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Turning Skyrim into Dark Fantasy on a low-end PC


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Hello!

 

I'm looking for performance friendly mods that make it possible to re-create the atmosphere of the (more commonly known) Dark Souls series, and (the much less commonly known) Gothic Series (Gothic I and II, games from 2001-2002). I prefer the feeling of the latter over the former, but there -- at least how I see it -- aren't too many differences. I don't mind having horror elements either, which Skyrim mods seem to lack. I have to admit, though, that with my specifications, I will be happy with whatever gets me closer to my goals, so I'm not picky.

 

Specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8400 @3.00 GHz (overclocked to about 3.4).

NVIDIA GeForce GT 730, 2GB VRAM (4GB with virtual vram)

4 GB RAM.

 

Obviously, I do not care about 4k textures -- not even 2k. Personally, I care very little how the game looks -- which I admit, seems weird, considering this topic --, I care about how it feels, that is, overall atmosphere.

 

I use ENBoost and a whole lot of performance mods, including all kinds of remover / disabler mods, such as:

- TESV Reduced Textures

- Remove Interior Fog
- Remove Exterior Fog

- Remove Underwater Grass and Other Stuff

- Performance Textures

- Insignificant Object Remover

- Fog Mesh Remover

- Disabled shadows and grass in the .INI files.

 

I also experimented with lowering resolution, which also added some performance boost. At this point, I'm not entirely sure if the above mods are an overkill (they probably are), but the game runs and relatively stable with ~120 ESPs.

 

I've been messing around with "I can't believe it's not an ENB" and Imaginator, but I'm still looking for an acceptable look. I'm sure everyone knows the atmosphere of Dark Souls, so here are a few pictures about the previously mentioned game, Gothic:

 

 

 

Some of these pictures are obviously modded.
 

fonstola.ru-142119.jpg

 

G2NotR-LH-DX11-005.jpg

 

Gothic%20II%202.jpg

 

gallery_27_635_img.jpg

 

 

c65a537ebb8b6fd73f88788b32177fea.jpg

 

RBJP2R.jpg

 

maxresdefault.jpg

 

Gothic2%2013.jpg

 

aGRQ3vw_700b.jpg

 

Gothic2_2015-06-10_11-11-58-42.jpg

 

Gothic2_panorama.gif

 

gothic2-2010-12-26-17-46-17-57.jpg

 

 

 

 

To be perfectly honest, I wouldn't even mind having the same texture quality as the vanilla version of this game, if it would make it possible to re-create a similar feeling. Of course, re-creating Gothic in Skyrim takes more than a few visual mods, and I did set up my entire mod order to cater to that (actually you can re-create almost all of the game mechanics -- spare a few -- with mods, what is missing is the content, like armors and the rest, but I even found some of those (followers from the Gothic story are still missing, though, and my best chance is to create them with Familiar Faces, and hope that some of their skins can be transferred to a fitting custom follower with NPC Visual Transfer)). If anyone is interested, I may go into further detail on the other mods I use for game mechanics.

 

So, the goal is a Gothic - Horror - Dark Souls atmosphere/theme (in that order of importance).

 

Now, the reason why I opened this topic is because I'm looking for mod suggestions, with my specs and preferences in mind. I have no weather or lighting mods installed (besides a simple one that hasn't even a plugin, and makes nights darker), so I'm primarily I'm looking for recommendations on those.

 

I need a weather/lighting mod that:

(- Doesn't break my system

- Doesn't break my game)

- Makes the weather cloudy

- Makes nights and dungeons darker

- Makes the overall atmosphere of the game gloomier / darker

 

Another thing I have just installed is "I can't believe it's not an ENB", which after further inspection may have been a mistake, considering what I'm trying to achieve here. :D

 

I know about the Dark Fantasy Overhaul mod, as well as the recently released "The Blue Forest", which turns the orange Rift into something more of a my-kind-of-forest. My problems with both of those are the 2k textures; maybe if there was a way to convert them to 512, I could use them.

 

Otherwise, I'm open to all suggestions about mods that would help me achieve this with little to no performance loss.

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Oooh, I'm also trying to achieve the dark & gloomy & harsh athmosphere in my game, so (hopefully) I can give some recs. To be honest I'm not quite sure if most of these mods are truly lightweight, but I experience little to no harm runnig all of them, and my rig is far from best.

So, I obviously propose using an ENB if not for the looks, then for great perfomance boost using ENBoost. If running an ENB is still too much, try this.

For weather mod the Purity is both lightweight and great. Basic Vivid Weathers install without extended storms and volumetric fog also shouldn't take much. But I doubt you can call Vivid dark fantasy-ish, tho rainy weathers look stunning with it.
I also suggest Dungeon Darkness for it's unique and *gasp* immersive feeling. Since it runs scripts only in the beginning of a dungeon, you can hardly call it heavy. Using DD alongside with Customizable Lights really reminded me of the fisrt Dark Souls game and was beyond amazing :3
Enhanced Landscapes and Fantasy Forest Overhaul work great together (at least for me). I also was running Distinct Skyrim Landscapes for quite a long time, but in the end got bored by the bald lands all around. This one must be extremely perfomance friendly tho :"D I also like Grimm Grass, but it doesnt cover much places. 

