Skyrim Special Edition - Anyone Playing?

[Dillinger]

Skyrim Special Edition

 

I have been waiting for this game to drop as this years' CoD title just wasn't for me.  I am happy to say that it was worth the wait and that I am thoroughly enjoying the released version.  I played from Thursday night through Sunday and took a new character from start up through about level 22 at the moment.  The game has been updated with graphics, the skylines and some of the "world view from up on a mountain" scenes are truly a sight to see.  

 

Both the XB1 and PS4 version offer in game, downloadable (for free), content that was created by the Skyrim Player Community.  Items range from little bug fixes, to giant new side missions and even a new type of armor and weapon to create/use.

 

The XB1 version has about 5Gigs worth of community created and tested content.  I have downloaded about 10 enhancements to test them out and they do make the game feel more complete and makes the experience more enjoyable.

 

Mods I recommend - (These aren't the actual names, I need to look them up and edit):

• Town/City and Keep Pre-loading:  Instead of the annoying "open the gate" and then having to wait for 90 seconds for cut scenes, the town is pre-loaded and you can literally walk or ride your horse right into town.  Very nice and speeds up the game.
• Advanced Blacksmithing:  Somebody got the idea that NPC items in the game should be able to be melted down and turned back into ingots for re-purposing.  Now all those base iron and steel items can be re-used.  You can also create extra types of arrows and modify some of the Quest weapons.  With the heavy need for Iron Ignots in the building of your homesteads through the Hearthstone DLC, this was invaluable in my opinion.
• Advanced Dialogue & Town Expansions:  There is one dialogue extender and there are several town and outpost enhancements that are available.  I recommend them all.  
  • The dialogue leverages actual audio files by the original voice actors and expands your interaction.  NPC's now have back stories and they will interact with you differently depending on how you behave.  If you are into the story element of the game, this will definitely enhance your gaming sessions.  As an example, if you are with the Stormcloaks during part of your missions, don't try to buy/sell to anyone siding with the Imperials...LOL
  • The town enhancements range from little things, like making sure everyone you interact with in the game has a home, with valuables and furniture, to things like adding a blacksmith forge and a smelter to mining towns.
  • The enhancements are all in line with the what the town was originally designed to be, but fills in where I presume lack of time or budget had to stop the original development effort short.
• Skeletons (this may be the actual file name):  This was cool because it modifies the dungeon and random encounter engines to populate with skeletons of other in game creatures instead of just human skeletons.  Now you get attacked by Draugr skeletons and skeleton bears.  Just made for some cool variety for some of those "clear such-and-such keep for the Jarl" missions.
•  

OP Mods:

• There are a bunch.  I loaded one to give it a try (I think in the description it actually said something about not caring for realistic combat) and it made the game a complete cake walk, so I disabled it and loaded back to a save point before I enabled it.  It just made the game too easy with armor so powerful you barely register damage from standing in front of a fire breathing dragon and the ability to kill a giant with one arrow from a village away.  
• These weren't for me, but there are a ton of them that could "modify" your gaming style.

 

Mod I wouldn't recommend:

 

• Waves (actual file name):  It was a cool idea for a mod, to add actual waves on any ocean shore and add audio of crashing waves that you could hear as you begin to get close to water in your wilderness travels
  • Problem:  While it was tested in some larger ports, like Solitude, giant portions of the rest of the world offer a large, flat, green platform that is the wave generation point.  It looks like a giant, floating green dance floor about 30 feet offshore and extends for as far as you can see.  Definitely a bummer as the wave sound can be heard from one of the Hearthstone DLC homesteads you can build.

Anyone else playing?  What are your thoughts?

 

Discuss

[major masingil]

I am going to get into skyrim as soon as I get tired of TF2.  I played hell out of the original 

[Dillinger]

I am going to get into skyrim as soon as I get tired of TF2.  I played hell out of the original 

 

I played the original into the ground as well, even keeping a save point for just prior to Vampire and Werewolf story lines so I could revert back to human form.  

 

For some reason this type of game, with an ever updating quest list of things to do, keeps me seriously addicted and I can't stop closing open quests...LOL

 

The MOD community did a really good job.  The detail and the thought that went into some of the town expansions was really good.  Definitely a "well worth it" game purchase for me.

[Muntic0re]

I want to get Skyrim soon

[Dillinger]

Played a couple of hours last night, in between taking my turns answering the door for the Trick or Treaters.

 

Got my character up to about Level 30.  I have been focusing on purely side missions for anything (money, potions, rings, etc) that could help me with either in black-smithing or enchanting.  These are both abundant resources in game and a great way to level up quickly.

