Sofia Follower Mod for Skyrim: Hibblejaybob Reviews

 

Welcome to my review for the Sofia Follower Mod for Skyrim. I'm a little late on this particular bandwagon, but after seeing this mod reviewed elsewhere, I gave it a bash. I was extremely impressed by the mod, so I thought I'd share my opinion.

Voice Acting:
The first thing that jumps out at me is the voice acting. The quality of which is amazing; the actress really has nailed the Nord accent. In the default Skyrim, there are some speeches in which the pause between different lines is brutally obvious, and makes the whole thing seem alien. The mod author has done really well to make the transitions between lines, so smooth it seems completely natural. Overall, I think the quality of the voice acting is a league and a half above the majority of the voice acting in vanilla Skyrim.

There is lots and lots of dialogue written for the character, so much so that, despite playing 2 characters to level 45 & starting a 3rd new character, I'm still hearing new dialogue. The mod description boasts witty & humorous dialogue, and that is what you get and more! Conversations are topical, or making witty remarks about your current location. It screams out to me that is what M'aiq the Liar should have been like.

The writing is done really well, and the dialogue is kept very consistent to Sofia's character, while still being varied enough to keep her seeming natural and likeable. The only thing I will say is that does play the "I'm a cute/sexy girl" card a little too much for my liking, but I struggle to criticise it too much, because it does fit her character really well, as a boastful, confident Nord.

Balance:
As a companion, Sofia is well balanced. Generally more powerful than you, but not game breakingly so. I've seen some mods in the past that at level 4, your companion can 1 hit kill a dragon - and I play on the Master difficulty setting! That really does ruin the experience for me. However, Sofia is not overpowered, and you'll find her a competent assistant in combat. I don't know if it's just me, but I get a CTD if I try and give her arrows. Bows are fine, but no arrows it does mean she cannot use archery at all. She is, by trade, a spellsword, using magic and one handed weapons together: with the destruction magic making up the total of her ranged abilities. Fair enough if she does not use archery, but I do have to mark the mod down for causing CTD's.

Elsewhere, she's a pretty vocal follower, which is nice as it makes it her seem like more of an involved companion than just a box for all of your spare stuff who stops to stab things every now and again. I tend to play exclusively stealth characters and Sofia continues the trend of Bethesda companions by generally screwing things up. However, the Summon Sofia spell that comes with the mod means you can easily get her to wait somewhere while you stealth properly, then summon her in when shit hits the fan. On balance, I don't mark the mod down for that because it's more to do with the game AI than it is to do with the mod, and they do make up for it with the summoning spell.

Let me try and convey how good this mod is. I have 500 hours on Skyrim, and another 500 on other Bethesda RPG's. In all of those games, I never have a companion. I don't think they add anything to the experience, in fact, since I generally play stealth based characters, I'd say they take away from the experience because the AI cannot stealth. That being said, I've now done 3 Skyrim characters with Sofia by my side, and if do any more, you can bet your backside, she'll be with me again. I do leave her behind while I clear out dungeons, but at all other times, the sheer personality of character makes it worth taking her on your adventures.

Humour:
On the topic of her personality, lets talk about the humour of this mod. Some of the lines and jokes are so well written, they're not just "oh ha ha that was kind of funny", it's the proper laugh out loud material that firmly puts this mod in my top 3 funniest content in games, along with Portal & The Citadel DLC for Mass Effect 3. Even the bad jokes have a spin on them where she says "that was a bad joke even for me", which still made me laugh! John Jarvis, the writer of the mod and Christine Slagman, the voice of Sofia, have done a phenomenal job of brining the character to life and I feel more empathy towards Sofia than I do to any other character in the game, and indeed most other games that I've played.

Summary:
So to summarise, the Sofia Follower Mod for Skyrim is an absolutely fantastic mod, that has, for the first time for me in a Bethesda game, made it worth having a follower. The content and quality of the dialogue is a cut above that offered in the base game, and in some of the few other follower mods I've tried out. My only significant criticism of the mod comes from the fact you can't feed her arrows, or your game will hark it ye olde crash to desktop style. Despite that, I feel that this mod is an absolute must have for a playthough of Skyrim. You can check out links to the mod in the description, and I've also put in a link to Christine's other work, which you can check out as well.

