The voice acting is solid and the tone is sincere, but for a short mod whose sole feature is prose, there isn't much depth to it. You don't get to help him accomplish his task, learn more about what happened, or witness any revelations. You don't even directly help him to process the grief; you just ask a few questions and offer sympathies in between his explanations. The lack of interactivity would be fine if there was more going on or his arc was more dramatic, but once it's over there's very little to take away or reflect on, especially since there are no tangible rewards for completing it.
I suppose overall it feels like it's missing something. Despite its subject matter, it lacks punch. It needs a stronger resolution. A catharsis moving enough to make everything worthwhile. For something of its length and total reliance on dialogue, it needs to be as engaging as possible, whether that be through fiercely witty wordplay or a very powerful concept. Hopefully that makes sense. Don't get me wrong, this mod is far from thoughtless and I don't want to come off too negatively. I suppose the issue comes down to the medium for me. If this were a short story, where you have the space and freedom to be descriptive, I think it would be more valuable. As an encounter in Skyrim, which requires a user to go out of their way to download and install it, it doesn't do enough to justify itself.
Unless something went wrong with my game, I assume the lack of quest markers (and even a quest log in general until the end when I was suddenly told the quest was completed) was intentional. While I can appreciate a lack of hand-holding, I don't think it was a good idea to not only have no information for this quest at all, but to only be told once where the ghost's next general location will be. If for any reason you miss or forget that one mention, you'll be totally lost and have no resource to fall back on since this is a niche mod.
I have mixed feelings on having to search an area for him as well. I sort of like the vague idea of having to "find" him, but there's seemingly no meaning or mystery to the specific location he moves to, no trail to follow, or hints to guide you, so I feel like it doesn't really accomplish anything beneficial. Overall, despite what seems to be an attempt to keep things immersive, the benefits of quest markers outweighs the negatives.
The only technical problem I ran into was that the bandit at the final meeting was standing up in the A-pose. He did eventually fall over somewhat comically when the ghost disappeared, as the explosion generated Havok behavior.
Here is a list of specific errors (and one suggestion) I found in the subtitle text.
I didn't write down what follows afterwards or what (if any) punctuation is used, but the dialogue "I was subject to conscription" needs a semicolon at the end.
The ghost uses the phrase "complicit with" instead of "complicit in."
Ghost's dialogue "It is a vain hope but one I cling to" needs a comma between "hope" and "but."
Player dialogue "You're still here, what happened?" and "Farewell, may you see Erik once again" both use a comma in place of a period. These are independent thoughts and should be individual sentences.
Ghost's dialogue "My presence here is not out of hate, anger, remorse or guilt" is missing an Oxford comma. His next sentence, "It is instead out of love, and gratitude" has an unnecessary comma. The actor does pause here, in which case an ellipses is acceptable.
Ghost's dialogue "I cannot leave you empty handed" needs a hyphen.
Ghost's dialogue ""...and a return to the abyss I had fought so hard out of" is grammatically unsound, and should be "fought so hard to get out of." Unfortunately, the actor reads this line verbatim.
At some point, the ghost says "spelt" instead of "spelled." This is something I've only seen start to happen in the past few years, and it's always come across to me as a low-class misinterpretation of words. According to the internet, this is strictly a British English thing, and it's used interchangeably there, so I'm willing to accept that this is simply my American opinion. I mention it only because the impression I have marks this as a region-specific option, and therefore less accepted, and therefore should be avoided unless there's a particular reason for it. At any rate, it's something to consider, especially if you're trying to make a mod for an established universe.
Similarly, the ghost also says "a slither" instead of "sliver." The internet also tells me this is a British thing, but I couldn't find any information on it beyond that, which leads me to conclude that it's a simple a bastardization. Unfortunately again, the voice actor reads the word verbatim, but I think it's close enough in pronunciation that you could fix the text and it would be reasonably unnoticeable.
Lastly, there was a slight error in the usage of ellipses in one of the ghost's lines. If ellipses are used to trail off a sentence and a new sentence is used afterwards, then you add a space. If ellipses are used as a pause within a sentence, there is no space. For example:
"This sentence...has an ellipses." "This is a sentence... This is a different sentence."
I appreciate the detailed feedback, it's definitely helpful to hear what others have to say about my work. Based off what you've said, I believe my mods might not be the most suited for you. They all heavily rely on dialogue and are more akin to short stories within Skyrim than a typical quest found in the province. I have made some mods that appeal to this vanilla style of quest which I suppose you might find interesting. I can understand why you might not like this kind of content and I'm aware it's not for everyone but I do appreciate the feedback nonetheless.
The lack of quest markers is intentional, along with the lack of a quest journal. I like my quests to feel incredibly organic with encounters being either found with the NPC's instructions, or be complete chance. This sorta feeds back into the short story-esque style I aim for but I can understand why people may not like this.
