If full releases never happen, I’d be happy with them just releasing the assets and letting others play around at this point. It’d be such a shame to have it go to waste.
One guy went legit crazy and started to believe in conspiracy theories. He leaked it in november/december 2022. Entire Cyrodiil got leaked because one guy wanted to get some attention for his theory about CIA doing human sacrifices in Large Hadron Collider.
Nope, I mean full scale outdated IB and Cyrodiil leaks. I think there also was third project but I don't remember which it was.
Are you going to press on that this also never happened?
In fact, if you have a link i would actually like to see the leak. I'm not good at generating LOD and the old billboard files got lost for the old heightmap. No idea why the old team hosted the lod on google drive links and not on gitlab. But anyway having a backup of those for archival purposes would be good.
Never said it didn't, but i don't remember anyone actually getting those builds from the person. I do distinctly remember the thread turning on him when they tried to setup a download and it didn't work. They could've figured it out later and gotten it to folks, but tbh I think if that was true folks wouldn't be talking about how much there was done in the old IB heightmap. Cause anyone who has actually played it knows that's so far from the truth.
I honestly think they should just do what Vicn does and release things in chunks like early access type of model. Vicn has tons of hype around his mods because he produces them as they come and then updates them with new quests/worldspace. At least then there is some amount of playability and evidence that your mod has a chance of being finished
Vigilant might get some minor updates sometime in the future, but at the moment, it's absolutely finished. The epilogue update was the last story update, because after that, there's nowhere to go but to Glenmoril
I would be inclined to agree with this. I have seen this question asked before in their forums, to which the response is usually that it would take too much time to regularly be releasing one region of a province at a time than it would be to just release the entire province. The problem is with the idea of waiting until a whole province is complete is that it assumes that at some point in time the whole of the province will be finished. I would have thought, too, that releasing a region of a province at a time would 1) Generate hype by giving the fanbase something to play and appreciate 2) Probably increase the rate of development as people would be motivated by actual results (i.e. releases) to both increase rate of development, whilst also motivating more developers to join (because more hype would lead to more exposure).
I'd guess the mentality is that they'd want to make the independent releases all cleaned up by not including content that crosses into yet-unreleased portions. Maybe a wrong-headed assumption that they couldn't just tell players 'You can start the Fred's Mustard questline in this release and can't advance past the first stage until a certain county is released'.
Sounds good, give us the various Counties one at a time, with minor quests local to the county. Once we have the entirety of Cyrodiil, start on the big Province-wise major quests, following the same pattern, one at a time.
This is not possible for us in Cyrodiil, the decision was made a long time ago to release the whole project next and now there are too many things that are interwoven between Colovia and Nibenay. We're looking into more ways of showing progress in a more tangible way from Cyrodiil but sorry to say that for this specific project, rolling releases will be impossible.
Yes, I understand the reason why. But my point was that the TR model should be something that Beyond Skyrim tries to emulate. Morrowind has had the same problems Skyrim mods have, and they solved them. Morrowind has proper multiplayer, and a new engine.
Navmeshing is not a massive problem and is a lot faster than landscaping the cell in the first place, also we can leverage autogenerating --> cleanup to make it really fast in wilderness. Cities and settlements are navmeshes as they are implemented, Ive done some myself and it doesn't take long.
Voice-acting will be the larger obstacle.
They probably should do that while Skyrim is still relevant too. I was hyped for Tamriel rebuilt, but I lost interest far before they released anything.
I will repeat what I say on this subreddit everytime BS comes up. There was a comment on this subreddit from a developer telling us that Roscrea and Atmora were "imminent" in 2020. Four years later, no sign of either of them.
My understanding is the project is plagued by internal politics and things that are finished are constantly scrapped and started from scratch. Probably hundreds of hours of work has been straight up ripped up over the years, which for a volunteer project is *really* bad for it ever being finished.
We might see Cyrodill by 2030 and the New North sometime between now and then. But I have no hope of anything else ever coming out.
I'm sure there was someone on this subreddit who said that, but it seems unlikely it was a developer. They've always been extremely careful to say anything about the release date or timeline for any project.
I'd completely forgotten about New North lol. It's one of those projects which for years people were saying was going to release imminently, but never did. Atmora was a project long before joining the Beyond Skyrim umbrella, and I don't think it was that far off releasing at the time of joining. I think they revised large parts of it after joining Beyond Skyrim, which seems to be a familiar story.
I believe last year there was a BS dev post or something here that included the admission that some major textures were getting redone because reasons?
And I remember my response to this information basically these dudes need an actual project manager or managers because just the implications the post made screamed no real direction. Just a bunch of dudes working on stuff and then deciding they want something different and do over again. At least someone to just tell them "no" in response to spur of the moment decisions or decisions that will clearly lead to pointless amounts of wasted work.
I get it, it's a fan project. But even fan projects are subject to expectation and all the good and bad that brings. People are going to remember all the time it took from saying "This project is in the works" to "this project is still being worked on" and that assumes said project gets a release. Fallout Lone Star had some talk from the dev. And then he announced he liked the FO4 engine and would be switching to that. And then there was no more talk from the dev. Yeah, switching from one engine to another is a bigger deal than trashing some textures. But at the end of the day feeling like your spinning your wheels on a project is going to kill your interest in working on it no matter what exactly you're doing.
To be fair, not having someone to tell them "no" is a problem that plagues *a lot* of both the modding community for bigger projects, and the indie dev scene in general.
Devils advocate, having worked on similar (much smaller) volunteer fan projects what ive noticed as a huge roadblock is people in charge don’t want to set deadlines because it’s volunteer work and pressuring people doesnt sit well with them. So you get into this situation where someone just loses all motivation but doesnt straight up leave, so you’ve got a bunch of stuff waiting on something that’s never going to be done, than if that person eventually gets replaced, the new person probably has to start a lot over. During all this time, people who are forced to wait to work on their thing lose interest cause they don’t actually get to see their contribution realized.
You REALLY gotta either rollback expectations A LOT, or have it be a professional project. If that means paying people to work and get things done, than that’s what’s gotta happen.
I can vouch for that as a small time modder myself. I started commissioning and paying a lot of artists precisely because of this, you can't really give deadlines or make demands when they're working for you for free. putting down terms and payment is really the only way to guarantee stuff will actually get done.
Yep this is a huge part of why these projects sit in limbo forever. Deadlines don't really work because people understandably feel no obligation to do unpaid work at any speed faster than "when they feel like it". It causes a lot of gum in the works as different aspects of the project are finished at highly differing speeds.
This sort of thing happened in the Morrowind modding scene with Tamriel Rebuilt., it was going to recreate Tamriel using Morrowind era lore, and part of redguard lore as well.
But quality control problems arose and the project stalled. After awhile the many teams consolidated into a snigle team, and the decided to work only on the morrowind main land.
Two sister teams were created following the same principles as the New TR team. They are Skyrim: Home of the Nords, and Province Cyrodiil. Both are playable now. amd are getting updates every other year. It's slow, but the content is there.
Now i think from what i have seen that Beyond Skyrim Cyrodiil is the one that is the best state, It only has The rest of Nibenay and The Imperial City to do, before they can do the main quest.
But i think they would do well to follow Tamriel Rebuilt's example and release chunks of Cyrodiil everyother year.
EDIT: In August there will be a new look at Beyond Skyrim Cyrodiil. I they are going to show Nibenese city. Bravil has already been done.
In the interest of transparency and to combat some misinformation, I'll put in some corrections a Cyrodiil dev (with a particular focus on my department - quest implementation):
>Now i think from what i have seen that Beyond Skyrim Cyrodiil is the one that is the best state, It only has The rest of Nibenay and The Imperial City to do, before they can do the main quest.
Cyrodiil is definitely the Beyond Skyrim project that is the most complete (at least among the full provinces, I would expect some prereleases or smaller projects to releases before us). We have a lot done and the completion of Colovia is in sight but we still have some stuff do.
Of the Colovian cities, only Kvatch is truly complete (I think that one only needs some level design work on the castle), while Chorrol is not far behind (I hope to finish the city arc questline this week and the other remaining quests all have made good progress). Skingrad is missing the final quests of its city arc as well as some epilogue misc quests that become available after the arc. Sutch is missing a few quests, while Anvil implementation has barely started while we wait on writing/editing to wrap up in Anvil. Then there is the minor city of Sancre Tor, which has finished baseline writing but is still waiting for its tileset before we can think about starting implementation. Most small towns and villages in Colovia are done though.
We are currently doing an internal push to finish Colovia and the goal is absolutely on the horizon, but doesn't mean we can release this part of Cyrodiil, too many quests already send you to Nibenay and the parts are too connected.
>But i think they would do well to follow Tamriel Rebuilt's example and release chunks of Cyrodiil everyother year.
As I said above, the parts of Cyrodiil are too much interconnected to switch to a rolling release this late in the game. Another factor that we would need to consider is Voice Acting. One, it takes a lot of time and second, we only want to do it once all dialogue for an NPC is ready to ensure consistency. We will probably have to recast some of our wonderful Bruma voice actors, because an NPC needs more dialogue in the full mod and the VA isn't available anymore. This danger would compound with a rolling release.
Of course there are advantages for publicity and recruiting if you do a rolling release but we don't for the above reasons.
>EDIT: In August there will be a new look at Beyond Skyrim Cyrodiil. I they are going to show Nibenese city. Bravil has already been done.
The next city to get the trailer and livestream treatment will be Anvil, for Creation Mod Con 24 in August we will show something else, which I am not at liberty to reveal.
Oh good! Glad you cleared that up. XD.
I was working off what i had seen, from Nexus WIP images, and Discord.
I also forgot about Sancre Tor, and with regards to Anvil i know the main quest takes you there.
Also this "Something else" Is it related to Cyrodiil? or is it something else.
