Favourite computer games of all time. [2]

Post us a pic RA of your uber hi-def SKyrim .

Well its been a long time coming (17 months infact) but the pc version of GTAV is almost here- and boy does it look like it was worth the wait (if you have 3 grands worth of pc and monitor that can do 4k it looks Godlike!)















And best of all is the Director Mods- where it not only lets you record footage but lets you set up cameras and a variety of shot types within that space and direct your own version of your exploits. Thank you Driver (for anyone who remembers the first of that series and its very similar indeed and excellent directors mode)

GTA V was great, it's got most of everything any GTA fan could wish for. My only complaint is that it kept freezing on a mission when I was getting close to the end, and my save point was the start of that mission, so restarting didn't help either. Then my xbox died a few weeks later. Maybe I'll buy it again for the xbox one, but for now I'm enjoying other games. Definitely a great game, though

Well its certainly polished up rather nicely for the pc thats for sure. Im starting to see why its taken so long for them to convert it. Its stunning. (And it already was damn nice on the consoles)

Pish tosh. Pixels, mere pixels.

I'm all for gameplay over looks any time- but on the rare occasions when you get both- count me in!

Why am I still playing Destiny? I cant help myself!!!!!

Destiny? As in everyone hates it, its terribly designed Destiny? I have absolutely no idea Lance!

I need all the best guns

Lancebloke wrote:I need all the best guns

This wins the discussion

Oh dear, collect-em-up mania! A bad sign Lance!

Pettytyrant101 wrote:Post us a pic RA of your uber hi-def SKyrim   .

I saw this one mod that remakes the main dragon in 8k. I'll have to see about moving some mods around so I can support that!

But I did take this screenie of a nice view from Falkreeth

Spoiler:

Hopefully I can remember how to embedd properly


I've done a few reinstalls on Skyrim to make it more stable so I need to reinstall some of my 4k mods for the world. So far I just have an ENB, and some High resolution armor mods as far visuals go.

I sometimes forget that Skyrim is 4 years old.

Those are big, glorious pictures RA.   Which ENB set up are you using?

Mod wise for me there are a few essentials I just cant play it without any more.
Gameplay effecting mods -

Frostfall as it just changes your whole approach to playing.
Alternative Start as it just gives you far more options for inventing your own back-story for your character and where you start in the world.
Dragon Combat Overhaul for that extra variety and Deadly Dragons for more variety.
Enemy AI overhaul- smarter enemies = better game.
Farmers Sell Produce- I hate just taking the wheat from the fields right in fornt of them and no one reacts, kindof breaks the immersion This doesn't stop you doing that but it does give a better option, just buy it and leave their crops alone!
Amazing Follower Tweaks- just so many more options.
Follower Commentary Overhaul- particularly useful for vanilla companions as you can set how often they say stuff and cut down the repetition of lines.
Harvest Overhaul- good options to tailor things as you want them and means when you pick an entire bunch of plants for alchemy you don't just get 1.
iActivate- stops lot of stupid messages popping up you've seen a million times, so when you put your crosshair over something - say a thistle, it doesn't pointlessly say 'thistle' on the screen ect
People are Strangers- you only get to know someones name if you talk to them rather than mysteriously knowing who everyone in Skyrim is.
Merchants now have linen- handy for Hearthfire style house building. It was always weird the only place you can find linen is in a tomb.
More Interesting Loot for Skyrim- makes killing all those bandits and getting t their hoard more rewarding.
Order my items- does what it says, lets you order items (at a mark up) from most types of vendors.
Read and Learn Speechcraft- improves your speechcraft by reading the books.
Realistic Needs and Diseases- eat, drink, sleep or suffer the consequences. Also makes diseases something to actually worry about rather than just a minor irritation.
Run for your lives- NPC's now run away or indoors when Dragons attack.
The Dance of Death- unlocks loads of new kill moves and lets you tailor the experience.
Timing is Everything- lets you set the level at which quests are triggered, I love this one as I can set the dlc and even the main story to start much later letting you get on with exploring and stuff before the major shit hits the fan. Works great with alternative start.
Trade and Barter- improves the trade system in Skyrim.
Wet and Cold- as it sounds, you get wet you get cold, it rains you get wet and cold, also now you can see everyones breath when its cold- works great with Frostfall.
Wintermyst- adds tons of new enchantments and new enchanted items into the game.
Winter is Coming- adds big fur cloaks base don Game of Thrones into the game, they fit Skyrim perfectly. Works well with Wet and Cold, Frostfall and Cloaks.

