Thank you, Xiran.

Please allow me to bump once more. Earth is a wicked place, so i seriously retreated to Vvardenfell, and polished up the mod considerbly. I published the latest version a coupe of weeks ago, but before i got the chance to announce it Here, i stumbled into Gimp and NifSkope, so i finally started to change the way things look.

There's a lot of info in the release notes on the download page, and i can only be online for very short lapses of time, but i promise to keep an eye on this Thread for the next few weeks .

Bye for now.

PS : The Mod plays well without the Visuals, but the VB addition now has a semi final status, so i won't be releasing new distributions every other day anymore.

Missed You, and David, and Steve and all the others.

I think I might check this out soon. What puts me off slightly is the fact that it will conflict with so many other mods, but I think I'll just start a new game with just this mod

The concept reminds me a bit of Diablo...

Right - now I've only given this a little try in-game, and a quick look-over in the CS and TESAME - but already I have a lot of problems with it. This mod makes a LOT of changes to the game, so I can see why the author had some trouble describing it - and also why the author would want people to try it; obviously a lot of work has gone into this!

Firstly, this mod needs a REALLY thorough clean. So many objects are considered to be "changed" by this mod, but a lot of them haven't actually been changed at all; in other words, it is full of dirty references. I have no idea how many of the edits are legit and how many are dirty, because there are just so many of them, but at the very least, there are a full set of GMSTs and over 80 dirty statics.

That's certainly not all, though; nearly every type of "thing" you can possibly think of has been edited by this mod - activators, potions, ingredients, land textures, equipment, cells, landscapes, pathgrids, regions, NPCs... the works. I'm sure a lot of these are genuine edits, but a lot of them are just dirty references that can be cleaned.

I'm writing this half as a review and half as feedback / suggestions to the author - so, Rolf, if you don't know what I mean by any of this, please ask, because I think if this mod was cleaned up a bit, it could actually be pretty cool

From my quick inspection, I'd say the "main" focus of this mod is a lot of new creatures, distributed by new levelled lists, complete with new spells, weapons, armour, clothing and enchantments (many of which are new items for the player to take as "rewards" for killing the creatures, most of which are absolutely deadly).

Now, there's a lot to take from that; firstly, I'll emphasize again, the new creatures (and edited old creatures) are DEADLY. I imagine it would be very hard for a new character to go anywhere with this mod (although I imagine the new items make a big difference, as many of them are also very powerful). The first creature I encountered was a virtually indestructible Guar, which killed me in 1 hit.

Essentially, this mod is a total revamp of the game that totally messes with the difficulty - this isn't necessarily a bad thing, and can make the game more exciting, but, as the author has stated, it means that it might not work well with other mods. You literally need a character dedicated just to this mod.

Also note, that while a LOT of new objects have been added, none of them use any new graphics; everything this mod does is done through a single plugin file. While a lot of people won't like this, I actually really like the idea of using stock models in new and creative ways. I'm not quite sure what I think of making doors out of Ancestral Ghosts, Fire Ferns and Corkbulbs, but it's certainly creative

Perhaps to make up for the insanely over-powered creatures, some insanely-overpowered birthsigns have also been added. I think probably the most over-powered is "The 'Bull", which has the following abilities (yes, abilities): Sanctuary 25 pts, Fortify Luck 25 pts, Fortify Attack 25 pts, Restore Health 1 pt, Restore Magicka 1 pt, Restore Fatigue 1 pt. While this may be consistent with the new difficulty, it makes the original birthsigns (which have been left unchanged) basically useless by comparison.

A couple of points about naming conventions, because it's little things like this that really annoy me; a lot of object names (and all of the new birthsigns) have random apostrophes in, like "Quality 'Poison". A lot of creatures and items are numbered, i.e. "Daedric Ale 1", "Daedric Ale 2", etc. - I'd prefer it if these had names like "Weak Daedric Ale" and "Strong Daedric Ale". Similarly, "Daedric Milk H" and "Daedric Milk M" (one for health, one for magicka), could do with better names. Also, the new gauntlets and pauldrons are all called "... GauntletR", "... PauldronL", etc. instead of "Right ... Gauntlet" and "Left ... Pauldron". Lights have names like "Tube B2g", and in addition to "Crab Meat" there is also "Crab Meau", "Crab Meav", "Crab Meax" and "Crab Meaz". I've sure this is far from all of the bizarre object names, but hopefully you get the idea.

