New to SKYRIM

[shortylickens]

Marked for reference whenever I decide to actually play skyrim which bought many steam sales ago

At the bare minimum, get SkyUI. It makes the game easier to play. You spend less time digging around in your menu's and more time in the actual game.

 

[JumBie]

Well, I decided to reinstall Skyrim yesterday and give it a shot with mods. I had played the full game before and completed about 90% purely vanilla before getting bored with it, so I figured mods might bring some life back.

I installed all of the top mods on nexus including graphical, environmental, and equipment mods. After having installed everything I noticed that for the space and fps hit that I took, nothing really seemed to look any better.

The 2k texture pack is barely noticeable TBH. I did a comparison by activating then deactivating it and loading up a new game. I can tell you right off the bat, the difference was minimal so I have no idea why people say its a must have. I also got the ELFX mod for lighting, I could never understand why it looked nothing like the videos on youtube. The WATER mod which was one of the top mods barely made a difference in how the water looked.

I know for a fact the mods were working because I tested them with and without, but they NEVER quite seemed to look like what people were displaying on youtube. At that point I gave up, uninstalled and called it a night.

 

[Cerb]

If you have AA or AF forced, some effects won't work. Sometimes it makes it look bad, but other times just not as good. ENB also looks best when using its own transparency AA, though depending on other settings, that may make it run fairly slow (it's a highly variable thing, usually being a minor slowdown, but not on all presets, probably due to how it may interact with other effects used). The lighting changes using ENBs make quite a difference, but the rest, even if it looks great while not playing, often seems to disappear when immersed in the game, IME. I can get a couple ENB presets looking like screenshots and videos, right now, just not the ones I want to use (I don't want an over-vibrant, "cinematic," look, but Vividian Vanilla and Phinix Natural, which worked fine with a prior install, don't want to behave this time). Damn y'all for making me go at it anew (OK, I really have been meaning to, but needed motivation)!

If it is looking a bit dull, try changing in-game and in-ENB brightness and gamma. +0.1 gamma can make a world of difference.

Also, they usually have their INIs tweaked for color, foliage density, etc., along with vibrant environment mods (Vurt makes TESes look better, period).

2K/4K textures make a difference most for up close objects, like sacks, barrels, tree bark, some weapons, NPC clothing, and plants. It's nice to have all 2K or better, but while the difference is huge for a cloak, or berries, it's barely noticed as an animal's skin texture, or the ground texture (and, it's a waste, IMO, to get half-sized normals, since normals and parallax are what make more detailed textures look better, as much as the [A]RGB pixels for objects, and more-so for the environment), yet can chew up VRAM just the same. With clutter, the main advantage in both better textures and meshes is not needing to look as hard, with smoother curves on bottles and plates, and textures that more clearly look like what they are supposed to be, instead of, say, oval pink fuzz being meat.

Finally, the Youtube videos showing them off always skip over parts of the game not properly fixed, with low-res content not yet replaced, etc..

 

[tential]

Well, I decided to reinstall Skyrim yesterday and give it a shot with mods. I had played the full game before and completed about 90% purely vanilla before getting bored with it, so I figured mods might bring some life back.

I installed all of the top mods on nexus including graphical, environmental, and equipment mods. After having installed everything I noticed that for the space and fps hit that I took, nothing really seemed to look any better.

The 2k texture pack is barely noticeable TBH. I did a comparison by activating then deactivating it and loading up a new game. I can tell you right off the bat, the difference was minimal so I have no idea why people say its a must have. I also got the ELFX mod for lighting, I could never understand why it looked nothing like the videos on youtube. The WATER mod which was one of the top mods barely made a difference in how the water looked.

I know for a fact the mods were working because I tested them with and without, but they NEVER quite seemed to look like what people were displaying on youtube. At that point I gave up, uninstalled and called it a night.

PC specs, mods used, and in game settings used

Curious, I haven't bothered with attempting to make Skyrim more fun. Didn't enjoy it that much the first time around (it was just ok) so I moved on to other games in hopes of coming back and modding it to a point I would have fun (or at least enjoy the visuals).

 

[shortylickens]

PC specs, mods used, and in game settings used

Curious, I haven't bothered with attempting to make Skyrim more fun. Didn't enjoy it that much the first time around (it was just ok) so I moved on to other games in hopes of coming back and modding it to a point I would have fun (or at least enjoy the visuals).