For pure looks and aesthetics I'd recommend-

Any of Amidianborn's texture packs.
Animated clutter- now when you search barrels and sacks and stuff they actually open.
Apachii Skyhair- loads of new hairstyles (version for NPC's too)
Audio Overhaul for Skyrim 2- just loads more and better sfx throughout.
Beast skeletons - now you get skeletons of different races not just humans.
Bandoliers and Pouches- carry more in a lore friendly fashion.
Calientes Beautiful Bodies- improves the looks of the NPC's.
Cloaks of Skyrim- everyone looks better in a cloak (and works great with Wet and Cold and Frostfall)
Crimson Tide- now people really bleed when you whack them with a huge sword, messy but fun!
Expanded snow systems- much greater variety of snow, form light snowfall to full on blizzards (also great with Frostfall)
Female Facial Animation- does what it says, improves the animation on female faces.
Flora Overhaul- makes all the plants and trees look a lot better.
Footprints- leave your mark in the snow- as will everything else- great for hunting and tracking stuff.
Moon Glow- makes the moons have a soft glow round their edges.
Shooting Stars- adds celestial events, meteor storms and random shooting stars to the night sky.
No Snow Under Roof- does what it says, removes thick snow from places it shouldn't be.
Pets of Skyrim- cats and dogs in towns, villages and cities.
Point the Way- more and better road signs, handy if you dont use fast travel.
Real Clouds- adds proper volumetric clouds into the game world.
Realistic Boat Bobbing- now boats actually bob about on the water.
Realistic Water Two- my own preference but W.A.T.E.R. and Pure Waters are also both good option, much better than vanilla textures any of them.
Roosters at Dawn- adds crowing cockerels to places with chickens when the sun comes up.
RS Children Overhaul- stops all the children being based off about four models- now you can actually work out who their parents are just from what they look like and how they dress.
Skyfalls and Sky Mills- makes distant windmill sails still turn, and animates distant waterfalls.
Splash of Rain- adds splashes on surfaces as rain hits

On the technical mod side I'd also recommend-

SkyUI- because its pretty much essential for modding and great on its own merits anyway.
XP32 Maximum Skeleton extended- improves skeletons framework for better an more animation possibilities.
D13 Faster Get Up Stand Up animation- does what it says.
Dead Body Collision Fix- stops you being able to walk right through corpses.
Dragon Stalking Fix- stops the weird bug where a dragon you've killed keeps dropping in out of nowhere.
Dynamic Things- search every barrel and every crate now they are all interactive.
FSS- Better Bards- removes that annoying pause between lines when Bards are singing.
Left Hand rings- lets you wear rings on both hands.
Locational Damage- very script heavy I find, but hard to go back to not having once you've used it- cripple limbs or kill with a single shot to the head (fully customisable).
Stable Ugrids to load- does what it says, makes having distant ugrids more stable ad less likely to crash your game.
Static Mesh Improvement- makes loads of minor game items lool way better with improved meshes.
Wearable Lanterns- does what it says.
Unofficial patches- sorts loads of problems Bethseida didnt bother too.

Companions-
Vilja- comes with her own excellent quest.Loads of dialogue and situation aware.
Sofia- she is just funny and good to have about. Not quite as much dialogue as Vilja but still loads, also situation aware.
Arissa-  good backstory you uncover through helping her out. Les ialogue than the others, but what there is is good.
Indigo- well acted, good little story, and often quite funny- the most repetitive out of them all probably for dialogue though (but still a hundred times better than vanilla companions).
Rigmor of Bruma- just installed this and not actually started the quest line et- but has all the makings of a great companion mod.

All great companion mods, lots of variety, good voice acting, good back-stories and stuff to find out about them.

DLC sized mods-

Falskaar
Wyrmstooth


When it comes to weapons, magic and armour mods best to tailor those to how you play- I tend to play as one handed, light armour and with a shield- so I have mods which add loads more shields, one handed weapons and armour into the game, but no extra magic mods as I never use magic and it saves on the load order issues.


I'm currently running 122 of the 161 mods I have. So thats not anything like a full list- but they are the ones I would have a hard time laying without. As you may have noticed I am big on adding as much immersion into the gameworld as I can.
Still the odd freeze or ctd, but nothing to bothersome- roughly a crash for every three- four hours of game play (usually when scripts get backed up) but it did take several goes and some arsing about with Loot to get the load order just right as well as using Wrye and tesedit5.
If you dont already Id recommend using Wryre Bash and TESEdit5 to merge any level lists ect and to clean any mods that need it (always check the mod page, sometimes the dirty edits aren't and need to be in there, and always clean the official dlc- not the main Skyrim though!- as the DLC are full of dirty edits, literally hundreds of them!)

Oh and one last thing- more pics please! (Or maybe eve do one of these styley thingies- http://www.hobbitmovieforum.com/t426-canthiss-and-lydia-a-tale-of-skyrim?highlight=canthiss )

Pettytyrant101 wrote:Farmers Sell Produce- I hate just taking the wheat from the fields right in fornt of them

You, sir, are a gentleman!

Pettytyrant101 wrote:Oh dear, collect-em-up mania! A bad sign Lance!

That is pretty much the premise of Destiny... dangle that carrot just far enough...

This Gray Cowl mod for Skyrim looks neat.

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/64651/?

