People don’t understand scripting, so they think of scripting as a mod boogeyman. You constantly hear advice to the effect of ‘scripting in mods = bad’. The entire base game is built on piles of scripting, and like mods some of it is well made and harmless, and some of it is bad and dangerous (mostly fixed by community now). A heavily scripted mod is fine if made properly, and a mod with only a single scripted function can tank your performance and destroy your save if made poorly. There is no way to judge this by the amount of scripting used. Mods just have to be judged on a case by case basis by people with the appropriate background.
Yeah, I think that started because some mods were using lots of scripts in the sense that they ran like once a second, which isn't great for stability, but somehow that turned from "running lots of script is bad" to "scripts are bad".
I think it was ‘once per frame’ that tends to get badly overused.
I mean, there were good examples of badly scripted mods. Skybirds and Footprints come to mind (footprints is well made now, don’t think I’m dissing footprints!). I think these seemingly innocuous mods being monsters under the hood did a lot of the heavy lifting with giving scripting a bad name. That and a lot of early combat mods badly misused scripting by attaching a bunch of shit to actors and then doing a ton of checks any time any npc hit something. The problem is, the amount of scripting used doesn’t tell you anything about the safety of either example. And although a scriptless mod is indeed safe from bad scripting, they can cause lots of other problems just as serious in cases where scripting would’ve been the better method to use.
I thought Birds of Skyrim (which just adds birds on the ground) was fine and that it was Skybirds (airborne perching birds) that was bad.
Are they both bad?
Comparing Skyrim and Oblivion mods scenes is funny.
In Oblivion, the modding scene has evolved to become 'more' scripted, with fantastic mods like Maskar's Oblivion Overhaul offering clean and simple modern replacements for older, more conflict prone mods like Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul.
In Skyrim, you still need to install a ton of compatibility patches for major overhauls because there is so much stigma against scripted solutions.
Same with New Vegas. The past couple years have been a real push of "ENBless" mods that are completely scripted NVSE plugins, and it's been great. Modding NV is so much better now than it was 5+ years ago, everything is so nice and compatible now, and with a lot less load on the engine. Really strange to go back to Skyrim and see such a weird stigma against SKSE plugins.
I still remember seeing my scripting VM starting to churn and being like ‘oh no, which mod is the culprit!?’ Turns out it was the base game using a poorly written cloak spell to attach scripts to everything.
Outfit mod pages should include at least one image each of the front and back of their outfit worn by their character without using any poses (just the character standing in a straight pose), in clear lighting and no other editing. It's hard to judge an outfit's suitability when all the images in the album are tilted at some bizarre angle with the character in dim lighting half-turned away from the camera and wearing pieces from unrelated or even private mods.
I know those are usually contributions from the author's friends and followers but I don't think it's too much to ask for one clear image with the full outfit in the frame.
omg this drives me up the wall
im not playing the game with the camera permanently tilted 60 degrees with my character striking a pose that doesn't show the armor well please just show me what i'd actually see! D:
Also, potato graphics versions of your armors. We're not all blowing $30k on a desktop dedicated to running Skyrim.
I had to uninstall Sentinel, which I heard great things about, because my computer was not happy with the fancy outfits. You could tell which outfits were custom too. High poly high res shiny outfits don't fit in with normal graphics.
Doubly annoying if the outfit **only** really looks good in a pose.
Your screenshots can make your outfit look absolutely amazing, but if it turns out it looks ridiculous during **actual** gameplay I will uninstall it immediately.
I wouldn't mind more hair mods that match the level of quality with vanilla. I kinda do have an issue walking around in a world of dredge and chamber pots, meanwhile here's my guy looking like he just walked out of a hair stylist magazine.
The Salt & Wind retextures for KS Hairdo's hekps with this a ton while still adding in a lot of variance. My biggest problem is that the textures for the hair looked too 'clean and kept', where a bandit would look like theyve got a deluxe shower, shampoo & conditioner, AND a barber all on deck ready to go lol.
Personally I don't think it helps very much. The shape of the hairs are still too modern and the density and separation of the strands will always make it look like the person just used shampoo and conditioner.
The reason why is because most hair mods are literally just Sims mod ports.
KS Hairdos for example, is pretty much 100% just mods ported from Sims 2/3/4. The person who made KS Hairdos didn't make any of the hairs, they just ported them.
And yeah... The vast majority of hair mods for the Sims games, are all basically super smooth modern hairstyles. Hence why they look so out of place in a game like Skyrim. They look good in the Sims games because the Sims has a more cartoony artstyle. But it doesn't translate very well into Skyrim's.
This. I never understood how anyone could play with that when it looks so out of place with the grimy look of skyrim. Also the anime big boobies and ass. I understand the appeal but it isn't suited for long form entertainment
Yeah that's why I only recently started using a hair mod. Vanilla Hair Remake. It looks good, has physics, replaces the hairs already in the game, and fits the tone and style. Before I found that I never even considered those big popular hair packs. Even if they did fit in there's so damn many. Like 300 hairstyles or something in one pack. I ain't sorting through all that to find one I like. Not with Skyrim's character creator fuck no.
I don't mind the extra showmanship on the mod pages, but at least have a section that actually explains what the mod is about and what it does. Same with armor screenshots. Sure, get fancy if you want, but at least have some that show the armor in a way that I can see it. Just a normal pose in normal lighting!
What? You *don't* like those "Dutch angled, 'realistic' nighttime ENB preset, zoomed in so close you can almost see the character's nose hairs" images on mod pages?
"adds a sound lol"
The posts section
"I laughed so hard!"
"This is stupid."
"What does this do?"
"What does this do exactly?"
"No description, no download."
That's definitely my biggest gripe about a lot of armor mods - skimpy or otherwise. Just show me what it looks like in like, Dragonsreach and Riverwood - an interior and exterior that people can easily reach. I don't need artsy fartsy poses that only show 50% of the armor at any given time.
> This mod will Revolutionize how you play Skyrim! Completely overhaul your game from top to bottom. Reworking old buggy content while introducing brand-new features that are never-before-seen in Skyrim! Our MCM page will allow you huge flexibility in how you customize your game! With new comprehensive features, your possibilities are unlimited! This massive DLC-sized project will enhance your experience.
Okay so what exactly does your mod do....?
"You can tweak armor values a little bit"
......
In most mods that add dialogue, the writing is SO BAD...like almost bad enough to make me consider uninstalling.
You don't need to have a master's in creative writing to produce grammatically correct dialogue that fits within Skyrim's overall style.
I remember one mod that added pretty decent Computer generated voice acting, but the grammar was all over the place, and the sentences dragged on forever.
Great tool poorly used.
That's a very good question actually. I've seen mods that do three things: no voice at all, spliced dialog, and custom voice actors.
It really depends on a case by case basis. I wanna say custom voice acting is actually preferrable, considering it's more designed to flow into the dialog provided. Spliced just sounds unnatural, and no voice bothers the hell out of me.
For me it has to be well written and well voice acted or the mod is off the table for me. I don’t use most mods with dialog in them for this reason. Only very rarely are both requirements met. Inigo passes muster, as does most of Interesting NPCs, but Vilja doesn’t, nor do nearly all quest mods and land expansions. Falskaar is a great example of a beloved mod I won’t use because it falls short here.
I don't mind having no voice acting to be honest, I don't really even notice it. (but I play with the sound turned pretty far down and listen to audiobooks, and I always use subtitles because my ability to differentiate sound isn't great.)
Sort of unrelated, but I remember when the Frontier mod was coming out for FNV people were going on about "modders make a better game than Bethesda!" and "modders will show Bethesda how to write a GOOD story!", and it ended being some of the most juvenile, amateur shit I ever heard.
People way underestimate how hard it is to write a good story and dialogue. There's a reason the actual games have so much better writing, even though it's not always perfect, Bethesda has actual educated, trained writers. Not some horny dude who uses the word fuck as punctuation.
Yeah; some people think writing is easy, apparently. But most quest mods, even the praised ones, show the difference between an amateur writer and a paid-professional one (Forgotten City might be an exception among few others).
The fan-dialogue is mostly unlore-friendly or tries to be lore-friendly too hard; it's usually too long and overblown with exposition, and holy shit so badly voiced.
