Not a hater of the engine. As a player, I admit it has a lot of jank, but it definitely has a charm only Bethesda games can have. But I’m not a game developer, or someone who knows that much about game engines other than the basics. So besides the surface level stuff I notice as a player, can someone with gamedev knowledge really go in depth about what makes Creation Engine unique?

From my layman understanding, their worlds do stuff that no other open world RPGs do, at least with the same level of depth, but why is that, why don’t other games do what Bethesda games do?

Edit: Oh and one more thing I want cleared up. I see people calling it a 20 year old engine from time to time, but is that really accurate? Haven’t they continued upgrading the thing ever since then, wouldn’t it just be a ship of theseus scenario?

Tl;Dr this mod is very good but also incredibly flawed. I would definitely recommend it but I also think people should know what they're getting themselves into before they add this to their load order. Its dark but not any more than your average dark fantasy story. The writing has a lot of issue but the overall story is good. The setting and set design are amazing and truly give off dark fantasy vibes. But lore fans beware, while this mod takes some deep lore into account it also completely butchers some more mundane lore which I found frustrating during my playthrough.

I'll split my review into several parts to better organize my thoughts. Spoilers will be appropriately marked.

1. The Setting

To start off with praise, the actual worldspace is great. As i mentioned above, it truly makes you feel like you've left Skyrim and walked into a much bleaker realm. The ground looks fairly similar to the Reach but its the overall atmosphere that really makes the experience feel special. Everything is so bleak and pathetic but in a realistic way, really feels like you're walking through a real backwater of a world. The feeling is only enhanced by the mod's genuinely impressive custom Skybox which appears at night or when its raining in certain areas making you feel like you entered Oblivion out of a sudden. And on the topic of Oblivion, the Scuttling Void is amazing and I loved every moment of it. I feel like the mod author did a great job making that realm of Oblivion feel like its own unique take on Hell, with a sort of decaying fleshy dark pit of despair vibe that fits the setting of the Reach incredibly well.

The cities, dungeons and caves are all well made and interesting to explore. The cities weren't anything crazy but I really liked their designs. There's nothing mind blowing about it but it just feels simple and grounded while remaining visually distinct from Skyrim yet having that Markarth vibe to it without being Dwemer in nature. As for the dungeons they were great and even the puzzles were easy and intuitative which surprised me because in my experience Skyrim puzzles, especially modded puzzles, tend to either be extremely easy but tedious or extremely hard and tedious. Here, however, they were easy but not in a base game way where they feel like a chore due to how unique and cool the models and aesthetics used to represent those puzzles were.

Also, the design of various new armors is alright, not great but also not bad by any means and it definitely does its job. I find the guard armor to look much better than the several knight armors we see for example.

1. The Writing

The narrative of Beyond Reach is honestly just amazing. The story is overambitious and while it does end somewhat abruptly, it still works and I feel that by the end I had a comprehensive sense of the world I'd entered, like every tiny thing comes together in the end to make for an amazing climax. Of course, as everyone knows by now, its dark, but its not completely hopeless and the ending is bittersweet (or at least the ending I got) rather than outright terrible. And yeah the mod has several endings but there's no perfect happy ending and that's something I really enjoyed about the mod. Real history is messy, things that shake up realms don't just leave everyone happy at the end. The story tackles a lot of serious real world issues in a mature manner such as classism, racism, sexism, SA, horrors of war in general but also the reasons for it as well as human greed and corruption and how a world can come to be in such a horrible state in the first place due to these societal flaws. I feel that the mod's story truly shines nowdays because of all the things that have been happening in recent years. As for lore nerds... the narrative also includes a lot of deeper aspects of the lore, talking about the towers, enantiomorphs, CHIM and Namira's whole deal, Ayleids, Pelinel etc. Namira is trying to take over Ada Mantia in order to transfer her image into the next Kalpa and she's corrupting the vengeful survivors of a failed anarchist commune to achieve her goals.

