Man, I will just never be into modding. To me there's a good reason that dev teams have a core group of artists who confer with each other and design textures and objects in concert. Mods always have such conflicting looks and tend to mesh horribly with each other.
I get that individual objects and effects look better than the vanilla game, it's just than in practice I never find it a convincing whole. You get stuff like one guy committing to accuracy to the base game so he includes wooden beams that look very similar to the original ones and are low-contrast so they don't dominate the scene, and then another guy who has a vendetta against roofs and photoshopped a striking high-contrast shingle texture with baked in deep shadows that look strange when other shadows are cast across them in-engine. Both of these are in proximity to the lower res stone wall of the building, whose darkest areas are not as dark as the shingles, even though it's below the roof and generally ought to be darker. Repeat similar incongruities throughout the entire game.
I'm not much more tolerant of graphical incongruities than you, but there are plenty of mods that have little to no visual impact. I honestly recoil in disgust at the thought of playing Skyrim without SPERG or something similar to fix the stupidities in the leveling/perks systems.
Yeah, it all depends on the mod. Like removing the tint or the depth of field blur can just improve a game without futzing with the artistic vision. And plenty of mods do improve the textures and lighting. Sometimes stuff is in games because of time and budget and technical restrictions. And sometimes people put Thomas the Tank Engine in the game.
I mean there's mod lists that specifically don't change code graphics and instead focus on general bug fixes and quality of life improvements.
Not me, I go for the full graphics overhaul, with 10k textures and HDRIP graphics every time. Just because the game was made 20 years ago doesn't mean it had to look it.
I mean there's mod lists that specifically don't change code graphics and instead focus on general bug fixes and quality of life improvements.
Not me, I go for the full graphics overhaul, with 10k textures and HDRIP graphics every time. Just because the game was made 20 years ago doesn't mean it had to look it.
Whereas I actually like how Morrowind looks and don't want to change it, so any mods I download must at least mostly match the general vibe of base Morrowind's texture resolution and model poly counts. Artistically they should as well, I don't want to see some fuckin anime bullshit armor or hairstyles.
Really I just want mods to be like Tamriel Rebuilt where the content not only tries to match the lore of the game but also the look of the base game. The only graphical mods I ever use anymore are slightly increased draw distance, adding a bit of depth of field blur, and maybe futzing with the lighting in the game to be a bit less bright to make dungeon/castle/home interiors/nights moodier and to give torches and the light and nighteye spells some use.
Man, I will just never be into modding. To me there's a good reason that dev teams have a core group of artists who confer with each other and design textures and objects in concert. Mods always have such conflicting looks and tend to mesh horribly with each other.
I get that individual objects and effects look better than the vanilla game, it's just than in practice I never find it a convincing whole. You get stuff like one guy committing to accuracy to the base game so he includes wooden beams that look very similar to the original ones and are low-contrast so they don't dominate the scene, and then another guy who has a vendetta against roofs and photoshopped a striking high-contrast shingle texture with baked in deep shadows that look strange when other shadows are cast across them in-engine. Both of these are in proximity to the lower res stone wall of the building, whose darkest areas are not as dark as the shingles, even though it's below the roof and generally ought to be darker. Repeat similar incongruities throughout the entire game.
Yeah, the quality of modding in skyrim at the top end is just incredibly high and as such I disagree with that view of modding. There are visual overhauls that are remarkably consistent and just look dramatically better than the base game now. If you think every texture/visual overhaul is inconsistent like that, you're out of date! They exist, but man that's definitely not representative of the current modding scene in Skyrim.
That's the benefit of the game being out for 11 years! It's just silly at the top end, and you have modders and mod teams now that have spent more time on the game than the original team did. It's not one person making 1000 mods -- it's 1000 people each making a mod or part of a mod that they're passionate about and specialized in. The good visual design mods have teams that co-ordinate style just like Bethesda's teams do.
That's not to disrespect Bethesda! They did a great job. I was reading the Morrowind oral history that was posted here awhile back (it's amazing) and one of the artists comments on this specifically. He said he's not upset at people replacing his original vision -- pointing out that the modder artists just have dramatically more time than they did and a good artist who loves the game + more time is just better in the end. People love these games, and there are tons of talented modders that care about the "feel" of the base game too.
One example of modding quality is that the modpack I mentioned includes lots of high quality quest packs and and NPC mods. The voice acting is substantially better than Bethesda's across the board. It's not what I expected back when Oblivion went full voice acting, but the good mods just have much better voice acting in Skyrim now. Not every quest pack that exists does, but curators are spoiled for choice with the incredibly robust Skyrim modding scene and can pick and choose the standouts. That's what I'm playing -- not a mishmash of whatever incongruous stuff someone can slam in there just to change for changes sake. I've been modding the hell out of TES since Morrowind -- those wacky kitchen sink mod packs exist! I don't enjoy them, and there are plenty of cohesive mods and modpacks that are true to the vision of the original game while managing to improve it substantially.
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
The only mods I ever dislike are the ones I look for for one specific thing, but then add something random for no fucking reason.
Y'know something like "This mod adds a variety of dogs to Skyrim". Awesome, cool, just what I wa- "also adds infinite money". God damn it!
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The only mods I ever dislike are the ones I look for for one specific thing, but then add something random for no fucking reason.
Y'know something like "This mod adds a variety of dogs to Skyrim". Awesome, cool, just what I wa- "also adds infinite money". God damn it!
Yeah this drives me nuts. YOU CAN MAKE 2 MODS people!
Like the amount of times that I’ve deleted mods because they change random unrelated shit…
“Oh this mod adds a few cool looking ruins around, and also adds level 25 packs of unlevelscaled murderwolves to some areas.” “Oh this adds a cool gun, but also changes the scaling of vanilla grenades and adds a hat that doesn’t play nice with another mod I have that changes armor balance”
Like if you want to make a bunch of mod that adds a sword and changes a vanilla quest and rebalances and adds new trolls be my guest, but for fucks sake don’t package them all in one esp (especially if they aren’t at all related to or depend on each other) because I probably already have mods that touch those areas and im just not going to use it.
That's what I'm playing -- not a mishmash of whatever incongruous stuff someone can slam in there just to change for changes sake. I've been modding the hell out of TES since Morrowind -- those wacky kitchen sink mod packs exist! I don't enjoy them, and there are plenty of cohesive mods and modpacks that are true to the vision of the original game while managing to improve it substantially.
Oh uh...my mini-rant about low contrast beams, deep shadow shingles and comparatively less-dark stone walls was specifically about your screenshot last page. It felt like a kitchen sink situation.
I looked up the Librum pack and went through their site to see other screenshots, and this gate just looked so...I don't know, artificial, clean, out of place:
Again I think it's the rock blocks being high contrast, very light and very dark, and too small/repeated.
Sorry, I'm not trying to be Captain Bring-Down or be mean to anyone. It's of course perfectly acceptable to enjoy whatever mods you enjoy! I just saw those shots and it struck me as another reason why I tend not to mod.
I would rather 1 person make 1000 mods than 1000 people each make 1 mod, because that one guy is probably going to deliver consistent work in his own style. I might actually enjoy a total overhaul mod if everything looked consistent and also artistically correct/balanced.
The only mods I've tended to use are SkyUI, one that marks the location of every stone of Barenziah, and (in Morrowind) unlimited draw distance. One of my favorite times with Skyrim though was playing through on the Switch where there wasn't even any capability of modding.
That's what I'm playing -- not a mishmash of whatever incongruous stuff someone can slam in there just to change for changes sake. I've been modding the hell out of TES since Morrowind -- those wacky kitchen sink mod packs exist! I don't enjoy them, and there are plenty of cohesive mods and modpacks that are true to the vision of the original game while managing to improve it substantially.
Oh uh...my mini-rant about low contrast beams, deep shadow shingles and comparatively less-dark stone walls was specifically about your screenshot last page. It felt like a kitchen sink situation.
I looked up the Librum pack and went through their site to see other screenshots, and this gate just looked so...I don't know, artificial, clean, out of place:
Again I think it's the rock blocks being high contrast, very light and very dark, and too small/repeated.
Sorry, I'm not trying to be Captain Bring-Down or be mean to anyone. It's of course perfectly acceptable to enjoy whatever mods you enjoy! I just saw those shots and it struck me as another reason why I tend not to mod.
I would rather 1 person make 1000 mods than 1000 people each make 1 mod, because that one guy is probably going to deliver consistent work in his own style. I might actually enjoy a total overhaul mod if everything looked consistent and also artistically correct/balanced.
The only mods I've tended to use are SkyUI, one that marks the location of every stone of Barenziah, and (in Morrowind) unlimited draw distance. One of my favorite times with Skyrim though was playing through on the Switch where there wasn't even any capability of modding.
The shingles on a house....can be darker than the walls? I'll admit I don't see what you're seeing at all. It's a house made up of different materials....you're describing shadows on the house?
From the same screenshot:
The top is bright! Because there are no shadows hitting that part of the house. The parts that are in the shade from other parts of the village are shadowed, and darker....because that's how shadows work. The differences in lighting are all lighting effects, not the texture. If you turn off the EnB, you get a flat, brighter texture without lighting variance on the shingles. My screenshot was taken on a mostly foggy day with the sun peaking through the clouds -- you get areas that are quite bright (high contrast to use your language) where the sun hits, and areas that are quite dark where it does not because of the lighting and ambient occlusion. The sun is very bright, and when it peaks through the clouds at a few spots on an otherwise dark and gloomy day you get very high "contrast" if you want to put it that way. I'm looking out at my back yard right now and it checks out! The "deep shadow shingles and comparatively less-dark stone walls" are because you edited out the parts of the screenshot where parts of the tiles are brighter than the stone wall.