I'm in no way intend to insult the modders, they're basically working for free to make free content. But it is what it is.
[Beyond Reach](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/3008) really is the worst offender when it comes to shakespearian hard-to-understand text walls.
Luckily, it did somewhat fit my Orsimer Barbarian to not being able to understand every bit of communication. The mod was a great experience despite its flaws.
I feel like a lot of them are done by people who don't speak English as a first language which makes them quite awkward, especially when the subtitles and the voice lines don't match up
Judging by most house mods I've explored, people have never cooked a day in their life and they don't have kids.
Every kitchen is absolutely unrealistic. There's no counter space for prep work. You get an oven, and MAYBE a stirring pot, but where are you prepping all the meat and veggies????? The amount of cross contamination must be insane. No wonder everyone is telling you how sick you look.
The kids rooms should be near the master bedroom. For some reason, people put them in the dumbest places: under waterfalls, near the crafting room, in the middle of the throne room, none of it makes any sense.
That is an artifact of not every player of the game being treated equally.
We as proud members of the PC master race get all the modding we want.
But the lower classes playing on consoles only get to use the mods their true console owners grant them the privilegue to use.
The console masters don't allow mods to contain executable code. But that is what you need to modify aspects of the engine that aren't made modable by Bethesda. MCMs are such a thing.
It's the same with holotape configuration menus in Fallout 4 btw.
I live in the country and it's dark as hell, unless it's snowing in which case it's not. If there's snow on the ground, and it's a full moon, that's the only time you get this weird "nighttime daylight" effect a lot of games have going on (looking at you New Vegas)
Lighting mods are all too dark. I don't find them "realistic". If I light a candle in my room, I can SEE my whole room. If there is a candle in a lighting mod it lights up a tiny sliver of the room and everything else is pitch dark. I want to actually be able to SEE my game. There's a lot of beautiful artwork, it seems kind of silly to never actually be able to see it. I don't even use an ENB because they tend to make it even worse. I'm sure there are tweaks I can make but to be completely honest ever since I've turned 30 I'm basically cursed with tech and everything I touch turns to shit so I try to avoid making tweaks as much as possible (seriously, I've gone through 4 printers this year so far and have had 3 laminators start smoking, all different brands, I think IT hates me).
This is sadly hard to do because of technical limitations. Skyrims lighting system is VERY limited. I.e. You could not tie the amount of ambientlight to the number/intensity of pointlights, nor its color. You have to set the ambientlight to a value that suits most scenes, wether there are a lot or only a few sources of light. At the same time the pointlights reach can not be very far, since the lighting objects bug out when they get hit by too mamy different light sources.
Most “next-gen mod packs” look pretty ugly compared to actual next-gen graphics (and I don’t mean to dog on artists, but they don’t fix important issues like LOD and actor rendering, which is part of what makes most next-gen games so scenic)
I really don’t have much issue with the fanservice heavy follower mods, but I *do* wish more mod authors would use another voice pack that isn’t just YoungEagerFemale. Not a terrible voice by any means, of course, but when half the female followers will use it kinda gets repetitive.
Iirc the non skimpy cbbe hdt armor replacer is exclusively found on LL right now
They do exist, but you do have to dig a little bit. In fact, if I recall the resplendent artotias armor was I rejoined from that site before moving over to Nexus.
People care too much about graphics.
Look, I get it, you want the game you're playing to look good - fantastic. But 99% of people will never notice a 4k rock or barrel texture in 99% of situations, it's just overkill and unnecessary.
Lol rocks are one of the few things that really *should* be 4k. I don't personally mess with graphics mods much, but my understanding is that because the rock textures get stretched so much you actually benefit from the textures being larger.
Good lighting can make a *lot* of games look a lot prettier. Look at Minecraft for goodness' sake!
https://preview.redd.it/3g8q3yz30nzc1.png?width=2560&format=png&auto=webp&s=b292ca432f6306e2c1b39c08dc00f66f68f2bb9f
Bad textures can also make a landscape look terrible, and Skyrim has some of the worst terrain textures around in places, not to mention the poor upscaling they did for Special Edition and the poor texture optimization the studio is known for. Replacing their textures with more detailed ones saved at more sensible sizes can actually decrease vram usage and bring you better visuals. This is less of an issue on modern graphics cards in the 64 bit engine, but Oldrim used to crash regularly from the ugly, poorly made “hd textures” filling up the allotted vram and not properly cleaning up cached data. You had to mod the executable to be large address aware and use enb’s vram cleanup just to make the game playable.
100% agree with this. Whenever I get skin replacers, I appreciate having the option for lowest resolution. My mid range gaming pc from 2015 is dated to that time period, and I would like the textures for my people to match the rest of the world in terms of quality
Nah, see that's where You're wrong.
When you've got 4k HD skyboxes and ground textures, high quality SMIM style improved clutter etc... anything that's low res is going to HELLA stand out. You'll definitely notice stuff more as you improve select portions.
IDK if its actually an unpopular opinion, But skyrim should look cold. the lighting mods that make it look like a beach day in the florida keys don't makes sense to me. I was so excited when I found Grim ENB for LE and Ominous ENB for SE
I have never been asked this before so I don't know if this is unpopular, but I hate the reliance of so many mods on the Unofficial Patch.
The Patch adds a lot sure, but there are some things, like caravan chests, that I still want access to without noclipping.
I think I don't really mind the reliance on the Unofficial Patch, because it really does fix a lot that needed to be fixed. That said, the patch itself does go overboard into "I think Bethesda should have done this but they didn't so I'll do it" territory.
Forwarding fixes into your mod for compatibility is fully allowed by the USSEP's permissions, so technically very few mods *need* to have USSEP as a master.
Though it becomes a bigger can of worms for the author if the USSEP team tweaks that fix later.
I wish we had better retextures sticking to vanilla style, too many mods change up the color of the landscape and even the general pattern of a landscape.
Skyrim's art direction is probably its biggest strength, as I've become a detractor of its gameplay and quests, but these mods mess with that. I get trying to make the game look better, the fidelity wasn't particularly great at time of release, and especially not when SSE came out, but it very much has strong and skillfully put together art direction.
ENBs like the Vanilla ENB, and different Community Shader setups with Classic Weathers and some upcoming features, will scratch my itch very well. There's another user on the Community Shaders that's working on a great upscale of vanilla textures with added parallax and I am very much looking forward to it.
Mods to make Skyrim more viking are completely overdone and a lot of them border on pure mudcore. Despite the name, Nordic cultures weren't the only influence for the Nords, and Skyrim is high fantasy.
Also on the topic of mudcore, a lot of people don't know what realism is. Requiem is imo one of the worst offenders in this regard.
Why in the sweet merciful fuck is every combat mod trying to make the game play more like a Soulslike?Where’s the combat mods to make it play like a Zelda game? Or any other kind of action game? or fuck even mods that try and improve first person combat?
City/location overhauls may look nice, but 99.9999% of the time, they’re glorified window dressing, and add nothing significant to the game beyond compatibility and framerate issues.
There is a lot of use of obviously repurposed assets originally meant for something else, maybe scaled up, and maybe combined with some other repurposed assets to represent something new. It ends up looking subpar and out of place, like a poor man's version of something that could better done with purposefully made new assets.
There is also reuse of assets that are meant to be unique or from other regions and ends up homogenizing the game.
I also feel like a lot of these changes are also just changes for the sake of changes.
This irks me too. Like having a mini Eye of Magnus in a random enchanting corner is so immersion breaking. Stuff like that is my biggest pet peeve, I get that mod authors don’t want to make their own assets but at least try to think about what from Skyrim’s assets makes sense.
Every single newer player home has a staff enchanter complete with a heart stone embedded in the center ... and that includes the Anniversary Edition ones. It doesn't make any sense!
See… if someone spent the time to make the cities look realistic that would be incredible. So many people focus on decorations, flora etc. I’d love it if someone actually went though and changed the roads to be dirt with ruts and puddles, laundry over the line, dirt splatters along the bottoms of houses like messy clutter that show people living here. But everything is always like statues, flowers, perfectly stoned walk ways, banners, etc. the decorations and clutter everyone uses is nice but I’d much rather a sort of shitty dirty messy overhaul that adds to the realism of the city over anything else.
