/games/ - Games

>>26333
Sick trips. Gambatte, senpai!

You know what, I always though the puzzles in dungeons are kinda pointless. All they did from my view was ruin the pace of dungeon crawling while being incredibly boring and samey. Same fucking fish-eagle-snake shit all over and over again every Nordic dungeon. They should have at least had decency to mix things up once in a while, but all they could come up was this. The fuck?

>>26350
Dude I said it myself most levels in Skyrim not related to quests that also aren’t called the red water den or black reach are just plain terrible which is almost every dungeon in Skyrim. I won’t entirely blame the developers for this as lazy as they’re due to the fact that level design in games is by far the most satirically difficult component of game design

Skyrims fundamentally an open world game where players have the option to pick and choose where they want to go than have levels streamlined in your standard linear game, meaning if the development team gave as much of a shit about level design as they did with bethesdas single player releases and campaigns for Skyrim they’d have to both completely rework how much space in Skyrim is used for exploring these side regions of the map, most of which will never even be used by most of the player base and have to account for how these maps should even be designed depending on both what they’re made for and where the player is progression wise in skyrims story and mechanics.
If you want to know how fucking time consuming of a process something like this could be you can look at the developers for suit for hire, me personally just trying to free up space in the dungeons already present so its easier to fight in them, or even the strawberry jam project for Celeste made by god knows how many volunteer developers over the course of years
It’s a bad mess and even if the end product is shit side dungeons everywhere in the overworlds at least more resources were put in to making the fun and interesting shit about Skyrim fun and interesting like the civil war quest line invasions, blackreach and the red water den themselves, DLC quest lines, etc

>>26350
I wanna bet that they made the ones which you have to solve via a book first, and then Todd was like "ah thats cool, now make 50 more of them!" and they just had no idea how to make good ones after that one.

I’ve just discovered a new bug
Apparently some of skyrims collisions for static objects are completely fucked. Like if I remove objects from the game world the hitboxes will still behave as if an object was still there indicating Bethesda never attached the hitboxes to the models of certain ingame objects and what’s crazier is knowing projectiles can pass right through them.


Oh well this also means I’m gonna be making a “replacer rat” with the dungeon mod that will just replace certain enemies with a modified variant of skeeters that basically do nothing for the sake of making dungeon exploration in certain regions that have this phenomenon just that much less painful

>>26375
Also I’m amazed by how fucking shit of a feature blocking in Skyrim is. It’s stupid knowing you can’t block enchantments, spells, shouts or just prevent taking any damage in general despite the fact that the mechanic does stamina damage which makes me question who tf on the design team thought fucking over melee builds even more with that decision was a smart idea

>>26377
Blocking not working on spells or even poisons from arrows (wtf Bethesda?) is textbook shit game design. Instead you have to rely on channeled ward spells that block spell damage but leave you open to physical and consume mana, which makes leaves warrior characters absolutely incapable of relying on them and thus utterly helpless against mages without anti-magic enchantments and some genius maneuvering and exploiting the terrain.

>>26379
Blocking doesn’t protect you against perks either apparently. I found this out while having a mod just to disable physical damage from open attacks and discovered I was somehow still taking damage even though I was visibly blocking hits and realized the damage was coming from a perk called limb splitter that apparently was coded to just straight up not register if someone was blocking or not leading to me taking extra bleeding damage and yes this got me killed twice

>>26383
Weird that this issue persisted all this time and was not even fixed by USSEP. On the other hand though, the vanilla perk tree itself is pretty shit in general and one of the first things I do whenever I throw together a modpack is replace it with the Adamant one.

This image of Helgen insights a lot of sad emotions in me. And also a weird sense of coziness

>>26379
Bro when you see a mage you're just supposed to run at them. But yeah I get that it would be better to have more options.

>>26445
Dude you also have to keep in mind that staggering in Skyrim is based quite literally off rng being any direct hit regardless if it’s blocked or not only has a 25% chance of causing staggering meaning magic literally isn’t punishable at all. That’s also why bethesdas developers for the game made so many bandits and low level enemies have ridiculous stat offsets because they’d get curbstomped immediately by any player using it instead

>>26446
Is there any mods that revamp staggering, tying it to attack force rather than RNG? I think Blade & Blunt and POISE did.

