Hey everyone, it's Elijah Houck and Justin Hardin, the team that brought you http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16949. Today, we're announcing a brand new project many times larger than even Alton, titled Ethas: Embrace of Destiny. Below is a both a description of the mod itself, as well as an introduction for those not familiar with our past work. The community support for Alton was overwhelmingly great, and we can't wait to bring Ethas to the masses as well. We'll add posts as we develop the mod, giving you guys an inside look at the work that goes into a project like this. We might also write a few posts (or even make videos) that are more learning-oriented, so you guys can see the workflow that worked so well for Alton.

Trailers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkhIGR-SFxI


Select Images (the rest can be found on our http://www.moddb.com/mods/ethas-embrace-of-destiny)

http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/21/20603/Rilekarth.jpg

http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/21/20603/Just_an_Epic_Screenshot.png

http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/21/20603/SteelClaymoreScreen.jpg

http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/21/20603/Wasteland_Dwarven_Ruin.jpg

http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/21/20603/Elven_Ruin.jpg

Ethas: Embrace of Destiny is a modification for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim being developed by Justin Hardin and Elijah Houck, the team that brought you the mod Alton, Il. for Fallout 3. In Embrace of Destiny, you will explore the lands of Arelia and Virardan, two countries currently at war with each other. Your role starts you out as one of the five famous Captains of the Arelian Army. Choices will be made, and sides will be chosen. The only question that remains, is, will you become the hero, or the villain?

Ethas will bring the player to a huge new world to explore, and lets the player choose at any time whether to play Skyrim or Ethas. Whether it be the the sweeping valleys, lush forests, or harsh, volcanic wasteland, Ethas will immerse the player in an experience rare to the modding community. Ethas will of course be free for all to download, and is planned for release on both Steam and various other modding communities.

Elijah Houck and Justin Hardin, the creators of Ethas, are certainly an experienced duo. In 2009, Elijah started development on http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16949, which took players to his hometown in a world over twice the size of Point Lookout. Elijah would continue work on Alton for almost three years, finally releasing the mod on October 27th, 2011. Alton was (and currently still is) the largest mod for Fallout 3, and won File of the Month on Fallout3Nexus for the month of October. It wasn't only Elijah that brought Alton to the masses, however. Justin Hardin was essential to the project, creating amazing trailer and in-game music and sounds, brilliant voiceovers, meshes, textures, and even finally getting the GECK to generate LOD meshes for Alton (which is usually unheard of for such a large world).

With this experience under their belt and Alton completed, Justin and Elijah looked forward to Bethesda's next title, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Since July, they have been hard at work writing quests, creating artwork, and even preparing in-game assets as they await the release of the Creation Kit.


We'll be keeping this forum thread up to date with posts and information, but most importantly, we'll be posting stuff on http://www.moddb.com/mods/ethas-embrace-of-desti. We hope you'll enjoy watching the project grow, and we can't wait to release it to ya'll in the future!

sounds good. I'd love to see it.

Come one, come all, the first screenshots of Ethas: Embrace of Destiny.

http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/7752/westernreachcreek.jpg

http://img406.imageshack.us/img406/9441/sendinn.jpg

http://img803.imageshack.us/img803/8164/plainsofsorrow.jpg

Best of luck to you and your team, Elijah Houck.

And now for my screens;

http://img406.imageshack.us/img406/8999/tesv2012040622084932.png

http://img804.imageshack.us/img804/1585/tesv2012040622553187.png

http://img861.imageshack.us/img861/7928/tesv2012040723274008.png

Enjoy

This looks like a great mod by a 1st class team with a proven track record can`t believe there arn`t more comments on this one they deserve support

Hey there, I remember Alton. I was really excited to play it until my FO3 messed up and I lost all of my progress. From what I could tell though it was some real quality work!

This mod will almost definitely be one to look forward to and remember, screenshot's look great! I agree with the previous poster, modders with your experience should be getting more of the limelight!

Edit: I like the "contact" page on your site, a very professional touch!

It looks good so far and I'm especially interested in the wasteland. Good Luck!