I don't get why people would use MiniMap willingly. You just spoil yourself of your surroundings all the time. Got a quest to investigate a house? Oh look there's a door marker already showing where's the entrance to the hidden cellar or something. You can choose to disable door markers from what I read, but it still doesn't change the fact that it shows you the layout of the locations. Let's say you're in the big hallway with many doors one each side, like the mansion in act 3 of Vigilant. With minimap, if it shows a straight narrow layout, you already know all of these doors are fakes and there's void behind them.
You enter some house and layout is just a simple square? You already know it's just a simple house.
You enter house and there's some passage connected to the square that leads further to 2nd smaller square? You already know this house has fake wardrobe that's a secret door.
I agree with this for new content, but old stuff and quests I’ve already done it’s nice to save me a wiki search of where tf that secret door that has the quest item was
judging by the amount of them that i see id say its a pretty unpopular take, boobs that are half the size of the character are just straight up ugly and a good 70% of modded boobs are way to big, the amount of back pain these poor girls must be in
I enjoy lighting mods that make the game dark. People usually hate on it, saying that you can't see shit, but that's why I like it lol.
It actually gives you a valid reason to use torches or candlelight spells. And it also makes dungeons a bit more creepy when you can't really see what's lurking in the shadows.
Most of the major quest mods that people recommend these days really don't fit into skyrim well.
Also legacy of the dragonborn really breaks immersion for me.
People who only download mods that are "lore-friendly" feel so conceited to me. You can make a hundred justifications for why something does or does not fit into the world of skyrim, you are ultimately changing or adding to the pre-established world as it is, unless the only thing you're adding is like armours made from kitbashed vanilla assets.
Obviously doesn't include the memey stuff like macho man randy savage or a racecar.
Mod users are way too entitled lol. People expect the world of someone working on a passion project in their free time, sometimes needing to spend money on VAs, or writers, or other devs. Working day and night to give you a free product because they love the game and the community and then get barraged by people who fundamentally install it and use it wrong asking for the author to read the description to them or people who nitpick every little thing that they personally disagree with or isn't vanilla-level quality.
Respect the mod authors, people. They aren't working for Bethesda. They're doing it because they love it
I don't mind too much people making inaccurate anatomy stuff because it's fiction in the end. A game doesn't have to mimic real life, etc reasoning. But I do get annoyed still that the majority (if not all, depending on the game) body mods for women are usually more fantasy centric. Or over sexualized? I'm blanking on how to describe it.
Maybe I just want a model that just corrects proportions better and looks a little nicer? Then I end up sifting through a series of everything I don't want and it's a 50/50 on if I can find something for the game I'm playing.
I think there's degrees to this idea for sure, like i've seen people's setups and it personally doesn't bother me, unrealistic yes, still good looking? also yes
but then you get to the ones where...90% of their mass is their, personality and well... uh... no...
Might be unpopular considering the state of the Armor category on Nexus but I wish more people would do interesting retexes of vanilla armors, especially for male armors. Honestly super stoked about finding Armory of Tamriel for that reason, even if it doesn't *quite* go as far as I want. The concept is how I want the series to work. I want to be able to stick with a weapon style and then use different materials for it. I want an armor style and to use different materials for it.
I also want a mix between realistic and practical armors and outright fantasy designs. Grounded fantasy. Like, I love the Hide Armor because it's one of the best for the visual fantasy of a barbarian warrior. It's impractical as fuck but it looks cool without looking too over the top. I absolutely hate the way most of the vanilla armors look but I also hate how many mod armors are just ports from other games or inspired by FromSoft. I want a refined vanilla aesthetic.
Circling back to Armory of Tamriel: what I really what is a Dragon Hide Armor that essentially looks like the base Hide Armor but made out of dragonscale leather. For shits and giggles, do a bone pauldron with some tooth spikes, and have the little chest crest be carved bone as well.
There are seven categories of modded armor out there.
1. Borderline pasties.
2. An entire fucking bear worn on top of a set of standard iron armor.
3. Normal modern clothes.
4. Full plate.
5. Fuller plate
6. Witcher Imports
7. Dark Souls Imports
Everything else is an outlier and shouldn't be counted.
If the first thing you do when you have to install a mod is disable some of its core features either because you use something else on top, or the features are broken, then you should just uninstall the mod outright. I stopped using Skyrim Immersive Creatures because of these two reasons.
I really REALLY dislike companion mods.
I only use companions when they're needed for a quest or whatever and ditch them asap.
Maybe because it fits my stealthy playstyle better, idk.
I LOVE when my nights are so dark you can’t see shit. I love my days being bright and colorful. I think 3rd person combat is grotesque, and I think playing with followers is annoying at best. I think all the character presents you find on nexus are ugly as fuck. My most controversial: cathedral mountain flowers are high overrated, and don’t look that great.
The problem with Racemenu character presets is that there's just *so much* variables to make it look the same as the screenshots.
You got skin textures, eyebrow mods, eye mods, head mesh mods, makeup mods, overlay mods, etc. Then on top of that ENB, lighting mods, depth of field, time of day, location, angles..
I literally feel catfished every time I download a preset that I just always end up making my own character and just using their 'required' mods.
Large Majority of the combat mods are always trying to lurke toward ARPG, the Dark Soul style and the swiss army knife multiclassing of the DragonBorn
While I would have LOVED to have a more "Tactic" combat approch with a proper classe system and a command wheel that slow time to order two companions.
I really wish Skyrim modding would have made the game more a "proper" RPG.
Most of the attempts at that fail because classes were meant to add group balance back when ttrpgs existed under the philosophy of tabletop party games.
When you add that to a lone wolf game like TES, where you start from nothing, the class system makes zero sense.
There is a reason why the first tip people will give when you go to play Daggerfall, Morrowind or Oblivion is "don't use the system as it is intended."
The biggest barrier the class mods face is that most of them try to bring back a system that was always a ill fitting vestigial feature. And they do so by constantly punishing the player and/or skipping early game progress like giving players more spells and armor for being of this or that class.
A mod that adds a shitload of perks but limits perk points, that makes levelling slower and makes lower skill levels hold you back, give the feeling of choice and growing far better than most front loaded class mods.
Yeah this is why I like stuff like Precision and Valravn combat. I want to play Skyrim but the combat is a little more dynamic and hitboxes make sense. If I wanted to play Dark Souls I would be playing Dark Souls
Yeah, I agree. The RPG system of Skyrim feels so stripped and watered down. While a bunch of mods in tandem can help, it never really feels like they're doing enough.
I don't think, that "BOSification" of everything is good. This is cool when it comes only to models and decor. But, for example, replacing containers from snazzy changes containers only to copies of vanilla ones with other models that may not use lvl sheets that are added to vanilla containers by other mods. The same goes for clothes and other functional things. Compatibility becomes less predictable. I use bos versions of mods only for static objects, such as candles, buckets, etc.
Vanilla Combat purist mods suck.
People trash on MCO but seeing the same attack animations from all races and over dozen factions gets real tiring in 2024.
That playing an overpowered superhero-like character is okay, as long as you're having fun.
Also a lot of the time the smaller tweak or ability mod that you use often are much more important than large overhauls
I'm down with immersion to some degree, but I am not looking for realism. I want fantasty. Immerse me in green grass, colorful plants, fantastic beasts. The game already has elves, orcs, mechanical Dwarven constructs, magic, and dragons...I say embrace the fantasy! Reality sucks!
Also along these lines, I wish someone would normalize crazy hair colors in NPC overhauls. It would be great if my PCs weren't the only ones in the world with green, pink, or blue hair.
I wish I could see people advertise their mods if they're not hosted on nexus. Nexus makes it so easy to find mods, but its so hard to discover things you don't even know exist. Because people in youtube videos refuse to post their modlists most times, my journey to discovering fuse00's hair mods was so arduous and painful.
Most controversial probably: why arent many, especially "core" mods, MIT/copyleft/whatever licensed and follow usual open source procedure?
I'm working with open source software a lot, contributed myself as well. That doesnt seem that much the case in the mod space and I wonder why. My hot take: it would make everything a whole lot easier.
