Project Tamriel & Tamriel Rebuilt - Morrowind modders keep chugging along

[frajaq]

Yeah don't try to do the quest you get in Charach to salvage the ship northeast if you're low level, this Lamia bitch one-shot me lol

 

[JarlFrank]

The lamia still one-shot my fragile Breton mage character with high damage spells.

But there's a trick: their spells are touch range.
Cast swift swim (not required, but helps) and just swim away while they follow you. They will keep casting spells but miss because you evade their range just as they begin to cast.
At some point they run out of magicka, at which point you can engage in melee without having to worry about being one-shotted by their spells!

The lamia in the underwater Ayleid ruin though is a much bigger problem because it's an enclosed space where you can't just infinitely swim away...

 

[None]

If anyone is playing with MWSE and hasn't noticed it yet, there's custom weather now. You should experience the occasional tropical storm. Now I'm not the one who did the work, but I was the one who showed them it was possible after getting told "nu uh" so you're all welcome.

But they've started to embrace lua, which is great because it opens up tons of opportunities to do some really cool shit. OpenMW just needs to catch up so there can be feature parity. Other shit that I'm aware of is the insight spell, among other new spell types, which is supposed to be useful in solving quests. Think there might even be some kind of speak to the dead spell iirc. Again, lots of cool opportunities to make skills useful elsewhere and expand on existing or introduce new gameplay mechanics.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Yeah don't try to do the quest you get in Charach to salvage the ship northeast if you're low level, this Lamia bitch one-shot me lol

Classic Daggerfall monster!

 

[frajaq]

Also playing an Imperial is way too easy, thinking of rerolling something stupid like Thief/Mage Orc

 

[JarlFrank]

Yeah don't try to do the quest you get in Charach to salvage the ship northeast if you're low level, this Lamia bitch one-shot me lol

Classic Daggerfall monster!

They also added a classic Redguard monster!

 

[Losus4]

Unpopular opinion incoming...

The TR/province mods are no doubt an astounding achievement of talent, dedication, hard work, and imagination, but with each new release I cannot help but lose more interest.

Any time I explore the new lands, I cannot help but shake the overall feeling of incompleteness. After playing the Anvil update like all the other province updates before it, it wasn't long before I encountered the ugly edge of the map, in which the land just drops into the sea, missing meshes that I'd need to report on their bugtracker, and various other instances of jank.

Instead of playing a complete mod, all I see are things I need to fix in the CS... new flora I need to add harvest scripts to, new food items I need to add to survival script of foods that satiate hunger needs, wells that need replacing to act as water sources, and dozens more instances of things I need to work on and fix rather than simply enjoying the game.

The golden age of Morrowind landmass mods was all the great, quirky stuff that came out years ago, mods like Goblin lab, Silgrad Tower, Havish, Sword of Perithia... they might've been janky but they were mostly complete mods which used mostly vanilla assets and added a few dozen extra hours, and were generally a small download size that could be installed quick and easy.

As the province mods get bigger, so too does the entire house of cards on which the whole thing rests. Each new release takes longer to load. I left a house in Anvil and had to wait 30 seconds for the exterior to load. If one day they're ever completed, then the TR Data asset archive could easily reach 20gb or so in size. At its current state, it takes about 10 minutes to unpack the 40,000 loose files and even longer to copy them into the MW directory.

With TR... old locations I visited I now find have been completely redesigned, gutted, or removed altogether. The feeling if playing an ever-shifting, changing work in progress is not something I feel I want to keep up with.

I guess you could call it province mod fatigue. Good luck to all the teams, but at this point I'd rather just play the base game with some of the classic aforementioned landmass mods.

 

[None]

Unpopular opinion incoming...

I think you'll find more sympathy here and elsewhere than you expect. Morrowind has turned into something of a tinkerer's game. Making mods, mod lists, adjusting this and that, it's almost inevitable that you'll find yourself spending more tinkering than playing. At the end of the day it just comes down to having to turn that part of your brain off and enjoying what is there. This isn't a traditional product and is more akin to a DM's homebrewed setting, it'll never really be finished. Faerun isn't finished, nor or are many of the other settings. There'll always be some part of the map that can be fleshed out, updated, etc. The closest we'll see to a final product will most likely be TR, and even that is at least a decade out, if not more.

As for the herbalism concerns, modern versions of graphical herbalism already take care of automatically handling new containers. If the survival scripts you're talking about are Ashfall, that is going to be supported by the projects moving forward.

 

[Funposter]

At its current state, it takes about 10 minutes to unpack the 40,000 loose files and even longer to copy them into the MW directory.

use a fucking mod manager, jesus christ

 

[Zothique]

Funny when an RPG from the early 2000s absolutely bodies most of the newer shit coming out nowadays.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

funny? funny how?

