It says [WIP], but with the CK still in the works, we all know that means alpha planning.


Although still working on my play-throughs of the game, I've been working on the skeleton for a fairly large realism mod that I'd like to do for Skyrim. This post is to probe for interest as well as to see if anyone would like to make early suggestions or requests. The mod will serve as a sort of "hardcoe" mode, and is generally meant to make the world feel more realistic and better for RP-type characters. My intentions are not to drastically change combat mechanics (except a possible adventure into working on magic) or game balance, and the mod will not be introducing nudity. And assuming I can figure out a way around dialogue issues, expect new content.

This is a non-exhaustive list of planned changes (and stuff is still in the works!):

Environmental

• Replace all invisible ambient lights with real ones
  
• Make dark interiors actually dark by removing unrealistic light sources
  
• Lightable lanterns and other light sources
  
• Something to do with children, but its sort of against the rules to talk about it here. ;P
  
• More realistic animal behaviors, and (if I can find the support/resources) more wildlife including fawns, birds, and more

Companions

• Increase humanoid companion limit to 2
  
• Add purchaseable animal companions (namely dogs) and pets, with appropriate behaviors
  
• UI Change: The ability to assign commands to companions from a distance, perhaps through a menu system similar to the Favorites menu for selecting correct companions
  
• Ability to command beast companions with appropriate actions
  
• MOAR! companions, particularly representing more races or goals
  
• Potential companion quests and likes/dislikes, with appropriate behaviors
  
• A little something for everyone, from the upstanding Legionaire to the dirty scoundrel necromancer
  
• Expanded play with marriages with more options, potential quests

Characters

• Carried raw meats will begin to go bad after 24 hours; fruits and veggies may also go bad.
  
• Raw foods may make you sick. (Khajiit and argonians may receive some immunity.)
  
• Rotten food will always make you sick.
  
• Starvation - Players must eat to survive. Starvation can take up to 2 weeks in-game to kill you, dependent on race.
  
• Dehydration - Players must drink to survive. Death from dehydration can occur in 4 days, dependent on race.
  
• Lack of Sleep - Death may occur in 10-12 days from lack of sleep.
  
• All three of the above will have varying degrees of severity.

Other Gameplay Issues

• Will look into adding refillable bottles/wineskins
  
• The ability to drink from open water sources (rivers, wells, etc)
  
• Cooked food will become more valuable
  
• Players can discover new recipes through gameplay, and may start with fewer known recipes
  
• Foods will have qualify values - example, burnt, overcooked, undercooked, excellent, etc, which may apply unique effects.
  
• Arrows and other mundanes may have weight

Planning is still all in the works, but I wanted to throw the idea out there to see how people felt.

Is removing the spartan blood from my horse a part of this mod? :I

I 100% approve of (and look forward to) this massive undertaking. If I weren't already working on the beginnings of a rather large quest mod, I'd totally help you out.

Good luck!

I have 2 suggestions for your mod:

1. Campfires cause fire damage when stepped on or touched
2. Shooting electricity into a pool of water will cause shock damage to nearby enemies in the water.

This looks amazing, if you can bring this to "reality" it would be awesome.
It's disappointing that Bethesda didn't implanted a hardcoe mode on vanilla game, but I'm sure if they did, that idea of your mod would be better, since it spans so many things.
Seriously, do not stop with this project.

Cool idea, I was thinking of something like this myself! I'd be happy to try and help with some of the modding in the future. I dabbled in modding a bit on Oblivion so I'm kind of familiar with the Construction Set, but I'll definitely be getting into it for real once they release it so I'll at least hopefully be able to contribute a thing or two.


Making that mode would've taken lots of unnecessary time and resources, look how buggy the game is already; and it's still better suited as a mod anyway.

Just because it is unnecessary for you doesn't means it is unnecessary for everyone.
For me, and alot of players IT IS NECESSARY, no discussion.

Also, resources?
What do you mean, that Bethesda didn't had enough time and resources just to add a hardcoe mode, that we've seen already in Fallout 3? huum, alright.
The game would be buggy anyway, it always is, since Bethesda makes games.

