The Elder Scrolls

[Microplastics In My Blood]

Why aren't there more Elder Scrolls (Skyrim) clones out on the market?

To make a proper Skyrim clone you would probably need a lot of capital and the games industry is currently (and for the past few years) on the hunt for the "live-service, endless font of money". Indie studios don't have the resources, studios that do are either on said live-service hunt/quick cash or if they aren't driven only by money, then they don't want to copy something successful and want to make something kind of new or what their studio typically makes. It's in this odd goldilocks zone of being too expensive but not profitable enough.

Also the game industry as a whole is retarded. Sony has the rights to Bloodbourne and they could easily have it ported over to PC, not even a remaster, just 60fps, and it would make them fuck tonnes of money. But they would rather it be a dead IP in their back pocket to sit on and do nothing with.

 

[StacticShock]

Why aren't there more Elder Scrolls (Skyrim) clones out on the market?

eh it's too much of a issue, like what are you going to take out of skyrim to put it in there? mods? storytelling? lore?
skyrim works in a very retarded way with all of it's concepts held together with spit and it works mostly because of it's lack of focus.
something all skyrim clones fail at, it's the same as minecraft clones failing miserably to replace minecraft or souls games failing to copy dark souls.

because at the end of the day, i already have skyrim and will always go back to it as the clone is missing something that skyrim has that i'm used to it.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

To make a proper Skyrim clone you would probably need a lot of capital and the games industry is currently (and for the past few years) on the hunt for the "live-service, endless font of money". Indie studios don't have the resources, studios that do are either on said live-service hunt/quick cash or if they aren't driven only by money, then they don't want to copy something successful and want to make something kind of new or what their studio typically makes. It's in this odd goldilocks zone of being too expensive but not profitable enough.

Also the game industry as a whole is retarded. Sony has the rights to Bloodbourne and they could easily have it ported over to PC, not even a remaster, just 60fps, and it would make them fuck tonnes of money. But they would rather it be a dead IP in their back pocket to sit on and do nothing with.

Dude, get over the whining about Bloodborne (also learn how to spell!)

Sony has shown the numbers, PC ports didn’t sell enough to justify the ports, so no more single-player Sony games are going to PC. The money isn’t there.

 

[Spooky Dogwood]

eh it's too much of a issue, like what are you going to take out of skyrim to put it in there? mods? storytelling? lore?

A new story, deeper mechanics, and better gameplay. I think the issue is game studios and most casual players don't really understand what makes "The Bethesda game" work in the first place. You'd be surprised how many people just lump "open world RPGs" together and act like The Witcher 3, or KCD, or Elden Ring are similar enough substitutes. So the question is "Why isn't anyone making Elder Scrolls ripoffs?" Maybe they think they already are.

 

[Microplastics In My Blood]

Dude, get over the whining about Bloodborne (also learn how to spell!)

Sony has shown the numbers, PC ports didn’t sell enough to justify the ports, so no more single-player Sony games are going to PC. The money isn’t there.

I was using Bloodborne as an example, I personally do not care one way or the other if it comes to PC or not. While yes, single-player games do account for a small amount of revenue as a percentage of Sony's earnings, we are still talking about over a billion dollars in income. So you have two options:

A/ Have a game that would earn them tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars and would easily cover the cost of porting it over.

B/ Do nothing and let the IP rot on a previous-gen console.

But yeah, porting over games to PC and generating free money is retarded. Sony is a sensible company that only spent hundreds of millions developing and marketing Concord and 3.6 billion to buy Bungie.

 

[CryptoHermit]

Jeremy McGuinn's Knights of Tamriel - Incredibly old quest mod got a recent update


A barebones Quest journal - Questman - Modern Quest Journal (OpenMW)


Devilish Touch of Madness (OpenMW) -
This is a long quest adventure based on skooma consumption induced visual and auditory hallucinations tied to the daedric prince Sheogorath and his artifact the Wabbajack.