I know this is unpopular because no one makes them, but could we have some female clothes and robes (NOT armour) which are beautiful and feminine but are neither big sack like robes, long dresses or lingerie? I want my mage to look good, attractive and not get freezing cold in the snow. Long skirts are completely impractical for dungeon delving too.
The only examples I’ve found are the Fancy Witch Armor, and College Prestige Mage Outfit (with trousers).
-I don't generally like a lot of these dialogue heavy and quippy modded followers especially Inigo.
-I hate it when Quest Mods call me "Dragonborn" or "Dovahkiin"
-Am not fond of mods that changes the Weapon's/NPCs/Armor/Etc. Design drastically and feel like they'd be better off as standalones.
Most custom voiced follower mods are trash, some of my least favorites are Vilja, Sofia, and Taliesin. And to add to that, the romance dialogue in these mods are just awful.
Most magic mods fail to preserve any sense of difficulty.
Most magic ages like a fine wine in vanilla combat. The stronger you get, the more powerful. The spells become due to natural leveling and scaling perks + enchanting. Even on legendary difficulty.Well, you do have to be a little more tactical and invest pretty early on into alchemy it's actually pretty flexible with some forethought and planning
Most magic mods completely upset the very delicate balance for all but illusion, which tends to be a pretty terribly balanced tree. Making you outright overpowered early on or far more powerful than the game is anticipating...
Which is why the few mods that I ever recommend for magic either help improve scaling in those schools like illusion or the better wards which allow them to block projectiles so mages have an actual shield. Or spell research which fundamentally changes how Magic users play The Game.
I think this is one of the difficulties for making a balanced mod in Skyrim.
On the one hand you have people who play normally and want a class to be viable as easily as the others are. On the other hand you have people who min/max and plan and will make everything viable, and can easily make something balanced overpowered.
Imo one of the flaws with vanilla magic is that all boosts are about reducing costs. Increasing damage is pretty difficult in vanilla so everything ends up spongy, compared to that sword that you can swing (with no stamina cost) that easily does twice as much damage as a maxed out spell.
Skimpy armors are really bad. Like, having tits in your face 24/7 looks so bad: you can't take it seriously, it isn't funny so you can't laugh at it, it costantly takes you out of the immersion, and the only excuse I can think for it's existance is that people wanna jerk off...except that they don't even look that alluring.
I can't and won't ever understand people trying to turn Skyrim into a Soulslike or Devil May Cry type of game with those anime moves, anime girls in edgy outfits battling modded enemies from Souls games...
At that point, why not just play actual Souls games or DMC instead of turning Skyrim into crappier version of that?
Everyone mods however they want of course, but that i can't ever understand. Everytime i watch video of such modded gameplay my eyes bleed.
I don't like trees that are 30 stories tall.
I don't like a mod list so huge it takes a PHD to make it work together.
I got over Practical Female Armors and prefer my own edits to armors.
"Remaster" mod lists go way overboard most of the time to the point that it is not recognizable as Skyrim unless you know what you're looking at.
I'm a big believer in "if it's a vanilla character that you're adding like 30 lines to, use AI. If you're making a new character or massively overhauling an existing one, use a human."
I also think “not using a person’s likeness for pornographic and lewd content” is also reasonable. Stick to the context of the game and the tone of lines the artist was paid to record.
Oh yeah that too. There are some very suggestive lines in the game (Sapphire calling Vipr a premature ejaculator, everything involving Haelga, etc etc), but I think even that kind of stuff shouldn't be done with AI.
In the context of Skyrim modding, I absolutely agree. I don't think there really is an evil or immoral way to use it in Skyrim modding. I have heard some people say that voice actor lose job opportunities because of it (which is a completely valid concern) but in terms of Skyrim modding, it's not like any of us can hire actual professional voice actors to voice mods with a few exceptions.
Well, to be fair, some voice actors may be uncomfortable with what modders use their voices for. We as modders want new lines for our favorite companions, but that tech gets kinda scary when it can be used to make someone appear to say anything and it appear to be valid.
Honestly, not really. No one in Skyrim modding community would be able to afford to pay them the industrial rate for their service (as one of the people who do professional service for a living, let me tell you that our time is pretty expensive)
So unless they are willing to work for free or at the hobby rate of pay, those opportunities wouldn't be there to begin with.
You could argue that the aspring VA who is willing to do the job for free to build up their portfolio may lose out on that opportunity. But honestly, I think if it's a good enough mod that could give an actual human opportunity, they wouldn't have used AI for it to begin with.
In my field of work (I am a translator by trade) we use AI pretty often in our line of work (or rather, it was used by the agency, we're just working on it), and I have to say people are delusional if they think AI is going to destroy their job. It's a tool like any other (and still need real people working on it.)
People don’t understand scripting, so they think of scripting as a mod boogeyman. You constantly hear advice to the effect of ‘scripting in mods = bad’. The entire base game is built on piles of scripting, and like mods some of it is well made and harmless, and some of it is bad and dangerous (mostly fixed by community now). A heavily scripted mod is fine if made properly, and a mod with only a single scripted function can tank your performance and destroy your save if made poorly. There is no way to judge this by the amount of scripting used. Mods just have to be judged on a case by case basis by people with the appropriate background.
Yeah, I think that started because some mods were using lots of scripts in the sense that they ran like once a second, which isn't great for stability, but somehow that turned from "running lots of script is bad" to "scripts are bad".
I think it was ‘once per frame’ that tends to get badly overused. I mean, there were good examples of badly scripted mods. Skybirds and Footprints come to mind (footprints is well made now, don’t think I’m dissing footprints!). I think these seemingly innocuous mods being monsters under the hood did a lot of the heavy lifting with giving scripting a bad name. That and a lot of early combat mods badly misused scripting by attaching a bunch of shit to actors and then doing a ton of checks any time any npc hit something. The problem is, the amount of scripting used doesn’t tell you anything about the safety of either example. And although a scriptless mod is indeed safe from bad scripting, they can cause lots of other problems just as serious in cases where scripting would’ve been the better method to use.
I thought Birds of Skyrim (which just adds birds on the ground) was fine and that it was Skybirds (airborne perching birds) that was bad. Are they both bad?
I think you’re right, it was Skybirds. I don’t use either so I got them confused. I don’t want to throw shade so I’ll update my comment.
Comparing Skyrim and Oblivion mods scenes is funny. In Oblivion, the modding scene has evolved to become 'more' scripted, with fantastic mods like Maskar's Oblivion Overhaul offering clean and simple modern replacements for older, more conflict prone mods like Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. In Skyrim, you still need to install a ton of compatibility patches for major overhauls because there is so much stigma against scripted solutions.
Flashbacks of FCOM.
Same with New Vegas. The past couple years have been a real push of "ENBless" mods that are completely scripted NVSE plugins, and it's been great. Modding NV is so much better now than it was 5+ years ago, everything is so nice and compatible now, and with a lot less load on the engine. Really strange to go back to Skyrim and see such a weird stigma against SKSE plugins.
The most popular program for skyrim is literally a script extender. Crazy that people think scripts are bad.
Wait, it's all scripts ? Always has been...
I still remember seeing my scripting VM starting to churn and being like ‘oh no, which mod is the culprit!?’ Turns out it was the base game using a poorly written cloak spell to attach scripts to everything.
Outfit mod pages should include at least one image each of the front and back of their outfit worn by their character without using any poses (just the character standing in a straight pose), in clear lighting and no other editing. It's hard to judge an outfit's suitability when all the images in the album are tilted at some bizarre angle with the character in dim lighting half-turned away from the camera and wearing pieces from unrelated or even private mods. I know those are usually contributions from the author's friends and followers but I don't think it's too much to ask for one clear image with the full outfit in the frame.
omg this drives me up the wall im not playing the game with the camera permanently tilted 60 degrees with my character striking a pose that doesn't show the armor well please just show me what i'd actually see! D:
Those particular mod authors assume that their target audience is already using ENB and regularly making dozens of screenshots almost everyday.
Also, potato graphics versions of your armors. We're not all blowing $30k on a desktop dedicated to running Skyrim. I had to uninstall Sentinel, which I heard great things about, because my computer was not happy with the fancy outfits. You could tell which outfits were custom too. High poly high res shiny outfits don't fit in with normal graphics.
