Now that Skyrim has been out for a while, and the advent of the Creation Kit is upon us, I think it is about time we start discussing the future of Skyrim. We have all seen many posts saying things like, "mods will fix that". My question is, how much can we reasonably expect from Skyrim over the next 5 years or so? I am wondering on a couple fronts:
1. Engine-wise. We know that Skyrim is the second game released on the current gen consoles. Unlike Oblivion and Morrowind, Skyrim appears to be less of a generational shift, and more of an interation. It hardly pushes the graphical boundaries of today's PC's, and seems to have inherited the quirky flaws of engines past. With this in mind, can we really expect as large of an improvement relative to past games? Looking at the difference between vanilla Morrowind/Oblivion and their modded counterparts, the differences are astounding. However, both of those games were really pushing boundaries for their time. Will Skyrim have that kind of headroom? I'd like to hear your thoughts on this mattter.
2. Gameplay-wise. At the end of the day, old games will never be able to age perfectly graphically. What keeps us playing old games is the gameplay itself. Will Skyrim as a game age well? Do you think it will give modders enough meat to work with and add to? Do you think the world of Skyrim will be conducive to replays years down the road? Can it be added to? Are the cities open to expansion and reworking (ex open cities, better cities)? Will we be able to play Skyrim 5 years from now and feel like there enough to keep our attention?
3.Do you think the modding community itself will be strong, irrespective of the quality of the game? At the end of the day, someone has to create these mods. Do you feel Skyrim has a solid group of modding talent compared to previous games?


Any other comments would be appreciated...

im going to go out on a limb given beth's current PC support and say the creation kit will not be as expansive or user-friendly as the construction sets. with the removal of spellmaking, certain skills, seperate armor, attributes.... and everything else, modders are plain and simple going to have less to work with. less they can do with spells, combat mods cant take into account acrobatics, there is much less that can be done with leveling mods, though admittedly no one ever really made armor with top/greaves, they mostly merged them. still, the few that had complete sets were of high quality.

really, my big concern is just that the creation kit is going to svck. as a complete amateur even i could do all sorts of things with the CS, but im worried the CK wont allow me to do everything i could before, or at least not nearly as easily.

From what the SKSE team is saying, the new engine includes an object oriented scripting language. That's a good sign.

Please do explain. I confess myself a uneducated. What would this allow for?

Even if the CK is awesome sauce, the game needs to be popular for things to happen. Nexus admin obviously knows all the stats of traffic to his sight....let's let him speak....
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http://www.skyrimnexus.com/

So we're just about 2 weeks in to Skyrim's global launch and Skyrim Nexus has reached over 1,000 mods available for download, which is pretty damn impressive without an available SDK! And for you nit-pickers out there, I deliberately waited until we surpassed the threshold of uploaded save games, so that's 1,000 actual mods and game files, not including save games.

I just wanted to post up a little something about what I, and the sites, have been through these past two weeks. Not least because I don't want you to think I've been sat on my backside rubbing my hands at some sick traffic figures!

To say that I wasn't really ready for the influx of traffic Skyrim Nexus received was a bit of an understatement, despite my 12 months of planning! The last benchmark I had to go off of was the launch of Fallout: New Vegas and the subsequent launch of New Vegas Nexus, which at it's peak received just over 200,000 unique visitors a day. So I applied some logic to these figures and thought an extra 50% (so 300,000 UV) on those figures, perhaps 75% (350,000 UV) would be a logical top figure. But no, Bethesda out-did themselves, and we've been pushing more than 550,000 unique visitors a day (and some 4million+ page views a day) since the game's launch. That's over 6 unique visitors a second (and 46 page views a second). And that's just Skyrim Nexus, not including the other sites. This traffic not only causes massive server load issues (and we're using some real powerful servers) but bandwidth issues too. The Nexus sites alone are pushing over 600mbit/second at the moment. The file servers are pushing 1Gbit. So put the two together and the network is pushing some 1.6Gbits of traffic a second (that's 205 Megabytes of bandwidth a second). So if you're wondering why the sites have been a bit slow at times, that's why.

People criticised me when I put those video ads up on the downloads last year. I hope now you can at least partially acknowledge my foresight on the matter, being aware that Skyrim was coming out and that I would need the funds to pay for the ridiculous bandwidth and server bills. A note on those ads; they'll be coming off the other Nexus sites (they aren't on Skyrim Nexus) within a couple of weeks. These ads brought in much needed funds to pay for an upgrade in the site infrastructure. Prior to the release of Skyrim I had bought 2 additional super powerful servers to augment the 4 we were already using. And I've bought another 2 since then to handle and spread the load more. Folks in the EU will be getting a brand new file server by the start of December to download from, so stay tuned on that.

If you're going to take away one thing from this wall-of-text, it's this (aka. TL;DR:). It's been one hell of a ride these past 2 weeks and I'm glad we're all still here. I hope to continue to do good by you all for a long time to come. And watch this space, because super cool things are on the horizon.

I'll answer your last question first. Yes, TES has one of the best mod communities I've ever seen. The community support is there. As for question 1&2, I expect to see about the same sort of things we saw for Oblivion (it is the same engine after all). The only real question I have it this point is what exactly are they doing to the CK? They are spending a long time releasing it, is it all going into the Steam integration (waste really) or what? I could see a lot of the tools we've had available in the past maybe not being available anymore, we'll have to wait and see.