Start the quest by talking to a skooma addict in Old Ebonheart in the alley behind "The Moth and Tiger"



Dynamic Sounds Phoenix - A new dynamic soundbank editor for OPENMW

Description

So you though this was over? No, Dynamic Sounds still lives, now reborn from ashes like a Phoenix. Now better than ever. Always with carefully chosen high quality sounds, some edited myself.

Dynamic sounds is a soundbank based system that adds and replaces many many sounds to the game. All dynamically using Lua. This means:

• you can install and uninstall the mod mid game without breaking it
• you can easily add your own sounds to any object, creature or just add ambient sounds, with zero knowledge of Lua or the TES Construction Set. If you are familiar to Dynamic Music or S3maphore, you will be right at home with this mod.
• Future proof. Any mod using objects covered by Dynamic Sounds or areas with the same general name ("Foo Cave", "Bar Ancestral Tomb", "Zeta Grotto" and so on) will automatically get the corresponding sounds out of the box.

Features
The mod is separated in two components.
Ambient and Object Sounds
You can pretty much add object or ambient sounds to anything (with some small restrictions), but along the months (or years), i implemented many of them, so you already have an out of the box solution, supporting the base game and dlc's, Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel (and a couple of other mods). The current mod implements the following:

• City Exterior ambient sounds, with some differences depending on the faction: Church bells, chicken cluking, dogs barking for Imperial, exotic temple chimes and sword training to depict the militaristic and faith oriented Redoran and magic chimes for Telvanni.
• Unique house Interior ambient sounds, from temples to smiths, from fighter's guild weapon training sounds to the mages guild book reading and alchemy workingm Telvanni houses with random wood creaks, taverns, apothecaries, Forts and more.
• Door exterior sounds. When close to doors from outside, you will hear the corresponding ambient sounds. Mainly inns and smiths at the moment, but easily extensible to other types of houses.
• Unique ambient sounds outside populated areas, with different sounds depending on the region. From the ominous sounds of the Ashlands to the bogs of the Bitter Coast, to the summer lands of the Grazelands, you will hear various types of birds near trees, insects buzzing around mushrooms and crawling on the sones, seagulls on some areas, ice cracking on glaciers, quakes on the Red Mountain, rock rumbling, sand debris and much more.
• Unique dungeon and cave sounds. Demonic sounds on Daedra Shrines, eerie sounds on Ancestral Tombs, water drippings on Grottos, ambient sounds on caves, deep metal and electrical related ambient sounds on Dwemer Ruins, custom sounds for Fort Ruins, Ayleid ruins, water dripping and rats crawling on Sewers and mine picking and carts moving on Mines. Some dungeon exits will also have sounds, like wind blowing.
• Interior and exterior weather effects. Different interior raining sounds depending on the construction type (stone, wood or cloth). The volume of the sounds are also adjusted to reflect this. The same for thunders and wind. Also, when you get close to the windows, you will hear rain or snow (depending on the weather) hitting the windows. On sand storms you will hear sand hitting your armor. Outside, tents will also flap or produce a sound when raining.
• Day/Night cycle support. For instance, crickets, owls and wolfs at night, daytime birds during the day. Quieter cities at night.
• The little things count to immerse yourself. Many, many sounds added to objects. Flags and banners flapping, boats creak (as well as other wooden structures), cauldrons boiling water, silent water fountains are no longer silent, metal chains rattle, crystals and portals emit sounds, ice and fire ingredients, bellows animation sounds, kwama eggs, and so on.

Creature Sounds
A separate module (enabled by default) deals with the creature sounds. Here are some of the highlights:

• A soundbank that allows you to easily add or replace creature sounds on any or every animation.
• Annoyed that many creatures share the same footstep? No more! Dremora finally sound like they are walking with heavy armor, instead of the original "bare foot". Big creatures now have proper sounding footsteps.
• Cliff Racers now play a flapping sound when flapping their winds. Originally there was none.
• Many creatures now play an aware/aggro/battle sound. When a creature starts combat it will play that sound.
• Many creatures now have a breathing loop sound
• Some creatures, like ice and fire atronach will also play a ice cracking or fire sound even after dead, to reflect what the animation is doing.
• Some Dagoth Ur and Vivec animations now have sounds
• All in all, many, many creatures sounds were changed, including the ones from Tamriel Rebuilt, Project Tamriel and OAAB.
• The best part, you can extend this with no knowledge of Lua. You just need to know the creature id and, if necessary, the animation name (you can do that easily by opening TES-CS and selecting the creature).