I downloaded that - haven't installed it yet as I feel its worth waiting for a thief style play-through.

Anyone here play GTA V on PC yet?

I got it and it's surprisingly a good port. I'm playing at 2560x1440 with very high settings and I'm averaging around 40-70 fps. Pretty good I'd say!

it's surprisingly a good port- RA

It ought to be given ho w long they spent working on it.
My mate got it and his pc is low-medium spec and he says it still runs well and looks pretty damn good. So it sounds like its been well optimised, which is an improvement on previous GTA pc ports.

Have you mucked about with the director mode yet?

Pettytyrant101 wrote:it's surprisingly a good port- RA

It ought to be given ho w long they spent working on it.
My mate got it and his pc is low-medium spec and he says it still runs well and looks pretty damn good. So it sounds like its been well optimised, which is an improvement on previous GTA pc ports.

Have you mucked about with the director mode yet?

I haven't messed with it yet. I'm very slow with open world games; I have to examine every nook and cranny. Takes me a while to get into them

I also heard some sad news today. Apparently Valve has made some sort of deal and mods are going to start costing money on the Steam Workshop. As far as I know it's only some mods on the workshop, but this is terrible. I don't think the Nexus has any plans to implement this but the ramifications for this are heavy. Is Bethesda going to play test all of these mods? Somehow I doubt that, hundreds of mods come out each day and while they make work independently, everyone's load order is unique as I've discovered first hand. Breaking the game is quite easy to do and with a price tag attached to mods, the whole experience becomes dangerous.

I can see the whole practice of modding turning into quite literally scamming people out of money. I hope I'm wrong about this and that this isn't just a way to make a quick buck... Modding is one of the most attractive things about PC gaming and this threatens to ruin it. I mean look at how modern and crazy Skyrim can look despite being 4 years old now. Would they throw away that unbridled potential that future games could possess all for essentially adding microtransactions?! I really hope I'm wrong.

I dont like the way it is going at all- there was a good piece on the nexus about this a few weeks back predicting it and laying out some of the issues-

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/news/12444/?

Just awful, awful business I think. I mean, mods can fix mistakes developers make. Are they going to charge for those too? That in particular feels very slimy. Using unrelated third parties as bug fixers and then charging people who've already purchased the game for access to the bug fixes, this could turn mods into scams really easily. I've broken Skyrim so many times since modding it. I don't blame anyone for that, I was just trying to see what went where and how certain mods would interact together. Fixing the game and finding out which mods couldn't operate with which other mods was fun. I feel that I learned a lot.

But had there been money involved, I'd have been far more cautious about everything; I also would not be able to just so casually download the amount of mods I do without going bankrupt. That's part of the beauty of it all too. I'm able to play and experience the stories people want to tell and I'm able to learn a little about how the engine works too if I'd like. Barring that behind a paywall removes that magic; I'm no longer exploring, I'm shopping at a store. Worse yet, the products at the store may end up (and likely will) break my game. Except now there's no learning involved or fun; I'm angry for having spent money on something that doesn't work in my load order and now having to rely on myself to fix what is essentially being sold as DLC even though it's not official and is potentially broken regardless of my load order.

Valve wake up. This is a stupid plan that's going to make the modding community implode on itself.

I think I'm just going to stick with the Nexus and hope that everyone else rejects this as well so it doesn't go anywhere.

Whew, I just had a lovely evening playing some Defense of the Ancients 2.

First game my Steam friends and I lost pretty badly, and typically enough two of them got quite upset over it (some immature "raging" was involved). I had fun though, playing a hero I don't try very often.

And then second game was just beautiful. Not that this will mean much to anyone unfamiliar with Dota 2, but I played Pudge mid. He's a hero that has a particularly-famous skill-shot-ability called Hook. He basically throws out this long hook on a chain and then drags it back in again quickly, pulling in any creature he hits. It's like a "no-scope" sort of thing, somewhat hard to pull off but very rewarding.

Anyway, dota is, more than anything else, a team game that requires a positive outlook and a certain friendliness towards what will most likely be either: young adult male foreigners with thick accents and a propensity for swearing at you, or fellow young adult male countrymen with a propensity for swearing at you. I embrace it as a challenge to be upbeat in the face of constant negativity. It can wear you down, but if someone else is similarly upbeat the game can be really fun and rewarding.

This particular game I just finished was hard. The team was very negative about our selection of heroes because we basically got weaker relative to the enemy team the longer the game went on, simply because of the nature of our selected heroes. This can be stressful and is difficult to enjoy and usually leads to a lot of complaining directed at the Captain who picks said heroes.

I did really well mid though, thankfully, and kind of snowballed out of control and we eventually managed to finish the game about 20 minutes shorter than what would probably have been the point at which we could no longer win. It's easy to enjoy dota if you're winning your game, but tonight I feel like I was positive and supportive when we lost the first game, and then positive and supporting when we won the second game too. It just felt really good and I was really on my game, so to speak.