>>26446
>staggering is RNG
nah, there is a guarenteed stagger with shield/weapon bashing, which means that the only situation you won't be able to bash is dual-wielding (which makes some sense, trading utility for raw DPS). Higher levels of weapon skills also give power attacks a chance to stagger.
>>26447
Some options are included natively in wildcat if I remember right, if you pass a certain damage threshold enemies will auto-stagger.

>>26444
bittersweet nostalgia
it was always kind of a solemn place in Skyrim

>>26447
Stagger on hit and staggerlcok would be the two mods your thinking of though I’d imagine you’d also want to make light attacks cost stamina aswell to prevent stun locking

>>26447
Also poise mechanics are stupid and make certain builds unrewarding to use because the amount of hits you can get off them ends up being limited by your opponents poise(this would also mean dual wield dagger or 1H builds would become inviable at a high level since stronger enemies would just wake up out of every attack you throw out immediately). Just look at the difference between the pacing of pvp in elden ring compared to blood borne and dark souls 3

>>26454
I think the problem is not the poise mechanic itself, but the weird way it is implemented and that rogue builds in DaS are not given a poise breaking attack option to compensate for their weapons' low weight. Logically that would be kick attacks, but from what I read in DaS they are pretty cumbersome to perform and mechanics behind how much damage they do are pretty arcane, with kick attacks while wielding certain weapons being more powerful than with others. As for the Skyrim poise mod, it is even probably worse because neither vanilla Skyrim nor any mods to my memory provide any kick attack options at all which reduces the melee combat to either shield waiting games or Flynning away at your enemy until either they or you drop.

>>26455
No it just sucks to implement. It’s better to simply attach poise to hitstun duration and not wether or not an attack causes stun at all so having high poise only increases how often you have the ability to block out of stun not wake-up out of it(like how it should’ve been implemented in turn based souls 2) allowing for both poise as a mechanic to promote defensive play without destroying the ability of a player or enemies ability to even attack

>>26457
Yeah, that would be a good fix for it. I never understood why the poise stat affects stun/stagger duration when it probably would be more logical to make it dependent on a character's dexterity stat, simulating one's ability to regain their senses and/or get up after getting thrown off balance. Poise could be better reformulated as a "steady" stat and act as measure of how much force and pain one can withstand in a short period of time before losing their stance.

>>26460
Nah it’s either you lose or stance or you don’t that’s just throwing in more and more features
Believe me man this system was taken after play testing reworked hitstun for Skyrim, dark souls, kingdom hearts, several fighting games, and DMC it genuinely is better off to have poise as a mechanic only affect hitstun duration universally it’s consistent, it makes sense and allows for multiple levels of playz

A stagger system dependent on force will always boil down a fight to who hits the hardest not whose gaining the most hits

>>26461
Oh wait misread that when you were trying to say having your stance broken completely removes your ability to even move would be negated while dexterity affects your ability to get out of ordinary hitstun to use a defensive option my bad

The way to balance poise is easy, tie it to stamina. It's harder to topple someone fully ready for your moves, but an exerted person is easier to knock over. It allows for punishing failed attacks, people trying to run, and just generally bad play. It is how TeS (mostly) did it in the past and it tended to work out… well, insane but it kinda worked.

>>26465
No that’s still a poor way to implement poise because then every ingame enemy regardless of their armour and physical size won’t be toppled because most have absurd stamina sizes due to skyrims absurd scaling

Just keep it simple as something attached to armour or for creatures physical size that affects stun duration and that’s fine since Skyrim has no form of dexterity. Also if you tied poise to something like that it would be pointless to use power attacks, sprint, bash and even less fun to block since both those actions all cost a lot of stamina

>>26466
>every ingame enemy regardless of their armour and physical size won’t be toppled because most have absurd stamina sizes due to skyrims absurd scaling
Partly a good thing - you obviously want tougher enemies to stand up and fight for longer. Though, the exact values would obviously need tweaking cause Bethesda never designed the enemies with that in mind. It could also be extended to the dragon AI - in basegame, the dragons have no reason to ever land except if they are sufficiently low HP or their AI package tell them to, but if you made flying slowly consume their stamina pool and landing be the only way to restore it, then you could make dragons have to chose to land to restore their stamina.