Scoring:
-5% - Game CTD's when giving Sofia arrows
-1% - A bit to much use of the sexual nature for my liking.
Total: 94% - Gold Standard!
This mod was awarded the Hibblejaybob  Gem Award for being the first mod to ever make me give a damn about a follower!

Banners, Scoring and Prizes

 

Banners:
In an effort to improve readability and to encourage more traffic through the blog, I've introduced banners to the top of review articles, like the examples shown above. Currently, I only have a few reviews on the site, and they are all positive reviews, but that is changing very soon!

Scoring:
Which brings me on to scoring. Since this blog started back in 2013, I've used a percentage system to convey my recommendation. I generally like to have an expectation vs reality approach to my reviews. So, for example, if I were to do a Call of Duty review, I expect that to be a mindless, simple FPS game and that's generally what I get from the experience, and so my review would generally be more favourable than some other reviews.

While I have used a similar system in my reviews up until now, I thought it time to come up with a more definite system to improve consistency in my past and upcoming reviews. So with my reviews,
 I always start at 100% and penalise for any issues I find. To standardise the penalties, I've come up with categories:
-1% - Trivial Issue - Something I don't like but doesn't effect the overall experience of the product.
-5% - Minor Issue - A minor issue that slightly detracts from the overall experience.
-10% - Major Issue - An issue that noticeably, regularly detracts from the overall experience.
Exceptional Issue - These issues are something so major it completely ruins the game play experience. I was going to standardise it at -25%, but then I decided that some issues can be so major they deserve a penalty well above that!

I am also introducing a standardised reward system that rewards products from some features. This will be used much less than the penalties as only features that impress me that are over and above my expectation of the product.
+1% - Minor feature over and above expectation.
+5% - Major feature over and above expectation.

I have backdated my reviews using the new banners and scoring scheme. In the future, I will list a products rewards and penalties in the review itself, however, I am electing not to backdate my reviews in that way. You can find our more on my scoring system here.

Award:

While coming up with my scoring system, I realised that it is possible for a product to receive several penalties, but still carry an outstanding recommendation from me. I've then created the wonderfully drawn Hibblejaybob Gem Award to give to products that have overcome my criticisms to still get a strong recommendation from myself.

For example, a product may get a good (>70%) or perhaps even an average rating because of some design flaws, but still be an absolutely must have product! Similarly, a product may have a good or gold (>90%) rating - but for one reason or another - will not receive the Gem Award. In this case, it's not to say I do not recommend the product, but in terms of games, there may be other similar games I enjoy/recommend more, and in terms of mods, it may be a fantastic mod but it doesn't contribute to the overall experience of the game for me.

This award is purely subject to my opinions of how I enjoyed the product, and unlike my scoring system, I will not specifically qualify why a product did or did not receive the Hibblejaybob Gem Award, as this award is more about my personal opinions than an objective critique. You can find out more about this award, including it's recipients, here.

RealVision ENB Review

Mod: RealVision ENB by SkyrimTuner
Link: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/30936/
Game: TES V: Skyrim
Note: The score for this game has been revalued based on my new scoring system. 4/2/15.


So I'm finally back to reviewing some Mods and my mod of the moment is definitely the RealVision ENB by SkyrimTuner. I'm doing a complete playthough of Skyrim again, and I decided to experiment with different ENB's before starting. The RealVision ENB was by far, the best one that I found.

First things first, what is an ENB? The ENB series is a set of graphical modifications for games; using an array of post-processing effects, rather than amendments to the game engines, to get the improved graphics. You can read more about the ENB series, as well as get ENBs for this and other games by following the link in the description. The ENB is a fixed program, but what you download are configuration files made by different users to get different artistic effects. Some focus on trying to be photo-realistic while others make the game seem more fantasy, and so on. As you might imagine, the RealVision ENB focuses on a realistic appearance.

So, what did I think about the RealVision ENB? Everyone who's played Skyrim will have that one vista that made them just stop, look out at the view and just go "wow". But as the game wears on, the scenery can wear a bit thin. Well, the RealVision ENB makes you have "wow" moments at most of the views in the game. I know people will say that Skyrim's scenery looked fine before, and they're right, it does. BUT. The RealVision ENB makes it look absolutely stunning. I did think the notion of the better graphics would wear off, just as the originals did, but after a dozen hours or so of gameplay, I'm still finding these big vistas, different times and weathers, and even little places that just stop me in my tracks. It is that good.

