely, back to your camp (Consisting of a fireplace you can create anywhere and feed with firewood, and a portable, pitchable tent). Want to run with it? Drink a carry weight potion. Once at your fire, you can drop it, harvest its meat, use the cooking pot and ingredients you're carrying to cook it so the raw meat doesn't make you sick, and you'll still have a lot of meat to spare. So you eat, put some of the meat for provisions in your pack (You can salt the meat if you have salt piles so it doesn't spoil) and lie down in your tent to wait out the storm. Once the skies clear (Or you get impatient and use Clear Sky to end the storm immediately) you add more firewood to your fire, get as warm as you can, then quench it and continue on your way. Those mods make moments like the one I just described frequent and engaging. Oh, and you can toggle each of the mods on or off in-game, or edit their settings using SkyUI's MCM (Also in-game) to choose just how hardcore you want to play them. Hell, you can even set the rate at which you're affected by cold, or at which you get hungry, thirsty or sleepy. Once you've seen all of Skyrim, you've done most of the quests, and the game gets boring, this really breathes life back into it. Harnbrand is my alt btw.[/QUOTE] If i wanted all that, i'd just go outside. we have all that here. I'm gaming, not trekking when i start up skyrim. Bring me a mod that lets you put a turd at the feet of Cicero and i'm intrigued.

[QUOTE=Koleskab;42786335]If i wanted all that, i'd just go outside. we have all that here. I'm gaming, not trekking when i start up skyrim. Bring me a mod that lets you put a turd at the feet of Cicero and i'm intrigued.[/QUOTE] But you won't encounter dragons and self-entitled high elves fighting self-entitled nords and repetitive dungeons by going outside

[QUOTE=MrJazzy;42786390]But you won't encounter dragons and self-entitled high elves fighting self-entitled nords and repetitive dungeons by going outside[/QUOTE] You ever been to Denmark? Because we have those. Much like you have giants in sweeden and norway has trolls.

[QUOTE=Excalibuurr;42777004]Vampire attacks can be fixed with a mod.[/QUOTE] Yes, but... A random vampire attack happened a while ago and because I have the mod you mention, "when vampires attack", everybody ran inside to safety. Well, almost everybody, some punk ass kids were playing tag in the evening and two of 'em got hit by some AOE spell (I think) and those little bastards thought it would be wise to attack a master vampire with his hound/mongrel. Needless to say, their courage in combination with the non-essential children mod (hooray), proved to be pure awesomeness as their little bodies flew lifeless through the air, wondering how a day of joyful playing ended up as becoming permanent residents of some nice unmarked small graves.

[QUOTE=Banshee FrieNd;42784393]There are emulators.[/QUOTE] The only TES travels worth playing is the one on the N-GAGE, and there are no emulators for that that aren't a virus.

[QUOTE=Harnbrand;42783960]Anyone else here big on immersion/survival? I've installed Hunterborn, Frostfall, and Realistic Needs and Diseases. Best mods on the nexus, hands down.[/QUOTE] Frostfall and Hunterborn covery mainly the same aspects of survival, except Hunterborn does it in a more annoying, less fun way of forcing you to stop by and take 5 in game hours just to get some pelt off an animal, which when used with realistic needs will tend to fucking kill you a lot. Frostfall alone is widely sufficient. You have a good incentive to take sensible travel routes, the tent and backpack systems are complete and good looking (getting a blank backpack and obtaining gear like an axe, a bedroll, etc will complete the backpack and display said items), and it's just the right amount of realism without being straight up annoying. Realistic needs and diseases is a mod I personally can't stand, but that's because I really dislike basic needs mods in general. I find them tedious and unfun, whenever my character sleeps (which is something you have to do with Frostfall if you don't want to die of cold every night) I just assume he eats and drinks stuff he owns and move on. If you really want to go into something hardcore there is this one mod featured on skyrim gems that make your character tired during fights to the point where his skills are temporarily lowered. When you are dealt a heavy blow that takes health above a certain threshold, you suffer a long lasting injury that needs healing, and that will keep your stats low as long as you don't take care of it.