 

I have maxed out my Blacksmithing (Lvl 100) and am able to create Dragon Armor with a Dragon Bow and Dragon War Axe.  Yeah, the bad guys are having a tough go of it now unless they have a good magic user...LOL

 

I bought one of the Homestead properties from the Hearthstone DLC.  This is where you buy a parcel of land (sight unseen for the one I bought) and then when you show up there, you have a chest, a drafting table, a work bench and an anvil.  There is a book on the work bench explaining how you build your home and how to use the drafting table and work benches scattered throughout the project.

 

You have a TON of expense to set up and build your own house.  Logs are $200 Gold for 20 logs, and you need about 80-100 logs to make any real improvements on your home stead.

 

Cool features of building your own homestead:  

• Well Rested Bonus:  The key benefit here is you can sleep in your own home and attain the Well Rested bonus (+10% to skills you are using for 8 hours) prior to doing any work.  This is a great way to level up faster.
• Blacksmith, Smelter, work bench and a grinding stone:  You can melt down, forge, sharpen and shape anything in the comfort of your own place.  Granted, you need to travel to town to sell it off and restock, but with the safe storage available, you can literally build up a wagon load to sell off all at once.
• Stable (and later I can add a Caravan): Once you buy a horse (assuming you don't get it killed off by your horse being stupid and charging some high level beast) it will always be there in your stable after you rest or fast travel.  
• Enchanting and Alchemy rooms:  You build them and stock them accordingly with chests to hold on the stuff you need to work

Ended last night by getting curb stomped and set on fire.   I was battling some Bandits at a Keep, a Jarl side mission..... and then a Dragon showed up and proceeded to land right in the courtyard to both bite and breathe on us.  Thanks for that.... 

 

Tonight I shall respawn and go looking for revenge. 

 

Anyone else playing?

[Dillinger]

Been grinding this game off an on and am still enjoying it as a nice distraction from CoD.

 

Started in on some of the DLC content - Dragonborn to be specific.  While the main story arc is entertaining, the big niche' item for me was the discovery and smithing/crafting ability of a new mineral call Stahlrim.  

 

It can only be found off the mainland from Skyrim proper, in and around the city of Solstheim, and you need a special Nordic pick axe to be able to mine it yourself.

 

The mineral is blue in color and can be used to forge all the usual weapons and armor.  The value of these items will quickly rise if you try to sell them on the mainland and you will find many vendors who just don't have the coin to afford them at face value.

 

As my primary is the longbow, I needed to craft a magical bow out of the stuff.  While it took a bit to amass what I needed, the benefits are awesome.  The bow looks great, hits like a runaway cruise missile and has a perceived value higher than just about everything else I have come across in the game.  After a while of running around with weapons that are all black, or black and red, a nice ice-blue from the Stahlrim just makes for a different viewing experience.

 

There are some glitches from the DLC.  Some of the items you can pick up in foreign lands don't show up for sale at some merchants (even though they are willing to buy other items of the same type like weapons or armor), and I found a glitch where an item I sold would keep appearing in my inventory for use and resale if I tried to sell it on the mainland.

 

The Hearthfire DLC was added to allow you build a house from the ground up.  I have now built all three houses and I did enjoy it to be perfectly honest.  

 

One of the houses features a private lake to use as a fish hatchery that you can stock with fish you find throughout the land. Later you can catch the fish to prepare and eat them if you want.

 

Another house features a Hawk's nest on the roof.  I keep checking it to see if one has nested there yet and to no avail, so it's one of those little quirks I need to solve to make my life complete...LOL

 

Ability to Add-On community mods - Unexpected consequences to say the least.  

 

Loaded a mod to alter the residence you get in the main city of Whiterun.  The mod looks great and alters the entire interior of the residence to make it more like a cooler version of a bachelor pad.  The downside is that when you sleep overnight in the residence, a glitch happens where the townsfolk do not populate the following morning and you can't access the shops, you just sit at a set of half open doors.  You have to go do any main or side mission, return and the city goes back to normal.

 

All in all it was definitely worth the purchase price and I fully recommend if you like open world, character development type games.  I think I have about 88 hours played and there is still a ton of game left to play as I counted (11) main quests and (18) side quests that I still have open.

 

Anyone else playing?

 

 

 

[major masingil]

It's in my cart on amazon. I saw a lot of folks commenting about how a patch started causing the game to crash.  Did you get any of that?  

[Dillinger]

It's in my cart on amazon. I saw a lot of folks commenting about how a patch started causing the game to crash.  Did you get any of that?  

 

I read that at some point as well when I was doing some reading up on game features for the re-release.  When you asked I had to stop and pause, but yes.  I do remember a couple of issues early on in my restart where the game froze in the loading screen, like going into a cave or keep.  

 

They released a good sized patch last night that I downloaded, but was playing Mafia 3 with the wife last night, so I have not dropped back in.  Tonight I will be playing so I will see if there is anything relevant to report.

