He's the favored pet of the Used car Salesman of HELL.

What did you expect? Fair play?!? ;D

He's marked as essential which means he cannot die. Even your companions will rarely die unless you deal the fatal blow (usually they just take a knee and the enemies ignore them until they get back up).

Bah, thats lame.

My last playthrough of Stalker spoiled me to these kind of things. You see, thats exactly one of the aspects where "traditional rpgs" are getting behind other games. Games like Stalker, Mount & Blade, Minecraft, Faster Than Light, Crusader Kings, etc. whose "emergent" envrionment makes it much more believable and free of artificial constraints like those. The irony is that the "trad rpg" is the genre that should nail this aspect in the head, much more so than any other. And yet it doesnt.

Companions that aren't essential -----> me going solo 99.99999% of the time. Because AI companions are STUPID about friendly fire - either trying to shoot through me, or, getting in my line of fire.

*shrug*

AI companions is why I use shock magic over fire/frost.

QFT. To prove: in Fallout 2, your companions, Marcus in particular, were dumber than a sack of hammers and had the nasty habit of shooting through one another, with very predictable results. Those in FNV (if you played in hardcore mode, which is actually worth it) were slightly less daft, but still daft (especially when it came to melee fighters, they were dumb enough to attempt suicidal things like soloing a deathclaw or wading into a pack of cazadores). And since Skyrim uses pretty much the same programming routines as FNV, imagine what can happen to your companions in Skyrim (yes, they sometimes do croak).

Thank god for mods to fix that, right? (And don't forget Ian from FO1, give him a 10mm SMG and watch him proceed to hit you more than the enemy).

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/14037

Last night I had a giant attack my Hearthfire house....

That was an unwelcome surprise.

Giants, wildlife, and bandits all can and will attack the house.

And giant's can't pass over the little pathway that can connect to patio wings making kiting them stupid easy. I got a Giant's Toe. I ate it.

Presumably after scraping the toe jam from under the nail.

What? No! That's the best part!

I followed it up by raiding my homes beehive and eating bees.

--

I tweaked some of my .ini preferences for Skyrim (go go PC) in order to improve the visual quality. I decided to do this after noticing a static image for the great Rift waterfalls. You can see some before/after changes. The change basically changes how many cells were loaded around the player. Loaded cells have their objects rendered rather than using a placeholder static.

Waterfall before tweak
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-GCOR8mPs...02-21_00001.jpg

Waterfall after tweak
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-9A5zg8CC...02-21_00003.jpg

You can see that the rearmost waterfall in the first image looks vastly different from the foreground waterfalls while it looks the same in the second image. The difference between waterfalls is far more drastic when observing them in game since the rearmost waterfall is a static image while the foreground is animated.

Before
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-xfH8aref...02-21_00002.jpg

After
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-R-iTKTTD...02-21_00004.jpg

Those two are about a 180 degree turn from looking at the waterfalls. The big thing is the number of objects that start to be defined. A nord barrow shows up more clearly near the bottom right across the river in the after image while it's just a tannish smudge in the original.

I had the option cranked up as high as it could go and be stable but I was having issues when looting bodies (everything else performance wise was fine) so I backed it down one step.

Well, this game is now down to around $20 on Steam so in principle I'd be OK with getting it and seeing if it will run on my Inspiron 15 laptop.

Good game? Worth getting?

I see that there is now a staggering amount of mods. Any that are recommended?

definately worth getting. Arguabley one of the best games i've ever played.


I don't mod so I don't know anything about that.

I enjoyed it, but yeah, the mods make all the difference. I spent a few hours searching Nexus, categorizing by most downloaded. I'd have to go back and look at which ones I got. I remember getting an upgraded werewolf one, new visuals, vendors have more cash. There's no 'argonians don't have mammaries' mod--I looked. That really bothered me.

Frankly, I got a lot more fun out of my Fallout mods. Even after forty hours of play, clown mask, chainsaw, and tripping on enough drugs to kill a horse just never gets old.