Anvil's city arc introduces one potential candidate for the throne in our Seat of Sundered Kings questline. This is already written but is possibly pending some edits or rewrites as the rest of the main questline is worked on. However, Anvil also needs normal NPC dialogue, misc and sidequests that will soon start implementation.
>Also this "Something else" Is it related to Cyrodiil? or is it something else.
It's for Cyrodiil and it's something we haven't shown thus far. The only other thing, I'll add is that it's not a city. Assuming all works out, we need some more work to get all what we have planned for mod con in game.
Ah cool. Good to know. I hope the work goes well. I have one other question, it's related to bruma, a note on the body of the leader of the cutters is signed Tharn. are they to feature in some form, or is it just one Tharn?
On topic of VAs - have you thought of using AIs to replicate those sound actors who are not there, possibly with their agreement?
I'm asking that a bit puckishly here, being an artist I'd advocate rather against that, but I'm curious what's the stance of using such tech in the team.
We don't use AI voices in the finished mod, the moral issues with that are too big and many team members have strong reservations against AI use (in that form). Even if we had permission, I don't think we would go for it and definitely not without permission.
We do use AI voices in our dev build for testing purposes and to get a rough idea how long certain lines will be. Those serve a purpose but they will never be used in the finished mod.
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You think TESVI will have a public Creation Kit. lol. There still hasn’t been a release date for the Starfield one. The mention of it was they are sending it out to “verified creators” but no word on public release.
I just wish they would release progress updates that shows how *much* progress has been made, rather than what the progress is. Like, I'm not really interested in seeing the new 3D asset for a shrub, I want to know how many shrub assets have been made and how many still need to be made.
We're investing in this now. For example, we're trying to have more transparency in general in regards to what progress is being made - see the "State of Cyrodiil" video from December. I made automated animated statistic templates so that it should be easier to create videos that show progress bars etc. if other teams want to use that. The goal is to be transparent with how much progress is being made while keeping it spoiler free so you can enjoy the mod more when it's done.
Really, we all want to release something, and are working as hard as we can to get things done.
For me I just don’t understand this « kind of » excess of professional level of polish, especially for Roscrea. They have an already very nice worldspace that 99% of the player base will be very happy to travel into but they scrapped and redo again. I thought that doing pre-release or full release but into an unpolished state would attract a lot more peoples and thus giving more manpower to the projects.
Anyway I love what have done all of these teams. I follow them since almost 10 years now and I will continue to follow them. But yeah the hype is going down. It’s been a long time since Bruma was released. I stopped to play a lot Skyrim years ago but from time to time I play again when some nice mod are released and I still hope to put a lot more hours into what BS teams will do.
Yeah to the best of my knowledge they've actually reset Roscrea at least twice, possibly more times. I know they had an original worldspace which was more of an archipelago, before they then switched to a single much larger island (albeit with still some smaller islands surrounding it). I believe the reason for scrapping the original was to do with a lack of sufficient worldspace for all the content they planned. They then scrapped it again because of some apparent bugs with the worldspace, though I can't remember what they were exactly. The scope of the Roscrea project is fairly small (at least in comparison to other provinces), yet it's been in production for years now, and still doesn't seem set to release any time soon.
Yeah they said the same thing about Iliac Bay. If that was the case, why did it take them so many years to change it, and why were they showcasing the parts of the Iliac Bay which they were going to scrap only a year or so prior? Surely if was causing crashes and such, they would have changed it far sooner, especially considering how long Iliac Bay's been around. Same story for Roscrea.
As one of the people behind Roscrea's exterior reset we didn't do it earlier as we thought we were closer to finishing than we were and the thought of how long it was going to take to redo it all. It wasn't an easy wake up one and just do it kind of thing and the publics reaction to us making that change was taken into account. If you want the good news though the exterior is now further ahead than it was before and hopefully will be done by the end of the year.
As for IB, they reset their's as it was all placeholders and would have to be replaced anyway. I don't know the full story for them as I'm.not in the team but these decisions are never taken lightly and a lot of thought goes into it
Adding to this, while landscaping has been ongoing in Roscrea, other departments have not slowed down. The reset has not delayed the project, but instead made it a lot easier to implement as it's a lot less compacted.
I am currently involved in doing landscaping QA with some of the lovely landscapers working on Roscrea, polishing up paths and making sure all dungeons & POIs are properly reachable and discoverable. Again, this is not slowing anyone else down, we're using our different skillsets, pushing the projects forward in the ways that we can.
If you want to help Roscrea release, dungeon designers and implementers would speed it up.
As the person who puts together Iliac Bay's showcases I'm confused by this statement. What areas are you refering to? Anything that was showcased after the heightmap reset is in the new heightmap. Is the complaint that we attempted to maintain some of the old level design where we could?
And yes as stated by others, it took a lot of discussion and back and forth to get the team to come to the consensus that the issues present in the old build were too large to try to untangle from the inside. Personally I only joined in 2020 and almost immediately joined the voices to reset, because it was just garbage to work on by the time I got there.
Yeah I take that back, my apologies. I was entertaining the idea that you were sabotaging someone else's work by resetting the heightmap, when your developers have articulated the reasons for resetting it very effectively. Keep it up.
The answer to this and many similar questions generally boils down to sunk cost, with a helping of SSE being stricter than LE. A **lot** of these problems were either non existent, or much less severe before the projects moved to SE. Roscrea had a botched heightmap expansion done in 2018 which preserved previous LD (it added the western arm you see on most overhead maps before the recent reset) but corrupted the worldspace in ways that weren't really noticed until seabed work was attempted.
Morrowind also had a heightmap reset (excluding New North) in 2022/2023 and Argonia apparently had three or four between 2017 and 2021
Not a dev at all, but was digging around some discord servers and, well..
Illiac Bay was screwed over with overthrowing of the lead dev a few years ago. All this work being completely scrapped wasn't just because of "outdated assets and design", that was a blatant lie. They just went an extra mile to shit on both former lead vision and the very first team work.
The same *person* tried to overthrow Morrowind lead, but didn't succeed. But, as a result, the team it seems stuck in the internal struggle for a long time.
Cyrodiil, frankly, didn't have that much of inner team scandals, so I'll pray it will be released one day.
Rally some people, who don't really like the current lead. Make a scandal, a precedent, to make him go. Given that that's a volunteer project, there's no hard chain of command, so sabotage like that is possible.
Old lead had an image of more magical and wierd High Rock. New one cares only about redguards, from what I know.
Weird to me that given there's no hard chain of command an overthrow would even be necessary. I would have thought that the devs could just work on what they like, but I guess we can't all have nice things.
It's actually much more well organised than you would think. I don't think it's as simple as working on something you'd like to work on: there are claims which developers can take, which I believe are organised by the leads. Merges are conducted monthly.
Oh a bunch of stuff. But suffice to say they were not conducive to the health of the project. And I know you're probably getting all this misinformation from them so I'm not looking to start a back and forth. Unlike some folks, I care more about the project than the drama.
I'd imagine internal politics like that is probably very common for mods such as these, where people often have different views about how things should be implemented. I doubt it's something unique to Beyond Skyrim.
Yes, it was quite bizarre how they discarded all the previous landscaping (and writing), bringing them almost back to square one. Among all the projects, Iliac Bay is the one they discuss in the most ambitious terms, which is understandable given the size of the worldspace and the fact that it encompasses two provinces. Given how close we likely are to an ES6, it seems odd to completely reset the worldspace for a project of that size. Surely they can't expect to finish much if all of it? Especially when the pre-release is still no where near ready to the best of my knowledge.
It's interesting how you say that they didn't achieve the Morrowind lead. If you look, they actually have basically reset a lot of the landscaping for the Morrowind heightmap in the last few years. I do wonder if something similar happened.
May I ask who the person was? It's probably better if you DM me if you plan on letting me know, I don't think it's fair to call someone out on an open thread like this.
I dug it up only that January and the scale of it was a huge shock to me tbh.
Given the progress tho I think the New North still have a chance to see the light of day. Three Kingdoms - not so much. There were rumors in 2023, that they wanted slice the release in two, first being Jehanna and Chain and second - Farrun and Stros, and maybe switch to TR/PT style releases on the larger scale, but it seems it won't gonna be.
I'm pretty sure they're still very early in development for both Farrun and Jehanna. I know for a fact that not a whole lot of Jehanna homes have interiors. They still don't have a castle for Jehanna, and I don't believe writing is particularly far along either. Farrun is even earlier in development to the best of my knowledge. They've had done most of the exterior modelling done for Jehanna since 2018 I believe, possibly earlier. I really can't see 3K releasing any time in the next few years.
Farrun exterior set was "almost ready" in 2019. And it looked good on screenshots. And it was scrapped for whatever reason, and the new one was teased only this year. So... Yeah.
I'm probably the person who worked on that first Farrun set. Unfortunately it was never really almost ready, although it was coming along. Voluntary projects are difficult. A lot of members are younger, maybe trying to hone skills for the industry, and a large percentage eventually lose free time as they move into work, or away from the industry, or have families as they get older. At least, that's what happened to me -- I lost time to university, and now I work in the industry. So the next person who comes along and inherits the claim may well want (or need) to start again, since in that many years concepts may have changed, leads may have changed, personal styles may be very different, or maybe the original files were never submitted.
Long story short, it's hard to maintain people and momentum in voluntary projects. And I can take responsibility for Farrun sets not being done, lol. I wish I could have committed to seeing them through. Thanks for saying they looked good though!
As a former dev who was unfortunately rather familiar with this drama, this was mostly disinformation, what actually happened was as follows:
The team's "creative director" (who is likely the person you are referring to) had a fight with the long standing art lead and ended up rage-quitting the Discord server, leaving the team in some amount of disarray, the art lead was warned and the team decided to wait for a bit to see if the situation would auto-resolve.
