Nexus downsides:

1. The community is notoriously immature, in the sense that all the top mods will always be nvde mods, or mods that add russain anime girls to Skyrim. You'll never find an actual solid built, or non-lore breaking mod in the top endorsed/downloads list. As such, it can be hard to find the actual good mods - they are often buried under a mountain of crud.

2. You pretty much have to use their mod manager. It's nice, but it's annoying that you have to be a member (free) of their site to use it.

3. Mods that compete for popularity via oversized graphics on their profile, massive amount pleas for endorsments, etc are RAMPANT and there's a strong "modder ego" that goes with the Nexus that really isn't found anywhere else. In other words, many of the top modders on Nexus don't really follow the modding spirit, and instead just want to be super popular, even if it means their mod just adds a bunch of flashy, buggy bullcrap.




Workshop downsides:

1. Very limiting to modders. You can only have mods with 1 esp file (so no modular mods that have different options you can enable by selecting which ESP file you want to use), and everything you make is compressed in a BSA file format.. which is bad when there's only a limited number of BSA file formats that can be active at one time, last I checked.

2. No support for 3rd party script extenders, which means you can never get mods like SkyUI on Workshop

3. Search system is FAR worse on Workshop than Nexus. You can generally be pretty specific with what you are looking for on Nexus, while Workshop you can't. It's search feature is hard to find, and it does a terrible job. The only other thing to do is to manually go through giant lists of mods categorized by what they do.

4. You can't directly download mods, you can only "subscribe" to them. In that, they will auto-update whenever an update is released. This is very bad for the single reason that some mods that modify similar things, are often co-dependant on each other. So if one mod gets an update that another mod requires, you've broken the other mod until BOTH mods get updated. With the nexus, you can just hold off until both mods are updated. Sure you can unsubscribe right after you subscribe so you don't get updates, but then you'll never know when to update.

5. Load order (i.e. which mod loads first, which one loads last) is very important, because any mod that modifies something another mod modifies and is set to load last (including very small stuff you wouldn't expect, like adding a tree in a forest that a different house mod adds stuff to) will always have "priority". The default mod manager for Skyrim is really barebones in this, and the Nexus one (as much as I hate how bloated it is) is miles better than the default one. I'm also pretty sure whenever a mod is updated, it'll reset the load order. Which svcks if you have 50 mods in a specific order, then it gets reset on an update... you'll either have to remember what load order you had or go through trial and error trying to figure out crashes.

6. File size limits on mods through Workshop. This severely limits the type of content you can get from the Workshop.

7. Comment system is a bit wacky, unhelpful, and people tend to not care about the development of your mod. Despite Nexus's community ethos being awful, when it comes to small-time mods they are still generally helpful at "working with you" as you develop your mod, and are more able to deal with various bugs.


All in all, Nexus is better. While Nexus might have a pretty awful modding ethos and community, they are at least helpful and tolerant of "mod bugs" should they happen. And using Nexus ironically is much easier than using Workshop when you are actually browsing for and getting mods. The only thing with Nexus is you have to manually install them - while Workshop is automatic "click one button" style, since it is integrated with Steam. Because of manual installation, you can have any type of mod you could possibly make on Nexus, while the Workshop pretty much exclusively supports only simple mods like house mods, quest mods, etc.

Plenty of good stuff on both though.

2. You pretty much have to use their mod manager. It's nice, but it's annoying that you have to be a member (free) of their site to use it.

Why this?
Clicking on the file name (or probably "manual install", which should do the same) just downloads the archive file.
I've been using the Nexus for years, and have never even looked at the NMM - I download manually and install via Bash.

Staind716: He does have a point, though, with Hot Files.

I am a modder and I use the Skyrim Nexus exclusively. Steam is a company and companies make money. Skyrim Nexus is a company and it makes money. I consider Steam to be the Walmart snuffing out the little guy and I refuse to support such a large corporation that is putting it's foot on the Skyrim Nexus's prefounded purpose.

