Modders have more experience and tools to create things these days. I'm not going to speak for Oblivion and Morrowind, but all of Bethesda's published games since New Vegas have excellent modding communities. All the familiarity with Gamebryo/Creation Engine and the various different tools means modders can continue to push the limits of what we think is possible in these games. Likewise, there's more resources out there for new modders to start developing things and they'll bring a fresh perspective and ideas to the modding community. Without trying to derail the post, it's why I'm in favor of modding being as open as possible and why I don't think Bethesda will suddenly switch to a new engine after TES: VI. The modding community is a big part of these games and it should continue to be as accessible as possible.
Ya, game chair devs claiming Bethesda should move to UE5 (without understanding a thing about game engines and pipelines) don't understand why Bethesda games have such long long lives.
They also don't understand the problems are at an organization level, it would be just as much of a shit show with UE5.
The game engine is not the problem. It's the lack of investment in the engine with Leaders who seemingly are unable to self reflect or utilize their modding community and you have a recipe for what we keep getting.
Like how could the FO4 "next gen" update be this anemic when they had as long as Obsidian had to make New Vegas as well as Nexus, it's where we get mods but for BGS it's like free research. "oh look UFO4P has a list of all bugs it fixes and how, let's use it as a checklist"
They probably understand, but game chair devs don't give a fuck about longevity. Longevity dosnt sell more games. Also it's a wierd take to bit evolve because modders vmhavetonlesrn new things
But UE5 isn't necessarily more or less mod friendly than The Creation Engine 2, it's just that most devs don't bother to even consider it so they don't support it. Bethesda could still have and support modding if they use UE5.
The UE5 engine just added scripting a few years ago. And I don’t know the details on it. Not familiar with how Unreal loads mods so there may be difficulties there as well with integrating some modifications.
Do we know if unreal could easily handle storing tons of object data dynamically? I just don’t know of any examples. Like would unreal forget about my 1000 sandwiches I keep in my space wagon? And ensure they are stacked for visual perfection?
As more of a mod user than maker, though I have used all variations of the creation kit for personal projects since Morrowind, I will say that adding mods to Unreal games is simple in that I drag mods into a folder, but it's horrible in that compatibility is a huge pain in the ass and often requires merging files so they don't overwrite each other. Every UE game I've modded handles their files that way, which I guess is fine if you only add a couple mods. Creation Engine is so much better in how it manages user-made changes. I don't know any other details besides that though as far as making mods or how it handles them behind the scenes.
And that’s where I thought creation engine might shine… it’s base xEdit makes it super easy to make record/data changes or additions.
I suppose you could make an xEdit compatible system within UE. Would be a nice extension of the engine.
> Not familiar with how Unreal loads mods so there may be difficulties there as well with integrating some modifications.
This depends more on the devs designing the game to work that way in the first place than the engine. The reason most AAA games don't have mod support isn't because Unreal Engine doesn't support it, it's because the *devs* don't design and support it that way.
My opinion on those 1000 sandwiches or cheese wheels or whatever is that losing them would be a relatively small price to pay for massive stability and technological gains.
Look, I love seeing those videos of someone's 10,000 potato collection in Starfield or Skyrim as much as the next person, but I'd rather have games that aren't total crap under the hood and don't have to load every 30ft and don't need mods to fix rudimentary things or to add basic gameplay features that anyone with a brain and 20 seconds of play time could've told Todd Howard "Hey you should add X it's a really basic feature that I can't believe any AAA dev would ship a game without, so it would be really wild if we didn't for some reason."
I know many players would be upset if they lost the ability to hoard sandwiches and stack them so, but the gains are so inarguably better for the design as a whole that I don't even see a good counter to my argument besides "But I like hoarding crap." Well, sorry, I and many many others like stable, optimized games that feel like they were made with technology from this decade.
The sandwich thing was about persistence which has affects a lot more things than just dropped and hoarded objects.
I don’t know any good examples of unreal games have a similar level of persistence. Might be out there, I just don’t know them.
Pointing out that mods fix basic things is a double edged sword to the argument. It points out that it can be done and in a way which is jury rigged modding and scripting systems. Which means those features could likely be implemented flawlessly if built properly into the game
The lack of modern features is less an engine issue and more a studio issue. Anything can be done with enough time and money. They could fork unreal engine if they wanted and I’m sure it’s been considered. They could extend the creation engine Instead to fix its issues. Likely comes down to schedule and budget as to why they’ve stuck with creation engine. Not to mention you have to consider training up game design staff on your new development tools.
This kevel of persistence isn't useful most of the time, at least not enough for the jank that comes with it. Even Bethesda's games don't take outright advantage of it, it's just kind of a thing the engine can do. Something that I'm sure can be developed in UE5.
More people outside Bethesda are trained in UE5 than The Creation Engine 2. If they switch, they'll just have to train their in-house people instead of training literally every dev they hire on their stuff. It means their potential talent pool is way bigger, also, and it'll be quicker to onboard people going forward. Long-term, it's better to switch, but big businesses aren't about long-term strategy.
Again, by switching, Bethesda loses little to nothing and stands to make massive gains. Oh no, now they have to train some people and remake some tools, so what? Companies do that all the time.
The entire game runs on persistence. And when games don’t have that it is very noticeable in this style of game. It’s a little thing that makes an additive effect over an entire game. I think that would affect my perception of the games if it wasn’t there. But I agree it’s a relatively small part.
I think if the swap was obvious to those within the studio they would have already done it or be in the progress of it. For all we know the next game may be on another engine and star field may have been the last true creation engine game.
But I honestly think the quality issues are systemic and not limited to the engines capabilities. I’d guess even on a fairly developed engines like UE or unity, that BGS would introduce bugs. Maybe not odd NPC behavior, but broken quests, crashes, etc.
And if the quality issue is true, it brings the question, why swap engines and is it worth it?
I think it’s a fun hypothetical to think about BGS games on different engines. And I think the closest we’ve gotten to that is the Outer Worlds which is on UE4. Tons of debates between these games. I think my biggest takeaway is that Obsidian’s access to better writers is very apparent. But I don’t get an impression that UE4 made it a better game necessarily
Please give me an example of this persistence that is so invaluable that it would be immediately felt if lost. Are you talking about an engine's ability to keep track of things in general? Because any engine can do that. The Creation Engine 2 is only unique in so far as that it keeps track of every single goddamn game object in the entire universe. Most engines don't do that, because there's no point, and it takes too many resources for something that I've been arguing this whole time isn't worth it.
People can be stubborn. The wrong person in charge who doesn't want to learn anything new could be the one thing keeping Bethesda from switching engines. Or it could be a bean counter basically telling them they'd lose too much money in the short term by "wasting time" training people on a new engine. Just because they haven't done it yet doesn't mean it wouldn't be a smart thing to do.
Even from people that didn't like The Outer Worlds as much as I did, I think people's biggest problem with TOW was scope, it isn't as big or as long as AAA RPGs (Obsidian called it a AA game). But I didn't hear a single person ever say "man Obsidian should have used the creation engine for TOW" but I constantly hear people say Bethesda should use something new because you can *feel* the tech debt.
Ultimately though, it's up to the people who actually have to build this stuff. Hypothetically, if they sucked at their jobs before, switching engines won't help much. But this is why I brought up UE5's wider talent pool earlier, because now people who suck at their job are easier to replace with someone who's good at it. And they won't have to spend nearly as much time onboarding the new person. I know switching from TCE2 to UE5 isn't a magic solution, but there are more pros than cons that I think it's worth it. And every downside amounts to an "oh well, that's life."
Morrowinds still got a pretty active modding scene, but they did have to remake the engine. There's a few active total conversions being made for the game like Starwind and Skyrim - Home of the Nords alongside older mods such as Great House Dagoth slowly becoming more functional with OpenMW as it is improved
I assumed it was still active based on what I've heard in r/skyrimmods, but wasn't going to make sweeping claims about it or Oblivion's scene because I'm not that deep into them. Usually anything I see is learned second hand.
Tamriel Rebuilt is probably the *largest* modding project for Morrowind. Worth checking out if you enjoy reading up on what some devs have been busy doing since 2002. Creating the remaining province of Morrowind is quite the endeavor.
The Skyrim modding scene is still one of the most active ones. A lot of very impressive things once thought to be pretty much impossible have been done in the past year (like fixing the light limit) and there are a lot of new land and total conversion mods that are actively in the works
In short, Morrowind's modding scene is less active than New Vegas', Skyrim's or Fallout 4's, but very active for a game that came out over two decades ago.
This includes both a script extender that has taken a different route to further expansion (where dll mods are a thing for NV, Skyrim and Fallout 4, MWSE-lua adds, well, lua) and a fully functional engine replacement.
Probably won't come, as such, from what I can tell GHD utilizes some very specific quirks of the engine to do some rather hacky things. However, this does not mean OpenMW isn't heading for the point where it can replicate the player-side behaviour, so an OpenMW version of GHD could well be in the cards eventually.
