DIscussion: Direction of Upcoming Content Mods

[heroesneverdie]

Hello TES Alliance... this is my first post here, and as someone who has used hundreds upon hundreds of mods (for Morrowind, FO3, NV, and Oblivion), I've been kicking these questions around in my head since before 11/11/11. After playing a great deal of Skyrim, my thoughts have at last coagulated into the coherent soup I set before you now. Please understand that I'm expressing many opinions here, but I want this to be a discussion that helps us all put our different thoughts in perspective.

What do I mean by the topic? In my opinion, Skyrim is arguably packed more densely than Oblivion, possibly even Morrowind, with content, with my definition of content including any and all 'stuff to do'... quests, factions, storylines, even interesting items. This isnt to imply that the content is more complex, more diverse, or 'Better' than any previous TES iteration, just that there are fewer nameless, unused locations. The majority of even the most remote locations have built-in quests and stories once you begin to delve into them. In oblivion, nameless unused locations were rampant, and while it may have pushed away more casual players, I think these blank spaces were a tremendous opportunity that the Oblivion modding community took full advantage of. Skyrim is less open for interpretation, again, in my own opinion. There is room for a number of gameplay improvements (a more balanced magic system and the return of many spell effects from previous games comes to mind...), but let's keep the focus of this thread on content, locations, factions, and quests.

What I want to ask everyone is a matter of opinion and probably gut instinct. When the CS is presented and this place becomes (very hopefully) a hub of inspiration, what do you plan to do with Skyrim on a general scale? Which direction would you like to see the community favor?

Do you feel Skyrim's existing quest and story content is lacking and needs to be expanded upon? Personally, I feel the joinable faction storylines were shorter than I would've liked, and while it is a positive addition, the Radiant Quest system gives me no illusion of there being 'more content'. There is a definite demand for more content, more factions, more quests; Bethesda did a fine job of producing a rich world, but I'll never be satisfied in this regard; there is always room for more. However, considering most every location is already part of some story, however small, is it feasible to try to weave in a major questline or expand on existing content? Can we fit many epic 'Heart of the Dead/Tears of the Fiend/Ruined-Tail's Tail/Reclaiming Sancre Tor' type mods into the already densely packed exisiting landmass? We could end up with maps full of overlapping, conflicting locations, if we all try to crowd into the forementioned 'fewer blank spaces'.

But what then? Do we pump out an archipelago of new islands containing each individual's work? This alternative ends up just as ridiculous.

Further still, with the improved stability and modernization of the engine, I'm sure a lot of us are wondering when the big projects will start rebuilding Tamriel... this is bolstered further by the discovery of the rudimentary heightmaps and beginnings of major chunks of surrounding landmass, including Morrowind. Do you think Bethesda plans to release expansions of such a scale as to fill them? I personally doubt it, but it still stands for discussion. I have no doubt that groups will spring up with the intention of doing it themselves (In fact I hope to be part of one!), but there are still important questions to answer about how. Some people will favor the idea of remaking TES III and IV entirely, the old beloved content with the new engine. There is also something to be said for sticking to the timeline and intepretting these huge landmasses for ourselves, hundreds of years after the events of previous games... however, this approach will probably lead to huge, ambitious projects with conflicting styles among the authors, among other problems faced by projects with multiple modders. Could we ever -finish- something like this?

Finally, I'd like to answer my own questions with opinions, some of which I've already expressed while asking them, but just to get discussion started;

Obviously, there will be a mix of methods and focuses, and I'm hoping to see the the major factions greatly expanded upon, main stories lengthened, sidequests added, etc etc. In fact, I hope to put out a major mod myself in this regard for my first large project. However, I think we have a huge opportunity here; exhorbitant ammounts of time and effort were placed into improving the gameplay of Oblivion, as much as its content. This new engine is not perfect by any means, but to me it seems much more complete and more easily tweaked. I'm hoping that this leads to the community having more time to focus on new content without the limitations of an unstable or just outdated engine. I hope that, after the initial rush of improvements and updates for existing content (More dialogue choices please?), the community organizes some large projects and moves into modern interpretations of surrounding landmasses. Ambitious, yes, but I've seen what the mod community here and elsewhere can accomplish.

What direction do you think content mods will take? What about your own?

[HeyYou]

Most of your wishes will probably come true. Building off what beth provided, expanding questlines, etc. Not to mention unofficial patches to fix some of the more glaring issues...... The community has cut its teeth on previous games, and oblivion attracted a whole new pool of talent. Many things in O went WAY beyond what the were in Morrowind. (OBSE comes immediately to mind here.) SKSE is already in the works, and an alpha version is already out.

