» Tue May 17, 2011 9:44 am (You may also be interested in: http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1067649)
(Also, Brumbek has converted the in-game movies from German to English: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=33639).
INTRODUCTION
Arktwend is a German TC (Total Conversion) for the Morrowind engine by SureAI. Some time after Arktwend was finished, Golden Thief did an English translation. This project is a continuation of those efforts.
About Arktwend
The game takes place in a land called Arktwend. The size of the landmass is around 30 square kilometers, making it larger than Morrowind. The player traverses idyllic forests, birds are flying through the air, animals such as
sheep, deer, rabbits, wild boars and wolves cavort on the ground and fish swim underwater. Leaves fall from trees, grass and grain sway in the wind.
Stormwend, the largest city in the game, is about the size of Vivec. A large part of the game takes place in Stormwend, which is the intellectual and cultural center of Arktwend. There are many guilds you can join: the City
Guards, the Clerics, the Gladiators, the Brotherhood or the Thieves Guild. And rumor has it that somewhere in the woods of Arktwend there still is a guild of Hunters that has kept hidden, a group of rough boys.
The player can join each of these guilds and receive quests from them. In Stormwend itself resides Kanzler Brutus, a power-crazed tyrant. He has withdrawn into the big tower on the outskirts of the city, where the fate of the whole Arktwend will be decided. Furthermore, there are small villages and castles throughout the country in which the player can do side quests.
The player begins his adventure in a monastery where he grew up, blissfully ignorant of the faroff land of Arktwend. Outside the monastery the whole wide
world awaits him. But strange things are happening in Arktwend. Putrefying revenants roam the frontier and long-forgotten dark forces seek a return to
power. The Age of Heroes has begun!
Features
- New and original main quest.
- Six Guilds
- 1000 NPC's
- CA. 30 sq. km land mass
- Almost a thousand interiors
- Flora disappears after being picked, then regrows after a certain amount of
time has passed. - Several "runes" when used, impact various attributes of the player.
- Dimension doors which one can use to enter an alternate dimension.
- New weapons, armor and items
- New Soundtrack
- German Speech
INSTALLATION
- Before you install, it is recommended that you choose an install location for Arktwend that is different from your regular Morrowind directory. This is because the Arktwend install will overwrite files, including Morrowind.ini. You can find some ideas on how to create a separate install at this gamesas http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=832760. In any case, what you want to start with is an installation of Morrowind GOTY.
- If you have not already done so, Run the German installer: Arktwend_DvR_Install_v2.0.0.de.exe http://www.sureai.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=43&Itemid=64. This gets installed on top of Morrowind GOTY from the first step.
- Then unpack the Arktwend_English archive to the install directory (where Morrowind.exe is located) and verify that Arktwend_English.esm is put into "Data Files". This will also put a Morrowind.ini in your Morrowind directory, which must be used for playing Arktwend. The vanilla Morrowind.ini will not work with this mod.
- Activate Arktwend_English.esm via the Launcher or Wrye Mash. This is the only plugin absolutely necessary for the running of Arktwend English. You should not activate any of the plugins that came with the German installer.
- Review the optional plugins in the "Data Files/Extras" sub-directory, copy the ones you want to "Data Files" and activate them.
- Start your game.
A Note on Compatibility
Due to the extensive changes in Arktwend English 3.1 it is incompatible with all previous versions of the English translation of Arktwend, and so previous savegames will be invalid with this new release, and you will have to start a new game. Also any mods, patches, or other plugins made for previous versions are not supported for the latest version.
In addition, due to the many differences with the German (and other) language version (notably CELL names), mods made for Arktwend English will not work with other language versions of the game.
3.1 Release Notes
The changes in 3.1 are numerous, and they are mostly enumerated in the Changelog file that will be included in the release.
Here is an incomplete summary of changes in this release:
- 3.1 is based on "Arktwend EMaster v2.014.esm", but it includes some aspects of "Arktwend English.esm" (v3.0 by Golden Thief) and also "Arktwend 2.0.0 (DE).esm".
- The goal is to make a stable, unchanging basis for future mod development that conforms closely to the original German version. (A more detailed list of the goals is given in the included Readme).
- All known sources of crashes have been fixed (non-persistent summoned critters, use of position(cell) while in menu mode, active spell effects from non-persistent casters, etc.)