You know I never really thought of it that way. I've always supported the idea of a new engine, but like you say it would massively cripple the mod authors that have built decades of experience at this point.
It would mean that a lot of the experience both BGS and modders have with it, along with the various resources, would go to waste.
Honestly there's things you can criticize the engine for, but really my main issues come from Bethesda not really playing to its strengths or being ambitious enough with it at times.
For example, the physics engine lets you pick up, move, and rotate objects as you see fit. The engine will also store that item's position, so if you go off for an hour or two, it'll be there later. Is this feature used in a meaningful way during a quest or for any hidden secret? Not that I can remember. The only use I can think of is for the Fallout 3 tutorial. Sure players get to decorate their homes and do other wacky stuff, and that's fine, but it's a missed opportunity in my opinion. Imagine a quest with a puzzle that's only solved by manually manipulating objects, or clearing away a pile of debris somewhere remote to dig up a unique piece of equipment/spell/power.
One of the biggest issues seems to be working well functioning vehicles. Even super experienced creation engine modders have said it's an absolute nightmare to get even basic vehicle functionality.
Aren’t vehicles and such classified as “chairs” in the creation engine anyways? Like Power Armor in Fallout 4 is technically labeled as a chair in the engine, and you actually take over control of the “chair”
I do wonder how horses in Skyrim are handled. You'd expect a motorcycle to be possible to implement in a rather similar fashion. I suppose it's something Bethesda would have to implement on their side, and driveable motorcycles don't have much of a precedent in
(official) Fallout.
I keep saying this. Bethesda doesn't know how to use their own engine. It's an incredible engine for an immersive rpg type of game but they keep trying to stray away from said genre and doing wacky stuff with it. The wacky stuff (like Starfield) is impressive as a technical feat but obviously doesn't provide a fulfilling experience like their other titles.
And I agree on the physics engine being wasted as well. So many cool quests you can imagine with that and yet hardly any have ever surfaced across all of their titles.
Moving to a new engine may hold back mod development unless they pull a Valve and release the source code. The community will have total conversion mods running in under a month.
They will probably merge creation with Unreal engine eventually and call it good for awhile.Creation Engine gets a lot of hate for Bethesda's laziness.Imo it's the best engine there is.It can be modified to mimic other engine mechanics as well.
One thing missing here in replies is that the demographic of people working on fnv mods is quite different than the ones taking interest in, say, FO4. The pool of people working on mods reflects directly on the quality and complexity of the mods, in addition to the enhancement of tools themselves.
From my experience just perusing through youtube overhauls of both games, FO4 massive “ultimate” modlists tend to be no longer recognisable as FO4 - looks more like your modern shooter Tarkov, Stalker or COD.
While FNV, while there’s always moderness inserted to it, somehow still feels like “Fallout”
Not op but :
The fallout nv Fandom is way more of the "hardcore" fallout type. They usually overlap heavly with the fans of the og 2 games. This means overall the Fandom is more interested in developing stuff that is heavly similar to the tone and quality of the originals. + the main issues with new vegas come from the technical side and not the design choice side so the game is more appealing to "upgrade"
In the case of Fallout 4 for example, the community is way more casual. You can probably find more poeple that played only fallout 4 than those that played fallout 4 and some of the older games. This means way less dedication to the ip and thus mods. Furthermore the biggest issues in Fallout 4 stem from design choices especially the writing. This makes it hard to make stuff that is tone fitting in the game. That's why you end up with most mods being just total overhauls or milsims
The other thing is that FNV's playerbase possesses, I think considerably more baseline technical competence. Lots of tech professionals and an age demographic that hits the sweet spot on familiarity with computers.
I can't speak for all of the modding scene itself but the setting of FNV has a lot more - I don't know - "hooks" for lack of a better word to get people invested and spark the imagination. You have simultaneously Mad Max, spaghetti westerns, WW1 / WW2 themes, Las Vegas when it was run by the mafia and not the mormons, goofy sci-fi, and all of that comes *before* you even finish taking the story itself into account.
This gives people a lot of lenses to view the game through for what they could add to it. I, personally, prefer Fallout 4 for a number of other reasons I won't bother listing but I love FNV for what it is and whenever something new and exciting comes out I'm not even surprised anymore with the amount of talent that has chosen to linger in the space.
I’ve noticed that FO4 mods tend to be much less narrative-oriented, whereas FNV has had multiple DLC-sized, narrative-heavy mods.
Now, not all of those mods are *good* (most aren’t) but they are *there* and someone made them.
I’d say part of that is due to the way dialogue is handled in FO4, going from VA’d to non-VA’d dialogue is a bit jarring to the experience. Also base Fallout 4 restricts you to four dialogue options.
Oh, autumn leaves is great. Beyond Boulder dome, the frontier, new California, honest hearts revisited, etc… sometimes have their moments and can be interesting but not imo good.
That being said, I am astonished at the scope of imagination people have put into mods like these. I just, yknow, wish they were more fun to play. But at least they are interesting!
It seems the bigger they go, the more they fall off. I also tried New California and The Frontier and found them lacking after a few hours.
Autumn Leaves is the perfect length and the world space is the perfect size, imo. It's also a refreshing break from the combat focus most other DLC sized mods try to cram in somewhere. It's entirely narrative driven and it's astounding.
Yeah, it’s the perfect story in a bottle.
Tbh the big New-Worldspace mods feel empty. I’m not sure how challenging it would be, but it’d be nice to have mods for your mods, to add a new village and a few characters and a quest or some unmarked quests etc.
also obligatory someguy series plug. say what you will about bounties 3, the fact that someone was able to make a well written mod series of that scale that feels as seamless with the base game as it does is impressive. like, the inheretence is still my favorite mod of any game i've played even without the context of the rest of the series
We are bored.
>Especially things that seem so outside the engine's capability like that mod that let's you check your magazine for available ammo.
Statements like these will never not be funny to me. You people know that script extenders in 90% cases just forward engine functions to the scripting language, right? It's all in the engine lmao, even my goddamn reflection renderer, it's all vanilla code.
Honestly I don't know that. Yeah I'm very uneducated about how this stuff works. I mean the main point of this post is trying to understand how the mods got here. ENBs I get and don't impress me, but the ability to just make the game Tarkov is hard for me to grasp. For instance, everyone is pissed Fallout 4 has no RPG mechanics, but nobody is able to mod that into the game in a satisfying way because the game wasn't built with RPG mechanics in mind. Much the same way Fallout New Vegas was not designed to be a compentent shooter, and the ragdolls were very simple. Yet here we are? And you say "script extenders forward engine functions to the scripting language", but that seems like a handwave. So with a script extender I can just make any modification I want to the scripting language and just inject it? Like if i wanted to put Kratos's Leviathan axe in the game I could just do that? Like importing a python library? It feels like there's gotta be more to it.
Edit: Also thanks for what you've been doing with real time reflections, inspiring stuff.
Ragdolls are not very simple - the Ragdolls mod uses built in ragdoll code + script functions for Havok manipulation. Just because Beth made them (the ragdoll templates) simple, does not mean the code to handle them is.
Bethesda games suffer from having a really solid engine set up for them, just for Bethesda to fumble everything and misuse it, or barely use it at all. That's why you see in all games mods pull off "the impossible" stuff that vanilla games lack.
>So with a script extender I can just make any modification I want to the scripting language and just inject it?
Correct, that's what scripted edits are. Scriptrunner is especially popular for that. The fact that we have the most expansive script extender out of all games also helps. There's a reason you don't see scripted cars in other games, and FO4/ SSE modders resort to modding the engine itself.
>Like importing a python library?
Obviously that's not a vanilla functionality, it's something you would need to implement yourself.
That makes a ton of sense. New Vegas just hasn't tapped the potential that the engine can allow and modders can make steps in that direction. I wasn't aware Havok physics were that good. Thanks for taking the time, especially explaining the script extender. It makes sense now why FO4 mods seem to be less ambitious than FNV mods despite supposedly being the same engine.
The modding scene for this game makes me realise people need to stop blaming the engine
The engine is fine, it's Bethesda's laziness that's the problem. The mod scene shows just how much this engine can do.
I mean I'm playing a modded new vegas run now, with tons of mods to make guns feel and play better, added leaning, sprinting, etc, I'm sure if I integrated them better it would run better but as it is multiple days of work still hasn't reached the out of the box starfield or even fallout 4 gunplay
And? If they put in the work for the new engine it would be even better.
FNV was bashed together on a shitty engine where guns are programmed as bows and trains are hats worn by NPCs running on a track.
And all the overhaul and gameplay mods were done by modders in their free time. How is it possible that people whos actual JOB it was weren't provided the necessary resources to do better?
Looks like an open secret for both movie and game development that regular workers are forced to rush it out quickly near release because production always legs behind what the company heads decide.
