Mad God Overhaul hasn't really changed its core graphic mods for a very long time. SRP/202x with JK's exteriors was a classic combo in 2023, and while we added countless features since then, visually we never completely moved away from that combination.
Lorerim 2 - The Inspiration
Going into 2.5, I really wanted to review the modern options available to SE/AE players, and create something truly special for VR. None of the top SE/AE lists use JK's Skyrim anymore, so I removed it to see what I can do if I can use the headroom with newer mods. I started with Nolvus v5, but it is very old at this point. Tiger sent me a video on Lorerim 2, and the rest was history.
While neither CS or VR ENB comes close to SE/AE's full ENB, I really feel I can bring much of the same experience over to the VR world, thanks to a very talented team working behind the scenes to help with mod curating and testing. I can't tell you how good it feels when the team can tell me there is a crash/purple texture AND how to fix it! It has accelerated the development by ten fold when I only need to focus on development, not debugging.
My vision of Skyrim is fantasy, which means everything should look as gorgeous as possible. 202x and Tomato would be my texture choice over Skyland and Atlantean whenever possible. You just need to look at the screenshot of the texture authors to get my general direction.
- Capital Whiterun Expansion, Whiterun Has Walls Redone
- Capital Windhelm Expansion, Icy Windhelm
- Great City of Solitude, Blue Palace Terrace
- Ryften, Riften Docks Overhaul
- Markarth Sky City, Markarth Outskirt
- The Great City/Town/Village Series
- Snazzy Interior Series
- TNF Player Home
- Northern Road (Clutters Only)
- 202x + Tomato + many other handpicked texture packs to fit the overall vision
I will let the screenshots do the taking. I have redone the entire load order from scratch, hand sorted 1300+ plugins to make sure this list can grow toward 1500, may be even 2000 mods. Lorerim 2 really breaths new life into existing locations and makes every city and town feels epic. I hope to capture the same magic in VR.
How is Performance?
Believe it or not, it is actually much better than 2.0 from my experience. Big buildings and sprawling cities take less draw calls than JK's Skyrim and Outskirts because you can only have so many buildings on screen at once, anything in the distance is Dyndolod. Buildings are also far more noticeable than JK's clutters.
I also removed High Poly NPC's which also helps with draw calls, as we now have more NPC's in bigger cities. I tried to add SMP to NPC's, but it is just too much for a high end list like this.
Finally, I turned off more effects on default. Terrain parallax, screen space shadows and the Reshade combine for another 20% FPS, and personally I don't REALLY miss them in the out of box settings. Feel free to turn them on. On a 4070 I am running comfortably 90-120 FPS everywhere with Virtual Desktop Ultra, Quest 3 and SSW, that is before DLSS/FSR upscaling and Open Composite.
But That Is Not All
- Mantella is now true plug and play thanks to their latest major release. There is even free LLM now so there is zero reason to not try it, you will also save 60GB of space
- Switched from Northbourne/Nithi to the classic Bijin/Pandorable series based on a super comprehensive survey result (thanks Tiger!). The community have spoken
- Switched from Sexlab to the much more modern Ostim VR from the great Shizof. This offers much more interactivity than Sex Lab during scenes
- Added Vigilant, Bruma, Wyrmstooth and Skyrim Sewers to match Mad God Overhaul 1.8 in content
- Added Dismember Framework
- Added more clothing and armors add-on's from Sentinel and Animated Armory
- Added Dareni's collection of Simonrim spell mods
- A complete audio remaster with Lorkhan, Chapter 2 Jeremy Soule, Unique Battle Music and swapped out Sounds of Skyrim with the much more compatible Clofas collection
- Changed to Verolevi combat animations to slow down the pace of combat, and make melee center around pseudo parry
- Moved Blocking Spark Nioh, Legacy of the Dragonborn Curator, Nether Follower Framework, and Strange Runes to Under Investigation Mods and disabled by default
2.5 NSFW - Available on Nexus now!
We will not have Wabbajack Gallery or SFW version for this initial release, it will be Nexus only.
We will also not have a Dyndolod Quality output with Grass LOD initially, as we expect a Dyndolod re-generation after some initial updates based on user feedback and bug reports.
Expect Another Update in September With CS Making Major Update With PBR Textures
We are actively looking at Bendr texture packs. Feel free to install them and see how you like them. You don't even need to run Dyndolod again.
There will also be PBR texture packs added with the next major CS update.
I will also spend more time with Lorerim 2 and try to add more mods from it. I don't think Mad God Overhaul needs 3500 mods, but we will definitely move toward 2000 in the year ahead!
7 comments
If there's a way to take the textures and the distance of this pack and put it on the 2.0 so that I don't have to start a new game, it would be awesome !
Edit: Figured it out