The rest of the writing is unfortunately not very good. Dialogue in this mod is outright atrocious. It ranges between overly verbose language that feels stiff and unnatural to just plain lore breakingly modern slang and sentence structure used from time to time. For example, there are guys who will say "hey sexy" to you if you're playing a female character. This completely breaks my immersion because it makes them sound like horny fratboys rather than medieval soldiers. Meanwhile everyone except them will talk like they're reciting from a shakespearean play. Now, as an aspiring writer myself, one who isn't a native speaker, I understand that writing dialogue is difficult, but verbose language like that doesn't actually make something better written. Beyond Reach tries to write archaic dialogue but instead it just ends up sounding wooden and boring to listen to. It makes you feel like these characters are just characters and not real people.

On that topic, the characters are just boring and forgettable. This is partially due to having bad dialogue but also because they're all so incredibly mundane. Skyrim isn't great with its characters in general but I feel like this mod takes it to the next level in somehow making them more boring than in the vanilla. I'm a big fan of Interesting NPCs and while its approach has its flaws, the tackiness of its characters at least makes you care about them. I felt nothing for anyone in Beyond Reach. They were just boring caricatures of people with nothing to actually make me like them. I felt like I was reading a wiki page on some ASOIAF side characters rather than experiencing these people as part of the story. They were kind of just there to fill in various roles and they all felt the same with the exception of the two guys who talk like frat bros for some reason. In that sense, the one companion you get is also fairly mundane and even the commentary he provides tells you about the world rather than him as a person.

But I can live with that. I don't mind boring characters as much if the story and the world are great. In that sense the mod feels almost like Morrowind giving you a bleak world that feels real even if its characters feel like they don't actually have much going on for them. What I do mind however is the writing on the player character...

So, Skyrim gives you dialogue and story options that make you as much of a blank slate as possible. Dialogue options in the base game are as neutral as they can be. This lends itself to a wide variety of potential personalities for the Dragonborn to have and reasons for doing various quests. Skyrim never really pushes you into the role of a mercenary. Characters offer you gold for their quests but its also left open to interpretation, you might be doing these quests for the love of the game or because you want to help people, or maybe you're just trying to make friends. But in Beyond Reach you don't really have a choice as to why your character is there because the narrative (which I did praise earlier but whatever) forces you to be a mercenary who is hungry for coin. Which is extremely odd because you're literally sent there by Mara herself to fix the land, so why the Hell can you not roleplay as a missionary on a holy quest to save this land? Why do you NEED to be a mercenary who is only looking out for gold? The story definitely allows you to be a mercenary with a heart of gold, but you're always referred to as just a merc looking for gold. There are quests where your only reason for doing them is to get money and you're even referred to in such a way. Main quests are locked behind you needing to answer summons "or you won't get any riches!" and you're constantly told that you're just a mercenary and that you only want gold.

That just kind of sucks? It isn't even that hard to write neutral dialogue instead, right? To not call the player a mercenary all the time but to just say adventurer or to acknowledge player choice in dialogue. Why not let the player say "i am here to do good" instead of "im here for money" maybe even give less or no monetary rewards if you choose to roleplay as a hero instead of a mercenary?

But whatever, what really pisses me off is how player dialogue is written. Remember the bland skyrim dialogue I mentioned? Well, its no longer open ended! Now you're locked into long and overly specific dialogue options (and I say options despite you only having 1. the ability to ask more lore questions and 2. the ability to progress the story by saying overly specific things that dont fit your character in the slightest). This is INFURIATING when I'm talking to someone and my character is talking like a completely different person saying things they wouldn't say and making reasonings and assumptions my character would not make. But worst of all, you're actively punished for those dialogues. Like, a character will call you out on being stupid or uneducated or for talking shit about royalty or whatever when you had no option to say anything else, and they'll react to these specific dialogues in specific ways too (usually to make really bad unfunny puns or to have gotcha moments against you) it just feels like the author really liked how skyrim npcs will sometimes call you out on asking stupid questions you should already know (like a dunmer asking about the great houses) while also... forgetting that those were always optional. Also feels like the author had a very specific idea of the player character in mind that just doesn't really work as a neutral blank slate like how the dragonborn is meant to be written so people can insert their own ocs into that role. My worst example of this is how when you first speak with the Crown Prince he admonishes you for sucking up to him. You can then walk two steps and speak to the king and then act suspicious about him.