Same house at a different time of day:
Now most of shingled area is very bright because it is receiving direct sunshine (still cloudy day with sun peaking through the clouds) The left side of the house is now much brighter to match, again due to sun location, and the lower parts dark because they are underneath the roof. Sunshine gives you bright brights and dark darks on days like that -- high contrast just like in reality.
Same house at the same time/weather conditions with default skyrim lighting that relies heavily on fake non-sun light sources in the day:
Now it's neon bright because the game by default doesn't care about the sun much. It's still a foggy day where most of this shouldn't be lit up, but the fake light sources strewn about largely overpower the sun. The texture looks pretty blah in this context and I would probably go with the default, but it's made to be used alongside mods that give the game more realistic lighting. It also shows that without the effect of proper lighting that uses the sun instead of fake light sources, the "deep shadow shingles" you're describing are actually brighter than the stone wall. The relative darkness you commented on originally is because that's how actual lighting that uses a sun as its light source works.
The second screenshot you just posted is on a vibrant, bright, and sunny day. It's bright and sunny, and it glistens as a result. Yeah it's a clean texture, if you think it should be a bit "dirtier" for realism I won't really argue that (it's personal preference given that there is a glistening white tower in Cyrodiil we can point to in the lore to prove it's not impossible in the setting at least). But if I take a screenshot of that location on a foggy day, it will be...not at all bright and vibrant. The weather changes are dramatic with mods. It's not a texture thing, it's a lighting/shader thing. Because it actually makes the game use "real" light sources instead of a bunch of inserted fake lights that give you more consistent textures.
I mean there's mod lists that specifically don't change code graphics and instead focus on general bug fixes and quality of life improvements.
Not me, I go for the full graphics overhaul, with 10k textures and HDRIP graphics every time. Just because the game was made 20 years ago doesn't mean it had to look it.
Whereas I actually like how Morrowind looks and don't want to change it, so any mods I download must at least mostly match the general vibe of base Morrowind's texture resolution and model poly counts. Artistically they should as well, I don't want to see some fuckin anime bullshit armor or hairstyles.
Really I just want mods to be like Tamriel Rebuilt where the content not only tries to match the lore of the game but also the look of the base game. The only graphical mods I ever use anymore are slightly increased draw distance, adding a bit of depth of field blur, and maybe futzing with the lighting in the game to be a bit less bright to make dungeon/castle/home interiors/nights moodier and to give torches and the light and nighteye spells some use.
A big issue I have using graphic overhauls for games as old as Morrowind and Oblivion is that they don't change how crude the animations are. Having even base Skyrim level graphics in the previous games would be weird given how wooden all the movement was. The jump in how more alive everything looked when I wrapped up the Oblivion replay and jumped into Skyrim was staggering.
I mean there's mod lists that specifically don't change code graphics and instead focus on general bug fixes and quality of life improvements.
Not me, I go for the full graphics overhaul, with 10k textures and HDRIP graphics every time. Just because the game was made 20 years ago doesn't mean it had to look it.
Whereas I actually like how Morrowind looks and don't want to change it, so any mods I download must at least mostly match the general vibe of base Morrowind's texture resolution and model poly counts. Artistically they should as well, I don't want to see some fuckin anime bullshit armor or hairstyles.
Really I just want mods to be like Tamriel Rebuilt where the content not only tries to match the lore of the game but also the look of the base game. The only graphical mods I ever use anymore are slightly increased draw distance, adding a bit of depth of field blur, and maybe futzing with the lighting in the game to be a bit less bright to make dungeon/castle/home interiors/nights moodier and to give torches and the light and nighteye spells some use.
Yeah I'm extra picky with my Morrowind aesthetic, because it's very much it own weird alien thing. Skyrim errs towards generic fantasy with snow/vikings in there (which is fine), and allows for more changes in how it's presented while keeping a similar feel. The province has been a core part of the Empire for a very long time in ways that Vvardenfell was not, and having non-viking stuff is more common due to those ties.
There are some really solid Morrowind graphics overhauls that I think capture the aesthetic well, but I know they've kind of morphed and taken different forms since I last used them. It sounds like OpenMW tries to be similar in that same vein, but I haven't played it myself to confirm/deny.
The top is bright! Because there are no shadows hitting that part of the house. The parts that are in the shade from other parts of the village are shadowed, and darker....because that's how shadows work. The differences in lighting are all lighting effects, not the texture. If you turn off the EnB, you get a flat, brighter texture without lighting variance on the shingles.
I mean the shingle texture itself has very dark baked-in shadows that clash with the more natural, less harsh lighting of the surrounding textures. In the light the shadows are pitch black, and in the shade the shadows are pitch black. It looks like a photo of shingles taken on a really sunny day with the contrast cranked to make the shadows dramatic, which doesn't work on foggy Skyrim days. Most textures are not so high contrast in order to allow the engine's lighting to take over and provide that effect if necessary. Also, similar to what I mentioned about the other screenshot I posted, it feels very high-res, shrunk down and tiled more often, so it stands out when compared to the surrounding environment.
Trying to explain what I mean about contrast...I'm not an art expert, but here's something:
The stone wall has a nice bell curve of light levels. Some darks, more midtones, and then some lights. But with the roof texture, you can see it has a lot of very dark colors (which the stone wall lacks), then actually dips down and doesn't have as many midtones, before rising back up on the lighter side. It has an explicit separation of dark tones from light tones with less middle, so visually it feels more striking and doesn't fit the scene as well.
The second screenshot you just posted is on a vibrant, bright, and sunny day. It's bright and sunny, and it glistens as a result. Yeah it's a clean texture, if you think it should be a bit "dirtier" for realism I won't really argue that (there is a glistening white tower in Cyrodiil we can point to in the lore to prove it's not impossible in the setting at least). But if I take a screenshot of that location on a foggy day, it will be...not at all bright and vibrant. The weather changes are dramatic with mods. It's not a texture thing, it's a lighting/shader thing. Because it actually makes the game use "real" light sources instead of a bunch of inserted fake lights that give you more consistent textures.
To be honest, it immediately gave me memories of Turok:
Not to invoke the comparison of terrible old graphics, but in terms of having straight, perfect walls with very repetitive texturing that immediately draw your eye to them. I think it would feel just as jarring with fog in front of it.
The top is bright! Because there are no shadows hitting that part of the house. The parts that are in the shade from other parts of the village are shadowed, and darker....because that's how shadows work. The differences in lighting are all lighting effects, not the texture. If you turn off the EnB, you get a flat, brighter texture without lighting variance on the shingles.
I mean the shingle texture itself has very dark baked-in shadows that clash with the more natural, less harsh lighting of the surrounding textures. In the light the shadows are pitch black, and in the shade the shadows are pitch black. It looks like a photo of shingles taken on a really sunny day with the contrast cranked to make the shadows dramatic, which doesn't work on foggy Skyrim days. Most textures are not so high contrast in order to allow the engine's lighting to take over and provide that effect if necessary. Also, similar to what I mentioned about the other screenshot I posted, it feels very high-res, shrunk down and tiled more often, so it stands out when compared to the surrounding environment.
Trying to explain what I mean about contrast...I'm not an art expert, but here's something:
The stone wall has a nice bell curve of light levels. Some darks, more midtones, and then some lights. But with the roof texture, you can see it has a lot of very dark colors (which the stone wall lacks), then actually dips down and doesn't have as many midtones, before rising back up on the lighter side. It has an explicit separation of dark tones from light tones with less middle, so visually it feels more striking and doesn't fit the scene as well.
The second screenshot you just posted is on a vibrant, bright, and sunny day. It's bright and sunny, and it glistens as a result. Yeah it's a clean texture, if you think it should be a bit "dirtier" for realism I won't really argue that (there is a glistening white tower in Cyrodiil we can point to in the lore to prove it's not impossible in the setting at least). But if I take a screenshot of that location on a foggy day, it will be...not at all bright and vibrant. The weather changes are dramatic with mods. It's not a texture thing, it's a lighting/shader thing. Because it actually makes the game use "real" light sources instead of a bunch of inserted fake lights that give you more consistent textures.
To be honest, it immediately gave me memories of Turok:
Not to invoke the comparison of terrible old graphics, but in terms of having straight, perfect walls with very repetitive texturing that immediately draw your eye to them. I think it would feel just as jarring with fog in front of it.
edit: I was misreading your tool, and will admit I've never used it before.
The stuff you're talking about again just seems to be lighting? Run that same tool on my screenshot without the lighting mods. The lighting on the roof texture is different because the sun is hitting it at a different angle.
The texture is brighter than the stone wall with Skyrim's base lighting, and darker in my screenshot because it's using the sun as a light source. The texture isn't receiving "special lighting" -- it's just how it looks when it is hit by the sun at the angle it is. I posted 3 screenshots that show that that section of the roof looks dramatically different based on time of day.
Same U-shape (notice the tall line of solid black at the beginning), and same very looooong U-shape. The texture just lacks midtones which makes it feel at odds with the other textures in the scene that produce more of a bell curve -- because they were designed to be neutral and allow the lighting of the engine to modify their light and darkness.
Sorry again, I know this is really specific and not something likely to bother other people as much as it might for me. And I'm not trying to target you specifically Fiatl, I don't have anything against you, just explaining my reasoning.
Same U-shape (notice the tall line of solid black at the beginning), and same very looooong U-shape. The texture just lacks midtones which makes it feel at odds with the other textures in the scene that produce more of a bell curve -- because they were designed to be neutral and allow the lighting of the engine to modify their light and darkness.
Sorry again, I know this is really specific and not something likely to bother other people as much as it might for me.
Haha you know what, fair enough.