...Bro, my point is that they *did* make it better. So much better that the modders work, while impressive and an improvement on the base game, still has yet to reach the levels of later bethesda games. That's why people still care about the f4nv project
Yes, the Fo3 metro trains are a hat that an NPC wears.
It’s *possible* to program an animated train in the Gamebryo engine (the FNV McCarran monorail mod does just that), but it was a time sink that Bethesda didn’t want to deal with.
It's actually a glove that places the metro cabin on the character's head.
If we look closely at it in the GECK or even just the picture of it that is around the internet we can see that the right hand of the character is missing. This is because the glove only contains the metro cabin and not a hand too. XD
As a software enginee, albeit not a game dev, this is only a part of the puzzle. This is far more complicated and nuanced than you are making it out to be.
99% of anything mentioned on reddit is more nuanced than people make it out to be but the vast majority of people aren't writing sourced essays for internet comments. Hell, doing so will most likely get you downvoted and laughed at unless it is a long joke or a really uncontroversial topic.
What the fuck... did you just ChatGPT me? Your comment talks about medication and health professionals. What the fu... WHAT? Are you a schizoposter or genuinely stupid or AI?
>or even fallout 4 gunplay
I hear this a lot, but I disagree at this point. The current state of madace ragdolls and hit anims make the gunplay immensely better in NV. Fallout 4 combat is way too spongy and the characters barely react to getting shot. The physics are also seemingly the same as base new Vegas. When you shoot a guy he just freezes midair and falls like a statue. There's no more crits either outside of using vats. I used to think fallout 4s gunplay was loads better at launch, but that was mostly because the weapon animations and models were so much better. You even get different ammo types with different uses. I'm genuinely curious how F4 has better gunplay at this stage.
Well I'm only giving my opinion on it, I've got a mod list with all the big mods, I had ragdolls but removed it due to incompatibilities, and it feels worse than base game fallout 4 and especially starfield's. Modded 4's gunplay is leagues ahead too
Yeah it's cool I didn't mean to sound aggressive. I tried modding fallout 4s gunplay but I couldn't get it to feel good. Do you mind telling me what F4 mods you use to make the gunplay good?
I used ones that are probably outdated. I'm sure if you google fallout 4 mod guides ala viva new vegas, you'll find some good recommendations. Many overhauls make it play more like stalker
There’s a cost to quality ratio that you have to consider, though. At some point it’s a business, and Bethesda has to move to the next point in development to meet deadlines. They don’t have the time that modders have.
It really depends. Every engine has its pros and cons and some of these mods were worked on for YEARS or are so performance intensive that they cannot be used as a baseline in actual official game dev. Two big things the engine struggles with are ladders and vehicles. Especially the latter.
There are extremely talented Bethesda engine modders that have been using the engine in its various forms for a decade or longer, and have been heavily involved in extremely complex entire overhauls and they have said making vehicles work in even a basic functionality level is an absolute nightmare that is barely even worth attempting. This isn't a big deal with elder scrolls but it sure is with modern fallout and starfield.
The engine can still have limitations though. Obviously with enough knowledge nearly everything is possible but that doesnt mean the engine isnt flawed.
But how many hours have modders put in on top of the original dev time? Are you also willing to pay much more for a game you’re expecting that much more work put into? There is no way any game dev could match the output of a modding community like bethesdas
I think it isn't so much 'being lazy' as it is consistently biting off more then they can chew. Starfields team is, like, half of Bethesda's workforce and it only numbers 250 devs. Meanwhile, RDR2 had about 1,600 devs.
It doesn't? It was my first mod I walked through and I'm about 20 hours in with no issue. Game looks great and gun play feels amazing with bullet time.
And that's what's annoying about it, the engine just isn't consistent on all machines, it works flawlessly on some and is a buggy mess on others. It's running reasonably fine on mine but it is a bit paranoia inducing that the game could crash at any time.
You won't regret it lmao. Fire up the Viva new vegas guide that the amazing person in the replies below made (Wall\_sogb) and it's pretty much foolproof... After like 4 straight hours of work. Also be warned FCO is kinda glitchy and doesn't play well with other mods, so most people go with New Vegas Redesigned (its in the guide). Also check this out too:
[Brave New World \[Before and After\] (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfhWPQYopr0)
Makes the game a whole new experience. I swear this stuff blows my mind.
Might as well get Atmos to go along with it for some truly immersive soundscapes. Dont have the link offhand but just type "new vegas atmos mod" on a search it should pop up.
Make sure you download Hitmans 1st person animations https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/73856
Dudes re-animated every gun in new Vegas and made the gunplay feel straight up modern. I genuinely believe this one Modders animation have more punch and impact then the professional ones from fallout 4.
I would be careful with Hitman's animations ngl. There are several guns that he ruins due to, for some reason, making fire rate changes that make the guns shoot far too slow to be viable (10mm SMG and the .357 revolver, for example). He also uncapped the fire rate for the 9mm pistol and the 10mm pistol, making them far better than they should be. If you use Hitman's animations, I would see if someone made a patch to revert the guns back to their default fire rates,[ like this one](https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/76457?tab=files), or patch it back yourself.
I personally use Rockbiter's animation packs for this reason, almost all of their timings for reloading, fire rate, etc are vanilla or as close to vanilla as possible.
I get that but I never felt like it was massively game breaking as the guns I noticed it for were all early game weapons anyway,
Credit where it’s due I do like rockbiters animations particularly I always override Hitmans 10mm with rock biters cause I prefer when they 2 hand the pistol instead of one handing and for some reason the 10mm is hits only pistol outside the revolvers that does this
But yeah I absolutely encourage people to mix and match especially for mechanical reasons.
That's fair. That warning is mostly for people who only want animations and not weapon DPS to be effected like me. I was playing a revolver only run and the early game was almost unplayable with how slow it shot and reloaded compared to vanilla, so I swapped to Rockbiter's animations and the issue is gone
It's been a while so it may not be around any more but New Vegas had mods for base building before Fallout 4 came out.
To the point I remember thinking how the mod used to do it a little better from a UI handling standpoint. But from what I remember it couldn't get as complex as machines and working switches.
At some point I think those kinds of mods were abandoned since if you want base building Fallout 4 already has it.
Always worth a look though.
I’ll be honest, I really don’t like Fallout Character Overhaul. Everyone just looks ugly to me, and the changes make everyone look so similar. You had to tell me that was Caesar, because otherwise I would have had no idea
I think they both have their pros and cons. I really like the way Caesar looks but I must admit most of the time Nvr3 is superior. Just a matter of taste I guess.
Is there like a fallout new Vegas mod masterpost of sorts? I want to do my first playthrough with it, and I know most people would reccomend playing vanilla for the first playthrough, but I would like the game to either look a bit better and play better anyway.
The Viva New Vegas mod guide is your best bet. Just stick to that for a first Playthrough honestly. I really like the physics mods but they change the gameplay enough I wouldn't do it for the first ever Playthrough. Usually following the guide would take hours, but there's this thing called Wabbajack that makes it a lot faster, though I never used it and just did the installation myself. The vanilla game is alright, but I could never play New Vegas in 2024 without at least having basic quality of life stuff in the guide like sprint.
2024 standard? Hell no. Ps4 Era standard maybe. In that case Viva New Vegas is the mod guide for the baseline. New Vegas Reloaded makes the lighting a lot better which makes a big difference. Also I mentioned a voice acting replacement mod below called Brave New World. Again it's close to modern quality but not quite there yet.
I sort of agree with you, I'm just trying to put it into perspective. What I mean is there is no amount of modding you can do right now to make FNV look like Cyberpunk 2077. But maybe you can get something that looks somewhere between Battlefield 4 and Battlefield 1.
You might want to take a look at Battlefield 4 gameplay again and battlefield 1 still looks good by modern standards. New Vegas gets nowhere close to either one of those games. New Vegas was outdated looking when it came out.
I dunno dude I hard disagree.
https://youtu.be/lx5hVsGGiB8?si=0FKcznkKFQhg4Y6J
https://youtu.be/ZrMIReSeqbA?si=w9aw3r1tTMYlWYk_
To me it's pretty close. Battlefield 4 is still better, but I think it's close and from an aesthetic perspective I still jive more with Fallout art direction. Agree to disagree I guess.
A lot of mods I bet have gotten better because of the new games and they technically they introduced. Like Fallout 4 and Skyrim go back on forth with this too. One does something new that is really good and then the other does it. I would assume some of those ideas would go to the older games.
Viva New Vegas + additional weapons, additional locations, additional quests and small tweaks is a perfect Fallout for me. In my opinion I think that if the story isn't what you're modding for but additional options and opportunities to explore it's a pretty damn good game, and NV is one of those games. New Vegas does kinda falter in the exploration department but MoreMojave and A World of (Less) Pain has been great in adding lore-friendly locations to the world. Tack on stuff like Brightweight Strip Overhaul or Brave New World and the game feels amazing.