Just so you know, we do have some a few extra pics on our website at http://www.ethasproject.com/. We also have a blog (http://www.ethasproject.com/apps/blog) up there we will be doing a some tutorial series throughout the development of Ethas (Elijah has already put one up), and even some extra stuff we like to share/write about with our time (we'll even be showing off some blog exclusive screenshots that help detail Ethas's development). A big goal of our tutorial series is not only show you the overall development of Ethas, but to give you an idea what you can do to get your own projects started and developed. And for more on the website, we even have a sampler of a song from the soundtrack being composed for Ethas. In otherwords, visit the site every once in a while for some cool extras. Any updates we post on here will be on the site, but as stated already, we do have a few extras, so keep your eyes peeled.

Some interesting news- http://www.ethasproject.com/ is now fully HTML5! What does this mean? For one, HTML5 is a lot more optimized and less resource-intensive than Flash. Another major plus is that instead of having a clunky mobile-optimized site for phones and tablets, the full site is accessible from all devices.

Anyways, work on Ethas goes well! Plenty of progress on the Western Reach and other secret areas that we can't show off. I'll put up a new tutorial soon for all of you thinking about creating a large-scale project, look for that in the coming weeks. In the meantime, here's a nice image of only http://www.risingsunofnihon.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Coconut-Crab-1.jpg

The website sure looks fancy :3 I like those black fade-ins a lot.

BUT WHY THE CRAB, WHY. I should retaliate with spiderception, but I would be hurting myself in the process, I fear.

Thanks! I was actually quite pleased how it turned out.

And yeah, I'm not afraid of spiders, snakes, or any other standard creature that people are afraid of. But that crab? Holy crap.

Are you not? Are you? http://www.omgif.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/so-cute.gif D:<

Not to be completely off topic, I'm gonna ask if you have any ETA on the mod

No set ETA. This is a large multi-year project, significantly bigger than what was done in the Alton mod.

Alright, something I've been planning for a while is happening tomorrow.

18 hour modding day #1!

I will literally be modding nonstop (well, besides eating and those other unimportant things) for 18 hours, running from 8am-2am, maybe a bit later. This is something I plan to do multiple times during the summer, seeing as I got a ton done when I did it one day for Alton. Should be fun!

All support to you on this - Ethas seems to be one of the most interesting Mods anyone is working on at present, Mod is not really enough at the size you are talking about this is an expansion pack - Steve

Thanks for the kind words! And that's true- in this case, it's essentially an entirely new game.

It's good to see a decent sized project being worked on.

I look forward to it.

Alright, so some pretty exciting news.

We got "Version Control" working! For those that don't know what it is, it essentially allows us to work on Ethas simultaneously within the Creation Kit, thus essentially doubling the amount of work we can get done at one time. This is exciting news for us, as before we were using a system to where only one of us could work on Ethas within the Creation Kit at a time. A huge thanks to Crosshair from the SureAI team for his tutorial on Version Control, as it has been invaluable to us in order to get this to work. We plan to show off some more stuff later this summer, and now that our work flow has just been greatly improved, we're even more excited to share with you guys.

But, hey, who am I kidding, ya'll want a screenshot. So here's one for now.

http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/1441/westernreachmouthm.png

Keep in mind that we're not procedurally generating anything, all of the objects and textures are hand-placed by either Justin or I. Just thought I should mention that, since generation seems to be a pretty popular choice. Do I have anything against generating exterior detail? No, I used it a bit in Alton. But still, I prefer doing it by hand.

Hey guys! We're gearing up for our summer progress update, which you can expect in the coming weeks. Get ready for plenty of exciting stuff, including episode 1 of a podcast we'll be starting.

Before we record said podcasts, any questions you guys have for us that you want us to answer?

We've got some exciting news! It's not our Summer Update, which will be next month, but none-the-less awesome. On Wednesday, we added a new person to the Ethas development team! Everyone give a warm welcome to Andreas Stavaas! We're very excited to have him and his experience with us. Some of his past works include being a former member of the Black Mesa Source development team and being a part of Sure AI during the development of Nehrim: At Fate's Edge. He'll be doing a few things, including level design, scripting, and modeling. We're excited to have him on the team, and can't wait to see all that he'll bring into the world of Ethas!


Also, keep in mind that we plan on doing a podcast soon as well, so if you have any questions, feel free to ask, and we may include them.

Neat.

Western Reach? North Hammerfell or West High Rock? More Forsworn to kill!

Color me interested!

(By the way, I was just kidding, I know it's a new landmass and all about it. )

Yeah, the whole "Western Reach" thing was purely coincidental.