There is a lot of new dialogue, but unfortunately it suffers from the same oddities, wrong cases (lots of "i"s instead of "I") and spelling / grammar errors as the object names. I had a quick flick through the dialogue window, and decided the worst offender was probably the greeting: "THANX !" (unnecessary space included).

Just a few more miscellaneous points:

A quick warning to anyone who cares: this mod isn't exactly lore-friendly, in case it wasn't obvious. "Lord Welcome", the first new NPC you meet, is a Dremora walking around Seyda Neen. Arrille also has some new equipment: Young One's Spear and Young One's Shield - identical to Daedric, but really, really bad. These are just some things I noticed, but hopefully you get the idea.

There are some new Lights in some places (such as the Census and Excise Office in Seyda Neen) which aren't actually Lights at all, such as "' Black Shelf '". As the name suggests, this object is actually a standing set of shelves, and yes, it can be picked up (it has the icon of a book) and even carried in the player's hand. Tables and other objects are also available. Seriously, what on Tamriel is this about?

A final thing I noticed - you've created some new "soul gem" objects, but, as I believe you figured out, they don't actually work as soul gems, because soul gems are hard coded into the game.

So that's pretty much everything I've noticed so far. I'll keep playing as it's kind of fun to see all the new changes - I'll say it again, they are certainly creative - but I suspect when the fun wears off after maybe an hour, I will stop playing with this mod. It's just too crazy and all-over-the-place, and it needs a LOT of work.

Hi Danjb

First of all : THANX !

Thank you for taking the time to write all this down. I can't react to everything you mentioned in one go, so i'll tackle some of your issues first, and others maybe later.

I checked the 'dirty' statics, and most of them seem to be the ones i used when building Interior Cells. Why they appear as being changed? I have no idea. If there's anything i can do to fix it, i'd be happy to. I notice a lot of doors have asterisks as well. Now i' ve had some problems with disappearing doors in the past. so maybe these issues are connected.

Apostrophes and Spaces and Uncapitalized I. None of these are random. You may like Left and Right Pauldrons, but i like to group functionality. It's a Pauldron. I'd rather have all Levitatinng DarkBro Items together in the Inv than having to guess that there may be one more in the Left or Right department. Unfortunately, the Alphabet is rather one-dimensionall, so the choice of one may be the annoyance of two. I can't really help that.

My uncapitalized i is as deliberate. But maybe i'd have to capitulate on that one, as convention prescribes the capitalized one as a placeholder for the Curly I in handwriting. In my native language, a mid-sentence capital is rude.

Quality 'Poison and Quality 'Shock do damage, thats why i group them apart from Quality Potion of Jump. I use Apostrophe and Space to achieve a bit of order in the overwhelming inventory one has after playing the mod for several hours. The names of the ingredients, lights and other such items are meant to help the Player keep control of what's going on in their backpack.

, , ,

You were right about the amount of work i have put into this Mod so far. It's insane. And though theremay be things to clean up, most of the time i put into it, was testing, testing and testing again. Running through Grand Quests to check for sure that nothing was broken. And most of the other time was sheer playing fun.

I hope you'll have more than 1 hour of fun, as there's so much more than just the violence.

Bye,
Rolf

Hi again

The only birthsign i cared about in TOG (as i call The Original Game) was Atronach, and a lot of those eight+ years old Heroes stil do remarkably well in AT after a while. Yes, they get killed more often in the first hours after conversion, but when they have acquired some special equipment, they flourish. Xiran and David helped me balance the distibution of goodies in a significant manner, praise be.

But please do not consider Young One's Items garbage. The Y1 Weapons do not do much harm per stroke, but they are relatively fast, and even after a 1000 hits a lot of their 10K Health survives, meaning they still do that same amount of little damage without having to be repaired. They are designed to help you train your skills. Espcially the ones in Misc. Many Heroes of mine had a couple of L100 Weapon Skills before they turned L03. The Y1 Ammo is stil being used by my L51 Uber Hero RQ,.with a Butcher Xbow of course ,

Tables etc are there to place anywhere and put trophies on. The icons have changed finally in VB, but even the original books were intentional, as there are four open book icons and four types of furniture lights. The Shelves are great for leaving Potions or Clothes or whatever on. The Dinges is basically an error, but when carried by an adversary in mid battle, they can obscure friends and foes, thusly adding some more adrenaline.

