Nolvus. What does the team think?

[Grey Cloud]

Came across it a couple of weeks ago on YT.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nolvus+skyrim&hps=1&start=1&atb=v185-1&ia=web

 

Lots of hype and lots of videos of Skyrim looking lovely but empty.

 

Two thousand mods? If my game had that many mods I'd expect it to cook my breakfast.

 

 

[Pamatronic]

18 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

Came across it a couple of weeks ago on YT.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nolvus+skyrim&hps=1&start=1&atb=v185-1&ia=web

 

Lots of hype and lots of videos of Skyrim looking lovely but empty.

 

Two thousand mods? If my game had that many mods I'd expect it to cook my breakfast.

 

 

Im honestly a bit shocked to see you off al people bring this up.

 

People on YT trying to wow others with their "ultra modded" games (where 3/4 of the mod count is made up of small patches and minuscule texture/mesh replacers) isn't something new, is it?
Only Difference here is that they hired a webdesigner to make a good looking website, but ultimately its really just another sales pitch for stuff you can easily get for free.

Did a bit of sifting trough the actual modlist and the amount of redundancy and padding is staggering. Functionally this is a 300 mod setup tops.

[cornbreadtm]

The majority of the mods are for making the game pretty. Then there are the standard dependencies and the usual gameplay stuff. It's not for the latest AE version though, so most of the package is outdated. Skyrim modding advances faster than hyperthermia. So Nolvus is currently Skyrim 2020 pretty much. You can look at 'Ultima', I believe it's called, that's more up to date. Like Skyrim 2022.

 

But yeah, mod packs are kinda iffy since you might as well not even be using them if you're going to be micro managing everything anyway. Several mods in the pack are updated to fix problems that wont be fixed in the dated pack versions. Current mods use base object swapper and SPID to make changes to the game seamlessly without endless esp/l wrangling and cloak scripts. So a lot of what these older packs are achieving with those 2k mod lists is doable with half that number or less. My mod list is only 1,144 and I long since surpassed Nolvus, I used it as a base mod list example but use updated AE. 

[Gukahn]

I am more surprised how people can take them seriously.  If you were to stack up the number of support requests for their shit-list, you could tickle the moon with it

[Grey Cloud]

13 minutes ago, Pamatronic said:

People on YT trying to wow others with their "ultra modded" games (where 3/4 of the mod count is made up of small patches and minuscule texture/mesh replacers) isn't something new, is it?
Only Difference here is that they hired a webdesigner to make a good looking website, but ultimately its really just another sales pitch for stuff you can easily get for free.

That's pretty much my take. What I don't understand is what the guy hopes to achieve. According to the hype it is free although he does have a Patreon account.

 

15 minutes ago, Pamatronic said:

Did a bit of sifting trough the actual modlist and the amount of redundancy and padding is staggering. Functionally this is a 300 mod setup tops.

I haven't found a mod list yet but that was my initial guess/suspicion.

 

14 minutes ago, cornbreadtm said:

The majority of the mods are for making the game pretty.

That is my impression from the vids I watched - lots of carefully managed shots of sun, snow, stars etc. Not a lot of a Skyrim inhabited by people and wildlife. Never any sign of an FPS counter either.

 

 

Just as an aside, I think the YT-ers are in a difficult place nowadays. Most people mod Skyrim for the sex and even Nexus features some pretty graphic mods and images but YT doesn't allow this type of thing so the 'content creators' are struggling to remain relevant.

[Grey Cloud]

21 minutes ago, Gukahn said:

If you were to stack up the number of support requests for their shit-list, you could tickle the moon with it

That was another thing I was thinking about. It's a sort of Catch-22 situation. The only people who would be daft enough to go near this are people who know nothing about modding a game and therefore the last people you want near something like this.

 

BTW. Somebody pointed me at this Bard mod

Bards - Go the F to Sleep

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/71291

 

Basically, you ask the bard to take a break and they stop until you ask them to sing again.

[Miauzi]

I would simply enter "Nolvus" as a search term here in the forum... and then look at the results

Essentially, people start with absolutely ZERO knowledge of modding and never use the forum's internal search function for the same topic.