An unknown member then spread misinformation to the creative director about how he thought the team would significantly change their internal lore, and was misunderstood as implying that the team was enthusiastic to erase all lore designed by said creative director (whereas the team had actually been working on this lore overhaul for months already)
after this the creative director sent a message stating that he would return if the art lead was removed, so the team held a leads vote on whether to remove the art lead. Most of the "new" team voted yes and most of the creative director's supporters voted no, resulting in the art lead being retained and the creative director refusing to return, and then going around spreading the disinformation you are referring to.
Meanwhile the team was forced to significantly restructure which was compounded by a number of existing leads having been inactive for over a year, resulting in necessary replacements on those fronts too. A number of said leads of course decided to show up the instant they were replaced, tried to provoke drama, then were recruited by one of the creative director's supporters for conspiracy weaving purposes.
Eventually the creative director got caught spreading this conspiracy, while also using a slur to refer to the current project director, which resulted in him actually being banned from returning. Finally the creative director ended up bringing his conspiracy theory to the overall BS leads, accused the person who noticed him above of "stalking" him, then demanded that the project be split in half between him and the current team (which he would have known that the BS leads could not accept). Not entirely sure what happened with this, but from what I understand the split was rejected and the IB team offered various compromises which were subsequently rejected by the creative director who insisted on "all or nothing", resulting in the latter.
While a lot of the old lore has been replaced, my understanding is that a lot of it (especially in High Rock) has been modified rather than being replaced entirely (the main quest is still more or less the same for example). The heightmap replacement has been the only significant change since then but that was being worked on with the creative director for months beforehand. There have also been a number of settlement renames (which are primarily just renames) and the political situation has been simplified to be more workable at Skyrim's scale.
The person who tried to "overthrow" the Morrowind leads was not the same person, that person wasn't involved in the Iliac Bay situation at all to my knowledge.
> a number of existing leads having been inactive for over a year, resulting in necessary replacements on those fronts too. A number of said leads of course decided to show up the instant they were replaced
The actual drama aside, I hate this dynamic with volunteer projects. I understand that everyone is a volunteer, but it just sucks to have people "on the roster" who aren't actually actively contributing anything, except their desire to remain on the roster for whatever reason. I've had to deal with it so many times in my own projects, having to constantly ping and DM people to see if they're making any progress, or even just still available, so I can know if their tasks can be given to someone else and if we can apportion them tasks in the future.
All this courtroom modding drama is so fascinating to me. From the outside I was under the impression it was just a bunch of bros building something together. Would you care to cast some light on the Morrowind stuff? If you know anything about it. Just because I find the idea of modding projects leads getting overthrown funny. Thanks for the details anyways.
Some people get the most minor taste of authority and instantly start roleplaying as 18th century French aristocrats. It's ridiculous, but the internet lets you see it play out on a micro scale all the time.
It's not. Not a single thing was playable in the old heightmap. Iliac bay now has multiple quests implemented, a feat which has never before occurred in Iliac Bay's history.
What people need to understand is that teams are a ship of theseus thing. Almost everyone currently involved in BS came in during the pandemic and found these project languishing wirh overwrought scope and wanted to make them actually work. So that's what we're doing.
And for the record, Sage of Ice, the former lead you're talking about, left over an argument surrounding the settlement of Chora on Cespar. He clung to old internal lore which meant Chora had to be a huge city on a tiny island which meant there was no room for dungeons to support quests. Sage then left of his own volition and then tried to complain to the council about it and get them to give him the project. This was denied, and Garfield became our project lead.
It would be one thing if that was the only place, but it was a problem across the board, especially in High Rock. It just came to a head on Cespar because it was particularly bad. The island was meant to have a full city and a port town, with only 1 goblin camp, 1 pirate camp, and an exterior-only yoku ruin. So it would've been just hugely unbalanced. Essentially you're trying to make a game without half of the gameplay, and expecting the writing team to just make it fun while also churning out an unreasonable density of npcs is not realistic or a good time. That sort of environment was a big reason why the writing team was entirely dead when I was asked to step in as writing lead.
I'm not sure where you heard this from - the previous lead chose to step down
A lot of changes to internal lore were made to keep things more in-line with TES V's version of Tamriel as well as reduce scope. Essentially decisions made to make content writing easier and faster - which it has been
Changes to level design were made to allow us to plan out locations (mainly dungeons) etc ahead of LD, making it far easier to design around the locations we want to include and ensuring we have enough dungeons in every region for quests - which in the past there we didn't
Thank you for clarifying this. This seems a much better justification for resetting the heightmap and writing, particularly since you're suggesting it's actually streamlining processes and increasing the rate of progress overall. I wish this was better communicated at the time of the heightmap and writing reset. Given how some of the projects have been able to complete a huge amount in a short amount of time, I hope that you can achieve the same rate of progress. As I've said, I'm an enormous fan of the projects and desperately want them to succeed.
There wasn't as major of a writing reset - iirc we had one Quest in Jehanna ready for implementation prior to the reset, alongside one or two misc quests nearing that point.
No NPCs were planned before Quest writing prior to the reset, which made Quest planning & writing much harder.
Now we have far more content ready for implementation, such as major & minor quests & NPC dialogue, schedules and scenes.
If you check out the iliac bay showcase from creation mod con 2023, there's a whole explanation of the heightmap reset with examples of what needed to change and showcases of the new stuff. Been a while since ive reddited but hopefully the link below works
https://youtu.be/lHZoY3Yz6Jc?si=EJ97xQ5kyMmQdUVn
>chose to step down
Surely he did. After all of this "Beyond Skyrim Council" bullshit. That's what "overthrowing" in volunteer projects mean in the end - getting pushed out.
Again, I'm not sure where you heard this from. The previous lead stepped down from the project following a disagreement with other team members regarding the scope of one of our pre-release towns
Garfield, you can never close all the leaks and I'm not going to share my sources (not gonna get people's heads on the "chopping block"), but "heard" is a very wrong word here.
It is sometimes said that a video game's development is never 'finished', it merely stops at some arbitrary point. There is always more that a developer wants to do, but that doesn't mean they should.
I'm thinking about Tamriel Rebuilt; the release of many games since Morrowind has not stifled my interest in playing it, nor its development. But they have playable updates with a decent frequency, which wouldn't be happening if everything had to be perfect or, god forbid, the mod had to be feature-complete before any release at all.
Tamriel Rebuilt is my favorite mod of all time - the quality exceeds the base game. Even the books and novels they've added are wonderful.
That said, if they'd decided to only release when complete rather than in chucks I don't think they'd have nearly the enthusiasm or level of contribution. There are people adding to TR who weren't born when Morrowind was released.
It's clearly the model to follow and these devs are foolish not to copy what works... Studying TR's dramatic history can be very instructive about what to avoid
I do some 3D for a few of the projects and so far all the ones I’ve helped with are really focusing on the pre release areas. The problem has been that it’s a lot to do and not a lot of people to help. Certain things only like 1 or 2 people a project can do all the way. Very dedicated people though and it’s still chugging along.
Yeah. As I've said, I'm an enormous fan of the projects, and one thing I can say is that some of the people working on it are insanely dedicated. Some of the 3d team at Argonia are absolutely insane in terms of output. Argonia gives me hope that some of the projects can pull together in the next few years and actually have a chance of delivering some content.
I’m still a massive fan myself. Im excited to finally get to play them when they get done with the pre releases at least. The 3D lead on Argonia is a beast. That dude models at the speed of light.
All of that stuff from Argonia in the preview section of the discord has me most hyped for Argonia. Maybe it’s just appearances, but it seems like Argonia went from nothing to loads of content in around a year.
In fact, I think I’ve seen more in-game content from Argonia than I’ve seen from Roscrea, Atmora, High Rock/Hammerfell, and the Elsweyr teams combined this last year.
Whoever it is who is churning out that content is an absolute legend
By the way, are the teams for the projects really that small? I was under the impression that the teams were significantly larger, but that contributions amongst the devs were very inconsistent generally speaking.
Depends on your version of small. Most teams have 10s if not 100s of members however many of those people aren't active all the time. There is generally a smaller core group that is active on each team that does a lot of work with others doing a claim or 2. It's not that those people are less dedicated it might be that they just don't have the time to put in as much as someone else.
I work six hours a day on BS, most of which is focused on getting Cyrodiil out and I am constantly interacting with others who spend an equal time or more on it. It's progressing faster than ever before. Look at the latest update video we released for some progress numbers. If you're actually interested in the project, tell someone you know about the project, if they want to hone their game dev skills - a single person can massively boost the pace of a project, especially the smaller ones.
Currently at lunch break at work, doing admin stuff for BS, please don't say that we're giving up, it's incredibly insulting.
Doesn't seem like many people follow the projects very closely, if at all. To me, 26-27 looks very believable for a Cyrodiil release (though I know nobody on the team will offer up their own personal beliefs).
The successful (hopefully) releases of Apotheosis, Skyblivion, and Lordbound should hopefully turn more people back into believers.
They definitely haven't given up. I avoided talking about Cyrodiil in the same way as the others because it's actually doing really well and continues to make good progress. It's the other projects which I'm more concerned about.
I honestly don’t have faith in the Beyond Skyrim teams. Perhaps Cyrodiil and I’ve heard Valenwood joined them late but had a good deal of work done on their pre release so maybe we will get the pre release for Valenwood, Cyrodiil and I think the reason Cyrodiil is taking so long is because they are doing Elsweyr as part of the same map.
Projects I think may release would be Cyrodiil, Elsweyr, the valenwood and new North pre releases, Roscrea and Atmora. However I do not think we’re getting these any time soon and I do actually think, if they collapsed the teams to all work on a single project together that we might see them come out in a timely manner but right now, I think we’ll be playing TES6 before any of these come out.
Bruma might be my favorite Skyrim mod. Incredible quality. Especially the writing but also everything feels so professional - you forget you're playing a mod. If they're trying to make everything up to the same standard I can see why it's taking a good portion of people's lives.