This extends into quest design and story design. You do have options to finish quests differently which is great but you also don't have options when you should be able to because the mod sets you up to make different decisions but then doesn't allow you to make them. For example, you can't actually do anything about Sigmayne forcing you to escort children to his basement so you just have to do it and buy into his lies despite... you already being able to learn that Wayrest was razed in a war over Sigmayne wanting to sleep with a nine year old girl. You know this as a historical fact. Like its not even a vague "oh he was accused of it but maybe its just propaganda" kind of thing. No, you're explicitly told by one of the priests that Sigmayne is a pedophile. Its a known fact of the setting, yet you are not allowed to disobey him when he tells you to bring him children. No option to escort them elsewhere or anything like that. It just feels really fucking weird and makes you later discovering what he did to them feel cheap because its not really your fault as a player that your character is locked into such a stupid choice for no reason. How can you feel bad when you literally knew better and couldn't do anything? Its not like you were tricked. The game just didn't let you do anything else. You are even allowed to be suspicious about it too, but you just aren't given an option to do anything else.

Another aspect of the writing we need to talk about is... the problematic stuff.

The mod takes on mature topics and handles them well narratively but then it does a complete 180 and makes weird real world references that not only cheapen but also make those topics concerning.

The ustase are in this mod. I'm not going to spoiler tag this because its genuinely upsetting to me and I feel like everyone should know what they're getting into. The fucking ustase are in this mod. The Croatian fascist genocidal military group from the Second World War. They are randomly inserted into the mod (or at least their name is) in a setting where that word doesn't belong (there is no Slavic language in Tamriel and the Reach isn't slavic in any sense) and they ARE monsters but the reference is in bad taste and I don't think you should be haphazardly taking real world things and inserting them directly into fictional stories that have nothing to do with them in such a way. I don't mind taking inspiration from real history but come on. I am Serbian. I don't want someone to make light of the topic by inserting it into a game for edge points. The mod has nothing to do with them so why are they there? Its a 14 year old's idea of maturity to include edgy references to real history and call it a day.

On this topic, they also have an orc called Luther, who wants to negotiate peace and whose whole thing is that he's Martin Luther King but an orc. First of all, wtf, why are we inserting MLK as a fucking orc, and why is an orc named Luther in the first place. I just thought it was also very distasteful and it created a lot of direct parallels with the real world that I found kind of gross and immature which stands in contrast with the overall narrative of this mod. There was also one quest related to abortion which I'll spoiler tag but basically a woman is impregnated through SA and she wants to have that child aborted. She goes to a witch because no one else will help. Instead of using this as an opportunity to show us that not all members of the Reach's original culture are BAD, instead the witch betrays you without a real reason and kills the woman and her child. When you return to the imperial officer he says oh no she wasn't in the right state of mind! I found this really gross but also stupid because historically witches were the people you'd go to for an abortion. It would've worked much better if the witch did actually try to help but the medicine didn't work because its dangerous, so it maintains the darkness of the setting without making a presumably accidental pro life argument. Either way I found the way this quest was handled to be extremely distasteful and concerning.

Also, one last thing about this but the dialogue can be extremely confusing and make no sense when mysterious characters are involved, but not in a "oooh cool" kind of way but in a "I know what this person is talking about but they're just saying random words half the time to sound mysterious" kind of way. Sometimes the dialogue feels like reading the Sermons of Vivec but replace all the meaningful references with random shit and make it into dialogue instead of an intentionally confusing religious text. This all paired with the voice acting of these specific characters can make the experience feel exhausting rather than entertaining at times.

1. The Lore

I'm not gonna talk about this for too long but the lore is a mixed bag. The map is flipped the wrong way but the mod author acknowledges that so its fine and not that big of a deal because the actual in game lore uses accurate geography (they say go north and thats south on the map for example). And the mod does a great job filling in the blanks of what might've happened in the Reach and High Rock in general. I loved all the lore the mod added in about history of the Reach, I loved the Mados stuff, the failed commune and how all the bad stuff originated from it, I loved the whole war with Wayrest thing and how Namira influenced everything and the way she was depicted and all the deeper lore stuff was neatly intergrated.

However... the lore also forces some topics that don't belong in Tamriel or at least literally contradict what we see elsewhere in the setting.

For one, the Reach is weirdly sexist and there are moments where it just feels weird as fuck. Almost all important characters are male for one, and the female characters barely play a part in the story and are more just background for what's happening or there to try and make you sad. But more than that, the mod has specific references about women's jobs being to marry and men's being to go to war, and that... doesn't make any sense.

