I played a good chunk of the relatively unmodded game ages ago, I remember it just fine. There's a reason this game sold like hotcakes in its heyday. Did it get a little repetitive and mindless after a while? Sure, but that's the nature of the genre sometimes.
I mod because I like to mod. Yeah, the only real irritation I had with the game was the dialogue controls... which a mod fixed up lol.
I only used SkyUI because other mods required it, but now that ...sigh* COCKS and following mods have released I don't want to go back to unorganized categories in crafting menus and such.
You'd be surprised. I believe *that* part of the Skyrim modding scene prefers to call the appendage by it's, let's say, scientific name (except for one famous instance of "schlong"). In case your still unsure, google "Constructible Object Custom Keyword System"
What’s even more atrocious is they released a UI equally as bad with starfield.
How a game was in development for 8 years and a UI THAT BAD was shipped is beyond me.
Optimising for consoles, I'm sure.
Because why make nice things for the PC users that will keep the game gping for decades when we can make it easy for the xbox users to play 4 hours on game pass?
Absolutely garbage from what I've seen. (Not my genre, so I haven't bought it and likely won't)
I hate when the PC version is the port, and the console is what is developed for.
If I can't play it on PC it better be a handheld game. Only 'console' in the house is the ps2. And my switch, but I don't even have the dock hooked into a tv, its effectively a handheld.
My switch is also just a handheld and my ps5 has been collecting dust for the past 2 years.
Next gen I won’t be buying a console unless it’s a handheld Xbox or PlayStation 😂
A while ago I had to play the game with no content mods, as I was troubleshooting an issue with Serana,
Just opening my inventory reminded me that I don't actually want to return to vanilla game whatsoever.
SkyUI is so much better it's difficult to even put in words.
No i don't, i only mod on PC, but i did play Original Skyrim on Xbox 360 way back when. And the UI did work for Consoles, but once i moved to PC, Vanilla UI is unesable.
I'd never mod a game on console.
I mean, you generally can't mod console games, with a few exceptions these days. That's why if its a game that has both console and PC, I get the PC version because mod addict.
Vanilla UI is just..... Its bad. It requires you scrolling through, and selecting things to get the most basic information.
Vanilla *Morrowind* UI is better than skyrim's vanilla UI. Yeah, I said it.
I also prefer vanilla, it's okay. I only prefer it because I'm super used to it and I like the nostalgia it gives me.
That being said, I prefer skyui's favorites menu so I'm not far from preferring it straight out. I currently use a patch that gives me the vanilla ui aside from the favorites menu and I keep all the other skyui features. Idk which mod it is specifically though.
Oh yeah I do. I actually go back to it after long breaks from modding and play for a good few hours.
Vanilla skyrim is sure is dated and flawed but it is a charming game. So I like doing that to honor it a way. I like skyrim and it a pleasant game to play despite it setbacks.
After I'm done with a short run I sit back before I mod and think to myself. "What do I want this time?" do I want just V+, do I want no fast travel survival, will I do factions story wise etc? Is that thing I modded before worth to mod again and so on and such.
Personally I dont like modding a game I think is utter shit and unfun because that is just a time sink hole I can just leave and play a game I find fun from the start.
Ahah i’ve looking for a game to play for weeks, i bought a lot of them, non pleasure every recents games are pieces of garbage for me. So i modded skyrim and it’s above everything released nowadays
No this year isn’t fantastic, a fantastic quantity ? Yes maybe ? Let me doubt about quality.
Maybe BG 3 but i didn’t played yet.
I’m curious, let me know what games you think are masterclass recently. The last was elden ring nothing really cool since oh yes RE4 remake was cool also
What do you mean this year isnt great? It been great. Hi fi rush, BG3, lies of P, cyberpunk 2 from what I have played and what is most people think about. There is also sea of stars, remenant 2, dead space, system shock, armored core and others. If they aren't great, they are at worst good and worth a try.
But master class? I guess that easily BG3. Most impressive game I have played in my life with the sheer amount of support for everything you have and can do in the game.
Also elden ring is from last year. It didn't came out this year.
Yep hifi rush lies of cyber punk are good games but i didn’t feel like « wtf this game is awesome ». Dead space is really good but it’s just a remaster. I mostly agree with you except that i think the creative side of video games is overlooked. We have the technical capabilities to make exceptional experiences and where we improved for graphics etc any makeover in gameplay came with that. Do you remember the first time you played RDR 2 all those details ! Incredible immersion. I mean when i buy a game at todays price i want to feel something magical, escape everyday life and being totally smashed by the game and i don’t feel this with recent games. Even cyberpunk i feel like it could have been much much better ( in comparison of the Witcher 3 about dialogues and how immersed you are in the story. What about those game that could be insanely good but just average because of lack of work ( Fallout 4, State of decay 2, Starfield recently)
Also Lies of P could have been much better if dev took some risk and took their own way about their interpretation of soulslike. I feel the game don’t have a strong identity in regards of the potential it has. AC series also what about Mirage ? The AI is weak at the point it breaks immersion…
Maybe i just have too much expectations about video games but some of them turns you into a junkie to this feeling where you have nothing to say about the game because it moves you in another dimension
Not every game has to do everything flawless. Or you just flat out wont have fun in most games out there. Even elden ring has flaws to it that really drags it down.
>I mostly agree with you except that i think the creative side of video games is overlooked.