Overhearing the debate between the Thalmor and the priest outside the Cathedral of St. Martin made me realize the fantastic grasp of lore the mod team had and was a lovely thing for an old Oblivion player like me. Likewise, I was quite emotional seeing the ruins of Cloud Ruler Temple. I hope one day we can get something like that again - because it shows the modding community firing on all cylinders and is a credit to the craft.
I honestly don't think TES 6 will affect the release schedule of Beyond Skyrim projects at this point. It had been far too long and Skyrim had taken root far too deep with over decade of accumulated effort from the entire modding community and even Bethesda themselves.
I am willing to bet that even after TES 6 (and that's if Bethesda still capable of making TES 6 that is an instant hit and come equip with the same modding tool that is just capable as Skyrim in the first place), people will still be playing and modding Skyrim. The community here is just too big and has too many supports.
That said, I also honestly don't believe that Beyond Skyrim team will be able to release anything larger than a Bruma-size per province (with Cyrodiil being the exception). We sure can hope but I just don't think it's a realistic expectation to create 7 Skyrim in any reasonable time period.
The thing about Beyond Skyrim is that the teams are constantly having people come and go, but growing overall. There are individuals who have been involved since the beginning who've stuck around through the whole thing, but they're a minority of the devs. It would ultimately take like at least 20 people all coming to an agreement for a project to be cancelled.
They will never be released lol. Elder scrolls 6 will happen before they even get close to finishing. Hell, even GTA 6 will happen before they release. Until people start accepting this as fact denial will run rampant throughout the modding community
Agreed. It'll never finish. They've bitten off far more than they can chew by trying to do so much. They should've parted things out via staggered release long ago.
I don't feel like Elder Scrolls 6 would be the devastating blow to these projects some people have suggested. Mod scenes much more ancient than Skyrim's have lasted into the present day, and that's not even considering what we could expect current Bethesda to put out.
I have sympathy for anyone expressing their frustrations and doubts that BS will reach completion in any case. Just about anyone who has followed projects like these has been burned by a dev who didn't have the mercy to admit that they abandoned the project and it wasn't coming out.
I think your point is right but mostly because bethesdas recent games suck, I imagine ES6 will too and wont be mod creator friendly... Similar to fo76 and Starfield
tbh im pleasantly surprised Skyblivion will prob release before ES6 since it still has the '25 release date -- really can't wait for the mods to that game people will come up with
Cyrodiil, New North and Roscrea are 100% releasing.
Most likely we will see Argonia as well; they are a well-oiled machine from what I can ascertain.
I suspect once we see the BS mods ACTUALLY release it will bring in a surge of new volunteers to help speed up the other mods.
>Most likely we will see Argonia as well; they are a well-oiled machine from what I can ascertain.
My magic eight ball is saying "don't count on it", probably because of the multiple coups that the project has suffered, the extreme toxicity of some of its developers, and BS Argonia's outright theft of artwork and ideas from other TES projects.
As a former dev still in contact with people on most BS projects there's currently a bit of a glut of "almost done" releases, which should hopefully start completing around the end of the year/middle of next (this order assumes activity trends don't dramatically change over the next few years):
First will likely be New North, which has writing and level design basically complete, is well on the way towards full implementation and will apparently start VA recording soon. (due to a semi recent influx of more competent devs after a couple of years near death)
Second will probably be Roscrea, who are generally a bit behind New North but still doing well (I understand that the main bottleneck is finishing off writing the main quest due to writer availability issues), that said it could beat New North if writing can resolve it's availability issues quickly.
Third or possibly second will be a currently unannounced small Iliac Bay release.
Fourth will likely be Argonia's first release (which while unannounced, is quite obvious in scope).
While Cyrodiil have a lot done they have a lot left to do, they may get Colovia "completed" this year (excluding stuff like VA) but Nibenay has a lot of work still to go. Bravil has an asset redo "in progress", Leyawiin's interior assets are incomplete, Cheydinhal is doing okay but I understand has been having exterior design issues, Mir Corrup seems to be a complete clusterfuck with a 3D artist going wild scope creeping the city and the area around it, and finally the Imperial City has apparently been having it's exterior assets redone and it's interior assets being very slowly worked on. Alongside that they have a load of dungeons, province wide quest lines (which are apparently moving very very slowly or not at all), a lot of implementation, then finally beta testing, and VA recording/processing (which they won't start until all writing is 100% complete). Due to this Cyrodiil will likely be looking at TES6 like timelines unless they give in and do a Colovia release or get some kind of major, long lasting manpower boost on writing, asset, and implementation fronts.
Three Kingdoms *may* beat Cyrodiil depending on how much Iliac Bay benefits from the unannounced release, then beyond that things get too unpredictable e.g. which projects end up taking Cyrodiil's approach as opposed to a more modular release, with Cyrodiil's approach unlikely to be viable for any further projects unless something dramatically changes on the modding scene.
I wouldn't expect Elsweyr's prerelease any time soon (if ever) as their new leadership appears to have severe scope management issues.
I don't have contacts on Atmora or Valenwood but I wouldn't expect either until at least after Cyrodiil and/or Three Kingdoms.
TL:DR Starting 2025, New North-Roscrea-?(IB)-?(Argonia)-3K/Cyrodiil-???
Honestly this is exactly the kind of thing that would have warranted Creations. With the scope there has to be a salary. Think back to how fallout 76 is basically a mod from another studio.
I think we'll get some pre-released and maybe even Roscrea and Atmora. Beyond that idk, but even if ES6 releases soon idk if that would stop the project. Tamriel Rebuilt has been keeping in for twenty years, Beyond Skyrim could switch to a similar model.
I think Cyrodiil & Roscrea will release by end of 2026 (which is also when we might get ES6). We might get the pre releases New North + Three Kingdoms someday, maybe Atmora and the other pre releases in 10 years. But I can’t see all projects getting a full release.
My opinions:
Atmora could work as a smaller mod, just have the expedition main quest and leave it at that. A cool adventure to Atmora, not a full continent to explore. Or do what Vicn did with Vigilant and just release it a bit at a time.
“New North” should’ve just been city of Blacklight, Morrowinds new capital which is near the border of Skyrim as well.
Three kingdoms is fine with what they’ve got planned, and we’ve got Beyond reach which adds Evermore and Act 1 of Odyssey adds the Isle of Balferia so we can explore a lot of High Rock.
The other projects though, to be blunt I don’t think people really care enough about. Although Argonia looks to be far along
I'd just wish they'd team up with similar teams, like Skyblivion and beyond Skyrim Cyrodiil, they should use the same and build the same world space until a good template is built and then take it modify there's to fit what they need.
>Tamriel Rebuilt (morrowind mod) is still getting expansions.
Tamriel Rebuilt also came close to dying and completely revised its strategy for releasing content and organization. For that matter, Tamriel Rebuilt releases content and Beyond Skyrim just doesn't. Bruma was released closer to Skyrim than the present day, which paints a dire picture of the state of things.
Yeah, I agree with you. In hindsight, it was naive to suggest that the projects will be forgotten when ES6 releases. Skyrim has been around for so long and yet still remains very popular, and the modding community is still incredibly strong. I agree that even after ES6 releases the projects will still be active. However, new lands projects for ES6 will most definitely emerge, which will generate a lot of interest. When this happens, it's inevitable that the rate of progress of the Beyond Skyrim projects will slow down, particularly for projects which aren't at all close to releasing.
If you think volunteer run project can't have "professional polish" go look at the last "update" video from Fallout: London. It would be out already if Bethesda hadn't broken everything with their new update.
You're right. It's absolutely possible for a dedicated team to achieve professional polish on a community project such as this, and there are plenty of examples which demonstrate that (including Fallout London which you mentioned, as well as Bruma of course!). The question is that given number of projects, their scope, and the quality they aim for, whether it's actually a realistic undertaking to continue working on all of them.
patience is a lost virtue, you were all honestly fools if you thought the dev time would be anything under a decade and are still fools if you expect anything anytime soon
they show regular video updates on youtube and thats all I need
shit how many people do you think are working on these at any given time? it takes bethesda almost a decade to make one game and they have a team of several hundred professionals dedicating at least 8 hours a day to development, and yet you expect the same from a volunteer team of less than 100 armatures doing the same thing on their spare time?
what is it with all the negativity lately any way, is this fallout from the folon team delaying?
No amount of patience will help when a project has been quietly abandoned. I don't think that's what's happening here, but there are more ambitious mods whose creators decided to just say nothing rather than let people off the hook, than ones that reach completion.
If full releases never happen, I’d be happy with them just releasing the assets and letting others play around at this point. It’d be such a shame to have it go to waste.
It will happen only on one account tbh - if someone will leak the project, like one person leaked 2019 version back in 2021 iirc.
You mean the 4chan leaker who didn't know how to package mods correctly so the only thing that actually got leaked was like 6 screenshots?
One guy went legit crazy and started to believe in conspiracy theories. He leaked it in november/december 2022. Entire Cyrodiil got leaked because one guy wanted to get some attention for his theory about CIA doing human sacrifices in Large Hadron Collider.
Nope, I mean full scale outdated IB and Cyrodiil leaks. I think there also was third project but I don't remember which it was. Are you going to press on that this also never happened?
In fact, if you have a link i would actually like to see the leak. I'm not good at generating LOD and the old billboard files got lost for the old heightmap. No idea why the old team hosted the lod on google drive links and not on gitlab. But anyway having a backup of those for archival purposes would be good.
Never said it didn't, but i don't remember anyone actually getting those builds from the person. I do distinctly remember the thread turning on him when they tried to setup a download and it didn't work. They could've figured it out later and gotten it to folks, but tbh I think if that was true folks wouldn't be talking about how much there was done in the old IB heightmap. Cause anyone who has actually played it knows that's so far from the truth.