I'll admit that I think the end result is better -- make the light source do the lighting, not the texture. Turok has shit lighting, so yeah it looks shit. The EnB has really good lighting, and I think the end result looks fantastic. The same section looks dramatically different based on time of day and weather in ways that it does not with the base lighting. That makes me happy, and makes me stop and go "ohh dat pretty." I was walking around at the start for awhile and was like "huh does the EnB make it gloomy all of the time?" And no, it's really bright on bright days that make my sunshine and bright colors loving self happy on bright days, and really foggy and atmospheric and gloomy on days where the weather is such in ways that the base game doesn't. With the base lighting, that modded roof texture clashes horribly with the default skyrim texture that has "baked in" lighting. With the modded lighting, I think they blend well enough and ultimately look really good in my eyes.
I guess you saying it was "kitchen sink" kind of threw me off. It's consistent with the way they do their lighting. It's not a mishmash of crazy different fantasy styles, but yeah I'll admit some of the new textures are different in nature to the old because of how they're built to use the revised lighting. I think the bridge you linked looks great for a bright sunny day, and from what I've seen would look very dark and gloomey if the weather were different. The sun provides lots of contrast like that, and the lighting mods that move towards using "real" lighting sources (sun, candles, torches) gives you those same contrasts.
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NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
I guess I don't know enough about skyrim's lighting/texturing engine to know how stuff can be set up, are those shadows underneath the various shingles baked directly into the texture itself or can you actually light up those dark bits if you stand with a torch at night?
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I guess I don't know enough about skyrim's lighting/texturing engine to know how stuff can be set up, are those shadows underneath the various shingles baked directly into the texture itself or can you actually light up those dark bits if you stand with a torch at night?
edit: I misunderstood the question and my response was wrong.
I guess I don't know enough about skyrim's lighting/texturing engine to know how stuff can be set up, are those shadows underneath the various shingles baked directly into the texture itself or can you actually light up those dark bits if you stand with a torch at night?
They are baked into the texture, but so are plenty of other shadows everywhere else. The behavior of engine lighting depends on the brightness of any given part of a texture, but also shaders. For example if you had a pitch black piece of metal or onyx, it should be reflective and won't be black across the whole surface, but you're also not seeing any extra detail in the texture itself that's not already there. However, if the shadows are not too dark, then that area can be illuminated.
It's something you encounter a lot with Photoshop/photo editing, if dark areas are just too dark then no amount of cranking up the brightness/altering the levels will reveal more detail, black will just stay black.
Here's an imperial fort texture, I think from the Special Edition:
Notice how it's pretty evenly lit, with few dark areas. Obviously there are shadows/shading of parts of the stone that should be darker than others, but it's very neutral overall. So when it's not lit by the engine it will be pretty pitch black, but when lit there is detail to see there. The engine decides if there's a cutoff, like "everything darker than X should be crushed, but if the player has a harsh light source like a torch then show the detail that would normally be hidden."
The base Skyrim textures have more "built in" lighting because the base lighting is kind of "flat". It doesn't rely on the sun for lighting as much as real life -- it uses the sun and candles and such but also a lot of "god mode/developer" light sources that ultimately result in less variant lighting through "real" light sources, but mimics it through the textures.
Respectfully, and without having examined all the textures in the game or anything, I think it's the opposite. Like the example above, the artists tried to keep things neutral so that the engine could do the heavy lifting on lighting, even if their game wasn't yet on the level of modern ENB effects. It's why the game can still look pretty good with its base textures plus modern lighting systems.
That's my criticism of the work of some modders, who might say "alright this is a nice higher res texture of a medieval roof / basket weave / stone wall, moving on," without realizing it was a photo with crushed blacks that isn't suited to the way the rest of the textures were designed.
Edit: eh, nm. way too much granular texture discussion and very strange graphs going on.
You're right -- I had the description of the texture sets flipped. The graphs threw me for a loop but yeah ultimately you are correct that the modded texture has baked in shadows to try to make a 2D texture representing a 3D surface (tiled roof) look more 3D.
I got lost a little bit in the forest while the discussion had moved to a careful study of one of the trees. My definition of "fits the style" differs -- to me that looks like a roof that is right at home in Skyrim and doesn't clash with the style of the other roofs in a meaningful way. But you are correct that it has baked in shadows to try to emulate a 3D look, and my prior post had it flipped.
It's cool, again I'm not trying to be a dick or like "YOU'RE WRONG," just looking for the best way to communicate my point. And it's ok to enjoy the look of anything you like or have different tolerance levels for this stuff.
I know I harped on this one texture like c'mon man, is it really that important, but for me it's emblematic of a lot of mods I've seen, and could pick out other examples along those lines across the modding scene. Some textures might use a less neutral color temperature so they don't quite fit into as many contexts as the base textures do (again, you want to let the engine do the heavy lifting on tinting things warm or cool, etc.).
I had literally nothing to do with either of these, but I feel good about their success because they're being worked on/made by friends of mine, and most of the beta testing/patch work happened on a discord server that I made so I feel a weird sort of pride because of that?
In other news, I have a very, VERY early peek at something I'm working on which there's still plenty of things wrong with this video, but....
I mean there's mod lists that specifically don't change code graphics and instead focus on general bug fixes and quality of life improvements.
Not me, I go for the full graphics overhaul, with 10k textures and HDRIP graphics every time. Just because the game was made 20 years ago doesn't mean it had to look it.
Whereas I actually like how Morrowind looks and don't want to change it, so any mods I download must at least mostly match the general vibe of base Morrowind's texture resolution and model poly counts. Artistically they should as well, I don't want to see some fuckin anime bullshit armor or hairstyles.
Really I just want mods to be like Tamriel Rebuilt where the content not only tries to match the lore of the game but also the look of the base game. The only graphical mods I ever use anymore are slightly increased draw distance, adding a bit of depth of field blur, and maybe futzing with the lighting in the game to be a bit less bright to make dungeon/castle/home interiors/nights moodier and to give torches and the light and nighteye spells some use.
Yeah I'm extra picky with my Morrowind aesthetic, because it's very much it own weird alien thing. Skyrim errs towards generic fantasy with snow/vikings in there (which is fine), and allows for more changes in how it's presented while keeping a similar feel. The province has been a core part of the Empire for a very long time in ways that Vvardenfell was not, and having non-viking stuff is more common due to those ties.
There are some really solid Morrowind graphics overhauls that I think capture the aesthetic well, but I know they've kind of morphed and taken different forms since I last used them. It sounds like OpenMW tries to be similar in that same vein, but I haven't played it myself to confirm/deny.
For OpenMW: it's more of a new engine/sourceport that enables better usage of modern tech/fixes some wonky engine bugs but largely it's still OG Morrowind. You can ofcourse fuck it right up with mods (I've got a way to modded OpenMW playthrough that's a bit visually incoherent, and one that's just engine/mesh tweaks and upresed textures)
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augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
There are some decent Morrowind texture packs that are just AI upscales of the originals. Pretty vanilla if that's what your'e going for.
There are some decent Morrowind texture packs that are just AI upscales of the originals. Pretty vanilla if that's what your'e going for.
There is a texture pack I used for awhile that isn't any higher res or anything, but it remade all the game's textures in a watercolor painting style. Not super obvious in screenshots, and even in-game it was a bit more noticeable but it was still pretty subtle, and it fit the feel of the game pretty well imo
I mean there's mod lists that specifically don't change code graphics and instead focus on general bug fixes and quality of life improvements.
Not me, I go for the full graphics overhaul, with 10k textures and HDRIP graphics every time. Just because the game was made 20 years ago doesn't mean it had to look it.
Whereas I actually like how Morrowind looks and don't want to change it, so any mods I download must at least mostly match the general vibe of base Morrowind's texture resolution and model poly counts. Artistically they should as well, I don't want to see some fuckin anime bullshit armor or hairstyles.
Really I just want mods to be like Tamriel Rebuilt where the content not only tries to match the lore of the game but also the look of the base game. The only graphical mods I ever use anymore are slightly increased draw distance, adding a bit of depth of field blur, and maybe futzing with the lighting in the game to be a bit less bright to make dungeon/castle/home interiors/nights moodier and to give torches and the light and nighteye spells some use.
Yeah I'm extra picky with my Morrowind aesthetic, because it's very much it own weird alien thing. Skyrim errs towards generic fantasy with snow/vikings in there (which is fine), and allows for more changes in how it's presented while keeping a similar feel. The province has been a core part of the Empire for a very long time in ways that Vvardenfell was not, and having non-viking stuff is more common due to those ties.
There are some really solid Morrowind graphics overhauls that I think capture the aesthetic well, but I know they've kind of morphed and taken different forms since I last used them. It sounds like OpenMW tries to be similar in that same vein, but I haven't played it myself to confirm/deny.
For OpenMW: it's more of a new engine/sourceport that enables better usage of modern tech/fixes some wonky engine bugs but largely it's still OG Morrowind. You can ofcourse fuck it right up with mods (I've got a way to modded OpenMW playthrough that's a bit visually incoherent, and one that's just engine/mesh tweaks and upresed textures)
It does have a few fairly significant graphics tweaks (water shaders, infinite draw distance), but yeah definitely not a full overhaul:
Improved rendering precision - the vanilla engine had precision issues that result in objects shaking when the player travels far from the world origin
Support normal, specular, and parallax texture maps (TextureModding)
Unclamped lighting (See TextureModding for info on enabling this option)
Support for all resolutions
Adjustable field of view
Anisotropic filtering
Improved sun flare rendering using hardware occlusion queries
New water shader featuring reflection and refraction effects
New terrain engine featuring seamless rendering and distant terrain
Support for OSG mesh / scene files as an alternative to the proprietary NIF format
Support for weapon sheathing, including dynamic quivers and scabbards
Ultimately yeah, still mostly just going to look like Morrowind for better and for worse. I found my old posts -- god damn it was 2013 -- and it looks like I was using Morrowind Overhaul for my last "make it pretty but keep the vanilla feel" run of Morrowind. Sadly the screeenshots have been purged from the forum and I know that overhaul doesn't really work anymore.