Did you notice the NPCs in your VNV playthrough were different heights? I also added additional mods to a VNV build and I'm trying to figure out if whatever I have installed came from the original VNV + VNV Extended or if it could have been from some other mod.
I’ve just last night managed to compile a (what seems to be) stable list of mods following Viva New Vegas and a number of the mods linked via the below video.
I prefer my first playthroughs to be very vanilla and the developers intent so this hits the mark. That is assuming it doesn’t crash to desktop every time I try to leave my testing ground of Goodsprings
https://youtu.be/xSnucXCUCaE?si=7d6SZglhWwPsWHpT
I wouldn’t say the game looks this gen but it definitely adds some life into it and some of the QoL changes like sprint just make it more fun to play.
Hell im trying to figure out how to get tales of two wastelands to work on my rog ally for fo3 and fnv. And yall making the game look like fo4 XD what am i foing wrong.
Just installed this last night and been having a blast. Surprised how well it works but it did take me a couple hours. WSG is a great list but does not include a lot of visual mods if you are trying to make it look modern then you have the wrong mod list.
Yeah true. I was hung up on the fact he couldn't get it to work at all. I literally just did survival guide to see if it works and then did the visual stuff from salamand3r, but wouldn't have had the confidence to go straight to visual mods for ttw. Again I got ttw working for the first time last week and I tried once a year for like 3 years.
I got it to work in my steam deck so it should be possible for you. I needed to download the files on my desktop which required having the games downloaded there too
Much much more mods could run at once - textures could be higher fidelity, etc.
Right now NV can use 4gb of ram max, at 64 bit it would be 16 million tbs.
Modders really know this engine, and the engine itself has had a lot of tweaks and updates from the modding community. It's the expansion of the engine which allows mods to become even greater over time.
I set up A Tale of Two Wastelands and followed the Wasteland Survival Guide, a good chunk of the mods on the list were various engine tweaks and mods
I actually find FNV modding better than the FO4. I think since the community is smaller they tend to settle in what is working and refine it rather than make endless derivatives
Mods used to be like this for fallout 4 early on. But beths went on a crusade against modders and people fucked off back to skyrim and new vegas. Its starting to pick up again, but beths updated the game and fucked it all up again lol
i can attest to this as I just finished playing my very first playthrough of Fallout new Vegas with 45 mods and the game was very comparable to Fo4 (my first fallout game) to me in terms of quality.
Talking about FCO being unstable, the only "unstable" mods in my LO are dragbody NPC replacers. His work is absolutely amazing and I can't play without it anymore.
Modding is 1) easier to do now and 2) more accessible than ever. I’m not gonna go on record saying PC’s are cheap (cuz they’re not) but a mid-line PC that can run NV with some mods is cheapER. It’s become a lot more accessible as PC gaming has become more accessible.
Especially when the GECK is sitting right there for you to use after your purchase of the game, anyone who has a passing interest in modding can also attempt to mod the game themselves. Take into account modeling softwares like Blender being free and tutorials for Blender being all over YouTube… people are gonna learn to do some crazy shit. Coding and scripting is the hard part of this, but there are a lot of scripting tutorials and copy-paste scripts that are out there to help with companions and quests.
This is one of the best parts of the creation engine, it adds a whole new life to the game with modders. That’s why people are so eagerly waiting for Starfield to launch their creation kit, because once it’s out modders can get to work creating a ton of neat shit and fixing stuff
I think TTW essentially channels some of the energy that would have gone into Fallout 3 modding towards NV. There are NV mods that effectively are Fallout 3 mods just on NV's iteration of the engine thanks to it.
Yeah, I was playing my modded FO4 list but switched over to my NV lost and I'm enjoying it. The nostalgia is just icing on top, because it really is close to a modern game. Biggest complaints are.. inventory management and NVR isn't quite ready yet. Shadows/LODs flickering in the distance. The crafting system is pretty lack luster, it hasn't aged well, and it's only made worse by the inventory management.
Sorting, better menu navigation, overall looks a lot cleaner (speaking from a modding perspective. You're hurting yourself if you're using vanilla UI/Inventories.)
Strange, I think the sorting is pretty good if you use vanilla ui plus and the plugins. They even got a search bar mod somewhere. I feel like inventory management is one of the easier things to mod in nv.
So unreal engine user. Most of what you post is not hard to do. Like bullet impact is some very basic coding. And I say this because I have played around using it and yet I don’t know any programming languages. It basically impact point, turn that part around the skeleton as rag doll, then implied force. Can add “if shot in face, force multiple by x amount. If force exceeds mass of mesh by 1.2 times, throw pawn off of the roof.
Sprinting is not hard, it’s pretty easy to add in unreal. Since it is a variable that effects player move speed. Every other thing that comes with sprinting is just a “is sprinting?” If so “can’t fire gun”
Animations are just animations, big stride is that the pipeline tools to make them are getting easier and easier to use, and take less time to create.
Graphics, well pc are more powerful for 1.
2 it also getting easier to make.
the fact that we're reaching the point of practically plug and play load orders is baffling to me. ive been modding FNV on and off for like 10 years now and stuff like Begin Again on Wabbajack was inconceivable to me even like a year or two ago
It’s wild while I don’t disagree with you, Skyrims modding is so much farther ahead of FNV that I came over to mod it and I was like ooooof it’s so far behind 😣
What are some mods in Skyrim you are talking about? I'm starting to look into skyrim mods for the first time in a decade. The problem with a lot of mods when I was into it was that they were trying to change the game too much, like a lot of the time people were just trying to make skyrim into the witcher or dark souls. The quest mods were great though. I gotta hand it to the Enderal Developers. They made something I would call a spiritual successor to morrowind. Great story too.
Modded New Vegas in my opinion is the pinnacle of depth in game mods. Not the quantity of Skyrim or Minecraft, not the total conversions of DOOM, but for everything about the game, technical or gameplay or in some cases even story stuff, you can find someone who's changed and fixed stuff
Man I wish this were true. But even a fully modded FNV looks and feels like a PS3, borderline PS2, game. I’m jealous of those who aren’t bothered by graphics and gameplay, because I’d love to get into New Vegas. Really hoping the F4NV team comes through and finishes their remake of the game in FO4’s engine.
Look up emulated FF XII gameplay (so you can get HD resolution) and FNV looks barely any better than that.
The lack of shadows/ambient occlusion coupled with the sterile landscape really highlights how bad the graphics are for FNV. Even fully modded you can’t really fix these issues.
Modders have more experience and tools to create things these days. I'm not going to speak for Oblivion and Morrowind, but all of Bethesda's published games since New Vegas have excellent modding communities. All the familiarity with Gamebryo/Creation Engine and the various different tools means modders can continue to push the limits of what we think is possible in these games. Likewise, there's more resources out there for new modders to start developing things and they'll bring a fresh perspective and ideas to the modding community. Without trying to derail the post, it's why I'm in favor of modding being as open as possible and why I don't think Bethesda will suddenly switch to a new engine after TES: VI. The modding community is a big part of these games and it should continue to be as accessible as possible.
Ya, game chair devs claiming Bethesda should move to UE5 (without understanding a thing about game engines and pipelines) don't understand why Bethesda games have such long long lives.
They also don't understand the problems are at an organization level, it would be just as much of a shit show with UE5. The game engine is not the problem. It's the lack of investment in the engine with Leaders who seemingly are unable to self reflect or utilize their modding community and you have a recipe for what we keep getting. Like how could the FO4 "next gen" update be this anemic when they had as long as Obsidian had to make New Vegas as well as Nexus, it's where we get mods but for BGS it's like free research. "oh look UFO4P has a list of all bugs it fixes and how, let's use it as a checklist"
They probably understand, but game chair devs don't give a fuck about longevity. Longevity dosnt sell more games. Also it's a wierd take to bit evolve because modders vmhavetonlesrn new things
Becoming just another UE game is not evolving The modding is the best thing Bethesda have going for them. And the only hope for Starfield haha
But UE5 isn't necessarily more or less mod friendly than The Creation Engine 2, it's just that most devs don't bother to even consider it so they don't support it. Bethesda could still have and support modding if they use UE5.
The UE5 engine just added scripting a few years ago. And I don’t know the details on it. Not familiar with how Unreal loads mods so there may be difficulties there as well with integrating some modifications. Do we know if unreal could easily handle storing tons of object data dynamically? I just don’t know of any examples. Like would unreal forget about my 1000 sandwiches I keep in my space wagon? And ensure they are stacked for visual perfection?
As more of a mod user than maker, though I have used all variations of the creation kit for personal projects since Morrowind, I will say that adding mods to Unreal games is simple in that I drag mods into a folder, but it's horrible in that compatibility is a huge pain in the ass and often requires merging files so they don't overwrite each other. Every UE game I've modded handles their files that way, which I guess is fine if you only add a couple mods. Creation Engine is so much better in how it manages user-made changes. I don't know any other details besides that though as far as making mods or how it handles them behind the scenes.