You either like it or you dont. Its not for everyone.
Thats part of the reason I manage to enjoy Bethesda games. If they tried for mass appeal like Call of Duty I probably wouldnt be able to enjoy them.

Mods are only for making a game better when you already have fun with it.
They cant fix something you fundamentally dont enjoy.

 

[zinfamous]

Congratualtions, OP. see you in a year!

2 most essential mod for anyone starting out would be official texture pack and SkyUI.

Not sure how well SkyUI works through steam workshop--you used to need the script extender for full functionality, and at one point you had to launch it through SKSE for that.

There are also some very good content-specific texture packs--such as for cloths and fences and what not. I thought some of these were excellent, particularly for all of the cloth and crap you see lying around in the dungeons.

Silversmithing or any well-balanced crafting mod is almost necessary, as well.

I'm a fan of Frostfall, which adds survivability component to exploration--you can succumb to cold, wet, even dampness quite quickly. You learn to carry certain types of armor sets (fur is best for cold, but sucks if you get wet, for example), food, campfire gear, wood gathering, etc. It adds a lot of depth to the meta game, and may seem tedious at first--it is very easy to die at low levels when just starting off with this, but it makes sense soon enough and becomes easy to manage.

 

[zinfamous]

Play through vanilla first. It's a great game without mods. Then on the repeat play throughs mod it up.

I think it's virtually unplayable on PC without SkyUI.

I agree that playing through "vanilla" is best, first off...but I feel that fixing the interface, and maybe adding some textures to enhance visuals don't really affect the gampeplay, so it might as well be vanilla.

The console UI that defaults on the PC version is just, just....turrible.

 

[Nebor]

For my first attempt at playing I did the full STEP mod. It took about 4 hours. I played the game for about 20 hours, got bored and moved on. Went to fire it back up and it wouldn't even start a couple months later. Ended up restoring to vanilla and it worked fine, and so did my saves. And I noticed no difference in how the game looked or played. Mode seem like a waste of time to me. The need for a mod manager and SKSE all just seems ridiculous to me.

 

[Cerb]

A mod manager isn't 100% necessary, but learning to use one is easier than not, as you start adding mods. With any mod that doesn't have a conflict with inventory lists, cell contents, or stats, no patches should needed. For those, you can just extract it, and if it uses ESPs, enable them in the main launcher. The mod manager allows keeping compatibility across many mods, even 100+, without too much trouble, and easier rolling back if a problem does exist. Typical quality standards have better with each game (typical Skyrim mods > typical FO3/NV mods > typical Oblivion mods > typical Morrowind mods), along with the tools and community both helping to keep compatibility wherever possible between them. So, with the likes of Skyrim, you can take the tools available, and if you really want, play with 200+ mods, with no major whacky behaviors or CTDs (I think that many will require merging ESPs, however).

If you minimize gameplay mods, saves will just need to technically load the game, then reset, then save again, to get back to 100% vanilla (this can be done in a matter of seconds, but I forgot the console commands to make it happen that way). To me, the greatest problems with the Bethesda's open games have been that it gets boringly easy over time, and ranged aspects usually aren't given good attention (archery in Skyrim or Oblvion, ballistics and aiming for FO3, FI--Morrowind at least had legit technical limitations, when it was new). Amazing base content, but made for people that enjoy being able to regularly win, rather than regularly retry from older saves . TBF, I'm a fan of Nethack, Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Keeper, and once I get around to installing it, I'm sure I'll enjoy Prison Architect; and in more linear RPGs, I never grind, so with a few exceptions, I'm usually playing a slightly more challenging game when boss fights come, having fewer recovery items, lower levels, etc..

 

[shortylickens]

QQQ is the command to quit the game instantly.

 

[escrow4]

For my first attempt at playing I did the full STEP mod. It took about 4 hours. I played the game for about 20 hours, got bored and moved on. Went to fire it back up and it wouldn't even start a couple months later. Ended up restoring to vanilla and it worked fine, and so did my saves. And I noticed no difference in how the game looked or played. Mode seem like a waste of time to me. The need for a mod manager and SKSE all just seems ridiculous to me.

This. Everyone always points to mods as a plus point for PC gaming, and they might be, if you can be bothered to spend hours fiddling about to get little difference for fat FPS dips.

 

[Cerb]

Again, fallacious. If you want FPS dips, you can get them, but tons of mods create none (BYOD, map markers, UI changes, rebalancers, enemy AI changes, and on and on and on; most lighting mods, and no PC video card from the last 5 years will have issues w/ 1K textures from any mods). Only the hours of fiddling part is true .