I think the modern successor is MGE XE, which looks pretty nice from the screenshots but I haven't taken it out for a spin myself.
Unlike Skyrim, I hate playing Morrowind with infinite draw distance. It looks like that mod is similar to Morrowind Overhaul and lets you keep the fog but pretties it up and lets you push it back as much as you what. Gotta have the fog for Morrowind atmosphere.
I mean there's mod lists that specifically don't change code graphics and instead focus on general bug fixes and quality of life improvements.
Not me, I go for the full graphics overhaul, with 10k textures and HDRIP graphics every time. Just because the game was made 20 years ago doesn't mean it had to look it.
Whereas I actually like how Morrowind looks and don't want to change it, so any mods I download must at least mostly match the general vibe of base Morrowind's texture resolution and model poly counts. Artistically they should as well, I don't want to see some fuckin anime bullshit armor or hairstyles.
Really I just want mods to be like Tamriel Rebuilt where the content not only tries to match the lore of the game but also the look of the base game. The only graphical mods I ever use anymore are slightly increased draw distance, adding a bit of depth of field blur, and maybe futzing with the lighting in the game to be a bit less bright to make dungeon/castle/home interiors/nights moodier and to give torches and the light and nighteye spells some use.
Yeah I'm extra picky with my Morrowind aesthetic, because it's very much it own weird alien thing. Skyrim errs towards generic fantasy with snow/vikings in there (which is fine), and allows for more changes in how it's presented while keeping a similar feel. The province has been a core part of the Empire for a very long time in ways that Vvardenfell was not, and having non-viking stuff is more common due to those ties.
There are some really solid Morrowind graphics overhauls that I think capture the aesthetic well, but I know they've kind of morphed and taken different forms since I last used them. It sounds like OpenMW tries to be similar in that same vein, but I haven't played it myself to confirm/deny.
For OpenMW: it's more of a new engine/sourceport that enables better usage of modern tech/fixes some wonky engine bugs but largely it's still OG Morrowind. You can ofcourse fuck it right up with mods (I've got a way to modded OpenMW playthrough that's a bit visually incoherent, and one that's just engine/mesh tweaks and upresed textures)
It does have a few fairly significant graphics tweaks (water shaders, infinite draw distance), but yeah definitely not a full overhaul:
Improved rendering precision - the vanilla engine had precision issues that result in objects shaking when the player travels far from the world origin
Support normal, specular, and parallax texture maps (TextureModding)
Unclamped lighting (See TextureModding for info on enabling this option)
Support for all resolutions
Adjustable field of view
Anisotropic filtering
Improved sun flare rendering using hardware occlusion queries
New water shader featuring reflection and refraction effects
New terrain engine featuring seamless rendering and distant terrain
Support for OSG mesh / scene files as an alternative to the proprietary NIF format
Support for weapon sheathing, including dynamic quivers and scabbards
Ultimately yeah, still mostly just going to look like Morrowind for better and for worse. I found my old posts -- god damn it was 2013 -- and it looks like I was using Morrowind Overhaul for my last "make it pretty but keep the vanilla feel" run of Morrowind. Sadly the screeenshots have been purged from the forum and I know that overhaul doesn't really work anymore.
I think the modern successor is MGE XE, which looks pretty nice from the screenshots but I haven't taken it out for a spin myself.
Unlike Skyrim, I hate playing Morrowind with infinite draw distance. It looks like that mod is similar to Morrowind Overhaul and lets you keep the fog but pretties it up and lets you push it back as much as you what. Gotta have the fog for Morrowind atmosphere.
Not just atmosphere but the game was literally designed around having the fog (probably because of hardware limitations) so you are tricked into thinking the world is bigger than it is. Like, you might only travel 1 mile as the crow flies but you really walked 3 miles in switchbacks, and since you can't see the destination from the starting point and vice versa you feel like you made a longer journey than you really did. Push the fog back too much and it's like, "oh, it's right over that hill!" and then you cast jump/levitate and get there in two seconds
I mean there's mod lists that specifically don't change code graphics and instead focus on general bug fixes and quality of life improvements.
Not me, I go for the full graphics overhaul, with 10k textures and HDRIP graphics every time. Just because the game was made 20 years ago doesn't mean it had to look it.
Whereas I actually like how Morrowind looks and don't want to change it, so any mods I download must at least mostly match the general vibe of base Morrowind's texture resolution and model poly counts. Artistically they should as well, I don't want to see some fuckin anime bullshit armor or hairstyles.
Really I just want mods to be like Tamriel Rebuilt where the content not only tries to match the lore of the game but also the look of the base game. The only graphical mods I ever use anymore are slightly increased draw distance, adding a bit of depth of field blur, and maybe futzing with the lighting in the game to be a bit less bright to make dungeon/castle/home interiors/nights moodier and to give torches and the light and nighteye spells some use.
Yeah I'm extra picky with my Morrowind aesthetic, because it's very much it own weird alien thing. Skyrim errs towards generic fantasy with snow/vikings in there (which is fine), and allows for more changes in how it's presented while keeping a similar feel. The province has been a core part of the Empire for a very long time in ways that Vvardenfell was not, and having non-viking stuff is more common due to those ties.
There are some really solid Morrowind graphics overhauls that I think capture the aesthetic well, but I know they've kind of morphed and taken different forms since I last used them. It sounds like OpenMW tries to be similar in that same vein, but I haven't played it myself to confirm/deny.
For OpenMW: it's more of a new engine/sourceport that enables better usage of modern tech/fixes some wonky engine bugs but largely it's still OG Morrowind. You can ofcourse fuck it right up with mods (I've got a way to modded OpenMW playthrough that's a bit visually incoherent, and one that's just engine/mesh tweaks and upresed textures)
It does have a few fairly significant graphics tweaks (water shaders, infinite draw distance), but yeah definitely not a full overhaul:
Improved rendering precision - the vanilla engine had precision issues that result in objects shaking when the player travels far from the world origin
Support normal, specular, and parallax texture maps (TextureModding)
Unclamped lighting (See TextureModding for info on enabling this option)
Support for all resolutions
Adjustable field of view
Anisotropic filtering
Improved sun flare rendering using hardware occlusion queries
New water shader featuring reflection and refraction effects
New terrain engine featuring seamless rendering and distant terrain
Support for OSG mesh / scene files as an alternative to the proprietary NIF format
Support for weapon sheathing, including dynamic quivers and scabbards
Ultimately yeah, still mostly just going to look like Morrowind for better and for worse. I found my old posts -- god damn it was 2013 -- and it looks like I was using Morrowind Overhaul for my last "make it pretty but keep the vanilla feel" run of Morrowind. Sadly the screeenshots have been purged from the forum and I know that overhaul doesn't really work anymore.
I think the modern successor is MGE XE, which looks pretty nice from the screenshots but I haven't taken it out for a spin myself.
Unlike Skyrim, I hate playing Morrowind with infinite draw distance. It looks like that mod is similar to Morrowind Overhaul and lets you keep the fog but pretties it up and lets you push it back as much as you what. Gotta have the fog for Morrowind atmosphere.
Not just atmosphere but the game was literally designed around having the fog (probably because of hardware limitations) so you are tricked into thinking the world is bigger than it is. Like, you might only travel 1 mile as the crow flies but you really walked 3 miles in switchbacks, and since you can't see the destination from the starting point and vice versa you feel like you made a longer journey than you really did. Push the fog back too much and it's like, "oh, it's right over that hill!" and then you cast jump/levitate and get there in two seconds
Yeah, when I turned off the fog (for being annoying and, on my old-but-still-beefier-than-an-XBOX PC, unnecessary), the "amusement park" scale of the world became apparent almost immediately.
I mean there's mod lists that specifically don't change code graphics and instead focus on general bug fixes and quality of life improvements.
Not me, I go for the full graphics overhaul, with 10k textures and HDRIP graphics every time. Just because the game was made 20 years ago doesn't mean it had to look it.
Whereas I actually like how Morrowind looks and don't want to change it, so any mods I download must at least mostly match the general vibe of base Morrowind's texture resolution and model poly counts. Artistically they should as well, I don't want to see some fuckin anime bullshit armor or hairstyles.
Really I just want mods to be like Tamriel Rebuilt where the content not only tries to match the lore of the game but also the look of the base game. The only graphical mods I ever use anymore are slightly increased draw distance, adding a bit of depth of field blur, and maybe futzing with the lighting in the game to be a bit less bright to make dungeon/castle/home interiors/nights moodier and to give torches and the light and nighteye spells some use.
Yeah I'm extra picky with my Morrowind aesthetic, because it's very much it own weird alien thing. Skyrim errs towards generic fantasy with snow/vikings in there (which is fine), and allows for more changes in how it's presented while keeping a similar feel. The province has been a core part of the Empire for a very long time in ways that Vvardenfell was not, and having non-viking stuff is more common due to those ties.
There are some really solid Morrowind graphics overhauls that I think capture the aesthetic well, but I know they've kind of morphed and taken different forms since I last used them. It sounds like OpenMW tries to be similar in that same vein, but I haven't played it myself to confirm/deny.
