Mineshaft_Gap
4077th
So I put hours upon hours into Skyrim for XBox 360 back when I owned one. Really, it was one of those games I felt like I was enjoying when I played it but at a certain point I'd had enough and felt like the game was a piece of shit that didn't value my time. I was spending more time managing inventory and participating in menial bullshit than I was actually having fun.
The quests, compared to Oblivion were bleh. Certainly, Oblivion had its fair share of stinkers but overall the guild quests were much more interesting and rewarding if for no reason other than writing and story. It should be noted that my experience with Oblivion was on console. Same going all the way back to Morrowind which was my first Elder Scrolls game. And there were a number of things I found disappointing in Oblivion as well compared to Morrowind.
The pervading feeling I'd had since Morrowind was that each game embodied bunny hop sort of deal. Two steps forward, one step back. Oblivion built on Morrowinds gameplay and graphics (improved significantly) but still the combat was kind of bleh and you lost a bunch of skill types, abilities, weapons, and generally a large degree of customization. Skyrim wrought even more improvements to the graphics and gameplay arena but STILL there was a lot of room for improvement. Except this time the leap back in terms of overall freedom and customization was enormous.
So my feeling was that the Skyrim experience was pretty shallow in the long run. Fast forward to today. I sold my X360 a few months back and built myself a capable gaming PC with two GTX760's running in SLI and an i7-4770K. I can now play anything I god damn please on pretty damn high settings if I do say so myself.
So I decided to give Skyrim a whirl. At first I was surprised at how much better it looked on PC compared to console - completely vanilla. But that's not why I was revisiting something that left a bad taste in my mouth. Going all the way back to Morrowind I was always told about how the definitive versions of these games were on PC because of the modding community that supported them with massive upgrades to gameplay, graphics, and more. I never took advantage because I never had a gaming PC capable enough at the time to handle any of the games on settings high enough that would make me happy. So I settled for the console versions and tried to convince myself that mods were a waste of time because they weren't what the developers had as their original vision.
Well now I know not to trust Bethesda's vision. We don't see eye to eye, and as it turns out the modding community has a lot of the same gripes I did. Except instead of pissing and moaning (like me) they went and did something about it. The result is a collection of the most fucking awesome things I have ever seen.
Going in completely without any experience whatsoever, I felt my way around in the dark until I discovered the Skyrim Nexus and the tool for managing mods. One of the biggest hurdles I had to overcome was the notion that installing mods was going to have to involve making really tedious changes to the game files as in, downloading a zip file, extracting it to a specific folder, then copying and pasting this here and there, then changing a bunch of values in notepad files. As it turns out, it's not quite that complicated but it's still a massive pain in the fucking ass. I decided first thing's first was that I wanted to improve the graphics. Looked around on youtube and saw some videos, none of which really impressed me. So instead of following the beaten path I went on a rampage just installing mods here and there without putting any thought into it whatsoever.
Patch here, patch there. Textures here textures there. The result was something that looked hardly ANY better than the vanilla experience. I was more than a little disappointed. "That's what everyone is so excited about?" So it's a miracle I decided to really sit back and do it right.
RealVision ENB caught my eye. I saw a few youtube vids and decided to give it a whirl. I installed all of the recommended mods and all of the essential mods and it took me for fucking ever, but it taught me essential little things like "always overwrite when a mod tells you to" and "don't bother updating when you're prompted" as a general rule. Also it taught me that the order in which you install things really matters. I didn't bother reading general tutorials, I learned all of this through the trial and error because I figured it'd stick better that way. Alright... so I might have had a little help from the youtube tutorial linked on the realvision enb page.
Fast forward two hours from the beginning of that whole process and HOLY FUCKING SHIT THIS LOOKS AMAZING. I MEAN FUCK.
FUCK.
Game went from being "meh" to being jaw dropping. I was seriously expecting something very anti-climactic after putting that much time into getting it to work properly but I was knocked off my ass. Everything from the texture improvements, volumetric fog, depth of field. It decimates the vanilla in terms of graphical prowess. The vanilla Skyrim didn't really make my GPUs break a sweat even when set to ultra. Not so much with all these mods going. I don't mind. It makes me glad I invested the money for sure.
So now here I am. If the graphics have been improved that much I can't wait to see what's in store regarding things like the interface, dialog, quests, dungeons, weapons, armor, abilities, magic, balancing. Everything. I no longer have the naive believe that vanilla = better simply because it's a more "true" experience. The fact of the matter is, sometimes gamers know best. I can't help but feel like Bethesda should hire a bunch of these people...
