Hello,

I am Muspila and you may know me as Worsas at Tamriel Rebuilt, Province Cyrodiil and Skyrim:HOTN. I would like to do discussion on something that has been moving me quite a bit lately:

The group of people that are still left modding this game and the way we interact. To me it sometimes looks as if these few people would keep banging into each other about their opinions and how they think things should be done.

The other thing is that I have sometimes gotten into situations when I would have liked to keep a certain consistency among the province mods I've been working on but people often weren't aware of changes and the way certain things were handled in each others mod and anything added or updated in the other mod had to be arduously transported over, assuming you could be troubled to do so at all. Some province mods don't showcase their work very often and only few people are aware of them or they are thought of as dead or inactive but really aren't.

I have had some talk with SGMonkey and Wollibeebee months ago on his Project-Tamriel and he set up a site to create an additional link between the currently existing province mods. We also had many ideas to create a functioning platform to promote and support each mod, but things became quiet when we stopped to frequent each other. The site is still up nevertheless and you can find it here. Perhaps there is going to be a development yet:
http://project-tamriel.com/

I don't want to speak about Project-Tamriel in particular now. I'm thinking further towards mods created by people outside of the province mods. The mods naturally are mostly designed to function within the original game without taking the province mods too much into account. Moreover people have conflicting opinions and attitudes and mods often cover similar areas but are somewhat exclusive to each other.

I wonder if it was possible to establish a common modding effort towards the goal of creating a heavily extended (by province mods and content mods) and updated (by graphical replacers and completion-mods) gameworld. I believe to see a general movement towards creating mods that are visually and content-wise lore-friendly aswell as appealing. There is the graphical overhaul mod that assembles quite a few pieces of modding work to create a composition players can easily install. Something like this, but more fitted to the individual world regions would be desirable at some point, but on the larger scale that we will hopefully one day reach.

There might be structures to achieve an overarching collaboration on this gameworld in future. But my main concern at this point is that people try to stop conflicting with each other and think about how they can mutually create the absolutely best-possible gameworld. This is not done by just sticking with the state of the original game. Sounds, 3D- and texture-art, dialogue, places, no matter if created by professionals, can be improved. Where is the point in going to back to the game as it was 11 years ago? There are few people left that create texture replacers with unedited fotographs or do Balmora House mods.

You guys should, in any way, face towards the future and do better and more. You can improve on this game without destroying atmosphere and turning things upside down. But to ease such a development it could be helpful to do some more intercommunication. There is a reason why people at TR have often refused mods by people since those sometimes removed some of the atmosphere. But I believe that opposedly a mod can strengthen and fully flesh out something only started by Bethesda when they made this game.

Overall, I agree that it'd be nice to collaborate as much as possible to create a lore-friendly world in TESIII. I especially like the idea of sharing economical goods between projects so that items from Skyrim will show up in northwestern cities of Morrowind and northern cities of Cyrodiil. And possibly some architectural overlap as well.

At the same time, I disagree about avoiding conflicts and steering towards lore correct mods. I'm of the opinion that this community is already too concerned about conflicts and remaining "lore correct" (terrible, limiting term) and I think that's a poor focus which can staunch creativity and innovation. I'm all for patches being made after the fact if people want to use mods together or want to make changes; but if something is groundbreaking I really couldn't care less if it's incompatible with every popular mod already in existence.

Obviously this is something I'm a bit conflicted about myself. I like to have a lot of good mods in my game and I err towards being lore-friendly at least, so something like Lyithdonea was created to be compatible with TR since I want to play them together (and because I knew people would [censored] if they intersected). At the same time, with my Of Ash and Blight mod, I really couldn't care less if it's incompatible with MCA, Creatures, MOSG, Morrowind Rebirth, and every house mod on Vvardenfell.

So I'm very interested to see where the Project Tamriel concept goes.

The idea of sharing objects between provinces is good, but I'd really like a new economy style in that case. I'd imagine those skyrim goods would be more expensive in Morrowind as it is an import. Maybe OpenMW will allow an easy way multiple regional economies.

I have to respectfully disagree with Melchior on the lore-correctness, as I do not think it staunches creativity. To remain within lore-correctness, you have to imagine the world, see the world at work, and imagine what would fit in that world. That takes a fair bit of creativity I'll agree on compatibility though. It is nice to have that in mind when making the mod and adjust slightly for that (if it is an easy fix), but having to build your mod around another one sometimes hurts the mod. Ideally though, I'd like to avoid conflicts where is it relatively easy to avoid. The ash/blight mod above is a good example of a mod where conflict is not a simple thing to avoid....

Which isn't something many creative minds want to bother with and they often get shot down in this forum.

Though for me personally I love the challenge of making some of my mods fit into the existing lore while also expanding on it. Both Lyithdonea and OAAB focus on that.

I think when it comes down to it, an individual modder will do as they please. After all, a lot of us aren't modding to please everyone, but rather to satisfy our personal ambitions and artistic goals for this game. That's not to say a modder can't or won't try to make their mods appealing to others, I know I often focus on the opinions of others and trying to create mods that not only I, but others will enjoy, I'm just saying that it's not the be-all and end-all focus. If making a mod compatible to as many mods as possible, or be as lore-friendly as possible would creatively stifle or make modding significantly more difficult for a modder, I don't think they should focus on that. It's also important to realize that no mod will be "lore correct", as the only thing that can really be agreed apon as "lore correct" is the unmodded game itself, and not even loremonkeys would totally agree with that. As Melchior said, it's more about trying to find a balance where a mod fits into the existing gameworld and either is based on or builds on existing lore. Not every mod has to do this, but it certainly helps when one does.

What it all comes down to is the individual modder, really.