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
Aiming at your computer 
I'm sorry, it's for your own good
No! Wait! I still haven't started the Dragonborn DLC! I wanna see Solstheiiiiiiimmmmm
Me but its morrowind
Well, not even last night's storm could wake you. I've heard them say we've reached Morrowind, I'm sure they'll let us go. Quiet, here comes the guard.
It is 2003 - i am tits deep in the morrowind creation kit
It is 2013 - i am tits deep in the morrowind creation kit
It is 2023 - i am tits deep in the morrowind creation kit
I'm pretty hyped for the rtx remix software so I can add traced rays to all the n'wahs
Morrowind is so good.
I picked it up on a recent steam sale so I can try Morrowind's own high quality VR mod through OpenMW, I'm pretty excited to try that out too
what is the hold this game has on people? i'm not judging or anything, i've spent an unconscionable amount of time playing MMOs, but i just don't get the skyrim appeal
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 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 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, 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.
For millions of years humans wandered around eating stuff they found on the ground and fighting skeletons.
Skyrimblionwind is a game about wandering around eating stuff you find on the ground and fighting skeletons.
I sincerely believe much of the appeal of open world games is that for most of the time there have been humans we kind of just wandered around exploring and finding neat stuff and sometimes getting eaten by lions. People who live in capitalism hell where everything is fenced and it's illegal to go outside and you move between a series of small artificially lit boxes get a chance to wander around and explore and find neat stuff and eat things they found in barrels are like "oh my god this is what I was meant to do. This is why i am a biped with two dedicated limbs for grasping and manipulation. This is why i have binocular vision and symbolic reasoning. This makes sense, while my life of misery and boredom does not.
ahahahha definitely not me haha
I got really into Skyrim one year and haven't touched it since
I'm not bragging though, since I am in the middle of my fifth JESawyerMod run of New Vegas
600 game gang, and I still just play 90s games.
I mean to get around to playing a lot of classic iconic games, but the siren song of my sandbox games... it calls to me 
I have enough console games to fill a car and barely have enough space to drive it. I'm doing an orc no-magic playthrough right now. On the switch, so I can play it everywhere. And I do.
Damn, I can't imagine ever playing Skyrim on a console, finding and installing all the big fancy mods is half of the appeal for me.
...though admittedly this may also be why I never get more than halfway through the MSQ
Same. I hate the base games, they're so boring and flavorless. But once the modders have, well, fixed all of Beth's bullshit they're a lot of fun.
none can resist the siren song of stealth archery
I am downloading a bunch of high octane flashy spell mods plus rebalanced mage perks and scaling to facilitate my first ever Skyrim pure mage playthrough but... resisting the stealth archer is never easy
"Oh, word? You're telling me I can shoot chain lightning from invis if I go Illusion/Destruction?" -person who decided they weren't going to play stealth archer this time
Advancing all points in to destruction on the "no survivors means no witnesses" theory of stealth.
"Ah-hah! See! I'm not playing stealth archer, I am playing Enchanting/Alchemy! Archery is simply the most efficient delivery mechanism for my poisons and enchantments!" -person who decided that for real this time they weren't going to play stealth archer
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Alright nerds explain what mods make Skyrim good.
These days all the cool kids download modpacks from Wabbajack, but it comes down to what you like about Skyrim and RPGs in general. Legacy of the Dragonborn adds a huge collection quest that you fill out as you go exploring, there are a lot of 3rd person combat overhauls that make the combat more dynamic and enemies less spongey, there's huge dramatic quest mods (Vigilant and company) or even total conversions like Enderal. There's also stuff like 3DNPCs and talkative companion mods if you just want more interesting characters to meet around Skyrim
Wabbajack
I haven't been able to get this to work on Linux
In that case, can you recommend a modpack that fills these criteria:
Full disclosure but I've never played someone else's modpack. I've downloaded multiple from Wabbajack but I'm so picky about everything in game that I immediately start ripping chunks out of it. But I do have some recs from the community.
Not actually Wabbajack but Gate to Sovengarde is supposed to be easy to install and vanilla+ type. Pretty well tested and pretty stable, includes a lot of the dynamic world changing mods like Seasons and reclaiming locations after you clear out bandits and the like.
Path of the Dovahkiin overhauls the game to be a more ARPG experience with a focus on character builds, dungeon crawling and looting.
Living Skyrim and Wildlander are supposed to be increased difficulty immersive survival overhauls that probably aren't to everyone's taste.
People who enjoy modding Skyrim into Dark Souls talk a lot about Nolvus, but learning that the modpack includes "Immersive Wenches" has made me slightly question its 'ultimate lore friendly and immersive experience' lol
I have no room to talk. I'm playing Ocarina of Time with my nephew.
same but it's league of legends or victoria 3 (restarting playthroughs of the same countries)
I started playing palworld a couple nights ago but haven't been back to it because I keep having weird anxiety where I feel like doing nothing until I'm 3-4 beers drunk and then it's been time to go to bed
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
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