A user then tried to set up a service thread... but hardly anyone uses it - since it's much easier to open a new topic

 

Edited March 16 by Miauzi

[Gukahn]

23 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

That was another thing I was thinking about. It's a sort of Catch-22 situation. The only people who would be daft enough to go near this are people who know nothing about modding a game and therefore the last people you want near something like this.

Exactly my thoughts after the third request for support I read.  🤔

 

25 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

BTW. Somebody pointed me at this Bard mod

Bards - Go the F to Sleep

that's nice! Thank you for sharing ^^

[Savelion]

I've been playing Nolvus recently, along with some Loverslab mods. It's really great! The installer also takes a lot of the work out of your hands.

Unfortunately it takes up a lot of ESP slots, too, so you have to surgically remove a few things you don't want to make it work with LL.

[Grey Cloud]

20 minutes ago, Savelion said:

I've been playing Nolvus recently, along with some Loverslab mods. It's really great! The installer also takes a lot of the work out of your hands.

Unfortunately it takes up a lot of ESP slots, too, so you have to surgically remove a few things you don't want to make it work with LL.

I've no intention of using Nolvus, I'm just curious about the hype and what the author is trying to achieve.

[Savelion]

54 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

I've no intention of using Nolvus, I'm just curious about the hype and what the author is trying to achieve.

Well, you have a modpack with up-to-date graphics and a completely revamped combat system that runs stable and you don't have to configure it yourself. That in itself is very appealing imo.

 

As for the author, I think this is sort of his hobby. There are donations, but that doesn't seem to be the main reason for him.

[Elgate]

Meh. Personally it's mostly that making a good modpacks takes hours and a lot of testing. Not only that, but I don't have the drive to do a lot of it myself; It's an easy way to take it off my hands really.

[Grey Cloud]

1 hour ago, Savelion said:

Well, you have a modpack with up-to-date graphics and a completely revamped combat system that runs stable and you don't have to configure it yourself. That in itself is very appealing imo.

 

47 minutes ago, Elgate said:

Personally it's mostly that making a good modpacks takes hours and a lot of testing. Not only that, but I don't have the drive to do a lot of it myself; It's an easy way to take it off my hands really.

 

Okay, but I like the modding part as much as the playing part. Wabbajack and Nexus packs have been around for years so why is this Novlus getting all the hype? My Skyrim looks great with 230 mods and I haven't tweaked my ENB, lighting or weather mods yet and I'm still to install and set up DynDolod.

 

This is all 2k.

 

 

 


 

 

Edited March 16 by Grey Cloud

[Pamatronic]

4 hours ago, Miauzi said:

never use the forum's internal search function for the same topic.

Thats because the internal search function is completely useless.

[Pamatronic]

7 hours ago, Savelion said:

Well, you have a modpack with up-to-date graphics and a completely revamped combat system that runs stable and you don't have to configure it yourself. That in itself is very appealing imo.

Thing is, its not even anything special. Graphics wise its mostly 2K textures with parallax, paired with Rudy ENB. Which is perfectly serviceable but hardly anything noteworthy. Ive been running shit like that since 2018.
And combat wise there isn't anything special either. If I recall correctly, Its ultimate combat, wildcat, poise mod, and like 5 different Dodge mods for some reason.
Again, these have been around for ages by now and don't require any effort to get working.

 

Honestly, If I look at the modlist (stupid amount of repetition to get the number high), as well as the main site itself. Made up testimonials and a (potentially made up) list of donations to serve as social proof, I really cant think of any other motivation then simply money.

Edited March 16 by Pamatronic

[Grey Cloud]

39 minutes ago, Pamatronic said:

And combat wise there isn't anything special either.

One fight I saw featured an armoured troll which looked as if it would attack once a week while the PC was acting like a gerbil on speed doing Olympic-class somersaults.

Another fight featured a bunch of rieklings which also basically stood there while he killed them between the gymnastic display.

 

The PC was also carrying his own weight in weapons. I think he had three on his back.

[Alessia Wellington]

18 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

One fight I saw featured an armoured troll which looked as if it would attack once a week while the PC was acting like a gerbil on speed doing Olympic-class somersaults.

Another fight featured a bunch of rieklings which also basically stood there while he killed them between the gymnastic display.

