This has frustrated me for a long time. The limits of modding, both in a developing sense, and a gameplay sense. I'll cover both.

I figure that while we sit and wait for the next Elder Scrolls, and it's greatly improved editor (and multi-threading capabilities, I think) I'll take the time to rant about my grievances of the current generation editor.

Developing Limitations

Most developing limitations are due to the game engine and editor limitations. Simply the limits of how much RAM can be used by the engine, and lack of multithread support can cripple many modding endeavors (this is more of a gameplay hindrance however).

I want to concentrate on the editor limitations here though. After messing with the GECK (Fallout 3/ NV editor) a bit I realized how helpful a search function in the CS would be, it is an invaluable time saver. While modding DBE I ran into some roadblocks where I couldn't find a certain object quickly, and that costs time. Time is very valuable to a solo modder, as you all know.

However, most of my grievances from the editor are with NPCs, and the Quest/ Dialog system. These are just sluggish and nonsensical, if you step away from a mod for a week you're doomed with not knowing anything of what a certain quest stage, faction, or dialog option is used for. It's a haphazard system at best, and this is leading to why this is such a frustrating block to hurdle over. Roleplaying games are generally defined by dialog. In this environment dialog is very tedious to implement, and the style in which it is organized leaves no room for actual coherent dialog.

Most of the time in the CS though, it's not that you 'can't' do a certain thing but it's extremely tedious to do so. Like with the dialog, you can make as many responses as you like, but handling that quantity of dialog is damn near impossible.

The world editing (object placing, etc., ...) is quite good but the limitations here are of the tedious sort, where if you don't have millions of dollars and a few dozen world builders on your team you're going to have some trouble. In the GECK we found the awesome power of object groupings, where you could drag premade structures out and modify them as needed, which was very convenient. The best thing in Oblivion we could get was the Warehouse cells (which I recently discovered... shutup!) where you could copy out a section of a fort dungeon (example) and paste it into your cell. The Oblivion route would involve changing cells repeatedly as needed (be it bookshelves, hallways, clutter, or whatever you required).


Gameplay Limitations

Think of the many mods that add beautiful scenery, textures, or a handful of NPCs to liven up a town. These mods at best reduce the game to a just playable state, but combat... forget it, the lag would ensure not a single one of your attacks landing and your quick death. NPCs in the Elder Scrolls are designed much differently than those of most games. The NPCs have many, many processes running on them, meaning a couple extra NPCs to a city, or IC district and the lag becomes noticeable.

How about the many cool ideas, even properly implemented with no bugs that suffered from clunky interfaces because of limitations. While this can't be completely avoided in modding (obviously) Oblivion's clunky console oriented interface made this more of an issue than it needed to be.

Crashing. Meh, what are you going to do, right?
====================================

Perhaps the funniest and most ironic modding limits lie not in the mods, but in the game itself... or does it? When modders make content at a higher quality than the vanilla game (large weapon overhauls, monster overhauls) it tends to stick out a bit. But the biggest problem I've had with this, is even when it's fully implemented and blended with the vanilla game, sometimes it can be too overwhelming. With the vanilla voice acting and quests in place where do these new things fit in? On top of it all.

This is mostly why I chose to do an overhaul mod, because not many other people were doing it. You could have the coolest armor, but where does that fit into the gameworld? You are walking through a town dressed in Tyrael's armor from Diablo II and to everyone else you're just a normal guy. The original guild's go on in their bland vanilla reality while the player and dungeons move on far ahead of them. In the end the towns get degraded to a simple merchant stop and going anywhere near an NPC unless they were running at you with a battleaxe to hear about their mudcrabs just breaks the immersion.

I suppose the rhetorical argument I'm getting at is that while I love my mod list from the new weapons, to realistic storms, to darker nights/ dungeons they don't seem to fit. Vanilla Oblivion was a centralized product, everything fit together, it was one package. While the hundreds of new monsters and weapons are great in the end they are mostly just pasted into the gameworld. My favorite mod Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul is my favorite because it's the only one that seems to blend itself with the vanilla world. You can see the posted warnings in the cities about the new dangers in the wilderness, warnings penned by familiar Guard Captains, it seemed as though they were always there.

I had a concept I discussed with Pronam about for a while. About a mod somewhat similar to what COBL did except instead of working on 'mod - mod' compatibility it worked on 'mod - game' compatibility. The idea would be to implement factions based on where an NPC was from, where they lived, their occupation, etc., ... and condition categories of dialog for these groups. When a mod get's released and shows that it's popular a patch would go out for it incorporating some dialog, notes, and perhaps some other small things to tie it in with the world. This project would likely have some sort of group administering it to assure uniformity. I might make a topic about that idea another time, but for now I'll get back to my point.