Bull may not be the 'worst' balanced BS afterall: that may be The Ghost. Or the Frog. I like all three equally well.

Cheers mate and have fun.
Thanx again for your words.
Bye.
Rolf.

No problem - thank you for all the work you've put into this - despite my criticisms, I believe this mod has a lot of potential and I do want to play it, I'm just finding it rather difficult to do so; I played it again yesterday and encounted a "Nix-Hound Puppy". I thought "surely I can take this guy", and hit him about 5 times, hardly denting his health. He hit me once and killed me. I don't understand how I can get anywhere if I can't kill a single enemy?


If you open up your mod in http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=other.detail&id=53, you can clean it up; select the entries you want to clean, press space to "mark" them, and then press delete.


You can still achieve that by following Morrowind's naming conventions, i.e. "Dark Brotherhood Left Pauldron", or even "Dark Brotherhood Pauldron (Left)".


Interesting... but since the mod is in english, surely you can overlook the rules of your native language?

Either way, these naming conventions and dialogue "errors" (for lack of a better word) are not the biggest of problems. I'm sure a lot of people will care about these a lot less than I do.


Fair enough, I guess.


Well, the other birthsigns are still very much there, and a lot of people (myself included) still consider them feasible options in TOG, especially with mods like "Birthsigns are More Fun" as well. However, with your mod, I would never choose any of the original birthsigns.


I see what you mean, but really, especially in your mod, the damage is so low that IMO the items are worthless. They may have a lot of health, but that doesn't really matter as it's so easy to repair items anyway. I don't know about this "Ammo" though, I didn't see that... But, useful or not, these items are nowhere near as good as Daedric, which is the point I was making (since they have the appearance of Daedric). Again, not a big deal, I was just pointing out that it's not really "lore correct".


What do you mean by VB? And Dinges? I don't object to the idea of furniture that you can take with you and position in the game world, but the fact that they are made as lights is very strange.


So do I

I want to stress that most of the things I've mentioned aren't massive issues (although I still consider them issues, nonetheless). The main problem I have at the moment is simply that I can't even kill a single enemy.

Welcome back Rolf!



I made this exact same mistake many times my self and came to the same conclusions.

Ask your self, why are you trying to kill a nix-hound puppy that's just sitting there doing nothing? Why I bet that if you just left him alone he wouldn't bother you one bit. He might even be tame enough that you could walk right up and talk to him.

I have two Morrowind shortcuts on my desktop, one for my serious role playing and one for good old fashions swords and sorcery action play with RPG elements. Guess which one points to Azura's Touch?

This interests me... :huh:

I'll give this another try later

Alright, I gave this another little play. You were right SteveDog, all of the "uber" creatures I encountered before were actually friendly, and the hostile creatures I found were all quite reasonable. That makes this mod significantly more playable, and as such I will continue playing it every now and again, as I'm very intrigued to see the rest of the new content.

The "friendly" creatures, then: these can be talked to (silly me for not realising that, eh?) and generally offer services. Two that stand out were a Scrib that wanted to sell me some Moon Sugar and a Kwama Forager that taught me some insane spells for ridiculously cheap prices. All the friendly creatures could be seen a mile away in the dark as they give off a lot of light.

Most of the enemies I encountered were fairly standard (Rats, Cliff Racers...) but I also found a Ghost of some sort. I couldn't hit it with my weapon, so I ran away, only to find that the Ghost had zero speed, and therefore couldn't even begin to chase me. All of the creatures had a lot of ingredients on them, which didn't really make a lot of sense.

I also only just noticed all the new landmasses around the edge of the main island; I'm quite impressed by how much there is! However, I must admit that after a short trip to "Peaceful Oasis" I actually found it quite dull... The whole landmass is very flat and empty, with nothing but a few trees here and there and lots of creatures. It serves as a good Diablo-esque "wilderness" area, as there is lots to fight, but it was just so plain and samey...

One final thing I found was some sort of throwable bottle. I threw it, and it immediately started snowing an absolute blizzard. This was in the middle of Balmora. Have you got any idea what happened here? :wacko:

In summary:

I don't think this is really a "good" mod, by my usual standards; it's just too crazy and makes too little sense. However, it's this that makes me want to carry on playing it, at least for a while, because, although it might not be my usual type of mod, it's just... interesting. It's so unique and different and I really want to see what other surprises it has to offer.