I broke my vow to never pre-order any game again for Cyberpunk 2077 and it is leaving a bad after taste so far.
The game looks fantastic and plays very smoothly so far (on PC) but my wish-list for mods to fix annoyances or flat out misses from the game is growing at an alarming rate.
Top of the list so far:
A way to re-map the action key [F]. Why should we have to edit a config file for something so basic?
A barber/tattoo parlor. I was looking forward to changing my character’s appearance over time and from comments I have seen so far, I am not the only one. Locking hairstyles, make up and nail color after the game creation is a huge step backward for a game that pretends to be about freedom of play style.
No preview when buying clothes? really? are we supposed to do a quick save every time we buy clothes?
Tone down the random people falling from the sky (3 splats in 2 hours of walking around)
Tone down the spam. The random calls from fixers are giving me nasty flashbacks from GTA Online.
No way to buy food from the MANY street food vendors. No need to voice over the transactions, a simple menu would be enough.
Oh well.. hopefully mods or future patches will fix these issues eventually.
In the meantime, we still gave gorgeously ray-traced street trash.
First it was Baldur's Gate 3 update that bricked my old saves after becoming unresponsive to load games with old or missing mods.
Then Cyberpunk 2077 promised-this-time-it-is-the-real-final-update update broke my mod set up. I have to go through the usual song and dance of waiting for modders to update their mods before I can even start the game to look into updating my own mods.
And today Skyrim drops a huge update that breaks all SKSE mods, and for what? to add another boneheaded paid mods scheme? It will be weeks if not months before I can recover from that update.
Even the Sims 4 joined the fun and dropped its own huge update that made any old games unusable without spending hours adding and removing mods to identify the few mods that beak it.
And yes.. I have back ups and I can roll back to an earlier version of Skyrim, but that's not the point.
I wish these games were built for modding from the start, with built in mechanisms to start gracefully or at least, good error messages and diagnostics to tell you which mods are causing issues.
I think I will have to take a couple of months off any kind of modding and simply play the games I paid for and haven't touched yet.
With a burn out from a very full 2021 with Skyrim mods, combined with offline emergencies that took several months off my personal time, I ended up spending more time on playing than modding.
It wasn’t all bad.. I finally started Assassins Creed Valhalla after more than 2 years of wait on Steam (I refuse to having to manage too many launchers).
I played through God of War, The Chant and Scorn, took a detour in Star Citizen and survived four community expeditions on No Man's Sky. And I re-discovered Cyberpunk 2077 with the latest patches and a collection of amazing mods to bring it close to the game it should have been
The Modding side of this year wasn’t a total waste. I did create four mods for Cyberpunk 2077 : Limited Encumbrance, Claim Vehicles, Vehicle Fast Travel and Adaptive Sliders.
I dedicated this year's TES Fest on Tumblr to material for the background quest to Sanguine Debauchery and packaged my current ENB / Reshade settings for Skyrim .
I also got distracted with Dream AI and Midjourney to create illustrations outside of my current abilities.
What’s next for 2023?
Even as I explore other games, echoes of Skyrim are not far and I keep feeling the pull of completing what I started there.
Since I took a more than 6 months break, I think I will try to get back into my Skyrim mods by setting up the Special Edition with my minimal required mods. I need to have Skyrim feel like a new game and the mods I have seen to change combat and animations are all designed for SE. There's also a DLSS mod for Skyrim SE that looks very tempting.
Once that is set up, I will resume work on finishing the main quests for my current Skyrim mods.
So it looks like 2023 might be the year I switch to SE for good if I can get it working without wanting to throw myself out of a window.
Mod options are limited for Assassins Creed: Valhalla.. mostly Reshade settings and character customization.
I have been using my own formula for Reshade across most of my games: DPX, Luma Sharpen, a dash of tilt shift and a brightness-constrast-color filter to desaturate everything while bumping up the red colors to make them pop. I find the results more satisfying while not deviating too much from the original colors.
The character customization mod (Eivor customizer 2), on the other hand, is an absolute necessity.
I gave Eivor the body type of her mother. I tried to apply her mother’s face but she came out as too mature for some reason, so I reverted back to the default. Once she got to England, I started her with a shorter hair cut.
That mod will come in handy to give Eivor a very different look when she ‘dreams’ herself in Valhalla.
I was disappointed to find hair styles are locked behind a vendor and still very limited compared to what is available for NPCs.
What is it with game designers anyway? Why go through the trouble of creating diverse looks for everyone else around and NOT for the main character?