I for one, am GREATLY looking forward to what the various folks come up with for skyrim. I am sure that some of the more useful Oblivion mods will get ported in short order, Map Marker Overhaul, UI mods, etc. Should be fun.

[Mannimagnus]

I'm hoping and thinking mods will take the quests/landmasses route, they're the mods that make the games bigger than they are and that keep them alive. There'll always be companions, house mods, races, weapons and armour being made, but how many of them do you need? There is plenty of variety of each in Oblivion, a lot more in comparison to quests/landmasses. For Oblivion the majority-minority was, pretty much in order: 1) Weapons/Armour. 2) House mods. 3) Races. 4) Companions. & 5) Quests/Landmasses. I'm hoping for Skyrim that quests and landmasses will be made more as they're the mods that really keep it going. While it is impossible that quests/landasses will ever reach the top of the majority, simply because of the shrill willpower modders need to have to get them finished, due to their size. So I'm at a loss at that end really, because the best thing that could be done is the hardest thing to do. So to that end, I hope that more meshes, textures, both redone and new, are made in abundance to give modders a more broad selection of new material to use in their mods.

I can see a few quest mods that could be made just off of the vanilla game's content. (And I'm sure someone will make them.)

1) Rebuilding Helgen. (Village that gets burned down at the start, would actually be a quick mod seeing how Beth most likely did a quick enable rubble/disable houses, just have to reverse the process, with a quest tied in of course for immersion.)

2) Restoring Winterhold. (Apparently the city collapsed into the ocean, leaving 3 buildings and the college, not much of a city so I can see someone making a mod to make it one, via "restoring" what was lost. Like Kvatch Rebuilt.)

3) Dark Brotherhood Expansion. (As you said, too short. There is plenty of room here for expansion. Looks like a new Dark Brotherhood Chronicles is coming our way.)

As for the other factions, haven't played them, so I can't comment. The main quest though, I'd say can't safely have an expansion of any kind, reason being.....

Don't read if you haven't completed the main quest:

At the end of the game Alduin's soul is never absorbed by the player, if you talk to Arngeir afterwards you can even ask him is Alduin dead, and tell him that you never absorbed Alduin's soul. He says he does not know, and that may mean Alduin will return again. So I think Beth is making it very clear he's going to come back again soon, I imagine in an expansion, it does, however, also mean they are playing Alduin up as yet another enemy that just won't die.

Myself, I always love the Daedra. Oblivion had you visit Mehrunes Dagon's Deadlands and Sheogorath's Shivering Isles, but that's not enough, I want to see more. So myself I am making an expansion of a Daedric realm. Which gives me a lot of freedom from everything that's in Skyrim, I can be completely original. After that, I'll make other, smaller quest mods, races, companions and hopefully weapons and armour. So I'm planning to do anything I can.

Thank you for posting this, it is good to discuss where we think the modding community is going to go with Skyrim.

[_echo]

I thought the same thing. The world is dense. Ive not seen half of the locations and i still feel like ive done more quests to last me 2 times over. So space within the game world will be at a premium.

Personally, I hope to see new lands, be them additions to the main world in morrowind, cyrodiil, high rock or hammerfell, or entirely new landmasses.

On a smaller scale though, I do think there is room for many other additions like house mods and things of that nature.

[Bloodpact]

Myself, I always love the Daedra. Oblivion had you visit Mehrunes Dagon's Deadlands and Sheogorath's Shivering Isles, but that's not enough, I want to see more. So myself I am making an expansion of a Daedric realm.

Same here, we're working on a lore-friendly pocket of Evergloam (Nocturnal's realm) in Bloodpact for the mod Darkshines: Twilight and this is of course not going to overlap in the slightest with any vanilla game areas. We're pretty far along in getting voice acting done, and we are nearly completely done with all the writing. We had a survey up on The Escapist, Nexus and Bethsoft forums where we found most people prefer an instanced game area rather than base sandbox integration, to avoid overlap. That was surprising to us originally, but it seems the average mod user has more sense than we thought

[brucoms]

...

We had a survey up on The Escapist, Nexus and Bethsoft forums where we found most people prefer an instanced game area rather than base sandbox integration, to avoid overlap. That was surprising to us originally, but it seems the average mod user has more sense than we thought

Instanced game areas offer a great potential to introduce drastically different enviroments for the player to explore, and I think that is why a good proportion (if not all) players would rather have instanced game areas. However, to get these areas to their full potential we need many, many new art assets due to the fact that Skyim is quite limited (especially so when compared with the previous two games).