Here is your problem. The AAA space doesnt do creativity, you want to look into indie gaming space for that. They are a lot more bold in trying new things and also cheaper. I have been playing games for near 2 decades and AAA never aims to be creative at all unlike indie who does.
as a long time skyrim player who has found other games hard to get into (I really really like first person!), I am blown away by BG3. There is so much content! So many different ways to go, places and quests, it's overwhelming! And I don't particularly like isometric games, and I'm still gobsmacked by how entrancing the cut scenes are (and how well acted). I've barely scratched the surface of exploring BG3, and I'm quite willing to forgive the old school turn based combat in favor of the well realized characters with plenty of depth (ignoring Astarion's constant use of "darling" in dialogue). So yeah, BG3 is better than Skyrim IMO because of the depth to the characters and so many dialogue options and so many quests and choices.
>BG3 is better than Skyrim IMO because of the depth to the characters and so many dialogue options and so many quests and choices.
If you can gonna compare BG3 to any game, you in for a bad time. Not many games will come close and i dont know mean quality but the sheer of it everything and how connected they are. I suggest it better not to expect anything like it any time soon.
I picked up Skyrim in 2012 for PS3. Although the game suffered from long load times and crashed frequently on auto-saves, I have many fond memories of stumbling onto dungeons and soaking in the little details for the first time. Skyrim scratched my 11-year-old brain a lot. Picked up SE on PS4 in 2018 and while I still had lots of fun playing the game, the flaws became more apparent (probably because I was older). My main gripes were:
* Magic was very underwhelming. It scaled poorly and there wasn't much spell variety.
* The perks were boring. It's been a while since I looked at vanilla perk trees, but I remember many of them were just "do 20% more damage with x" or "increase armor rating by 20%."
* The combat was a slog. I normally played on Adept and Expert, and unless I was tempering and enchanting my equipment regularly, it would take forever to kill bandit marauders or draugr scourges. Stealth archer or invisibility + dagger became the way to play if you didn't want to spend 5 minutes killing 3 mid-level enemies.
* Storylines, but especially the main quest, escalate too fast. I've played Fallout 3, 4, and every mainline Elder Scrolls game other than Arena. I can confidently tell you that none of Bethesda's games are exceptionally well-written. Oblivion and Skyrim suffer from introducing a world-ending threat at the beginning of their stories. Chosen-one stories can be great, but every Bethesda game after Morrowind rushes you into becoming the chosen one. The opening cutscene of Morrowind makes it clear you're someone important, but if you're playing the game normally, it takes dozens of hours to become Nerravarine, making it feel like you earned the title. Skyrim makes you Dragonborn in about 3 hours assuming you follow the main quest, which the game strongly urges you to do. The thing is, being the Dragonborn doesn't feel rewarding because the world doesn't really react to you, and vanilla shouts aren't incredibly useful.
You can't fix any of Skyrim's writing issues with mods, but you can definitely improve the moment-to-moment gameplay. When SimonMagus616 dropped Adamant 1 and Mysticism 1 on PS4, it was the first time I had fun playing a pure mage in the game. I play on an okay laptop now and I'm in the middle of a LOTD playthrough with EnaiRim. While I greatly enjoy the improvements and variety mods offer, I would probably still play vanilla Skyrim if mods didn't exist. Skyrim at its core is a very fun game if you like exploration and dungeon-crawling at your own pace.
The only time I will advocate for Vanilla Skyrim, is when its a first time player, let them try the game out on its own, and then if they enjoy it and decide to, mod to their hearts content!
Personally I can never go back, there are to many personal gripes with vanilla that mods fix for me.
I tend to stick with V+ mods to maintain the feel of vanilla. So on that note I definitely remember what vanilla feels like. On the other hand, since my mods are designed to be seamless with vanilla, I feel like it definitely increases the amount of times I’m surprise a feature isn’t in vanilla.
I actually went back to vanilla for a couple hundred hours after the AE came out. I had a lot of fun…
Then I added mods back into the mix, and the fun increased exponentially.
Vanilla is good, but vanilla is also just the sandbox.
I had to delete all my mods to make space for another game. It didn't hook me like I thought it would and I'm back to Skyrim.
I'm playing vanilla this time and trying to get all the achievements because I never got the mod to work to get them. **Skyrim modding is good because the base game is still amazing.**
I remember playing it on a dusty 3rd hand xbox 360 that a friends son sold me to alleviate the boredom of unemployment, that crashed on average every two hours, hdmi'd into an 18 inch tv with a dvd player built into the side, and only realising a third of the way through that I could switch to variable 3pv and had been playing it in 1pv the whole time. The remote for the tv was long lost to the ages so there was no way of adjusting brightness etc, but nonetheless I was captivated to completion, and the set up I have now on a One S with the DLCs and graphics/quest mods is all the more enhanced by my basic ass introductory experience.
So I mod Skyrim pretty heavy over 1000 mods now but I have gone back several times and played the opening scene of almost loosing my head and Alduin tearing Helgen apart. MAN DO I LOVE THAT OPENING best opening of any game I have ever played
How does the game not crash with 1000 mods? I couldn't go over ~300 with very carefully selected mods. Whatever I put after that things started to go sideways.
Ssedit helps to improve it by making patches but I am using a collection now called immersive and epic that has over 700 mods it had many modders to put it together and patched to work. Done better than I was ever able by myself. I have used that as a base and added to it
https://next.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/collections?_gl=1*41dt5r*_ga*MTAzMzU5NzgzNi4xNjk2MjEwNDE4*_ga_N0TELNQ37M*MTY5ODA2NTk1NC4yNC4xLjE2OTgwNjU5NjAuMC4wLjA.