Great for Newcomers and Previous users alike

For newcomers, i suggest you check the features above. For users that at some point were using Dynamic Sounds before the mod disappeared, i'm happy to say that during that time the mod was being optimized and updated, so this version suffered an heavy code refactor and is now much improved, performance wise. On normal circumstances, you should no longer get a 1-2 second freeze when crossing cells. If you still do, it only should be happening on heavily populated zones when visiting for the first time after loading the game. After that, the data is cached and you should have no issues.

Also, all sounds are now in opus format for extreme reduced size at the same quality of the original wav files (from 237Mb to 57Mb). This theoretically means faster reading times and as consequence, much better performance loading the sounds.

And as always, i highly recommend you play around with the soundbanks and share your work. Improvement suggestions are also welcome.

TODO

• Improve city sounds (ideally, using dunmer mumblings instead of classic D&D town voices)
• Improve differences between cultures even more
• extend sounds based on biome instead of regions. This is already present on swap regions (playing swamp/tropical birds) and Solstheim playing tundra/snow birds, but it would be great to extend this
• finishing dungeon/caves exit sounds
• adding base sound replacement
• [Always WIP] tweaking sounds, frequency and volume
• [WIP] Adding more stuff

How to Install

Install like any other mod, but keep in mind that for performance reasons all sound files are inside a bsa archive.
This means you have to both enable dynamicsounds.bsa on the Archive Files section of the OpenMW launcher and enable DynamicSounds.omwscripts on the content files section.

 

[mnt_ms]

I've read that some of the sound mods add dog's barking to the Morrowind town's ambience.
After that, I gave up the idea of installing one.

 

[Snekposter]

Help! I've been struck by a sudden bout of madness and reinstalled Skyrim. I need recommendations on mods, specifically magic, combat, and perk, and most especially, bug fixes.

Loot and other items, while desired greatly, is secondary.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

Help! I've been struck by a sudden bout of madness and reinstalled Skyrim. I need recommendations on mods, specifically magic, combat, and perk, and most especially, bug fixes.

Loot and other items, while desired greatly, is secondary.

Just install Winds of the North.
A great vanilla-like modlist: upgrades any base game mechanics and not adding new ones.

 

[mnt_ms]

Out of all the Elder Scrolls games that I have played (Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim), Morrowind is my favorite one, and the one that I've spent most time playing.
However, I've recently realized, that I jerk a bit too much to it, without accepting some of it's flaws.
So, just to keep discussion going, I've decided to list some things that I hate about the game. No need to get offended over this - just me being mildly discontent with clouds.

Walking/running speed.
This is the reason why I will never play this game as a full mage Aldmer Atronach.
Sure, if you play for a bit, you'll be able to overcome this problem via scrolls/potions or raising your athletics and speed, but daaamn dis nigga slooow.

Running animation of humanoid races.
Some people I know say that I am a fucking furry. That's not true.
The first character that I ever created was either an Ork or a Nord, I don't remember precisely.
But what I do remember is that I did not choose to play as a a damn Pinnochio.
Yet, there he was, moving like some kinda deranged green wooden boy.
After seeing that, I decided that I would play as a cat-man.
I've never seen bipedal cats before, so even though he was still silly-looking, it was not the kind of silly you see in your everyday life.
Furthermore, they have high agility and acrobatic skill, which is important to me.
And yes, I know that there are plenty of animation mods nowadays, but I don't like to change the game that much.
So cat-man that is.

Situations where you can't properly use a skill without first raising it with a trainer.
The most fun I tend to have with this game is when I don't use trainers at all and don't purposefully train skills.
Like, for example, sneaking into a wall for an hour, or running around giving compliments to all the Orkish women you meet just to raise your speechcraft.
While the speechcraft training isn't that bad and even surprisingly realistic (training on a fat chick so you can get better pussy later on), raising all the other skills is a chore that sucks the fun out of the game.
Because of that I always put sneak and speechcraft to majors, just so I don't have to do this shit. It's a solution, but a limiting one.

