The Gaming Den

Skyrim question:

A lot of mods now require crazy crap like physics extenders and different skeletons and all sorts of crazy crap that they only rarely required before. How would I go about installing something like that? Every time I do, it crashes to desktop (and I do this on a clean install in the exact order the instructions tell me to)

Does anyone know how I'm supposed to install something like that? Because the mod authors are either leaving out steps or are just fucking wrong.

Use BOSS. http://boss-developers.github.io/

I also recommend using the Nexus mod manager (http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/modmanager/?). Nexus has all the mods you want anyway, and this makes using them legitimately easier.

I've been having a lot of fun with Shadow of Mordor, but I have some complaints.

1) it badly needs to give Captains funny hats with more reliability. There is nothing quite so infuriating as running into battle with a captain and discovering you in fact charged three of them.
2) The Nemesis system is fun, but once I've personally killed a dude three times I would appreciate it if he stayed dead. Admittedly, many of the orcs think that about me.
3) There is this major bossfight against a guy who uses uninterruptible attacks that kill your combo meter, is surrounded by dozens of orcs, and causes you to fail the mission if you take to the rooftops.

Count and fectin: BOSS has actually been replaced by LOOT, which is in active development and has current master lists for mods. I don't know how heavily you're modding Skyrim, but the Nexus Mod Manager is probably fine. If you want to do some more advanced things (such as keeping different mod profiles) you might want to use Mod Organizer instead, which can actually pretend to be the Nexus Mod Manager and download nexus mods for you.

Are you using SKSE, ENBoost, or a Memory patcher?

I've recently been doing a fair amount of Skyrim modding and finally got a stable build myself, if you don't mind posting or PMing me your mod list, I'll look and see if I notice any obvious problems.

I ran LOOT and it smoothed everything over. I might try Mod Organizer

I'm not yet running a lot of crazy stuff, it's just that most of the armors built for female characters are obsessed with having tittehs bouncing all over the place for some reason. I don't know why that is. All I'm running is a male and female body replace, some outfit mods, and the unofficial patches. I'm also running an unarmed combat mod (the unarmed portion is neat, adds a new type of weapon and some new perks. The unarmored is ass, it doesn't level up if you have any armor bonus. Including stuff like Oakflesh. And including the freaking monk robe the mod gives you at the beginning... the unarmored portion is very shit but having claw and fist weapons are thematically appropriate for khajiit).

I do keep one pristine, no mod save in case I have to start over. This would be my third time.

What body mods are you using? I use CNHF v2_5 for women, because the basic body is barely muscly even at weight 100. It has modified armor and clothing for the new body shape too. (DLC included)

For men, I use Better Males, if only because I felt dirty having only one gender naked.

Other mods I suggest:

Skyrim Redone-The perks plugin adds unarmed perks to the One Handed skill.

Interesting NPCs-A buttload of new NPCs, followers and quests, fully voice-acted (and quality, too!), adds hours to an already big game. Their website.

SkyUI-Makes the inventory non-shit.

Apocalypse Spells-Adds a lot of variety to a rather boring spell list.

Jesus, modding TES shit has gotten really complicated since Oblivion.

I recommend saying fuck you to Skyrim Redone and finding a total conversion mod that doesn't suck.

If I read the word trice one more time, I will murder the world.

So then, two part question Kaelik: why do you hate Skyrim Redone so much, and what total conversion mod would you recommend?

Well, I've finished the main plot of Shadow Of Mordor.

Cool things:
1. The Nemesis system is pretty fun. Basically, there's a bunch of Uruk captains, each with their own collection of traits. One guy might be a tough badass but runs screaming like a little girl when he sees people get attacked by insects, another might die instantly to headshots, and others might just suck and fall over to a stiff breeze. They're dynamically generated, and they fight amongst themselves, get promoted, and get stronger, especially if they win fights with you. Or sometimes they lose fights with you but come back with terrible scarring and a thirst for revenge. If a rank-and-file soldier kills you, he gets promoted to captain. If you want to find out an Uruk's weakness, you can interrogate another captain or certain regular soldiers. You can also issue death threats, making them a lot tougher and surrounded by elites but giving bigger rewards if you kill them and also being helpful when combined with...
2. The Branding system, where you can mind-control Uruks, notably including the captains. Also, there are senior captains, called Warchiefs, who have other captains as bodyguards. Approximately the only thing more fun than attacking a guy after you've branded all his bodyguards is doing it by having one of your branded Warchiefs and his bodyguards and mooks attack.
3. The combat system in general is pretty fun, particularly riding around attacking people.