Other than the graphics, what else did I like about it? Well, some ENB's I've seen before have been largely as-is, with little or no documentation. While RealVision ENB does not ship with any documentation, the guide on it's Nexus page is very thorough and I was able to get everything working with ease. Follow the guide properly, and you should have no problems. I also liked how the various options for ENB settings are nicely packaged into little drag and drop folders making them really easy to install, quickly giving you the package you want.

As much as I love this mod, I do have one slight concern: I have a reasonably good gaming rig, but this mod takes my GPU up to 100%. I can run the game and all my mods for it, including the ENB, at over 40 FPS. My worry is that many people will not have gaming setups as I do, and as a result, the frame rate they get might be too low to be enjoyable. That's not to say they can't use the RealVision ENB, but it does mean they will have to change the settings of the ENBs using the various text files that are part of the program. It's not impossible, but I've taken a look through the settings files and I couldn't really make heads or tails of it, although I do admit I've never really looked into what they all do. The summary here is that the mod will be usable by all, but for some people, the installation might not be quite as "drag and drop" as it was for me.

So that little issue aside, I really loved this mod. Starting a new playthough of Skyrim, this ENB was enough to make me completely fall in love with the game all over again! All the videos and pictures in this video are footage taken from my game. I seriously recommend giving it a look and if you are interested, you can follow the link in the descriptions. Hope you enjoyed this review!

GTA IV - LCPD:FR

Liberty City Police Department: First Response

Game: Grand Theft Auto IV & Episodes From Liberty City

Type: Script Mod

My Rating: 95%

Website: http://www.lcpdfr.com/page/index.html

I've been meaning to talk about the mod since this blog started, as people who have visited my Youtube channel will be aware, I spend alot of time using this mod. Never in my entire time of playing games have I come across a mod that's had such a profound impact on that game. Before this mod GTA IV was a decent game for me: good for messing about and a decent storyline to play through, enjoy and forget. Then I discovered this mod and now I spend most of the time playing games on EFLC (the mod works for both GTA IV and EFLC). It adds a whole new lease of life to the game and it was this mod; the hard work and dedication to an excellent idea that completely changed the game for me, that inspired me to start giving praise and reviews to the individuals and teams that make great mods for games.

So what is it? LCPD:FR is a fairly comprehensive police simulator for GTA:IV. Rather than taking just one mission, LCPD:FR allows you to take on the role of a police officer in Liberty City. It's not a complete police simulator (hence the name First Response), so there's no investigations and bureaucracy - which is a good thing. Instead, you can drive or walk around the city, stopping cars and pedestrians for suspicious behaviour (or even for the hell of it) or waiting for an incident to get phoned to you, such as muggings, domestic abuse and suicide calls. I'll spit these into "callouts" and "patrols" and discuss them in detail.

Callouts

Callouts are when you are dotting about and a call comes in for you to attend an incident. You do have the option of taking the incident or not (useful if you are roleplaying a certain role like armed response), or the option of a "busy" status so you don't receive callouts. Callouts always follow a well working formula: you go with blues and twos to the scene of the incidents and deal with the suspect. In muggings and domestic calls, you try and apprehend the suspect. In suicide calls, theres a nice little quite time event where you have to "talk the suspect down" by hitting a key when a bar is in the green area of a moving slider. Get it right and the suspect puts the gun down, get it wrong.... you'll need crime scene clean up! Sometimes you can get called to a gang shooting, which aren't massively realistic (at least not from a UK standpoint) as its about 20 people with guns shooting up the town, but they are pretty fun and really make you use the mods other features, which I'll discuss later.

Patrols

On patrol, you drive or walk around city looking for crime. Sometime crime comes to you: you can be parked up at a traffic light when a pursuit goes blazing by or maybe you'll turn a corner and there's a fight on the pavement. Maybe you'll find crime: doing stop checks on vehicles and pedestrians can bring out some unsavoury characters. Of course, people don't always want to stop to talk to the police and foot chases and vehicles pursuits are rife! The nice thing I like about the mod is that as well as scripted crime, the game's AI does alot of accidental crime, like crashes and missing red lights, which fits in with the mod like a charm - you can stop a vehicle for dangerous driving or just let it slide - the discretion is yours. 