A lot of spells that are cool on paper, but utterly useless in reality.
The sound spell is a good example. The idea is neat, but the spell itself is absolutely pointless.
High level mages won't even notice the effect, and there are more efficient ways to achieve the same thing in the same school of magic.
It would have been fine if the sound effect were very very cheap in terms of magicka cost, but that's not the case.
There are also some really cool spell effects that are useful, but when you are able to cast them, you will be so powerful that there is really no point.
I am, of course, talking about the command humanoid spell.
Really cool idea, but Skyrim, of all games, does it better via rage spells.
I have to admit, though, that the variety is still better than scarcity, and the magic system of Morrowind is still vastly superior.

There are also very obvious ones like broken economy and how easy the game is overall.

 

[scathefire]

Situations where you can't properly use a skill without first raising it with a trainer.
The most fun I tend to have with this game is when I don't use trainers at all and don't purposefully train skills.
Like, for example, sneaking into a wall for an hour, or running around giving compliments to all the Orkish women you meet just to raise your speechcraft.
While the speechcraft training isn't that bad and even surprisingly realistic (training on a fat chick so you can get better pussy later on), raising all the other skills is a chore that sucks the fun out of the game.
Because of that I always put sneak and speechcraft to majors, just so I don't have to do this shit. It's a solution, but a limiting one.

I think the idea of it is that if you have a very low ability to use a certain skill, you can try and teach yourself but that’s much more difficult than having the basics taught to you by someone else. Or something like that.

 

[mnt_ms]

I think the idea of it is that if you have a very low ability to use a certain skill, you can try and teach yourself but that’s much more difficult than having the basics taught to you by someone else. Or something like that.

It's just that some skills are very hard to improve either way. Sneak is a good example.
Even at 40, it's not easy to use at all. But that's the problem with sneak I guess.
On the other hand, when you do raise it high, you become practically invisible. I remember some NPCs in vanilla Morrowind that wouldn't talk with you and instead say something like "Who's there?".

 

[Asian tech support]

It's just that some skills are very hard to improve either way. Sneak is a good example.
Even at 40, it's not easy to use at all. But that's the problem with sneak I guess.
On the other hand, when you do raise it high, you become practically invisible. I remember some NPCs in vanilla Morrowind that wouldn't talk with you and instead say something like "Who's there?".

Sneak is weird. It can only level while you're undetected (duh), you need to be around hostiles and not foo far out of line of sight, and at low levels you're going to be detected almost immediately, making harder than skills that you only have to use to level. One of my favorite tactics if I'm feeling frugal early game is to repeatedly use either a low level invisibility spell or the ring of khajiit in this one spot in the bitter coast that has three or four nix hounds really close by.

 

[mnt_ms]

Sneak is weird. It can only level while you're undetected (duh), you need to be around hostiles and not foo far out of line of sight, and at low levels you're going to be detected almost immediately, making harder than skills that you only have to use to level. One of my favorite tactics if I'm feeling frugal early game is to repeatedly use either a low level invisibility spell or the ring of khajiit in this one spot in the bitter coast that has three or four nix hounds really close by.

It grows quicker if you are in combat, weirdly enough.
So, if you want to raise it a bit faster, the best way is to find a mudcrab, aggro him, and sneak around. Uneven terrain helps - if he is higher than you(on a slope, for example), then he will have a harder time seeing you.

 

[Asian tech support]

It grows quicker if you are in combat, weirdly enough.
So, if you want to raise it a bit faster, the best way is to find a mudcrab, aggro him, and sneak around. Uneven terrain helps - if he is higher than you(on a slope, for example), then he will have a harder time seeing you.

Yeah there are a handful of spots like that right outside vivec. Good for training armor skills and block there too.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

Remember: Morrowind doesn't have a limit when paying to training skills.
You can search for the master trainer at Sneak and sell your university funds to reach 100.

