I look at the state of modded skyrim and it has come far. It's true that some of the ambition has died or at least plateau'd, some mods are dead in the water, certain promises have not been followed through since 2011 for various reasons, the most obvious is probably just real life calling, but we still seem to have a rather driven community that will be making this game legend for decades to come, if morrowind and oblivion and even the DaggerXL project are proof that we might see TES modding for the rest of our lives! isn't that exciting!?

But i'm in a mood now! i want to play skyrim today and i'm looking for something that seemingly doesn't exist. Prompted by my recent playthroughs of borderlands 2, and farcry 3, and a bit of love thrown in for a little game called the dark mod which is a free standalone mod for doom 3 that is in essence THIEF!! Each of these games have elements of interactivity that i would love to see shoehorned into skyrim, I say the word shoehorn not to insult your skills, only to point out that these will be mods and without access to proper code we are left with few options.

My main issue is with menus, we love SKYUI and the functionality it gives us, but we still spend an unfortunate time in menu's. There are animation mods for looting, as well as some autoloot mods, but nothing that i know of that makes looting more like in borderlands in which the container you loot spills everything on to the ground beside it. Some of you may not wish for that type of loot, it might be too busy and messy, and i understand, but for me personally it gets the business of menu's off to the side while i focus on my surroundings and feel immersed completely.

I mention the dark mod because that provides looting in stealth, which is always jarring in the TES games because of MENUS! In thief there were loot pouches, or keys, glinting on a loop on your mark's belt, ripe for snatching, in skyrim you sneak...and open your mark like they are a .docx file. a bit disappointing.
Theifloot? is this possible? anyone want to give it a try?

Farcry 3 provides excellent examples of immersive looting that are wonderful. In farcry 3 there are loot animations for everything, you want something from a plant, you reach out and cut it away, its a bit jarring and cartoon like but at least its represented. We have a mod that does this already if i remember.

Farcry 3 though goes above loot with its interactive elements, and has interactive exploration tied to weapons, which is nothing new for games, games such as zelda have been revealing hidden paths with bombs for as long as i have been alive, but skyrim has none of that.
Well i ask for dungeon and world elements that make use of utility, something that has been lacking in the whole rpg genre is utility outside of combat. You can see bethesda experementing with uses for arrows in dungeons with vanilla skyrim, as well as dawnguard, and in oblivion arrows and spells were especially useful for knocking over loot to be within grasp. In morrowind there was a whole spell tree tied to utility, the most notable spell was levitation.
In skyrim we had some utility in the dragonshouts, especially whirlwind sprint, which could be used in many places for psuedo platforming, as well as trap evasion, which is fantastic!
But do you think modders should be attempting to diversify the utility functions of our arsenals? Or is simply running through the dungeons as they are enough of a joy?

Again to darkmod, Arrow utility brings me to a mod we have already, sneaktools. a mod that is also inspired by thief. Most notable is the rope arrow, which is a bit buggy for sure and levitation would make this a moot point, but we want both do we not? and we also want reason to use them. so in future dungeon and new lands mods maybe think about vertical space a bit in your designs, as well as rewarding those who attempt the impossible, alternate paths for those who take the high road, make it interesting

Thats my goal here, to provoke people to make some interesting things.

People make what they want. To them, it is interesting.

Most of what you appear to be looking for isnt possible. Pausing time in menus, as far as I know, can't be changed.

I never said that they were not doing interesting things. nor did i say anything about pausing time.
not trying to offend anyone. just trying to get a discussion going. if this is not the place to do that then sorry, ill go away :/

Ever considered trying 'to make some interesting things' yourself ?

http://www.gamesas.com/forum/183-skyrim-mods/ would likely be the place.

I agree that less time spent on a menu screen creates deeper immersion, although that said, I don't actually find menus to be particular bothersome or immersion breaking at the end of the day. I guess the dilemma that I see with what you're proposing is that the loot systems from games like Farcry 3 do not have anywhere near the amount of variety that TES has, so I can't see it working very well. In FC3, you can't just choose which items you're going to loot, you have to 'take all' every time. On a game like skyrim where you're trying to manage your carry weight and keep your inventory organized, it would be a real hassle if you couldn't decide what loot you wanted to take or leave. The reason that works okay in FC3 is because their loot is just way more basic.

This would also create some serious issues with storage. In some ways TES storage is very unrealistic, because chests are like Mary Poppin's bag, where you can just fill them forever. Nevertheless, the game is already designed that way, so changing it would create problems. For example, if you made it where it wasn't a menu and was instead an actual physical chest with naturally limited space, that would severely limit your ability store the enormous amount of items that you accumulate overt he course of the game.

So I don't know, maybe it's possible, but this is essentially an overhaul of the entire game's system from the ground up, and I suspect it would require a huge amount of work to create.