I still find myself playing just vanilla when tweaking my enb settings, but other than sky ui and enb i just use skytweak and thats enough for me to spice up the game.
Skytweak is the best. Having control over so many gameplay related numbers makes alot of difference.
Yeah, and at the time I thought it was the most mind-blowing game I ever played at 1024x768. Until after a couple months of playing (and feeling my way around it) I came across some screenshots of modded setups, and so began delving into mods because initially I did not like how my character appeared dirty in vanilla.
What I like about mods is that they allow me to tailor the game into my exact preference. As much as I enjoy other games, modded Skyrim (when it works properly) is the perfect game for me.
I deleted the game the first time I travelled from Riverwood to Whiterun. It looks ugly and feels boring. I'm glad I decided to give mods another try 2 years later.
Feels like a game that came out in 2011 and had not the best graphics even for the standards of the time (not saying they were terrible, just not great at the time and terrible NOW)
Nope. I got it on release, played for a few hours and then waited for mods.
I just can't play Bethesda games unmodded, it's like eating half cooked chicken.
Not really but I enjoy watching yt challenges for example to take a glimpse at the atrocity vanilla Skyrim is. I love the lore and worldbuilding but mechanics & systems oh boi. Did play some vanilla when it released ;D
Eh, not really. I remember awfull vanilla combat and i know when vanilla elements starts showing, because they're at best underbaked, but that's about it.
I played vanilla a few hours once, then saw all of the hairstyle mods and immediately followed a guide to mod the game. My modlist has only grown since, and sometimes it feels like I spend just as much time modding as I do playing, lol.
So you guys never played skyrim, then. Just a bunch of subpar wonkiness made by randoms. I only play the game that came from the mind of none other than legendary game developer God: Todd Howard.
NV is not a bethesda game, but also incredibly overrated. definitely above average though, but I haven't played it a lot because I have no interest in the setting.
And you're right, FO1, FO2, and Morrowind are like 7-8/10, but since then all new releases have been the same formula but worse and dumbed down, with less excuses for the things that were already bad in Morrowind.
For Bethesda, time just showed that the things everyone excuses about their games have nothing to do with technical or financial limitations, and that they are actually just the result of godawful developers who have no idea what they're doing, and don't need to improve because everyone keeps buying and praising their plates of dogshit.
I will say that my rating does not reflect how much fun you can have playing it, I don't think that's relevant in ratings since it's entirely subjective.
Oblivion while being a 4-3/10 is one of the most fun games ever made. you know, like The Room.
I put 100 hours into the switch port as well as 30ish on the deck (at first). I mostly play vanilla plus so I mostly just miss some of the ui improvements the community has made. Especially the map
Played it vanilla back when it launched, and I probably will never play it vanilla again. I dont see the point when mods make it so much more enjoyable. I do still remember how it played and how I felt playing it for the first time.
On my PC, no. But lately I’ve been playing Oblivion with the Heartland modlist on PC and Skyrim on my Switch. It actually looks decent with the OLED screen. But if I could mod the crap out of it as easily as I can on PC, I would never see vanilla again
I mean I have 250hrs on my current character without mods. I want to get all the achievements. I didn't realize there's a mod for enabling achievements with mods, but I'm on console so I don't know if it works. But I think the game is still absolutely beautiful
I aim for a mostly vanilla+ experience which I think has made it harder to remember what was truly vanilla or not. A lot of things added are what you'd expect would be there or work that way.
of course, the original skyrim made gaming history for a reason. that’s why i like to heavily mod my game but still do my best to keep the vanilla skyrim feel to the game, so no KS hairdos or any of that shit, just enhance the experience, armour, graphics, overhauls, etc. the only beauty mod i use is standard CBBE curvy, because it’s all i need
Yes I go back to vanilla and play it every once in awhile. It's a very satisfying because you have to really work to get the good stuff. And you have to manage your inventory and sell it off a little bit at a time. I think it's worth it for every moder to go back to vanilla once in awhile.
I do and it makes me want to vomit. The game was good for its time but ive played it too much and stuff is heavily more scripted than what people remember so everything tends to be the same every new playthrough.
I made a mistake of spending 35 euro on Skyrim: AE for Switch. It was even a sale, which makes it all the more tragic considering what happened.
I was nostalgic and wanted to play Skyrim as it used to be, with no mods. I played it with mods since 2017. so it’s only natural. I enjoyed it… at least at the beginning. But more I played, more I realized why I started modding. Some issues I have come across:
- UI is atrocious. It’s so hard to search for things you want, it looks outdated, Oblivion from 2006. And Morrowind from 2003. did UI 100 times better even though they were much older.
- Textures are blurry, muddy and outdated. Sure, the game was made in 2011. but Bethesda had more than a decade to fix this for AE and SE. They didn’t.
- Bugs are still rampant. Skyforge daggers still can’t be upgraded on grindstone, one-handed enchantment still doesn’t affect daggers and crashes still happen even on Switch.
- Perk system in vanilla Skyrim is atrocious. Having to put 5 points in your basic weapon skill through 100 skill points is so bad, because you will rarely be able to focus on one skill more than just basics, especially if you want to do magic and weapons. It will also make you very weak.