Also, it may be worthwhile to have something like a small amount of stamina loss on a melee hit, like 10-15 points, to represent exerting yourself to keep your balance - while blocking regularly may cost more stamina it leaves you unharmed - but if you do a "perfect block" it costs you no stamina at all. This system would also mean that daggers have a much more viable position in combat as something that can rapidly drain stamina and let you out-poise your enemies, especially since they would cost less stamina to swing to begin with. Plus, it would give you a viable way to stagger landed dragons semi-consistently in tandem with the flying changes.

The only thing left to balance, then, is mages.

This has to be the worst dungeon ingame by far for several reasons

>bad enemy placements like horrendous enemy placements
The 2 bosses in this dungeon were cancerous to fight against to the point where I had to go in and delete the patrol references along with moving around NPCs just so certain sections of this horrible level were completable without immediately getting swarmed and instakilled for not putting points in sneaking

>gimmicks over effort
Bosses are typically unique like enemies due to their movesets, stats, sizes, weights and types. In Skyrim because so many enemies are made off templates with almost no actual effort to be put into what’s mentioned they all end up being the same to fight but with bosses it’s so much worse especially here. This dungeons deathlords and its boss quite literally just random enemies to dwindle the players health down for absolutely no reason than because the game wants these bosses to feel hard without the devs doing anything to make them hard. What happened was me getting stunlocked and being forced to again delete more references and move enemies around. Also I’m planning on removing frost magics ability to lower player stamina aswell because that just makes it flat out broken now that you can’t block or bash to save yourself in vanilla Skyrim making magic go from another style of play to a hard requirement on any player that wanted to play with something different or even dumber a stealth archer build as if camping for several hours in a play through is actually any fun

This dungeon is horrible by far one of the worst ones in game

I had to take a break from Skyrim modding to play other games because endlessly play testing mods and dealing with Skyrims mechanics was giving me an actual migraine if the sterile gameplay itself wasn’t enough. I played dark souls 1 the original and not the remastered version and oh my the difference in quality hit me so hard I teared up and smiled a little

Dark souls 1 has unique weight classes, unique movesets for unique enemies. Variants of enemies actually felt like the variants i made in xedit for the bandits. Those variants in ds1 made them feel more than just the cheap randomized template abusing mess that was skyrims enemies. The game is shockingly well balanced, you get enough resources to progress reasonably at the start, creatures and NPCs aren’t just brainlessly given magical ability’s just to make them feel unique even if there is nothing to them that would suggest that along with the fact that stamina actually feels useful and as something that benefits gameplay

Not like in Skyrim where its only function is to prevent you from blocking and forcing you to run for several seconds every time you try to sprint across the map without a horse.


Enemy placements are actually balanced around the size and stats of the levels and enemies in them for ds1. Something I will never complaining about not just in Skyrim but modern open world games that forget what level design is. The map layout in ds1 was so comprehensive it actually felt at times like I was in areas made for the inhabitants within them because there was enough space for them to properly move around than the narrow corridors and rooms clogged to the brim with furniture EVERYWHERE even in spaces where it doesn’t make any sense to include it.
Weapons felt unique due to the fact that they have actual movesets and significant damage differences between them than just some copy pasted template with a different name.

I could keep going but right now I really need a break from Skyrim modding and the dungeon mod. It’s exhausting and I can understand better why bethesdas staff go through so much making these games considering how unfun they can be to play test due to how badly they’re designed

balance patches released

<draugr
>draugr health stamina and magicka offsets set to 0
>draugr magicka universally set to zero with the exception of scourges classified as magicians and deathlords
>draugr deathlords are now the only ones capable of using shouts to prevent getting stunlocked by hordes shouting at the same time as attacking
>disarm shout removed from draugr deathlords
>draugr scourges now only the ability to use icebolts to prevent the player from getting swarmed by a horde of frost atroches while taking stamina damage from freezing spells
>draugr health has now been reduced to half the values of bandits within a similar tier, the exception of draugr deathlords whom now have their base health standing at 244

<NPC general
>health offsets universally set to 0 for all ingame enemies

<dungeons
>some objects brought back in to bleak falls barrow
>enemy placements in volunduur and the swindlers den have been changed you will need to reload cells for the changes to be felt or start a new game or better yet install a mod that respawns enemies every 72 hours
>general objects removed from an increased amount of dungeons to prevent obstructions getting in the way of combat

thats about it.

