Still.... only Bethesda titles.
RP in Skyrim SE with NO mods on legendary difficulty is errrr... challenging!
It's funny you say that... I'm back into Fallout 4 a little these days, but on the opposite spectrum with mods.
I'm so torn on the modding aspect of this game. Like, there is SO much you can do and it's really a pretty satisfying endeavor sometimes. You get to mold it yourself. I get into this mode where I'll see things and think "I wonder if I can find a way to change that." And it's always about things you could pretty much never hope to change in other games. Very little has gone untouched at this point. It's amazing, what can be done. Well... it can all kinda be done. Sorta.
When you really get deeper into modding that game, it really only makes you realize just how shoddily put together it truly is. You can touch everything, sure, but it doesn't mean it won't vanish in a puff of fine, effervescent dust. I think of it less as being designed to be modular and more just... "left undone" for the world to see and tamper with. So many things can just up and break on you for no reason... and if you do figure out what broke and see what the oversight actually was, it's usually something infuriatingly stupid. And then maybe you fix it almost irritatingly easily... or maybe it's buried so far down towards the core of the engine that neither you nor anybody else have the means to reach it without uprooting fundamental systems.
I truly feel sorry for the devs working with this engine... it must be a nightmare to get anything to work halfway how they want it to. Almost anything you change breaks
something. And it goes down these strange, round-robin chains of things that should never have anything to do with each other where it's like something 10 links down on the next chain over breaks because of some minute, insular change you made. That's the thing that becomes most glaringly obvious with them - Bethesda's engine mechanics are full of conflicts. Hell, the whole thing is
predicated on them... they're what make the game run in the first place. It's just a bunch of conflicting factors bumping up against each other, mutating and cancelling-out, and somehow manifesting into a game... the magical, janky gestalt that is FO4.
So it's like... yeah, you can modify it a whole bunch, but it's not really very moddable... a lot of 'nuance' to the meaning of that reality. The way things are made to work is not practical... they're tedious, convoluted, and counter-intuitive. Nothing works as it should. It's more like "It shouldn't work, but it does." It's hard to ever reasonably expect you'll get what you're after, no matter how simple it looks. The vanilla game already puts a lot of effort into emulating more modern graphical techniques and appearances than the code beneath it could handle, leaving it already half-broken. The reason it mostly works is because they've painstakingly assembled and scripted things, like stacking dominoes, in order to prevent those conflict events from happening. So when you try to go beyond that, what you're faced with really is like a navigating minefield - a precarious and sisyphean task. Many other games, if they were moddable would make modding this game seem like a terrible prospect... because I'm betting a lot more shit would just work. Instead you are constantly at the mercy of arbitrary, temperamental forces, sent to test the boundaries of your rationality. It's your obvious bandaid fixes against the mysteriously-veiled ghetto-rigs of the developers.
You've basically just gotta know when to be vigilant and meticulous - and when to do the equivalent to smacking the CRT TV set. Okay?
A deeper analogy, now. Say you have this broken plate. It's always been broken... for as long as you can remember. But you quite like it - it's a very unique plate and you get to thinking it would be a nice thing to have if you could only piece it together. You can almost see how it would look. The gauntlet of tasks laid before you seems insurmountably difficult, but it is to be a labor of love.
Fast-forward a little bit. You've somehow managed to glue it together with spit and polish its surface to a respectable glow with nothing but cheesecloth. The pieces don't line up - somehow there's enough plate for one whole plate and a tenth of another, even though all of the edges of the pieces seem to match perfectly. So you found yourself very judiciously filing and reforming a few of the pieces with an emery board. A good call - the material was never supposed to be there. It was an anomaly of the manufacturing process and in truth the surface was never uniformly flat, nor the edges round. The way the plate was originally assembled made it seem otherwise.
All in all, it was a process that nearly drove you to madness. But you did it. Even took pictures to show your friends, even if all they see is a crappy broken plate made to look like a piece of amateur modern art.
Still, this plate is your baby... it IS your child. But now a problem has arisen: you want to use the plate on the other end of the long table where you assembled it... and where it has always sat. You really want to be able to sit in the window. It's the only place where you can sit with your tea and also see to read, as by law all rooms must be no more than 60% lit. You're currently on the side of the 40%, where it's nearly pitch-black. Also, by strict rule of law only one room can be designated for reading and one for tea. You must pick one or the other, or via an intentional loophole may combine them to have both in one room. And it cannot be a room that you sleep in, groom in, or enter the house through. Kitchens are for cooking and toiling - they are not for liesure and revelry. Storage rooms similarly are for storage only. There are many other stipulations that I won't get into for the sake of the analogy.
So with all of that in mind, there's really only one thing to do... and that's move the plate, across the table, in that room. If you start now, you can finish before sunset. But be quick! It's already 6am and this will take some time!
As an aside... why the global laws are this way in your world, nobody quite knows. But they do know that there are very good reasons for them being that way. Things have happened to make them vitally necessary. And trying to change any of those laws would cause all of society to crumble into dystopian anarchy. Such a terrifying precipice, does your world broach.
So what do you do with all of these strange things lining up to bear down on you? Inch it along the table with gentle pushes from a curled index finger? Or maybe you lift it under a soft, thick blanket at bullet-time speed, carry it over with both hands, and gently set it down. It might even be better to carefully break down the plate and reassemble it where you want it. Maybe sometimes that's the right way to go. Any of these options might work. But either way, you know you're in for a long, white-knuckle trial of focus and dedication.
But no. This time those methods will not work. I only pray you don't have to try those other options to realize, as so many often do. What you actually have to do is forcefully flick it into the air with your finger slid underneath a very particular point of the lip (-8 degrees from vertical diameter,) ensuring that it flips
exactly 3.27x on a verry particular velocity curve so that it bounces and rears back when it makes contact, shifting the table-cloth back somewhere within a 2-2.5mm envelope in the process, before settling with a firm, staccatoed, thud - square-centered on the vertical axis. If any one of these things does not happen, the plate will shatter and the spit trick will not work a second time. Nobody knows why this is true - it is beyond our current conception of the physical universe.
Additionally, even if it does work, your silverware will invariably be thrust off of the table in the process. Of the many others who have attempted similar endeavors, only one person has ever come forward and said otherwise. Now, being made of nickel-free steel, it will cling aggressively to your floor tiles, which are magnetic, as are all floors in this world, because shoes make gravity work in reverse, meaning all shoes have to be magnetic as well (and you can only wear them indoors - you must take them off before stepping outside.) This is fine with you, because you're a sneakerhead, like Kanye West or anyone else in your society, and would sooner take your shoes off at construction sites to keep them from getting dirty than protect your feet. Suffice to say nobody wears their shoes outside, or wants to, even if their feet were better protected by them. There's a logic to it: so long as you are careful not to get hurt, dirt washes off of feet more easily than it does shoes. But, man what a pain that makes all of this! And unfortunately, you can't get non-magnetic silverware either. Nickel is among the most coveted precious metals. So they don't make it for all but the richest people in the world. Mostly people just try not to drop their silverware.
There is no happy ending, here. No resolution to this tale. It is up to you to decide. These are the great conundrums of life. Again, nobody knows why things are this way. These are simply the hard limits of the physical reality upon which all technology and social constructs are built around in the world of Bethesda modding.
That is what Fallout 4 is underneath. That's what messing with those things is like. That is the level of nonsense and bullshit you deal with. What I just wrote is going to be the closest you can get to a direct analogy of the experience.