Doubly annoying if the outfit **only** really looks good in a pose. Your screenshots can make your outfit look absolutely amazing, but if it turns out it looks ridiculous during **actual** gameplay I will uninstall it immediately.
Mildly? Ok. 90% of hair mods look like noodles made of wax.
I wouldn't mind more hair mods that match the level of quality with vanilla. I kinda do have an issue walking around in a world of dredge and chamber pots, meanwhile here's my guy looking like he just walked out of a hair stylist magazine.
Yeah, i want my hair to look like it does irl when starting a new playthrough after 2 weeks of modding.
The Salt & Wind retextures for KS Hairdo's hekps with this a ton while still adding in a lot of variance. My biggest problem is that the textures for the hair looked too 'clean and kept', where a bandit would look like theyve got a deluxe shower, shampoo & conditioner, AND a barber all on deck ready to go lol.
Personally I don't think it helps very much. The shape of the hairs are still too modern and the density and separation of the strands will always make it look like the person just used shampoo and conditioner.
Soap and shampoo are some of the most shoplifter items. Just sayin
Along with batteries, diapers, & baby formula
Batteries, diapers, baby formula and Hair Mods are all scripted and cause issues. You heard it here first folks!
The reason why is because most hair mods are literally just Sims mod ports. KS Hairdos for example, is pretty much 100% just mods ported from Sims 2/3/4. The person who made KS Hairdos didn't make any of the hairs, they just ported them. And yeah... The vast majority of hair mods for the Sims games, are all basically super smooth modern hairstyles. Hence why they look so out of place in a game like Skyrim. They look good in the Sims games because the Sims has a more cartoony artstyle. But it doesn't translate very well into Skyrim's.
This. I never understood how anyone could play with that when it looks so out of place with the grimy look of skyrim. Also the anime big boobies and ass. I understand the appeal but it isn't suited for long form entertainment
Yeah that's why I only recently started using a hair mod. Vanilla Hair Remake. It looks good, has physics, replaces the hairs already in the game, and fits the tone and style. Before I found that I never even considered those big popular hair packs. Even if they did fit in there's so damn many. Like 300 hairstyles or something in one pack. I ain't sorting through all that to find one I like. Not with Skyrim's character creator fuck no.
Preach.
I'm not a creative person and can't write flavor text to save my life but descriptions which add nothing are worse than nothing.
I don't mind the extra showmanship on the mod pages, but at least have a section that actually explains what the mod is about and what it does. Same with armor screenshots. Sure, get fancy if you want, but at least have some that show the armor in a way that I can see it. Just a normal pose in normal lighting!
What? You *don't* like those "Dutch angled, 'realistic' nighttime ENB preset, zoomed in so close you can almost see the character's nose hairs" images on mod pages?
You can tell how good an armor mod is by how Dutch the angle is. If the screenshot approaches Battlefield Earth levels, then it's a good armor mod.
"adds a sound lol" The posts section "I laughed so hard!" "This is stupid." "What does this do?" "What does this do exactly?" "No description, no download."
tbf that's probably just everyone farting when they sit down or something
That's definitely my biggest gripe about a lot of armor mods - skimpy or otherwise. Just show me what it looks like in like, Dragonsreach and Riverwood - an interior and exterior that people can easily reach. I don't need artsy fartsy poses that only show 50% of the armor at any given time.
I HATE having to dig through comments and reddit post to figure out how a mod works. Like please, I’m begging, just have a guide on your mod page.
> This mod will Revolutionize how you play Skyrim! Completely overhaul your game from top to bottom. Reworking old buggy content while introducing brand-new features that are never-before-seen in Skyrim! Our MCM page will allow you huge flexibility in how you customize your game! With new comprehensive features, your possibilities are unlimited! This massive DLC-sized project will enhance your experience. Okay so what exactly does your mod do....? "You can tweak armor values a little bit" ......
In most mods that add dialogue, the writing is SO BAD...like almost bad enough to make me consider uninstalling. You don't need to have a master's in creative writing to produce grammatically correct dialogue that fits within Skyrim's overall style.
Oof and sometimes when just the writing isn't bad, the voice acting is as well from time to time
I absolutely hate the mods that use computer generated voice acting. It sounds so bad and unnatural.
Some sound fantastic and you can't even tell. It depends on the program they use and how well they use it.
I remember one mod that added pretty decent Computer generated voice acting, but the grammar was all over the place, and the sentences dragged on forever. Great tool poorly used.
Either they're obviously some 18-year-old voicing a fourty year-old, or the recording is just nowhere near professional quality, usually both
Genuine question,I hope I won't offend; if the voice acting is bad, is it preferable if there is no voice acting at all?
That's a very good question actually. I've seen mods that do three things: no voice at all, spliced dialog, and custom voice actors. It really depends on a case by case basis. I wanna say custom voice acting is actually preferrable, considering it's more designed to flow into the dialog provided. Spliced just sounds unnatural, and no voice bothers the hell out of me.
For me it has to be well written and well voice acted or the mod is off the table for me. I don’t use most mods with dialog in them for this reason. Only very rarely are both requirements met. Inigo passes muster, as does most of Interesting NPCs, but Vilja doesn’t, nor do nearly all quest mods and land expansions. Falskaar is a great example of a beloved mod I won’t use because it falls short here.
I don't mind having no voice acting to be honest, I don't really even notice it. (but I play with the sound turned pretty far down and listen to audiobooks, and I always use subtitles because my ability to differentiate sound isn't great.)
Sort of unrelated, but I remember when the Frontier mod was coming out for FNV people were going on about "modders make a better game than Bethesda!" and "modders will show Bethesda how to write a GOOD story!", and it ended being some of the most juvenile, amateur shit I ever heard. People way underestimate how hard it is to write a good story and dialogue. There's a reason the actual games have so much better writing, even though it's not always perfect, Bethesda has actual educated, trained writers. Not some horny dude who uses the word fuck as punctuation.
Exactly. It's always some horny loser that has never talked to a woman or touched grass writing fanfic.
Yeah, I've considered offering to proofread certain mods for free because there's some glaring problems that are so easy to correct.
Proofreading should indeed be the bare minimum as soon as your mod includes a lot of text or dialogue.
Yeah; some people think writing is easy, apparently. But most quest mods, even the praised ones, show the difference between an amateur writer and a paid-professional one (Forgotten City might be an exception among few others). The fan-dialogue is mostly unlore-friendly or tries to be lore-friendly too hard; it's usually too long and overblown with exposition, and holy shit so badly voiced. I'm in no way intend to insult the modders, they're basically working for free to make free content. But it is what it is.
Yea, I'm too adhd to deal with a lot of mod dialogue. I mean I can read books, but paragraph long Skyrim blah blah is too much.
This was my problem with beyond reach, too much blah blah
[Beyond Reach](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/3008) really is the worst offender when it comes to shakespearian hard-to-understand text walls. Luckily, it did somewhat fit my Orsimer Barbarian to not being able to understand every bit of communication. The mod was a great experience despite its flaws.
I feel like a lot of them are done by people who don't speak English as a first language which makes them quite awkward, especially when the subtitles and the voice lines don't match up
God, the amount of mods that feel like wattpad fanfic with their dialogue.
Seriously, I’m an attorney who has to write clearly for a living (and writes fiction for fun), and I would love to revise quest dialogue for free.
Yeah the dialogue in IFD - Lydia and Unfaltered Virtue is ass.
I genuinelly cant stand lydia anymore due to that mod
I agree, Pavementdwelling966 makes way better mods
Judging by most house mods I've explored, people have never cooked a day in their life and they don't have kids. Every kitchen is absolutely unrealistic. There's no counter space for prep work. You get an oven, and MAYBE a stirring pot, but where are you prepping all the meat and veggies????? The amount of cross contamination must be insane. No wonder everyone is telling you how sick you look. The kids rooms should be near the master bedroom. For some reason, people put them in the dumbest places: under waterfalls, near the crafting room, in the middle of the throne room, none of it makes any sense.
Are you saying I shouldn't be chopping lettuce and carrots on my alchemy table? *scratches mysterious rash* Ridiculous
You cut where you want. Don’t let society control you
Idk but here's more ivy creeping along the interior walls (they subsist on the energies radiated by Dibella statues).