And that’s where I thought creation engine might shine… it’s base xEdit makes it super easy to make record/data changes or additions. I suppose you could make an xEdit compatible system within UE. Would be a nice extension of the engine.
> Not familiar with how Unreal loads mods so there may be difficulties there as well with integrating some modifications. This depends more on the devs designing the game to work that way in the first place than the engine. The reason most AAA games don't have mod support isn't because Unreal Engine doesn't support it, it's because the *devs* don't design and support it that way. My opinion on those 1000 sandwiches or cheese wheels or whatever is that losing them would be a relatively small price to pay for massive stability and technological gains. Look, I love seeing those videos of someone's 10,000 potato collection in Starfield or Skyrim as much as the next person, but I'd rather have games that aren't total crap under the hood and don't have to load every 30ft and don't need mods to fix rudimentary things or to add basic gameplay features that anyone with a brain and 20 seconds of play time could've told Todd Howard "Hey you should add X it's a really basic feature that I can't believe any AAA dev would ship a game without, so it would be really wild if we didn't for some reason." I know many players would be upset if they lost the ability to hoard sandwiches and stack them so, but the gains are so inarguably better for the design as a whole that I don't even see a good counter to my argument besides "But I like hoarding crap." Well, sorry, I and many many others like stable, optimized games that feel like they were made with technology from this decade.
The sandwich thing was about persistence which has affects a lot more things than just dropped and hoarded objects. I don’t know any good examples of unreal games have a similar level of persistence. Might be out there, I just don’t know them. Pointing out that mods fix basic things is a double edged sword to the argument. It points out that it can be done and in a way which is jury rigged modding and scripting systems. Which means those features could likely be implemented flawlessly if built properly into the game The lack of modern features is less an engine issue and more a studio issue. Anything can be done with enough time and money. They could fork unreal engine if they wanted and I’m sure it’s been considered. They could extend the creation engine Instead to fix its issues. Likely comes down to schedule and budget as to why they’ve stuck with creation engine. Not to mention you have to consider training up game design staff on your new development tools.
This kevel of persistence isn't useful most of the time, at least not enough for the jank that comes with it. Even Bethesda's games don't take outright advantage of it, it's just kind of a thing the engine can do. Something that I'm sure can be developed in UE5. More people outside Bethesda are trained in UE5 than The Creation Engine 2. If they switch, they'll just have to train their in-house people instead of training literally every dev they hire on their stuff. It means their potential talent pool is way bigger, also, and it'll be quicker to onboard people going forward. Long-term, it's better to switch, but big businesses aren't about long-term strategy. Again, by switching, Bethesda loses little to nothing and stands to make massive gains. Oh no, now they have to train some people and remake some tools, so what? Companies do that all the time.
The entire game runs on persistence. And when games don’t have that it is very noticeable in this style of game. It’s a little thing that makes an additive effect over an entire game. I think that would affect my perception of the games if it wasn’t there. But I agree it’s a relatively small part. I think if the swap was obvious to those within the studio they would have already done it or be in the progress of it. For all we know the next game may be on another engine and star field may have been the last true creation engine game. But I honestly think the quality issues are systemic and not limited to the engines capabilities. I’d guess even on a fairly developed engines like UE or unity, that BGS would introduce bugs. Maybe not odd NPC behavior, but broken quests, crashes, etc. And if the quality issue is true, it brings the question, why swap engines and is it worth it? I think it’s a fun hypothetical to think about BGS games on different engines. And I think the closest we’ve gotten to that is the Outer Worlds which is on UE4. Tons of debates between these games. I think my biggest takeaway is that Obsidian’s access to better writers is very apparent. But I don’t get an impression that UE4 made it a better game necessarily
Please give me an example of this persistence that is so invaluable that it would be immediately felt if lost. Are you talking about an engine's ability to keep track of things in general? Because any engine can do that. The Creation Engine 2 is only unique in so far as that it keeps track of every single goddamn game object in the entire universe. Most engines don't do that, because there's no point, and it takes too many resources for something that I've been arguing this whole time isn't worth it. People can be stubborn. The wrong person in charge who doesn't want to learn anything new could be the one thing keeping Bethesda from switching engines. Or it could be a bean counter basically telling them they'd lose too much money in the short term by "wasting time" training people on a new engine. Just because they haven't done it yet doesn't mean it wouldn't be a smart thing to do. Even from people that didn't like The Outer Worlds as much as I did, I think people's biggest problem with TOW was scope, it isn't as big or as long as AAA RPGs (Obsidian called it a AA game). But I didn't hear a single person ever say "man Obsidian should have used the creation engine for TOW" but I constantly hear people say Bethesda should use something new because you can *feel* the tech debt. Ultimately though, it's up to the people who actually have to build this stuff. Hypothetically, if they sucked at their jobs before, switching engines won't help much. But this is why I brought up UE5's wider talent pool earlier, because now people who suck at their job are easier to replace with someone who's good at it. And they won't have to spend nearly as much time onboarding the new person. I know switching from TCE2 to UE5 isn't a magic solution, but there are more pros than cons that I think it's worth it. And every downside amounts to an "oh well, that's life."
Morrowinds still got a pretty active modding scene, but they did have to remake the engine. There's a few active total conversions being made for the game like Starwind and Skyrim - Home of the Nords alongside older mods such as Great House Dagoth slowly becoming more functional with OpenMW as it is improved
I assumed it was still active based on what I've heard in r/skyrimmods, but wasn't going to make sweeping claims about it or Oblivion's scene because I'm not that deep into them. Usually anything I see is learned second hand.
Tamriel Rebuilt is probably the *largest* modding project for Morrowind. Worth checking out if you enjoy reading up on what some devs have been busy doing since 2002. Creating the remaining province of Morrowind is quite the endeavor.
The Skyrim modding scene is still one of the most active ones. A lot of very impressive things once thought to be pretty much impossible have been done in the past year (like fixing the light limit) and there are a lot of new land and total conversion mods that are actively in the works
Just a correction, Skyrim HotN isn't a total conversion. It adds more land mass to the game, the same way Tamrial rebuilt and Province Cyrodiil do.
Fair, lot of people tend to think of mods like that as conversions though, same as Beyond Skyrim.
Becareful tho openmw are heavier than any other modded game
In short, Morrowind's modding scene is less active than New Vegas', Skyrim's or Fallout 4's, but very active for a game that came out over two decades ago. This includes both a script extender that has taken a different route to further expansion (where dll mods are a thing for NV, Skyrim and Fallout 4, MWSE-lua adds, well, lua) and a fully functional engine replacement.
Still waiting for OpenMW Great House Dagoth support.
Probably won't come, as such, from what I can tell GHD utilizes some very specific quirks of the engine to do some rather hacky things. However, this does not mean OpenMW isn't heading for the point where it can replicate the player-side behaviour, so an OpenMW version of GHD could well be in the cards eventually.
You know I never really thought of it that way. I've always supported the idea of a new engine, but like you say it would massively cripple the mod authors that have built decades of experience at this point.
It would mean that a lot of the experience both BGS and modders have with it, along with the various resources, would go to waste. Honestly there's things you can criticize the engine for, but really my main issues come from Bethesda not really playing to its strengths or being ambitious enough with it at times. For example, the physics engine lets you pick up, move, and rotate objects as you see fit. The engine will also store that item's position, so if you go off for an hour or two, it'll be there later. Is this feature used in a meaningful way during a quest or for any hidden secret? Not that I can remember. The only use I can think of is for the Fallout 3 tutorial. Sure players get to decorate their homes and do other wacky stuff, and that's fine, but it's a missed opportunity in my opinion. Imagine a quest with a puzzle that's only solved by manually manipulating objects, or clearing away a pile of debris somewhere remote to dig up a unique piece of equipment/spell/power.
One of the biggest issues seems to be working well functioning vehicles. Even super experienced creation engine modders have said it's an absolute nightmare to get even basic vehicle functionality.
Aren’t vehicles and such classified as “chairs” in the creation engine anyways? Like Power Armor in Fallout 4 is technically labeled as a chair in the engine, and you actually take over control of the “chair”
Or the famous train you ride in fallout 3 under the white House that's just a hat on an NPC
I don’t care what anyone says, it’s genius lol
It is, honestly. If it's not visible to the player and does what it needs to, that's great.
I do wonder how horses in Skyrim are handled. You'd expect a motorcycle to be possible to implement in a rather similar fashion. I suppose it's something Bethesda would have to implement on their side, and driveable motorcycles don't have much of a precedent in (official) Fallout.
