How have bugs and tech issues affected your role-play experience?

[teitogun]

The life of a Skyrim player involves solving a lot of mod induced bugs, loose scripts, unknown conflicts, partially working mods, glitchy little things and crashy goodness. Anyway, this isn't a thread to complain about these problems, in my case most of which are due to my own fault, and most I can fix myself if I put the time and effort. The purpose of this thread is to wonder how people had bugs or glitches actually changing their role playing experience as opposed to just being an obstacle to it?

 

 

For me this happened recently. My character is a muscly orc who's been  long time chums with Mjoll (as in "testing" various loverslab mods on her, while leveling my one-handed) and I was even contemplating marrying her. One day I leave her be in my house, and head to town to craft and sell some stuff. As usual,  I pick up some broads from the Drunken Whorehouse and head over to my Whiterun love-shack to engage in a night of drunken orgy  (finally  found a use for those  bottles of wine I accidentally picked up in my travels). As the dawn breaks, with my desires satisfied, I slowly wobble back to Riverwood, to my little wooden lovers' retreat. But when I cross the front porch, my lioness is nowhere to be found in the house. So after I search everywhere for her, I find her in Riften's Bee, back chilling next to Aerin and sipping a cold Blackbriar. How could you Mjoll? After all we've been through together? Oh boy. Could it be she got wind somehow of my lustful infidelity (that damn fox Jenassa had something to do with it probably), and finally sick of my insatiable orcish libido and tendency to faff about instead of saving the world from dragons, decided once and for all to head back to her home city of Riften to where she could make a difference?

 

Oh well I still have Lydia right? Hell no. "Oh howdy my thane, are you here to unload your trash on me, while gawking at how the latest  thong  you found in that "nexus" place looks on my body?  Well screw you, I'm not taking orders from you  no more. From now on I'm just going to  squat in Breezehome, and nothing short of a console command can remove me." No luck on that front. Jordis likewise gave me the middle finger, and Talos knows where the hell Iona's gone. 

 

Actually the source of this whole thing was that UFO broke after I carelessly updated some mod or other, and so did its associated mods. All of the characters that were re-based in custom locations defaulted to their original homes. Worse, when I tried to hire or give out commands to my previous followers, they didn't respond to any inputs at all. As I was troubleshooting the problem, I amused myself by trying to reason it away from an in-game perspective. I'll miss Mjoll, she was dayum fine, but I guess she'll be better off with Aerin policing Riften after all. Oh well, plenty of mudcrabs in the pond -  right now I'm hanging with Uthgerd - she's the kind of cold, insensitive person who probably doesn't give a slightest hoot if I sleep around with other women. I mean hell, Uthgerd barely qualifies as a woman as much as a face breaking engine of bloody destruction.  A perfect match for my equally inconsiderate and amoral jerk of an orc. So anyway, this is the story of how mod bugs turned my Skyrim  from an epic fantasy adventure into a rather sluggish course in computer science and finally into a trashy reality television show ala  TES edition Jersey Shore. Fun stuff.

[Redflyingmonkey]

Ha, I feel your pain. 

I played and finished five TES games only on the XBOX (Fo2, FoNV, Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim). I only bought Skyrim on the PC after watching an awesome modded play through, with skyships and giant monsters and shit. I thought hey, I didn't finish the game at 100% yet, this could be a fun way of doing it !

And the first two or three weeks were awesome, I kept things simple and downloaded only stuff that would enhance the vanilla game without modifying it too much. Then I got raped in my sleep by the devil god of modding, and I kept installing and installing ... After a dozen nuke of my Skyrim folders, thousands of hours spent tweaking shit in the CK or cleaning in TES5edit, or bashing on Wyre Bash, or learning Mod Organizer, or learning Nifskope, honestly the game just turned into a way like another to learn basic computer stuff.

 

And it also became a self destructive, eternally painful, amazingly boring and time consuming battle against bugs and glitches and crashes and orphaned scripts and exploding meshes and striped shadows...  The list goes on. 

They will not win ! THEY CAN'T

[Nergui]

That was good reading.

 

One game I'd put about 40 hours into a character when a vanilla script went full retard. The worst experience was after 200 or so hours with a character, my quest log was empty and my only thought was "What the hell do I do now?".