Many times i do that to reach Athletics as fast as possible.

 

[Gilgamesh]

Has anyone read C0DA? What were your thoughts on it? I read through it just before, I'd already read a summary on the UESP so I had an idea of what the themes are supposed to be, though it was still hard to read and I'm glad it was only 60 pages. A lot of the weirdness reminded me of YIIK IV.

Spoiler: some screenshots

Wyświetl załącznik 9162337Wyświetl załącznik 9162355
Wyświetl załącznik 9162382Wyświetl załącznik 9162387Wyświetl załącznik 9162407Wyświetl załącznik 9162461

C0DA is really fun and has some references to it in the canon (Many in ESO, and trainwreckz made a mod with C0da lore that Bethesda says is canon, and possibly one about Pelinial in Oblivion??) but it also just completely messes with the universe and takes the weird parts of it and stretches them out a whollllle lot. I still think Kirkbride’s wacky lore is what makes TES shine for me and it’s always been cool that there is a semi continuation of it in C0da. The “open sourcing” of TES lore is also cool. Sad there is no actual graphic novel of it though. Doesnt seem like Kirkbride is interested in it much anymore, although I do see LadyNerevar, his wife, talk about it sometimes.




Not sure if you all saw, but Bethesda and Zenimax Online just got huge layoffs. Most of the senior ESO team is gone (lead dungeon designer, writers, artists, and engineers) so people on Twitter are speculating that Microsoft wants to sunset the game soon. One of the senior designers claimed that half the team was laid off but deleted her tweet shortly after posting. Bethesda lost their lead lighting guy, who worked on the gorgeous ESO cinematic trailers. Who knows what this means for TES 6.

 

[GratsTheat783]

Recently did a Khajiit playthrough of Morrowind as the pre-made healer class, planned to try and dedicate purely to the Imperial Cult, but instead spent all my time stealing shit and becoming rich. I found the Khajiit's swimming animation to be kind of funny since it's literally a doggy paddle.

C0DA is really fun and has some references to it in the canon (Many in ESO, and trainwreckz made a mod with C0da lore that Bethesda says is canon, and possibly one about Pelinial in Oblivion??) but it also just completely messes with the universe and takes the weird parts of it and stretches them out a whollllle lot. I still think Kirkbride’s wacky lore is what makes TES shine for me and it’s always been cool that there is a semi continuation of it in C0da. The “open sourcing” of TES lore is also cool. Sad there is no actual graphic novel of it though. Doesnt seem like Kirkbride is interested in it much anymore, although I do see LadyNerevar, his wife, talk about it sometimes.

I was really confused reading through it so I assume it would have made more sense as a graphic novel

Not sure if you all saw, but Bethesda and Zenimax Online just got huge layoffs. Most of the senior ESO team is gone (lead dungeon designer, writers, artists, and engineers) so people on Twitter are speculating that Microsoft wants to sunset the game soon. One of the senior designers claimed that half the team was laid off but deleted her tweet shortly after posting. Bethesda lost their lead lighting guy, who worked on the gorgeous ESO cinematic trailers. Who knows what this means for TES 6.

A little sad, I used to play it a lot, my favourite base-game questline was that of the Aldmeri Dominion, though that's likely because I spent most of my time as an AD character. I think I stopped playing around the Elswyr DLC, which might have been a good time since I heard it's gotten worse over the years.

 

[TrainWreckWatcher]

Why aren't there more Elder Scrolls (Skyrim) clones out on the market?

Money, Time, and a love for it.

You need all 3 for that. I don't think anyone in AAA has a love for anything they do anymore. Companies don't want to invest the money into it because its not multiplayer milking their playerbase. The closest we got was Avowed in terms of AA/AAA and it was a fucking joke and embarrassment. No one there loved what they were doing which is why arrows didn't have gravity or stick into walls.
Why lockpicks were just a timer instead of a game.
Why NPCs just stood still instead of going about their date.

No one fucking cared.

 

[Pierre D'Olnique]

Appaently half of Zenimax Online got canned

can you name one memorable thing about TESO? because i sure fucking can't