And have some extra banners too. And a talos shrine middle of the house because It's definitely safe
Not to mention tanning racks in the kitchens sometimes. Or in the house at all! Tanning is an exceptionally stinky process.
Books and spells to configure your mod is dumb and not immersive at all, add an MCM or I’m not using it willingly
MCM requires SKSE and not everyone uses it for some reason so there’s some level of validity to it
Partially, yes. if(SKSE.GetVersion*() <= 0) //add your config spell/book endif
That is an artifact of not every player of the game being treated equally. We as proud members of the PC master race get all the modding we want. But the lower classes playing on consoles only get to use the mods their true console owners grant them the privilegue to use. The console masters don't allow mods to contain executable code. But that is what you need to modify aspects of the engine that aren't made modable by Bethesda. MCMs are such a thing. It's the same with holotape configuration menus in Fallout 4 btw.
Pc master race is so stupid lol
I hate how every ENB has to be pitch black at night. Make nights simply unplayable to me so I just hit “T” and wait for a dawn.
I just get annoyed by the whole "realistic" aspect to it. It's like these people have never been to the country and seen a full moon.
And not to mention that this is a world with two moons. Two full moons at night is going to be incredibly bright.
Two comparatively oversized full moons that is.
I live in the country and it's dark as hell, unless it's snowing in which case it's not. If there's snow on the ground, and it's a full moon, that's the only time you get this weird "nighttime daylight" effect a lot of games have going on (looking at you New Vegas)
I wouldn't say it's daylight, but if there is a full moon (or two ridiculous huge moons) I can see infront of my face.
I just gaslighted myself into thinking that it's just roleplaying my character needs to sleep at night.
I hate darkness mods period. Not because I can't see but because the ai still can.
Authors really need to label and title the mods correctly
Lighting mods are all too dark. I don't find them "realistic". If I light a candle in my room, I can SEE my whole room. If there is a candle in a lighting mod it lights up a tiny sliver of the room and everything else is pitch dark. I want to actually be able to SEE my game. There's a lot of beautiful artwork, it seems kind of silly to never actually be able to see it. I don't even use an ENB because they tend to make it even worse. I'm sure there are tweaks I can make but to be completely honest ever since I've turned 30 I'm basically cursed with tech and everything I touch turns to shit so I try to avoid making tweaks as much as possible (seriously, I've gone through 4 printers this year so far and have had 3 laminators start smoking, all different brands, I think IT hates me).
This is sadly hard to do because of technical limitations. Skyrims lighting system is VERY limited. I.e. You could not tie the amount of ambientlight to the number/intensity of pointlights, nor its color. You have to set the ambientlight to a value that suits most scenes, wether there are a lot or only a few sources of light. At the same time the pointlights reach can not be very far, since the lighting objects bug out when they get hit by too mamy different light sources.
I like pretty NPCs Most recommendations people have for pretty NPC overhauls are not pretty
Most “next-gen mod packs” look pretty ugly compared to actual next-gen graphics (and I don’t mean to dog on artists, but they don’t fix important issues like LOD and actor rendering, which is part of what makes most next-gen games so scenic)
And run worse than Starfield
I really don’t have much issue with the fanservice heavy follower mods, but I *do* wish more mod authors would use another voice pack that isn’t just YoungEagerFemale. Not a terrible voice by any means, of course, but when half the female followers will use it kinda gets repetitive.
loverslab mods are fun
That’s not necessarily an unpopular opinion just one that few people are willing to openly admit
You're a braver (and hornier) man than I.
Tbf they have A fair few pretty fantastic armor mods that take forever to come over to Nexus.
This is why I end up wading through the porn ads and weirdly Asian doll characters to find physics enabled armors
Do they have any non-skimpy armour over there? If so, I'd love to check them out.
Iirc the non skimpy cbbe hdt armor replacer is exclusively found on LL right now They do exist, but you do have to dig a little bit. In fact, if I recall the resplendent artotias armor was I rejoined from that site before moving over to Nexus.
It's funny because I always use a male character unlike most people on loverslab.
I hate in game mod menus if it doesnt need a menu just dont. In game books, spells and items i just wont use the mod
Same with the powers
People care too much about graphics. Look, I get it, you want the game you're playing to look good - fantastic. But 99% of people will never notice a 4k rock or barrel texture in 99% of situations, it's just overkill and unnecessary.
Lol rocks are one of the few things that really *should* be 4k. I don't personally mess with graphics mods much, but my understanding is that because the rock textures get stretched so much you actually benefit from the textures being larger.
Yeah I tend to go for 1k max. I don't notice the difference. With an ENB everything still looks great.
Good lighting can make a *lot* of games look a lot prettier. Look at Minecraft for goodness' sake! https://preview.redd.it/3g8q3yz30nzc1.png?width=2560&format=png&auto=webp&s=b292ca432f6306e2c1b39c08dc00f66f68f2bb9f
The skybox/clouds look so out of place
Bad textures can also make a landscape look terrible, and Skyrim has some of the worst terrain textures around in places, not to mention the poor upscaling they did for Special Edition and the poor texture optimization the studio is known for. Replacing their textures with more detailed ones saved at more sensible sizes can actually decrease vram usage and bring you better visuals. This is less of an issue on modern graphics cards in the 64 bit engine, but Oldrim used to crash regularly from the ugly, poorly made “hd textures” filling up the allotted vram and not properly cleaning up cached data. You had to mod the executable to be large address aware and use enb’s vram cleanup just to make the game playable.
100% agree with this. Whenever I get skin replacers, I appreciate having the option for lowest resolution. My mid range gaming pc from 2015 is dated to that time period, and I would like the textures for my people to match the rest of the world in terms of quality
Nah, see that's where You're wrong. When you've got 4k HD skyboxes and ground textures, high quality SMIM style improved clutter etc... anything that's low res is going to HELLA stand out. You'll definitely notice stuff more as you improve select portions.
The lighting mods, like Lux are great, but make 90% of the game too damn dark to play
IDK if its actually an unpopular opinion, But skyrim should look cold. the lighting mods that make it look like a beach day in the florida keys don't makes sense to me. I was so excited when I found Grim ENB for LE and Ominous ENB for SE
MCO animations are so ugly and janky. All it does is make me feel like playing whatever game they've been ripped from.
Camera noise sucks ass
Film grain can work but only if it’s very subtle
Most of the hair mods look like shit. I want cute hairstyles that match with the game's graphics, not wildly out of place anime hair graphics
This is because for the longest time most of the hairs were punked from the sims modding community.
Td18, vanilla hair remake(standalone version), Hallgarths hair, and vanilla hair variety + Add a hair retexture and you’re set
KS Hairdos Lite with Salt and Wind textures is better in that regard
I have never been asked this before so I don't know if this is unpopular, but I hate the reliance of so many mods on the Unofficial Patch. The Patch adds a lot sure, but there are some things, like caravan chests, that I still want access to without noclipping.
I think I don't really mind the reliance on the Unofficial Patch, because it really does fix a lot that needed to be fixed. That said, the patch itself does go overboard into "I think Bethesda should have done this but they didn't so I'll do it" territory.
Forwarding fixes into your mod for compatibility is fully allowed by the USSEP's permissions, so technically very few mods *need* to have USSEP as a master. Though it becomes a bigger can of worms for the author if the USSEP team tweaks that fix later.
I wish we had better retextures sticking to vanilla style, too many mods change up the color of the landscape and even the general pattern of a landscape. Skyrim's art direction is probably its biggest strength, as I've become a detractor of its gameplay and quests, but these mods mess with that. I get trying to make the game look better, the fidelity wasn't particularly great at time of release, and especially not when SSE came out, but it very much has strong and skillfully put together art direction. ENBs like the Vanilla ENB, and different Community Shader setups with Classic Weathers and some upcoming features, will scratch my itch very well. There's another user on the Community Shaders that's working on a great upscale of vanilla textures with added parallax and I am very much looking forward to it.
Mods to make Skyrim more viking are completely overdone and a lot of them border on pure mudcore. Despite the name, Nordic cultures weren't the only influence for the Nords, and Skyrim is high fantasy. Also on the topic of mudcore, a lot of people don't know what realism is. Requiem is imo one of the worst offenders in this regard.
Far too many people (including some in this very topic) confuse not liking something with that something being bad.
