I haven't gotten Skyrim yet, so I realize this is old news for most of you by now... but I just found out about how you become a Thane for each town by helping several citizens in that town. I realize this isn't exactly a new idea in RPG games, but I haven't seen an example of it yet in Oblivion unless you count faction quests. The reason I'm excited is because way back in May 2010 I announced this as a feature of my Ravensgate mod (yea... it's taking a while I know). In order to become the big cheese of Ravenholme, and therefore the owner of Ravensgate, you have to do several quests for the townspeople of Ravenholme first to earn their trust (and disposition).

Coincidence? Almost definitely. Still awesome for me? You betcha!

lol im not gonna flame, ecause ive talked with buddies before on a game like how to improve or soemthign thatd be fun that id do and thn find out they did just that int he next one...even though i had nothing to do with it or anythign like that i guess its childess but it did feel good.

I think Beth does patrol the forums and check out mods for ideas. We've seen some of our ideas in Skyrim too. And you can certainly see that flora is now shows that it's been picked and containers show as empty when you hover the mouse over them, just to name a couple of examples. Oh, and lit windows too! Can't forget that one. I'm probably forgetting several...

It's cool when it happens. My only concern is that if it takes a long time to get your mod out, like it took us, I just hope people don't think we stole the idea from Skyrim!

Well, I think that Beth ported many good ideas from Oblivion's mods to Skyrim. Actually I think that, among other things, that is the factor that decided of a great success of the game, why it is so good. I could write out several ideas just out of hand: shield bash(and critical strikes with melee), bow sway, spells being cast as long as the key is held, spells and powers similar to what we could see added by many Oblivion's mods, spell impact, improved sneaking detection(can hide after attacking), many companions present by default, companions commenting various situations( )... there's really more of it.

Agreed - even these days it's still rare to see a studio that listens to its fans. Bethesda though is leading the pack in that category, I think. Oblivion used ideas from several Morrowind mods, and now Skyrim seems to be doing the same, which is fantastic! Add their interaction with the fan community and the quality of their work, and they're definitely one of my top three studios.

I agree with this. It's really great they're listening that much to people's demands or preferences in their last games and mods for them for features in their next games.

But Oblivion modders getting accused of stealing ideas from Skyrim is just silly. It is exactly the other way round in an abundance of things.
Really, I perhaps used Oblivion and its mods far too often and in far too big numbers and variety, but now every single step in Skyrim my brother takes my mind only comes up with "hey, that's a 1:1 port from an Oblivion mod I know, cool!".

It's far too much already for anyone ever stating an Oblivion mod took from Skyrim without being wrong. The whole game feels like "almost" (big emphasis!) everything was taken from Oblivion mods, if you know too many of them.

Again, this is definitely not a bad thing, so don't get me wrong. Accusing an Oblivion modder for "stealing" features from Skyrim, while it clearly was Skyrim stealing (with permission) from them in the first place, though is just ridiculous and silly.

I prefer the term "borrowing". We're all here to help each other out. (Plus, according to the EULA for the constructiin set, Bethesda has te right to use some or any ideas created by modders aside from copyrightable content (such as custom images).

They stole my dragon's spiky back design! I demand an artist's tribute pay!!

Yes there are many, many mods and ideas from modders that are now implemented in vanilla Skyrim, without a doubt.

All I can say is spoilers aboud in this thread, if one has not played Skyrim!

Please insert spoiler tags!

Fine...



Happy gaming!
--Tomlong75210

For a myself I mod a game because there is no stock game that is perfect. No mater how great there is always something that could be improved. The issue is always for me either how much do I enjoy the game or how easy is the game to mod? The more fun I have the more I will learn a hard process to modify the game, The less I like the game then the easier it has to be to modify. But no mater the case the game engine has to first allow what I would like to accomplish.

Why would the company allow people to modify their games? Allowing them to change can allow them to copy or steal their game, for competitors to steal their ideas and put out similar products. (Look at all the clone and conquer games, or the tons of first person shooter games) This is too much for most companies to allow and for a very long time the trend had been to more control over the user rather than more freedom for the user. What the makers of games always forget is choice, it is simple we do not have to accept what they offer and can go else where.

With these two factors I would like to come to the benefits that allowing your game to be modified, First there is limited time when making a new game and there will always be unfinished things, you have either patches or new versions of the same game to fix this. But allowing free workers to find and track the worst of these allows your team the freedom to not spend hours of paid time to track them down. The player who mods the game gets a way to customize and the developer gets unpaid work. Both parties win, or can win, if there is a good way to work together. Seeing what is downloaded the most along with what features fit with the original vision of the game makers is the best way to get a new feature added.

The real task that the team at Bethesda has had to contend with has been sorting the thousands of mods to see out of them what are gems and what are tweaks, what is a copy that changes something and what is true creativity that has added something new to the game. While in theory this is a simple task, too often most people do not know the difference, to them both are new and as such equal. I can only hope that the developers can continue to develop new ideas and not become dependent as others have on following rather than leading. Only time will tell.

That's correct.

Andalay, I can promise you that the Skyrim version of Ravensgate will most definitely have something similar to http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27150. Not sure on the ETA, though - the Oblivion version is taking me far longer than originally planned.

Those are static, right? Need to include some that the player can fill. Looking good though.