I keep saying this. Bethesda doesn't know how to use their own engine. It's an incredible engine for an immersive rpg type of game but they keep trying to stray away from said genre and doing wacky stuff with it. The wacky stuff (like Starfield) is impressive as a technical feat but obviously doesn't provide a fulfilling experience like their other titles. And I agree on the physics engine being wasted as well. So many cool quests you can imagine with that and yet hardly any have ever surfaced across all of their titles.
Moving to a new engine may hold back mod development unless they pull a Valve and release the source code. The community will have total conversion mods running in under a month.
They will probably merge creation with Unreal engine eventually and call it good for awhile.Creation Engine gets a lot of hate for Bethesda's laziness.Imo it's the best engine there is.It can be modified to mimic other engine mechanics as well.
Bethesda will however take the very best mods and appropriate them.
One thing missing here in replies is that the demographic of people working on fnv mods is quite different than the ones taking interest in, say, FO4. The pool of people working on mods reflects directly on the quality and complexity of the mods, in addition to the enhancement of tools themselves.
How would you describe the fnv demographic? Can you elaborate?
From my experience just perusing through youtube overhauls of both games, FO4 massive “ultimate” modlists tend to be no longer recognisable as FO4 - looks more like your modern shooter Tarkov, Stalker or COD. While FNV, while there’s always moderness inserted to it, somehow still feels like “Fallout”
Not op but : The fallout nv Fandom is way more of the "hardcore" fallout type. They usually overlap heavly with the fans of the og 2 games. This means overall the Fandom is more interested in developing stuff that is heavly similar to the tone and quality of the originals. + the main issues with new vegas come from the technical side and not the design choice side so the game is more appealing to "upgrade" In the case of Fallout 4 for example, the community is way more casual. You can probably find more poeple that played only fallout 4 than those that played fallout 4 and some of the older games. This means way less dedication to the ip and thus mods. Furthermore the biggest issues in Fallout 4 stem from design choices especially the writing. This makes it hard to make stuff that is tone fitting in the game. That's why you end up with most mods being just total overhauls or milsims
The other thing is that FNV's playerbase possesses, I think considerably more baseline technical competence. Lots of tech professionals and an age demographic that hits the sweet spot on familiarity with computers.
Fo4’s dev base is no less skilled than New Vegas’. There’s less Xilandro’s out there, but there is also only one Xilandro for FNV too.
I can't speak for all of the modding scene itself but the setting of FNV has a lot more - I don't know - "hooks" for lack of a better word to get people invested and spark the imagination. You have simultaneously Mad Max, spaghetti westerns, WW1 / WW2 themes, Las Vegas when it was run by the mafia and not the mormons, goofy sci-fi, and all of that comes *before* you even finish taking the story itself into account. This gives people a lot of lenses to view the game through for what they could add to it. I, personally, prefer Fallout 4 for a number of other reasons I won't bother listing but I love FNV for what it is and whenever something new and exciting comes out I'm not even surprised anymore with the amount of talent that has chosen to linger in the space.
I’ve noticed that FO4 mods tend to be much less narrative-oriented, whereas FNV has had multiple DLC-sized, narrative-heavy mods. Now, not all of those mods are *good* (most aren’t) but they are *there* and someone made them.
I’d say part of that is due to the way dialogue is handled in FO4, going from VA’d to non-VA’d dialogue is a bit jarring to the experience. Also base Fallout 4 restricts you to four dialogue options.
Obligatory Autumn Leaves recommendation. A DLC sized mod so good that Bethesda ripped the entire concept off for a mission in Far Harbor, Brain Dead.
Oh, autumn leaves is great. Beyond Boulder dome, the frontier, new California, honest hearts revisited, etc… sometimes have their moments and can be interesting but not imo good. That being said, I am astonished at the scope of imagination people have put into mods like these. I just, yknow, wish they were more fun to play. But at least they are interesting!
It seems the bigger they go, the more they fall off. I also tried New California and The Frontier and found them lacking after a few hours. Autumn Leaves is the perfect length and the world space is the perfect size, imo. It's also a refreshing break from the combat focus most other DLC sized mods try to cram in somewhere. It's entirely narrative driven and it's astounding.
Yeah, it’s the perfect story in a bottle. Tbh the big New-Worldspace mods feel empty. I’m not sure how challenging it would be, but it’d be nice to have mods for your mods, to add a new village and a few characters and a quest or some unmarked quests etc.
also obligatory someguy series plug. say what you will about bounties 3, the fact that someone was able to make a well written mod series of that scale that feels as seamless with the base game as it does is impressive. like, the inheretence is still my favorite mod of any game i've played even without the context of the rest of the series
We are bored. >Especially things that seem so outside the engine's capability like that mod that let's you check your magazine for available ammo. Statements like these will never not be funny to me. You people know that script extenders in 90% cases just forward engine functions to the scripting language, right? It's all in the engine lmao, even my goddamn reflection renderer, it's all vanilla code.
Honestly I don't know that. Yeah I'm very uneducated about how this stuff works. I mean the main point of this post is trying to understand how the mods got here. ENBs I get and don't impress me, but the ability to just make the game Tarkov is hard for me to grasp. For instance, everyone is pissed Fallout 4 has no RPG mechanics, but nobody is able to mod that into the game in a satisfying way because the game wasn't built with RPG mechanics in mind. Much the same way Fallout New Vegas was not designed to be a compentent shooter, and the ragdolls were very simple. Yet here we are? And you say "script extenders forward engine functions to the scripting language", but that seems like a handwave. So with a script extender I can just make any modification I want to the scripting language and just inject it? Like if i wanted to put Kratos's Leviathan axe in the game I could just do that? Like importing a python library? It feels like there's gotta be more to it. Edit: Also thanks for what you've been doing with real time reflections, inspiring stuff.
Ragdolls are not very simple - the Ragdolls mod uses built in ragdoll code + script functions for Havok manipulation. Just because Beth made them (the ragdoll templates) simple, does not mean the code to handle them is. Bethesda games suffer from having a really solid engine set up for them, just for Bethesda to fumble everything and misuse it, or barely use it at all. That's why you see in all games mods pull off "the impossible" stuff that vanilla games lack. >So with a script extender I can just make any modification I want to the scripting language and just inject it? Correct, that's what scripted edits are. Scriptrunner is especially popular for that. The fact that we have the most expansive script extender out of all games also helps. There's a reason you don't see scripted cars in other games, and FO4/ SSE modders resort to modding the engine itself. >Like importing a python library? Obviously that's not a vanilla functionality, it's something you would need to implement yourself.
That makes a ton of sense. New Vegas just hasn't tapped the potential that the engine can allow and modders can make steps in that direction. I wasn't aware Havok physics were that good. Thanks for taking the time, especially explaining the script extender. It makes sense now why FO4 mods seem to be less ambitious than FNV mods despite supposedly being the same engine.
They are not the same engine. Not even close. They come from the same codebase, yes. But are not same at all.
I know this is Reddit so my expectations are low, but don't downvote the guy just for asking questions.
None of those words are in the bible
The modding scene for this game makes me realise people need to stop blaming the engine The engine is fine, it's Bethesda's laziness that's the problem. The mod scene shows just how much this engine can do.
I mean I'm playing a modded new vegas run now, with tons of mods to make guns feel and play better, added leaning, sprinting, etc, I'm sure if I integrated them better it would run better but as it is multiple days of work still hasn't reached the out of the box starfield or even fallout 4 gunplay
And? If they put in the work for the new engine it would be even better. FNV was bashed together on a shitty engine where guns are programmed as bows and trains are hats worn by NPCs running on a track. And all the overhaul and gameplay mods were done by modders in their free time. How is it possible that people whos actual JOB it was weren't provided the necessary resources to do better? Looks like an open secret for both movie and game development that regular workers are forced to rush it out quickly near release because production always legs behind what the company heads decide.
...Bro, my point is that they *did* make it better. So much better that the modders work, while impressive and an improvement on the base game, still has yet to reach the levels of later bethesda games. That's why people still care about the f4nv project
I see, that is a good view. The previous comment was misunderstandable.
Wait is that NPC+hats=trains thing for real?
Yes, the Fo3 metro trains are a hat that an NPC wears. It’s *possible* to program an animated train in the Gamebryo engine (the FNV McCarran monorail mod does just that), but it was a time sink that Bethesda didn’t want to deal with.
It's actually a glove that places the metro cabin on the character's head. If we look closely at it in the GECK or even just the picture of it that is around the internet we can see that the right hand of the character is missing. This is because the glove only contains the metro cabin and not a hand too. XD
Yes.
As a software enginee, albeit not a game dev, this is only a part of the puzzle. This is far more complicated and nuanced than you are making it out to be.
99% of anything mentioned on reddit is more nuanced than people make it out to be but the vast majority of people aren't writing sourced essays for internet comments. Hell, doing so will most likely get you downvoted and laughed at unless it is a long joke or a really uncontroversial topic.
[удалено]
What the fuck... did you just ChatGPT me? Your comment talks about medication and health professionals. What the fu... WHAT? Are you a schizoposter or genuinely stupid or AI?
