My Skyrim Looks Better Than Real Life

I think the armor really brings out her personality.

I've always had this big problem with Skyrim where my game is capable of doing all these amazing things you'd never dare dream of in the console version, but I can't get myself to actually play, because there is so much more I want to tweak and improve and mess around with. It's almost like some kind of messed up art project, except 99% of the art was made by other people and I just manage to get it all to run without too many FPS dips or crashes. Which is a bit of an art form in itself, really.

I remember when I had not touched the game for a few months, we had Claire's sister over, I wanted to show off my pet project and of course the fucking thing crashed about three times in ten minutes, so I just gave up. Stupid me, I tried using the latest version of Deadly Mutilation without updating to the high compatibility version of the XPM32 skeleton, so of course the whole thing would constantly go kaputt after a few minutes. Duh, right?

I messed up and I need to be punished by Aela the Huntress.

One reason why I'm so obsessed with this shit is how lots of people try this sort of thing, but ultimately fuck it up for two reasons. One, they slam so many 4k resolution textures, graphical overhaul mods and parallax textures in there that the whole thing turns into a beautiful landscape simulator for breathtaking screenshots, but the whole thing will run at around 20 frames - per minute. And then it crashes. Two, they just combine whatever texture mods they can find, which can make parts of the game look and feel like they don't belong there. Worst case, the whole thing doesn't resemble Skyrim anymore. Of course that's really just bad if you actually give a fuck. If not, well...

"Ultimate Skyrim" is an abomination, but it's still beautiful, if for all the wrong reasons.
Now, don't get me wrong - people should modify their game (or leave it plain vanilla) any way they fucking want. That's what makes it so great, right? Personally, I want mine to look as stunning as possible without running like total ass.

If a tree falls in the woods and nobody takes a screenshot, is it truly covered in 4k parallax bark?

And if the game doesn't just look amazing, but also allows me to be part of a massive battle, which ends with mountains of corpses, severed limbs, intestines, brains, skulls, random torsos and a lake of blood covering the place, all the better. Because no matter how nice and arcade-ish the combat system in vanilla Skyrim may be, introducing a bandit to the business end of one's claymore should leave a bit of a scratch.

If you know what I'm saying.

However, the most exciting mod I've tried in a long while doesn't add extra violence or realism. It added Claire's character to my game. It's not exactly Multiplayer, but at least I get to spend some time with her virtual self in Skyrim. It's a mod called Familiar Faces and it allows you to save an exact copy of any of your Skyrim characters, their stats, gear and achievements, in a central hub. Then you can visit the hub with another character and make these copies a part of your game. So I went and transferred Claire's jack of all trades argonian into my hub, then put her into my main character's game world.

You can do all kinds of stuff with these characters, give them a voice and personality, make them your spouse, have them live somewhere in particular or let them roam the world or even turn them into an epic enemy for your character to fight. I received messages as I was playing, telling me where her character was traveling, so when I finally caught up with her she was just slaughtering her way all across The Rift, toasting trolls and spiders with thunderstorms and all sorts of impressive dragonborn shit like that. I recruited her as a follower and now we can fuck shit up together. I love mods!

Now all I have to do is wait for Youtube to support a bitrate, which will actually do the game justice. In the meanwhile, this looks pretty good, I suppose.

-Cat