What mods are these? I’m not using a lighting mod and I still find dungeons too dark. Night Eye doesn’t help much and I’m sooo sick and tired of casting Magelight everywhere.
Although casting Magelight on your companion is fun. Also invisibility. They all respond differently.
The only one I have run is Wearable Lanterns, which lets you equip lanterns to places that don’t interfere with, say, combat. (It can also optionally make them require fuel. I opted not to.)
That is a nice one.
Is there a wearable Codpiece Lantern? That’s all I need to know about that mod.
I’m playing a cool looking Khajit right now. With Inigo I have two in my party. Now I just need to find that Khajit caravan guard, which is proving nearly impossible, to run with my all Khajit party.
(The ones listed “more lights for ENB.” Requires an ENB installed.)
Ever since Skyrim added Always On Moonlight to the night sky I can hardly make myself play it. It ruined the ambience imo.
I’m down with all this although I have always felt that the reason combat gets priority in most RPGs is because it is easier to model in a non-scripted way than conversation. It also feels like gameplay, in that it’s a learnable system that can deliver some comfy feedback loops.
But yeah, I yearn for the day when a broader range of interactions is consistently possible and I support all design ideas that go beyond the usual “bash 'em on the head/enter a scripted conversation tree” duality.
(actual quote by Relayer71)
There is actually ONE instance of this. I wandered into a random dungeon with some kind of magic spiders that some mage was working on. An NPC labelled “adventurer” was in the atrium of the starting area, approached me, and said something along the lines of “These spiders are magic! Regular spider are bad enough, but magic spiders? I’m out. Good luck.” Then he left. Added a bit of flavor to the dungeon, I agree. Would love to see more of that.
I also like the dungeons where they are half cleared out by bandits or some other group, and you see dead drauger and dead NPCs strewn about until you get deeper into the dungeon. Also adds some “this world is alive” flavor.
The combat is specifically horrible in Skyrim, in every possible way. So is the menu system that is constantly taking you out of immersion. They are good at building cool looking worlds, and pretty much horrible at everything else. Mods can make this a bit better, but the core gameplay in all of their games has the same problem. Janky weird animations, laughable character models, combat that was done better in the 90s…
I’ve had some fun with Skyrim, mostly thanks to the fact that I love character building games, but this game really is largely a piece of crap. It makes me angry because it really wouldn’t take much to make it the best game ever made. Meaningful loot that wasn’t so boring, and a combat system that’s at least in the 2000s.
This is probably the most frustrating game for me, because the potential to be my favorite game ever is so high.
Interesting to see the hate for the combat system. I would agree there’s room for improvement, but it’s been a steadily evolving system since…Morrowind, at least. Daggerfall? (I never played that one.)
I really liked the addition of a separate spell or weapon in each hand, if one so desired. With weapons the implementation is a little clunky, but man, the magic side of that was pretty well done.
There are certainly things that could be improved, but I’ll be damned if I haven’t found it to be incredibly satisfying. 400+ hours in.
I’ve gotten used to the pauses in combat, and almost see that as a feature now. It’s kind of like pausing in VATS for a moment. The neat thing is you can still see your enemies in front of you when looking for an item, spells, etc. So that orc bandit that is coming at you gets a couple of arrows and then when he gets close I watch him start to wind up and freeze time while I switch to shield. Sometimes the timing is pretty close.
Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you.
I would welcome a better system though. Maybe an improved radial thing next time. The challenge is, the game is trying to be very flexible in play style and combat style, so it’s gonna be hard to winnow down that complexity into a good interface.
Concentrating on a console/controller interface will probably help there. /ducks
It’s been a while since Morrowind, but I kind of remember you could specifically slice, or stab, depending on how you moved the mouse. That was good in theory but in practice it devolved to the same smashy smashy combat. I do remember interrupting attacks with a well timed quick stab though (which works wonderfully in real life, by the way).
I think the magic implementation is abysmal. Like, okay, dual-casting is a little cool (if janky), but it’s impossible to fluidly use more than two spells in any given fight, and still a pain for out of combat use. So there’s all these spells and heavy incentives to only use the two most effective - and then dual-casting reduces this to one. At least with a fighting build there’s no need to do a bunch of hot-swapping mid combat.
I think it was directional movement + attack? I dunno, been a while for me as well.
I really preferred the magic system in Morrowind, and would LOVE to see something like that come back (although it was easily exploitable,) but having the ability to put a different spell on each hand IMPROVES the system, as you can keep your two most-used spells handy (heh) all the time.
In Morrowind, if I remember right, you don’t use your hands to cast, it just appears out of your body when you hit the cast button. So you could be banging away with an sword and board (was that a thing? don’t remember shields) and hit them with a spell.
Also, whoever upthread said the theme song to Morrowind is better than Skyrim is crazy. It’s the exact same theme, but they made it better by adding some downbeats and a chorus to to the song. Listen to them side by side, the Skyrim one is much better IMHO.
I mean, sure, it’s potentially an improvement over the even worse system in previous Elder Scrolls games. It’s still a loooong way from good. And dual-casting, as I say, mitigates that improvement a fair bit.
I’d just like to say I am grokking this thread.
Magic system also is shitty because everything is bigger fireball for more mana cost.
Mods do have some creative stuff though with terrain manipulation and combo spells.
Yeah, that’s the thing. The lack of creativity in the spells is a problem, but mods can fix that. They can’t fix it being a huge pain to actually use more than a few spells, disincentivizing using those more creative but situational spells.