[QUOTE=Ganerumo;42787895]Frostfall and Hunterborn covery mainly the same aspects of survival, except Hunterborn does it in a more annoying, less fun way of forcing you to stop by and take 5 in game hours just to get some pelt off an animal, which when used with realistic needs will tend to fucking kill you a lot. Frostfall alone is widely sufficient. You have a good incentive to take sensible travel routes, the tent and backpack systems are complete and good looking (getting a blank backpack and obtaining gear like an axe, a bedroll, etc will complete the backpack and display said items), and it's just the right amount of realism without being straight up annoying. Realistic needs and diseases is a mod I personally can't stand, but that's because I really dislike basic needs mods in general. I find them tedious and unfun, whenever my character sleeps (which is something you have to do with Frostfall if you don't want to die of cold every night) I just assume he eats and drinks stuff he owns and move on. If you really want to go into something hardcore there is this one mod featured on skyrim gems that make your character tired during fights to the point where his skills are temporarily lowered. When you are dealt a heavy blow that takes health above a certain threshold, you suffer a long lasting injury that needs healing, and that will keep your stats low as long as you don't take care of it.[/QUOTE] The time it takes to skin/hunt is determined by the size of the animal and the skill level. If you dont like how long it takes just make it so you are a skilled hunter in the MCM menu instead of doing the normal way where you start out as unskilled and must level it up. Realistic needs and diseases suck because you need to babysit your inventory. Much better: Kurtee's Eat and Sleep (I think). It works basicallly like new vegas in that being tired/hungry/thirty gives you debuffs and notifications but it doesn't really kill you (I don't know if new vegas did the latter or not). AKA incentive to have food/drink/sleep. It also works like New Vegas in that its all automatic - you don''t have to baby your inventory. When you get to a certain hunger threshold the mod will anaylize your inventory and give you food options you can choose to each, with each have a varying level of hunger reduction. All without having to manage inventory. Sleep pretty much works the same as hunger but you just go to sleep to satiate "exhaustion" (doing things like fighting or whatever add onto your exhaustion). Its great because its not tedious at all but it still works to keep you eating/sleeping. That injury mod you mentioned sounds interesting, I've heard of it before but not used it yet. Really the worst thing about Skyrim is while its fun to explore and survive in the land the way the quests and cities are laid out really discourages you from doing so. No place has any real sense of identity because you'll frequently be travelling halfway across the world for completely stupid bullshit all the time making it all meaningless. After the 10th time of having to go to solitude from riften or whiterun you just get tired of doing it. Bethesda once again ruined the game by designing the meta-structure of questing in such a way that you are constantly being told to go to new and far away places without you ever having time to enjoy the journey or make the act of exploration/travel actually signifigant thanks to over reliance on fast travel. Which really kills the entire point of having a game in an open world setting.

[QUOTE=Ganerumo;42787895]Frostfall and Hunterborn covery mainly the same aspects of survival, except Hunterborn does it in a more annoying, less fun way of forcing you to stop by and take 5 in game hours just to get some pelt off an animal, which when used with realistic needs will tend to fucking kill you a lot. Frostfall alone is widely sufficient. You have a good incentive to take sensible travel routes, the tent and backpack systems are complete and good looking (getting a blank backpack and obtaining gear like an axe, a bedroll, etc will complete the backpack and display said items), and it's just the right amount of realism without being straight up annoying. Realistic needs and diseases is a mod I personally can't stand, but that's because I really dislike basic needs mods in general. I find them tedious and unfun, whenever my character sleeps (which is something you have to do with Frostfall if you don't want to die of cold every night) I just assume he eats and drinks stuff he owns and move on. If you really want to go into something hardcore there is this one mod featured on skyrim gems that make your character tired during fights to the point where his skills are temporarily lowered. When you are dealt a heavy blow that takes health above a certain threshold, you suffer a long lasting injury that needs healing, and that will keep your stats low as long as you don't take care of it.[/QUOTE] Well, where hunterborn's concerned, just go to the mod options in the SkyUI menu and uncheck 'Skinning takes time', 'Field dressing takes time', 'Harvesting takes time', etc.

