Maybe I'm just change adverse.

[Psalam]

I'm off work this week and decided that I would take the Skyrim SE that Steam or Bethesda or whoever it was, gave me for free since I bought LE a long time ago, and load it up. Having chosen to do that I decided to look at a couple of other things as well. I downloaded Vortex to be its mod manager and I chose to use the UNP body instead of the CBBE to which I am accustomed.

 

As the title indicates I must admit I wasn't terribly happy with the results. First the mod manager switch. This was the most successful of the lot. I looked at some videos, downloaded it and really didn't have any problem with it. I would go so far as to say that, if I were learning to manage mods for the first time right now, there are some real advantages to Vortex over NMM. However, the biggest advantages were dealing with things (like avoiding conflicts) that I had already learned while using NMM. In short, I can't see what the deal with it is especially for a veteran mod user such as me.

 

Second the body. There are some really good armors out there for UNP. However, as I was scrolling through Nexus all the most downloaded and endorsed armors and armor replacers were for CBBE. I never could find a complete replacer (like CT77's for CBBE) that I liked (skimpy and adjustable).

 

Finally SE itself. I was not all that impressed by any change in the play or the "look" of the game. I was very impressed that, like the body, a lot of my favorite LE mods were not available. There may be similar mods in SE (although I didn't find them - I didn't look for ALL of them either, I got bored) but I sure didn't find them.

 

As the title says, maybe I'm just change adverse, but I don't know that I learned anything that I will wind up using. However, I learned something and, at my age, that's a good thing all by itself.

[pinky6225]

Main thing i noticed when i started with vortex was being able to install ENB's as that use to have to be done manually when i used NMM so i was aways a bit wary of then trying different ENB's once i'd got one setup, after watching the tutorial on how to do it that was quite easy so i tried quite a few on the Re-engaged ENB options before settling on Re-Engaged ENB Obsidian SE Best Preset Soft Dof

 

Think so far the only mods i miss that i had on LE are slaverun by Kenjoka (SE conversion didnt really work i tried it) and one from nexus that let you pick the city the thieves guild job was in, rest i've managed to find a working SE version or something that does the same

[worik]

I might add to your experience that I had recently "re-discovered" Oblivion for myself.

It's just that I couldn't find that ancient install CD anymore and used a special offer on Steam. (Well, comparing that price with a glass of cheap wine or beer in my pub nearby, it's not even half the money)

 

By modern standards, TES4 is unremarkable, but there's an ongoing project to port/rebuild it for Skyrim SE's engine.

And THAT would be my (very good) reason to start SE and to play my old beloved Oblivion with modern eye-candy

 

Shameless teaser ?

Spoiler

https://skyblivion.com/

https://www.youtube.com/c/Rebelzize/videos

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68uUeZGppXw

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRLqjCLSehQ

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGvU7QDWEDc

 

 

[Scrab]

1 hour ago, Psalam said:

However, as I was scrolling through Nexus all the most downloaded and endorsed armors and armor replacers were for CBBE

CBBE has been outshining UNP in SE since ever

The only advantage UNP had over CBBE for a very long time is the Belly Node which until 3BA got released wasnt used for anything beyond body morph mods and with 3BA, CBBE got access to it too so that one limited advantage just got taken away and with that, CBBE was utterly superior to UNP until BHUNP got released

The only reason why youd ever use UNP in SE before BHUNP was because youre either having a morph fetish or you like the UNP base body and are too lazy to recreate it in CBBE

 

If you want BHUNP Armor, you should look for SunJeongs Webpage & Rektas Market, both of them offer a decent quantity of BHUNP based Armors and the default Armor can be replaced by using the UUNP Armor Collection (there is one for SE yes)

 

1 hour ago, Psalam said:

a lot of my favorite LE mods were not available

SE isnt LE

 

If you want a proper SE build you best build something up from ground up. Looking for your LE mods in the SE section just makes you blind for what SE already has

[MonVert]

4 minutes ago, Scrab said:

If you want BHUNP Armor,

 

Or, visit my nexus page and get all the BIkini Armour you could want, in BHUNP. ?

[KoolHndLuke]

Porting mods from LE to SE is easier than ever. I ported a player home mod just see if it works and I had no problems with it other than one or two textures. Scripts are a different story since it seems some work and some don't after recompiling. I'm happy with my third switch to SE and really have no intention of playing LE again since SE loads, looks and runs better for me than LE ever did with much less effort. 