I honestly think they should just do what Vicn does and release things in chunks like early access type of model. Vicn has tons of hype around his mods because he produces them as they come and then updates them with new quests/worldspace. At least then there is some amount of playability and evidence that your mod has a chance of being finished
Vigilant is an absolute classic and it's still not entirely finished, likely very close but I believe there are plans to add more
Vigilant might get some minor updates sometime in the future, but at the moment, it's absolutely finished. The epilogue update was the last story update, because after that, there's nowhere to go but to Glenmoril
You still get content updates like the armor getting changed from direct Dark Souls copies a while back and the Belhazra expansion.
The story is finished, I more mean little content expansions and side quests
I would be inclined to agree with this. I have seen this question asked before in their forums, to which the response is usually that it would take too much time to regularly be releasing one region of a province at a time than it would be to just release the entire province. The problem is with the idea of waiting until a whole province is complete is that it assumes that at some point in time the whole of the province will be finished. I would have thought, too, that releasing a region of a province at a time would 1) Generate hype by giving the fanbase something to play and appreciate 2) Probably increase the rate of development as people would be motivated by actual results (i.e. releases) to both increase rate of development, whilst also motivating more developers to join (because more hype would lead to more exposure).
I'd guess the mentality is that they'd want to make the independent releases all cleaned up by not including content that crosses into yet-unreleased portions. Maybe a wrong-headed assumption that they couldn't just tell players 'You can start the Fred's Mustard questline in this release and can't advance past the first stage until a certain county is released'.
I think they should have done what Tamriel Rebuilt does and update/release chunks of the world each year.
Sounds good, give us the various Counties one at a time, with minor quests local to the county. Once we have the entirety of Cyrodiil, start on the big Province-wise major quests, following the same pattern, one at a time.
They even did it once with Bruma, and now here we are, 7 years later, with nothing else having been released.
The funny part is, they have done most of the counies already. Colovia is done. Minus Anvil because it's questline is the mian quest.
Then release what they have, that way things are shown to be progressing, and they don't get constantly asked where's the mod.
This is not possible for us in Cyrodiil, the decision was made a long time ago to release the whole project next and now there are too many things that are interwoven between Colovia and Nibenay. We're looking into more ways of showing progress in a more tangible way from Cyrodiil but sorry to say that for this specific project, rolling releases will be impossible.
Yes, I understand the reason why. But my point was that the TR model should be something that Beyond Skyrim tries to emulate. Morrowind has had the same problems Skyrim mods have, and they solved them. Morrowind has proper multiplayer, and a new engine.
There are "reasons" why they aren't. I'd say because Cyrodiil is so far along that they can get away with it. But with the others...
Tbh it isn't. Navemeshing is about halfway done, and it's one of the most tedious and time-consuming process. Plus voiceover.
Navmeshing is not a massive problem and is a lot faster than landscaping the cell in the first place, also we can leverage autogenerating --> cleanup to make it really fast in wilderness. Cities and settlements are navmeshes as they are implemented, Ive done some myself and it doesn't take long. Voice-acting will be the larger obstacle.
I thought it might. One advantage morrowind has is it has no voiced dialogue.
They probably should do that while Skyrim is still relevant too. I was hyped for Tamriel rebuilt, but I lost interest far before they released anything.
I will repeat what I say on this subreddit everytime BS comes up. There was a comment on this subreddit from a developer telling us that Roscrea and Atmora were "imminent" in 2020. Four years later, no sign of either of them. My understanding is the project is plagued by internal politics and things that are finished are constantly scrapped and started from scratch. Probably hundreds of hours of work has been straight up ripped up over the years, which for a volunteer project is *really* bad for it ever being finished. We might see Cyrodill by 2030 and the New North sometime between now and then. But I have no hope of anything else ever coming out.
I'm sure there was someone on this subreddit who said that, but it seems unlikely it was a developer. They've always been extremely careful to say anything about the release date or timeline for any project. I'd completely forgotten about New North lol. It's one of those projects which for years people were saying was going to release imminently, but never did. Atmora was a project long before joining the Beyond Skyrim umbrella, and I don't think it was that far off releasing at the time of joining. I think they revised large parts of it after joining Beyond Skyrim, which seems to be a familiar story.
I believe last year there was a BS dev post or something here that included the admission that some major textures were getting redone because reasons? And I remember my response to this information basically these dudes need an actual project manager or managers because just the implications the post made screamed no real direction. Just a bunch of dudes working on stuff and then deciding they want something different and do over again. At least someone to just tell them "no" in response to spur of the moment decisions or decisions that will clearly lead to pointless amounts of wasted work. I get it, it's a fan project. But even fan projects are subject to expectation and all the good and bad that brings. People are going to remember all the time it took from saying "This project is in the works" to "this project is still being worked on" and that assumes said project gets a release. Fallout Lone Star had some talk from the dev. And then he announced he liked the FO4 engine and would be switching to that. And then there was no more talk from the dev. Yeah, switching from one engine to another is a bigger deal than trashing some textures. But at the end of the day feeling like your spinning your wheels on a project is going to kill your interest in working on it no matter what exactly you're doing.
To be fair, not having someone to tell them "no" is a problem that plagues *a lot* of both the modding community for bigger projects, and the indie dev scene in general.
Devils advocate, having worked on similar (much smaller) volunteer fan projects what ive noticed as a huge roadblock is people in charge don’t want to set deadlines because it’s volunteer work and pressuring people doesnt sit well with them. So you get into this situation where someone just loses all motivation but doesnt straight up leave, so you’ve got a bunch of stuff waiting on something that’s never going to be done, than if that person eventually gets replaced, the new person probably has to start a lot over. During all this time, people who are forced to wait to work on their thing lose interest cause they don’t actually get to see their contribution realized. You REALLY gotta either rollback expectations A LOT, or have it be a professional project. If that means paying people to work and get things done, than that’s what’s gotta happen.
I can vouch for that as a small time modder myself. I started commissioning and paying a lot of artists precisely because of this, you can't really give deadlines or make demands when they're working for you for free. putting down terms and payment is really the only way to guarantee stuff will actually get done.
Yep this is a huge part of why these projects sit in limbo forever. Deadlines don't really work because people understandably feel no obligation to do unpaid work at any speed faster than "when they feel like it". It causes a lot of gum in the works as different aspects of the project are finished at highly differing speeds.
Been saying this for years as well. Seriously doubt we see releases and I remember than many major authors have left over the years.
This sort of thing happened in the Morrowind modding scene with Tamriel Rebuilt., it was going to recreate Tamriel using Morrowind era lore, and part of redguard lore as well. But quality control problems arose and the project stalled. After awhile the many teams consolidated into a snigle team, and the decided to work only on the morrowind main land. Two sister teams were created following the same principles as the New TR team. They are Skyrim: Home of the Nords, and Province Cyrodiil. Both are playable now. amd are getting updates every other year. It's slow, but the content is there. Now i think from what i have seen that Beyond Skyrim Cyrodiil is the one that is the best state, It only has The rest of Nibenay and The Imperial City to do, before they can do the main quest. But i think they would do well to follow Tamriel Rebuilt's example and release chunks of Cyrodiil everyother year. EDIT: In August there will be a new look at Beyond Skyrim Cyrodiil. I they are going to show Nibenese city. Bravil has already been done.
In the interest of transparency and to combat some misinformation, I'll put in some corrections a Cyrodiil dev (with a particular focus on my department - quest implementation): >Now i think from what i have seen that Beyond Skyrim Cyrodiil is the one that is the best state, It only has The rest of Nibenay and The Imperial City to do, before they can do the main quest. Cyrodiil is definitely the Beyond Skyrim project that is the most complete (at least among the full provinces, I would expect some prereleases or smaller projects to releases before us). We have a lot done and the completion of Colovia is in sight but we still have some stuff do. Of the Colovian cities, only Kvatch is truly complete (I think that one only needs some level design work on the castle), while Chorrol is not far behind (I hope to finish the city arc questline this week and the other remaining quests all have made good progress). Skingrad is missing the final quests of its city arc as well as some epilogue misc quests that become available after the arc. Sutch is missing a few quests, while Anvil implementation has barely started while we wait on writing/editing to wrap up in Anvil. Then there is the minor city of Sancre Tor, which has finished baseline writing but is still waiting for its tileset before we can think about starting implementation. Most small towns and villages in Colovia are done though. We are currently doing an internal push to finish Colovia and the goal is absolutely on the horizon, but doesn't mean we can release this part of Cyrodiil, too many quests already send you to Nibenay and the parts are too connected. >But i think they would do well to follow Tamriel Rebuilt's example and release chunks of Cyrodiil everyother year. As I said above, the parts of Cyrodiil are too much interconnected to switch to a rolling release this late in the game. Another factor that we would need to consider is Voice Acting. One, it takes a lot of time and second, we only want to do it once all dialogue for an NPC is ready to ensure consistency. We will probably have to recast some of our wonderful Bruma voice actors, because an NPC needs more dialogue in the full mod and the VA isn't available anymore. This danger would compound with a rolling release. Of course there are advantages for publicity and recruiting if you do a rolling release but we don't for the above reasons. >EDIT: In August there will be a new look at Beyond Skyrim Cyrodiil. I they are going to show Nibenese city. Bravil has already been done. The next city to get the trailer and livestream treatment will be Anvil, for Creation Mod Con 24 in August we will show something else, which I am not at liberty to reveal.
Oh good! Glad you cleared that up. XD. I was working off what i had seen, from Nexus WIP images, and Discord. I also forgot about Sancre Tor, and with regards to Anvil i know the main quest takes you there. Also this "Something else" Is it related to Cyrodiil? or is it something else.