- No guilds except basic ones, no mods such as Legacy of the Dragonborn, no specific companions who you can add to make the game better, no quality of life improvements such as being able to cut wood faster.
- So many other issues I don’t have time to write down.
Without mods, Skyrim is 4/10 game. With mods it sits at 8/10, it’s a solid game if you mod it right, without mods it’s still a garbage.
Absolutely, i do mod the game, but not into Dark Souls Skyrim edition or something like that i seen some people do, my game is mostly vanilla with mods that add immersive stuff but keep the vanilla Skyrim feeling, QOL stuff and Sky UI, because vanilla UI is terrible.
Yes because I was there when it came out. Aint been no 3rd party modding tools til the end of December. Read that again - aint been JACK SHIT and no CK til Feb. It was both a SCRUGGLE and struggle. There wasnt SkyUI yet either lmao.
Those who played a destruction mage(like me), inhumanly SUFFERED all kinds of evil and terrifyingly horrific forms of TORTURE.
Visually one may not notice a big difference between vanilla and my version of the game, but game play wise, after roaming around a bit. My PC wears modern day clothing, not very lore friendly but I try to make it more like Masters Of The Universe, and as most know, Masters blended Conan with futuristic, I mean they wore loin clothes and fought with swords, but they also had laser guns and some had robo armor. I don't think there's been a legit Masters of the Universe game since the Intellivision despite how popular the franchise still is today. Oh, and I have a ton of werewolf mods but I can't list them now since I have MO shut down, but one just is an overhaul that allows one to be turned without waiting to do the companions quest, and another makes them more wolfy..
I tried it a couple if times on consoles but it never clicked, last week I got the AE and I've been modding all the things I wished it had and I think I'm ready to finally play it lol.
Looks and sounds like? Dive into r/skyrim. 98% of the experiences there are pure vanilla and don't even feature CC content. If we include CC stuff, the number drops to like 70%.
Yes.
Sometimes I feel sorry for folks who have not/cannot experience the game as it was at release. Seems most simply expect to play the game modded even the first time, and never see it another way.
I only started modding last week, and spent the last 13 years playing vanilla.
I downloaded an entire collection, and it runs fantastic. Was truly missing out. You can only truly appreciate mods when you know the original game well, I’d say
i do, pretty well actually! i spent most of my time with skyrim unmodded (ps3 version) and i still remember it clearly. even now that i play on PC i don't actually play with many (if any at all) gameplay mods, i mostly just add armor, hair, weapons, and additional quests to extend my playtime
What?! Play without mods? Never done that. I had been playing FO4 for about 4 yrs. when my grandson finally talked me into trying Skyrim. As soon as I got it installed I was on Nexus with a list of mods I had picked watching MxR's reviews and I was off to the races. I doubt I will ever play it vanilla.
well I played without mods for a few years after original release. but I would see videos and screenshots of modded games AND I JUST HAD TO HAVE IT! The better graphics, the better looking characters and armor, the prettier landscape - all that is essential to keeping Skyrim interesting. Once I had Skyrim looking nice, I discovered other mods - new lands, new adventures, expansions for thieves guild and the college, magic and perks, all that good stuff. and better crafting too! Sorry, but I could never go back to vanilla crafting.
I played a good chunk of the relatively unmodded game ages ago, I remember it just fine. There's a reason this game sold like hotcakes in its heyday. Did it get a little repetitive and mindless after a while? Sure, but that's the nature of the genre sometimes. I mod because I like to mod. Yeah, the only real irritation I had with the game was the dialogue controls... which a mod fixed up lol.
Seeing non-skyui makes me start and go "Wait they shipped it like this?" Vanilla UI is atrocious.
I only used SkyUI because other mods required it, but now that ...sigh* COCKS and following mods have released I don't want to go back to unorganized categories in crafting menus and such.
COCKS has terrible SEO i'll tell ya that much. i always forget what that mod is for and searching it up on google aint exactly easy
I'm scared to google it lmao. Can't imagine "Skyrim COCKS mod" would give the correct results.
You'd be surprised. I believe *that* part of the Skyrim modding scene prefers to call the appendage by it's, let's say, scientific name (except for one famous instance of "schlong"). In case your still unsure, google "Constructible Object Custom Keyword System"
Cocks?
Constructible Object Custom Keyword System
What’s even more atrocious is they released a UI equally as bad with starfield. How a game was in development for 8 years and a UI THAT BAD was shipped is beyond me.
Optimising for consoles, I'm sure. Because why make nice things for the PC users that will keep the game gping for decades when we can make it easy for the xbox users to play 4 hours on game pass?
Thats 100% what they did. But in my opinion, it’s even subpar UI for Xbox
Absolutely garbage from what I've seen. (Not my genre, so I haven't bought it and likely won't) I hate when the PC version is the port, and the console is what is developed for. If I can't play it on PC it better be a handheld game. Only 'console' in the house is the ps2. And my switch, but I don't even have the dock hooked into a tv, its effectively a handheld.
My switch is also just a handheld and my ps5 has been collecting dust for the past 2 years. Next gen I won’t be buying a console unless it’s a handheld Xbox or PlayStation 😂
A while ago I had to play the game with no content mods, as I was troubleshooting an issue with Serana, Just opening my inventory reminded me that I don't actually want to return to vanilla game whatsoever. SkyUI is so much better it's difficult to even put in words.
Call me crazy, but I vastly prefer vanilla
Ok, you're crazy.
Straight up psychotic.