 

 

 

[Psalam]

48 minutes ago, KoolHndLuke said:

Scripts are a different story

All of my mods (the three that there are) involve scripting. That's probably why I haven't tried SE porting them. Although, to be honest, it was never a particularly high priority for me.

[HentaiGnome]

4 hours ago, Psalam said:

I'm off work this week and decided that I would take the Skyrim SE that Steam or Bethesda or whoever it was, gave me for free since I bought LE a long time ago, and load it up. Having chosen to do that I decided to look at a couple of other things as well. I downloaded Vortex to be its mod manager and I chose to use the UNP body instead of the CBBE to which I am accustomed.

 

As the title indicates I must admit I wasn't terribly happy with the results. First the mod manager switch. This was the most successful of the lot. I looked at some videos, downloaded it and really didn't have any problem with it. I would go so far as to say that, if I were learning to manage mods for the first time right now, there are some real advantages to Vortex over NMM. However, the biggest advantages were dealing with things (like avoiding conflicts) that I had already learned while using NMM. In short, I can't see what the deal with it is especially for a veteran mod user such as me.

 

Second the body. There are some really good armors out there for UNP. However, as I was scrolling through Nexus all the most downloaded and endorsed armors and armor replacers were for CBBE. I never could find a complete replacer (like CT77's for CBBE) that I liked (skimpy and adjustable).

 

Finally SE itself. I was not all that impressed by any change in the play or the "look" of the game. I was very impressed that, like the body, a lot of my favorite LE mods were not available. There may be similar mods in SE (although I didn't find them - I didn't look for ALL of them either, I got bored) but I sure didn't find them.

 

As the title says, maybe I'm just change adverse, but I don't know that I learned anything that I will wind up using. However, I learned something and, at my age, that's a good thing all by itself.

 

If you're a veteran to modding then of course Vortex isn't gonna be leaps and bounds better than NMM, or any mod manager for that matter. At this point, the only thing that makes Vortex "better" is ease of use (especially for the newcomers), the modern UI, and a few conveniences here and there. But ultimately, Vortex is just a tool. Like the console wars of Xbox vs Nintendo vs Playstation, comparing mod managers is pretty moot. Personally I've started with NMM, moved onto Vortex, dabbled with Wrye Bash, and currently using MO2. All of which I have no problems using with and wholeheartedly recommend ALL OF THEM. The only thing I don't recommend? Manually installing mods.

 

Personally I prefer CBBE, but I can understand if people prefer the UNP stuff. Not gonna go there, that's a touchy subject lol.

 

As for SE, it's a little too bad that they call it "Special Edition" because frankly I agree that vanilla SE doesn't look much better than LE. It's got a pretty weak godrays and HDR effect, the TAA is just marginally better than FXAA, and the overall look and feel of the game doesn't look quite remastered as one would expect. The thing that makes SE better than LE however is the 64-bit architecture. Makes the game so much more stable especially once you go crazy with modding. Just from personal experience, I've had more crashes with LE than SE and the only times I crashed with SE was due to user-error, not because of some technical/memory limitation.

 

As for SE mods, there are some that don't exist on LE and vice-versa. Unfortunately, it'll be impossible to cater to everyone, but again I can only speak for myself and ever since I switched to SE I've never looked back. For me personally, all the mods that I ever wanted from LE had been ported to SE. And those that didn't, I found an alternative or I was able to port it myself somehow. Otherwise, I've learned to just carry on with life without some LE mods and that's fine. Over time I realized I want more of a minimalistic mod list as opposed to when I used to play on LE and got super crazy downloading and installing just about everything.

 

EDIT: Oh and to point out your first line, if you got Skyrim LE on Steam then you can thank Bethesda for giving you the upgrade to SE for free. ?

[KoolHndLuke]

10 hours ago, Psalam said:

All of my mods (the three that there are) involve scripting. That's probably why I haven't tried SE porting them. Although, to be honest, it was never a particularly high priority for me.

I had some troubles with LE and mods that I couldn't solve easily (or maybe at all) is why I decided to give SE another go. Those problems I mention are likely more due to my mods and LO than anything else and I would never say SE is some vast improvement over LE out of the box or anything. If you're having no troubles with LE and still enjoy it, then there's no reason to switch. It follows that if you can port an LE mod to SE, then the reverse must also be true.