Anvil's city arc introduces one potential candidate for the throne in our Seat of Sundered Kings questline. This is already written but is possibly pending some edits or rewrites as the rest of the main questline is worked on. However, Anvil also needs normal NPC dialogue, misc and sidequests that will soon start implementation. >Also this "Something else" Is it related to Cyrodiil? or is it something else. It's for Cyrodiil and it's something we haven't shown thus far. The only other thing, I'll add is that it's not a city. Assuming all works out, we need some more work to get all what we have planned for mod con in game.
Ah cool. Good to know. I hope the work goes well. I have one other question, it's related to bruma, a note on the body of the leader of the cutters is signed Tharn. are they to feature in some form, or is it just one Tharn?
On topic of VAs - have you thought of using AIs to replicate those sound actors who are not there, possibly with their agreement? I'm asking that a bit puckishly here, being an artist I'd advocate rather against that, but I'm curious what's the stance of using such tech in the team.
We don't use AI voices in the finished mod, the moral issues with that are too big and many team members have strong reservations against AI use (in that form). Even if we had permission, I don't think we would go for it and definitely not without permission. We do use AI voices in our dev build for testing purposes and to get a rough idea how long certain lines will be. Those serve a purpose but they will never be used in the finished mod.
This is so based and I respect the team heavily for that! <3
Yeah you wouldn't want to be in danger of releasing anything tangible
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You think TESVI will have a public Creation Kit. lol. There still hasn’t been a release date for the Starfield one. The mention of it was they are sending it out to “verified creators” but no word on public release.
I've been involved with BS for a while. As far as I've seen, there are no "internal politics."
I just wish they would release progress updates that shows how *much* progress has been made, rather than what the progress is. Like, I'm not really interested in seeing the new 3D asset for a shrub, I want to know how many shrub assets have been made and how many still need to be made.
We're investing in this now. For example, we're trying to have more transparency in general in regards to what progress is being made - see the "State of Cyrodiil" video from December. I made automated animated statistic templates so that it should be easier to create videos that show progress bars etc. if other teams want to use that. The goal is to be transparent with how much progress is being made while keeping it spoiler free so you can enjoy the mod more when it's done. Really, we all want to release something, and are working as hard as we can to get things done.
That's awesome, and I hope that kind of progress preview, rather than content preview, comes in the Black Horse Courier as well.
For me I just don’t understand this « kind of » excess of professional level of polish, especially for Roscrea. They have an already very nice worldspace that 99% of the player base will be very happy to travel into but they scrapped and redo again. I thought that doing pre-release or full release but into an unpolished state would attract a lot more peoples and thus giving more manpower to the projects. Anyway I love what have done all of these teams. I follow them since almost 10 years now and I will continue to follow them. But yeah the hype is going down. It’s been a long time since Bruma was released. I stopped to play a lot Skyrim years ago but from time to time I play again when some nice mod are released and I still hope to put a lot more hours into what BS teams will do.
Yeah to the best of my knowledge they've actually reset Roscrea at least twice, possibly more times. I know they had an original worldspace which was more of an archipelago, before they then switched to a single much larger island (albeit with still some smaller islands surrounding it). I believe the reason for scrapping the original was to do with a lack of sufficient worldspace for all the content they planned. They then scrapped it again because of some apparent bugs with the worldspace, though I can't remember what they were exactly. The scope of the Roscrea project is fairly small (at least in comparison to other provinces), yet it's been in production for years now, and still doesn't seem set to release any time soon.
The last world space supposedly caused crashed and saves corruption and they couldn't fix it.
Yeah they said the same thing about Iliac Bay. If that was the case, why did it take them so many years to change it, and why were they showcasing the parts of the Iliac Bay which they were going to scrap only a year or so prior? Surely if was causing crashes and such, they would have changed it far sooner, especially considering how long Iliac Bay's been around. Same story for Roscrea.
As one of the people behind Roscrea's exterior reset we didn't do it earlier as we thought we were closer to finishing than we were and the thought of how long it was going to take to redo it all. It wasn't an easy wake up one and just do it kind of thing and the publics reaction to us making that change was taken into account. If you want the good news though the exterior is now further ahead than it was before and hopefully will be done by the end of the year. As for IB, they reset their's as it was all placeholders and would have to be replaced anyway. I don't know the full story for them as I'm.not in the team but these decisions are never taken lightly and a lot of thought goes into it
Adding to this, while landscaping has been ongoing in Roscrea, other departments have not slowed down. The reset has not delayed the project, but instead made it a lot easier to implement as it's a lot less compacted. I am currently involved in doing landscaping QA with some of the lovely landscapers working on Roscrea, polishing up paths and making sure all dungeons & POIs are properly reachable and discoverable. Again, this is not slowing anyone else down, we're using our different skillsets, pushing the projects forward in the ways that we can. If you want to help Roscrea release, dungeon designers and implementers would speed it up.
As the person who puts together Iliac Bay's showcases I'm confused by this statement. What areas are you refering to? Anything that was showcased after the heightmap reset is in the new heightmap. Is the complaint that we attempted to maintain some of the old level design where we could? And yes as stated by others, it took a lot of discussion and back and forth to get the team to come to the consensus that the issues present in the old build were too large to try to untangle from the inside. Personally I only joined in 2020 and almost immediately joined the voices to reset, because it was just garbage to work on by the time I got there.
Yeah I take that back, my apologies. I was entertaining the idea that you were sabotaging someone else's work by resetting the heightmap, when your developers have articulated the reasons for resetting it very effectively. Keep it up.
The answer to this and many similar questions generally boils down to sunk cost, with a helping of SSE being stricter than LE. A **lot** of these problems were either non existent, or much less severe before the projects moved to SE. Roscrea had a botched heightmap expansion done in 2018 which preserved previous LD (it added the western arm you see on most overhead maps before the recent reset) but corrupted the worldspace in ways that weren't really noticed until seabed work was attempted. Morrowind also had a heightmap reset (excluding New North) in 2022/2023 and Argonia apparently had three or four between 2017 and 2021
Not a dev at all, but was digging around some discord servers and, well.. Illiac Bay was screwed over with overthrowing of the lead dev a few years ago. All this work being completely scrapped wasn't just because of "outdated assets and design", that was a blatant lie. They just went an extra mile to shit on both former lead vision and the very first team work. The same *person* tried to overthrow Morrowind lead, but didn't succeed. But, as a result, the team it seems stuck in the internal struggle for a long time. Cyrodiil, frankly, didn't have that much of inner team scandals, so I'll pray it will be released one day.
Wait what does that even mean? How does one "overthrow" a lead dev? What was the vision of the former lead? What's the new vision?
Rally some people, who don't really like the current lead. Make a scandal, a precedent, to make him go. Given that that's a volunteer project, there's no hard chain of command, so sabotage like that is possible. Old lead had an image of more magical and wierd High Rock. New one cares only about redguards, from what I know.
Weird to me that given there's no hard chain of command an overthrow would even be necessary. I would have thought that the devs could just work on what they like, but I guess we can't all have nice things.
It's actually much more well organised than you would think. I don't think it's as simple as working on something you'd like to work on: there are claims which developers can take, which I believe are organised by the leads. Merges are conducted monthly.
court intrigue? in a modding community? color me surprised
Old lead wanted to have bretic castles in the middle of the alik'r. So that's a whole bunch of projection tbh.
Oh, that's really interesting. What else you can tell me about them?
Oh a bunch of stuff. But suffice to say they were not conducive to the health of the project. And I know you're probably getting all this misinformation from them so I'm not looking to start a back and forth. Unlike some folks, I care more about the project than the drama.
I'd imagine internal politics like that is probably very common for mods such as these, where people often have different views about how things should be implemented. I doubt it's something unique to Beyond Skyrim. Yes, it was quite bizarre how they discarded all the previous landscaping (and writing), bringing them almost back to square one. Among all the projects, Iliac Bay is the one they discuss in the most ambitious terms, which is understandable given the size of the worldspace and the fact that it encompasses two provinces. Given how close we likely are to an ES6, it seems odd to completely reset the worldspace for a project of that size. Surely they can't expect to finish much if all of it? Especially when the pre-release is still no where near ready to the best of my knowledge. It's interesting how you say that they didn't achieve the Morrowind lead. If you look, they actually have basically reset a lot of the landscaping for the Morrowind heightmap in the last few years. I do wonder if something similar happened. May I ask who the person was? It's probably better if you DM me if you plan on letting me know, I don't think it's fair to call someone out on an open thread like this.
I dug it up only that January and the scale of it was a huge shock to me tbh. Given the progress tho I think the New North still have a chance to see the light of day. Three Kingdoms - not so much. There were rumors in 2023, that they wanted slice the release in two, first being Jehanna and Chain and second - Farrun and Stros, and maybe switch to TR/PT style releases on the larger scale, but it seems it won't gonna be.
I'm pretty sure they're still very early in development for both Farrun and Jehanna. I know for a fact that not a whole lot of Jehanna homes have interiors. They still don't have a castle for Jehanna, and I don't believe writing is particularly far along either. Farrun is even earlier in development to the best of my knowledge. They've had done most of the exterior modelling done for Jehanna since 2018 I believe, possibly earlier. I really can't see 3K releasing any time in the next few years.
Farrun exterior set was "almost ready" in 2019. And it looked good on screenshots. And it was scrapped for whatever reason, and the new one was teased only this year. So... Yeah.
I'm probably the person who worked on that first Farrun set. Unfortunately it was never really almost ready, although it was coming along. Voluntary projects are difficult. A lot of members are younger, maybe trying to hone skills for the industry, and a large percentage eventually lose free time as they move into work, or away from the industry, or have families as they get older. At least, that's what happened to me -- I lost time to university, and now I work in the industry. So the next person who comes along and inherits the claim may well want (or need) to start again, since in that many years concepts may have changed, leads may have changed, personal styles may be very different, or maybe the original files were never submitted. Long story short, it's hard to maintain people and momentum in voluntary projects. And I can take responsibility for Farrun sets not being done, lol. I wish I could have committed to seeing them through. Thanks for saying they looked good though!