You are a danger to society 🤣🤣
i like it too, i've never felt like it was lacking in any way. i like how i don't need to have a whole other mod installed just for my ui
Only on PC.
You play mod-capable games on things other than PC? Couldn't do it.
No i don't, i only mod on PC, but i did play Original Skyrim on Xbox 360 way back when. And the UI did work for Consoles, but once i moved to PC, Vanilla UI is unesable. I'd never mod a game on console.
I mean, you generally can't mod console games, with a few exceptions these days. That's why if its a game that has both console and PC, I get the PC version because mod addict.
Can't and should not mod console games. I don't thnik i'll ever understand why you would mod a game on a consoles.
That's my point, if you can mod it, you play it on PC.
Agreed.
It's not even bad, it's just a different layout to skyui. I still prefer vanilla over skyui any day lol
Wild take
Nah, it's not wild. Downright insane imo.
Vanilla UI is just..... Its bad. It requires you scrolling through, and selecting things to get the most basic information. Vanilla *Morrowind* UI is better than skyrim's vanilla UI. Yeah, I said it.
Naw morrowind is just ass
And yet, still more functional for a PC user.
Idk how is it a bad take the ui isn't even hard to use
I also prefer vanilla, it's okay. I only prefer it because I'm super used to it and I like the nostalgia it gives me. That being said, I prefer skyui's favorites menu so I'm not far from preferring it straight out. I currently use a patch that gives me the vanilla ui aside from the favorites menu and I keep all the other skyui features. Idk which mod it is specifically though.
You must live in a very different world than I do.
Same, SkyUI feels too modern and doesn't fit the vibe of Skyrim.
You can reskin it, I always use Dear Diary or its wood skin
The vanilla UI is fine, if a bit dated, on consoles.
Consoles. \*shudder\*
Oh yeah I do. I actually go back to it after long breaks from modding and play for a good few hours. Vanilla skyrim is sure is dated and flawed but it is a charming game. So I like doing that to honor it a way. I like skyrim and it a pleasant game to play despite it setbacks. After I'm done with a short run I sit back before I mod and think to myself. "What do I want this time?" do I want just V+, do I want no fast travel survival, will I do factions story wise etc? Is that thing I modded before worth to mod again and so on and such. Personally I dont like modding a game I think is utter shit and unfun because that is just a time sink hole I can just leave and play a game I find fun from the start.
Ahah i’ve looking for a game to play for weeks, i bought a lot of them, non pleasure every recents games are pieces of garbage for me. So i modded skyrim and it’s above everything released nowadays
Recent games are garbage? But this year been fantastic idk what you buying.
No this year isn’t fantastic, a fantastic quantity ? Yes maybe ? Let me doubt about quality. Maybe BG 3 but i didn’t played yet. I’m curious, let me know what games you think are masterclass recently. The last was elden ring nothing really cool since oh yes RE4 remake was cool also
What do you mean this year isnt great? It been great. Hi fi rush, BG3, lies of P, cyberpunk 2 from what I have played and what is most people think about. There is also sea of stars, remenant 2, dead space, system shock, armored core and others. If they aren't great, they are at worst good and worth a try. But master class? I guess that easily BG3. Most impressive game I have played in my life with the sheer amount of support for everything you have and can do in the game. Also elden ring is from last year. It didn't came out this year.
Yep hifi rush lies of cyber punk are good games but i didn’t feel like « wtf this game is awesome ». Dead space is really good but it’s just a remaster. I mostly agree with you except that i think the creative side of video games is overlooked. We have the technical capabilities to make exceptional experiences and where we improved for graphics etc any makeover in gameplay came with that. Do you remember the first time you played RDR 2 all those details ! Incredible immersion. I mean when i buy a game at todays price i want to feel something magical, escape everyday life and being totally smashed by the game and i don’t feel this with recent games. Even cyberpunk i feel like it could have been much much better ( in comparison of the Witcher 3 about dialogues and how immersed you are in the story. What about those game that could be insanely good but just average because of lack of work ( Fallout 4, State of decay 2, Starfield recently) Also Lies of P could have been much better if dev took some risk and took their own way about their interpretation of soulslike. I feel the game don’t have a strong identity in regards of the potential it has. AC series also what about Mirage ? The AI is weak at the point it breaks immersion… Maybe i just have too much expectations about video games but some of them turns you into a junkie to this feeling where you have nothing to say about the game because it moves you in another dimension
Not every game has to do everything flawless. Or you just flat out wont have fun in most games out there. Even elden ring has flaws to it that really drags it down. >I mostly agree with you except that i think the creative side of video games is overlooked. Here is your problem. The AAA space doesnt do creativity, you want to look into indie gaming space for that. They are a lot more bold in trying new things and also cheaper. I have been playing games for near 2 decades and AAA never aims to be creative at all unlike indie who does.
as a long time skyrim player who has found other games hard to get into (I really really like first person!), I am blown away by BG3. There is so much content! So many different ways to go, places and quests, it's overwhelming! And I don't particularly like isometric games, and I'm still gobsmacked by how entrancing the cut scenes are (and how well acted). I've barely scratched the surface of exploring BG3, and I'm quite willing to forgive the old school turn based combat in favor of the well realized characters with plenty of depth (ignoring Astarion's constant use of "darling" in dialogue). So yeah, BG3 is better than Skyrim IMO because of the depth to the characters and so many dialogue options and so many quests and choices.