Here's my two cents. The problem I have with most so-called "realism" mods is this: they merely penalize my character. That's not interesting to me. If I'm going to pay attention to this stuff I want to be rewarded for my effort as well as penalized. I would love to see a mod that included bonuses for sleeping (higher for good beds indoors, less so for bedrolls outdoors, ect), eating (and cooking) certain types of food (which it sounds like you're considering), and drinking certain types of beverages - as well as the usual types of penalties for not doing these things.

Another problem I have: realism mods tend to affect only the player character. Personally, I don't like being the only actor in the game who has to play by these special rules. If I have to do it, then I think everyone should have to do it.

I love the idea of companion quests and expanded marriage options. It looks like you're off to a great start with this.

Falmer territory should be pitch black most of the time.
The predator / prey ratios are all messed up as is.

I think this should probably work a bit like vampirism, and I wonder if you could lift a lot of the code from there. A little hungry? No health regeneration. Thirsty? No stamina regeneration? Then you develop weaknesses / vulnerabilities, et cetera. I also think that food should lose most of its healing effects, and the value should all come from the fact that you have to eat it.

I really liked the "hardcoe" mode from Fallout New Vegas. And as the poster above me pointed out already, it would be great for hunger and thirst to have an influence on health, stamina and magicka regeneration.

Or if your character lacks sleep, make the image blurry, heavely reduce damage output etc.

I love this. Definately going to keep reading and suggesting more stuff here.

Water:
- You sink in it.
- You dont swim as fast as you run
- You don't see better underwater than above water

Diseases:
- They might cure naturally over time.
- Some of them are deadly.
(Hard to make difference between hardy and fragile characters since Enduration is removed.)

Potions:
- You can't gulp down 10 potions in a millisecond. Now hotkeying a potion is a free god-mode, exactly as it was in TES4. See The Witcher for near perfect potions usage. Regen over time rather than immediate heal, real time drinking, intoxicates you from overuse.

Traps:
- More lethal, maybe less frequent. Why would bandits keep flaming bowls on top of their heads while walking through oil all day long, just waiting for someone to finish them off with a single arrow.

Archery:
- Mount & Blade style, aiming crosschair goes smaller as the skill increases.

Adrenaline in combat will propably negate all affects of lack of sleep. Things like spellcasting, reading, lockpicking and crafting should be affected more. Eventually make the character doze off. In old games you fell asleep right next to monsters and they ate you, which makes little sense.

I hope this mod makes it to public. I especially look forward to having more than 1 companion and also the dark dungeons, giving you a reason to use magelight and torches.

Can't wait for this!

Only thing I don't like is dying from lack of sleep. That just doesn't make sense.

I like the blurry screen and lower chance of success on non-combat skills, but I would also add dozing off if NOT in combat and not waking up all too quickly if something were to attack while totally sleep deprived. Hmm, sleep might actually be one of the toughest to do realistically...

All of these are going to be MUST HAVE modifications for me. But, here's the thing: you are taking a big risk if you don't make it modular. Someone else is going to make a food and sleep mod, a companion mod, an improved marriage mod, a lighting mod, and so on. What if I like their version more? If I am going to continue using your mod, I'll need the option to turn off the features I don't like.

Changing ALL of these things at once is ambitious, and if you could pull it off and do it well, it could be the next Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul or Fran's.

A major one should be giving the Bretons more clothing choice instead of the fallback bethesda chose... "brown people with turbans and scimitars"

For me, the most important thing to change in Skyrim is reintroducing actual exploration, navigation and orienteering. As such I'd suggest the following features:

• Remove Quest markers and POI markers from the compass
  
• Remove ability to set your own marker
  
• Remove Fast Travel and extend the carriage system as necessary
  
• Replace the 3D map with a static topographic map (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Topographic_map_example.png) complete with all places labeled (everything normally shown by map markers).
  
• Add an index that lists all the places and the grid coordinates they have in the map (maybe as extra tab in the journal screen, maybe replacing the local map screen)
  
• Show a compass in the map screen (Seriously, if you allow a map to be panned, you need to show a compass in the map screen, Bethesda!)
  
• Compass is only visible in HUD while pressing a button, normally hidden.
  