The grammar issues you found are something I might fix in future but just due to their simple nature, I might leave them be. I am from the UK as you guessed with some of the minor differences in word usage. They've always appeared to me as correct to use in these scenarios but I suppose that's just due to the region-specific differences.
I don't think it's a "not for me" problem; I think this particular work would have been much better in a written format, but it's not as if I dislike short stories or anything. I keep thinking about the book "Vernaccus and Bourlor" as I type this. It's a book I discovered while playing Vigilant for the first time several months back and read because I thought it was important to the mod due to the circumstances of its placement. I had no idea it was a book in the base game, as I never read the game's books unless it's journals or notes relevant to a quest, and I was so impressed by it that I shared it with friends. It's a great story with a really clever ending, and that's what I think this quest is missing: a clever hook to seal the deal.
I think your philosophy on quest markers and journal entries only works if someone has this mod installed without realizing it somehow. Otherwise, I can't imagine a scenario where someone intentionally installs this and then doesn't attempt to pursue it as the main focus. Sure, it's possible to find the ghost completely organically each time, as in without explicitly searching for him, but it's just not realistic. At minimum, the scenario required for such a thing is incredibly niche. I can't imagine anyone installed this without intention to start it straight away, and I wonder how many people experienced frustration trying to find the ghost each time, especially considering the apparent 12 hour wait time between spawns. I feel like I only ever found him due to luck, especially in Ivarstead. I circled the area for a significant amount of time and only found him by happening to glimpse a blue speck as I was moments from giving up. I also had to Google the name of the lake for his final encounter. It would have helped for him to say "south of Riften" or something.
That's the case I'd make for it, anyway. We don't need to go back and forth. Thanks for the mod and your response. Contrary to your advice, I may actually check out some of your other mods, but I'll spare you further critique unless I find something significant to mention or want to drop a casual compliment. That said, while looking over your profile I did happen to notice the summary for "Blood and Grit" has a typo: "pastime" is one word.
The game is crashing on 4th encounter, I uninstall skyrim and delete all mods. And then install skyrim again with only this mod but it crashing again on 4th encounter.
by 4th encounter do you mean Lake Honrich?? because I'm getting CTD whenever I get close to the area where the ghost is at Lake Honrich, now that I've done the Ivarstead encounter. I don't even make it to his island tent, but was able to explore there earlier. Which I might have taken something when I was there before, like alchemy ingredients? I wonder if that's causing the problem. The tent was there prior to getting that far along in the quest. So now I need to remove this quest from my game save, or start another playthrough, sigh.
The writing and voice acting in this quest is amazing. Just had the third encounter north of Ivarstad and I enjoyed listening to the ghost a lot. It helps with immersion to hear from someone who fought in the Great War and since I didn't start the civil war questline (yet) my char really has some thinking to do now. Love it. Thank you so much for this gem.
So I was going to try to add Ghost Mechanics and Shaders Restored as a Master via xedit to attach the scripts/shaders from that mod to the NPC in this quest, but it gave an error about the ghost not having a formID (and, looking at it, FFFatherGhostNPC1 is just 00000000/NULL, which is very scary). I then, curious, checked for errors in xedit, and it showed 140 errors out of 154 processed records.
Between that and Batwield's post, can anyone confirm if the whole quest works/is stable? Nothing against the mod author, you're obviously very talented. I'm just a bit... concerned about destabilizing my carefully crafted setup and not finding out until I'm days or weeks into a playthrough.
This mod is made the exact same as all my others so have no idea why the formid shows a null value. I can confirm that the entire encounter works and you’ll be able to complete the quest without issue, I’m just not sure why XEdit says that
EDIT: It looks like it was because I wasn't using the latest version of xedit. I guess because the header is 1.71, so xedit 4.1.5. wasn't able to parse the records.
61 comments
-
1
-
2
-
3
JumpI suppose overall it feels like it's missing something. Despite its subject matter, it lacks punch. It needs a stronger resolution. A catharsis moving enough to make everything worthwhile. For something of its length and total reliance on dialogue, it needs to be as engaging as possible, whether that be through fiercely witty wordplay or a very powerful concept. Hopefully that makes sense. Don't get me wrong, this mod is far from thoughtless and I don't want to come off too negatively. I suppose the issue comes down to the medium for me. If this were a short story, where you have the space and freedom to be descriptive, I think it would be more valuable. As an encounter in Skyrim, which requires a user to go out of their way to download and install it, it doesn't do enough to justify itself.
Unless something went wrong with my game, I assume the lack of quest markers (and even a quest log in general until the end when I was suddenly told the quest was completed) was intentional. While I can appreciate a lack of hand-holding, I don't think it was a good idea to not only have no information for this quest at all, but to only be told once where the ghost's next general location will be. If for any reason you miss or forget that one mention, you'll be totally lost and have no resource to fall back on since this is a niche mod.