The large host of mods, even very popular ones such as Martigen's Monster Mod seem disorganized in way. Although there's many new creatures and ingredient/ loot drops they only transfer to gold. How much more immersive would it be if you were to walk into a Mage's Guild and when you approach the Alchemist they propose to you a deal for all of your Hill Giant hearts? How about instead of someone putting their new weapons in some shop there were rotating ships in Anvil harbor that switched out every couple of days, new ships selling new goods. Just some way of breathing life into the world rather than dumping some new stuff into it. Even modifying leveled lists in dungeons mods like MMM only add to the disorganized chaos already occurring in them.

I'll cut this off for now I suppose but I'd like to explain my reason for this. While modding DBE I've modified much more than just the Dark Brotherhood (such as the Chorrol Sewers). The reason I ended up doing this (and unfortunately grossly delaying release) is because I wanted to enhance the Dark Brotherhood experience, not tack on some new stuff. The new dialog and story ties in with the vanilla game, your new items are explained, the other sanctuaries and their secrecy is explained, it fits. There's stuff here for any type of character, I'm just finishing a new necromancer dungeon actually! I've utilized notes pretty heavily as well as journals to help paint a picture of the Dark Brotherhood that the difficult dialog system wouldn't have allowed. I'm working within my boundaries, and showing no shame in using vanilla practices (simple dialog trees, dungeon pieces, etc.).

I want to give players a reason to play a new character other than some new sword or armor they get. I'm making an experience, no, I'm enhancing the original one. Remember when Oblivion was young and modding wasn't tedious? Remember when modding was fun? Playing Oblivion alongside my modding has kept me going and reminded me why I started modding in the first place. To fix all the damn crap that Bethesda messed up in the first place!

Amen.

Don't like this post. It's way too long.

I agree on the dialog system. I tried getting into it back when I was playing Morrowind and it was impossible to keep track of your work if you left it alone for a few days, plus, it's unbelievably unstable. If you misclick and select a vanilla reply it can easily modify it in some way where you mess up a something. I only spent 4½ minutes looking at the dialog editor in Oblivion. It looked like the one in Morrowind, just worse.

I never tried New Vegas' dialog editor though, do you know if it's better? Obsidian said they improved it a lot.

I agree on the search function. Back when I modded I wrote down the names and categories of the most used statics, and the most rare. Like the beer keg for the secret door. That's hard to find.

The thing most "Veteran" ES gamers hated about Oblivion was the lack of depth in the game. They spent too much time getting good graphics compared to creating a deep and believable world. The voice acting is .. "pretending" but not acting, and the characters did not look serious at all. Just look at the wood elves, they're a joke for christ sakes. I loved them in Morrowind, despised them in Oblivion. Anyway, when modders create mods that are deeper than the vanilla game it gets confusing.

When players are used to a dialog that basically goes:

1. "Greetings"
2. "I need your help, will you help me?"
3. "Good, go to this cave, kill this guy, get this item and return it to me."
4. "Thank you, Good luck."
   

Adding a few choices makes players wonder what is going on. Adding a "Why do you need the item?" breaks the usual dialog and can actually confuse players instead of immerse them. For me, if I wanted to feel part of Oblivion I would start a conversation, read the subtitles and click through whatever the jerk was saying, and then re-imagine how the conversation went and what cool things my character said.

In a way, Dark Brotherhood already broke the norm in Oblivion before you modded them. Their quests was more than "Go there, kill that, retrieve that, return here" because there were a lot more conversation going on along with a PLOT TWIST. It had a friggin' PLOT TWIST. If a faction could get deepened out without becoming distant from the vanilla game, it's the DB. Freshing out the Fighter Guild would be fine, but then you'd need to give the other guilds an update too to make it feel "vanilla".

Obsidian lied. All they did is using another system as in 'lets order it differently'...nothing more.

I don't agree at all in its difficulty though. Once you get the hang of it, it's easy to follow. They haven't added any options they didn't use and it's very powerful. The condition system is mandatory in such a large open world game and that will not change in Skyrim. A note is that you can expect quests to get even more complex in their new games with all the variable options they've claimed to add so far. So if you disliked it now, you'll dislike it even more . So get over it .

I've always offered anyone to learn quests, but I can only comment by saying people don't take time for it as that's all it is..And it's a matter of days, or hours. Quests are where the whole game fits together, so yeah...it's more complex than placing an npc. You can blame the system, but looking at various other games and engines that involve the same gameplay...it's equally complex or less. What else did you expect , that it'd read your mind ?

(03-23-2011 02:13 PM)Pronam Wrote:  Obsidian lied. All they did is using another system as in 'lets order it differently'...nothing more.