• Remove local map altogether

That way, instead of

• receive quest
  
• go to map screen
  
• quick travel to nearest discovered place
  
• follow HUD compass straight to destination

You have to

• listen to the quest giver/read the journal
  
• find out where you are on the map by observing landscape features
  
• search for the destination in the index, remember the grid coordinates
  
• note destination on map
  
• plan a route
  
• and keep observing your surroundings, comparing it with your map and correcting your route

If you don't watch yourself, you might get lost and, with the other changes you suggested, that might prove fatal very fast.

Understandably that might feel unnecessarily tedious for some people, but I draw immense satisfaction and a feeling of accomplishment from playing like that.
Incidentally I am working on a topographic map for Skyrim right now. I need to clean up the contour lines a bit more, but apart from that I'm only waiting for the CK release to extract the local map to know where to place buildings and vegetation.

I have some more ideas in my mind, but they'd require a lot more work.

• Questline from some sort of explorers/cartography/science guild to visit landmarks, climb mountains for altitude measurements, fetching map sources in other cities, following rivers to map a spring, find the missing cartographer, etc
  
• Extend the quest dialogue to include actual descriptions where to go.

Lastly, I'm not sure how well this would work, considering I already encountered a few quests that couldn't possibly be solved without a quest marker, because the NPC would give no directions at all in the dialogue.

Yes please, love all the things you mentioned there.





I want this as well, especially the shocking of enemies that are in the water. As i recall, besides Bioshock, even Heroes Of Might and Magic the Dark Messiah had this feature (don't shoot me if I'm wrong).




Yes please .





What he said.



Now this one i don't like, maybe make it optional or modular as Kafeid' mentioned, so we can turn this one off.

Great idea!

I especially like the food and hydration comb with recipes.

Also i love to hunt more. Expanded interaction in marriage would be sweet aswell ^-^

What I'd like to see is if you hit a sabre tooth/bear/falmer/troll with a fire ball, it should hurt. In vanilla game, they just keep coming after you. It's ridiculous that they're on fire and keep coming and kill you with two hits.

Corpses rottens too and i.e, if a wolf was killed one week ago, shouldn′t be possible to get their fur, cause of their rotteness.

Don′t know if it′s possible too, but I think I saw a fox eating some dead corpses around. If you plan to do more Birds, why not put crows, and when they "eat" the dead, their bodies decay faster.

Would be nice too if we could plant wheat, harvest it better (animations), and grind them in the mills and do Bread out of their flour. Using the NPC′s animation for ploughing the land doesn′t seem much hard.

Just a few suggestions if you′re accepting it, of course.

Anyway, I′m anxiously waiting for this mod.

Would you consider changing the way food health restoration works to have it be over several in-game hours, making chowing down on 500 potatoes mid-combat less of a strategy?

Also, are you going to be playing with damage values? I feel like bears and saber cats etc. are immersion-breaking powerful. I mean, I'm more worried about facing bears than Dragons typically. Perhaps making their later variants (snow cat, cave bear) have the same stats as early ones?

I'm not against progressive challenge, I just think that should come from harder enemies, not just harder variants of easy enemies, which I find really makes level scaling obvious.

/me approves this message.

Hey folks!

Sorry that I haven't been right on top of this -- been keeping up with Thanksgiving prep.

Just some responses:

- I do plan to make related parts of the mod modular.

- I love a lot of these ideas! Keep them coming. I also appreciate the criticism on the nature of realism mods, and I'll be sure to look into ways to provide benefits as well as penalties.

- I will consider altering the effectiveness of some animals in combat. I personally have come to hate the ineffectiveness of dragons, despite how beautiful they are and some of their behavior. But rebalancing these will be a secondary goal; one thing I know that I want to fix if I do decide to take this on is the weird issues that come with higher-level characters being able to basically one-shot the poor beasties right out of the sky, and the seeming requirement to run around in MASTER difficulty mode just to get a challenge.

- Any change in the mod that will require a new resource (texture, model, animations) will have to come in with outside help. I couldn't photoshop my way out of a brown paper bag, so I would have no idea what to do with Blender.



Edited - Oops! I forgot to address one of the comments.

- Death from lack of sleep is realistic; in real life, it causes severe issues other than just "fatigue." That said, I am going to look into ways to implement it that will make dying from it almost downright intentional, so that it otherwise will just be a great annoyance in gameplay.