- One rather huge change was to switch all merchants from selling out of their personal inventory to selling out of merchant chests. This change included a complete change of all merchant inventories (hopefully they make a lot more sense now), and it also means that modifying merchant inventories in future mods will be easier. This also means that merchants no longer sell the really powerful artifacts. These artifacts have been distributed around Arktwend to find on quests or as Boss drops.
- A few of the more blatant "windfall profits" have been nerfed. You can no longer loot vast quantities of cheap grain from the prison ship and sell it at exorbitant price to Garb in Gron (the rice was way overpriced and overabundant). The clothes of the patron have been reduced in price by 10 times, as you could find dozens of bandits running around with gloves worth 5000 gold. The "rusty sword" used to have a value of 500 gold, but now it's just a cheapo sword, and other changes of this sort have been made. Money is still pretty easy to come by, there are still many, many valuable items that can be found fairly early.
- Continuing Golden Thief's work of "opening up" Arktwend, for the most part, the English version supports going places and doing things without regard to any plan or order. So collisionboxes have been deleted, and quests bulletproofed with the result that in Arkwend English 3.1, you should be able to roam and explore freely without worrying about pooching some quest. For example, previously you may have been required progress from stage A -> pass by some marker B -> be greeted by NPC C -> arrive at D, now you can proceed from stage A to stage D, and perhaps skip inconsequential steps B and C. This allows the player to play quests without wondering if they've skipped an important step, possibly screwing up the quest.
- Lots of dialogue has been rewritten to make quests clearer. Instructions given to the player are now more specific in terms of where the player should go and what they should do. And the instructions are now more often mirrored better in the journal entries, in case you forget where you are supposed to do.
- I added a fair amount of context sensitive greetings so that dialogue interactions are more natural. For example, the Hunters Guild quest line has been almost entirely revamped so that you get appropriate quest-context-sensitive greetings, instead of having to guess and find the right topic from the list of topics in the dialog box. Also the Hunters Guild quest rewards and promotion dialogue have all been revamped. So, become a hunter and have some fun. To a lesser degree, I've given the same treatment to the Clerics and City Guard faction quests, but those quest lines were in better shape to begin with.
- I enabled a couple incidental quests that weren't working: "The Heart of Shark'a" and "Magical Fabric".
- I overhauled all the quest journal entries to make it clear when a quest is finished. So the journal should now be more useful. In general, after a quest line of any length, you'll eventually get to an entry that says something like: "now it is time to continue my adventures", so you know that quest is done.
- I've re-anchored zillions of floating statics. So hopefully, you will not see any floaties about.
- I've smoothed many pathways, so you and your companions should not have any trouble navigating stairways and other places that were previouosly sticky.
- More followers now use the companion script so they do not give you any troubles following you on your travels.
- More NPCs carry torches, for night-time ambience.
- I integrated my readable waysigns from TAO into this release, they make the roadways more interesting to look at. And, should someone wish to re-texture them in the future, it should now be easier as they all use unique meshes.
- Numerous unused objects were deleted from the Master. If they are needed, they can be put into supplemental plugins.
- A number of duplicate objects were coalesced. Most notably, I coalesced all the Mytrehen NPCs, so for example, there
is now only one MytrehenBogen (Archer), of whom there are 57 instances. - All scripts have been checked with MWEdit, all files checked with TESFiles, and all dialogue has been spell-checked.
- Included some of the enemy balancing changes from TAO.
- Improved more immersive transitions: previously there were quite a few places where NPCs would just disappear in front of your eyes, or the PC would be teleported instantaneously from one place to another. Now most of these transitions are done during a "fade-to-black" so they are not as abrupt. And in some cases, instead of having NPCs take their leave by blinking out of existence, they walk/run off instead.
Quite a few of the changes will be quite subtle and you probably won't notice them unless you were looking for them. For instance, in previous versions, if you went exploring the snowy mountains to the north you could have accidentally triggered some markers and dialogue meant for a much later quest, which would mess up that quest when you went to do it later. Or you couldn't sleep in many of the beds/bedrolls you found because they didn't have the bed script attached. Or you could be charged for a crime for killing some mob after you because some of them had alarm settings ... Some angles of PositionCell were wrong, so now NPCs and player are more correctly positioned after some teleports ... NPCs instead of blinking out of existence to teleport off, instead they run off. So even if these little changes aren't very noticeable, hopefully you will find the game is more fun to play, and there are fewer cases of wondering why something seems out of place.
Feedback appreciated, positive or negative. Let me know how I can make it better. Thanks.
