There's nothing wrong with environmental story-telling; what's wrong is boring environmental story-telling, or environmental story-telling that is as generic and poorly-implemented as "Hey look, the body has a letter on it."

It could be done better, but IMO it adds more then it subtracts and you are not forced into reading all the letters or looting all the stuff. I am most annoyed with games that fill your map with "?" markets for some garbage and does not give you an option to hide it.

I understand that we have different preferences and it is fine, my wish would be to have more unique dungeons in the next games.

Like the above poster said, doing it once or even a handful of times is cool. It happens all the time, though, and in a less-than-polished way. It's lazy.

I normally love things like that in games. I read everything and there's not a game I own that I don't have a 100% in. In Skyrim it's barely even storytelling.

OK, probably depends on how we play the game. What is your strategy to 109% Skyrim? There are locations that are not linked to quests or the quests for them are not easy to find. I don't play that much so when I play I use a mod that gives you a different start/origin story and try to role play a bit, avoid the man quest as much a s possible.

I didn't really have a strategy at the time, I just had time. Like, a lot of time. "It was one of the only games I could get to work with WINE and I had no hobbies because I was a child" amounts of time. Time, an abundance of characters and UESP made it possible. I think UESP has a completion page now, but it didn't when I did, and the one it does have seems to be missing a lot of things.

My experience with Skyrim did lead me to developing strategies for other games, after having less time, but at the time I definitely went about it in one of the longest ways possible.

It's probably time for a replay.

Cool, a fellow wine user, Special Edition has some issues with wine though, the Script Extender takes a long time to hook the game and I get some crashes (I suspect is the lightning effect) , so combining the 2 issues makes me dread opening the game though I am very tempted to finally reach level 80.

The game I had too much time to play was Gothic for me, this one has no quest markers and I also had no internet so I had to struggle with it but I still have it burned in my memory.

Why use SE? Did it add content?

The game looks better in general, SE uses the Fallout4 engine so most features in Fallout4 are present including 64 bit. Characters are looking a bit better, there is more grass and flowers/mushrooms around you can collect(for alchemy), the lighting looks better. If you don't plan to put many hours then is not worth it, but if you want to put a lot of hours and use many mods then my personal opinion is that is worth it. Modding support for it is good the only issues might be the wine/proton related stuff and the mod manager support issues.

I already have SE, I just wanted to know why I'd ever use it; from what you list it seems like everything can be covered via mods in the regular edition?

It depends , I think some mods might be now onlyu updated for SE , some will also suggest S# because is more stable (on Windows). I think I am not qualified to give a correct answer. I have both installed and setup, it was not easy and I gave up on graphics mods (emb or shaders that come with .dll files).

Now I started maybe 1 year ago a new game on SE, just essential mods for me because I had the bad luck of my game crashing in certain regions of the map when I was around level 30 and I had to give up on the save. I was using those cool mods that improve the cities with new buildings, NPCs and quest. I could not solve that issue and I promised myself that I will play next time only with minimum stuff.

I suggest to ask in winegaming subreddit for more info on what other players are using and what to avoid. If you have both games try them both , no mods and compare how it looks and feels.

It's the always part of it. There is not a single abandoned cave I remember. In every single one there is a necromancer that died in an experiment and lived to wrote about it right till the moment the zombies turned against him, died an adventurer while writing his last words, ... It's cool if it's an occasional thing, that adds to creating a realistic world. If it's always, it breaks the immersion. It becomes clear they had a level enrichment team go through a list of every single location to add one of the same type of stories.

FNV did that way better - but okay, FNV did everything better.

I am not sure that are that many though, aren't more caves populated with bandits(makes sense) , crypts populated with undead or necromancers(makes sense) and ruins populated with treasure hunters(makes sense too). All those letters and journals add a bit of lore and most people do not read them anyway. From time to time you find unique characters though with unique stories and sometimes side quests.

There are a lot of issues with Skyrim, there are some very funny videos about it, but for me personally those quirks are not significant enough to complain.

> All those letters and journals add a bit of lore and most people do not read them anyway.

But that's just it: They don't add lore, they add noise. If this kind of story telling is done well and occasionally, then players would actually read those letters. You are right, here they don't, and that's not surprising if they are placed everywhere.