 

Perfectly realistic. Not.

 

Even the attack moves in RWBY are more believable than this.

[woodsman30]

I like the idea but anyone who has modded Skyrim and built a good looking and stable game knows you cannot just dump 2000 mods in it and expect great results. beside one dumb ass update and your game is screwed up again. I will pass i am no guru but I can make Skyrim look good and playable all on my own. 

[cornbreadtm]

10 hours ago, woodsman30 said:

I like the idea but anyone who has modded Skyrim and built a good looking and stable game knows you cannot just dump 2000 mods in it and expect great results. beside one dumb ass update and your game is screwed up again. I will pass i am no guru but I can make Skyrim look good and playable all on my own. 

Technically Nolvus uses a downgrader. So it downgrades Skyrim to SE. So updates don't matter. But that also means you can't update the actual mods in the pack since most are outdated and the ones that aren't have been updated multiple times over the last 4 years or are obsolete and author created a newer version.

 

And the mod number doesn't matter, it's all texture packs to change one thing. Like a texture pack to change the old gildergleam, one to change to young version and a last one the change the fully regrown one for example. That would take up 3 mod slots. But then you do that for everything in the game and you have 1500 texture mods. Me? I install a 2k texture pack and install skylands and other large texture compilations over it like a regular person. Instead of nitpicking one texture each from 100 different mods to get Whiterun to look nice.

 

The whole purpose of the mod list is to make the game look as advertised. It's tedious to force it's usage (otherwise you'd just download the mods from the list normally). You can again easily get your Skyrim looking better, quicker using modern modding practices. 

 

Unique Towns - Base Object Swapper

 

This mod is an example of what you can do now without needing to deal with 10+ compatibility patches.

 

The Nolvus team can use base object swapper to install everything Nolvus is offering instantly without flooding you with endless esl and unused textures. But since they aren't using modern tools, we have this 2k mod pack that does what you can do with 50 now.

 

This is problem with the concept of mod packs though. They are for people who don't know how to mod. But to use them, you are going to want to know how to mod, for troubleshooting. So you end up knowing enough about modding that the pack is redundant. But the people making them at times have that same limited modding ability. So they end up making a pack that too complex to be practical, which defeats the purpose since newbies cant use that.

[belegost]

I'm going to hand it to those modpacks, they are great to look through when I'm looking for mods that I could install myself. They are useful in discovering new stuff or can point me to patches or overhauls I could use.

 

Like for example there used to be this wabbajack modpack Dungeons and Deviants or something along these lines, that actually made me discover a lot of really cool DD mods, simply by listing them, back when I was just starting my "adventure" with LL and had no idea what to look for.

 

EDIT:

Actually, now that I think of it, it led me to discover that DD framework existed in the first place and that I had a previously unrealised kink for that sort of stuff. What an eye opener that was.

Edited March 17 by belegost

[myriad]

I got all Nexus and Loverlab mods installed, LE, SE, AE and GOG versions and my game runs super smooth at Ultra settings on a 1060 with an i3. /s

 

Quote

Nolvus v4.4 is TRULY AMAZING. You will not regret watching this!
Surprisngly, it ran pretty well with my specs 30fps-60fps.

 

From their Nexus page. *sigh* Doing a proper grammar and spelling check is too difficult. It is TRULY AMAZING...ofc. I'll am already regretting reading this thread let alone replying. I could have installed a new bug, eh mod. /ss

[Kastagir]

It can be helpful when a modlist like this documents the individual mods they use so that users can go and see if they like them, but I'd never use them all together like the modlist does.  The environmental mods alone make Skyrim look like a schizophrenic's interpretation of nature - all different kinds of trees and shrubs growing next to one another, growing out of rocks, growing out of each other...  There's no editing and to anyone who knows anything at all about seasonal or regional growth patterns it just looks stupid and puts on full display the author's ignorance.  Personally I don't care for mods that try to make Skyrim look like something it isn't.  More people need to look up what tundra is supposed to look like.  It doesn't look like that.  Of course, you're entitled to do whatever you want with your game, just keep it out of my face. 

 

The Youtube videos are helpful and appreciated when I come away having learned of a mod I hadn't seen before and want to try but the modlist as a whole is unpalatable.