Huh
I was trying rebalance magicka in the latest patch and noticed vampires were seemingly immune to any patches related to nerfing their obscene stat offsets despite their stat increases being set to 0. Turns out there’s another layer of garbage that’s built in to skyrims level scaling that just inflated the power creep of NPCs even more…

>>26650
Why do you do this to yourself? Please. You know you can stop, right? Are you in too deep now?

>>26651
Shockingly enough with the balance patches enabled Skyrim is actually alright for me especially since I am a fan of the lore. The actual building of the mods themselves isn’t what’s tiring it’s play testing them because it means I have to load and replay through content to check for where the issues are coming from before each patch releases

It gets tiring and at a certain point it can boil into frustration which is why I’m not making updates as frequently unless something super obnoxious just wrecks my whole experience that wasn’t ever accounted for by the developers

Like how in a dungeon near markarth there’s a room containing 4 draugr deathlords that’s only possible to beat without gaining a headache by abusing a fire trap next to it for cheap and easy AOE damage unless your testing your build and decide to rank them like a lunatic

It’s that kind of thing

>>26652
I dunno why some people say Skyrim is a easy game to mod. Maybe adding new items is, but anything else is a pain in the ass even compared to the earlier games. The CK interface is complete dreck and does not show windows properly at all resolutions and you cannot even resize them. Also the constant crashes do not help either.
There is a lot of modding potential in this game sure, but it is primarily thanks to third party tools like TES5Edit and SKSE, not Bethesda's efforts to make it so.

>>26667
It’s easy to mod because there’s a lot of tools available compared to other games, BSA browser, hkanno, CK, SSEDIT, animation motion revolution, DAR, SPID, SKSE, etc the only other games I can think of as easy to modify is Garry’s mod and team fortress 2

Good news :)


I managed to finally nerf the vampires and a lot of ingame magic to the point where I don’t feel like I’m breaking the game using it. Spell casting is not anywhere near as spammable as it originally was as most NPCs outside of the Breton because the base costs for most spells was increased significantly while the max magicka for most NPCs was shot down significantly. More spells were removed from the leveled list entries of NPCs, the movement speed while using spells was drastically shot down to near zero to make it just a little more punishable.
Magicka regeneration was removed from most races again meaning both the player and NPC cannot just brainlessly stack spells onto each other and devolve fights into a projectile festival like what would happen with boss fights like karstaag, the ebony warrior, or tougher variants of enemies like briar hearts or vampire masters. In the continued development of the patch the damage output of some spells will be tweaked to be lowered significantly

That’s all things are going smoothly

Important news I’ve moved all the patches to one esp and will no longer be catogorizinf mods for the sake of performance. That’s it

>>27049
handy

alright heres some patch notes
>having magic equipped at all auto enables a speed penalty casting magic will reduce your speed to near zero meaning its impossible to run away from an enemy while casting magicka at them
>from previous patches mentioned magic does not regenerate for all races except the breton because lore wise they have legitimate reasons to be in possession of magicka
>carryweight has been reworked so its not upgradable and is influenced by the race you select at the start of the game, bretons have the lowest carryweight while orcs have the most, nords, imperials and redguards are given automatically a static carryweight of 100. this is just implemented so clever resource management and what type of build you run with at the start actually matters
<important one especially for third person players

turn speeds have been reworked and jump heights have been reduced for all human npcs. this is less effective on NPCs but for the player youll notice that how fast you can turn around while running or sprinting has been drastically reduced in third person to feel alot more natural, coincidentally how fast you move while running walking and sprinting has both been reduced and have the difference between each movement types speed reduced aswell making the transition between each movement option alot smoother


thats all thanks for reading and have fun. also to all mod users please delete all previous mods ive made and replace with this one as this will be the mod im supporting and if you use this version with prior ones you will have mod conflict issues

>>27087
>magic does not regenerate for all races except the breton because lore wise they have legitimate reasons to be in possession of magicka
wut
all races are perfectly capable of magic - there is higher expression of it among elves (and bretons by extension as half-breeds) but there are plenty of famous human wizards. Shalidor was human, after all.