The Mechanics

I could rattle on for absolute hours about this mod (and I would really like to!) but I'll keep this as short as I can. The reality is, it's all just random number generators: will a car pull over for you, will they be wanted, how will they react to being arrested - do they take it, or do they pull a gun and fight for freedom - but it really flows and ensures a great variety of outcomes for callouts and patrols. When in a pursuit, other police cars nearby will join in the chase and try and "help you" (help, being very generous due to the ridiculous driving the AI can pull off sometimes). You can also call out other vehicles to help and helicopters too. On foot, you can call for regular backup or SWAT teams to help you on the ground. All the features in the game are actuated by quite an extensive set of keys: with only a few keys being used by the vanilla game, this leaves the rest of the keyboard to be used in place of menus. There is a menu that overrides the vanilla police computer, that you can use to check the identity of people and call for backup and services. All things together, the interface is fairly easy to use once you get used to it and works fairly well in dealing in quick-paced situations. 

The Community

One thing that does speak for this mod, is the sheer numbers of the community following for it, with over 100,000 registered members. There is even an extensive list of mods made to accompany and supplement this one. These range from vehicle skins to plugins to give you more diverse crime. One of these mods worth noting is the Emergency Lighting System (ELS) which allows developer to make cars that utilise realistic light bars and customisable lights patterns. These can be tweeked by the user to get the lights they want for their cars. I, for example, decided to replace all my police cars with British police cars, which requires setting the lights to be blue and white, rather than white and red which the vanilla game uses. 

Issues

Overall, the mod is really well constructed. Unfortunately, the game is not: I tend to get only around 45 minutes of playing before it CTD's (unmodded or not). This sets the scene: the issues I have with the mod are limitations of the base game itself. The AI behaviour and spawning errors make up the bulk of issues, with no backup turning up from time to time and the AI crashing into and killing everything, which kills the whole mood really. 

However, the timing of this article isn't a coincidence: LCPD:FR have just announced a preview to the first non-beta release and it looks great! They've completely reworked all the scripting, you can check out the preview at http://www.lcpdfr.com/page/features.html/_/lcpdfr-preview. I'll do an another review when it's released. Most people I know are looking forward to GTA V, I'll be looking forward to LCPD:FR 1.0!

This review really doesn't do the mod the justice it deserves and I've no doubt missed out a good few features. To see more of what is offered, you can check out my videos on my channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/hibblejaybob) or on a channel I enjoy alot: http://www.youtube.com/user/SpeirsTheAmazingHD who did a great series "Speirs on Patrol". You can also just Youtube search LCPDFR and look at the many great videos by other developers. Even as the beta release now, I'd seriously recommend giving it a try; it breathes a complete new life into the game!

Thanks for reading.

Mass Effect - New Textures Mod

[art from creator]

Game: Mass Effect
Type: Graphics Improvement
My Rating: 100%
Website: http://www.moddb.com/mods/mass-effect-1-new-texture-updatesimprovements-mod

So, at the request of my friends (so they could talk about the series without giving me spoilers), I recently started my first ever playthough of the Mass Effect series. Released in 2007, the game has held up relatively well from a graphics standpoint, but one thing that particularly caught my eye was that, while the faces very well modelled, the uniforms and armour were noticeably poorer. Even on the highest graphics settings, the uniforms were terribly blurred. So I went in search of a HD textures mod, and what I found was this: the New Textures mod.

The praise I have for this mod is very high: if you had never played Mass Effect before, and then did for the first time using this mod, you would honestly mistake it for a near-new game. The updated graphics are simply stunning, with the game now utilising 8 times the resolution available to the vanilla game textures and a HD textures pack to make full use of it - the level of detail is fantastic. To quantify just how much work has gone into these textures: the vanilla game is ~7 GB on your hard drive whereas the HD textures alone are ~20 GB!

Using the Steam version of Mass Effect, there is an additional step to the install, but that and other troubleshooting topics are covered in the readme, although I've not encountered any other issues.

This mod is seriously impressive and well worth getting if your planning on playing Mass Effect in the future.