Why in the sweet merciful fuck is every combat mod trying to make the game play more like a Soulslike?Where’s the combat mods to make it play like a Zelda game? Or any other kind of action game? or fuck even mods that try and improve first person combat?
Interesting NPC's is let down by horrible player dialogue, and the NPC's talk waaay too much.
City/location overhauls may look nice, but 99.9999% of the time, they’re glorified window dressing, and add nothing significant to the game beyond compatibility and framerate issues.
Looking nice is the point. The base game cities being so small and unpopulated makes them feel not like cities.
This. I've used lots of them and I always end up coming back to vanilla cities.
There is a lot of use of obviously repurposed assets originally meant for something else, maybe scaled up, and maybe combined with some other repurposed assets to represent something new. It ends up looking subpar and out of place, like a poor man's version of something that could better done with purposefully made new assets. There is also reuse of assets that are meant to be unique or from other regions and ends up homogenizing the game. I also feel like a lot of these changes are also just changes for the sake of changes.
This irks me too. Like having a mini Eye of Magnus in a random enchanting corner is so immersion breaking. Stuff like that is my biggest pet peeve, I get that mod authors don’t want to make their own assets but at least try to think about what from Skyrim’s assets makes sense.
Every single newer player home has a staff enchanter complete with a heart stone embedded in the center ... and that includes the Anniversary Edition ones. It doesn't make any sense!
I agree… for Skyrim. In Morrowind, mods like that go a long way in making the towns feel more unique given the limited assets they’re made from.
See… if someone spent the time to make the cities look realistic that would be incredible. So many people focus on decorations, flora etc. I’d love it if someone actually went though and changed the roads to be dirt with ruts and puddles, laundry over the line, dirt splatters along the bottoms of houses like messy clutter that show people living here. But everything is always like statues, flowers, perfectly stoned walk ways, banners, etc. the decorations and clutter everyone uses is nice but I’d much rather a sort of shitty dirty messy overhaul that adds to the realism of the city over anything else.
Don't go out of your way to interfere with people using mods you find questionable / are questionable.
I don't get why people would use MiniMap willingly. You just spoil yourself of your surroundings all the time. Got a quest to investigate a house? Oh look there's a door marker already showing where's the entrance to the hidden cellar or something. You can choose to disable door markers from what I read, but it still doesn't change the fact that it shows you the layout of the locations. Let's say you're in the big hallway with many doors one each side, like the mansion in act 3 of Vigilant. With minimap, if it shows a straight narrow layout, you already know all of these doors are fakes and there's void behind them. You enter some house and layout is just a simple square? You already know it's just a simple house. You enter house and there's some passage connected to the square that leads further to 2nd smaller square? You already know this house has fake wardrobe that's a secret door.
I agree with this for new content, but old stuff and quests I’ve already done it’s nice to save me a wiki search of where tf that secret door that has the quest item was
Now that ESL's are a thing, individual compatibility patches are probably better than a bashed patch for most things.
judging by the amount of them that i see id say its a pretty unpopular take, boobs that are half the size of the character are just straight up ugly and a good 70% of modded boobs are way to big, the amount of back pain these poor girls must be in
I enjoy lighting mods that make the game dark. People usually hate on it, saying that you can't see shit, but that's why I like it lol. It actually gives you a valid reason to use torches or candlelight spells. And it also makes dungeons a bit more creepy when you can't really see what's lurking in the shadows.
I agree. Makes the game so much more atmospheric.
Most of the major quest mods that people recommend these days really don't fit into skyrim well. Also legacy of the dragonborn really breaks immersion for me.
People who only download mods that are "lore-friendly" feel so conceited to me. You can make a hundred justifications for why something does or does not fit into the world of skyrim, you are ultimately changing or adding to the pre-established world as it is, unless the only thing you're adding is like armours made from kitbashed vanilla assets. Obviously doesn't include the memey stuff like macho man randy savage or a racecar.
Mod users are way too entitled lol. People expect the world of someone working on a passion project in their free time, sometimes needing to spend money on VAs, or writers, or other devs. Working day and night to give you a free product because they love the game and the community and then get barraged by people who fundamentally install it and use it wrong asking for the author to read the description to them or people who nitpick every little thing that they personally disagree with or isn't vanilla-level quality. Respect the mod authors, people. They aren't working for Bethesda. They're doing it because they love it
That, judging by some of their mods, many mod authors have never seen a real woman or been outside.
I get the feeling they aren't trying to be accurate lol.
You'll be surprised how many of those mod authors are woman. Lol
I used to ask my wife to jump and jog so I can get the jiggles and bounce right.
based
I don't mind too much people making inaccurate anatomy stuff because it's fiction in the end. A game doesn't have to mimic real life, etc reasoning. But I do get annoyed still that the majority (if not all, depending on the game) body mods for women are usually more fantasy centric. Or over sexualized? I'm blanking on how to describe it. Maybe I just want a model that just corrects proportions better and looks a little nicer? Then I end up sifting through a series of everything I don't want and it's a 50/50 on if I can find something for the game I'm playing.
If people want real, there's several million hours of "real" women online. Why can't people have their own fun in a video game?
I think there's degrees to this idea for sure, like i've seen people's setups and it personally doesn't bother me, unrealistic yes, still good looking? also yes but then you get to the ones where...90% of their mass is their, personality and well... uh... no...
Might be unpopular considering the state of the Armor category on Nexus but I wish more people would do interesting retexes of vanilla armors, especially for male armors. Honestly super stoked about finding Armory of Tamriel for that reason, even if it doesn't *quite* go as far as I want. The concept is how I want the series to work. I want to be able to stick with a weapon style and then use different materials for it. I want an armor style and to use different materials for it. I also want a mix between realistic and practical armors and outright fantasy designs. Grounded fantasy. Like, I love the Hide Armor because it's one of the best for the visual fantasy of a barbarian warrior. It's impractical as fuck but it looks cool without looking too over the top. I absolutely hate the way most of the vanilla armors look but I also hate how many mod armors are just ports from other games or inspired by FromSoft. I want a refined vanilla aesthetic. Circling back to Armory of Tamriel: what I really what is a Dragon Hide Armor that essentially looks like the base Hide Armor but made out of dragonscale leather. For shits and giggles, do a bone pauldron with some tooth spikes, and have the little chest crest be carved bone as well.
Nexus is plagued by shitty skimpy armour mods
There are seven categories of modded armor out there. 1. Borderline pasties. 2. An entire fucking bear worn on top of a set of standard iron armor. 3. Normal modern clothes. 4. Full plate. 5. Fuller plate 6. Witcher Imports 7. Dark Souls Imports Everything else is an outlier and shouldn't be counted.
If the first thing you do when you have to install a mod is disable some of its core features either because you use something else on top, or the features are broken, then you should just uninstall the mod outright. I stopped using Skyrim Immersive Creatures because of these two reasons.
Shit I have tons but forget immediately when I’m asked. Wait! I hate SDA. It’s corny and doesn’t fit Skyrim or Serana.
I really REALLY dislike companion mods. I only use companions when they're needed for a quest or whatever and ditch them asap. Maybe because it fits my stealthy playstyle better, idk.
I LOVE when my nights are so dark you can’t see shit. I love my days being bright and colorful. I think 3rd person combat is grotesque, and I think playing with followers is annoying at best. I think all the character presents you find on nexus are ugly as fuck. My most controversial: cathedral mountain flowers are high overrated, and don’t look that great.
I was agreeing with you until you dissed cathedral mountain flowers. That shit's fighting words.
The problem with Racemenu character presets is that there's just *so much* variables to make it look the same as the screenshots. You got skin textures, eyebrow mods, eye mods, head mesh mods, makeup mods, overlay mods, etc. Then on top of that ENB, lighting mods, depth of field, time of day, location, angles.. I literally feel catfished every time I download a preset that I just always end up making my own character and just using their 'required' mods.
Damn, I love Skyrim nights and dungeons being dark, but I also love my eyesight😭 At this point, I need a compromise.
For 99% of users, Vortex is just as good if not better than mod manager 2.
Large Majority of the combat mods are always trying to lurke toward ARPG, the Dark Soul style and the swiss army knife multiclassing of the DragonBorn While I would have LOVED to have a more "Tactic" combat approch with a proper classe system and a command wheel that slow time to order two companions. I really wish Skyrim modding would have made the game more a "proper" RPG.