 

I can say that, for me, the game has been pretty stable other than the code overlay glitches mentioned above.

[Dillinger]

Was able to get in some gaming over the weekend in between burst of effort tied to the pending move.

 

I deleted a few of the community mods that I tried out.  No problems, just looking to try some variety out and some of the mods are just too overpowered to even make the game fun.  The ability to carry EVERYTHING you find with a "portable room" and the ability to "smith" a weapon up to over 1,000 points of damage per hit is just ridiculous.  

 

[PAUSE]  What the fuck is with all the mods from the community that have to do with making the female NPC characters into extras from a Skyrim Stripclub?    [/uNPAUSE]

 

This past weekend I did notice the complete freeze and boot to the console screen.  It happened twice to me, but this was after I had a list of about 15 add-ons that I was mixing and matching, so I can't say the game itself is unstable.

 

I purged a lot of the mods and loaded up some basic map stuff (no clouds on the game map - I hate that shit), along with a couple of character enhancements (like the ability to have a fur cloak - because Skyrim is a cold, frost covered place) and the ability to wear more than just (1) ring or Amulet/necklace.  I may look like Mr T - but everything is base vanilla Skyrim issued.

 

I think my character currently sits at level 49.  He is overpowered for sure.  With just the basic game abilities, and some clever use of them like crafting a special set of clothes to JUST blacksmith in, you can create weapons that do ridiculous damage.  If you use the mods, it makes it so every character in the game can be killed with one shot from a bow or one blow from a hand held weapon, which seems boring as shit to me, but I guess there is a market for it.

 

I purged my character of anything OP, placed them all on the demo mannequins in the Heartstone DLC homes you can build (such a cool feature) and have resumed my game with more basic, vanilla equipment.

 

I still haven't decided if I am going to join the Stormcloaks (do I believe enough in Religious Freedom to support a Xenophobe) or do I join the Legion and try to bring "Peace through Superior Firepower" to the realm?  

[Dillinger]

Well, getting old sucks gents, enjoy the awesomeness of your youth while you can....LOL

 

So old JD had to do some reading and relearn the aspect of stacking mods IN ORDER.  I was having some random glitches that were affecting my ability to finish quests and went to the reliable interwebz for answers.  Turns out one of the mods, that I thought was pretty cool but didn't work all that well, received enough reports and was pulled from the available list at Bethesda.  When I disabled and deleted it, I had interwoven enough of my gameplay saves through it that it made my saves pretty unreliable.

 

THIS MOD (Hideout_ESE_) IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE - SO DO NOT WORRY IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING THE AVAILABLE MODS - THEY ARE AWESOME

 

In addition, I had done some random adventuring where I had discovered an island keep PRIOR to having the NPC who lived in said Keep with me, so that whole story line was corrupt.

 

C'est la vie!

 

Complete uninstall and start over with some really cool mods, stacked in the correct order, early last week prior to the holiday weekend.

 

The ALTERNATE START mod was very cool, worked perfectly, and allowed me to skip a lot of the opening cinematic that I have seen 3 or 4 times by now.

 

I personally enjoy the forging and blacksmithing aspect of the game.  Being able to craft my own stuff has always appealed to me over just "getting the random chest loot".  In that vain there are 6-8 really good mods that allow you to craft a whole slew of new weapons, armor and jewelry provided your blacksmithing levels are high enough and you have the resources.  They have mods that allow you to craft every weapon from the Lord of the Rings Trilogy (wasn't for me) as well as mods that give you "custom" variants of existing weapons, along with some cool fantasy type blades.  Nothing OP, a lot of them are skin overlays and range from totally realistic to completely ridiculous with swords twice the size of your character.  The customization of the weapons and armor is greatly enhanced through the community mods to change up the variety.

 

Forgotten City:  This is an award winning mod/add-on that was created by one guy with a lot of community sourced aspects and it was AWESOME.  I actually tweeted the guy(his contact info pops up at the end of the Questline) and he replied which I thought was cool.  A couple of things you need to know #DumaArmy if you play this expansion.

• One you are in, you are stuck until you solve it.  You do earn a place to stay, so you can store stuff in this contained world, but when you drop in, you are there until you solve it.
• Bring Lockpicks!  Holy hell.  The difficulty of the locks in this expansion is easily twice as hard as your average lock of the same name in Skyrim.  I actually had to load a save before dropping into the City (see first bullet above) because I was only carrying about 12-13 lockpicks and ran through them quickly.  There were only 3-5 of them available for sale in the city itself, so forewarned is forearmed
• The Coffin Jumps - I don't know if it was me, or if they were programmed to be very narrow, but you need a gymnasts' touch for this aspect, so patience will be your friend....LOL
• When you are done:  Talk to everyone you see to get the full story of how Forgotten City has changed since your arrival, it is worth it.