[Guest]

My journey with Skyrim: 1st playthrough no mod: 50 hrs then black screens happened.

2nd playthrough 225 mods: 40 hrs then I cannot exist Breezehome O_O.

3nd playthrough 255 mods: 15 hrs then crashes in Whiterun occurs.

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nth playthrough 400+ mods: 100+ hrs then I updated Wet and Cold Q_Q

n+1th playthough 400+ mods: 15 hrs then scripted NPC stop dying Q_Q (probabbly because of script lag or updated OBIS)

Then I ragequit and started playing FO New Vegas (currently at 250 mods)

New Vegas has been so nice to me, and I am a happier man now...

 

[nutluck]

I guess I have been lucky all and all.

1) First time I tired to mod I made such a complete mess of it I never made it to level 10 before I had to completely reinstall Skyrim.

2) Second time I got to around level 28 before I started having issues, lags, freezing for short periods of time etc. Tweaked mods, removed some and added some and then tried again.

3) Third time made it to 58 before I started having issues with Skyrim, mostly it was stutters, lag, stuck in load screen, it was playable but had issues. I decided to start over.

4) Fourth time which I have no started right now since a lot of people are updating mods I like I am just testing mods for the moment until they are all to a stable version then i will try my next game.

 

So far after each time I have gotten further in the game and learned a lot with each one.

[TalMaheRa]

I like Hearthfire, believe it or not.  A witch or vampire might lair in the swamp while a werewolf resides in the Pale.

Not anymore.  For some reason Heljarchen and Windstad are purchasable AND buildable; yet they simply do not exist.

Lakeview is the only manor left to me until I do what I always do; mod and mod until the whole install implodes.

 

Hello, Aggressive Prostitution.  And PSQ.  And a dozen ridiculously gorgeous followers.  And Zaz in the basement.

 

And I always wanted to build, own, and manage a whorehouse.  Well, not really, but fuck it.  I can live in Honeyside.

[bradleyh]

I have not been able to keep any characters I have made since March more than a few weeks.

Sexlab gets updated, fixed, Updated Again. The Mods that are based off of Sexlab then need to get updated...

Open Cities can be reinstalled if I use ENBoost and SSME!

SKSE releases 1.7, and I can use My SKSE ini to do the same things SSME does. hdtPhysicsExtension gets updated! A new ENB is released!

My Game suffers a conflict of .dll files and all of My stability dissapears. I even flushed out and cleaned the cooling loop on My PC because I thought the missing Textures were a result of My GTX 780 not getting cooled.

I discover that My characters have become unkillable after removing a Mod.

When Vampires Attack gets a complete overhaul, and I have to abandon My characters I have been playing recently again.

 

I am starting a new character tonight

 

 

[DeepBlueFrog]

I almost gave up on Skyrim the first time a Steam update crapped on my game. Remember those dragons flying backwards?

 

Now I am glad I waited. The only thing that kept me going early on were the amazing screenshots from early versions.

 

[Guest]

My roleplay efforts have always been fucked up by bugs and tech issues, since day one. I started with the Ultima series on my big bro's comp as a kid, that was always a bit wobbly. 

I've played most of the other big RPGs like Planescape Torment, BG, Fallout 1 and 2, Neverwinter Nights etc, they were all amazing in their own right. But it's the big world building series like ESO and Gothic that really made me feel I had the freedom I craved, beyond just stats and simulated dice roll checks. And I've learned over the last 15 or so years that there's a price to pay.

 

I've lost count of how many restarts I've had in Skyrim - a few more than Morrowind maybe. All the characters I spent ages building up, only to abandon them because things got just too flakey -  I dread to think how many hours that amounts to. 

 

Right now I'm playing I think the best ever character I've ever had in Skyrim, the play style of the build I'm using  is just amazing. And right there I've just hexed it. 

 

[1angryDOLL]

I had a goofy thing happen that, I don't know if I consider it a bug maybe, but sexlab defeat is fun.

 

I had snuck up on a bandit encampment just to find a travelling merchant being raped by an orc. I tried to rescue him but that somehow made the merchants horse mad at me. Fortunately I was on my elf and could pacify the horse...but oh...that poor mans anus. Sadly he wouldn't talk to me because I became a hostile to him after that. rape victims...am I right. jk that's a bit dark.