Spoiler

 

[CootKeeper]

If anyone is playing with MWSE and hasn't noticed it yet, there's custom weather now. You should experience the occasional tropical storm. Now I'm not the one who did the work, but I was the one who showed them it was possible after getting told "nu uh" so you're all welcome.

But they've started to embrace lua, which is great because it opens up tons of opportunities to do some really cool shit. OpenMW just needs to catch up so there can be feature parity. Other shit that I'm aware of is the insight spell, among other new spell types, which is supposed to be useful in solving quests. Think there might even be some kind of speak to the dead spell iirc. Again, lots of cool opportunities to make skills useful elsewhere and expand on existing or introduce new gameplay mechanics.

so if you were in my shoes, you would pick a mwse modlist over openmw? still undecided

 

[JarlFrank]

Instead of playing a complete mod, all I see are things I need to fix in the CS... new flora I need to add harvest scripts to, new food items I need to add to survival script of foods that satiate hunger needs, wells that need replacing to act as water sources, and dozens more instances of things I need to work on and fix rather than simply enjoying the game.

None of those are vanilla features and TR/PT are made for a vanilla experience. Of course their added food items won't qualify for survival mods. I think you're approaching these mods with the wrong expectations.

 

[None]

If anyone is playing with MWSE and hasn't noticed it yet, there's custom weather now. You should experience the occasional tropical storm. Now I'm not the one who did the work, but I was the one who showed them it was possible after getting told "nu uh" so you're all welcome.

But they've started to embrace lua, which is great because it opens up tons of opportunities to do some really cool shit. OpenMW just needs to catch up so there can be feature parity. Other shit that I'm aware of is the insight spell, among other new spell types, which is supposed to be useful in solving quests. Think there might even be some kind of speak to the dead spell iirc. Again, lots of cool opportunities to make skills useful elsewhere and expand on existing or introduce new gameplay mechanics.

so if you were in my shoes, you would pick a mwse modlist over openmw? still undecided

I'm an MWSE supremacist so that'll always be my recommendation. It can be a more involved process than OpenMW but it comes with benefit of being more feature rich. OpenMW looks better and has a better shader model but that's where the advantages (as far as I see it) stop.

 

[Zothique]

If anyone is playing with MWSE and hasn't noticed it yet, there's custom weather now. You should experience the occasional tropical storm. Now I'm not the one who did the work, but I was the one who showed them it was possible after getting told "nu uh" so you're all welcome.

But they've started to embrace lua, which is great because it opens up tons of opportunities to do some really cool shit. OpenMW just needs to catch up so there can be feature parity. Other shit that I'm aware of is the insight spell, among other new spell types, which is supposed to be useful in solving quests. Think there might even be some kind of speak to the dead spell iirc. Again, lots of cool opportunities to make skills useful elsewhere and expand on existing or introduce new gameplay mechanics.

so if you were in my shoes, you would pick a mwse modlist over openmw? still undecided

I'm an MWSE supremacist so that'll always be my recommendation. It can be a more involved process than OpenMW but it comes with benefit of being more feature rich. OpenMW looks better and has a better shader model but that's where the advantages (as far as I see it) stop.

I would argue MWSE looks better, or can look better, but is a pain in the bitch to get running compared to the relatively out-of-the-box stylings of OpenMW.

 

[deuxhero]

If anyone is playing with MWSE and hasn't noticed it yet, there's custom weather now. You should experience the occasional tropical storm. Now I'm not the one who did the work, but I was the one who showed them it was possible after getting told "nu uh" so you're all welcome.

But they've started to embrace lua, which is great because it opens up tons of opportunities to do some really cool shit. OpenMW just needs to catch up so there can be feature parity. Other shit that I'm aware of is the insight spell, among other new spell types, which is supposed to be useful in solving quests. Think there might even be some kind of speak to the dead spell iirc. Again, lots of cool opportunities to make skills useful elsewhere and expand on existing or introduce new gameplay mechanics.

so if you were in my shoes, you would pick a mwse modlist over openmw? still undecided

I'm an MWSE supremacist so that'll always be my recommendation. It can be a more involved process than OpenMW but it comes with benefit of being more feature rich. OpenMW looks better and has a better shader model but that's where the advantages (as far as I see it) stop.

Counterpoint:

Morrowind.exe has stopped working

 

[None]

I'm an MWSE supremacist so that'll always be my recommendation. It can be a more involved process than OpenMW but it comes with benefit of being more feature rich. OpenMW looks better and has a better shader model but that's where the advantages (as far as I see it) stop.

Counterpoint:

Morrowind.exe has stopped working

Counter-counterpoint:

OpenMW not supported.

