Idea: "The Elder Scrolls: Cosmos" Space Exploration Mod

[Glitchipedia]

So I've had this idea for quite some time. It started out as nothing more than a lore-ignorant premise just for the sake of fun, but it has grown considerably since then. Here's the pitch.

 

Centuries ago, the mortal plane of Mundus was designed and built by Magnus, the god of magic, together with the et'Ada. However, when it became evident that such a venture would require many of them to sacrifice their power, Magnus fled to Aetherius, tearing a hole in the sky which became the sun. Some et'Ada stayed behind and gave rise to the mortal races, but most followed Magnus, tearing smaller holes which became the stars.

 

At least, that's what we have always been taught....

 

THE ELDER SCROLLS: COSMOS

 

Using a starter pack consisting of an ESM (containing all available planets) and several ESPs, you choose one ESP as a starting planet and, by extension, which races you are permitted to play as. Each planet is themed after a different genre or franchise (or the real world, if you choose Earth) and comes with appropriate playable races. All types of Earth human would prove the greatest challenge to play as, having no innate magical talent and below-average physical attributes.

 

You go through a short quest on your starting planet to unlock space travel. The full-size ship appears in the worldspace and can be explored in its entirety. On the bridge, the captain's chair functions as a door, ejecting you into an underwater environment designed to look like deep space. At this point, you are equipped with a costume made to disguise you as the spaceship, and spaceflight uses the same controls as swimming. The ship costume is equipped with:

• A life support system (a piece of equipment with a Water Breathing enchantment—if broken, it will unequip itself and the ship's atmosphere will vent/you will suffocate)
• An energy cannon (an invisible bladed weapon with scripted visual effects) ideal for combating rival spaceships (specially-designed aquatic creatures)
• A shield generator (an invisible shield)
• Engines (a piece of equipment with a speed fortification enchantment—if broken, it will unequip itself and the ship will become much slower)

In deep space, several doors made to resemble wormholes allow access to the different systems, placing you back in the ship's interior. Separately-downloaded add-on ESPs make the other planets visitable—this lets you pick and choose which genres/franchises you're interested in visiting.

 

Each planet has a quest to obtain some sort of token that upgrades your ship, giving you better life support, engines, shields and weapons (i.e. the number of tokens obtained changes which ship parts are scripted to equip on you in space). After collecting five of these tokens, your ship is fully upgraded and a quest is unlocked which takes you beyond the boundaries of the mortal plane and into Aetherius itself....

 

 

....and it is here that the boundaries between lore and non-lore are well and truly broken.

 

You actually get to meet Magnus, who is no god, but a Bethesda employee! It turns out the et'Ada were actually his development team, and Lorkhan was his boss. The mortal plane of Mundus is exactly what it appears to be: a simulated world.

 

Magnus goes on to explain that the tools used to build Mundus have since fallen into the hands of outsider gods—otherwise known as the modding community. This means that all mods, whatever they may be, are perfectly lore-friendly.

 

 

Visitable Planets

 

Obviously, Nirn remains visitable and largely unaltered, though perhaps with a main quest delayer in place. The idea would be to keep it compatible with most other mods, the only additions from this one being two new questlines (one if not chosen as the starting planet). Like all the other planets, access to Nirn is optional.

 

I really want modern-day Earth to be accessible—it lends itself to a space exploration game and could appeal to fans of multiple genres.

 

Personally, I'd love to have other planets themed around various movies, shows and other video games, but should that prove beyond the realm of possibility, simply basing them around other popular genres would do nicely.

 

Why haven't I done this yet?

 

Because I lack the time, skill and patience necessary to use a 3D modeling program. I can do plot-writing and voice acting, and could maybe learn to do scripting, but meshes and textures are out of my reach, at least for now. Whether the future will bring with it a change to this harsh reality remains to be seen.

 

So why should you consider helping?

 

Face it, if you made it this far, the idea has you interested. Don't try to deny it. :tongue:

 

In all seriousness, if you have an interest in helping to make this mod a reality, please don't hesitate to say something. I will be truly grateful for any and all contributions, constructive criticism included.

[Germandeathkittiez]

A space mod is one thing I'd love to see in Oblivion. By space though I just mean space... making entire new planets would be a massive undertaking (I assume you are suggesting Cyrodiil-sized worldspaces that only look like planets from afar. My vision of what this mod would be like is based on how when you fly up, you can just keep going. So if there was a way to make it look like you are leaving the atmosphere and seeing Nirn get smaller behind you, you could take any flying machine (maybe a dragon) and just fly away, no need for water or different worldspaces. I don't know much about how the sky works in Oblivion, but it seems like it would be quite simple and feasible to me to turn the distantLOD or weather effects into space/Nirn in the distance, as you get to a certain altitude. Then space will just be a black background with planets, and as you get closer they transform into distantLOD - then you fly into the atmosphere and just see fog below you as you would high above Tamriel. There would only be a small part of any planet that one can actually enter, of course, because most of it wouldn't exist, so you'd either get border regions and have to find the right place to enter the atmosphere, or have the planet simply be much smaller than it actually appears (I think there are space games that do this, but I can't remember them). I hope anything I said makes sense, because it seems to make sense in my mind. I'm barely any good at scripting or the CS, and have no idea about Texturing, but I'm willing to do what I can to help make this a possibility.

[Glitchipedia]

That's a cool idea, but I'm not sure how one might implement that while still making it possible to choose which planet your game starts on. Putting everything in the same worldspace is best accomplished by means of an ESP, whereas separate worldspaces are best placed in their own ESM and modifiable by ESPs. Making an ESP masquerade as a master is possible, but tricky—we must ask ourselves whether smoother transitions are worth the extra hassle.