 

 

[Martianman]

I changed about 2 years ago and noticed a staggering improvement in stability. I regularly play with 200+ mods and on LE my computer crashed pretty regularly when I had a messy load order or if there was a blip where too much was being processed at once. I spent probably more hours trying to fix mods so they would work with the fragile system than I did actually enjoying the game. CTD's happened a ton whenever I would remove an unwanted mod mid-game, regardless of whether or not they were script heavy. The LE version is and has been notorious for ctd and then save file corruption, etc. When I made the switch to SE, I have had no ctd's and notice that disabling the same mods doesn't crash the game or corrupt the save files at all.

From my understanding, the SE version has better coding and ultimately in the long haul it will end up having more mods and more capabilities than the LE version. I used to use 7-base body but when I moved to SE I tried out CBBE and honestly after learning how the bodyslide mechanic works and with SMP it is much better and customizable than the 7B HDT version body I had for female characters/npcs. 

The big thing for me was the stability factor, and I've had a lot more enjoyment in my gameplay without having to worry about crashing and have a lot of active mods.

[Mombasa69]

I started off with cbbe, but then changed to unp, as it was more compatible with vanilla armours. Using BHUNP now.

 

[TentakelnBitte]

SE is much more stable, but even with my pc's upgrades it still runs terribly for me. I could probably fix this with work, but I'm also in camp "my favorite mods aren't here". It doesn't help either, when on the asian sites (where I get non-armor mods from these days) most people mod for LE only (tho usually ok with others porting)... It's only on N*xus that I encounter most "I'm SE only, don't ask" authors. 

 

With how easy it is to port things either way and me generally avoiding scripty mods these days, mods are a weak excuse. I'm just too lazy to optimize whatever is wrong with my setup. Stability is a MASSIVE blessing, but sticking with my old, buggy, pretty, familiar set up is just easier.

 

I don't know if that's really change adverse, or just wanting to avoid the effort of changing. I'd do it 100% if the effort felt equal to the reward (and it doesn't, to me).

[Psalam]

12 hours ago, TentakelnBitte said:

I don't know if that's really change adverse, or just wanting to avoid the effort of changing. I'd do it 100% if the effort felt equal to the reward (and it doesn't, to me).

Good point. That's why I've been such a fan of this (no real thought required):

 

[chuBBies1]

Going off from what other people have said, I also normally stick to LE... sort of. Normally for SE, I mod it for long playthroughs where I know it will be a massive time sink. Think of Bruma, Legend of the Dragonborn, or any other massive expansion or overhaul. Not to say I don't do this with LE, because I definitely do, it's more so that that is ALL I do for SE. For whatever reason, I never use any LL mods in SE. Maybe I'm biased, nostalgic, or a bit of a luddite, I just … don't use 'em for SE. I guess you could say that my SE is more of a tolkienesque adventure where the hero kills bad guy, saves world, the end. My LE setup is more akin to J.R.R. Martin type fantasy which entails... a bit of smut... a lot of smut. But, I actually quite like playing like this, since I can have two totally different, well games to play around with. And I know, I know, I have MO2 and use different profiles to save my endless different load orders, but what is essentially the same game that could be played through two vastly different perspectives is what I actually enjoy about having both LE and SE.

 

Changig gears for a second and moving on to the different body types for SE( which I rarely use for SE, I know shocker), I'd also advise CBBE. Just the sheer number of outfit mods/ overhauls/ and replacers for CBBE is staggering. I'm UNP type of person, at least for LE, but I would almost defiantly go CBBE on that.

[BAB PEEG]

It was a pain to switch from le to se but my game almost never randomly crashes (as opposed to all the damn time) and run a hell of a lot better. All the mods I was using have been ported over too.

[Distortedrealms]

For whatever reason that just amazes me, SE does not have any broken aliasing for me which just sent it into the stratosphere over LE for me. I have the infamous 'broken aliasing in all games' bug where I NEED to force SGSSAA on LE through inspector to get no aliasing, jaggies, shimmer, etc on most games, and LE was the worst one of all. Just a mess with any other AA. But I tried SE on a whim and loved the result. But holy hell it makes me nauseous even thinking about starting from scratch with the amount of mods I use on LE.

[Distortedrealms]

On 7/22/2021 at 10:21 PM, BAB PEEG said:

It was a pain to switch from le to se but my game almost never randomly crashes (as opposed to all the damn time) and run a hell of a lot better. All the mods I was using have been ported over too.

LE can be as stable as SE. My game is insanely modded and I only ctd when its outside the game like when Windows decides to do windows things, which is annoying but super rare thankfully. Game itself is super stable.