P.S. I played, with and without ENBs, using a GTX 460 1GB, for nearly a year w/ my Haswell, and started playing with a lowly Core 2 Duo. These last two threads finally got me doing a scratch install w/ new and updated mods, and I'm still messing with it, just using higher-res textures now that I have 4GB VRAM (I made no significant changes, after upgrading the CPU). The 1GB VRAM was much more a FPS limiting factor than anything else, once I got a newer CPU. I probably got 20 hours in before starting with mods (given how similar it was to Oblivion in play and balance, I had a pretty good idea what I was looking for by that point).

 

[ImpulsE69]

Yes the hours of fiddling, but no FPS dips here. The people doing 'art' are doing like 1 FPS to get those caps.

As usual people with little understanding or know how making presumptuous judgements. Pretty much if you're in the minority, you are doing it wrong. It wouldn't be as popular as it is if everyone had those experiences.

It's not for everyone and probably more for those who prefer to tinker and experiment.

 

[tential]

You either like it or you dont. Its not for everyone.
Thats part of the reason I manage to enjoy Bethesda games. If they tried for mass appeal like Call of Duty I probably wouldnt be able to enjoy them.

Mods are only for making a game better when you already have fun with it.
They cant fix something you fundamentally dont enjoy.

My issue is almost always difficulty level with games. I enjoy the rest of the game, I find the difficulty of most games to bore me to no end. But I've lurked neogaf recently and from what I've read there, it's no wonder games get easier and easier.
I'm hoping mods will fix the difficulty for me and also hoping the visuals will make it more interesting to explore (I liked it the first time exploring but with a new GPU, I want to utilize that).

 

[zinfamous]

This. Everyone always points to mods as a plus point for PC gaming, and they might be, if you can be bothered to spend hours fiddling about to get little difference for fat FPS dips.

Seems like all your posts in the threads in the PC forums over the last month or so can be summarized as: "PC games are horrible. They have dumb controls and don't look any better than my glorious console games. Dumb people play PC games. "

that about right?

 

[tential]

Seems like all your posts in the threads in the PC forums over the last month or so can be summarized as: "PC games are horrible. They have dumb controls and don't look any better than my glorious console games. Dumb people play PC games. "

that about right?

He's feeling a little down after this year's batch of releases. Guy just got a cool new i7-5930k and each triple A release has been bugged to all hell this year. He's a little jaded currently about the gaming industry as a whole.

And you'd be silly to think he is some console gaming enthusiast.

 

[Markbnj]

Lol, relevant ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=y5C3itd89yY

 

[tidy]

.

 

[mikeymikec]

I think it's virtually unplayable on PC without SkyUI.

Playing it on 1080p without mods, it's perfectly playable. So the writing is bigger than you'd like... hardly "virtually unplayable". If the writing was so large that only three lines fit on the screen, I'd agree with you.

The two things I'd change about the inventory system management though is that I think there ought to be configuration options and 'quick binds' allowing one to adopt weapon / apparel configurations (for example, in a tough battle I might start with an atronach, switch to sword + shield, then later switch to a warhammmer. It's irritating to have to go into the quick access menu twice to specify sword and shield because it defaults to sword + atronach.

Another example of what I mean is what I call my 'smithing outfit', I have a ring, necklace and bracers to improve smithing but I have to ferret around for these items each time.

I'd probably have another quick bind for the deathbrand armour + one handed improvement ring as that would help me switch back quickly.

---

Someone else commented about enemies levelling up with you, I can't say I've seen this particularly except for dragons. It was once a job achieved in several attempts to kill one draugr deathlord (plus some luck), now it might be a challenge if I tried to kill them unarmed!

---

I might switch off the high res texture pack, it's rare that I can see a difference and even then the differences aren't amazing, IMO.

 

[tidy]

.

 

[Cerb]

Playing it on 1080p without mods, it's perfectly playable. So the writing is bigger than you'd like... hardly "virtually unplayable". If the writing was so large that only three lines fit on the screen, I'd agree with you.

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/3863/?
Nothing to do with the font size, though that does default smaller and become adjustable.

The two things I'd change about the inventory system management though is that I think there ought to be configuration options and 'quick binds' allowing one to adopt weapon / apparel configurations (for example, in a tough battle I might start with an atronach, switch to sword + shield, then later switch to a warhammmer. It's irritating to have to go into the quick access menu twice to specify sword and shield because it defaults to sword + atronach.