And lastly, to break out a specific point separately "Will we be able to play Skyrim 5 years from now and feel like there enough to keep our attention?". I don't think so actually, especially if new consoles get released and game development is finally allowed to move forward. Assuming the new consoles come with beefy enough hardware, DX11 capable, plenty of RAM, etc., new games coming out the next couple years will make Skyrim, even mod'ed Skyrim, look like a relic as the engine has no ability to scale. You'll never see DX11 features in Skyrim, you'll never see 64 bit exe's allowing for more massive content. Skyrim is already behind curve as far as what the engine really allows it to do on PC, pretty soon it'll be behind the new consoles as well. I don't see the community support for Skyrim 5 years from now being as strong as OB's is today.

Past Bethesda scripting languages did not support object oriented design concepts like classes or even functions. You can sort of envision a script as a recipe - a list of instructions for the computer to follow. Lets say you were writing a recipe for making a sandwich, completely from scratch. It would make things a bit easier if you could bundle the instructions for making bread as a separate recipe, and reference that from your sandwich recipe. Especially if you were writing a bunch of other recipes that called for bread. In the old scripting languages, you'd need to include the entire recipe for bread in every recipe that called for it. So scripts in those languages tended to be long and impossible to read. If you needed to tweak your recipe for bread, you had to hunt down every place that you referenced it and make the same changes over and over again. With functions (what the recipe within a recipe is anologous to) you can code things a lot more cleanly and efficiently, meaning gameplay mods and other stuff that requires code are going to become a lot more powerful, easier to write, and easier to maintain.

I'm pretty sure the new language (called Papyrus I think) supports classes too, those let you create your own complex data types with their own built in functions (so you could make, for instance, a "spell" class that included more functionality than the existing spells, things like sustained spells and damage scaling, all bundled in a single package.)

As somebody who mods primarily through scripts, believe me, this is going to make a big difference for a lot of the more advanced modders, and potentially attract more skilled programmers to the mod scene. And the fact that the scripting side has become this much more sophisticated makes me think the rest of the CK should be at least as flexible as past kits, or better.

I'm not really worried about the new Modding kit being in any way less of a leap forward than Skyrim itself. More than any previous ES game, which I have modded all extensively, I am feeling excited to work with Skyrim's content and universe.

Not with any previous title have I had this degree of inspiration. I have a whole tablet filled with quest ideas, character dialogue, and various other cool ideas that I would really like to bring into the world.

Unfortunately, with deaths in the family and being unemployed and essentially out of money and about to be homeless again, I doubt I'll have much time for that sort of thing. This whole release has really been wreaking havoc with my emotional state, as so much of modern society, being this amazing, shiny new potential that once again I won't be able to afford to participate in.

Sort of like looking through the walls of a glass prison at a future that is leaving you behind...

Not like I've been working 9-5 every day of my young life for the past 15 years or anything. Making decent wage in the tech sector as well. Now, what do I have to show for it, and a modest, minimalist lifestyle? Homeless, no healthcare, family dying, and defenseless against biotechnology.

It doesn't seem fair somehow, though I can't stand whining about it. I just hope that someday I get a chance to do the things I love without having to worry about starving in the street for not PRESENTLY working for some wealthy man (or company.) Talk about "what have you done for me lately."

/endrant

Hey Phinix I just sent ya a PM,

I'm kind of leaning this way as well, as you probably could have guessed from the OP. It seems like there haven't been too many notable technical improvements. That being said, I'm not knowledgable enough to really pass informed judgment as to the potential for improvements.

I think Skyrim will be just as strong. New generation of modders will have started their gaming with Skyrim learning and honing their craft. All the OB modders will eventually have competition or have retired or get tired of gaming in general while the fresh faces have taken over in their wake taken the torch and proceed on with new ideas etc from the next generation of gamers.

I think it's a better foundation than Oblivion was. Bethesda incorporated some functions from Oblivion modding in Skyrim. However, it certainly needs some improvement in some areas, spells and magic for one.

good signature sir. I approve.

Thanks!

skyrim needs less fixing than oblivion for sure. the one absolutely must have mod for me is a mod that adds faction reactions to armors and being able to wear disguises. having played fallout NV this just bugs me to no end. the other mods i want are obvious things like texture replacers, armor/weapon replacers and some balancing mods, definitely an open cities mod and mods that add more npcs. i will also be looking forward to something like TIE that completely unlevels the world so that you dont know what is going to be in any given area at any time.

bethesda seems to be getting better and better as i need progressively fewer mods at least coming from oblivion. in morrowind aside from graphics mods i didnt have many mods running other than piratelords creatures, GCD and morrowind comes alive. *shrug*

The new scripting language is like moving from MS Paint to Photoshop, trust me.

I still think Morrowind was the most moddable and easiest moddable game, mostly because of the lack of voice acting. With voice acting it makes it a lot harder to make good mods without requiring people to use subtitles (because the mod has no voice acting) or having to listen to awful quality "homemade" voices...

I think Skyrim in terms of "needing fixed" is about comparable with previous titles. It might seem like it needs more fixing, because it seems there are more game-breaking bugs in Skyrim than there were in previous games, whereas most of the problems in previous games were either cosmetic or fluff and not game-breaking so much.

It's as buggy as previous titles even more so in some aspects but overall generally the same.

Mods will have the potential of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3 same engine after all but nothing will come out spectacular in the graphics department or at least anytime soon due to it only being DX9 still. If DX11 was supported for more then just "optimization" we could see tons of improvement that would easily blast previous titles away.

I really hope so...

Skyrim seems to need less fixes, I don't know how many remember Oblivion and Morrowind @ launch but they had far more issues.

That's not to say it doesn't need a lot of fixes, though what Beth will consider fix-worthy will probably be much less than I do. I think mods will make it better than Morrowind or Oblivion though, other than certain things such as the main quest, factions, and setting which is sort of preference(Morrowind will still be my #1 for those). It's already better than Oblivion.