Speaking of Dark Souls, check this review. Some dark fantasy recs can be found here.

 

Oh, and for quick & easy change of texture size, use Ordenador.

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I need a weather/lighting mod that:

(- Doesn't break my system

- Doesn't break my game)

- Makes the weather cloudy

- Makes nights and dungeons darker

- Makes the overall atmosphere of the game gloomier / darker

 

As for lightweight weather mod, I also recommend Shadows (especially its weather tweaks) for foggy and rainy atmosphere.

And, check other mods from mobiusbelmont, mod author of the Blue forest.

All of her/his mods are very atmospheric, though the grass/ tree mod tend to be not so performance-friendly.

Her/his Dark Forest of Skyrim, however, is unfortunately now temporary hidden due to re-working.

 

If you are interested in weather fx (like the thunder and pouring rains), True Storms - Thunders and Rains Redone offers light-weight immersion. 

 

Among the performance mods, I noticed that you haven't mentioned: Low Res Particles and Flora - LRPF.

High-res magic effect during the combat is certainly FPS/ VRAM killer, so it may be worth trying.

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Wow, thank you for the recommendations!

 

Especially for you, okunireika, for reminding me of the existence of Ordenador. I used it to process all of my mods and the entire game with all DLCs, down to 512. As a result, my game looks better than ever, and I get fluid motion everywhere (I'm not too obsessed with frame numbers, I don't measure them -- if it looks good, it is good, period). I re-enabled grass rendering, and put it to the highest, as well as object and actor rendering.

 

I can run Skyrim Flora Overhaul, Dark Fantasy Overhaul and Blue Forest (after adjusting them with Ordenador) without a problem. I will add back some of the performance mods (because I removed them all for testing -- that solid performance occurred without any performance mods what-so-ever) which don't make visible difference. Also installed Grass on Steroids with the 128 value, works great.

 

I'm also using Shadows, Supreme Storms and True Storms, as well as Climates of Tamriel. From the description of Shadows, it doesn't seem to do much for the weather.

 

I'm testing CoT. It's main feature, variety, doesn't appeal to me too much, considering that if I could somehow set it, I would make the weather a variety of cloudy, foggy, and rainy for about 80% of the time, where a sunny day seems like a small beacon of light in endless darkness. I set up my Personalized Music folders with the same idea in mind; I generally have a variety of melancholic / lethargic music everywhere, in dungeons, vampire castles and during nights this moves more towards the tension / horror side, whereas in places where there are humans -- cities, taverns, any (friendly/neutral) civilization, I put still melancholic but somewhat "hopeful" music (I used mostly the soundtrack of the movie The Road for that). Same with mornings.

 

I have two another questions:

 

1. Is there any kind of utility or tweak out there which lets me set the probability of each type of weather? Or perhaps a mod that changes the current CoT weather to be most of the time foggy / cloudy / rainy.  I know there is a mod called "Always Raining" (or something similar), but that's not what I'm looking for.

 

2. Is anyone here uses Imaginator? I realized I'd better keep "I can't believe it's not an ENB", even though it makes the game the exact opposite of what I'm looking for, because it provides a lot of other features I could not have otherwise. So I -- I think -- I have to work with that and tweak it. This seems to be a major pain in the ass, considering how far it is from what I want to achieve. Can anyone recommend Imaginator presets that would/could work? I already tried the ones listed on the Nexus.

 

Thanks to all of you! :)

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  1. As for the mod that can change the probability among the weather types as well as is compatible with COT, I don't know. Sorry. 
  2. I once used (to tell the truth, tried to use) Imaginator, but gave up since I couldn't make the exact preset I'd like to use by myself, and almost none of the available preset does not fit my liking. 

I also usually use ENBOOST (for better memory management) and Skyrim Reloaded - SKGE for better waters/ shadows. While the latter is relatively light-weight and configurable (although default setting was meh for me), it's a shame that the file itself was not available on Nexus anymore (the downloaded file only contain the link to the new host site). 

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"I can't believe it's not an ENB" is not an ENB. It's a graphical enhancement, but it's less than an ENB. Here is a video.

 

y_sengaku, it doesn't have to be compatible with CoT. I'm not attached to any weather mod. I've found weather controlling spell mods, which gets the job done, but messing around with a spell every few hours to set the weather back to what I want it to be just kills the feeling. I probably ask way too much, but in my dreams I saw a mod that has an MCM menu with sliders for probability for each type of weather per hold. :D If I could make it, it would already be done.

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