With regards to survival mods players should be mindful of how many they have running at one time and how large their active mod list is. Most if not all surival mods are as far as I can remember very script-intensive and are frequently run in the game. So it's possible to overload the engine and cause crashes from time to time. And of course as with any other mod you should be careful when uninstalling it- as a rule of thumb with skyrim you should avoid removing mods, particularly script-heavy ones, in the middle of a game. Even if the mod has instructions for safely removing it through a SkyUI mod menu or using console commands to deactivate its scripts it'll still likely leave stuff in your save. So if you are planning on trying these survival mods, make a save without them and see how you like it. It'll save you a lot of headache if you find that you don't like them but end up stuck with it unless you want to cause your save to get screwed up by uninstalling them. [QUOTE=MrJazzy;42785517]Can anyone recommend me a good ENB 0.233 preset that doesn't eat up too much of my framerate? Also, I recently got a CPU and RAM upgrade so now I'm running with an i5-4670 and 8GB ram. Does skyrim still not use up more than a certain amount of ram or something, can I help that?[/QUOTE] I can't recommend any ENBs as I don't use them, but Skyrim still has that 3.1 gb issue, but even at that it should be remembered the game won't fully utilize the power of your computer - it is still coded for 32 bit use. The most that has really been done about that is already in the basic ENB build with the 64bit patch or what ever they're calling it which you'll already have active if you're using ENB. You can [url=http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/38649/?]learn more about those values at the nexus page and in the comments[/url]. Short of Bethesda providing a solution for this though (doubtful) there's only so much this and other "fixes" can do.

Cosplay time! [IMG]http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/558737771918109064/5A9ADE33AE8DCDED19A77949A0180B35A2B39A3A/[/IMG]

[QUOTE=Raxas;42784624]I used Frostfall last time I played Skyrim and I can testify that this is true. The trip to High Hrothgar is infinitely more engaging, wondrous, and maybe even 'magical' when you have to make stops every now and then to warm yourself up around a campfire, giving you time to reflect on the words inscribed on the ancient tablets, and your own journey. It turns what was previously a "hold w to go forward up a lot of steps" ordeal into an arduous trek, pitting you against nature. It really adds a lot to that moment when you finally see this fabled High Hrothgar materialize out of the harsh, unforgiving blizzard.[/QUOTE] And then that dumb frost troll comes and wrecks you up, making that experience for naught.

[QUOTE=Kurahk;42791035]Cosplay time! [IMG]http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/558737771918109064/5A9ADE33AE8DCDED19A77949A0180B35A2B39A3A/[/IMG][/QUOTE] Dirty dumb nord scum 2/10 would not touch with a 10 foot bargepole

[QUOTE=Kurahk;42791035]Cosplay time! [IMG]http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/558737771918109064/5A9ADE33AE8DCDED19A77949A0180B35A2B39A3A/[/IMG][/QUOTE] Face more expressive than actual skyrim NPCs 0/10 not even close to source material

[QUOTE=archangel125;42785299]Which adds a little realism to the whole thing - Fantastic for immersion.[/QUOTE] Honestly with how bethesda handled radiation in fallout 3 I honestly would have loved it if frost was an environmental factor in the vanilla skyrim experience. I mean morrowind had ash and blight storms, those things could fuck you up pretty bad Nothing like getting three diseases from rats and cliff racers as you stumble around blindy in a howling red haze :v: In fallout 3 bethesda did a good job of hiding cool stuff in irradiated areas, I would have loved a similar effect with cold exposure for skyrim with any experience they took on board.... could have put unique loot and dungeons in frozen ice canyons and stuff. Would have actually meshed well and not been an intrusive feature.