For OpenMW: it's more of a new engine/sourceport that enables better usage of modern tech/fixes some wonky engine bugs but largely it's still OG Morrowind. You can ofcourse fuck it right up with mods (I've got a way to modded OpenMW playthrough that's a bit visually incoherent, and one that's just engine/mesh tweaks and upresed textures)
It does have a few fairly significant graphics tweaks (water shaders, infinite draw distance), but yeah definitely not a full overhaul:
Improved rendering precision - the vanilla engine had precision issues that result in objects shaking when the player travels far from the world origin
Support normal, specular, and parallax texture maps (TextureModding)
Unclamped lighting (See TextureModding for info on enabling this option)
Support for all resolutions
Adjustable field of view
Anisotropic filtering
Improved sun flare rendering using hardware occlusion queries
New water shader featuring reflection and refraction effects
New terrain engine featuring seamless rendering and distant terrain
Support for OSG mesh / scene files as an alternative to the proprietary NIF format
Support for weapon sheathing, including dynamic quivers and scabbards
Ultimately yeah, still mostly just going to look like Morrowind for better and for worse. I found my old posts -- god damn it was 2013 -- and it looks like I was using Morrowind Overhaul for my last "make it pretty but keep the vanilla feel" run of Morrowind. Sadly the screeenshots have been purged from the forum and I know that overhaul doesn't really work anymore.
I think the modern successor is MGE XE, which looks pretty nice from the screenshots but I haven't taken it out for a spin myself.
Unlike Skyrim, I hate playing Morrowind with infinite draw distance. It looks like that mod is similar to Morrowind Overhaul and lets you keep the fog but pretties it up and lets you push it back as much as you what. Gotta have the fog for Morrowind atmosphere.
Not just atmosphere but the game was literally designed around having the fog (probably because of hardware limitations) so you are tricked into thinking the world is bigger than it is. Like, you might only travel 1 mile as the crow flies but you really walked 3 miles in switchbacks, and since you can't see the destination from the starting point and vice versa you feel like you made a longer journey than you really did. Push the fog back too much and it's like, "oh, it's right over that hill!" and then you cast jump/levitate and get there in two seconds
Yeah, exactly. They changed their world design for Oblivion and Skyrim and it shows.
Morrowind when it came out was the prettiest and most immersive game I'd ever played. It felt fucking huge in a way no 3D game ever had. But strip away the fog, and there are places you can see across the entire island. You've got the red mountain in the center of course, but aside from that it's pretty damn easy to see across the world on a small hill. Oblivion and Skyrim use elevation to keep towns feeling more separate and distinct in ways that Morrowind just didn't have to because of the technical limitations -- stripping away the fog in 2002 would have wrecked any consumer PC at the time.
I was looking at the OpenMW page and this screenshot illustrates it perfectly:
My gut reaction is "What the fuck? Balmora isn't a seaside town!"
Well dammit yeah it's actually like 300 meters away from the sea. But at no point in all of my time in Morrowind did it ever feel like a seaside town -- it's not supposed to be a seaside town in the world:
But strip away the fog and suddenly it's Balmora By The Sea. It's honestly neat how much the fog makes it feel like a completely different place. Luckily the big graphics overhauls recognize this now -- the fog is prettier and can be pushed back further (the default max is pretty low) -- but not so much that it removes the sense of scale from the world.
The only mods I ever dislike are the ones I look for for one specific thing, but then add something random for no fucking reason.
Y'know something like "This mod adds a variety of dogs to Skyrim". Awesome, cool, just what I wa- "also adds infinite money". God damn it!
At a friends recommendation, I downloaded the Nordic Music Overhaul (its name escapes me), and I do enjoy the jarring, but very different, traditional Scandinavian folk instrument soundtrack.
I'm less happy with the fact that it replaces all the UI sound ques--for example, leveling up--with weird Scandinavian throat vocals. And this is the less invasive version, apparently. I might have to drop it for that.
Art asset changes--"Change this set of clothing so it's not so fucking ugly"--or art asset additions--"Add weapons that don't look like shit"--are pretty straightforward. I didn't consider Skyrim a particularly good-looking game, especially in terms of concrete object modeling, when it was new. Even by western developer standards. Much less eleven years later. Your mileage will vary.
I would say that the modding hole gets a great deal wider with mods that may, or may not, alter the game's artistic assets, but instead change fundamental control or UI aspects. SkyUI--the user interface revamp--is practically a universal recommendation if playing the game on PC or Xbox One. Unlike a litany of glitches that existed at the game's release (Alva, part of the vampire conspiracy to infiltrate Morthal, isn't actually hostile to you or any other denizens of Morthal, and will attack her fellow vampires--I just completed that quest in my most recent playthrough on the way to Solitude), the original inventory management UI was completely usable, just rather awkward and slow for PC users.
Or take the oft-recommended True Directional Movement mod, which effectively completely alters movement, automatic camera control, and by extension combat, from a fixed third-person camera to a third-person tracking camera like something you'd see from Fromsoftware or Shadows of Mordor, etc. Obviously the game was playable with these classic Elder Scrolls third-person camera rules; I played through it multiple times as such. But it does practically remake the game so long as you're in third person (if you even play the game from third person), without changing a single art asset except components of the HUD. It requires things like the Skyrim Script Extender, which has no player-side art assets on it, and if you weren't looking for it, you might never realize it was running. It's still a mod, and a contender for "the single most important mod in Skyrim, possibly the most modded game in history or at least since Doom," it's just the infrastructure layer you can't see.
Despite having basically changed all the urban geography of Skyrim, not to mention all of the flora, I don't think I'd ever make use of one of the many "Play Skyrim in the summer/the autumn/in a tropical biome" mods. The incongruity is a problem; but considering how many times I've played Skyrim, I can see why they'd appeal to people.
The only mods I ever dislike are the ones I look for for one specific thing, but then add something random for no fucking reason.
Y'know something like "This mod adds a variety of dogs to Skyrim". Awesome, cool, just what I wa- "also adds infinite money". God damn it!
At a friends recommendation, I downloaded the Nordic Music Overhaul (its name escapes me), and I do enjoy the jarring, but very different, traditional Scandinavian folk instrument soundtrack.
I'm less happy with the fact that it replaces all the UI sound ques--for example, leveling up--with weird Scandinavian throat vocals. And this is the less invasive version, apparently. I might have to drop it for that.
Art asset changes--"Change this set of clothing so it's not so fucking ugly"--or art asset additions--"Add weapons that don't look like shit"--are pretty straightforward. I didn't consider Skyrim a good-looking game, especially in terms of concrete object modeling, when it was new, much less eleven years later. Your mileage will vary.
I would say that the modding hole gets a great deal wider with mods that may, or may not, alter the game's artistic assets, but instead change fundamental control or UI aspects. SkyUI--the user interface revamp--is practically a universal recommendation if playing the game on PC or Xbox One. Unlike a litany of glitches that existed at the game's release (Alva, part of the vampire conspiracy to infiltrate Morthal, isn't actually hostile to you or any other denizens of Morthal, and will attack her fellow vampires--I just completed that quest in my most recent playthrough on the way to Solitude), the original inventory management UI was completely usable, just rather awkward and slow for PC users.
Or take the oft-recommended True Directional Movement mod, which effectively completely alters movement, automatic camera control, and by extension combat, from a fixed third-person camera to a third-person tracking camera like something you'd see from Fromsoftware or Shadows of Mordor, etc. Obviously the game was playable with these classic Elder Scrolls third-person camera rules; I played through it multiple times as such. But it does practically remake the game so long as you're in third person (if you even play the game from third person), without changing a single art asset except components of the HUD.
Despite having basically changed all the urban geography of Skyrim, not to mention all of the flora, I don't think I'd ever make use of one of the many "Play Skyrim in the summer/the autumn/in a tropical biome" mods. The incongruity is a problem; but considering how many times I've played Skyrim, I can see why they'd appeal to people.
I agree! I do think Skyrim looked solid in 2011, but even then it had obvious limitations that the modding community dealt with with enthusiasm.
It's now over 10 years old and has received some nice official updates, but has more things that can be improved by mods than I can count. Gameplay, graphics, sound. The idea of Skyrim as a kind of holistic vision magnum opus that should not be altered is....totally new to me.
I say that as someone who doesn't think Bethesda games are bad at launch without mods. They're unique and fun and there's a reason they've become so popular. Ultimately it's a niche that no one at the same level quite fills in the same way, and as such I love playing them. But the warts are obvious and grow more obvious the more you play, and this is a series where the developers specifically encourage their players to go wild with their creation kit and change/fix/improve whatever they want. These games are on my all time favorite lists, but being able to mod out the more glaring issues or implement some in depth system you had never dreamed of are core to that with the latter entries in particular.
I never thought I would experience the sense of wonder and joy I'm having wandering around Skyrim now in 2022, but it's real! It looks so great and has so many cool new systems and spells -- balanced better than the vanilla spell system was by far -- it's just a completely fresh feeling experience while still being tethered to the Good Stuff that was in the game to start.
And the beauty is you get to pick what you want! I went 1000 mods pack because being able to install 1000 mods with 4 buttons and have it be stable sounded like some kind of miracle to me. Even that can be tweaked and molded to what you want. Don't like a texture? It's cool there's a check box for that. I love 95% of the stuff in this, but spent my time tweaking settings in MCM and sawing off some of the rougher edges I don't like (having 30 carry capacity and main quest on timer just isn't for me). If your vision of skyrim is "absolutely no changes to the aesthetic", hell there are modpacks that fix some of the bad up res-ing that Bethesda did to their own textures in SKSE while saving you tons of VRAM.
Sure. If I were only playing Bethesda games for the last one or two years, I would probably be one of those people using the mod compilation packs (and even just in the last year, I regularly forgot to consider how all my interior lighting mod fucks with every single altered indoor space in the game, and the need for compatibility packs for that in turn).
As it stands, I don't think I'd ever consider using them. I actually stripped out all the cell data for one mod, because it was a requirement for another mod (Convenient Horses post-AE release, I think?), but I didn't want the house the earlier mod was making adjustments to. No, I don't give a crap about it, why would I ever want to live two minutes down the road from Whiterun when I could just live in Whiterun? I had another mod that actually added something worth a crap to that space! So I refused to install that house DLC, so I stripped out the mod, so I could get everything working.