The Nexus site has been around for much longer then Steam when it comes to offering us modders a place to present our work to the public. I am faithful to the Skyrim Nexus because they were there for us modders when no one else was. They give me unlimited storage space and charge me nothing for it, a service they have offered free of charge for several years.

Being able to see when my friends logged on and off and being able to talk to them through Steam was all good and well. I liked that about Steam, no one else was already offering it and they charged me nothing for it. Then the advertisemants started and games started requiring an internet connection. Slowly they slipped in the back door that what they offered became apparent as not being free but rather a means of coorporate take over.

Personally as a supporter of the Skyrim Nexus I was offended to see the Steam Workshop open it's doors. Who do they think they are? I'll tell you what they are, the Walmart snuffing out the small business man. Scumbags in my opinion. They are just another small step towards taking away your freedoms. Remember when you didn't need an internet connection to play a video game that you bought and paid for? Remember when you didn't have to see some stupid advertisemant pop up everytime you exited the game you played?

I do and it's some of the other reasons why I absolutely do not support the Steam Workshop and what it really is. Another means of coorporate America to shut down anyone that wasn't born rich.

Do some research on what I've stated here and the big picture starts to become clear.

Yes, there are a lot of the anime type that make it to the Hot Files but not the nudity. I just get really tired of people saying the whole community is a bunch of pervs who live for nvde mods when a lot of us never even look at that garbage much less use it. I also manually install my mods and if people would take it upon themselves to do this they would have a lot less trouble with broken games since they would know exactly which files were being installed where. The Steam "Just click and subscribe" method is perfect if you want to lose all control over your mods and trash your game.

Lmao you say Valve, of all companies, is the corporate "Wallmart" of online services. I'm not sure where the Nexus is located, but judging by some of their server locations I'm going to bet that they aren't originated out of the US.

... Valve is one of the most pro-consumer companies on the planet.

Thanks for the chuckle.

Care to give insight?

I've been unexpedatly offline (such as interenet going out for a day or two) and was able to use Steam games just fine. Having to go "into offline mode while you are online" is an age-old myth that simply isn't true.

However if you are offline for extended periods of time, it won't let you log in until you can verify your connection. I think after 3 or so days of using offline mode it'll want to reconnect to verify that you're not running off pirated content. Yes, that's a form of DRM.

I've been unexpedatly offline (such as interenet going out for a day or two) and was able to use Steam games just fine. Having to go "into offline mode while you are online" is an age-old myth that simply isn't true.

You can replicate it: use process manager to kill steam.exe process. Disconnect and run Steam, it will offer offline mode but then fail to connect servers and won't run.

I don't see it as a screw up, it's more or less an experiement for them and they've admitted that it didn't work out. Steam has it's issues but I just find it funny how most of them are against how steam approached it's DRM, when in this day and ages its far more conveientent to have to deal with Steam than to have to deal with CD-key and forced cd-in-drive everytime you want to play, which is what every PC game used back before Steam became widespread. The advantage of the latter method though was that it was really easy to crack (technically you can crack steam but it is riskier).

It does sound like offline mode is hit or miss for people. It's worked perfect for me, when I've unexpectidly been ofline but at the same time I do hear stories like yours where someone expects offline mode to just work right out of the gate when they have no internet, and it doesn't. I'm starting to wonder if it works when you get disconnected while already online (i.e. you don't have to go into offline mode, you just lose internet when you are using steam), but it won't work if you go somewhere that doesn't have internet at all and you first start it up. I'd like to see steam implement a way for people to "remotely activate" online mode again, i.e. being able to log into the mobile app or on their website, and give you some kind of file you can run that gives you temporary offline mode without needing to be online first. I guess it can be exploitable, but they could just have it log if you are doing pirate activity or something, and/or just not care as long as your account is in good standing and not brand-new.

Because Valve wants to control every aspect of game rental.