Really not much to report at the moment; just thought I'd share a few more screenshots. I'm still playing Oblivion and tweaking my ever-growing band of companions. Apparently I was in the mood for a specific flavor when I created these companions from one of my variations of the Ainmhi nekomimi race...
Today I got my hands on the latest version of Skyrim, the Legendary Edition. So what's the logical thing to do now? Well, play Oblivion of course!
I've spent the last two weeks working to get my current install of Oblivion into a heavily-modded state that I'd be satisfied playing an actual long-term campaign with, so despite the allure of another shiny new Elder Scrolls game this afternoon I decided to start an Oblivion campaign from scratch.
The first companion I picked up was Svatava, who was originally a CM Partners companion until I decided to graft her onto one of the popular GGC Companions (minus the face paint you'll see in the last screenshot of this post). I like the scripting of these companions so I thought this time around my followers shouldn't be exclusively CM Partners. However, once I had taken Svatava through Vilverin (fully enhanced by Martigen's Monster Mod and Francesco's Creatures and Items Mod) I decided that, despite the increased number of enemies, she was just a bit too powerful for me to be traveling with so early in the game. So, on the fly, I polished up one of my Ainmhi works-in-progress and added her to the game. (That's one of the great things about CM Partners: you can pretty much add new characters or remove them whenever you want without worrying that it might bork the game.)
In full sunlight Frona is a bit paler than I'd prefer, but I used a pale freckled skin texture to begin with and it seems to fit well with the whole pink motif she seems to have fallen into.
I'm also unusually satisfied with how my player character has evolved. Usually she looks a bit more rugged and butch, but this time she ended up looking a bit more glamorous somehow. Doesn't seem to be a bad thing, though.
So anyway, that's what I've been up to.
I'll leave you now with this last, older screenshot that's a nice example of how things can change as my creative process runs its course:
(Now that should increase the ol' blog view total...)
Though I'm still not back in the mood to type walls of text that (as the previous parenthetical quip suggests) I doubt more than one or two people will be interested enough in to actually read, I am proud enough of this weekend's Oblivion modding results that I thought I'd break my silence long enough to share a few quick screenshots:
These are all Nonyxia and half-Nonyxia (the latter of which I created myself) using the two original body textures as well as two texture sets which I modified myself.
The armor they're wearing in these screenshots is all from the Full Metal Bikini series by Cenobite (if you like these, he also did some cool stuff for Morrowind).
I've been meaning to do a post on this for quite some time, but somehow I always manage to get distracted by something else. Today however, I received a reminder on this in the form of a request from a fellow Nexus member. Apparently there is a "new" version of Nehrim out and my only mod for it needed to be updated in order for it to work at all. (The most recent version was actually released in June; like I said, I get distracted...)
What, you might ask, is Nehrim? It's a total conversion for Oblivion that's so huge that it really is a whole new world.
If English is your only language, be prepared to do a lot of dialog subtitle reading; this project was created in Germany thus all the spoken dialog is in German. Apart from that minor language barrier, I've quite enjoyed playing this mod and have been quite impressed. I hesitate to call it a "mod" though; as I said, it's a "total conversion" and as such is virtually an entirely new game.
There of course are some differences between Oblivion and Nehrim. Level advancement is handled by experience points, for example, and many encounters, dungeons and quests are set at static levels rather than changing with the player's level as they do in Oblivion. Which brings me to my little Nehrim mod. By default in Nehrim you can't fast-travel... EVER. Thus I created a simple little Nehrim fast-travel mod which enables you to do so once you've "discovered" a location (like in Oblivion). As mentioned above, I've updated the mod so that it will now work with the latest Nehrim version.
Apart from such differences in gameplay mechanics, some things will look and feel familiar. Old forts, caves and towns, for example, really aren't so different. Overall, Nehrim to me feels like a big German Oblivion DLC, but its size and scope puts any Bethesda DLC to shame.
Oh, and I should mention Nehrim's easy installation. Unlike some game total conversions, Nehrim is really risk-free. It installs into its own folder and uses copies of the Oblivion executable and data files, so there's no worries about any of your Oblivion stuff getting overwritten by this. If you install it and decide you don't like it, uninstalltion is just as simple and again does not affect your Oblivion files. (Darn spell-checker; "uninstallation" is indeed a word!)
So if you miss playing Oblivion and want to explore a totally new Oblivion-style world, I highly recommend Nehrim. It's one of the most epic Oblivion projects I've ever seen and is definitely worth a look.