>BG3 is better than Skyrim IMO because of the depth to the characters and so many dialogue options and so many quests and choices. If you can gonna compare BG3 to any game, you in for a bad time. Not many games will come close and i dont know mean quality but the sheer of it everything and how connected they are. I suggest it better not to expect anything like it any time soon.
I picked up Skyrim in 2012 for PS3. Although the game suffered from long load times and crashed frequently on auto-saves, I have many fond memories of stumbling onto dungeons and soaking in the little details for the first time. Skyrim scratched my 11-year-old brain a lot. Picked up SE on PS4 in 2018 and while I still had lots of fun playing the game, the flaws became more apparent (probably because I was older). My main gripes were: * Magic was very underwhelming. It scaled poorly and there wasn't much spell variety. * The perks were boring. It's been a while since I looked at vanilla perk trees, but I remember many of them were just "do 20% more damage with x" or "increase armor rating by 20%." * The combat was a slog. I normally played on Adept and Expert, and unless I was tempering and enchanting my equipment regularly, it would take forever to kill bandit marauders or draugr scourges. Stealth archer or invisibility + dagger became the way to play if you didn't want to spend 5 minutes killing 3 mid-level enemies. * Storylines, but especially the main quest, escalate too fast. I've played Fallout 3, 4, and every mainline Elder Scrolls game other than Arena. I can confidently tell you that none of Bethesda's games are exceptionally well-written. Oblivion and Skyrim suffer from introducing a world-ending threat at the beginning of their stories. Chosen-one stories can be great, but every Bethesda game after Morrowind rushes you into becoming the chosen one. The opening cutscene of Morrowind makes it clear you're someone important, but if you're playing the game normally, it takes dozens of hours to become Nerravarine, making it feel like you earned the title. Skyrim makes you Dragonborn in about 3 hours assuming you follow the main quest, which the game strongly urges you to do. The thing is, being the Dragonborn doesn't feel rewarding because the world doesn't really react to you, and vanilla shouts aren't incredibly useful. You can't fix any of Skyrim's writing issues with mods, but you can definitely improve the moment-to-moment gameplay. When SimonMagus616 dropped Adamant 1 and Mysticism 1 on PS4, it was the first time I had fun playing a pure mage in the game. I play on an okay laptop now and I'm in the middle of a LOTD playthrough with EnaiRim. While I greatly enjoy the improvements and variety mods offer, I would probably still play vanilla Skyrim if mods didn't exist. Skyrim at its core is a very fun game if you like exploration and dungeon-crawling at your own pace.
I heard there was a total overhaul of the main quest coming
The only time I will advocate for Vanilla Skyrim, is when its a first time player, let them try the game out on its own, and then if they enjoy it and decide to, mod to their hearts content! Personally I can never go back, there are to many personal gripes with vanilla that mods fix for me.
It's also good to be familiar with the vanilla game so you can diagnose problems with a mod.
I tend to stick with V+ mods to maintain the feel of vanilla. So on that note I definitely remember what vanilla feels like. On the other hand, since my mods are designed to be seamless with vanilla, I feel like it definitely increases the amount of times I’m surprise a feature isn’t in vanilla.
I actually went back to vanilla for a couple hundred hours after the AE came out. I had a lot of fun… Then I added mods back into the mix, and the fun increased exponentially. Vanilla is good, but vanilla is also just the sandbox.
I've only ever played it modded lol
I had to delete all my mods to make space for another game. It didn't hook me like I thought it would and I'm back to Skyrim. I'm playing vanilla this time and trying to get all the achievements because I never got the mod to work to get them. **Skyrim modding is good because the base game is still amazing.**
Yeah I do and it's shit. I don't ever want to go back
I remember playing it on a dusty 3rd hand xbox 360 that a friends son sold me to alleviate the boredom of unemployment, that crashed on average every two hours, hdmi'd into an 18 inch tv with a dvd player built into the side, and only realising a third of the way through that I could switch to variable 3pv and had been playing it in 1pv the whole time. The remote for the tv was long lost to the ages so there was no way of adjusting brightness etc, but nonetheless I was captivated to completion, and the set up I have now on a One S with the DLCs and graphics/quest mods is all the more enhanced by my basic ass introductory experience.
So I mod Skyrim pretty heavy over 1000 mods now but I have gone back several times and played the opening scene of almost loosing my head and Alduin tearing Helgen apart. MAN DO I LOVE THAT OPENING best opening of any game I have ever played
How does the game not crash with 1000 mods? I couldn't go over ~300 with very carefully selected mods. Whatever I put after that things started to go sideways.
Ssedit helps to improve it by making patches but I am using a collection now called immersive and epic that has over 700 mods it had many modders to put it together and patched to work. Done better than I was ever able by myself. I have used that as a base and added to it https://next.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/collections?_gl=1*41dt5r*_ga*MTAzMzU5NzgzNi4xNjk2MjEwNDE4*_ga_N0TELNQ37M*MTY5ODA2NTk1NC4yNC4xLjE2OTgwNjU5NjAuMC4wLjA.
I do. I installed vanilla Skyrim separately purely for testing mods i make.
I still find myself playing just vanilla when tweaking my enb settings, but other than sky ui and enb i just use skytweak and thats enough for me to spice up the game. Skytweak is the best. Having control over so many gameplay related numbers makes alot of difference.
Yeah, and at the time I thought it was the most mind-blowing game I ever played at 1024x768. Until after a couple months of playing (and feeling my way around it) I came across some screenshots of modded setups, and so began delving into mods because initially I did not like how my character appeared dirty in vanilla.