I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. I remember jumping into the mod scene for Oblivion back when people were trying to figure out how the skeleton rigging worked, before Nexus even put out their original mod manager; I remember the original Skyrim armor mods were just conversions of bad-ass kits from Oblivion with unfortunate things like holes in the back of the meshes.
Haha yeah that's totally understandable. My normal approach is granular and picking exactly what mods I want and don't. I still did quite a lot of that with this modpack, and yeah I removed a mod that the documentation says "no don't remove this use a console command to disable it instead" and I wound up with "mysterious crashing" that was entirely my fault (who reads the manual?)
I decided to just kind of give in to someone else's vision -- there are so damn many little patches to make these 15 spell mods play nice together that I could never pull off on my own -- and I've liked it, but have still stripped out stuff I disagree with because their vision has flaws just like Bethesda's.
Edit: It's also just nice to be surprised again sometimes. I discovered a druid spell through my spell research that turns corpses into harvestable plants, and it's delightful. I have a channeled wind gust spell that that has a chance to blow enemies away, a DoT life/magicka drain, and some freaky void spell that creates void orbs on the ground that synergize with other void spells.
Despite having basically changed all the urban geography of Skyrim, not to mention all of the flora, I don't think I'd ever make use of one of the many "Play Skyrim in the summer/the autumn/in a tropical biome" mods. The incongruity is a problem; but considering how many times I've played Skyrim, I can see why they'd appeal to people.
Oh yeah, definitely this. I remember years ago now, one of the most common recommendations for Morrowind was a mod that overhauled all the flora in the game and added more pretty trees and weeping willows and such, and it basically made the place a jungle/swamp that was unrecognizable from the alien, mushroomy, dead/decaying weird land that it's meant to be.
I know there's a natural inclination to want to see more trees or bushes here and there, but that's not what Morrowind is like.
Despite having basically changed all the urban geography of Skyrim, not to mention all of the flora, I don't think I'd ever make use of one of the many "Play Skyrim in the summer/the autumn/in a tropical biome" mods. The incongruity is a problem; but considering how many times I've played Skyrim, I can see why they'd appeal to people.
Oh yeah, definitely this. I remember years ago now, one of the most common recommendations for Morrowind was a mod that overhauled all the flora in the game and added more pretty trees and weeping willows and such, and it basically made the place a jungle/swamp that was unrecognizable from the alien, mushroomy, dead/decaying weird land that it's meant to be.
I know there's a natural inclination to want to see more trees or bushes here and there, but that's not what Morrowind is like.
That's actually one of the "kitchen sink" mods I was picturing in my head earlier. The early Morrowind graphics overhauls were....rough.
I will admit that I once installed a mod to turn the Ashlands in Morrowind to grassland, but it's because the Ashlands behind Ghostgate were fucking terrifying as a 13-14 year old with how atmospheric the game felt at the time. I eventually conquered my fear of the freaky Sleepers and blight storms and such enough to remove it.
Despite having basically changed all the urban geography of Skyrim, not to mention all of the flora, I don't think I'd ever make use of one of the many "Play Skyrim in the summer/the autumn/in a tropical biome" mods. The incongruity is a problem; but considering how many times I've played Skyrim, I can see why they'd appeal to people.
Oh yeah, definitely this. I remember years ago now, one of the most common recommendations for Morrowind was a mod that overhauled all the flora in the game and added more pretty trees and weeping willows and such, and it basically made the place a jungle/swamp that was unrecognizable from the alien, mushroomy, dead/decaying weird land that it's meant to be.
I know there's a natural inclination to want to see more trees or bushes here and there, but that's not what Morrowind is like.
That's actually one of the "kitchen sink" mods I was picturing in my head earlier. The early Morrowind graphics overhauls were....rough.
I will admit that I once installed a mod to turn the Ashlands in Morrowind to grassland, but it's because the Ashlands behind Ghostgate were fucking terrifying as a 13-14 year old with how atmospheric the game felt at the time. I eventually conquered my fear of the freaky Sleepers and blight storms and such enough to remove it.
It's a testament to the writing and ability to set the atmosphere that I was terrified of going past the Ghostgate and Blight in general when I was playing after the original release. Blasted hellscape settings were really rare back then.
On a related note, I remember an occasion where my college roommate had to look outside the window to figure out if it was storming outside or just in my game.
It's a testament to the writing and ability to set the atmosphere that I was terrified of going past the Ghostgate and Blight in general when I was playing after the original release.
I like how the very first Tribal Temple quest has you dip your toe in there for just a second.
It reminds me of that one secret shortcut in Super Mario World that gave you a sneak peak of the Valley of Bowser from Donut Plains.
Posts
I'm not much more tolerant of graphical incongruities than you, but there are plenty of mods that have little to no visual impact. I honestly recoil in disgust at the thought of playing Skyrim without SPERG or something similar to fix the stupidities in the leveling/perks systems.
Not me, I go for the full graphics overhaul, with 10k textures and HDRIP graphics every time. Just because the game was made 20 years ago doesn't mean it had to look it.
Whereas I actually like how Morrowind looks and don't want to change it, so any mods I download must at least mostly match the general vibe of base Morrowind's texture resolution and model poly counts. Artistically they should as well, I don't want to see some fuckin anime bullshit armor or hairstyles.
Really I just want mods to be like Tamriel Rebuilt where the content not only tries to match the lore of the game but also the look of the base game. The only graphical mods I ever use anymore are slightly increased draw distance, adding a bit of depth of field blur, and maybe futzing with the lighting in the game to be a bit less bright to make dungeon/castle/home interiors/nights moodier and to give torches and the light and nighteye spells some use.
Yeah, the quality of modding in skyrim at the top end is just incredibly high and as such I disagree with that view of modding. There are visual overhauls that are remarkably consistent and just look dramatically better than the base game now. If you think every texture/visual overhaul is inconsistent like that, you're out of date! They exist, but man that's definitely not representative of the current modding scene in Skyrim.
That's the benefit of the game being out for 11 years! It's just silly at the top end, and you have modders and mod teams now that have spent more time on the game than the original team did. It's not one person making 1000 mods -- it's 1000 people each making a mod or part of a mod that they're passionate about and specialized in. The good visual design mods have teams that co-ordinate style just like Bethesda's teams do.
That's not to disrespect Bethesda! They did a great job. I was reading the Morrowind oral history that was posted here awhile back (it's amazing) and one of the artists comments on this specifically. He said he's not upset at people replacing his original vision -- pointing out that the modder artists just have dramatically more time than they did and a good artist who loves the game + more time is just better in the end. People love these games, and there are tons of talented modders that care about the "feel" of the base game too.
One example of modding quality is that the modpack I mentioned includes lots of high quality quest packs and and NPC mods. The voice acting is substantially better than Bethesda's across the board. It's not what I expected back when Oblivion went full voice acting, but the good mods just have much better voice acting in Skyrim now. Not every quest pack that exists does, but curators are spoiled for choice with the incredibly robust Skyrim modding scene and can pick and choose the standouts. That's what I'm playing -- not a mishmash of whatever incongruous stuff someone can slam in there just to change for changes sake. I've been modding the hell out of TES since Morrowind -- those wacky kitchen sink mod packs exist! I don't enjoy them, and there are plenty of cohesive mods and modpacks that are true to the vision of the original game while managing to improve it substantially.
Y'know something like "This mod adds a variety of dogs to Skyrim". Awesome, cool, just what I wa- "also adds infinite money". God damn it!
Yeah this drives me nuts. YOU CAN MAKE 2 MODS people!
Like the amount of times that I’ve deleted mods because they change random unrelated shit…
“Oh this mod adds a few cool looking ruins around, and also adds level 25 packs of unlevelscaled murderwolves to some areas.” “Oh this adds a cool gun, but also changes the scaling of vanilla grenades and adds a hat that doesn’t play nice with another mod I have that changes armor balance”
Like if you want to make a bunch of mod that adds a sword and changes a vanilla quest and rebalances and adds new trolls be my guest, but for fucks sake don’t package them all in one esp (especially if they aren’t at all related to or depend on each other) because I probably already have mods that touch those areas and im just not going to use it.
Oh uh...my mini-rant about low contrast beams, deep shadow shingles and comparatively less-dark stone walls was specifically about your screenshot last page. It felt like a kitchen sink situation.
I looked up the Librum pack and went through their site to see other screenshots, and this gate just looked so...I don't know, artificial, clean, out of place:
Again I think it's the rock blocks being high contrast, very light and very dark, and too small/repeated.
Sorry, I'm not trying to be Captain Bring-Down or be mean to anyone. It's of course perfectly acceptable to enjoy whatever mods you enjoy! I just saw those shots and it struck me as another reason why I tend not to mod.
I would rather 1 person make 1000 mods than 1000 people each make 1 mod, because that one guy is probably going to deliver consistent work in his own style. I might actually enjoy a total overhaul mod if everything looked consistent and also artistically correct/balanced.
The only mods I've tended to use are SkyUI, one that marks the location of every stone of Barenziah, and (in Morrowind) unlimited draw distance. One of my favorite times with Skyrim though was playing through on the Switch where there wasn't even any capability of modding.
(feel free to apply this to any of the above posts)
The shingles on a house....can be darker than the walls? I'll admit I don't see what you're seeing at all. It's a house made up of different materials....you're describing shadows on the house?