Racism is also depicted in a weird way. I am perfectly fine with how the orc/breton relations were depicted but why are there so few members of other races present in the province? Like, I remember a single argonian and a single khajiit here, no caravans or anything and I don't remember seeing a single Dunmer. I didn't play every single quest but I just found this very odd. It just feels like a complete opposite extreme to Skyrim and Oblivion where the races are completely absent rather than being stratigically positioned like in Morrowind. It makes the Reach feel like it belongs in a different universe rather than being a part of Tamriel at all. The ustase don't make sense at all as I've mentioned before.

And what actually upset me but there are just... moments that don't make sense. There's a random character named Jerry at one point. He's just mentioned for a brief moment as a haha joke but it took me out of the experience. I don't think a story like this should take itself seriously 24/7 but the jokes also shouldn't break my immersion either.

Anyway, I would definitely play through this mod again to do things slightly differently and i consider it a great mod, though not one of my favorites. I think it would've benefitted a lot from some rewrites to the story and a complete dialogue overhaul before it was published.

If you have ever noticed the jarring absence of the player's voice while doing things like sprinting, gasping for breath after swimming, blocking attacks and swinging weapons and so forth, you may want to check on any mods that affect death, or rather, prevent it.

After recently replacing the player's default voice, this became all the more noticeable to me.

Interrupting the default death process apparently bakes the change into your saves, and during my tests, dying properly did not always fix the issue. The best way to solve it is to reload a save from before your death mod ever saved you and to NOT DIE. Otherwise, start a new game and NEVER DIE.

I have reluctantly resorted to using the TIM cheat (Toggle Immortal Mode) to play. If you do not know what that is, TIM lets your stamina, health, and magic pools drain and even hit rock bottom as per usual, you just won't die.

Hopefully this information helps someone else. I was really at a loss until finally narrowing it down.

This is a tough one to fix, but I'm not sure how much of a problem it is in the first place. Would you say you don't engage with alchemy because of this, or is it just a minor thing?

Asking for a Cassandra.

Yesterday I made an update to my mod on Bethesda.net. This update fixed an issue for PC and Xbox. It also attempted to add the mod for PlayStation. From my end it appears to have worked, but without access to a PlayStation console I can’t personally test it.

That said, if anyone tries it for PlayStation if you could let me know if there are any issues with it and I’ll do my best to fix them ASAP.

I will link another post I made last night but not associated with any subreddit.

https://www.reddit.com/u/jah6575/s/FcnN54vS4V

Essentially the purpose of this post is to make people aware of the update, that it now 🤞 includes PlayStation users, that it needs PlayStation testing, and that i have some ideas for the future of the mod.

My ideas for the future of this mod are in the link, but they ultimately boil down to this: When I released the initial mod I was under self imposed time constraints and wasn’t able to get the full scope of the mod completed. I had initially intended to make the pack with 60 Female Styles and 60 Male Styles. Of course what released was 40/30. I am under the understanding that large packs struggle to load on consoles. With that in mind, I want to add more styles both male and female to my pack, and I have plans for that moving forward. My question to you is this: What form would you prefer that take?

Option 1: Simply add the new styles into the existing mod (this would be my preference, since I made the mod to replace 7 hair packs in my personal load order on console).

Option 2: Create a new mod with any supplemental styles which could be used independently. Using both would use another plugin slot.

Option 3: The same as Option 2, but also combining the two mods into a third mod with all the styles, new and old. Which would give players the option of using the original, the additional styles only, using 2 plugin slots for all the styles, or using a different mod that merges them so they are all in one place.

What do you guys think?

I just really like those finishers you get when fighting "people". Not all enemies have to be people, but I'd rather avoid the mods where you mostly just fight draugr, automatons, etc.

I was just curious as to what the thoughts of mod authors where regarding Nexus imposing harsher punishments for other mod authors who exploit Nexus systems?

Nexus announced they'd impose harsher punishments for mod authors who create new mod pages for mod updates, then deleting the original so they can either revive their mod in featured/trending page or bump up their donation points for a while, stating that updates must be kept strictly within the original mod page.