Complaints:

1. The Nemesis system can sometimes produce pretty batshit overpowered guys who are immune to ranged attacks and stealth attacks and really good against monsters and rapid-fire exploding crossbow bolts and have no exploitable weaknesses. That was on one guy. I think he was literally the first thing to kill me.
2. Okay, seriously, there's supposed to be a limited supply of reincarnating wraith-dudes in this setting. But apparently a bunch of them are Uruk captains. I had to kill a guy like five times before it stuck. It was fun the first three times. Admittedly, it was also fun when I lit one of them on fire and then mind-controlled him, but I kept having to deal with a seemingly immortal kill-team showing up whenever I went after other captains. It got to the point where four captains would show up, all of which I'd killed at least twice.
3. Speaking of which, you might notice that my description of the Branding system sounds like some serious supervillain-level shit. It's extremely weird to have a Middle Earth protagonist indulging in it. If this were Warhammer 40K: Ordo Hereticus it would fit right in. Or hell, keep the setting and just make the protagonist one of the Nazgul, the mechanics are pretty appropriate for that.
4. Also weird: the second zone has entirely too much fucking grass. This is Mordor we're talking about, even at this point in the story it has no business looking like the Shire.
5. The ending seriously disappointed me:

So you build up your huge army of Uruks and sail across Mordor's interior sea to confront The Black Hand, who is... I have no fucking idea. He's an evil human sorcerer who is somehow connected to Sauron and Celebrimbor's ghost, and he murdered the protagonist's family in the opening and promptly vanished for the entire fucking game. Anyways, having arrived at the head of an army, you and your personal guard of five Warchiefs and no one else proceed to fight some mooks and what I assume is supposed to be the surviving uncontrolled captains who have pissed you off but in my case was one guy I'd honestly forgotten about entirely because I murdered or mind-controlled all the ones who really pissed me off. Having done that, you leave your fireteam behind to confront an Uruk sorcerer named The Tower, then you sneak around and jump on him a couple times before killing him in a quicktime event.

At this point, you find out that The Black Hand had gone off to attack your headquarters, so you sail back, get in a fight where you bring at least some of your army as well as the honor guard, confront five new Warchief level dudes without prior intel (which is actually a reasonably fun fight, because you have goons and they aren't randomly invincible), then climb the Black Gate to kill your theoretical archenemy in a quick-time event.

Oh, and it turns out in this version Celebrimbor made the One Ring for Sauron, then yelled "Sucker!" and ran off with it, before returning to confront Sauron, charging in to kick his ass, and suddenly discovering the One Ring is sentient and hates him when it slipped off his finger directly onto Sauron's. I don't really mind that bit.

Black Hand is Sauron

Archmage Joda wrote:So then, two part question Kaelik: why do you hate Skyrim Redone so much, and what total conversion mod would you recommend?

Skyrim redone as a total conversion is mostly okay except that:

1) It makes you get overall worse loot even in the best places, because it fapps to "hardmode" but that isn't really a big deal because this is Skyrim, you will just craft and enchant your own stuff anyway. But it also tries to nerf late games spells, which is unforgivable.

2) It rewrites all the spell descriptions and and potion descriptions and ingredient effects in its pretend medival language that is absolute bullshit.

Uses the word trice to describe all fucking time effects. Often uses it incorrectly, which I would never criticize someone for if they didn't use it all the fucking time because fucks sake kill yourself stop saying trice.

Seriously, install this mod at your own peril, because you will grow to hate reading descriptions because of all the pretentious bullshit in the descriptions.

...I have only ever heard the word used in the phrase "it shall be done/ready in a trice". I'm not sure you're legally allowed to use it in any other form.

So, back when I first got Steam, a friend gifted me Portal. I finally decided to play it, despite knowing the cake is a lie, GLaDOS is out to kill you, and the amazing ending. I wanted to experience actually playing through it, and also I like puzzle games.

Every time I tried to find a way to break a padlock on a gate or something, I then felt stupid because try thinking with portals you idiot, you have a fucking portal gun, locks on wire gates are completely meaningless. And that's the only thing I have to say about it that hasn't been said in every single review ever. (And seeing as everyone else on the planet has played it, I don't need to review it or recommend it to anyone.)