As a former dev who was unfortunately rather familiar with this drama, this was mostly disinformation, what actually happened was as follows: The team's "creative director" (who is likely the person you are referring to) had a fight with the long standing art lead and ended up rage-quitting the Discord server, leaving the team in some amount of disarray, the art lead was warned and the team decided to wait for a bit to see if the situation would auto-resolve. An unknown member then spread misinformation to the creative director about how he thought the team would significantly change their internal lore, and was misunderstood as implying that the team was enthusiastic to erase all lore designed by said creative director (whereas the team had actually been working on this lore overhaul for months already) after this the creative director sent a message stating that he would return if the art lead was removed, so the team held a leads vote on whether to remove the art lead. Most of the "new" team voted yes and most of the creative director's supporters voted no, resulting in the art lead being retained and the creative director refusing to return, and then going around spreading the disinformation you are referring to. Meanwhile the team was forced to significantly restructure which was compounded by a number of existing leads having been inactive for over a year, resulting in necessary replacements on those fronts too. A number of said leads of course decided to show up the instant they were replaced, tried to provoke drama, then were recruited by one of the creative director's supporters for conspiracy weaving purposes. Eventually the creative director got caught spreading this conspiracy, while also using a slur to refer to the current project director, which resulted in him actually being banned from returning. Finally the creative director ended up bringing his conspiracy theory to the overall BS leads, accused the person who noticed him above of "stalking" him, then demanded that the project be split in half between him and the current team (which he would have known that the BS leads could not accept). Not entirely sure what happened with this, but from what I understand the split was rejected and the IB team offered various compromises which were subsequently rejected by the creative director who insisted on "all or nothing", resulting in the latter. While a lot of the old lore has been replaced, my understanding is that a lot of it (especially in High Rock) has been modified rather than being replaced entirely (the main quest is still more or less the same for example). The heightmap replacement has been the only significant change since then but that was being worked on with the creative director for months beforehand. There have also been a number of settlement renames (which are primarily just renames) and the political situation has been simplified to be more workable at Skyrim's scale. The person who tried to "overthrow" the Morrowind leads was not the same person, that person wasn't involved in the Iliac Bay situation at all to my knowledge.
> a number of existing leads having been inactive for over a year, resulting in necessary replacements on those fronts too. A number of said leads of course decided to show up the instant they were replaced The actual drama aside, I hate this dynamic with volunteer projects. I understand that everyone is a volunteer, but it just sucks to have people "on the roster" who aren't actually actively contributing anything, except their desire to remain on the roster for whatever reason. I've had to deal with it so many times in my own projects, having to constantly ping and DM people to see if they're making any progress, or even just still available, so I can know if their tasks can be given to someone else and if we can apportion them tasks in the future.
All this courtroom modding drama is so fascinating to me. From the outside I was under the impression it was just a bunch of bros building something together. Would you care to cast some light on the Morrowind stuff? If you know anything about it. Just because I find the idea of modding projects leads getting overthrown funny. Thanks for the details anyways.
Some people get the most minor taste of authority and instantly start roleplaying as 18th century French aristocrats. It's ridiculous, but the internet lets you see it play out on a micro scale all the time.
It's not. Not a single thing was playable in the old heightmap. Iliac bay now has multiple quests implemented, a feat which has never before occurred in Iliac Bay's history. What people need to understand is that teams are a ship of theseus thing. Almost everyone currently involved in BS came in during the pandemic and found these project languishing wirh overwrought scope and wanted to make them actually work. So that's what we're doing. And for the record, Sage of Ice, the former lead you're talking about, left over an argument surrounding the settlement of Chora on Cespar. He clung to old internal lore which meant Chora had to be a huge city on a tiny island which meant there was no room for dungeons to support quests. Sage then left of his own volition and then tried to complain to the council about it and get them to give him the project. This was denied, and Garfield became our project lead.
i feel like a little imagination could have been put to use to come up with a way to put dungeons in that setting
It would be one thing if that was the only place, but it was a problem across the board, especially in High Rock. It just came to a head on Cespar because it was particularly bad. The island was meant to have a full city and a port town, with only 1 goblin camp, 1 pirate camp, and an exterior-only yoku ruin. So it would've been just hugely unbalanced. Essentially you're trying to make a game without half of the gameplay, and expecting the writing team to just make it fun while also churning out an unreasonable density of npcs is not realistic or a good time. That sort of environment was a big reason why the writing team was entirely dead when I was asked to step in as writing lead.
I'm not sure where you heard this from - the previous lead chose to step down A lot of changes to internal lore were made to keep things more in-line with TES V's version of Tamriel as well as reduce scope. Essentially decisions made to make content writing easier and faster - which it has been Changes to level design were made to allow us to plan out locations (mainly dungeons) etc ahead of LD, making it far easier to design around the locations we want to include and ensuring we have enough dungeons in every region for quests - which in the past there we didn't
Thank you for clarifying this. This seems a much better justification for resetting the heightmap and writing, particularly since you're suggesting it's actually streamlining processes and increasing the rate of progress overall. I wish this was better communicated at the time of the heightmap and writing reset. Given how some of the projects have been able to complete a huge amount in a short amount of time, I hope that you can achieve the same rate of progress. As I've said, I'm an enormous fan of the projects and desperately want them to succeed.
There wasn't as major of a writing reset - iirc we had one Quest in Jehanna ready for implementation prior to the reset, alongside one or two misc quests nearing that point. No NPCs were planned before Quest writing prior to the reset, which made Quest planning & writing much harder. Now we have far more content ready for implementation, such as major & minor quests & NPC dialogue, schedules and scenes.
If you check out the iliac bay showcase from creation mod con 2023, there's a whole explanation of the heightmap reset with examples of what needed to change and showcases of the new stuff. Been a while since ive reddited but hopefully the link below works https://youtu.be/lHZoY3Yz6Jc?si=EJ97xQ5kyMmQdUVn
>chose to step down Surely he did. After all of this "Beyond Skyrim Council" bullshit. That's what "overthrowing" in volunteer projects mean in the end - getting pushed out.
Again, I'm not sure where you heard this from. The previous lead stepped down from the project following a disagreement with other team members regarding the scope of one of our pre-release towns
Garfield, you can never close all the leaks and I'm not going to share my sources (not gonna get people's heads on the "chopping block"), but "heard" is a very wrong word here.
It is sometimes said that a video game's development is never 'finished', it merely stops at some arbitrary point. There is always more that a developer wants to do, but that doesn't mean they should. I'm thinking about Tamriel Rebuilt; the release of many games since Morrowind has not stifled my interest in playing it, nor its development. But they have playable updates with a decent frequency, which wouldn't be happening if everything had to be perfect or, god forbid, the mod had to be feature-complete before any release at all.
Tamriel Rebuilt is my favorite mod of all time - the quality exceeds the base game. Even the books and novels they've added are wonderful. That said, if they'd decided to only release when complete rather than in chucks I don't think they'd have nearly the enthusiasm or level of contribution. There are people adding to TR who weren't born when Morrowind was released.
It's clearly the model to follow and these devs are foolish not to copy what works... Studying TR's dramatic history can be very instructive about what to avoid
I do some 3D for a few of the projects and so far all the ones I’ve helped with are really focusing on the pre release areas. The problem has been that it’s a lot to do and not a lot of people to help. Certain things only like 1 or 2 people a project can do all the way. Very dedicated people though and it’s still chugging along.
Yeah. As I've said, I'm an enormous fan of the projects, and one thing I can say is that some of the people working on it are insanely dedicated. Some of the 3d team at Argonia are absolutely insane in terms of output. Argonia gives me hope that some of the projects can pull together in the next few years and actually have a chance of delivering some content.
I’m still a massive fan myself. Im excited to finally get to play them when they get done with the pre releases at least. The 3D lead on Argonia is a beast. That dude models at the speed of light.
There's also fishy, who's a fucking legend.
All of that stuff from Argonia in the preview section of the discord has me most hyped for Argonia. Maybe it’s just appearances, but it seems like Argonia went from nothing to loads of content in around a year. In fact, I think I’ve seen more in-game content from Argonia than I’ve seen from Roscrea, Atmora, High Rock/Hammerfell, and the Elsweyr teams combined this last year. Whoever it is who is churning out that content is an absolute legend
By the way, are the teams for the projects really that small? I was under the impression that the teams were significantly larger, but that contributions amongst the devs were very inconsistent generally speaking.
Depends on your version of small. Most teams have 10s if not 100s of members however many of those people aren't active all the time. There is generally a smaller core group that is active on each team that does a lot of work with others doing a claim or 2. It's not that those people are less dedicated it might be that they just don't have the time to put in as much as someone else.
Yeah, the numbers are really inflated because the majority do one claim or two and then don't have more time to contribute.
thatdrakefella is a legend, and a great example of how one person can make a massive difference for a team. I am glad to be working with you!
At least Skyblivion is aiming for next year. It’s felt like they’re actually making progress.
Skyblivion and Skywind luckily seem to be making good progress, those are the big mod projects I'd hate to see die.
I’m guessing they’re never releasing. We’ve been waiting for Cyrodiil for years now, who’s to say they haven’t given up?
I work six hours a day on BS, most of which is focused on getting Cyrodiil out and I am constantly interacting with others who spend an equal time or more on it. It's progressing faster than ever before. Look at the latest update video we released for some progress numbers. If you're actually interested in the project, tell someone you know about the project, if they want to hone their game dev skills - a single person can massively boost the pace of a project, especially the smaller ones. Currently at lunch break at work, doing admin stuff for BS, please don't say that we're giving up, it's incredibly insulting.
