Saturday, April 21, 2012

Skyrim Mods

The same day Skyrim was released, players started releasing mods for it. Right now I have about 40 mods installed. I have improvement for textures, star fields, snow, ice, sounds, rocks, water, waterfalls, clothing, static meshes and more. It's amazing how much people have improved the game. Someone even thought the ever present dust in caves and dungeons was too coarse and the ash piles left over from reanimated corpses weren't high res enough (I have both installed). Every now and then I'll come across some really stupid shit though like cocks for trolls (see below).


Essential

SkyUI
Even before the game was released PC gamers were irate about the user interface. Bethesda developed a lot of the game for consoles first, PC's second and the menus were no exception. They just weren't designed for a mouse. Too much scrolling, no sorting, no filtering, and too much wasted space. SkyUI has been downloaded more than a million times.

Skyrim HD
This a mind blowing mod of epic proportions. More than 2GB in size, they've redone from scratch over 600 textures and normal maps. The 4k resolutions are more than 8 times that of the original game and still surpass Bethesda's official hi-res DLC pack. They've redone stars, galaxies, towns, dungeons, houses, ground, trees, barrels, dwemer ruins, and on and on.

Skyrim Flora Overhaul
Like the previous mod, but focused on overhauling all things foliage. Consists of high res photographs of real leaves and grass. This is made by the same guy who made a bunch of flora overhauls for Morrowind.

XCE - Xenius Character Enhancement
This is a compilation of Xenius' other character enhancements: detailed faces, detailed bodies, detailed lips, no more blocky faces, high quality eyes, high resolution scars, weathered warpaint and improved dirt. I don't know how it is on Xbox, but the PC game had these blocky seams on noses, chins, and necks which are fixed by this mod.

Enhanced Blood Textures
Replaces all the blood textures with custom ones 4 times the original resolution. Lengthens the duration blood stays on weapons and adds new wound textures. Check out the decapitation wound.



Absurd

Killable Children
It's all in the title. There a bug in this mod that lets you create a character as a child.

Derrax Male Frost Troll
Derrax has also made cocks for werewolves. If you browse through the comments page for this mod you can find people asking for bigger cocks. You know, because a frost troll with a small cock is just silly.

My Little Pony Weapons and Armor
Here to make you happy.

Calientes Female Body Mod Big Bottom Edition
Like the Eye Candy mod for Oblivion, but with adjustable T&A. You can select areola color and the style of pubic hair. Absurd.

Cussing Bears
This mod substitutes the sounds a bear makes with the Tourette Guy. BOB SAGET!

3 comments:

  1. Bravo, excellent compilation. I could have assumed these things existed, but not to these extremes. Mods for Morrowind and Oblivion weren't nearly as great as this. My personal favorite was Tourettes Bear yelling "OH BOB SAGET!" when he died lol.

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  2. Simple answer: Yes
    Complicated answer: You can "mod" Skyrim for Xbox, but not like the mods above. "Modding" Skyrim on Xbox is more like a gameshark hack where you're editing your game save to give yourself infinite health, money, carrying capacity, sprint, etc. You can unlock all spells, skills, shouts and basically give yourself god mode a la Quake (NOPE!). This guy has a video showing how to do this.

    Other than that I don't think you can get real PC mods on Xbox unless you soft hack your machine. The PC mods require editing or replacing program files. Bethesda has released a DLC Hi-res graphics pack for the PC. Have they done that for Xbox?

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