I don't agree at all in its difficulty though. Once you get the hang of it, it's easy to follow. They haven't added any options they didn't use and it's very powerful. The condition system is mandatory in such a large open world game and that will not change in Skyrim. A note is that you can expect quests to get even more complex in their new games with all the variable options they've claimed to add so far. So if you disliked it now, you'll dislike it even more . So get over it .

I've always offered anyone to learn quests, but I can only comment by saying people don't take time for it as that's all it is..And it's a matter of days, or hours. Quests are where the whole game fits together, so yeah...it's more complex than placing an npc. You can blame the system, but looking at various other games and engines that involve the same gameplay...it's equally complex or less. What else did you expect , that it'd read your mind ?

I didn't say it was difficult, only overly tedious.

Just reading that makes me want to bust out the Cs and make something. DAMN YOU LOST DISK!

I should go beat up my cousin, he was the last one to have it.

(03-23-2011 09:52 PM)ManyFacedFool Wrote:  I should go beat up my cousin, he was the last one to have it.

Redneck justice.

I just spent the whole day in the CS, got quite a bit done too

(03-24-2011 12:03 AM)ImmokTheSlayer Wrote:  Redneck justice.

That sounds like the title of a great game. Maybe it's a flash title, maybe it's a AAA console game, but it has a lot of potential either way.



Your 'mod - game' compatibility mod idea is interesting but it seems like you'd either be making individual mod fixes on someone else work or a single mod that patched multiple mods at once. If it were the first one, it would seem a lot like stealing the original modder's thunder instead of making suggestions or working with them on improving it. Based on what you said, I assume it's the second option but that would force the user to install every mod you choose to include in the patch compilation mod or there would be dead-end content. Maybe just a few letters that don't lead to a quest because it hasn't been installed yet or maybe worse. I'm not sure. Just something to consider.

Really, it sounds like your ________ Enhanced series of mods without generating all the mod content in-house. The idea, as it was, allowed almost anyone to make something for a given questline and the best stuff gets incorporated in the enhancement.



I like the idea of ships coming into port... but I don't think they should sell cargo directly from the ship. It would be integrated into a 'living economy' type of system. In addition to the many great things that mod incorporates, items would be transferred to and from distant lands and port cities via ship. A day or a few hours after a new ship arrives, the item stocks of each merchant changes slightly. If you buy all the cheap arrows in a store it'll take a few days to make more (1 in-game daylight hour per arrow?) but if you buy arrows of a style the merchant doesn't make, it could take up to a week to order them from somewhere else. Yes, just like the idea you just posted, this is where unique custom armor mods are incorporated. They're shipped in from artisans from an appropriate culture.

...anyways, I can't think anymore. I got side-tracked doing homework and now I'm too tired to fini

(03-24-2011 06:35 AM)Alcron Wrote:  

(03-24-2011 12:03 AM)ImmokTheSlayer Wrote:  Redneck justice.

That sounds like the title of a great game. Maybe it's a flash title, maybe it's a AAA console game, but it has a lot of potential either way.



Your 'mod - game' compatibility mod idea is interesting but it seems like you'd either be making individual mod fixes on someone else work or a single mod that patched multiple mods at once. If it were the first one, it would seem a lot like stealing the original modder's thunder instead of making suggestions or working with them on improving it. Based on what you said, I assume it's the second option but that would force the user to install every mod you choose to include in the patch compilation mod or there would be dead-end content. Maybe just a few letters that don't lead to a quest because it hasn't been installed yet or maybe worse. I'm not sure. Just something to consider.

Really, it sounds like your ________ Enhanced series of mods without generating all the mod content in-house. The idea, as it was, allowed almost anyone to make something for a given questline and the best stuff gets incorporated in the enhancement.



I like the idea of ships coming into port... but I don't think they should sell cargo directly from the ship. It would be integrated into a 'living economy' type of system. In addition to the many great things that mod incorporates, items would be transferred to and from distant lands and port cities via ship. A day or a few hours after a new ship arrives, the item stocks of each merchant changes slightly. If you buy all the cheap arrows in a store it'll take a few days to make more (1 in-game daylight hour per arrow?) but if you buy arrows of a style the merchant doesn't make, it could take up to a week to order them from somewhere else. Yes, just like the idea you just posted, this is where unique custom armor mods are incorporated. They're shipped in from artisans from an appropriate culture.

...anyways, I can't think anymore. I got side-tracked doing homework and now I'm too tired to fini

This was the idea! Look at what Oscuro did! He incorporated (among other mods) Ayleid Meteoric Weaponry into his overhaul. In the original mod they were giveaway weapons (if I remember correctly) but incorporated into the overhaul you might find one in an Ayleid ruin or Mage's Guild hall. It's a mod that enhances overall gameplay, and if that means using existing resources than it's all the better!

Such a mod for Oblivion at this point is moot with Skyrim on the way, but if it was 2007 or 2008 I may have attempted to pick this up.