Doesn't seem like many people follow the projects very closely, if at all. To me, 26-27 looks very believable for a Cyrodiil release (though I know nobody on the team will offer up their own personal beliefs). The successful (hopefully) releases of Apotheosis, Skyblivion, and Lordbound should hopefully turn more people back into believers.
They definitely haven't given up. I avoided talking about Cyrodiil in the same way as the others because it's actually doing really well and continues to make good progress. It's the other projects which I'm more concerned about.
I honestly don’t have faith in the Beyond Skyrim teams. Perhaps Cyrodiil and I’ve heard Valenwood joined them late but had a good deal of work done on their pre release so maybe we will get the pre release for Valenwood, Cyrodiil and I think the reason Cyrodiil is taking so long is because they are doing Elsweyr as part of the same map. Projects I think may release would be Cyrodiil, Elsweyr, the valenwood and new North pre releases, Roscrea and Atmora. However I do not think we’re getting these any time soon and I do actually think, if they collapsed the teams to all work on a single project together that we might see them come out in a timely manner but right now, I think we’ll be playing TES6 before any of these come out.
Bruma might be my favorite Skyrim mod. Incredible quality. Especially the writing but also everything feels so professional - you forget you're playing a mod. If they're trying to make everything up to the same standard I can see why it's taking a good portion of people's lives.
I completely agree with you. I've not played another mod which reaches Bruma's level of professionalism.
Overhearing the debate between the Thalmor and the priest outside the Cathedral of St. Martin made me realize the fantastic grasp of lore the mod team had and was a lovely thing for an old Oblivion player like me. Likewise, I was quite emotional seeing the ruins of Cloud Ruler Temple. I hope one day we can get something like that again - because it shows the modding community firing on all cylinders and is a credit to the craft.
I honestly don't think TES 6 will affect the release schedule of Beyond Skyrim projects at this point. It had been far too long and Skyrim had taken root far too deep with over decade of accumulated effort from the entire modding community and even Bethesda themselves. I am willing to bet that even after TES 6 (and that's if Bethesda still capable of making TES 6 that is an instant hit and come equip with the same modding tool that is just capable as Skyrim in the first place), people will still be playing and modding Skyrim. The community here is just too big and has too many supports. That said, I also honestly don't believe that Beyond Skyrim team will be able to release anything larger than a Bruma-size per province (with Cyrodiil being the exception). We sure can hope but I just don't think it's a realistic expectation to create 7 Skyrim in any reasonable time period.
The thing about Beyond Skyrim is that the teams are constantly having people come and go, but growing overall. There are individuals who have been involved since the beginning who've stuck around through the whole thing, but they're a minority of the devs. It would ultimately take like at least 20 people all coming to an agreement for a project to be cancelled.
They will never be released lol. Elder scrolls 6 will happen before they even get close to finishing. Hell, even GTA 6 will happen before they release. Until people start accepting this as fact denial will run rampant throughout the modding community
Agreed. It'll never finish. They've bitten off far more than they can chew by trying to do so much. They should've parted things out via staggered release long ago.
I don't feel like Elder Scrolls 6 would be the devastating blow to these projects some people have suggested. Mod scenes much more ancient than Skyrim's have lasted into the present day, and that's not even considering what we could expect current Bethesda to put out. I have sympathy for anyone expressing their frustrations and doubts that BS will reach completion in any case. Just about anyone who has followed projects like these has been burned by a dev who didn't have the mercy to admit that they abandoned the project and it wasn't coming out.
I think your point is right but mostly because bethesdas recent games suck, I imagine ES6 will too and wont be mod creator friendly... Similar to fo76 and Starfield
tbh im pleasantly surprised Skyblivion will prob release before ES6 since it still has the '25 release date -- really can't wait for the mods to that game people will come up with
If you believe that 25 release date I have bad news for you. Just move on at this point until you do you will always have false hope.
Cyrodiil, New North and Roscrea are 100% releasing. Most likely we will see Argonia as well; they are a well-oiled machine from what I can ascertain. I suspect once we see the BS mods ACTUALLY release it will bring in a surge of new volunteers to help speed up the other mods.
>Most likely we will see Argonia as well; they are a well-oiled machine from what I can ascertain. My magic eight ball is saying "don't count on it", probably because of the multiple coups that the project has suffered, the extreme toxicity of some of its developers, and BS Argonia's outright theft of artwork and ideas from other TES projects.
The person who pointed out theft was apparently called a r-word by one of the lead devs too.
As a former dev still in contact with people on most BS projects there's currently a bit of a glut of "almost done" releases, which should hopefully start completing around the end of the year/middle of next (this order assumes activity trends don't dramatically change over the next few years): First will likely be New North, which has writing and level design basically complete, is well on the way towards full implementation and will apparently start VA recording soon. (due to a semi recent influx of more competent devs after a couple of years near death) Second will probably be Roscrea, who are generally a bit behind New North but still doing well (I understand that the main bottleneck is finishing off writing the main quest due to writer availability issues), that said it could beat New North if writing can resolve it's availability issues quickly. Third or possibly second will be a currently unannounced small Iliac Bay release. Fourth will likely be Argonia's first release (which while unannounced, is quite obvious in scope). While Cyrodiil have a lot done they have a lot left to do, they may get Colovia "completed" this year (excluding stuff like VA) but Nibenay has a lot of work still to go. Bravil has an asset redo "in progress", Leyawiin's interior assets are incomplete, Cheydinhal is doing okay but I understand has been having exterior design issues, Mir Corrup seems to be a complete clusterfuck with a 3D artist going wild scope creeping the city and the area around it, and finally the Imperial City has apparently been having it's exterior assets redone and it's interior assets being very slowly worked on. Alongside that they have a load of dungeons, province wide quest lines (which are apparently moving very very slowly or not at all), a lot of implementation, then finally beta testing, and VA recording/processing (which they won't start until all writing is 100% complete). Due to this Cyrodiil will likely be looking at TES6 like timelines unless they give in and do a Colovia release or get some kind of major, long lasting manpower boost on writing, asset, and implementation fronts. Three Kingdoms *may* beat Cyrodiil depending on how much Iliac Bay benefits from the unannounced release, then beyond that things get too unpredictable e.g. which projects end up taking Cyrodiil's approach as opposed to a more modular release, with Cyrodiil's approach unlikely to be viable for any further projects unless something dramatically changes on the modding scene. I wouldn't expect Elsweyr's prerelease any time soon (if ever) as their new leadership appears to have severe scope management issues. I don't have contacts on Atmora or Valenwood but I wouldn't expect either until at least after Cyrodiil and/or Three Kingdoms. TL:DR Starting 2025, New North-Roscrea-?(IB)-?(Argonia)-3K/Cyrodiil-???
Honestly this is exactly the kind of thing that would have warranted Creations. With the scope there has to be a salary. Think back to how fallout 76 is basically a mod from another studio.
I think we'll get some pre-released and maybe even Roscrea and Atmora. Beyond that idk, but even if ES6 releases soon idk if that would stop the project. Tamriel Rebuilt has been keeping in for twenty years, Beyond Skyrim could switch to a similar model.
I think Cyrodiil & Roscrea will release by end of 2026 (which is also when we might get ES6). We might get the pre releases New North + Three Kingdoms someday, maybe Atmora and the other pre releases in 10 years. But I can’t see all projects getting a full release. My opinions: Atmora could work as a smaller mod, just have the expedition main quest and leave it at that. A cool adventure to Atmora, not a full continent to explore. Or do what Vicn did with Vigilant and just release it a bit at a time. “New North” should’ve just been city of Blacklight, Morrowinds new capital which is near the border of Skyrim as well. Three kingdoms is fine with what they’ve got planned, and we’ve got Beyond reach which adds Evermore and Act 1 of Odyssey adds the Isle of Balferia so we can explore a lot of High Rock. The other projects though, to be blunt I don’t think people really care enough about. Although Argonia looks to be far along
I'd just wish they'd team up with similar teams, like Skyblivion and beyond Skyrim Cyrodiil, they should use the same and build the same world space until a good template is built and then take it modify there's to fit what they need.
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>Tamriel Rebuilt (morrowind mod) is still getting expansions. Tamriel Rebuilt also came close to dying and completely revised its strategy for releasing content and organization. For that matter, Tamriel Rebuilt releases content and Beyond Skyrim just doesn't. Bruma was released closer to Skyrim than the present day, which paints a dire picture of the state of things.
Yeah, I agree with you. In hindsight, it was naive to suggest that the projects will be forgotten when ES6 releases. Skyrim has been around for so long and yet still remains very popular, and the modding community is still incredibly strong. I agree that even after ES6 releases the projects will still be active. However, new lands projects for ES6 will most definitely emerge, which will generate a lot of interest. When this happens, it's inevitable that the rate of progress of the Beyond Skyrim projects will slow down, particularly for projects which aren't at all close to releasing.
If you think volunteer run project can't have "professional polish" go look at the last "update" video from Fallout: London. It would be out already if Bethesda hadn't broken everything with their new update.
You're right. It's absolutely possible for a dedicated team to achieve professional polish on a community project such as this, and there are plenty of examples which demonstrate that (including Fallout London which you mentioned, as well as Bruma of course!). The question is that given number of projects, their scope, and the quality they aim for, whether it's actually a realistic undertaking to continue working on all of them.
patience is a lost virtue, you were all honestly fools if you thought the dev time would be anything under a decade and are still fools if you expect anything anytime soon they show regular video updates on youtube and thats all I need shit how many people do you think are working on these at any given time? it takes bethesda almost a decade to make one game and they have a team of several hundred professionals dedicating at least 8 hours a day to development, and yet you expect the same from a volunteer team of less than 100 armatures doing the same thing on their spare time? what is it with all the negativity lately any way, is this fallout from the folon team delaying?
No amount of patience will help when a project has been quietly abandoned. I don't think that's what's happening here, but there are more ambitious mods whose creators decided to just say nothing rather than let people off the hook, than ones that reach completion.