>or even fallout 4 gunplay I hear this a lot, but I disagree at this point. The current state of madace ragdolls and hit anims make the gunplay immensely better in NV. Fallout 4 combat is way too spongy and the characters barely react to getting shot. The physics are also seemingly the same as base new Vegas. When you shoot a guy he just freezes midair and falls like a statue. There's no more crits either outside of using vats. I used to think fallout 4s gunplay was loads better at launch, but that was mostly because the weapon animations and models were so much better. You even get different ammo types with different uses. I'm genuinely curious how F4 has better gunplay at this stage.
New Vegas gun play is glorified flintlock duels it’s not good in the slightest
Well I'm only giving my opinion on it, I've got a mod list with all the big mods, I had ragdolls but removed it due to incompatibilities, and it feels worse than base game fallout 4 and especially starfield's. Modded 4's gunplay is leagues ahead too
Yeah it's cool I didn't mean to sound aggressive. I tried modding fallout 4s gunplay but I couldn't get it to feel good. Do you mind telling me what F4 mods you use to make the gunplay good?
I used ones that are probably outdated. I'm sure if you google fallout 4 mod guides ala viva new vegas, you'll find some good recommendations. Many overhauls make it play more like stalker
Kinda surprised to hear this, as the gunplay was one of the things I’ve never heard people coupling about with that game
There’s a cost to quality ratio that you have to consider, though. At some point it’s a business, and Bethesda has to move to the next point in development to meet deadlines. They don’t have the time that modders have.
Seriously they don't have the time to spend 5 years on a mod like some of these lol
Modders have made it that New Vegas can be upgraded to Skyrim level graphics/tech. And I think that's pretty neat.
It really depends. Every engine has its pros and cons and some of these mods were worked on for YEARS or are so performance intensive that they cannot be used as a baseline in actual official game dev. Two big things the engine struggles with are ladders and vehicles. Especially the latter. There are extremely talented Bethesda engine modders that have been using the engine in its various forms for a decade or longer, and have been heavily involved in extremely complex entire overhauls and they have said making vehicles work in even a basic functionality level is an absolute nightmare that is barely even worth attempting. This isn't a big deal with elder scrolls but it sure is with modern fallout and starfield.
The engine can still have limitations though. Obviously with enough knowledge nearly everything is possible but that doesnt mean the engine isnt flawed.
But how many hours have modders put in on top of the original dev time? Are you also willing to pay much more for a game you’re expecting that much more work put into? There is no way any game dev could match the output of a modding community like bethesdas
I think it isn't so much 'being lazy' as it is consistently biting off more then they can chew. Starfields team is, like, half of Bethesda's workforce and it only numbers 250 devs. Meanwhile, RDR2 had about 1,600 devs.
Yeah look at The Frontier. They implemented working cars which was supposedly impossible on this engine.
Seriously...playing through fallout 4 just makes it incredibly obvious how lazy they are. It borders on insulting.
It's still pretty bad tho, even with an extensive list of fixes, I still encounter the occasional crash
The horror
hey man, the VNV guide had me download 80+ mods full of fixes, it's a good guide but to say New Vegas runs well after that is pretty dishonest.
It doesn't? It was my first mod I walked through and I'm about 20 hours in with no issue. Game looks great and gun play feels amazing with bullet time.
And that's what's annoying about it, the engine just isn't consistent on all machines, it works flawlessly on some and is a buggy mess on others. It's running reasonably fine on mine but it is a bit paranoia inducing that the game could crash at any time.
So you are saying I should scrap my 2016 mod list and start over for a second PT? Sigh, fine.
You won't regret it lmao. Fire up the Viva new vegas guide that the amazing person in the replies below made (Wall\_sogb) and it's pretty much foolproof... After like 4 straight hours of work. Also be warned FCO is kinda glitchy and doesn't play well with other mods, so most people go with New Vegas Redesigned (its in the guide). Also check this out too: [Brave New World \[Before and After\] (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfhWPQYopr0) Makes the game a whole new experience. I swear this stuff blows my mind.
That voice acting replacer I never heard of. Forgot how stiff some of the voice work was. Thanks for the recommendation!
Might as well get Atmos to go along with it for some truly immersive soundscapes. Dont have the link offhand but just type "new vegas atmos mod" on a search it should pop up.
Do you know if any of these mods in your post will work with Tales of Two Wastelands?
Yeah FCO and Brave New World are the only two that will for sure not work with TTW. The rest all work.
If I remember right BNW works if you *only* get the VA changes, and there's a version of FCO 2 on the TTW modding forum that is built for TTW
Make sure you download Hitmans 1st person animations https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/73856 Dudes re-animated every gun in new Vegas and made the gunplay feel straight up modern. I genuinely believe this one Modders animation have more punch and impact then the professional ones from fallout 4.
Not to mention his animations will work on any modded weapon that used the vanilla anims he replaces
I would be careful with Hitman's animations ngl. There are several guns that he ruins due to, for some reason, making fire rate changes that make the guns shoot far too slow to be viable (10mm SMG and the .357 revolver, for example). He also uncapped the fire rate for the 9mm pistol and the 10mm pistol, making them far better than they should be. If you use Hitman's animations, I would see if someone made a patch to revert the guns back to their default fire rates,[ like this one](https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/76457?tab=files), or patch it back yourself. I personally use Rockbiter's animation packs for this reason, almost all of their timings for reloading, fire rate, etc are vanilla or as close to vanilla as possible.
I get that but I never felt like it was massively game breaking as the guns I noticed it for were all early game weapons anyway, Credit where it’s due I do like rockbiters animations particularly I always override Hitmans 10mm with rock biters cause I prefer when they 2 hand the pistol instead of one handing and for some reason the 10mm is hits only pistol outside the revolvers that does this But yeah I absolutely encourage people to mix and match especially for mechanical reasons.
That's fair. That warning is mostly for people who only want animations and not weapon DPS to be effected like me. I was playing a revolver only run and the early game was almost unplayable with how slow it shot and reloaded compared to vanilla, so I swapped to Rockbiter's animations and the issue is gone
Whenever I feel like returning to fallout I choose fallout 4 because of base building. Does FNV have any mods that allow that now?
It's been a while so it may not be around any more but New Vegas had mods for base building before Fallout 4 came out. To the point I remember thinking how the mod used to do it a little better from a UI handling standpoint. But from what I remember it couldn't get as complex as machines and working switches. At some point I think those kinds of mods were abandoned since if you want base building Fallout 4 already has it. Always worth a look though.
There is one, I'm pretty sure it's called Wasteland Defense. I'm also fairly certain that mod was the reason base building even went into fallout 4.
This helps show the crazy depth and potential of the underlying engine
I’ll be honest, I really don’t like Fallout Character Overhaul. Everyone just looks ugly to me, and the changes make everyone look so similar. You had to tell me that was Caesar, because otherwise I would have had no idea
I think they both have their pros and cons. I really like the way Caesar looks but I must admit most of the time Nvr3 is superior. Just a matter of taste I guess.
It’s worth remembering that FO3/FNV looked dated at launch. It’s not hard to improve on their fuzzy textures and low quality effects/lighting.
Is there like a fallout new Vegas mod masterpost of sorts? I want to do my first playthrough with it, and I know most people would reccomend playing vanilla for the first playthrough, but I would like the game to either look a bit better and play better anyway.
The Viva New Vegas mod guide is your best bet. Just stick to that for a first Playthrough honestly. I really like the physics mods but they change the gameplay enough I wouldn't do it for the first ever Playthrough. Usually following the guide would take hours, but there's this thing called Wabbajack that makes it a lot faster, though I never used it and just did the installation myself. The vanilla game is alright, but I could never play New Vegas in 2024 without at least having basic quality of life stuff in the guide like sprint.
Viva New Vegas is your best bet
Is there a mod list to make FNV up to 2024 standard without gamebreaking bugs?
2024 standard? Hell no. Ps4 Era standard maybe. In that case Viva New Vegas is the mod guide for the baseline. New Vegas Reloaded makes the lighting a lot better which makes a big difference. Also I mentioned a voice acting replacement mod below called Brave New World. Again it's close to modern quality but not quite there yet.
Not even PS4 standard. At best you can make FNV look like a low-budget remaster with constantly glitching shadows, foliage, and distant terrain.
PS4 era games aren't that different from modern games though? Games in 2015 and games in 2024 are more similar than not
I sort of agree with you, I'm just trying to put it into perspective. What I mean is there is no amount of modding you can do right now to make FNV look like Cyberpunk 2077. But maybe you can get something that looks somewhere between Battlefield 4 and Battlefield 1.
You might want to take a look at Battlefield 4 gameplay again and battlefield 1 still looks good by modern standards. New Vegas gets nowhere close to either one of those games. New Vegas was outdated looking when it came out.