I have played about 58 hours of Skyrim so far, but I've barely scratched the surface, and so far I have seen a grand total of one deadra (and two Princes). Understandably there are fewer of them in this game due to the fact that in Oblivion they were invading, but I feel that they've taken too much of a back-seat. Then again I haven't played that much, so I should probably hold off that observation for a little while longer.

@heroesneverdie:

Fantastic read, and quite thought provoking.

Edited November 28, 2011 by brucoms

[heroesneverdie]

Good to hear I'm not alone in my thoughts. So, we're all expecting instanced locations and other landmasses to become the norm for content mods of any modest size. That leads to some important points that I didn't get very specific about in my original post, for the sake of its length.

Content requires space... and one of the key concepts of any modern rpg formula is that the content is interwoven. While instanced areas are more than reasonable for planar pockets and the like, if ALL of my mods took place in seperate tiny realms, it would start to detract from the living, breathing open world concept that makes ES games worth the bugs. And yet, as we said, Skyrim is already packed. Furthermore, the work required to make a mod in a seperate space involves more labor than weaving a story into the existing world. Instead of placing a ruin, tweaking a hill, and adding a few lines of dialogue... you're looking at creating an entire landmass, coming up with why the player can't walk beyond it's borders, creating all npcs from scratch, and essentially an exhorbitant amount of detail work to keep even the shortest extra quest believable.

To me, this demands that the mod community build an entire new landmass as a team. It's been done, it's an extremely complex process, and it's difficult to organize a talent pool without having already seen the kind of content that the staff and volunteers of the project produce. It's almost as if we need to organize a union to pump out a major worldspace in short order, such as a chunk of one of the other continents... and then build upon it. What kind of authority, though, will regulate the division of space and reviewing of content? I have no answer for these questions, but I think it's important that we're aware, as a TES Alliance community within a Skyrim Modding community, of how this round will be different from Oblivion.

Secondly, it's been pointed out that modder's resources will be a vital part of our efforts. I agree wholeheartedly with brucoms' statement that Skyrim feels more limited, in that the core game resources couldn't be used on their own for anything other than a mountainous tundra, and the Draugr infested ruins are rather specific to the ancient Nord culture. The most obvious modding resource goldmine would be to recycle content from Oblivion. This is where I have questions, as I don't possess the technical knowledge to come to any conclusion here; is it possible to port the models and textures into Skyrim? I'm speaking primarily of modder's resources faithfully uploaded by other modders, but the question extends even to official Bethesda material. Is it possible? Legal? Both games are made by Bethesda, and they've even recycled resources like books and music from previous games themselves. Can someone with the right knowledge chime in on these questions?

Finally, combining both of the last paragraphs, it needs to be asked... if by need I mean a trifling need, no more than a passing fancy. Would it be theoretically possible to import the whole of Oblivion's landmass, even in a form as rudimentary as detailed heightmaps?

I don't expect to have all of this hammered out in the scope of one forum thread, but it's going to take a great many head to put this all together.

Edited November 28, 2011 by heroesneverdie

[Bloodpact]

Yes, importing modder's resources from the Oblivion era is legal, but you would need permission from the author. MrSiika for example, for his Necropolis tileset etc.

[brucoms]

Yes, importing modder's resources from the Oblivion era is legal, but you would need permission from the author. MrSiika for example, for his Necropolis tileset etc.

That is, indeed, very possible, however it is illegal to import Bethesda's art assets. They can do it because they own the rights, but we don't, we can simply modify one game with what we are given or with what we make ourselves.

[ub3rman123]

I'm planning on a mod to add the Blacklight area of Morrowind to the game. Much easier than trying to wedge it into the game's existing space.

[zone22]

I'm hoping to mess with the AI. In particular the dragons ai package. I'm hoping it's not all hard coded. Its all kind of riding what I find in the creation kit.

[Narmix]

Hi, everyone. New here and this is my first post in a thread not made by me (the others being my introduction thread and my WIP models thread).

When the CK goes live, I plan to quickly integrate my models as mods in the cleanest way I can. I also want to get my hands dirty and would love to help out on any large mods that TESA has plans for. First and foremost, I'm modeling, but I wouldn't mind using the CK to make some new destinations/quests/etc. I'd just have to learn how to use it. My favorite mods in Oblivion were the mods that added content to every aspect of the game, not just locations. That is, adding extra food, weapons, armor, and especially miscellaneous items to the loot lists so that this new content can be found and played with regardless of where you are. Adding to that same idea, new creature types are a must as well.