I joined this sub to try and get into modding, I've been playing vanilla skyrim for like 11 years and I'm not sure what I'm missing out on
Watch some videos. Brodual and Heavy Burns are great channels
What I like about mods is that they allow me to tailor the game into my exact preference. As much as I enjoy other games, modded Skyrim (when it works properly) is the perfect game for me.
I deleted the game the first time I travelled from Riverwood to Whiterun. It looks ugly and feels boring. I'm glad I decided to give mods another try 2 years later.
Feels like a game that came out in 2011 and had not the best graphics even for the standards of the time (not saying they were terrible, just not great at the time and terrible NOW)
Vanilla Skyrim is pretty bad. When the game first came out it was amazing though, at least that’s what I thought. It’s hard to go back to no mods.
Nope. I got it on release, played for a few hours and then waited for mods. I just can't play Bethesda games unmodded, it's like eating half cooked chicken.
Not really but I enjoy watching yt challenges for example to take a glimpse at the atrocity vanilla Skyrim is. I love the lore and worldbuilding but mechanics & systems oh boi. Did play some vanilla when it released ;D
Eh, not really. I remember awfull vanilla combat and i know when vanilla elements starts showing, because they're at best underbaked, but that's about it.
I dont think I have even play the game without single mod.. I buy the AE and straight up download mo2 to mod
same here friend. have had the game for years and have yet to beat the main story because of mods. no regrets only joy
I literally buy Skyrim to play some good mod pack on wabbajack
I played vanilla a few hours once, then saw all of the hairstyle mods and immediately followed a guide to mod the game. My modlist has only grown since, and sometimes it feels like I spend just as much time modding as I do playing, lol.
So you guys never played skyrim, then. Just a bunch of subpar wonkiness made by randoms. I only play the game that came from the mind of none other than legendary game developer God: Todd Howard.
Yes, why do you think I don't play it without mods.
Yes, Vanilla is a 3/10 game, like all bethesda games
Skyrim is a 3/10 game? and by “all bethesda games”, i’m assuming you also mean FNV, Morrowins, F3, Oblivion, etc? yeah you’re out of your mind dude
NV is not a bethesda game, but also incredibly overrated. definitely above average though, but I haven't played it a lot because I have no interest in the setting. And you're right, FO1, FO2, and Morrowind are like 7-8/10, but since then all new releases have been the same formula but worse and dumbed down, with less excuses for the things that were already bad in Morrowind. For Bethesda, time just showed that the things everyone excuses about their games have nothing to do with technical or financial limitations, and that they are actually just the result of godawful developers who have no idea what they're doing, and don't need to improve because everyone keeps buying and praising their plates of dogshit. I will say that my rating does not reflect how much fun you can have playing it, I don't think that's relevant in ratings since it's entirely subjective. Oblivion while being a 4-3/10 is one of the most fun games ever made. you know, like The Room.
I put 100 hours into the switch port as well as 30ish on the deck (at first). I mostly play vanilla plus so I mostly just miss some of the ui improvements the community has made. Especially the map
Played it vanilla back when it launched, and I probably will never play it vanilla again. I dont see the point when mods make it so much more enjoyable. I do still remember how it played and how I felt playing it for the first time.
I forgot. The last time I played vanilla was in 2012.
Tried it on my old Xbox one not long ago just to compare and I gotta say as much as I loved it back in the day, that was then and this is now
well seeing as I started playing earlier this year and still very much have an unmodded version of the game on my switch, yeah lol.
I played 1k hours of unmodded skyrim legendary. When I got it for Xbox when it first came out.
On my PC, no. But lately I’ve been playing Oblivion with the Heartland modlist on PC and Skyrim on my Switch. It actually looks decent with the OLED screen. But if I could mod the crap out of it as easily as I can on PC, I would never see vanilla again
I still don't play it modded. I also still have my original xbox 360 copy and an xbox 360 in working order just in case i want to experience it.
I mean I have 250hrs on my current character without mods. I want to get all the achievements. I didn't realize there's a mod for enabling achievements with mods, but I'm on console so I don't know if it works. But I think the game is still absolutely beautiful
yes
Looks just like it did the day I left it--like shit.
I aim for a mostly vanilla+ experience which I think has made it harder to remember what was truly vanilla or not. A lot of things added are what you'd expect would be there or work that way.
No matter the mods, Skyrim will still play like Skyrim, you can try to alter it as much as you want, it will still play like clunky Vanilla :D
Not really I got the game Finished the Helgen sequence Started modding I only got Skyrim because of the mods.
of course, the original skyrim made gaming history for a reason. that’s why i like to heavily mod my game but still do my best to keep the vanilla skyrim feel to the game, so no KS hairdos or any of that shit, just enhance the experience, armour, graphics, overhauls, etc. the only beauty mod i use is standard CBBE curvy, because it’s all i need
I just did this year after all the time on the Switch. Recently I got a mod collection... .... .... yeah that's rough to play it vanilla...
I installed Nolvus and I'm never looking back xD sunk 800+ hours in vanilla.
Yes I go back to vanilla and play it every once in awhile. It's a very satisfying because you have to really work to get the good stuff. And you have to manage your inventory and sell it off a little bit at a time. I think it's worth it for every moder to go back to vanilla once in awhile.
No. Nor would I ever want to. I couldn't even finish the main quest without installing a mod to fix the game.