For my second play through, I wanted to improve fast travel and most of all, disable that damn teleport straight to the Hangman Tree and instead having to go from Vizyma / White Orchard to the Nilfgaard garisson in the south of Velen. I wanted to have to ride up to the Hangman tree and actually discover Velen along the way.
I studied the Long Journey Extended mod for The Witcher 3 to adapt it. This mod is a perfect base for what I needed - a toned down Fast Travel system that only enables roads that make sense and forces you to actually travel for the rest.
I ended up with a few tweaks:
a solution to the issue of fast traveling to unknown/undiscovered signposts
conditional routes that unlock after a certain destination is known (a ferry on the Pontar from Oxenfurt to the Nilfgaard camp in White Orchard for example).
fast travel to the outskirt of Kaer Morhen in addition to the main entrance
I posted the result on my GitHub page if anyone wants to take a look. It includes additional routes and a new conditional logic.
I haven't fully tested tall the routes yet but the early ones between White Orchard, Vizyma and Velen are working. I also included a full description of the changes I made.
These changes are for my own gameplay mostly, but looking at other comments on the Long Journey mod page, they may be helpful for some people.
Installation
Install the original Long Journey mod first
Install the files in this GitHub repo inside "The Witcher 3\Mods\modLongJourneyExtended" folder
Run TheWitcher3ModManager.exe to merge the changes with your mods
Changes to the Fast Travel system
Outside of Fast Travel, the map will show you all known Sign posts as landscape markers. When attempting Fast Travel, the map will show you only Sign posts unlocked for travel to or from the Sign post you are currently using.
I added a short fast travel route from Mulbrydale to the Hangman tree for people who would want to ride their way from the Southern Nilfgaard camp up to the center of Velen and properly trigger the next stage of the main quest.
As an alternative, you can fast travel directly from the Southern Nilfgaard camp to the Hangman tree.
Detailed Fast Travel routes available
Routes available by default:
Vyzima <-> Novigrad nilfgaard big camp on south
Vyzima <-> White orchard Sawmill
White orchard Sawmill <-> Novigrad nilfgaard big camp on south (skip Vyzima)
White orchard cackler bridge <-> Kaer Morhen
Mulbrydale <-> Hangman Tree (to preserve main quest checkpoint)
Novigrad nilf big camp on south <-> Hangman Tree (to preserve main quest checkpoint)
Unlocked routes when the destination is known or discovered during quests:
Crow's Perch <-> Novigrad nilfgaard big camp on south
Novigrad docks <-> Skellige (Craite Harbor)
Brunwich village (HS) <-> Kaer Morhen
Toussaint Lebioda Statue Harbor <-> Vyzima
Toussaint Lebioda Statue Harbor <-> Novigrad nilf big camp on south
I pushed the first two releases following a new process I have been working on (SD+ and Dialogues).
From this point forward, version numbers will be the same as release dates
I am using two scripts to automate tasks I need to do for a release: one to gather all the necessary files in the right folders and one to generate release notes based on issues completed in Github (like this page: https://github.com/SkyrimLL/SDPlus/blob/master/SanguineDebauchery/Releases/SD 2019-04-07.md)
(if anyone is interested in taking a look at these scripts, I created a new repo for them as well: https://github.com/SkyrimLL/CKTools )
Let me know if anything bad happens with these new releases. I am confident they will work but I will not know until they are used in the wild.
I will release updates to the other mods in the coming week.
The goal for these changes in process is to be able to release updates more frequently, even as early as one a month (although realistically, once every 2 or 3 month is a more reasonable target).
I didn't mean to tease with these posts... just to show how things are progressing.
I am currently finalizing my deployment script to stay on top of the files I need to assemble into releases.
The idea is to run one script to assemble all the parts of each mod into the folders they are supposed to go to - mainly one folder to serve as backup and staging area to create BSA files and the corresponding github repositories. That will avoid situations where I forgot files or copied things that shouldn’t have been part of a mod package.
If I can also automate creating BSA files, pushing releases to github and packaging lists of issues from a Github milestone into release notes, even better... but that part is still some ways off.
I should have done that a long time ago but I am slowly getting to a more reliable deployment process.
As an added bonus, the script gives me a manifest of all the files and folders needed for each mod.
I created a repo in Github about it in case anyone can take a look or use it for yourselves:
The file works for me at the moment but I am trying to design it in a way that can be adapted to any situation where you have a bunch of files in a list of source folders that you want to copy and dispatch into multiple target folders.
Once I am done adding sections to that file for all of my mods, I will be in good shape to package them into new releases.