Some of the punishments may include:

- Shadow-banning

- Full bans

- DP forfeiture

Do you think these are fair or would you say they need to be harsher as a deterrent?

I’m mid playthrough of my first ever playthrough of Skyrim and serana is pretty cool, I’m interested in getting the dialogue add on mod I heard it gives her wayyy more voice lines which sounds super immersive but I heard it just makes her weirdly clingy and not like her is that true? I opted for dialogue expansion instead but i can’t shake the thought if the other mod is better as I’d like to actually have a companion not a weight carrier ( also I have finished the DLC so she doesn’t even bat a word other than complaints 😭 )

Besides serana are there any other good companion mods that add tons of voice lines, me personally I like a “bro” shield brother and memer companion but if you’ve found one that you like feel free to share!

To give further context I have already tried GTS (Gate to Sovengard) and made a full playthrough in it, the only 3 small complaints I have about GTS is that dungeons were too dark (had to use dark vision spell everytime), and in the end game the character became OP and hardly anything could kill even when caught by surprise. Moreover, it felt too much like vanilla skyrim in terms of spells (at least all spells I encountered in my playthrough) with no cool high fantasy spells like in most TTRPG were a single spell can clear a room of normal bandits (like cloudkill in TTRPGs) or do something cooler than merely the vanilla-like calm/fury/courage/etc inducing spells.

But on the other hand I believe even a mob bandit should be able to kill a high level wizard if he is taken by surprise, perhaps not in 1 hit but a few swings.

Any suggestions for such modlists?

Some I have been looking into are Constellations 3.0 and Tomes of Talos the SFW version.

Title. Was browsing Nexus earlier and saw it, left it open in a tab and went surfing for a few hours. When I got back the tab reloaded and said the mod has been removed.

Anyone know what happened?

https://imgur.com/a/48Q2Gn1

I seem to get this bizzare bloom effect in some locations that i just cannot fix and is very immersion breaking

crash log: https://pastebin.com/Wp496faZ
quickloot log: https://pastebin.com/jNPtwddg
load order test: https://pastebin.com/LDLdEhWn
modlist: https://pastebin.com/TAT58dtD

Hello all, a friend and I are modding together on v1.7.104, and we have encountered an issue with Quickloot IE. When the mod is enabled and we interact with one of the menus it generates, a crash log is generated upon exiting the game. The generated crash log does not mention Quickloot IE, and its own log file does not appear to indicate any errors. We suspect this may be caused by a mod conflict. The mod appears to function correctly in-game, and we have not experienced any CTDs.

I commented on the mod page, and one of the authors suggested that the issue might be related to the "engine shutdown logic, specifically the destructor of the Scaleform allocation system" and that it is not an issue with Quickloot IE itself.

Any help would be appreciated.

Hello. As I'm currently redoing skyrim to make it better and feel that much more special, I wanted to look for a mod, like Unique Uniques, to update and change some of the in-game weapon models. Currently that mod from what I've searched isn't on PS4 yet, so I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations. This is for mods to make special weapons, quest items and or just unique gear look the part and feel that much more special to aquire

I like taking pictures of my character, would like a mod that lets me pose characters to get cooler screenshots.

What are your favourites/suggestions?

I've tried to tweak some potions and food effects in sseedit and now potions that give the regenerate health effect (the one that buffs your passive healing, not the ones that give a set amount of hp) give way more regeneration than they should. I set one to 25 from the 20 that it was at and instead of working as 25%, like how the previous value worked as 20%, it now gives 25 points of regeneration, which means that now I would heal 28% of my entire health bar per second instead of the 3.75% that it was supposed to be (3% is the base amount), but other things with that effect still work as the intended effect, a food with a 10% will make me heal 3.3% of my health bar per sec, not 13%.

If anyone knows how to fix this please share.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/190536?tab=description

I lose my direction all the time so i turned on storymode. Now i have too much help…

I dont want the map marker or quest directions, just a simple ”am i heading north or south”. Any tips on how to configure the modpack like that?

Hello all, playing on the newest AE version with Racemenu's beta, so not sure if that is a factor, but I'm having an issue where I can go to the hand overlays and feet overlays and attempt to apply textures, I can select the textures and change the colors; but the overlays don't actually show up at all and there's no actual changes. Is this a common issue?