I assume it is normal to feel sad for GLaDOS afterwards, right?

Longes wrote:

Black Hand is Sauron

Is he? He seemed to be talking about Sauron in the third person, then he slit his own throat to summon Sauron

name_here wrote:

Longes wrote:

Black Hand is Sauron

Is he? He seemed to be talking about Sauron in the third person, then he slit his own throat to summon Sauron

Ah, apparently I was wrong. Him being a reincarnation of Sauron is just a speculation. In which case yes, we know jack shit about the Black Hand

Spoilerception. We need to go deeper.

name_here wrote:1. The Nemesis system can sometimes produce pretty batshit overpowered guys who are immune to ranged attacks and stealth attacks and really good against monsters and rapid-fire exploding crossbow bolts and have no exploitable weaknesses. That was on one guy. I think he was literally the first thing to kill me.

You have two different at-will stuns; wraith stun and vault stun. Wraith stun works on everyone (even combat masters) except captains with a shield or captains with wraith stun block. Vault stun works on everyone (even combat masters) except captains with vault breaker. The toughest dude I've had was a shield captain with immune to ranged, immune to stealth, vault breaker, poison weapon, and some other bullshit. It was a revenge mission fairly early in the game, so I really only got one attempt and I did not succeed.

There don't actually appear to be any limitations on combinations of strengths and weaknesses, so theoretically you could end up with a monster slaying combat master who is immune to ranged and stealth, blocks wraith stun, breaks vaults, and regenerates. I'm not sure such a monstrosity would be killable except through exploitation of its fears - and I'm not sure that combination of abilities precludes fearless, either.

Yeah, I eventually got pretty good at using Wraith Stun on those guys. But that particular guy was pretty damn early.

I personally ran into a Berserk (attacks back after you attack him), Vault Breaker, Combat Master, Immune to Stealth, Immune to Ranged, Immune to Wraith Stun, Other things, guy. He was only afraid of Graug, and he was in the middle of the base at the bottom of the map, so basically never had graug to worry about, and it was the first area, so I couldn't brand Graug yet.

I killed him by kicking him off a ledge in that base, because that base has a bunch of places to do that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoTnIn9FJQE
This Chromophore remake looks pretty cool.

This is probably not a comprehensive overhaul, but I'm playing these mods:

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/10037/? (Ace Combat Enhancement)

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/4374/? (Better Magic)

Playing a mage is a lot more doable like this (I've gotten to level 8 without saying "fuck it", so it's superior to Vanilla skyrim. Will keep levelling up a primarily magic-using character to see how this goes)

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/15725/? (Way of the Monk) seems to really help with mage type characters, despite what the comments say you CAN skill up on items that give armor bonuses, just not when you are wearing anything that's classified as light or heavy armor (so mage armor does in fact let you skill up unarmored skill). The additional hand weapons might be a bit overpowered (they count as both unarmed and one handed weapons. They do better stealth kills than daggers and are better in hand to hand combat to boow).

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/21120/? (heavy armory) adds a bunch of weapons to the list. I'm still testing this, but this seems to play nice with ACE since the new weapons all are categorized as existing weapons (a quarterstaff is a warhammer, a hatchet is an ace, glaives are swords, halberds are spears, etc).

I am running http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/58704/? (faction crossbows), but I'm not sold on it yet. I would like to see more crossbows being dropped as loot in the world. Also as I have yet to get a crossbow in this playthrough I have no idea how Crossbows and ACE intersect.

I've had fun with Way Of The Monk, though unless it's changed since then it seems to have the unarmed skill level way too slowly and the unarmored skill level much too fast.

name_here wrote:I've had fun with Way Of The Monk, though unless it's changed since then it seems to have the unarmed skill level way too slowly and the unarmored skill level much too fast.

that might be possible, I tested it first by cranking both to 100 and fucking with it, right now I'm messing with it as part of gameplay. It does seem that Unarmored levels up like crazy, sometimes multiple times in a fight.

Massive Chalice just did an early access release on Steam, and it really is dynastic fantasy X-Com. I'm having a ball.

Pre-ordering AC:Unity was a terrible idea, and I regret doing it. It's right on par with other big failures in my life, like kickstarting Exalted 3rd edition and going for a swim in a sea full of jellyfish.

Dude, what the hell, why would you do such a thing?...Why would you kickstart Exalted 3e? It's like the Duke Nukem Forever of tabletop games...