From the same screenshot:
The top is bright! Because there are no shadows hitting that part of the house. The parts that are in the shade from other parts of the village are shadowed, and darker....because that's how shadows work. The differences in lighting are all lighting effects, not the texture. If you turn off the EnB, you get a flat, brighter texture without lighting variance on the shingles. My screenshot was taken on a mostly foggy day with the sun peaking through the clouds -- you get areas that are quite bright (high contrast to use your language) where the sun hits, and areas that are quite dark where it does not because of the lighting and ambient occlusion. The sun is very bright, and when it peaks through the clouds at a few spots on an otherwise dark and gloomy day you get very high "contrast" if you want to put it that way. I'm looking out at my back yard right now and it checks out! The "deep shadow shingles and comparatively less-dark stone walls" are because you edited out the parts of the screenshot where parts of the tiles are brighter than the stone wall.
Same house at a different time of day:
Now most of shingled area is very bright because it is receiving direct sunshine (still cloudy day with sun peaking through the clouds) The left side of the house is now much brighter to match, again due to sun location, and the lower parts dark because they are underneath the roof. Sunshine gives you bright brights and dark darks on days like that -- high contrast just like in reality.
Same house at the same time/weather conditions with default skyrim lighting that relies heavily on fake non-sun light sources in the day:
Now it's neon bright because the game by default doesn't care about the sun much. It's still a foggy day where most of this shouldn't be lit up, but the fake light sources strewn about largely overpower the sun. The texture looks pretty blah in this context and I would probably go with the default, but it's made to be used alongside mods that give the game more realistic lighting. It also shows that without the effect of proper lighting that uses the sun instead of fake light sources, the "deep shadow shingles" you're describing are actually brighter than the stone wall. The relative darkness you commented on originally is because that's how actual lighting that uses a sun as its light source works.
The second screenshot you just posted is on a vibrant, bright, and sunny day. It's bright and sunny, and it glistens as a result. Yeah it's a clean texture, if you think it should be a bit "dirtier" for realism I won't really argue that (it's personal preference given that there is a glistening white tower in Cyrodiil we can point to in the lore to prove it's not impossible in the setting at least). But if I take a screenshot of that location on a foggy day, it will be...not at all bright and vibrant. The weather changes are dramatic with mods. It's not a texture thing, it's a lighting/shader thing. Because it actually makes the game use "real" light sources instead of a bunch of inserted fake lights that give you more consistent textures.
A big issue I have using graphic overhauls for games as old as Morrowind and Oblivion is that they don't change how crude the animations are. Having even base Skyrim level graphics in the previous games would be weird given how wooden all the movement was. The jump in how more alive everything looked when I wrapped up the Oblivion replay and jumped into Skyrim was staggering.
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Yeah I'm extra picky with my Morrowind aesthetic, because it's very much it own weird alien thing. Skyrim errs towards generic fantasy with snow/vikings in there (which is fine), and allows for more changes in how it's presented while keeping a similar feel. The province has been a core part of the Empire for a very long time in ways that Vvardenfell was not, and having non-viking stuff is more common due to those ties.
There are some really solid Morrowind graphics overhauls that I think capture the aesthetic well, but I know they've kind of morphed and taken different forms since I last used them. It sounds like OpenMW tries to be similar in that same vein, but I haven't played it myself to confirm/deny.
I mean the shingle texture itself has very dark baked-in shadows that clash with the more natural, less harsh lighting of the surrounding textures. In the light the shadows are pitch black, and in the shade the shadows are pitch black. It looks like a photo of shingles taken on a really sunny day with the contrast cranked to make the shadows dramatic, which doesn't work on foggy Skyrim days. Most textures are not so high contrast in order to allow the engine's lighting to take over and provide that effect if necessary. Also, similar to what I mentioned about the other screenshot I posted, it feels very high-res, shrunk down and tiled more often, so it stands out when compared to the surrounding environment.
Trying to explain what I mean about contrast...I'm not an art expert, but here's something:
The stone wall has a nice bell curve of light levels. Some darks, more midtones, and then some lights. But with the roof texture, you can see it has a lot of very dark colors (which the stone wall lacks), then actually dips down and doesn't have as many midtones, before rising back up on the lighter side. It has an explicit separation of dark tones from light tones with less middle, so visually it feels more striking and doesn't fit the scene as well.
To be honest, it immediately gave me memories of Turok:
Not to invoke the comparison of terrible old graphics, but in terms of having straight, perfect walls with very repetitive texturing that immediately draw your eye to them. I think it would feel just as jarring with fog in front of it.
edit: I was misreading your tool, and will admit I've never used it before.
The stuff you're talking about again just seems to be lighting? Run that same tool on my screenshot without the lighting mods. The lighting on the roof texture is different because the sun is hitting it at a different angle.
The texture is brighter than the stone wall with Skyrim's base lighting, and darker in my screenshot because it's using the sun as a light source. The texture isn't receiving "special lighting" -- it's just how it looks when it is hit by the sun at the angle it is. I posted 3 screenshots that show that that section of the roof looks dramatically different based on time of day.
Same U-shape (notice the tall line of solid black at the beginning), and same very looooong U-shape. The texture just lacks midtones which makes it feel at odds with the other textures in the scene that produce more of a bell curve -- because they were designed to be neutral and allow the lighting of the engine to modify their light and darkness.
Sorry again, I know this is really specific and not something likely to bother other people as much as it might for me. And I'm not trying to target you specifically Fiatl, I don't have anything against you, just explaining my reasoning.
Haha you know what, fair enough.
I'll admit that I think the end result is better -- make the light source do the lighting, not the texture. Turok has shit lighting, so yeah it looks shit. The EnB has really good lighting, and I think the end result looks fantastic. The same section looks dramatically different based on time of day and weather in ways that it does not with the base lighting. That makes me happy, and makes me stop and go "ohh dat pretty." I was walking around at the start for awhile and was like "huh does the EnB make it gloomy all of the time?" And no, it's really bright on bright days that make my sunshine and bright colors loving self happy on bright days, and really foggy and atmospheric and gloomy on days where the weather is such in ways that the base game doesn't. With the base lighting, that modded roof texture clashes horribly with the default skyrim texture that has "baked in" lighting. With the modded lighting, I think they blend well enough and ultimately look really good in my eyes.
I guess you saying it was "kitchen sink" kind of threw me off. It's consistent with the way they do their lighting. It's not a mishmash of crazy different fantasy styles, but yeah I'll admit some of the new textures are different in nature to the old because of how they're built to use the revised lighting. I think the bridge you linked looks great for a bright sunny day, and from what I've seen would look very dark and gloomey if the weather were different. The sun provides lots of contrast like that, and the lighting mods that move towards using "real" lighting sources (sun, candles, torches) gives you those same contrasts.
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edit: I misunderstood the question and my response was wrong.
They are baked into the texture, but so are plenty of other shadows everywhere else. The behavior of engine lighting depends on the brightness of any given part of a texture, but also shaders. For example if you had a pitch black piece of metal or onyx, it should be reflective and won't be black across the whole surface, but you're also not seeing any extra detail in the texture itself that's not already there. However, if the shadows are not too dark, then that area can be illuminated.
It's something you encounter a lot with Photoshop/photo editing, if dark areas are just too dark then no amount of cranking up the brightness/altering the levels will reveal more detail, black will just stay black.
Here's an imperial fort texture, I think from the Special Edition:
Notice how it's pretty evenly lit, with few dark areas. Obviously there are shadows/shading of parts of the stone that should be darker than others, but it's very neutral overall. So when it's not lit by the engine it will be pretty pitch black, but when lit there is detail to see there. The engine decides if there's a cutoff, like "everything darker than X should be crushed, but if the player has a harsh light source like a torch then show the detail that would normally be hidden."
Respectfully, and without having examined all the textures in the game or anything, I think it's the opposite. Like the example above, the artists tried to keep things neutral so that the engine could do the heavy lifting on lighting, even if their game wasn't yet on the level of modern ENB effects. It's why the game can still look pretty good with its base textures plus modern lighting systems.
That's my criticism of the work of some modders, who might say "alright this is a nice higher res texture of a medieval roof / basket weave / stone wall, moving on," without realizing it was a photo with crushed blacks that isn't suited to the way the rest of the textures were designed.
You're right -- I had the description of the texture sets flipped. The graphs threw me for a loop but yeah ultimately you are correct that the modded texture has baked in shadows to try to make a 2D texture representing a 3D surface (tiled roof) look more 3D.
I got lost a little bit in the forest while the discussion had moved to a careful study of one of the trees. My definition of "fits the style" differs -- to me that looks like a roof that is right at home in Skyrim and doesn't clash with the style of the other roofs in a meaningful way. But you are correct that it has baked in shadows to try to emulate a 3D look, and my prior post had it flipped.
I know I harped on this one texture like c'mon man, is it really that important, but for me it's emblematic of a lot of mods I've seen, and could pick out other examples along those lines across the modding scene. Some textures might use a less neutral color temperature so they don't quite fit into as many contexts as the base textures do (again, you want to let the engine do the heavy lifting on tinting things warm or cool, etc.).
First off, JPSteel2 (COTN guy) released his next thing, Northern Roads:
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/77530
It's being very well recieved, and is....very large in scope to say nothing else. In addition to that, there's already a patch hub.
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/77386
I had literally nothing to do with either of these, but I feel good about their success because they're being worked on/made by friends of mine, and most of the beta testing/patch work happened on a discord server that I made so I feel a weird sort of pride because of that?
In other news, I have a very, VERY early peek at something I'm working on which there's still plenty of things wrong with this video, but....
....it works
Enjoy my keyboard clicks
For OpenMW: it's more of a new engine/sourceport that enables better usage of modern tech/fixes some wonky engine bugs but largely it's still OG Morrowind. You can ofcourse fuck it right up with mods (I've got a way to modded OpenMW playthrough that's a bit visually incoherent, and one that's just engine/mesh tweaks and upresed textures)
Want to play co-op games? Feel free to hit me up!
