Skyrim: The Definitive TES Modding Game?

[flossoraptor]

With the announcement of The Elder Scrolls Online, a lot of people hypothesize that Skyrim will be the last single-player Elder Scrolls game in a long time, if not ever. But Skyrim updates eventually being discontinued by Bethesda, and no new single-player TES game being introduced to replace it, are actually the best things that could happen to Skyrim for the modding community. That way modders can develop plug-ins freely without having to worry that an official expansion will break their mod or a new game will come out before they are done with their mod for the old game.

 

In this way, Skyrim could sort of become the pinnacle of TES modding.. Morrowind and Oblivion fell short because modding continued for 4 years or so, and then most people moved on to the next game in the series. Even now, if you were to create a really impressive Morrowind adventure/expansion, it probably wouldn't receive the attention it deserves because nobody's looking for Morrowind mods anymore.

 

But I have to wonder: does Skyrim really have what it takes to become that? As many people have pointed out, the game is much more difficult to create content for than its older siblings.. every single line of dialogue must be voice-acted (I suppose technically not, but I think characters who had unvoiced lines would stick out like a sore thumb), some mods and scripts malfunction for no apparent reason on some computers, and in general Skyrim would take a lot more work to mod for: every time you make a new armor, theoretically you have to make four new meshes: two for different weights of male characters, and two for different weights of female characters.

 

I almost wonder if perhaps the modding community should just take a step back and focus on creating new content for Oblivion or even Morrowind again because they are relatively easier. I'm currently playing through the entire modern TES series now (Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim.. with all currently released official expansions. Wish me luck) but when I'm done I will be focusing all of my RPG efforts on creating new content and I'm trying to decide which game it should be for.

[David Brasher]

Building mods for Skyrim has some serious problems, but the public usually wants the newest game. They want the latest and greatest with the best graphics and newest features. If you built an Oblivion mod and built a Skyrim mod and uploaded them both on the same day, you would probably get more than ten times as many downloads for the Skyrim mod. The download rates on my Oblivion mods have just gone to pot since Skyrim came out.

 

Oblivion is probably the easiest and most fun game to build mods for out of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. If you build an Oblivion mod, you will get some downloads. But if you are interested in things like mod popularity and high download count, then Skyrim is the place to be.

[gasti89]

I think that to have the final answer to this we just have to wait until Beth stops updating Skyrim ;)

[Veltoss]

Just start praying that they improve the CK before they stop supporting it or modding it won't last as long as Oblivion modding. There are just way too many bugs and terribly designed tools, it's difficult to do almost anything. If what you said in the OP were to happen, either Bethesda needs to make some big improvements, or the community has to be able to fix it themselves, which would require the source code or someone to tear it apart and put it back together, both unlikely. :confused: