When it's cranked too high, the world feels much smaller even though it takes just as long to walk anywhere. Probably because my mental understanding of the world is so fuzzy that it allows my brain to overestimate how far apart the more concrete nodes are like cities. Walking the path from Balmora to some quest location and being distracted half the time with cliff racers and dungeons doesn't really establish how far I walked in my head. It could have been kilometers.
But looking at the whole 3D model of the world removes all of that fuzzy uncertainty that made the world feel big. The best example of this is looking at all of Vivec in your viewport. Without the fog and short view distance, Vivec looks so small despite the amount of times I got lost in it as a kid.
There seems to be a healthy balance of fog + view distance.
When I played Oblivion and Skyrim, both great games, I felt I was back in a medieval setting rather than some fantasy land. (Skyrim is a bit better, Oblivion's look and feel is too Europe in the Middle Ages).
It just can't compete with Morrowind's giant mushrooms and random people calling me a filthy N'wah.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utG17UeUv00 (19 seconds)
I don’t know if the general strangeness of Vvardenfell could necessarily be attributed to Goodall, but various central themes and dialog certainly could be.
I read somewhere that he would come up with his weirdest lore during all-nighters, delirious from sleep deprivation & some kind of intoxicant which I forget.
> All of these rumors are false. The truth is that people on the Internet saw someone adding writing beyond a grade school level to a video game, and decided that to produce such a thing required you to be on drugs. Ignoring the dangerous message to budding creative types who may see the message that to be creative you have to be on drugs, it’s also extremely unfair to Michael Kirkbride himself. He’s a real person, with a real career. It’s not the best thing in the world to be a noted professional, and whenever someone googles your name, one of the top results relates to a fictional history with substance abuse.
Kirkbride's description tones it down to just some coffee and bourbon: https://www.imperial-library.info/content/thirty-six-lessons...
> "It was one dev, naked in a room with a carton of cigarettes, a thermos full of coffee and bourbon, and all his summoned angels."
And: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/hrmdzk/comment/fyd...
> You know that comes from a Photoshopped image, right? Come on now.
> Anyway, that’s all a lie. I’ve already given an account of how the 36 were written: a week of bourbon, smokes, and solitude. I’ve never dropped acid in my life.
(Or is it Ebonheart? That sounds right.)
The map also plays a trick on you. Many of the paths are deliberately winding through valleys and such to make the travel seem longer. Personally I felt this the most in the northern Ashlands. Combined with the Fog, limited Fast Travel, and a bunch of distracting Dwemer ruins the whole island felt huge.
...I might have to reinstall
... which means that younger-me totally did two entire playthroughs without ever learning any of those spells, of course. Ouch.
That'd be the extent of the mods I'd recommend to a first timer.
While that sounds great ... I bet AAA titles will find ways to make that repetitive as hell in the name of providing predictable fun.
But if you then crank them up, you won't have one or two cool landmarks to see, but way too many! You can see this done well in Elden Ring - you can see very far, and the map is big enough to still space out points of interest.
The only way to "fix" this for higher render distances is to rebuild the world with those in mind.
As I recall, the main things that don't work are graphics overhauls that require patching or wrapping the original executable in some fashion. Usually these do some kind of shader magic to e.g. make the water look nicer.
[EDIT] Oh, and I think I had Herbalism installed. If not that, something similar. A mod that turns plants from containers into pick-ups is one of those don't-play-without-it things, for me.
Also, for certain mods, you do need at least OpenMW 0.48 release candidate [1], a development build [2] (it's below Release Versions), or just build from source. I'm pretty sure it was after 0.47 when they added the ability to add shaders, and configure them using the F2 menu. The modding-openmw site will tell you if you actually need a 0.48 build for a particular mod.
I usually use "I Heart Vanilla" [3] as a base and then pick extra mods from "Expanded Vanilla" [4], which includes the load order if you also want Tamriel Rebuilt [5] (which lets you explore the mainland). The Expansions Integrated, Tribunal Rebalance, Bloodmoon Rebalance, and Expansion Delay are all nice mods too. Makes the expansions really feel like they are part of the base game. When adding extra mods like that, I just use the load ordering they suggest.
One of my favorites (in "Expanded Vanilla") is called Natural Character Growth and Decay [6], so you don't have to worry about min-maxing the level mechanics. It has some options, and I turn off the decay bit for a more relaxing time. It allows you to just play the game as you want.
I love the addition of shaders, and use Zesterer's Volumetric Cloud & Mist Mod for OpenMW [7] as you can have the game keep some of that hazy feeling yet still have distant land and objects. I also use Bloom Linear shader [8]. If you want some other shaders, you can use OMWFX Shaders [9] and/or Zesterer's OpenMW Shader Pack [10]. I have used Zesterer's OpenMW Shader Pack, but you have to edit the config.glsl if you want to set it different from the vanilla preset. The game looks nice with just FXAA, clouds and mist, and linear bloom (very mild). The "Expanded Vanilla" guide under shaders gives a good preset, and then you can change them using the F2 menu in-game.
This all said, it's been awhile since I've properly played last. I take my old list and update it occasionally as mods change or new features are added to OpenMW, thinking I will play through it again one of these days.
[1] https://openmw.org/2022/openmw-0-48-0-is-now-in-rc-phase/
[2] https://openmw.org/downloads/
[3] https://modding-openmw.com/lists/i-heart-vanilla/
[4] https://modding-openmw.com/lists/expanded-vanilla/
[5] https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/
[6] https://modding-openmw.com/mods/ncgdmw-lua-edition/
[7] https://github.com/zesterer/openmw-volumetric-clouds
[8] https://modding-openmw.com/mods/bloom-linear/
If I'm reading this correctly, this is a list of 268 mods, each of which must be downloaded and installed separately. Is that right?
There is a tool to try to automate game modlist installs called Wabbajack [1]. It was briefly discussed on the openmw forums [2]. I'm not sure if anyone has tried further to get the modding-openmw lists working with it. I have never used Wabbajack, so I don't know too much other than it exists. It still seems to have extra requirements according to the post, including a premium NexusMods account if you don't want to manually download everything.
Just as I typed all the above I saw a mention of portmod [3] in the modding-openmw guide about mod managers. Seems it's like Gentoo's portage, but for game mods. I see it has some meta packages for modding-openmw in their ebuild-like repository [4], but I don't think any of the big lists have been updated in awhile. Also, there again seems to be issues with it auto downloading from NexusMods mentioned in the issue tracker. Nevertheless, it looks to be an interesting project.
[1] https://github.com/wabbajack-tools/wabbajack
[2] https://forum.openmw.org/viewtopic.php?t=7581
All the alternatives seem to involved managing a plethora of mini-mods that hopefully work together.. it's really easy to install and it turns the game instantly from a drab/stale/dated look to something a lot busier and lively - at least at a surface level. Maybe it has some issues that I'm just not aware of - I never really got far in playing it
I'd be curious what other people thought of it. It seems to never be mentioned in lists and "hardcore" players seem to not like it for some reason
Worked perfectly. Zero glitches the whole time, and the official engine would have crashed at least a dozen times in such a playthrough, while this one didn't even crash once.
[EDIT] I mean, zero unexpected glitches. Obviously the entire game is made of glitches.