EDIT: FIXED! The solution is to not be Breton, I guess. :c

Hi guys,

Using effigy by coldsun anyone can turn a preset into a follower. Now how do i create custom presets? Especially when i want to create a face/preset based on a real person? Are there easy to use tools? Im not good at using sliders or the sculpt function in racemenu

I'm a huge fan of LOTD, and I'd love to play a modpack that is absolutely stuffed full of LOTD related mods. The more things I can stuff in that museum, the better! I also don't mind other worldly mods being added too, like JK's improvements on towns and cities. I've look for so long to see if there was any modpack like this out there, but I really can't find anything. I'm starting to wonder if I just need to take the time to build it all up myself. But gosh, that could take weeks lol!
I tried Lost Legacy for a little bit, but my computer was starting to have issues running it, and even crashed once. My PC isn't bad, it's just old and has been struggling lately. Or maybe my PC is bad.

Anyway, does anyone have suggestions on LOTD primarily oriented modpack? preferably low-tier PC friendly?

So I would usually use Proteus for this, but for some reason whenever I make a change to an armour, the stats do not save. It will work for a while but I exit the game and re load the stats revert. So I change a light arnour to heavy armour, but when reloading the game, it it back to light armour, vice versa.

I want another mod that let's do this. So where I can make heavy armour light armour, or can choose to remove the armour status completely and make it clothing. As well as being able to change the actual stats of the items, so I can increase the armour value etc.

Are there any mods like this? I appreciate any help. I am on 1.6.1170.

So, I've been at this for three days now, and I just cannot figure out how to get this to work. I use to do small, basic mods as the big stuff confused me but now I have a mod I really want. I've resetted my mods list, uninstalled/reinstalled everything four times now, and while I finally got it to run, the animations are stiff and nothing fully works... Can ya'll help me out pls?

These are the two mods I've been trying to run the most.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/180769

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/192922

And here's my mod listing.

All of EldenRim weaponarts

Address Library

Alternate Start

Animation Queue Fix

BFCO - Attack Behavior Framework

Bodyslide

CompaSSE

Draw fix -Move Equip Animation

dTry's Key Utils AE

Dual Wielding Unlocker

Dynamic Grip/OAR Folder

Dynasty Warriors Movement Basis

ER Moveset Collection

FNIS Data

Fores New Ides Skyrim SE - FNIS SE - FNIS Behavior SE 7_6

HIMBO

House of Horrors Overhaul

I'm Glad You're Here

Kamen Rider Zeztz Impact BFCO MCO

Kamen Rider Zeztz PLAZMA BFCO MCO

MCM Helper

Moddern.Stagger.Lock

Nemesis Creature Behavior Compatibility - Main

Nemesis PCEA Main

Nemesis Unlimited Creature Behavior Engine

No Shout Cooldown

NPCS Wear Amulets of Mara

Open Animator Replacer/IDE Conditions/Math/Melee Collisions - Precision

Precision

Race Compatibility All-In-One Scripted Installer

Relationship Overhaul - RDO Final

Relationship Dialogue Overhaul -Update MCMC

Serana Cure Quest Plus

Simple Movement Keytrace

Simple Movement Keytrace - Pad Version

SKSE64/VR

SkyUI

SkyUI_SE.esp Plugin with Skyrim.esm Master

SkyUI_SE.esp Plugin with Skyrim.esm Master ESPFE

Spell Perk item Distributor

SRR - Serana Relationship Revamp

Stormcaller II

Naruto Jutsu Overhaul

TK Dodge SE

True Directional Movement

TrueHUD

Uchiha Clan - v2

Ultimate Combat SE

Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Path

USSEP Nemesis or Pandora Patch - Death After Hug and Dagger Attack Speed Fix - USSEP Behavior Patch

I was listening to some dumb hexcore and the line at the time stamp gave me an idea:

The mod would add a potion that'd somehow make you resistant towards guards (maybe like giving an effect that'd lower damage taken drastically when the source NPC comes from a specific faction) OR add a new dialogue option that is available only after drinking said potion that'd apply the fear effect to all the guards and lower or clear the bounty in the hold (or maybe increase it since resisting arrest is still a crime?)

Idk, I haven't thought the details through, I got that idea like 3 minutes ago.