I have mixed feelings on having to search an area for him as well. I sort of like the vague idea of having to "find" him, but there's seemingly no meaning or mystery to the specific location he moves to, no trail to follow, or hints to guide you, so I feel like it doesn't really accomplish anything beneficial. Overall, despite what seems to be an attempt to keep things immersive, the benefits of quest markers outweighs the negatives.
The only technical problem I ran into was that the bandit at the final meeting was standing up in the A-pose. He did eventually fall over somewhat comically when the ghost disappeared, as the explosion generated Havok behavior.
Here is a list of specific errors (and one suggestion) I found in the subtitle text.
I didn't write down what follows afterwards or what (if any) punctuation is used, but the dialogue "I was subject to conscription" needs a semicolon at the end.
The ghost uses the phrase "complicit with" instead of "complicit in."
Ghost's dialogue "It is a vain hope but one I cling to" needs a comma between "hope" and "but."
Player dialogue "You're still here, what happened?" and "Farewell, may you see Erik once again" both use a comma in place of a period. These are independent thoughts and should be individual sentences.
Ghost's dialogue "My presence here is not out of hate, anger, remorse or guilt" is missing an Oxford comma. His next sentence, "It is instead out of love, and gratitude" has an unnecessary comma. The actor does pause here, in which case an ellipses is acceptable.
Ghost's dialogue "I cannot leave you empty handed" needs a hyphen.
Ghost's dialogue ""...and a return to the abyss I had fought so hard out of" is grammatically unsound, and should be "fought so hard to get out of." Unfortunately, the actor reads this line verbatim.
At some point, the ghost says "spelt" instead of "spelled." This is something I've only seen start to happen in the past few years, and it's always come across to me as a low-class misinterpretation of words. According to the internet, this is strictly a British English thing, and it's used interchangeably there, so I'm willing to accept that this is simply my American opinion. I mention it only because the impression I have marks this as a region-specific option, and therefore less accepted, and therefore should be avoided unless there's a particular reason for it. At any rate, it's something to consider, especially if you're trying to make a mod for an established universe.
Similarly, the ghost also says "a slither" instead of "sliver." The internet also tells me this is a British thing, but I couldn't find any information on it beyond that, which leads me to conclude that it's a simple a bastardization. Unfortunately again, the voice actor reads the word verbatim, but I think it's close enough in pronunciation that you could fix the text and it would be reasonably unnoticeable.
Lastly, there was a slight error in the usage of ellipses in one of the ghost's lines. If ellipses are used to trail off a sentence and a new sentence is used afterwards, then you add a space. If ellipses are used as a pause within a sentence, there is no space. For example:
"This sentence...has an ellipses."
"This is a sentence... This is a different sentence."
The lack of quest markers is intentional, along with the lack of a quest journal. I like my quests to feel incredibly organic with encounters being either found with the NPC's instructions, or be complete chance. This sorta feeds back into the short story-esque style I aim for but I can understand why people may not like this.
The grammar issues you found are something I might fix in future but just due to their simple nature, I might leave them be. I am from the UK as you guessed with some of the minor differences in word usage. They've always appeared to me as correct to use in these scenarios but I suppose that's just due to the region-specific differences.
I think your philosophy on quest markers and journal entries only works if someone has this mod installed without realizing it somehow. Otherwise, I can't imagine a scenario where someone intentionally installs this and then doesn't attempt to pursue it as the main focus. Sure, it's possible to find the ghost completely organically each time, as in without explicitly searching for him, but it's just not realistic. At minimum, the scenario required for such a thing is incredibly niche. I can't imagine anyone installed this without intention to start it straight away, and I wonder how many people experienced frustration trying to find the ghost each time, especially considering the apparent 12 hour wait time between spawns. I feel like I only ever found him due to luck, especially in Ivarstead. I circled the area for a significant amount of time and only found him by happening to glimpse a blue speck as I was moments from giving up. I also had to Google the name of the lake for his final encounter. It would have helped for him to say "south of Riften" or something.
That's the case I'd make for it, anyway. We don't need to go back and forth. Thanks for the mod and your response. Contrary to your advice, I may actually check out some of your other mods, but I'll spare you further critique unless I find something significant to mention or want to drop a casual compliment. That said, while looking over your profile I did happen to notice the summary for "Blood and Grit" has a typo: "pastime" is one word.
Between that and Batwield's post, can anyone confirm if the whole quest works/is stable? Nothing against the mod author, you're obviously very talented. I'm just a bit... concerned about destabilizing my carefully crafted setup and not finding out until I'm days or weeks into a playthrough.
EDIT: It looks like it was because I wasn't using the latest version of xedit. I guess because the header is 1.71, so xedit 4.1.5. wasn't able to parse the records.
Do I need to re-run DynDOLOD if I install this mod mid-game ?
-
1
-
2
-
3
Jump