Yeah but it would have gone directly in conflict with their policy of fixing level in dungeons to the player's level when entering, which had the consequence of making them both easy and stupidly hard in some instances where NPCs would somehow not scale properly and were instead at a fixed level, so you'd dash through a level filled with level 3 draugrs only to end up against a level 25 draugr overlord that fucks you up.

[QUOTE=Kurahk;42791035] [IMG]http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/558737771918109064/5A9ADE33AE8DCDED19A77949A0180B35A2B39A3A/[/IMG][/QUOTE] What ENB is this?

[QUOTE=TehMentos;42799216]What ENB is this?[/QUOTE] Real Life ENB.

[QUOTE=Kurahk;42791035]Cosplay time! [IMG]http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/558737771918109064/5A9ADE33AE8DCDED19A77949A0180B35A2B39A3A/[/IMG][/QUOTE] too much clothing not nexus material 0/10 [editline]8th November 2013[/editline] bad joke aside, are people willing to share some screenshots of their ENBs

ENB is an amazing invention but personally I simply never use it because it's way too much shit on the screen, it's distracting. I prefer using something more subtle like imaginator.

[QUOTE=Ganerumo;42799109]Yeah but it would have gone directly in conflict with their policy of fixing level in dungeons to the player's level when entering, which had the consequence of making them both easy and stupidly hard in some instances where NPCs would somehow not scale properly and were instead at a fixed level, so you'd dash through a level filled with level 3 draugrs only to end up against a level 25 draugr overlord that fucks you up.[/QUOTE] On my last install I had an unleveled world mod alongside Skyrim Immersive Creatures, and let me tell you I had some awful experiences. My first bounty contract was a bandit chief decked out in full Ebony, complete with a warhammer. I was level 4 at the time. Mirmulnir was a Legendary dragon, there was an unnamed dragon priest in Bleak Falls, and the Stormcloaks and I fought a roomfull of goddamn fucking Deathlords. I complain, but I can't find an unleveled world mod now and it makes me sad.

[QUOTE=hypno-toad;42798997]Honestly with how bethesda handled radiation in fallout 3 I honestly would have loved it if frost was an environmental factor in the vanilla skyrim experience. I mean morrowind had ash and blight storms, those things could fuck you up pretty bad Nothing like getting three diseases from rats and cliff racers as you stumble around blindy in a howling red haze :v: In fallout 3 bethesda did a good job of hiding cool stuff in irradiated areas, I would have loved a similar effect with cold exposure for skyrim with any experience they took on board.... could have put unique loot and dungeons in frozen ice canyons and stuff. Would have actually meshed well and not been an intrusive feature.[/QUOTE] did they fuck you up? i didn't spend that much time within blight storms. A 'cold' resistance'd be a short term thing though. Though it'd be good if each piece of clothing had a 'cold resistance' (which'd at least prompt the developers to make properly insulating apparel. you'd freeze in half of that skin revealing stuff)

[QUOTE=Ekalektik_1;42799514]On my last install I had an unleveled world mod alongside Skyrim Immersive Creatures, and let me tell you I had some awful experiences. My first bounty contract was a bandit chief decked out in full Ebony, complete with a warhammer. I was level 4 at the time. Mirmulnir was a Legendary dragon, there was an unnamed dragon priest in Bleak Falls, and the Stormcloaks and I fought a roomfull of goddamn fucking Deathlords. I complain, but I can't find an unleveled world mod now and it makes me sad.[/QUOTE] Doesn't Requiem remove level caps and replaces it with chance/position based encounters ?

[QUOTE=DeEz;42799288]too much clothing not nexus material 0/10 [editline]8th November 2013[/editline] bad joke aside, are people willing to share some screenshots of their ENBs[/QUOTE] [t]http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/578998987891025655/66C41F5DB3982691D5FC69DAC6EE17DD8E2F841F/[/t] [I]artistic~[/I] I use [URL="http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/18941/"]Opethfeldt[/URL], it's pretty.

I've stopped bothering with all enbs once I used this [url]http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/15551/?[/url] It's the only "high performance" enb that is legitimately high performance and has like a 2% performance impact Wish it had the enb shadows, though. Boris's shadow system is unambiguously way fucking better than the default skyrim one.