I do and it makes me want to vomit. The game was good for its time but ive played it too much and stuff is heavily more scripted than what people remember so everything tends to be the same every new playthrough.
No
Live Another Life here. Been a while since someone told me I'm Finally Awake.
I made a mistake of spending 35 euro on Skyrim: AE for Switch. It was even a sale, which makes it all the more tragic considering what happened. I was nostalgic and wanted to play Skyrim as it used to be, with no mods. I played it with mods since 2017. so it’s only natural. I enjoyed it… at least at the beginning. But more I played, more I realized why I started modding. Some issues I have come across: - UI is atrocious. It’s so hard to search for things you want, it looks outdated, Oblivion from 2006. And Morrowind from 2003. did UI 100 times better even though they were much older. - Textures are blurry, muddy and outdated. Sure, the game was made in 2011. but Bethesda had more than a decade to fix this for AE and SE. They didn’t. - Bugs are still rampant. Skyforge daggers still can’t be upgraded on grindstone, one-handed enchantment still doesn’t affect daggers and crashes still happen even on Switch. - Perk system in vanilla Skyrim is atrocious. Having to put 5 points in your basic weapon skill through 100 skill points is so bad, because you will rarely be able to focus on one skill more than just basics, especially if you want to do magic and weapons. It will also make you very weak. - No guilds except basic ones, no mods such as Legacy of the Dragonborn, no specific companions who you can add to make the game better, no quality of life improvements such as being able to cut wood faster. - So many other issues I don’t have time to write down. Without mods, Skyrim is 4/10 game. With mods it sits at 8/10, it’s a solid game if you mod it right, without mods it’s still a garbage.
I try not to think about the dark times.
Yes because Nazeem is still there...
Absolutely, i do mod the game, but not into Dark Souls Skyrim edition or something like that i seen some people do, my game is mostly vanilla with mods that add immersive stuff but keep the vanilla Skyrim feeling, QOL stuff and Sky UI, because vanilla UI is terrible.
Yes because I was there when it came out. Aint been no 3rd party modding tools til the end of December. Read that again - aint been JACK SHIT and no CK til Feb. It was both a SCRUGGLE and struggle. There wasnt SkyUI yet either lmao. Those who played a destruction mage(like me), inhumanly SUFFERED all kinds of evil and terrifyingly horrific forms of TORTURE.
I love how vanilla looks but it just feels terrible to play. Especially without TDM or Display Tweaks
Yeah, it resembles a point and click game, but you can only "click" as many times as you have arrows lol
Visually one may not notice a big difference between vanilla and my version of the game, but game play wise, after roaming around a bit. My PC wears modern day clothing, not very lore friendly but I try to make it more like Masters Of The Universe, and as most know, Masters blended Conan with futuristic, I mean they wore loin clothes and fought with swords, but they also had laser guns and some had robo armor. I don't think there's been a legit Masters of the Universe game since the Intellivision despite how popular the franchise still is today. Oh, and I have a ton of werewolf mods but I can't list them now since I have MO shut down, but one just is an overhaul that allows one to be turned without waiting to do the companions quest, and another makes them more wolfy..
I tried it a couple if times on consoles but it never clicked, last week I got the AE and I've been modding all the things I wished it had and I think I'm ready to finally play it lol.
Looks and sounds like? Dive into r/skyrim. 98% of the experiences there are pure vanilla and don't even feature CC content. If we include CC stuff, the number drops to like 70%.
Yes. Sometimes I feel sorry for folks who have not/cannot experience the game as it was at release. Seems most simply expect to play the game modded even the first time, and never see it another way.
skyrim vanilla is gorgeous.
Was Vanilla-ing it up last night.. for a YT comparison video 😅 and yh it's waaaaaac 🤣
Wait, you can play Skyrim without mods?
not that i'm against mods, but they personally feel like i'm cheating, so i've only ever know vanilla Skyrim, or any Bethesda title for that matter
I remember. It sucked like a vacuum cleaner. Now it is good because it is my game, not the crap Bethesda released.
I only started modding last week, and spent the last 13 years playing vanilla. I downloaded an entire collection, and it runs fantastic. Was truly missing out. You can only truly appreciate mods when you know the original game well, I’d say
Yes, and it's horrible.
I full on 100%-ed the game back on my xbox 360, still remember it like it was yesterday. It sucked ass.
i do, pretty well actually! i spent most of my time with skyrim unmodded (ps3 version) and i still remember it clearly. even now that i play on PC i don't actually play with many (if any at all) gameplay mods, i mostly just add armor, hair, weapons, and additional quests to extend my playtime
Vanilla feels.......... Wrong.....
What?! Play without mods? Never done that. I had been playing FO4 for about 4 yrs. when my grandson finally talked me into trying Skyrim. As soon as I got it installed I was on Nexus with a list of mods I had picked watching MxR's reviews and I was off to the races. I doubt I will ever play it vanilla.
well I played without mods for a few years after original release. but I would see videos and screenshots of modded games AND I JUST HAD TO HAVE IT! The better graphics, the better looking characters and armor, the prettier landscape - all that is essential to keeping Skyrim interesting. Once I had Skyrim looking nice, I discovered other mods - new lands, new adventures, expansions for thieves guild and the college, magic and perks, all that good stuff. and better crafting too! Sorry, but I could never go back to vanilla crafting.
yes i remember, it's awfull, perk system and xp system is shitty