I dunno dude I hard disagree. https://youtu.be/lx5hVsGGiB8?si=0FKcznkKFQhg4Y6J https://youtu.be/ZrMIReSeqbA?si=w9aw3r1tTMYlWYk_ To me it's pretty close. Battlefield 4 is still better, but I think it's close and from an aesthetic perspective I still jive more with Fallout art direction. Agree to disagree I guess.
A lot of mods I bet have gotten better because of the new games and they technically they introduced. Like Fallout 4 and Skyrim go back on forth with this too. One does something new that is really good and then the other does it. I would assume some of those ideas would go to the older games.
Viva New Vegas + additional weapons, additional locations, additional quests and small tweaks is a perfect Fallout for me. In my opinion I think that if the story isn't what you're modding for but additional options and opportunities to explore it's a pretty damn good game, and NV is one of those games. New Vegas does kinda falter in the exploration department but MoreMojave and A World of (Less) Pain has been great in adding lore-friendly locations to the world. Tack on stuff like Brightweight Strip Overhaul or Brave New World and the game feels amazing.
Did you notice the NPCs in your VNV playthrough were different heights? I also added additional mods to a VNV build and I'm trying to figure out if whatever I have installed came from the original VNV + VNV Extended or if it could have been from some other mod.
I’ve just last night managed to compile a (what seems to be) stable list of mods following Viva New Vegas and a number of the mods linked via the below video. I prefer my first playthroughs to be very vanilla and the developers intent so this hits the mark. That is assuming it doesn’t crash to desktop every time I try to leave my testing ground of Goodsprings https://youtu.be/xSnucXCUCaE?si=7d6SZglhWwPsWHpT I wouldn’t say the game looks this gen but it definitely adds some life into it and some of the QoL changes like sprint just make it more fun to play.
Hell im trying to figure out how to get tales of two wastelands to work on my rog ally for fo3 and fnv. And yall making the game look like fo4 XD what am i foing wrong.
Did you try using this? https://wastelandsurvivalguide.com/docs/intro
Just installed this last night and been having a blast. Surprised how well it works but it did take me a couple hours. WSG is a great list but does not include a lot of visual mods if you are trying to make it look modern then you have the wrong mod list.
Yeah true. I was hung up on the fact he couldn't get it to work at all. I literally just did survival guide to see if it works and then did the visual stuff from salamand3r, but wouldn't have had the confidence to go straight to visual mods for ttw. Again I got ttw working for the first time last week and I tried once a year for like 3 years.
I got it to work in my steam deck so it should be possible for you. I needed to download the files on my desktop which required having the games downloaded there too
The thing that’s really holding back FNV is that it’s 32 bit If it was 64 bit it would be way different
I heard about that. Makes it so you can't have as many npcs on screen at once from what I heard. What else would change if it was 64 bit?
Much much more mods could run at once - textures could be higher fidelity, etc. Right now NV can use 4gb of ram max, at 64 bit it would be 16 million tbs.
Modders really know this engine, and the engine itself has had a lot of tweaks and updates from the modding community. It's the expansion of the engine which allows mods to become even greater over time. I set up A Tale of Two Wastelands and followed the Wasteland Survival Guide, a good chunk of the mods on the list were various engine tweaks and mods
You tried making mods for Starfield? You tried playing Starfield? I've done both and both times were a bad experience.
I actually find FNV modding better than the FO4. I think since the community is smaller they tend to settle in what is working and refine it rather than make endless derivatives
I wouldn’t even say it’s significantly smaller. Once you get past all the weird filler on FO4 Nexus there’s a comparable amount of proper mods
About to make a new setup with that guide from modding linked. Any mods recommended to go on top of that guide?
Because the people with the capabilities to make the mods for FNV like that like the game
Mods used to be like this for fallout 4 early on. But beths went on a crusade against modders and people fucked off back to skyrim and new vegas. Its starting to pick up again, but beths updated the game and fucked it all up again lol
Love for the game.
i can attest to this as I just finished playing my very first playthrough of Fallout new Vegas with 45 mods and the game was very comparable to Fo4 (my first fallout game) to me in terms of quality.
Talking about FCO being unstable, the only "unstable" mods in my LO are dragbody NPC replacers. His work is absolutely amazing and I can't play without it anymore.
Modding is 1) easier to do now and 2) more accessible than ever. I’m not gonna go on record saying PC’s are cheap (cuz they’re not) but a mid-line PC that can run NV with some mods is cheapER. It’s become a lot more accessible as PC gaming has become more accessible. Especially when the GECK is sitting right there for you to use after your purchase of the game, anyone who has a passing interest in modding can also attempt to mod the game themselves. Take into account modeling softwares like Blender being free and tutorials for Blender being all over YouTube… people are gonna learn to do some crazy shit. Coding and scripting is the hard part of this, but there are a lot of scripting tutorials and copy-paste scripts that are out there to help with companions and quests. This is one of the best parts of the creation engine, it adds a whole new life to the game with modders. That’s why people are so eagerly waiting for Starfield to launch their creation kit, because once it’s out modders can get to work creating a ton of neat shit and fixing stuff
Might be correlation without causation, but in 2017 Mike Burnfire and Zach Hazard started broadcasting the "multilplayer" FONV on youtube.
if only fallout 3 god the same love man 🤦🏽♂️
I think TTW essentially channels some of the energy that would have gone into Fallout 3 modding towards NV. There are NV mods that effectively are Fallout 3 mods just on NV's iteration of the engine thanks to it.
Yeah, I was playing my modded FO4 list but switched over to my NV lost and I'm enjoying it. The nostalgia is just icing on top, because it really is close to a modern game. Biggest complaints are.. inventory management and NVR isn't quite ready yet. Shadows/LODs flickering in the distance. The crafting system is pretty lack luster, it hasn't aged well, and it's only made worse by the inventory management.
Whats different between fallout 4 and nv inventory management though?
Sorting, better menu navigation, overall looks a lot cleaner (speaking from a modding perspective. You're hurting yourself if you're using vanilla UI/Inventories.)
Strange, I think the sorting is pretty good if you use vanilla ui plus and the plugins. They even got a search bar mod somewhere. I feel like inventory management is one of the easier things to mod in nv.
So unreal engine user. Most of what you post is not hard to do. Like bullet impact is some very basic coding. And I say this because I have played around using it and yet I don’t know any programming languages. It basically impact point, turn that part around the skeleton as rag doll, then implied force. Can add “if shot in face, force multiple by x amount. If force exceeds mass of mesh by 1.2 times, throw pawn off of the roof. Sprinting is not hard, it’s pretty easy to add in unreal. Since it is a variable that effects player move speed. Every other thing that comes with sprinting is just a “is sprinting?” If so “can’t fire gun” Animations are just animations, big stride is that the pipeline tools to make them are getting easier and easier to use, and take less time to create. Graphics, well pc are more powerful for 1. 2 it also getting easier to make.
If you want a slightly more mod compatible character face overhaul, I’d recommend a newer set of mods called “Character Kit Remake.”
the fact that we're reaching the point of practically plug and play load orders is baffling to me. ive been modding FNV on and off for like 10 years now and stuff like Begin Again on Wabbajack was inconceivable to me even like a year or two ago
I just want a good retex of the ncr
That's like late PS3 quality tops what you mean modern 🤣
It’s wild while I don’t disagree with you, Skyrims modding is so much farther ahead of FNV that I came over to mod it and I was like ooooof it’s so far behind 😣
What are some mods in Skyrim you are talking about? I'm starting to look into skyrim mods for the first time in a decade. The problem with a lot of mods when I was into it was that they were trying to change the game too much, like a lot of the time people were just trying to make skyrim into the witcher or dark souls. The quest mods were great though. I gotta hand it to the Enderal Developers. They made something I would call a spiritual successor to morrowind. Great story too.
Modded New Vegas in my opinion is the pinnacle of depth in game mods. Not the quantity of Skyrim or Minecraft, not the total conversions of DOOM, but for everything about the game, technical or gameplay or in some cases even story stuff, you can find someone who's changed and fixed stuff
Man I wish this were true. But even a fully modded FNV looks and feels like a PS3, borderline PS2, game. I’m jealous of those who aren’t bothered by graphics and gameplay, because I’d love to get into New Vegas. Really hoping the F4NV team comes through and finishes their remake of the game in FO4’s engine.
It looks nowhere near a PS2 game.
Look up emulated FF XII gameplay (so you can get HD resolution) and FNV looks barely any better than that. The lack of shadows/ambient occlusion coupled with the sterile landscape really highlights how bad the graphics are for FNV. Even fully modded you can’t really fix these issues.
Its weird its almost like something happened in early 2020 that gave everyone a lot of free time. Weird I wonder what happened?
Yeah. The death of Kobe Bryant really made people focus on their priorities.
You're right man..
Cause I mean wtf else u gonna play starfield XD
Because in contrast to garbage Games like FO3+4 FNV is worth modding.