Well I played about 2 hours of vanilla Skyrim. I agree that it's a good game but much like you I really prefer Fallout New Vegas. I suppose that this is because for me, wandering the Nevada desert with a military pattern rifle exploring artifacts of the past is a real activity, so it's more interesting and real to me. In a sense Skyrim seems more like a typical sword and sorcery fantasy setting.

There were a few things that were jarring to me.

Regenerating health? Really? What is this, Call of Duty?

Apparently everyone in the world takes it for granted that my character, with no backstory or training to justify it, can just shoot lighting bolts from one hand. I had been surprised to find out that I could do it.


Anyway, I've been trying to get into mods but can't seem to successfully install FNIS at this stage. When I try to run the FNIS patch using Mod Organizer, the FNIS patcher opens up, and then I get an error message stating that 0_master.hkx behavior file can't be found. I've asked about it on Nexus Mods already, but it seems for the time being that I won't be able to use many mods till that issue is resolved.

What is strange is that Mod Organizer installed itself under Program Files in its own folder. 0Mmaster.hkx is present in the Mod Organizer folder, but it is not present in the Steam folder.

Maybe the default install for Mod Organizer is wrong? Do I need to uninstall it and then reinstall it so that it installs in the Skyrim folder in the Steam directory?

I appreciate that I could set up one game to be more realistic, with more weapon damage, exposure, etc. and set up a different one to be more high-fantasy.

What is FNIS?

Fores New Idles in Skyrim.

Apparently it is used by many mods. It basically allows modders to implement new behaviors or animations, in my understanding. It is on Nexus mods.

Interesting. Are you adding it via the Nexus Mod Manager, or are you doing it manually?

I was able to figure it out!

I have started using Mod Organizer which is superior to Nexus Mod Manager. Mod Organizer sets up a virtual directory to run mods off of so that you don't corrupt your vanilla Skyrim installation. It also makes it easy to prioritize the order in which mods are loaded in the event that one mod is dependent on another.

My problem before is that I had installed Mod Organzier to the wrong directory. It must be in the Skyrim folder to work.

Doing it manually seems like it would be a lot harder for sure.

Yeah. I did a few basic mods manually, but overall, I used the Mod Manager for everything. But then, I also shied away from those mods which required other mods. I troubleshoot enough during my day job, I don't need to do it again during my fun time

(Someone should probably remind me of that position as I play Kerbal Space Program though.)

I hear you. Years ago I used to be into PC retrogaming and part of the fun was getting old software to run. But nowadays I feel like I don't have time for that. Luckily Mod Organizer really makes it easier than it would be without it.

I was just reading about the Duel combat realism mod.

I realized that unlike firearms realism mod, there are very few people who have a realistic understanding of medieval hand to hand combat. Groups like ARMA literally worked for years to achieve current understandings based on historical manuscripts. As it turns out, for stuff like longsword or buckler and arming sword, the idea that you and your opponent swing at each other and try to dodge (people today involved with western martial arts call that the "sniping" approach) is really haphazard and doesn't work well. It's very hard to consistently be able to "win" at "sniping" if that's all you try to do. A lot of the technique involves using your weapon to control the other person's weapon, and/or integrating sweeps and throws into your use of the weapon.

When we get into the subject of armor, people know even less about that. I think only the really hardcore guys who spend thousands on suits of armor and train with them really understand it. How it affects your movement, how it affects the techniques available to you, and how well it protects you. We know from manuscripts that in Europe there are significantly different bodies of technique for fighting with or without armor.

My personal understanding is that if you're wearing full steel armor you should be extremely hard to injure in hand to hand combat. Someone would need to attack you with an anti-armor weapon like a maul to consistently get a good result. If someone wants to use a longsword they have to hit you in the head with the crossguard swinging it by the blade, or they have to use both hands to ram the tip of the sword between the articulations in your armor. So for a realism mod the idea that armor won't protect you a whole lot seems, well, unrealistic. I'd make it so that hits to armor do little or no damage but do stamina damage based on the weight of the weapon, unless the weapon is a maul type weapon in which case it can do both, or something like that. But I wouldn't just make it like Rainbow Six where getting hit by anything is devastating even if wearing armor.