Reposting from r/morrowind - Province: Cyrodil's *finally* worked their sweet little way into Anvil's city interior (to be absolutely transparent, from an island out on the Gold Coast, but I suppose only Team GabeN had a smaller product-to-time-taken ratio): [URL=http://imgur.com/sPdTy00][IMG]http://i.imgur.com/sPdTy00l.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

[QUOTE=The golden;42800328]Zoners is good but I had to tweak it because I find it has too much red-tint and contrast by default.[/QUOTE] Turns out it actually works with the .199 binaries or whatever, so you can actually get the ENB shadow system Don't know why he didn't just update to the newer enb version. had to install the new binary system then merge parts of the the enbseries.ini files He also includes multiple color palletes, so you didn't have to tweak it yourself. [editline]8th November 2013[/editline] Also holy shit, running enbseries in SLI without a frame limiter is like hardware suicide, my cards sounded like air conditioners before I shut skyrim down and turned the limiter on. Some of boris's work is sketchy as hell, I had the New Vegas ENB sucking up so much power the lights in my room started to flicker.

[QUOTE=Ganerumo;42799542]Doesn't Requiem remove level caps and replaces it with chance/position based encounters ?[/QUOTE] If so, that'd be one of the only good things I've heard about Requiem. I'll be the first to admit I don't know much about it, but I've heard it makes a lot of needless and annoying changes.

Does anyone have a badass khajiit character they could display? I'd like to make a khajiit (normally I play as an argonian) but something just looks off about them in Skyrim. I'd appreciate some cool examples to go off of. I'll be playing it on the PS3 so I can't install mods or anything. Also, can anyone tell me how they get involved in the misc stats like alchemy and crafting armor and weapons? It seems like by neglecting those I'm ignoring a good and interesting portion of the game. I've been trying to make my own potions and stuff to save some money but I still feel like I'm not using my skills to their maximum potential. I'm fairly sure I know the process involved in the skills, but there's no real motivation for me to go and do them, you know?

[QUOTE=Nifae;42801596]Does anyone have a badass khajiit character they could display? I'd like to make a khajiit (normally I play as an argonian) but something just looks off about them in Skyrim. I'd appreciate some cool examples to go off of. I'll be playing it on the PS3 so I can't install mods or anything. Also, can anyone tell me how they get involved in the misc stats like alchemy and crafting armor and weapons? It seems like by neglecting those I'm ignoring a good and interesting portion of the game. I've been trying to make my own potions and stuff to save some money but I still feel like I'm not using my skills to their maximum potential. I'm fairly sure I know the process involved in the skills, but there's no real motivation for me to go and do them, you know?[/QUOTE] I like my old were-Khajiit that I haven't played since 2011 :3 [t]http://imageshack.us/a/img405/354/screenshot5avatarbigpic.png[/t] [t]http://imageshack.us/a/img7/2978/screenshot3buh.png[/t] All these old Skyrim screenshots I have saved up make me want to continue my original characters. Also found this while browsing my folders: [t]http://imageshack.us/a/img263/6752/screenshot8f.png[/t] [t]http://imageshack.us/a/img84/8057/screenshot14k.png[/t] [t]http://imageshack.us/a/img854/3074/screenshot111jo.png[/t] Yay Skyrim 2011. For some reason I have been unable to recreate the relatively fantastic ENB settings I used to have as seen in the Rayman screenshot there.

[QUOTE=Nifae;42801596] Also, can anyone tell me how they get involved in the misc stats like alchemy and crafting armor and weapons? It seems like by neglecting those I'm ignoring a good and interesting portion of the game. I've been trying to make my own potions and stuff to save some money but I still feel like I'm not using my skills to their maximum potential. I'm fairly sure I know the process involved in the skills, but there's no real motivation for me to go and do them, you know?[/QUOTE] I literally just harvest all the ingredients I see and then when I reach an alchemy station mash them together into potions.