I have a love-hate perspective on mods. I love that they enhance the gameplay, fix/balance class and skill issues, and add cool new features that Beth neglected. But I also hate that when I'm playing with mods, I notice the mods' effects and I just can't help knowing that I deliberately put those features in. It totally breaks the immersion for me.

Anyone else feel this way?

Of course you don't want to have to improve the game yourself, because playing it is not as fun. But with the level of greatness that comes with some of these essential mods, it far outweighs vanilla with immersion points IMO.

No

OK... so a mod enhances your gameplay, fixes issues, balances things, and adds what you consider cool features the developer neglected, and that breaks your "immersion"? So you get immersed in playing games with bugs, which are unbalanced, and have no cool features?

I am confused.

Depends on perspective I guess, there are many mods that exist now and will exist in the future that to me will add to the immersion

It depends on the mods.

If you're adding mods that make women's briasts the size of hot-air balloons, then yea, you'll notice it.
However, right now I'm running a few homemade texture mods, and some made that just tweak gameplay a little, like, and extra perk point every few levels, or being able to
turn Dragons souls into a perk point etc...

Nein.

Someone deliberately put every feature in. There's really no escaping it. And if it's mainly about your personal hand in it... do you avoid changing your video options? Those also have visible in-game effects.

Some mods do, some don't. For Oblivion I only install fairly Lore-friendly mods. For example I wouldn't dream of playing without OOO, Better Cities, Unique Landscapes etc. Mainly aesthetic changes, the occasional environment or armour re-texture. Some people want swords and armour from different games and that isn't my thing at all unless maybe it was an original idea that was designed to fit the existing world.

There are of course flaws, for example the Teddy Bear shop in the Better Imperial City is a pretty ridiculous addition but it's well worth it considering how awesome the mod is.

So yeah I do generally go for things that are as lore friendly as possible, and if it isn't perfect it's always something that is barely noticeable/ well worth it.

And no I don't want every female NPC in the world to have briasts as big as my torso.

:]

Not really.

that is why morrowind was awesome . All text !!!!!

Real life is immersive enough for me, I play games to feel like a bad ass that can do things that i cant do in real life....

like beat the ever living hell out of a dragon
eat its soul
then dance around the bones and sing about it

Some mods can easily enhance immersion.

Particularly in Oblivion, where the vanilla game was soulless and had about as much depth as a movie set.

Two (Three) words: The Lost Spires.

Weird question?, that depends on what mod you are installing....some mods are enhancing immersion.

It breaks immersion, cause of the incessant crashing it causes.

BUT, it was definitely the best adventure mod I ever played.

I don't use many mods and this is one reason. I don't like being taken out of "official lore" and "official design." On top of that I also have a weird hangup about messing with other people's art.

The mods I tend to use are minor ones that add to immersion. For example Oblivion's immersive interface or Francesco's leveling rebalance. For Skyrim I am mostly looking forward to a more immersive and less noticeable compass, a new map that feels like a paper in-game-world map, and a new interface.

I Do somewhat agree; the smaller a mod is, the more you tend to notice it, which is why i often stuck with big mods like OOO in oblivion. There it's a whole world to get immersed in, but the smaller a mod is, the more it sticks out and the more it breaks immersion when you notice it.

Mods improve the game for me, I dont find it less immersive, at least not once my install is battle-tested and there are no issues popping up due to incompatibilities or such. These obviously break immersion

The sole negative for me is that properly modding a game require so much knowledge about it, its mechanics, its systems, so much testing and tweaking, that by the time I had a perfect oblivion install with 220 mods and everything was stable and running exactly the way I wanted it, I had spent so many hours getting there that the game had no magic anymore. It felt grand, but I didnt really feel the need to play it. I felt proud of my work but I felt more like a game developer than a player, I guess.

i find it difficult when i add mods that increase immersion to reduce my immersion in my game!

i think this thread is simply a flamebait thread!

Imo i think mods GREATLY enhance the immersion. Obviously depends what they do but overall i cant play without them, unless bethesda produces a game that is perfect for me. But cant see that happening despite how awesome their games are.

Except you didn't really deliberately put those features in, the modder did. All you did was DL and install it...kind of like what you did for the vanilla game.

Here is the thing. When you play vanilla ES, you are playing a game by the rules of Bethesda. When you download a mod you are playing a game by the modders rules. The only time it would break immersion for me is if I designed the mod myself, or simply force myself to ignore certain aspects of the vanilla game (roleplay).

At laest half the mods I tend to fall back on I have either made, or modified, to suit my purposes. And I still do not find that they "break immersion", no!

Quite to the contrary in many cases, in fact.

As a modder, "I forgot I was using it" is by far my favorite compliment.

It depends on the mod(s) you use, the mods will do what you select them to do. If they break immersion, you only have yourself to blame for the mod you chose to download.