Are Oblivion and Morrowind worth revisiting despite their ages? Do the mods for those games breath enough new life into them to make them worth while?
The quests, compared to Oblivion were bleh. Certainly, Oblivion had its fair share of stinkers but overall the guild quests were much more interesting and rewarding if for no reason other than writing and story. It should be noted that my experience with Oblivion was on console. Same going all the way back to Morrowind which was my first Elder Scrolls game. And there were a number of things I found disappointing in Oblivion as well compared to Morrowind.
The pervading feeling I'd had since Morrowind was that each game embodied bunny hop sort of deal. Two steps forward, one step back. Oblivion built on Morrowinds gameplay and graphics (improved significantly) but still the combat was kind of bleh and you lost a bunch of skill types, abilities, weapons, and generally a large degree of customization. Skyrim wrought even more improvements to the graphics and gameplay arena but STILL there was a lot of room for improvement. Except this time the leap back in terms of overall freedom and customization was enormous.
So my feeling was that the Skyrim experience was pretty shallow in the long run. Fast forward to today. I sold my X360 a few months back and built myself a capable gaming PC with two GTX760's running in SLI and an i7-4770K. I can now play anything I god damn please on pretty damn high settings if I do say so myself.
So I decided to give Skyrim a whirl. At first I was surprised at how much better it looked on PC compared to console - completely vanilla. But that's not why I was revisiting something that left a bad taste in my mouth. Going all the way back to Morrowind I was always told about how the definitive versions of these games were on PC because of the modding community that supported them with massive upgrades to gameplay, graphics, and more. I never took advantage because I never had a gaming PC capable enough at the time to handle any of the games on settings high enough that would make me happy. So I settled for the console versions and tried to convince myself that mods were a waste of time because they weren't what the developers had as their original vision.
Well now I know not to trust Bethesda's vision. We don't see eye to eye, and as it turns out the modding community has a lot of the same gripes I did. Except instead of pissing and moaning (like me) they went and did something about it. The result is a collection of the most fucking awesome things I have ever seen.
Going in completely without any experience whatsoever, I felt my way around in the dark until I discovered the Skyrim Nexus and the tool for managing mods. One of the biggest hurdles I had to overcome was the notion that installing mods was going to have to involve making really tedious changes to the game files as in, downloading a zip file, extracting it to a specific folder, then copying and pasting this here and there, then changing a bunch of values in notepad files. As it turns out, it's not quite that complicated but it's still a massive pain in the fucking ass. I decided first thing's first was that I wanted to improve the graphics. Looked around on youtube and saw some videos, none of which really impressed me. So instead of following the beaten path I went on a rampage just installing mods here and there without putting any thought into it whatsoever.
Patch here, patch there. Textures here textures there. The result was something that looked hardly ANY better than the vanilla experience. I was more than a little disappointed. "That's what everyone is so excited about?" So it's a miracle I decided to really sit back and do it right.
RealVision ENB caught my eye. I saw a few youtube vids and decided to give it a whirl. I installed all of the recommended mods and all of the essential mods and it took me for fucking ever, but it taught me essential little things like "always overwrite when a mod tells you to" and "don't bother updating when you're prompted" as a general rule. Also it taught me that the order in which you install things really matters. I didn't bother reading general tutorials, I learned all of this through the trial and error because I figured it'd stick better that way. Alright... so I might have had a little help from the youtube tutorial linked on the realvision enb page.
Fast forward two hours from the beginning of that whole process and HOLY FUCKING SHIT THIS LOOKS AMAZING. I MEAN FUCK.
FUCK.
Game went from being "meh" to being jaw dropping. I was seriously expecting something very anti-climactic after putting that much time into getting it to work properly but I was knocked off my ass. Everything from the texture improvements, volumetric fog, depth of field. It decimates the vanilla in terms of graphical prowess. The vanilla Skyrim didn't really make my GPUs break a sweat even when set to ultra. Not so much with all these mods going. I don't mind. It makes me glad I invested the money for sure.
So now here I am. If the graphics have been improved that much I can't wait to see what's in store regarding things like the interface, dialog, quests, dungeons, weapons, armor, abilities, magic, balancing. Everything. I no longer have the naive believe that vanilla = better simply because it's a more "true" experience. The fact of the matter is, sometimes gamers know best. I can't help but feel like Bethesda should hire a bunch of these people...
Are Oblivion and Morrowind worth revisiting despite their ages? Do the mods for those games breath enough new life into them to make them worth while?