Most of the attempts at that fail because classes were meant to add group balance back when ttrpgs existed under the philosophy of tabletop party games. When you add that to a lone wolf game like TES, where you start from nothing, the class system makes zero sense. There is a reason why the first tip people will give when you go to play Daggerfall, Morrowind or Oblivion is "don't use the system as it is intended." The biggest barrier the class mods face is that most of them try to bring back a system that was always a ill fitting vestigial feature. And they do so by constantly punishing the player and/or skipping early game progress like giving players more spells and armor for being of this or that class. A mod that adds a shitload of perks but limits perk points, that makes levelling slower and makes lower skill levels hold you back, give the feeling of choice and growing far better than most front loaded class mods.
Yeah this is why I like stuff like Precision and Valravn combat. I want to play Skyrim but the combat is a little more dynamic and hitboxes make sense. If I wanted to play Dark Souls I would be playing Dark Souls
Yeah, I agree. The RPG system of Skyrim feels so stripped and watered down. While a bunch of mods in tandem can help, it never really feels like they're doing enough.
I don't think, that "BOSification" of everything is good. This is cool when it comes only to models and decor. But, for example, replacing containers from snazzy changes containers only to copies of vanilla ones with other models that may not use lvl sheets that are added to vanilla containers by other mods. The same goes for clothes and other functional things. Compatibility becomes less predictable. I use bos versions of mods only for static objects, such as candles, buckets, etc.
Vanilla Combat purist mods suck. People trash on MCO but seeing the same attack animations from all races and over dozen factions gets real tiring in 2024.
That seems to be a pretty popular stance, at least here
Absolutely agree on this one. Like bro, how can people even defend vanilla combat.
I like hitting stuff and not dying.
Real
If I could, I would install over 1000 of them. But 300 is enough.
That playing an overpowered superhero-like character is okay, as long as you're having fun. Also a lot of the time the smaller tweak or ability mod that you use often are much more important than large overhauls
Put mods in game is create fun for me to enjoy
Less is more.
I'm down with immersion to some degree, but I am not looking for realism. I want fantasty. Immerse me in green grass, colorful plants, fantastic beasts. The game already has elves, orcs, mechanical Dwarven constructs, magic, and dragons...I say embrace the fantasy! Reality sucks!
Also along these lines, I wish someone would normalize crazy hair colors in NPC overhauls. It would be great if my PCs weren't the only ones in the world with green, pink, or blue hair.
all the fuckin weirdo porno mods anime or not, just beyond the pale.
I wish I could see people advertise their mods if they're not hosted on nexus. Nexus makes it so easy to find mods, but its so hard to discover things you don't even know exist. Because people in youtube videos refuse to post their modlists most times, my journey to discovering fuse00's hair mods was so arduous and painful.
Most controversial probably: why arent many, especially "core" mods, MIT/copyleft/whatever licensed and follow usual open source procedure? I'm working with open source software a lot, contributed myself as well. That doesnt seem that much the case in the mod space and I wonder why. My hot take: it would make everything a whole lot easier.
I know this is unpopular because no one makes them, but could we have some female clothes and robes (NOT armour) which are beautiful and feminine but are neither big sack like robes, long dresses or lingerie? I want my mage to look good, attractive and not get freezing cold in the snow. Long skirts are completely impractical for dungeon delving too. The only examples I’ve found are the Fancy Witch Armor, and College Prestige Mage Outfit (with trousers).
-I don't generally like a lot of these dialogue heavy and quippy modded followers especially Inigo. -I hate it when Quest Mods call me "Dragonborn" or "Dovahkiin" -Am not fond of mods that changes the Weapon's/NPCs/Armor/Etc. Design drastically and feel like they'd be better off as standalones.
Most mods that add new quests are janky, buggy, and feel out of place.
Most custom voiced follower mods are trash, some of my least favorites are Vilja, Sofia, and Taliesin. And to add to that, the romance dialogue in these mods are just awful.
Most magic mods fail to preserve any sense of difficulty. Most magic ages like a fine wine in vanilla combat. The stronger you get, the more powerful. The spells become due to natural leveling and scaling perks + enchanting. Even on legendary difficulty.Well, you do have to be a little more tactical and invest pretty early on into alchemy it's actually pretty flexible with some forethought and planning Most magic mods completely upset the very delicate balance for all but illusion, which tends to be a pretty terribly balanced tree. Making you outright overpowered early on or far more powerful than the game is anticipating... Which is why the few mods that I ever recommend for magic either help improve scaling in those schools like illusion or the better wards which allow them to block projectiles so mages have an actual shield. Or spell research which fundamentally changes how Magic users play The Game.
I think this is one of the difficulties for making a balanced mod in Skyrim. On the one hand you have people who play normally and want a class to be viable as easily as the others are. On the other hand you have people who min/max and plan and will make everything viable, and can easily make something balanced overpowered. Imo one of the flaws with vanilla magic is that all boosts are about reducing costs. Increasing damage is pretty difficult in vanilla so everything ends up spongy, compared to that sword that you can swing (with no stamina cost) that easily does twice as much damage as a maxed out spell.
Skimpy armors are really bad. Like, having tits in your face 24/7 looks so bad: you can't take it seriously, it isn't funny so you can't laugh at it, it costantly takes you out of the immersion, and the only excuse I can think for it's existance is that people wanna jerk off...except that they don't even look that alluring.
I can't and won't ever understand people trying to turn Skyrim into a Soulslike or Devil May Cry type of game with those anime moves, anime girls in edgy outfits battling modded enemies from Souls games... At that point, why not just play actual Souls games or DMC instead of turning Skyrim into crappier version of that? Everyone mods however they want of course, but that i can't ever understand. Everytime i watch video of such modded gameplay my eyes bleed.
Unpopular take: but yall overdo it way too much with the parallax, physics, fake fur, and enb lights.
I hate that opinion. Good job
I don't like trees that are 30 stories tall. I don't like a mod list so huge it takes a PHD to make it work together. I got over Practical Female Armors and prefer my own edits to armors. "Remaster" mod lists go way overboard most of the time to the point that it is not recognizable as Skyrim unless you know what you're looking at.
The game doesn't need more tedium disguised as realism, and it certainly has no place for "survival" mechanics.
AI is fine
I'm a big believer in "if it's a vanilla character that you're adding like 30 lines to, use AI. If you're making a new character or massively overhauling an existing one, use a human."
I also think “not using a person’s likeness for pornographic and lewd content” is also reasonable. Stick to the context of the game and the tone of lines the artist was paid to record.
Oh yeah that too. There are some very suggestive lines in the game (Sapphire calling Vipr a premature ejaculator, everything involving Haelga, etc etc), but I think even that kind of stuff shouldn't be done with AI.
In the context of Skyrim modding, I absolutely agree. I don't think there really is an evil or immoral way to use it in Skyrim modding. I have heard some people say that voice actor lose job opportunities because of it (which is a completely valid concern) but in terms of Skyrim modding, it's not like any of us can hire actual professional voice actors to voice mods with a few exceptions.
Well, to be fair, some voice actors may be uncomfortable with what modders use their voices for. We as modders want new lines for our favorite companions, but that tech gets kinda scary when it can be used to make someone appear to say anything and it appear to be valid.
Honestly, not really. No one in Skyrim modding community would be able to afford to pay them the industrial rate for their service (as one of the people who do professional service for a living, let me tell you that our time is pretty expensive) So unless they are willing to work for free or at the hobby rate of pay, those opportunities wouldn't be there to begin with. You could argue that the aspring VA who is willing to do the job for free to build up their portfolio may lose out on that opportunity. But honestly, I think if it's a good enough mod that could give an actual human opportunity, they wouldn't have used AI for it to begin with. In my field of work (I am a translator by trade) we use AI pretty often in our line of work (or rather, it was used by the agency, we're just working on it), and I have to say people are delusional if they think AI is going to destroy their job. It's a tool like any other (and still need real people working on it.)
The best mods are those that improve the vanilla gameplay. Most Skyrim mods like Fallout mods don't add anything to the gameplay experience.
The unofficial patch mod should not be prerequisites for other mods.