There is a texture pack I used for awhile that isn't any higher res or anything, but it remade all the game's textures in a watercolor painting style. Not super obvious in screenshots, and even in-game it was a bit more noticeable but it was still pretty subtle, and it fit the feel of the game pretty well imo
It does have a few fairly significant graphics tweaks (water shaders, infinite draw distance), but yeah definitely not a full overhaul:
Improved rendering precision - the vanilla engine had precision issues that result in objects shaking when the player travels far from the world origin
Support normal, specular, and parallax texture maps (TextureModding)
Unclamped lighting (See TextureModding for info on enabling this option)
Support for all resolutions
Adjustable field of view
Anisotropic filtering
Improved sun flare rendering using hardware occlusion queries
New water shader featuring reflection and refraction effects
New terrain engine featuring seamless rendering and distant terrain
Support for OSG mesh / scene files as an alternative to the proprietary NIF format
Support for weapon sheathing, including dynamic quivers and scabbards
Ultimately yeah, still mostly just going to look like Morrowind for better and for worse. I found my old posts -- god damn it was 2013 -- and it looks like I was using Morrowind Overhaul for my last "make it pretty but keep the vanilla feel" run of Morrowind. Sadly the screeenshots have been purged from the forum and I know that overhaul doesn't really work anymore.
I think the modern successor is MGE XE, which looks pretty nice from the screenshots but I haven't taken it out for a spin myself.
Unlike Skyrim, I hate playing Morrowind with infinite draw distance. It looks like that mod is similar to Morrowind Overhaul and lets you keep the fog but pretties it up and lets you push it back as much as you what. Gotta have the fog for Morrowind atmosphere.
Not just atmosphere but the game was literally designed around having the fog (probably because of hardware limitations) so you are tricked into thinking the world is bigger than it is. Like, you might only travel 1 mile as the crow flies but you really walked 3 miles in switchbacks, and since you can't see the destination from the starting point and vice versa you feel like you made a longer journey than you really did. Push the fog back too much and it's like, "oh, it's right over that hill!" and then you cast jump/levitate and get there in two seconds
Yeah, when I turned off the fog (for being annoying and, on my old-but-still-beefier-than-an-XBOX PC, unnecessary), the "amusement park" scale of the world became apparent almost immediately.
Yeah, exactly. They changed their world design for Oblivion and Skyrim and it shows.
Morrowind when it came out was the prettiest and most immersive game I'd ever played. It felt fucking huge in a way no 3D game ever had. But strip away the fog, and there are places you can see across the entire island. You've got the red mountain in the center of course, but aside from that it's pretty damn easy to see across the world on a small hill. Oblivion and Skyrim use elevation to keep towns feeling more separate and distinct in ways that Morrowind just didn't have to because of the technical limitations -- stripping away the fog in 2002 would have wrecked any consumer PC at the time.
I was looking at the OpenMW page and this screenshot illustrates it perfectly:
My gut reaction is "What the fuck? Balmora isn't a seaside town!"
Well dammit yeah it's actually like 300 meters away from the sea. But at no point in all of my time in Morrowind did it ever feel like a seaside town -- it's not supposed to be a seaside town in the world:
But strip away the fog and suddenly it's Balmora By The Sea. It's honestly neat how much the fog makes it feel like a completely different place. Luckily the big graphics overhauls recognize this now -- the fog is prettier and can be pushed back further (the default max is pretty low) -- but not so much that it removes the sense of scale from the world.
At a friends recommendation, I downloaded the Nordic Music Overhaul (its name escapes me), and I do enjoy the jarring, but very different, traditional Scandinavian folk instrument soundtrack.
I'm less happy with the fact that it replaces all the UI sound ques--for example, leveling up--with weird Scandinavian throat vocals. And this is the less invasive version, apparently. I might have to drop it for that.
Art asset changes--"Change this set of clothing so it's not so fucking ugly"--or art asset additions--"Add weapons that don't look like shit"--are pretty straightforward. I didn't consider Skyrim a particularly good-looking game, especially in terms of concrete object modeling, when it was new. Even by western developer standards. Much less eleven years later. Your mileage will vary.
I would say that the modding hole gets a great deal wider with mods that may, or may not, alter the game's artistic assets, but instead change fundamental control or UI aspects. SkyUI--the user interface revamp--is practically a universal recommendation if playing the game on PC or Xbox One. Unlike a litany of glitches that existed at the game's release (Alva, part of the vampire conspiracy to infiltrate Morthal, isn't actually hostile to you or any other denizens of Morthal, and will attack her fellow vampires--I just completed that quest in my most recent playthrough on the way to Solitude), the original inventory management UI was completely usable, just rather awkward and slow for PC users.
Or take the oft-recommended True Directional Movement mod, which effectively completely alters movement, automatic camera control, and by extension combat, from a fixed third-person camera to a third-person tracking camera like something you'd see from Fromsoftware or Shadows of Mordor, etc. Obviously the game was playable with these classic Elder Scrolls third-person camera rules; I played through it multiple times as such. But it does practically remake the game so long as you're in third person (if you even play the game from third person), without changing a single art asset except components of the HUD. It requires things like the Skyrim Script Extender, which has no player-side art assets on it, and if you weren't looking for it, you might never realize it was running. It's still a mod, and a contender for "the single most important mod in Skyrim, possibly the most modded game in history or at least since Doom," it's just the infrastructure layer you can't see.
Despite having basically changed all the urban geography of Skyrim, not to mention all of the flora, I don't think I'd ever make use of one of the many "Play Skyrim in the summer/the autumn/in a tropical biome" mods. The incongruity is a problem; but considering how many times I've played Skyrim, I can see why they'd appeal to people.
I agree! I do think Skyrim looked solid in 2011, but even then it had obvious limitations that the modding community dealt with with enthusiasm.
It's now over 10 years old and has received some nice official updates, but has more things that can be improved by mods than I can count. Gameplay, graphics, sound. The idea of Skyrim as a kind of holistic vision magnum opus that should not be altered is....totally new to me.
I say that as someone who doesn't think Bethesda games are bad at launch without mods. They're unique and fun and there's a reason they've become so popular. Ultimately it's a niche that no one at the same level quite fills in the same way, and as such I love playing them. But the warts are obvious and grow more obvious the more you play, and this is a series where the developers specifically encourage their players to go wild with their creation kit and change/fix/improve whatever they want. These games are on my all time favorite lists, but being able to mod out the more glaring issues or implement some in depth system you had never dreamed of are core to that with the latter entries in particular.
I never thought I would experience the sense of wonder and joy I'm having wandering around Skyrim now in 2022, but it's real! It looks so great and has so many cool new systems and spells -- balanced better than the vanilla spell system was by far -- it's just a completely fresh feeling experience while still being tethered to the Good Stuff that was in the game to start.
And the beauty is you get to pick what you want! I went 1000 mods pack because being able to install 1000 mods with 4 buttons and have it be stable sounded like some kind of miracle to me. Even that can be tweaked and molded to what you want. Don't like a texture? It's cool there's a check box for that. I love 95% of the stuff in this, but spent my time tweaking settings in MCM and sawing off some of the rougher edges I don't like (having 30 carry capacity and main quest on timer just isn't for me). If your vision of skyrim is "absolutely no changes to the aesthetic", hell there are modpacks that fix some of the bad up res-ing that Bethesda did to their own textures in SKSE while saving you tons of VRAM.
As it stands, I don't think I'd ever consider using them. I actually stripped out all the cell data for one mod, because it was a requirement for another mod (Convenient Horses post-AE release, I think?), but I didn't want the house the earlier mod was making adjustments to. No, I don't give a crap about it, why would I ever want to live two minutes down the road from Whiterun when I could just live in Whiterun? I had another mod that actually added something worth a crap to that space! So I refused to install that house DLC, so I stripped out the mod, so I could get everything working.
I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. I remember jumping into the mod scene for Oblivion back when people were trying to figure out how the skeleton rigging worked, before Nexus even put out their original mod manager; I remember the original Skyrim armor mods were just conversions of bad-ass kits from Oblivion with unfortunate things like holes in the back of the meshes.
I decided to just kind of give in to someone else's vision -- there are so damn many little patches to make these 15 spell mods play nice together that I could never pull off on my own -- and I've liked it, but have still stripped out stuff I disagree with because their vision has flaws just like Bethesda's.
Edit: It's also just nice to be surprised again sometimes. I discovered a druid spell through my spell research that turns corpses into harvestable plants, and it's delightful. I have a channeled wind gust spell that that has a chance to blow enemies away, a DoT life/magicka drain, and some freaky void spell that creates void orbs on the ground that synergize with other void spells.
Oh yeah, definitely this. I remember years ago now, one of the most common recommendations for Morrowind was a mod that overhauled all the flora in the game and added more pretty trees and weeping willows and such, and it basically made the place a jungle/swamp that was unrecognizable from the alien, mushroomy, dead/decaying weird land that it's meant to be.
I know there's a natural inclination to want to see more trees or bushes here and there, but that's not what Morrowind is like.
That's actually one of the "kitchen sink" mods I was picturing in my head earlier. The early Morrowind graphics overhauls were....rough.
I will admit that I once installed a mod to turn the Ashlands in Morrowind to grassland, but it's because the Ashlands behind Ghostgate were fucking terrifying as a 13-14 year old with how atmospheric the game felt at the time. I eventually conquered my fear of the freaky Sleepers and blight storms and such enough to remove it.
It's a testament to the writing and ability to set the atmosphere that I was terrified of going past the Ghostgate and Blight in general when I was playing after the original release. Blasted hellscape settings were really rare back then.
On a related note, I remember an occasion where my college roommate had to look outside the window to figure out if it was storming outside or just in my game.
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I like how the very first Tribal Temple quest has you dip your toe in there for just a second.
It reminds me of that one secret shortcut in Super Mario World that gave you a sneak peak of the Valley of Bowser from Donut Plains.