Another example of what I mean is what I call my 'smithing outfit', I have a ring, necklace and bracers to improve smithing but I have to ferret around for these items each time.

I'd probably have another quick bind for the deathbrand armour + one handed improvement ring as that would help me switch back quickly.

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/34593/?

That's my preferred solution.

Someone else commented about enemies levelling up with you, I can't say I've seen this particularly except for dragons. It was once a job achieved in several attempts to kill one draugr deathlord (plus some luck), now it might be a challenge if I tried to kill them unarmed!

It's not like that, so much. The enemies level with you, making it where there you won't wander in somewhere and just walk all over some enemies, or get destroyed in seconds from going somewhere with what should be powerful enemies. You still get more powerful at a faster rate than any of them scale, however (I am currently getting PerMa and ASIS working together, with Combat Evolved in there, too, in part because I liked SkyRe's skill/perk changes, and that it kept the challenge over time, with the scaling intact).

 

[Mai72]

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Gopher. He's going to teach you how to install everything Skyrim related.

Beginner guide to modding Skyrim 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QinA4qD6hXM

Beginner guide to modding Skyrim 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE0zXs34xSc

When I first played Skyrim two years ago I looked at Gopher videos.

 

[mikeymikec]

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/3863/?
Nothing to do with the font size, though that does default smaller and become adjustable.

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/34593/?

That's my preferred solution.

It's an interesting way of doing it, though these days with my houses in various places, I have all of my unneeded weapons in certain places, so I'm normally loaded with a warhammer, a bow, a sword and shield weapon-wise.

It's not like that, so much. The enemies level with you, making it where there you won't wander in somewhere and just walk all over some enemies, or get destroyed in seconds from going somewhere with what should be powerful enemies. You still get more powerful at a faster rate than any of them scale, however (I am currently getting PerMa and ASIS working together, with Combat Evolved in there, too, in part because I liked SkyRe's skill/perk changes, and that it kept the challenge over time, with the scaling intact).

Try walking into Fort Frostmoth at say level 6 or thereabouts while making this claim. I got my ass handed to me about 10 times before I left it for about 12 level ups, then I had to leave the end bloke for something like another 6 levels. Now I go there on a regular basis because the respawned Ash Spawn are extremely handy as sources of random ore and they're an utter push-over. Not as much of a push-over as skeletons are (one sword swipe or arrow and they're dead), but still. The place in SW Skyrim that I first encountered Draugr Deathlords was an utter nightmare, now they're more like quick sparring partners.

Wouldn't Skyrim be really absolutely boring if some enemies didn't level up with you? You would either get utterly whupped and the other battles would be complete push-overs.

I'm still finding vampires to be consistently tough opponents (well, not "save first, get killed in the first three attempts then succeed" tough, more like "I should keep my guard up and take precautions / keep an eye on my health"). Vampires are one of the few I can think of, possibly bandit marauders as well, that level up with me to some extent.

 

[Cerb]

Some enemies are tougher than others, and I think there are some caps. The scaling keeps you from being able to more or less walk in and watch weaker enemies die. Play Requiem, and you'll more or less get that, after awhile. It does mean some bandits are some bandits, with the level design making everything else about the encounters, though. I like the scaling, in that it allows wandering around without fear of insta-death, but not how easy things get over time. That's where mods that change balance come in handy (PerMa, ASIS, Combat Evolved, Ultimate Combat, Epic Gameplay Overhaul...). Bethesda has implemented scaling similarly for a long time, now, so it's just accepted that there will be modders dealing with it, once they get the tools released. So, modders can use the built-in functionality to make enemies tougher over time, so they can at least keep presenting some challenge.

I'm still working on installing some mods, but I've currently got these going, that make substantial changes:
Combat Evolved (standard, may try harder later)
Revenge of the Enemies
Epic Gameplay Overhaul (all but the magic, which I may try later)
PerMa (all)
Immersive Creatures
Realistic Needs and Diseases
Frostfall
ASIS
WTF (not sure if it works with PerMa or not, yet, though)
Crossbows Revamped, enhanced

 

[Sulaco]

This. Everyone always points to mods as a plus point for PC gaming, and they might be, if you can be bothered to spend hours fiddling about to get little difference for fat FPS dips.

You should really learn what you're talking about before sounding like an utter fool every time you open your mouth.