Can't tell you the last time I crashed with MWSE without deliberately fucking around with something. Last time was probably when I was messing around with a mod that manipulated the scenegraph, something you cannot do in OpenMW. So if you're crashing with MWSE, tell your mod authors to git gud.

 

[None]

I would argue MWSE looks better, or can look better, but is a pain in the bitch to get running compared to the relatively out-of-the-box stylings of OpenMW.

OpenMW definitely has the edge when it comes to visuals, specifically shaders and shadows, but if the game's renderer does end up getting ported to dx11 then that edge will most likely be gone.

 

[Lizard]

The lamia still one-shot my fragile Breton mage character with high damage spells.

But there's a trick: their spells are touch range.
Cast swift swim (not required, but helps) and just swim away while they follow you. They will keep casting spells but miss because you evade their range just as they begin to cast.
At some point they run out of magicka, at which point you can engage in melee without having to worry about being one-shotted by their spells!

The lamia in the underwater Ayleid ruin though is a much bigger problem because it's an enclosed space where you can't just infinitely swim away...

It sounds like cheese to most people, but this makes me think of all the old fantasy novels I used to read. Protagonists were always being clever, even going back to the roots like mythology. More real time fantasy games should reward wit.

 

[Funposter]

Playing SHOTN and I really wouldn't be surprised if they go back and re-make a lot of this content. The mapping in towns, in particular, comes off as being quite different to vanilla Morrowind. The scale seems...off, like all of the building are 1.5x too large. The buildings in Karthwasten are just horrid from an architectural standpoint too, and really add to the towns feeling like very ugly places. The quests are enjoyable, though, and all of the content out in the wilderness is quite nice. I'll mess around in The Reach for a bit longer and then make a move to Cyrodiil. Currently playing a Nord Sorcerer (the crappy pre-made class) and just hit Level 6 doing Mages Guild content. I've largely ignored the Vvardenfell guild with the exception of Ajira and Edwina's quests because you can get them done so quickly. I ran into Dwarven gear quite early, but only just found my first piece of Orcish to upgrade to, so the progression has been slow in a good way. I'm looking forward to doing the late-game Mages Guild stuff from TR, because I never got around to it the last time that I played.

 

[ind33d]

Funny when an RPG from the early 2000s absolutely bodies most of the newer shit coming out nowadays.

i assume the steam deck will give morrowind-era RPGs extra legs, which is good because most graphical advancements have had diminishing returns compared to when everything looked like Thief

 

[JarlFrank]

Funny when an RPG from the early 2000s absolutely bodies most of the newer shit coming out nowadays.

i assume the steam deck will give morrowind-era RPGs extra legs, which is good because most graphical advancements have had diminishing returns compared to when everything looked like Thief

Not to mention content creation for modders being a lot harder with modern graphics. Early 00s was the sweet spot between looking good and being easy to make.

Morrowind, Thief, Quake, Tomb Raider... all of these have still thriving mod scenes that keep pumping out quality shit.
And with engine updates and/or modern engine ports, they're pushing the graphical capabilities of these games to their limits, so they don't even look that "dated".

 

[Funposter]

they don't even look that "dated".

Vapourmist is very good

Spoiler

 

[deuxhero]

As the province mods get bigger, so too does the entire house of cards on which the whole thing rests. Each new release takes longer to load. I left a house in Anvil and had to wait 30 seconds for the exterior to load. If one day they're ever completed, then the TR Data asset archive could easily reach 20gb or so in size. At its current state, it takes about 10 minutes to unpack the 40,000 loose files and even longer to copy them into the MW directory.

My Morrowind install is on an HDD. Anvil itself loads pretty fast after the first time each boot (which goes relatively fast considering I have it on an HDD), reloads within a session are near instant (I have more RAM than my entire MW directory, a lot of which is for mods I don't use anymore) and everything else loads near instantly. Sure eventual full Tamriel won't run on a computer from Morrowind's era, but neither will the OS needed to run Morrowind.EXE normally.

 

[I eat frozen vegetables]

I'm an MWSE supremacist so that'll always be my recommendation. It can be a more involved process than OpenMW but it comes with benefit of being more feature rich. OpenMW looks better and has a better shader model but that's where the advantages (as far as I see it) stop.

Counterpoint:

Morrowind.exe has stopped working

Counter-counterpoint:

OpenMW not supported.

Can't tell you the last time I crashed with MWSE without deliberately fucking around with something. Last time was probably when I was messing around with a mod that manipulated the scenegraph, something you cannot do in OpenMW. So if you're crashing with MWSE, tell your mod authors to git gud.

Another counterpoint would be that OpenMW is a 64 bit application, while Morrowind.exe is a 32 bit application.