 

Also, I'd rather not be able to fly into space on a dragon. While that might work for players who come from magical worlds, those who don't would need a different explanation for why they don't suffocate, freeze, succumb to solar radiation or get torn apart by micro-asteroids. Or more obviously, why flapping wings would work in an environment with no air. Of course, some people have a more forgiving suspension of disbelief than I do, so maybe I'm the only one who would worry about such details.

[Germandeathkittiez]

Considering that other planets will probably be smaller than (Cyrodiil), which has many mods expanding the heightmaps to all of Tamriel, I think this could possibly be done by making space within the same worldspace as Tamriel, as it would be rather easy just to have a lot of space with nothing much in it. The borders of this space could have the planets appear as part of the DistantLOD, but as you get really close, you get sucked in to a loading screen, and then you are either on the ground or up in the sky somewhere in the planet's worldspace. So if I understand what you were saying correctly, an ESM would contain the other planets, modifiable by their own ESPs, and the ESP for space would not have to have anything dependent upon it. This would allow one to start themselves off on the planet of their choice, which would not require space in order to play on. I think portals between planets are a cool idea too, but shouldn't be accessible until you have done a quest or something to get to that planet on your own. When I said dragon, I was just giving an example, as I usually fly around on a dragon. Dwemer spaceships don't seem too far out of the picture; it would be just like Side's Sailing Ships in space. But the hard part would be the take-off in the atmosphere. I like your quest idea; I don't mind a bit of unlorified quirkiness in my game, it kind of reminds me of Rachet and Clank 2 where you go to all the planets and upgrade your ship and finish all the skill points and get to go to the Insomniac museum in the game where it shows a bunch of weird stuff the company did while working on the game. I would totally love a mod like that for Oblivion. I think it should start simple though, starting with individual "planets" in their own worldspaces, which would probably just be big enough to include a quest or two at first, to make it realistic, and then space itself and flying ships could be added later, and in the meantime some space-like loading screen would suffice, when you get in your ship. I really don't know much about modding so I don't know how feasible this sounds, hopefully it makes sense though. I am into writing storylines for weird worlds beyond Tamriel though. I could totally help out with that, and I could try to learn more about the modding skills that would go into this. I still think space itself should be open-world, because I think that's totally doable. The next thing we obviously need is more people interested in this.

[Glitchipedia]

I suppose that would be doable. No real reason why space has to come with the other planets by default. Sounds simple enough to implement.

 

Here's an interesting thought, what if each planet had its own unique spaceship? Nirn could have a Dwemer-inspired vessel, whereas Earth might be more Star Trek-ish (just as an example) and so on. It would mean more work, but it might help give each planet a greater sense of individuality.

 

Which brings us to an obvious question, what exactly are the other planets besides Nirn and Earth? Whether we go the genre or franchise route, they'll need to be noticeably different from those two. With Nirn being a Tolkien-esque medieval fantasy world, and modern-day Earth lending itself to life simulation and FPS elements, what other avenues sound explorable?

[Germandeathkittiez]

Perhaps Dune... I was just thinking we could use our imaginations to make more mysterious worlds of our own. We could start with the generic "Snow Planet" "Water Planet" "Jungle Planet" etc. I gotta go right now, I'll add more ideas later.

[3rdtryguy]

I've been wanting to do a mod for years now called "Mission to Masser."

 

Check it-- Umbacano had a habit of sending you out looking for stuff without saying why, and his reasons turned out to be much bigger than you expected.

So, what about those 10 statues?

They dont really look like statues, do they? Also, why did they go to so much trouble to keep them away from the humans when White Gold tower fell?

To me, they look more like fuses. Don't they?

 

I envision a mod where you have to steal back those statues and figure out where they really go. Once in place, they allow you to activate a teleporter deep in the Old Way sub-basement beneath the tower. That takes you to Masser, OR it takes you to a remote place where the Ayleids and Dwemer once worked together to build rockets and a launchpad to fly there the hard way. Either way, you eventually do some questing and finally find yourself on the big red moon of Masser, looking up in the sky a huge Nirn above.

 

That's when the trouble starts. You're not alone, and the locals weren't expecting company.

[Glitchipedia]

I hadn't thought of using the planets' satellites as explorable locations. That would definitely help expand the scope of the adventure.

 

Only problem I can think of is that the use of Masser specifically might cause inconsistencies for people who like to replace it with stuff like the Death Star. I suppose we could always address that in the mod description.

[Germandeathkittiez]

I forgot all about the moons, glad someone mentioned it. Secunda is actually a moon that orbits Masser. Perhaps a quest could even be included about an evil plot of the people existing on Masser to send Secunda flying into Nirn and you have to use alteration magic to stop it (of course what would be cool is if you fail the quest). I like the subway idea, it could add a level of mystery to the Dwemer Subway mod if we could get permission to use it, or if we just add to it we won't need permission. Perhaps the White-Gold Tower was actually once a magickal Sky Elevator that allowed access to the moons when they align, created in order to be sure to prevent a catastrophe in which Secunda falls to Nirn. Maybe it's also a giant cannon of alteration energy to blast Secunda back into orbit. The more I think about this, the more crazy ideas I will get, so maybe we should first keep this practical. :D

[3rdtryguy]

Take a look at Nibenay. ( the Imperial City )

 

See how different it is from all the other old ruins?

See how it's shaped?

 

It's a giant sattellite dish / teleport beam/ repusoblaster whatever. Plenty of potential here for it to be much more than just an ancient city, and again, look at those old Ayleid statues. Metal, with Pins, a crystalline core... they're fuses, I tellya! The fuses that are needed to let the old city do what it was really made for...whatever that was.

 

Do you have the Deserts of Anequina mod? The terrain of Elswheyr would be perfect for Masser, a desert full of big reddish rocks.