>>27089
Capable but not specialized for it. You can still use magicka with any race you like it just means the Breton are generally better equipped for it than most other ones.

>>27095
Do you need to find magicka potions to use magicka then? Or is there some other way to get it.

>>27095
I thought the bretons had magic only because they had high elf heritage

>>27101
Direnni kept local Nedelings as slaves, so it's speculated in Daggerfell that Bretons are Nedic-Mer couplings. However, later games just assume this even though the Nedes are barely explored in the B*thesda games.

>>27095
There is no specialization. Magicka is quite literally ones amplitude with external planes. That is why altmer start with the highest magicka: their culture promotes magicka cultivation. There is nothing anywhere that argues men could not excel in magic use, or the "beast races" for that matter. In fact, were it not for Shor being scattered across space and time, men would probably have the most magicka of 'em all.

>>27095
But the elves are vastly better equipped than Bretons for magic, just by virtue of their very insular nature? I feel like you all have been hitting the pipe to come to these conclusions, every race in TES has always leaned into certain class proficiencies - but their racial abilities were never direct impositions of a class playstyle upon them, both for your character and for NPCs and people in-lore. There are Orc battlemages as much as there are High Elf knights.

>>27101
Also this is correct, Bretons are like 1/14th High Elf so they tend to be more magically inclined, especially around the former Direnni holdings. However, Foresworn are like Bretons without the mixed elvish heritage, but even they delve heavily into magic endeavors, so usually it is more that magic is more cultural than racial - though, some people are far more inclined to it and take to it easier then others, I suppose in the same way different types of people are inclined to different mediums of learning new things.

>>27103
Thanks for the information I’ll switch it from Breton to high elf’s exclusively. My original reason for hate keeping magicka regen was because I felt like having it freely available for any race made it hinder that races identity and make its worth decline as a byproduct along with the fact that being able to cast any spell you want on top of having any weapon, skill or potion available on top of shouts was op and unabalanced as shit. Bretons were just the prime pick based off my awareness of the lore

Thanks though once again. In the upcoming patch this will be changed

>>27105
thats not what I meant but okay, I guess this is slightly less wrong?

if I was you I'd do some scripting to just make something akin to TES Morrowind or Oblivion's class system, and if you don't make magic your specialization then you have vastly reduced magica regen, by like 50 or 75 percent or something.

>>27106
I’ll see what’s doable

>>27104
>Also this is correct, Bretons are like 1/14th High Elf
It is not. Direnni are not "High Elves", they're an Aldmeri clan.

>Foresworn are like Bretons without the mixed elvish heritage
They're an alliance of Nedic people, those of Eastern Skyrim ("Reachmen", so called for the area). Breton "were" Nedes.

>even they delve heavily into magic endeavors
As any other culture on Tamriel (if not all of Nirn).
Come to think of it: the Talos Empire has the third most extensive magical society in all of Tamrielic history (after the Altmer and the Dunmer, and that last one is debatable). Why don't Cyrodilics start with a magicka bonus (especially the Nibenesse)?

alright genuinely the last balance patch. I did manage to make a perk for magicka regen but just scrapped it after realizing that it does absolutely nothing to curb power creep since you can have it on top of everything else, So i defaulted back on the original idea of making regen a trait for race selection but this time for high elves thanks to a suggestion from a user in this thread. As for minor tweaks theres nothing i could decide needed to be changed since the game was essentially balanced to the point where i could run any build at any level in any area and not experience serious issues with progressing anymore. thank you all for supporting me and as I have managed to create an experience with a TES game that doesn't feel foundationally unbalanced.

>>27284
This was sure a nice experiment. I do not think the result is exactly my cup of tea because I mostly play with a modpack based on the "A Dragonborn's Fate" list, but I think I might try doing a semi-vanilla run with it sometime to see how it actually plays out.