* This article is all about my personal thoughts about Holds the City Overhaul and Skyrim mods in general.
When Holds the City Overhaul was released in autumn 2016, everybody on this community was excited over Galandil's 4 years of comprehensive work which transforms the world of Skyrim by bringing in newly-designed buildings and hundreds of NPCs with backgrounds as well as dynamically remodeling Falkreath, Dawnstar, and Winterhold in a way that nobody else even attempted before.
While this newborn city mod immediately became popular, its size and extensiveness quickly led rather concerning questions to emerge in people's mind -- "Is Holds compatible with my favorite mod X, Y, and Z?"
If you've been tracking the development of Holds the City Overhaul, you should be aware that Galandil has patiently worked on further improvements for his project as well as creating dozens of compatibility patches so that these popular mods may function together with Holds.
However, there are some mods that are no less comprehensive than Holds in terms of how heavily they affect many aspects of your game. Making these mods compatible with Holds is a highly expected task, and also very, very challenging.
One of the mods most requested by users to make a compatibility patch for is Civil War Overhaul by apolodawn. Sadly the mod itself became unavailable on Nexus, but many people are still loving it.
A little technical thing first. Civil War Overhaul (CWO) resurrects some of Bethesda's original plan for Skyrim's Civil War quest line, in which the player can experience epic battles in Riften, Markarth, Falkreath, and Dawnstar. In Holds, Falkreath and Dawnstar have been relocated into new Worldspaces that can be accessed through city gates much like other capital cities such as Whiterun and Solitude. Due to this change in the Worldspaces, the battles in Dawnstar and Falkreath from CWO will not function correctly, as they are designed to take place in the original Tamriel Worldspace. In order for CWO to work with Holds, every reference placed inside Tamriel Worldspace that is essential in these battles would need to be moved to Holds' new Worldspaces in which towns of Dawnstar and Falkreath are located. Unfortunately, this is effectively made nearly an impossible task, because of "buggy" nature of the Civil War quest in Skyrim. Any quests in Skyrim are potentially buggy and fragile, and Civil War is a series of those complicated quests linked to each other like a long chain. So 1 reference failed to initiate properly could cause an entire quest line to get stuck. Therefore it is very unlikely that Holds is made fully compatible with CWO.
Other city mods such as Expanded Towns and Cities (ETaC) don't have this problem, as changes they make are fairy small compared to what Holds does. A little bit of new clutter items on the floor and a few new houses wouldn't have severe effect on your game.
So here comes the topic in the title -- If someone were to praise Holds or any other mods for its size and the author's commitment, even with incompatibility with many other mods...would you agree?
I think this question matters because if you're reading this, you probably have tried out Holds the City Overhaul. That means you have interests in immersion aspect of Skyrim modding to certain degree. You wouldn't download a 1GB mammoth mod if you had absolutely no problem with how the settlements were portrayed in Bethesda's Skyrim, would you?
Perhaps you would disagree, if you believe that simple mods with superb ideas should deserve more attention and real praise, as they don't take away the pleasure of choosing whatever mods you may like to try out.
So I wanna use this opportunity to ask this very question that I've always wanted to ask to the people of the modding community. What do you think is the most important factor which makes a mod great? And why? If you have any thoughts about this, please post your comment down bellow!
[Opinion] What makes a mod "great"? High flexibility/compatibility or extensiveness?
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That said, sometimes they are mutually exclusive (like in the case of city overhauls), and in that case I tend to lean towards compatibility. Holds was amazing when I tried it out, but I really don't like having to build an entire profile on a visual mod. If I'm going to make one amazing mod the centerpiece of a playthrough, it's probably going to be something that significantly expands or changes the gameplay, like Legacy of the Dragonborn.