LE a daunting yet truly epic nexus wide proposal

[BaronVvoltage]

Theres something of a mod im willing to propose to all modders out there that will be so huge that tropical skyrim will seem like just a small mesh replacement. This will require the skills of some of the best modders on the nexus and i know this can be done...here goes.

 

I am thinking of a mod that allows the player to traverse time itself, and influence the events of the past, present, and future within skyrim. Imagine, going from the mid 4th era all the way to the night of tears, and preventing the attack...or saving yngol before his ship wrecked. How would skyrim have evolved then? Or think of what the events in a possible 7th or 8th era would go if the events of the dragonborn concluded....would parthurnax have resumed his old ways of tyranny? Would the world eater somehow reemerge? Would the daedric princes attempt to retake nirn? These questions and more could be answered and best of all, YOU can influence how they go.

 

There are some tasks at hand that would need to be accomplished to undertake and execute such an epic mod...

 

First, several skyrim-wide mesh replacements...im talking all npcs and essential characters would need mesh replacements to reflect events as they changed, and even complete replacements of them throughout the ages...

Every structure in skyrim from the cities and villages right down to the roads would have to be redone and replaced...

Quest scripts will be written to reflect world changing events, and of course animations and new models to reflect such.

 

I really think this is doable but as the topic title says, this is INCREDIBLY large but as a community, this would be such a project that it would make headlines and truly sculpt the game. I ask you all to really think about the possibilities and think how incredible this can be. Thank you...

[BaronVvoltage]

And of course i didnt even post this in the right thread.....moderators, do please move this over to the suggestion thread....

 

 

Moved per OP request

Bben46

[iXenite]

I'm by no means an expert when it comes to this sort of stuff, but doesn't this all seem a bit beyond what Skyrim's scripting engine is capable of? I mean, it sounds very complex to me. Just saying. Good concept though.

[BaronVvoltage]

I originally though no way this could be done but then i saw a mod somewhere that lets you actually change vis settings and textures on the fly. Now if ya apply the concept environmentally, then you can create a whole new era...if caliente and sevenbase can change how every woman looks and fnis change how every woman can move, why not a whole new clothing variant. Not to mention if ya think about it, there was less and less people in skyrim in the past (not discounting the entire race of the dwemer or the falmer race before they were nearly wiped out) so i dont think jt would push the in game scripting TOO far... I Mean hell, we could limit the times one can travel to key points in skyrim's history.

[megageeklizzy]

I don't think it's as simple as you seem to think. Even if you were to limit it to key points in history, you would have to make exponentially more and more changes - huge changes - with each key event included. Say you want to have 8 key events, each with three potential outcomes. There would be three potential outcomes from the first, then three potential outcomes of each of the outcomes from the first event, making a total of nine. There would be three outcomes of each of the nine outcomes from the second event, leading to a total of twenty-seven potential outcomes from only three events. If each outcome includes different NPCs or changes to NPCs, different buildings, different clothing, different technology, different civilizations, etc. making a single key event and its outcomes would take thousands of hours of work by many talented modders, animators, voice-actors, artists, and writers. It is a huge scale, and unfortunately, Skyrim modding is probably drawing to an end now, with the game being almost four years old and Fallout 4 announced for a fall release.

 

If you were somehow able to get the amount of willing modders to do this, there are a lot of things that would make even conceptualizing difficult. Traveling in time and changing events is not lore-friendly, and definitely not canon. Even if you don't care about being lore-friendly, you have to have somewhere to start, and there isn't really enough detailed lore to have any idea how events took place. There's also the issue of time travel, which is enough trouble by itself to screw up any attempts at this. If you can go backward in time, there's all kinds of timey-wimey stuff that will either go against the laws of time travel or go right over players' heads. If you go back in time, assuming you have full control of your character like you do in the game normally, you will have the ability to do things that will completely screw up the timeline, especially if the player is given control during major events. What if you kill Talos as he lands on the shores of Tamriel? If you do anything major, why are there no references to your acts later in history? If you return to an event that you have already been to, do you see you past self? If your past and present selves can exist in the same place, how do you handle a paradox if it occurs?

 

In order to avoid those questions and problems, you would have to impose pretty strict limits on what players can do. You could make small, walled-off areas where key events took place with a little quest that leads players through the quest, which has multiple endings. At the end, they would be teleported via TARDIS or something to the next key event. They would start at the chronologically first event and complete them all in chronological order. It would almost be more like a 'choose your own adventure', than a Skyrim mod, and would be sort of a small RPG created in Skyrim's engine.