> oh yeah and mods work but obviously not to the fullest extend

No sex mods :<

i imagine sex mods use custom wire frames and textures so anything with that is going to have to be universally installed

Yeah, custom skeleton rigging and also using FMIS to completely reload thousands of new animations into the game, usually having to get a new version of that tool to make it load even more and still you'll get missing animations.  Also both players would have to be using the same models using Caliente's BBE or else there'd be clipping issues or something I'd imagine.

I know because uh, a friend told me.

texture mods are honestly the best bet for modding the online experience because textures just improve the fidelity so you can have like 4K or even 8K textures are out there

I can’t tell if UI overhauls cause problems but i had really good luck with floating damage numbers and increasing stat details where i would say reliability is about the same

a lot of weather mods cause problems because when you join a server you join it after when you load a game, then connect so your game flies through the clock and weather cycles have to sync

so if it’s 3 PM and clear and the server says it’s 5 AM and raining then the weather mods are like oh shit and the engine can’t do it even though it tries to and sometimes works really well

the elephant in the room is that you aren’t going to be beating this game with a friend or a party

you simply can’t because at some point, things are going to break and the scripted quests will not work because of a magnitude of reasons

however…
you might be able to fudge your characters enough to piece together a good playthrough and I’ve found out how to do this by having one friend be the dedicated main character, where they are the only ones who talk to NPCs for quests and they do the looting and when another party member runs into serious problems they have to make a new character (I used a .bat file to do this so it takes like two minutes tops)

using the console commands level yourself up where you were with the other character and give yourself the gear you had again and whatever else you need to be able to play decently

around level 30 for everyone the game started becoming a nightmare and so we just kept one person as the “host” and everyone just cheated in a way where you couldn’t tell a difference and that save game was “fresh” and thus the scripting issues were not piling up

thank you for coming to my ted