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I have at least 500 games immediately available for me to play and instead I'm trying to start another Skyrim playthrough
(hexbear.net)
HE CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT
In my defense I picked up a cheap used VR headset and playing Skyrim in VR and holding all the sparkly spells in your hands is genuinely a pretty novel and magical experience
As a dedicated modder, the appeal to me is probably different than a casual player, but I enjoy the thrill of the chase (making a 'perfect', beautiful and feature rich modpack) as well as every few years that I come back to the Skyrim mod scene, there's always some kind of really cool advancement that has released, like the functioning Seasons system, or the base object swapper and Spell perk item distributor, that can make your game even MORE beautiful and feature rich.
But uhh... someone who actually plays the game instead of modding it probably likes the open world and how there's generally always a series of sidequests and locations you didn't find on your last playthrough
i'm also a little modding goblin so i totally get you on that angle, i even get the appeal of other bethesda games (i am a new vegas girlie, as is trans tradition), i just don't understand why people are still so drawn to skyrim of all games, i guess. it just feels like a very generic open world fantasy game. i had the same issue with oblivion, thinking on it.
idk, sorry, i'm not trying to shit on your good time or anything. i'm glad you're enjoying yourself! i've always just kinda bounced off the non-NV bethesda offerings and i occasionally find myself wondering what i'm not seeing that leads people to love them (mostly skyrim) so much. thanks for taking a stab at explaining!
a major characteristic that makes it a perennial draw is imo that its so generic and mid. plus the technical side that it Just Works better than oblivion.
in a an actually good game completely altering core systems and questlines would actually risk you losing something---incidentally FNV has a lot less of this, and expansion-style is the main way stuff got added, since the original stuff is good. but with Skyrim? there's overhauls for every questline and mechanic, because the base was so barebones. ive played like 6 different experiences doing the Magic School in Skyrim with different mechanics & progressions.
Hmm... this is actually kind of difficult for me to answer because I bounced really hard off of vanilla Skyrim when I tried to play it. I have a lot of negative things to say about the base game, and the version of the game I like to play is similar but still very different in almost all systems (ie I am a Morrowloot fan)
I guess what draws people to Skyrim is
I played hundreds of hours in Oblivion in a single playthrough, but I had so many mods - Elsweyr and Valenwood, sailing ships, a de-levelling mod, vast amounts of new enemies and mobs, new quests, tons of new game systems. I waited over a year to by skyrim and fallout iv to give the mod scene time to mature.
I also really, really like the tes backstory. Skyrim and oblivion were,kt nearly as weird and fun as morrowind in that regard, but if you look you can still find some of the weird charm - Camoran's rantings in the Mysterium Xarxes, the painted world, the thieve's guild's relationship with Nocturnal, the backstory of Knights of the Nine if you just ignore the boring crusader armor, the whole shivering isles expansion.
I think it's noteworthy that you only refer to Oblivion content when describing what's good about the series. Imo Skyrim was much blander with less interesting things going on.
Very true. The dungeons were so generic and the enemy variety was so bad. There are things i like - the nord ruin aesthetic, riften, markarth, but hte game really failed to take advantage of the setting i n many ways.
Every time I play Skyrim and I'm armpit deep in another nord crypt I find myself weirdly yearning for the Oblivion Aeylid ruins even if most of the time I'd just be fighting a different kind of zombie in them.
The visuals just hit different. The floor to ceiling crush traps too
Never even mind the Forsworn/Forsaken/whatever they actually call the "wildpeople" in the markarth area. IIRC there are 0 quests related to them and they're just bandits+.
Indigenous resistance movement making pacts with the evil actually existing supernatural entities of Nirn to gain an advantage over the invading imperial power? Nah, that doesn't sound interesting. Let's do werewolves and vampires again.
I used to make mods a lot, but I got severely stuck on blenders texturing tools back in 2011.
Blender has advanced a lot in the last decade. It's more powerful but also easier to use.
Currently learning solidworks and revit at college, so if I have the energy I might pick it up again. That said, I want to focus more on real world machinery
I, too, have more time in the Creation kit than in the game
The mod that uses "ai" to have an npc respond to natural language speech is neat in a "burn it burn it burn it" kind of way.