The Conan Expansion:  I really wanted to like this expansion, because I enjoyed the movie when I was a kid (it does not hold up real well).  The truth is this was a lot of work without much reward in my mind, but part of that is because the final pay off is based on finding a new Ore element.  Fulgurite is needed to re-forge Conan's broken sword and to enhance a couple of other weapons from the movie (Valeria - Queen of Thieves' Blade, the triple headed axe and the giant war club of Thulsa Doom's henchmen).  I have not yet been able to find said ore, so the blades are hanging in my crib, just taunting me.  The expansion was pretty well done, but it just doesn't compare to what was done with Forgotten City.

 

The community mods have greatly enhanced the game play for me and given me whole new quests that are interwoven with main stories and quests, so they blend together nicely.  Without doing too much of the main story line I have been able to quickly level up with a litany of level appropriate side quests that paid off.

 

Of note, a lot of the available "follower" mods are female (see previous question about why all the skimpy armor choices).  The highest rated one (Sophia) was actually developed and is fully voiced with a voice actress from the original game.  She is full of quips, says a lot of double-entende shit as she has a crush on you, and fights like champion.  

• Downside is if you go through a quest door and she can't get through (some quests are dialogue of 1:1 before the fight) she is prone to try and get to you in anyway possible.  During the previously mentioned Conan trip she jumped off a bridge into what should have been death and proceeded to be stuck there.  If I tried to get down there, I died no matter what I did.  If I warped to another part of the world thinking she would join me there, like your horse does, nope.  I got a quest under MISC that is literally a Sophie tracker to bring you back to the spot where she is, and in my case, there was zero way to get her out, even if I reloaded the quest.  So yeah, I lost a shitload of stuff she was carrying and I had given her some sweet armor and weapons to keep her alive.. *LOL -SIGH*
• I had to disable her mod and I haven't re-enabled it.  I may do so after I do some of the community side quests and get back into the main story line where I suspect she was more thoroughly tested.

All in all I am still really enjoying this remastered release.  It has been a great CoD diversion this cycle and would recommend it to anyone who likes these sort of open-world, character development type games.

 

[Dillinger]

Update:

 

Still really enjoying the re-release.  To be fair, I have had some issues (mods failing to work with other mods not listed in the write-up, booted to desktop) but all in all the issues have been very minimal since I re-learned little things like LOAD ORDER.

 

The game enhancements are populating daily now as the giant PC mod community has been given tools to port their work over to the XB1.  All in all, there are almost 6GB worth of FREE mods to forever change the vanilla landscape of Skyrim.

 

The advanced armors that are now available are where the mod community really shows their creative work.  Aside from the LITANY of scantily clad female NPC's (gamers must be lonely, or have REALLY high sex drives - you decide, I don't judge ), the detail and work that is put in for creating armor that is wearable/playable from just an idea from one boss in the game fascinates me.  They include Lore and backstory, with references to the lore in some of the game audio and screen loading, it's really impressive.

 

Lots of new adventures, side quests, whole story arc "main quests".  I have probably added 300 hours of game time to the original just in the added free components.  In game currency system can be revamped so that if you choose to just go and do some hunting or ingredient acquiring, you can build a character on that alone and don't need to do a lot of the side quests that may not be up your alley.

 

With the holidays coming up, and a few God given days off added to the schedules, I hope a few of you pick it up and give it a try.  It's been a great distraction, perhaps too great of one as I am supposed to be in the middle of a move at the moment.  

[major masingil]

Just picked it up last weekend JD.  Haven't loaded any mods in yet, and I never heard of mod stacking. I guess I'll have some reading to do, but looking forwad to seeing what the community brings to the show

[Dillinger]

Just picked it up last weekend JD.  Haven't loaded any mods in yet, and I never heard of mod stacking. I guess I'll have some reading to do, but looking forwad to seeing what the community brings to the show

 

Hit me up if you have questions - I have done some of the leg work already.  Most of the well rated mods include a note about load order, but others are vague (at best).  

 

Example:  Alternate Start - Which if you have done the scripted start once, it's enough.  Too many cut scenes and nothing for the player to do other than ride/walk to impending "judgement".  With the Alternate Start, you pick right up after a lot of the cinematic and begin playing, but this mod HAS to be loaded LAST.  

 

Anything you download after it, will populate after it in the load order.  So you have to remember to go into the load order and move any additions HIGHER in the load order list.

 

Open Cities:  This mod is very cool, but it causes WAY more problems than it was worth for me. Multiple really good mods say they can not and will not ever work with Open Cities, which is a shame because I liked being able to ride my horse right up the steps to Dragon's Reach and make my grand entrance...LOL