Skyrim's code has provided us with a lot of new facets for enjoyable creations and I had my eye out for them as soon as I began installing the game. One of these that interests me are the AI driven, animated, moving ingredients like butterflies and fireflies. When I first saw them in the game, I was really impressed (and am still impressed) and I'm trying to think of ways to expand that.

I couldn't be more excited to mod for Skyrim

Regarding your fear of overcrowding or, worse, overLAPPING content locations; I think you're absolutely right. I've already seen this as an issue in the modding community: Lack of communication or awareness of what others are doing. Right now, the people in the modding community seem to be lone-wolfing it, and many people are unfortunately reinventing the wheel when someone else has already made it. Now, I'm not talking about different takes on the same armor (like multiple but different reskins of the dark brotherhood gear, for instance), I'm talking about multiple people retexturing the same food with high detail textures and such when there's no real appreciable difference between them. This is wasted man-power. Communication is going to be KEY for the modding community, and I think at least on TESA, that won't be so hard. We have a good group here it seems and I hope to see a lot of collaborative effort. Treating the modding community like one big development studio I think would go a long way in producing some fantastic things for Skyrim. Workflow, workflow, workflow! Even if one wants to be a lone wolf, it would do everyone a huge favor if one keeps an eye on what's already in the works or especially what is already finished. Reinventing the wheel is typically bad.

Edited December 12, 2011 by Narmix

[SonixBlade]

Hi everyone! Also new in here and I was hoping to find such a thread!

I mainly want to concentrate on 2 things:

1 - Working on the combat animation. I am a medieval sword fighting teacher (teaching Liechtaneur, Fiore de liberi, etc) and the movements of this martial arts (13 to 17 century) is what proper counter attack should be. It would be a overhaul of the animation and I would like the player to feel it through his levels as something he learned. I'd also like the player to be the only one to do those techniques as it would give a uniqueness to the player. Im learning Blender on the double to get to that stage and with a little planning it could be done.

2 - I am also working on Quests, some tied to faction and some not, but mainly to bring the missing element of Skyrim: Rpg. I intend it to follow the lore and to use what Skyrim has already given us. Each quest have various choices that would lead to different "endings" and most importantly, to make the player even more important throughout his/her gameplay.

Here are the mods I am currently planning (the titles should be self-explanatory lol) :

Adoption

The eye of magnus

A deadra companion and the Sea ghost (from The Midden)

The psijiic order

Rebuild the darkbrotherhood

Vampire society

Companion Sithis (Just too long to explain this one >.<)

Dark brotherhood execution

The slaughtered rabbit revenge

Dragon cult revive

The way of the voice

Dwemer language

Falmer rise

Hircine revenge (tied with the companions)

Vigilent of Stendar

The Giants evolve

Thief's guild true honnor

As you can see Im a busy bunny and I hope Im not stepping on this thread. My point was that Beth did this gigantic world where you do nothing but follow orders and have 2 choice of alignment (barely)

This is what I plan for Skyrim so far.

[SonixBlade]

Hummm... I realized I hardly answered on the topic of community workflow, lone-wolf modders, overlapping, etc

My hope is that we can do something about the radiant quest to gain some caves/fort/ruins to work with. Otherwise except large area with almost nothing on it, there isn't that much space left.

It would be wise to have something like a map where we can put dots for the mods lol but I cant even imagine how many ppl would fight for the perfect spot.

Interweaving mods is one solution (2 house on the same spot can end up doing a village) or Dragon rider with dragon companion mod, etc.

There could be a list of mods in each categories where you can pick one and propose your alliance to the author.

The large scale mods however will be harder to handle. Yes, it would end up in a bizillion new archipelago if we didn't take advantage of all that land mass behind the borders. Personally, I'd forget trying to bring TES III and IV into Skyrim for the simple reason that Beth wont let you. Who knows, maybe one day they will let out TES 27 - Nirn (LOL) but until then...we use what's there.

[darthsloth74]

I'm hoping to see mods that provide more choices within quests and anything that promotes more traditional roleplaying. As to my own projects I want to concentrate on hi-res improved textures that stick to the vanilla style and then move on to doing more 3d work in regard to diverse armour, clothing and weapons. I also want to make a house in Skyrim because its something I've never done with the GECK or the Oblivion Construction Kit.

I could do some of this now but I'd rather wait for the CK than go down the TESSnip, hex editing route some people are using at the moment because I don't understand that process at all. Providing the CK is very similar to the GECK in functionality I shouldn't have too many problems.